| We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering anticipating--lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotton how to be--to be still, to be ourselves, to bewhere life is; Here and Now. Eckhart Tolle
to bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an namal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in yhour awareness.
Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it resxts in Being--completely at one with what it is and hwere it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself. Eckhart Tolle
Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature--the rustling of leaves in the wind, raindrops fallin, the humming of an insect, the first birdsong at down. Give yourself completely to the act of lestening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater: a sacredness that connot be understood through thought. Eckhart Tolle
When you perceive nature only through he mind, through thinking, you cannot sense its aliveness, its beingness. You see the form only and are unaware of the life within the form--the sacred mystery. Thought reduces nature to a commodity to be used in the pursuit of profit or knowledge or some other utilitarian purpose. The ancient forest becomes timber, the vird a research project, the mountain somethng to be mined or conquered.
When you perceive nature, let there be spaces of no thought, no mind. When you approach nature in this way, it will respond to you and participate in the evolution of human and planetary consciousness.
Nature can bring you to stillness. That is its gift to you. When you percieve and join with nature in the field of stillness, that field becomes permeated with your awareness. That is your gift to nature. Through you Nature becomes aware of itself. Nature has been waiting for you, as it were, for millions of years. Eckhart Tolle
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. Meister Eckhart
The interconnectedness of the universe in its every manifestation is what established the unity of the entire world...Here we find the sublime expresion of the deepest mystery of the universe: the revelation of the divine. Thomas Berry
I know well that heaven and earth and all creation are great, generous and beautiful and good... God's goodness fills all his creatures and all his blessed works full and endlessly overflows in them...God is everything which is good, as I see it , and the goodness which is everything has is God. Julian of Norwich
Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly...The earth is at the same time mother, She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all. Hildegarde of Bingen
My beloved is the moutains and lonely wooded valleys, Strang islands and sounding rivers, the whistling of love-stirring breezes, the tranquil night at the time of rising dawn, silent music sounding solitude, the supper that refrshes and deepens love. John of the Cross
We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigoursly toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper we will respond to its endangerment's with passion. Hildegarde of Bingen
To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disamred by the fragrance of the new Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occaisonally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vetetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it ws, they took inventory. Frederick Turner
When religion lost the cosmos, society became neurotic. And we needed to invent psychology to deal with the neurosis. Otto Rank
We are at the beginning of a change of world view as radical as the Copernican Revolution--a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological view, from a value system based on domination to one based on partnership. Fritzof Capra
The most improtant function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive. Albert Einstein.
Mystical experience is the mirror image of negative paranoia. It sees "the universe as a conspiracy organized for my benefit". Andrew Weil
People often ask me how Buddhists' answer the question: "does God exists?" The other day I was walking along the river...I was suddnely aware of the sun, shining through the bare trees. Its warmth, its brightness, and all this completely free, completely gratuitous. Simply there for us to enjoy. and without my knowing it, completley spontaneously, my two hands came together and I realized that I was making Gassho. and it occurred to me that this is all that matters: That we can bow, take a deep bow. Just that. Just that. Rev Eido Tai Shimano
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