Alice Walker

"Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding."

Lucille Clifton "the poet is thirty two"

 

she has such knowledges as

rats have,

the sound of cat

the smell of cheese

where the holes are,

she is comfortable

hugging the walls

she trembles over herself

in the light

and she will leave disaster

when she can.

John Donne's "Anatomy of the World" excerpt

 

....

And now the springs and summers which we see

Like sons of women over fifty be

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out:

...

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all relation:

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that there can be

None of that kind, of which he is, but he,

.....

Cascading capitals

 

I can't remember if Jan Cox was the first to say that "as within so without" was the same as "as above so below." But here is a good example. This link is to an article talking about the significance of the Orpheus and Eurydice Greek myth. Read the article if you need to. 

https://interestingliterature.com/2021/01/orpheus-eurydice-myth-summary-analysis/?

An interesting thing is a really paramount point of the story, beyond anything in normal literature, is that "looking back" refers to all mechanical thought."  NOT looking back, the trick to achieving anything fresh, original, informative, is what Fourth Way schools call self-observation. 

Then, millenia ago, as our next moment, you have to keep your ass off the asphalt.

William Blake's Jerusalem

Excerpt from "Jerusalem" (1804-1820)

....to labor in knowledge is to  build up Jerusalem: and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders...he who ...mocks a Mental Gift in another calling it pride and selfishness and sin; mocks Jesus the giver of every Mental Gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrite as Sins, but that which is a Sin in the eyes of cruel Man, is not so in the eyes of our kind God.

Let every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself...publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the building up of Jerusalem. 

Evocative description of the Buddha

Quoted from an Aeon article :

An important text in the collection is the Muni Sutta (‘Discourse on the Silent Sage’), almost certainly known to the Indian emperor Aśoka (who reigned c268-232 BCE) as the Muni-gāthā (‘Verses on the Silent Sage’), and so in its extant form dating to the 4th century BCE, not very long after Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign (c326 BCE). In this text, the Buddha describes the sage as a radical outsider:

Danger is born from intimacy, dust arises from the home. Without home, without acquaintance: just this is the vision of a sage.

Avoiding the enveloping ‘dust’ of society, the sage remains aloof from worldly values, ‘not trembling amid blame or praise, like a lion not shaking at sounds … like a lotus not smeared by water’. Focusing his attention instead on the quest to cultivate deep states of meditation in the forest, the sage is likened to a swiftly flying swan, whereas a householder is imagined as a blue-crested peacock, beautiful but slow.

 Shadows illuminate the sun