Quotes about Planets

Angel and Stone

In the world are millions and millions of men, and each man,
With a few exceptions, believes himself to be at the center,
A small number of his more or less necessary planets careening
Around him in an orderly manner, some morning stars singing together,
More distant galaxies shining like dust in any stray sunbeam
Of his attention. Since this is true not of one man or of two,
But of ever so many, it is hard to imagine what life must be like.
But if you drop a stone into a pool, and observe the ripples
Moving in circles successively out to the edge of the pool and then
Reflecting back and passing through the ones which continue to come
Out of the center over the sunken stone, you observe it is pleasing.
And if you drop two stones it will still be pleasing, because now
The angular intersections of the two sets form a more complicated
Pattern, a kind of reticulation regular and of simple origins.
But if you throw a handful of sand into the water, it is confusion,
Not because the same laws have ceased to obtain, but only because
The limits of your vision in time and number forbid you to discrminate
Such fine, quick, myriad events as the angels and archangels, thrones
And dominations, principalities and powers, are delegated to witness
And declare the glory of before the lord of everything that is.
Of these great beings and mirrors of being, little at present is known,
And of the manner of their perceiving not much more. We imagine them
As benign, as pensively smiling and somewhat coldly smiling, but
They may not be as we imagine them. Among them there are some who
count
The grassblades and the grains of sand by one and one and one
And number the raindrops and memorize the eccentricities of snowflakes.
One of the greater ones reckons and records the times of time,
Distinguishing the dynasties of Mountains, races, cities,
As they rise, flower and fall, to whom an age is as a wave,
A nation the spray thrown from its crest; and one, being charged
With all the crossing moments, the coming-together and drivings-apart,
Reads in the chromatin its cryptic scripture as the cell divides;
And one is the watcher over chance events and the guardian of disorder
According to the law of the square root of n, so that a certain number
Of angels or molecules shall fall in irrelevance and be retrograde.
So do they go, those shining creatures, counting without confusion
And holding in their slow immeasurable gaze all the transactions
Of all the particles, item by atom, while the pyramids stand still
In the desert and the deermouse huddles in his hole and the rain falls
Piercing the skin of the pool with water in water and making a million
And a million designs to be pleasingly latticed and laced and interfused
And mirrored to the Lord of everything that is by one and one.

    And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.

    And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.

    Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.