[Image: “The Fight to Focus,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Around you is a subtle electromagnetic body of energy that is sometimes called the subtle body and is normally unseen by the naked eye. The ancient Greeks called it the etheric body. This is where the real you resides. It’s also where your real feelings reside.

Imagine it to be a faint energy field, like a colorless mist. But, unlike a slow, wafting mist, the etheric is moving very, very quickly. Flashing through it are mini-lightning bolts of energy, and fingers of flamelike etheric sunbursts that shoot out from you in all directions. Underlying the flashes are great waves of rolling energy that move up and down and sometimes outward, tumbling and turning in response to emotion. You walk inside an amazing glowing bubble of light that sometimes projects three or four feet away from you in every direction.

The etheric is fascinating and beautiful to watch. I find it very humbling — the secret human is all there to see, spiritually naked in his or her identity. In the etheric, you see how the human condition is complicated by the ego/personality, but you can have a deep compassion for it. For a human is not just a mind, a body, or an emotion — it is light. The brilliance of that human light overshadows the personality traits and weaknesses that come from human frailty.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

…and:

we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dust

the stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dance

the wheel of heaven
circles God
like a mill

if you grab a spoke
it will tear your hand off

turning and turning
it sunders
all attachment

were that wheel not in love
it would cry
               “enough! how long is this turning?”

every atom
turns bewildered

beggars circle tables
dogs circle carrion
the lover circles
               his own heart

ashamed,
I circle shame
a ruined water wheel
whichever way I turn,
is the river

if that rusty old sky
creaks to a stop
still, still I turn

and it is only God
circling Himself

(Jalaluddin Rumi [source])

From elsewhere:

Zero Gravity

The dry basin of the moon must have held
the bones of a race, radiant minerals,
or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy,
idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,

our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen.
Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures
digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated
Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer

electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit
like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl.
In the constant lunar night this luminescence
was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,

it poured into the room like a gradual flood
of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn
of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out
Manila would be blank ether, way station,

a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter,
at that moment, where our lives would lead:
father would disown one brother,
one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,

we were ready to walk on the moon. Reckless
in our need for the possible, we knew
there was no turning back, our bags already packed,
the future a religion we could believe in.

(Eric Gamalinda [source])

…and:

What the shamans of ancient Mexico found out when they focused their seeing on the dark sea of awareness was the revelation that the entire cosmos is made of luminous filaments that extend themselves infinitely. Shamans describe them as luminous filaments that go every which way without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.

Another of such masses of filaments, besides the dark sea of awareness which the shamans observed and liked because of its vibration, was something they called intent, and the act of individual shamans focusing their attention on such a mass, they called intending. They saw that the entire universe was a universe of intent, and intent, for them, was the equivalent of intelligence. The universe, therefore, was, for them, a universe of supreme intelligence. Their conclusion, which became part of their cognitive world, was that vibratory energy, aware of itself, was intelligent in the extreme. They saw that the mass of intent in the cosmos was responsible for all the possible mutations, all the possible variations which happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary, blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy, at the level of the flux of energy itself.

(Carlos Castaneda [source])

…and:

Every day as a wide field, every page

1

Standing outside
staring at a tree
gentles our eyes

We cheer
to see fireflies
winking again

Where have our friends been
all the long hours?
Minds stretching

beyond the field
become
their own skies

Windows doors
grow more
important

Look through a word
swing that sentence
wide open

Kneeling outside
to find
sturdy green

glistening blossoms
under the breeze
that carries us silently

2

And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing?…
Hope was always the thing!
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])