💭Spirituality & Philosophy

• Since the principle of interbeing and interpenetration in the Avatamsaka Sutra refuses to accept the concepts of inner/outer, big/small, one/many as real, it also refuses the concept of space as an absolute reality. With respect to time, the conceptual distinction between past, present, and future is also destroyed. The Avatamsaka Sutra says that past and future can be put into the present, present and past into the future, present and future into the past, and finally all eternity into one ksana, the shortest possible moment. To summarize, time, like space, is stamped with the seal of interdependence, and one instant contains three times: past, present, and future

• When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

• Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

• Conventionally, right speech means you pay attention to your speech, noticing if there are occasions where you are not exactly being truthful, you’re being harsh, or what you’re saying is divisive. Or maybe it’s just idle small talk, not amounting to much.

• My teacher said, “This is all good. But what will help you most of all is to taste silence.” I asked him why. He said, “When you learn how to live in even a little bit of silence and feel the beauty of it, the sacredness of it, then as soon as you open your mouth, you realize you’re wrong. No matter what you say, even if you use the most refined speech, it’s a crude instrument for expressing the deep experiences of being alive.”

• The more you listen and become sensitive to your speech, the more you taste silence. And the more you drink and taste the beauty of silence—real stillness—sometimes you don’t even want to speak. If you do speak, you want to say something that, in a sense, doesn’t sully the silence. Put another way, you hear when your speech is off, when there are false notes. You become more sensitive both in noticing what is not true and in being vulnerable, fragile