Posts Tagged ‘Henry Moore’
Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“People think that they see, but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“True Vision is insight, not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind-sight; insight is soul-sight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see not more.”
~ William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“People think that they see, but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“True Vision is insight, not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind-sight; insight is soul-sight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see not more.”
~ William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree
Dear Friends,
In early 1980’s I experienced at Wilbur Hot Springs, an unforgettably revelatory experience of perceiving luminescent Divine light streaming in a weeping willow tree. (*See Footnote) I was attending a week-end Board and staff retreat of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), as Board Chairman.
One morning I awakened early before any scheduled meetings, and meditated on a wooded hill above the lodge level. After descending I walked with a silent mind on a nature trail near the lodge. Whereupon, I discovered and crawled into a tiny cave where I again sat in deep meditation for a while. (Later, I learned that cave had long been considered a sacred place by original indigenous people there.)
On emerging from the cave, and while unknowingly still in an ‘altered’ state of awareness, I walked to the bathhouse, removed my clothes, stepped outside, and immersed my body in a large shallow hot springs pond.
While standing alone in the stilled pond with a stilled mind, I gazed at a beautiful weeping willow tree beside the pond on the side furthest from the bath house. Instead of seeing the tree as it appeared during usual waking consciousness, I beheld it marvelously transfigured as ever streaming lines of white light, more beautiful than any imaginable Christmas tree.
Unaware of my exceptional state of consciousness, I kept gazing at the tree in awe. After a while Tara, a CIIS staff member, entered the pond. Then, innocently I addressed her: “Tara, look at the lights in that tree. Aren’t they beautiful?” Puzzled, Tara responded “What lights?”. And immediately the lights disappeared for me, as I was abruptly returned to my usual state of waking ‘un-consciousness’.
But I can never forget the flowing tree lights, nor the insight which they confirmed: That there is much more to our “reality” than meets the eye; that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”.
Later that day, I recounted my experience to Dr. John Broomfield, then CIIS President, who cited me to this similar experience of author Annie Dillard:
“[O]ne day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
~ Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Like Annie Dillard’s tree vision at Tinker Creek, beholding the transfigured weeping willow at Wilbur Springs was for me an unforgettably inspiring and transformative experience for which I remain ever grateful.
May these and similar stories ever remind us that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”; that we are all Divine beings of light, gradually remembering and co-creating ever more luminous and numinous Earth lives.
And so may it be,
Ron Rattner
Footnote* Other memorable experiences of Divine light, beginning with an epiphany in Yosemite, are recounted elsewhere in these memoirs.
Vision and Perception
~ Quotations and Sutra Sayings
“The Master observes the world,
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is as open as the sky.”
~ Lao Tzu
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“I saw the angel in the marble
and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
~William Blake
“Perception is a mirror, not a fact.
And what I look on is my state of mind,
reflected outward.”
~ A Course In Miracles [ACIM]
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe
“Where there is no vision, people perish.”
~ Proverbs 29:18
“True vision is insight, not eyesight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
Vision and Perception Quotations and Sutra Sayings
“Let the waters settle,
you will see stars and moon
mirrored in your Being.”
~ Rumi
”Shut your eyes so the heart may become your eye,
and with that vision look upon another world.”
~ Rumi
“Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception
resembles more than anything else
that celestial source from which we all are come.”
~ Michelangelo
“Your vision will become clear
only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside, awakens.”
~ Carl Jung
“The question is not what you look at,
but what you see.”
”I begin to see an object
when I cease to understand it.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“Love and fear represent two different lenses
through which to view the world.
Which I choose to use
will determine what I think I see.”
~ Marianne Williamson
”Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees
takes off his shoes.”
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“The eye with which I see God
is the same eye with which God sees me.”
~ Meister Eckhart
“The eyes of the soul of the multitudes
are unable to endure the vision of the Divine.”
~ Plato
“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
”We are immersed in beauty,
but our eyes have no clear vision.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“People think that they see,
but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision
for the limits of the world.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
“As a man is, so he sees.
As the eye is formed, such are its powers.”
~ William Blake
“The most pathetic person in the world
is someone who has sight,
but has no vision.”
~ Helen Keller
“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind,
so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
~ Helen Keller
”When the sun rises,
do you not see a round disc of fire
somewhat like a guinea?
O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host
crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
~ William Blake
“There are many paths to the top of the mountain,
but the view is always the same.”
~ Chinese Proverb
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile
the moment a single man contemplates it,
bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery
“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed.
An artist is making something exist by observing it.
And his hope for other people is
that they will also make it exist by observing it.
I call it creative observation. Creative viewing.”
~ William S. Burroughs
“The soul never thinks without a mental picture.”
~ Aristotle
“For light I go directly to the Source of light,
not to any of the reflections.”
~ Peace Pilgrim
“Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision
to recognize it as such.”
~ Henry Miller
“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness,
we never really experience the universe directly;
we just experience our consciousness of the universe,
our perception of it – so … our only universe is perception.”
~ Alan Moore
“Perception is a mirror not a fact.
And what I look on
is my state of mind, reflected outward.”
~ A Course In Miracles [ACIM]
”The gull sees farthest who flies highest.”
~ Richard Bach
“Everything in the Universe,
throughout all its kingdoms,
is conscious:
i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind
and on its own plane of perception.”
~H. P. Blavatsky
“In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.”
~ Han-shan Te-Ch’ing
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on,
and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
~ William Shakespeare
“You can’t depend on your eyes
when your imagination is out of focus.”
~ Mark Twain
“Behold:
Reality’s Essence
is Divine Luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Seeing the Invisible is Knowing the Ineffable.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
Cast your glance inwardly,
and gaze there ‘til you’ll surely see,
beyond supposed mortality
you’ll ever be Divinity!
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
