“Yellow and Black Butterfly” | Anthony Satori
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
– Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
“Four-Winged Butterfly” | Anthony Satori
“Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.”
– Simone Weil
“Take Flight” | Anthony Satori
The fact is, life is a great mystery. None of us knows how long we have here. We may, by some miracle, still be around a hundred years from now. Or we may be gone next week. No one knows. So I say, live lightly. Glide as smoothly as you can over the bumps and dips of this world – they really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. Embrace each day as the gift that it is. Live love, live joy, and live kindness. Live compassion, live gratitude, and live courage. Watch, listen, and learn with humility. Think, speak, and act with intention. And then, when the stars align and the wind is at your back, be ready to fly when the universe presents you with the opportunity to fly.
“Dionysus” | Anthony Satori
“Every time that someone has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered them by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon their soul, not by inciting them to abandon their religious tradition, but by bestowing upon them light.”
– Simone Weil
“Face to Face” | Anthony Satori
“Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
“California Poppies in Spring” | Anthony Satori
“A positive and cheerful state of mind is a direct and immediate gain – the very currency, as it were, of happiness. It is not, like all else, merely a cheque upon the bank. For it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Every spring, when I see the California poppies bloom, it fills my heart with warmth. It reminds me that love exists outside of time and space. It reminds me that every single day of this brief lifetime – this exquisite and most precious moment between eternities that we’ve been given – is an opportunity for us to manifest our inner light, to engage in acts of compassion, kindness, goodness, and love, and to expand our enlightened mind.
These beautiful, vibrantly orange-colored flowers bloom every spring, and then disappear. But the sensations that they awaken within me remain vividly present, all year around. I truly believe that love – real love – once created, can never be destroyed. And joy, indeed, is the infallible sign of the presence of God. And every time we engage from a pure heart with the Spirit of Light and Love within us, we touch eternity.
“The Field” | Anthony Satori
“Whatever exists, animate or inanimate, is born through the union of the field and its knower. They alone see truly, who see the spirit of God the same in every creature. Seeing the same God everywhere, they do not harm themselves or others. Thus they attain the supreme goal.”
– The Bhagavad Gita
“Shy Venus” | Anthony Satori
“What’s wrong is not a problem with the great discoveries of science. Information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t. Information without human understanding is like an answer without its question: meaningless. And human understanding is only possible through the arts and humanities. It is the work of art that creates the human perspective in which information turns to truth.”
– Archibald MacLeish
One of the most startling revelations of quantum physics over the last century has been the assertion that, at the most fundamental levels of existence, there are virtually no inexorable truths or inherent meanings – just pure energy. Put another way: the closer we get to the subatomic realm, the more we discover that the cosmos seems to be made up entirely of nothing more than field equations and mathematical probabilities. All of the numbers, all of the wave functions, all of the raw data – all that they actually seem to be doing is merely suggesting or indicating a probability that some or other discrete particle, phenomenon, or event will occur at some particular point in time and space. Beyond this, there is, arguably, essentially nothing – that is, no “thing” – or perhaps more accurately, some varying probability of “everything.”
It seems that it is only when a conscious mind observes a particular particle or phenomenon that it becomes – almost mystically – transformed from a probabilistic wave function into something that is truly unique, measurable, and discrete. Conscious awareness alone, then, seems to be the singular mechanism in the universe which has the power to transform pure energy into something which has substance, meaning, and truth. And it is the arts and humanities – encompassing, in my view, acts of creativity, kindness, and love, and experiences of transcendence, enlightenment, and spiritual revelation – which, at their best, connect us most directly with this higher consciousness in our human nature, and thereby empower us to become the most effective co-creators of our own universe.
Let us then strive to use these profound gifts mindfully, compassionately, nobly, and constructively. Let us endeavor to make this the best of all possible worlds.
“Enzo Revisited” | Anthony Satori
“There are only four questions of value in life: What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: Only love.”
– Lord Byron
“Mystic Sky” | Anthony Satori
“This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been: in a state of non-being. There I was, now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had also first really created it. There, the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me: What nature leaves imperfect, art perfects, say the alchemists. In an invisible act of creation, I, Man, had put the stamp of perfection on the world, by giving it objective existence.
My old Pueblo friend came to my mind. He thought that the raison d’etre of his pueblo had been to help their Father, the Sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and I had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own.
Now I knew what it was, and I knew, even more, that Man is indispensable for the completion of Creation. I knew that, in fact, he himself is the second Creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently, through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being, down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and Man thereby found his indispensable place in the great process of Being.”
– C. G. Jung
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