classes ::: noun,
children :::
branches ::: Epiphany

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object:Epiphany
word class:noun

def:a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.

Wikipedia - Epiphany (feeling) - an experience of sudden and striking insight
Wikipedia - Theophany - the manifestation of a deity in an observable way

see also :::

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Collected_Poems
Heart_of_Matter
Savitri
The_Divine_Milieu
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
4.2.04_-_Epiphany

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
01.01_-_The_Symbol_Dawn
01.03_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Souls_Release
01.05_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Spirits_Freedom_and_Greatness
01.08_-_Walter_Hilton:_The_Scale_of_Perfection
0_1960-12-31
02.04_-_Two_Sonnets_of_Shakespeare
02.06_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Life
02.11_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Mind
02.12_-_The_Heavens_of_the_Ideal
02.15_-_The_Kingdoms_of_the_Greater_Knowledge
04.01_-_The_Birth_and_Childhood_of_the_Flame
10.04_-_The_Dream_Twilight_of_the_Earthly_Real
1.01_-_Fundamental_Considerations
1.04_-_On_blessed_and_ever-memorable_obedience
1.06_-_Wealth_and_Government
1.08_-_The_Historical_Significance_of_the_Fish
1.12_-_The_Superconscient
1.15_-_Index
12.05_-_The_World_Tragedy
1.37_-_Oriential_Religions_in_the_West
1.48_-_The_Corn-Spirit_as_an_Animal
15.09_-_One_Day_More
1.56_-_The_Public_Expulsion_of_Evils
2.15_-_The_Cosmic_Consciousness
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
24.05_-_Vision_of_Dante
2_-_Other_Hymns_to_Agni
3.1.23_-_The_Rishi
3.20_-_Of_the_Eucharist
4.03_-_The_Special_Phenomenology_of_the_Child_Archetype
4.04_-_Conclusion
4.2.03_-_The_Birth_of_Sin
4.2.04_-_Epiphany
7.5.20_-_The_Hidden_Plan
7.5.62_-_Divine_Sight
r1915_05_01
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
Epiphany

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

Epiphany: A magical revelation or sudden insight into magic.

Epiphany [from Greek epi to + phaino appear] In the Christian Church, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, celebrated later in the Christian Church on January 6, and variously referred to the baptism of Christ, the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem, and other events noted in the New Testament.

epiphany ::: 1. An appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity. 2. A sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. epiphanies.

epiphany: In literature, a work which symbolically presents a moment of inspiration, insight and revelation.

epiphany ::: n. --> An appearance, or a becoming manifest.
A church festival celebrated on the 6th of January, the twelfth day after Christmas, in commemoration of the visit of the Magi of the East to Bethlehem, to see and worship the child Jesus; or, as others maintain, to commemorate the appearance of the star to the Magi, symbolizing the manifestation of Christ to the Gentles; Twelfthtide.



TERMS ANYWHERE

Epiphany: A magical revelation or sudden insight into magic.

Epiphany [from Greek epi to + phaino appear] In the Christian Church, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, celebrated later in the Christian Church on January 6, and variously referred to the baptism of Christ, the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem, and other events noted in the New Testament.

Epiphany: The moment of Awakening; an “AHA!” experience that opens the mage’s eyes to new potential.

Christmas Christmas Day and its festival are a curious blend of Christian, Jewish, Roman, Western pagan, and perhaps other institutions. It arose as a Christian festival as part of the adaptation of the early Christian Church to the world in which it grew up. The accounts given of the birth of Christ present obvious difficulties against regarding this date as that of his actual birth, and it was looked upon rather as a commemorative festival. Before the 5th century there cannot be said to have been any general consensus as to the date, the choice wavering between that of Epiphany on January 6th, the 25th of March, and the 25th of December.

epiphany ::: 1. An appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity. 2. A sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. epiphanies.

epiphany: In literature, a work which symbolically presents a moment of inspiration, insight and revelation.

epiphany ::: n. --> An appearance, or a becoming manifest.
A church festival celebrated on the 6th of January, the twelfth day after Christmas, in commemoration of the visit of the Magi of the East to Bethlehem, to see and worship the child Jesus; or, as others maintain, to commemorate the appearance of the star to the Magi, symbolizing the manifestation of Christ to the Gentles; Twelfthtide.


In the fifth initiation, called in ancient Greece theophany (the appearance of a god), the candidate meets for at least a fleeting moment his own spiritual ego face to face, and in the most successful of these cases, for a time actually becomes one with it. Epiphany signifies a minor form of theophany.

opetide ::: n. --> Open time; -- applied to different things
The early spring, or the time when flowers begin opening.
The time between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday wherein marriages were formerly solemnized publicly in churches. [Eng.]
The time after harvest when the common fields are open to all kinds of stock.


tajalli :::   The state of irridation, epiphany, or theophany

Theophany [from Greek theophaneia from theos god + phainesthai to appear] The appearance of a god; a degree in the ancient Mysteries, where the candidate was illumined by his own inner god, and differing from epiphany in being of a more lasting nature. In Christian ecclesiasticism, used for the incarnation of the Christos. In the outer or Lesser Mysteries it meant the showing of representations of the gods to the people — as at the festivals held at Delphi. See also THEOPATHY; THEOPNEUSTY

twelfth-night ::: n. --> The evening of Epiphany, or the twelfth day after Christmas, observed as a festival by various churches.

twelfthtide ::: n. --> The twelfth day after Christmas; Epiphany; -- called also Twelfth-day.



QUOTES [11 / 11 - 267 / 267]


KEYS (10k)

   7 Sri Aurobindo
   1 Von Balthasar
   1 Proclus of Constantinople
   1 Hans Urs von Balthasar
   1 A. Schmemann

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   11 Sri Aurobindo
   6 Anonymous
   4 Matthew Syed
   4 Marcus J Borg
   4 Khaled Hosseini
   4 Donna Tartt
   3 Steven Johnson
   3 Paul Kalanithi
   3 Neal Stephenson
   3 Lisa Wingate
   3 Dan Harris
   3 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
   3 Azar Nafisi
   3 Atul Gawande
   2 Thea Harrison
   2 Scott Berkun
   2 Sarah Rees Brennan
   2 Ryan Holiday
   2 Rebecca Solnit
   2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
2:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
3:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
4:On this day land and sea share between them the grace of the Saviour, and the whole world is filled with joy. Today's feast of the Epiphany manifests even more wonders than the feast of Christmas. ~ Proclus of Constantinople,
5:A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal,
6:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
7:A being appears, it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful and makes us marvel. In appearing it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. And in giving itself up, it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true.... ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work 116,
8:A being appears, it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful... In appearing it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. In giving itself up, it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true (in itself, but in the other to which it reveals itself). ~ Von Balthasar,
9:Epiphany": the primordial intuition that everything in this world & the world itself not only have elsewhere the cause & principle of their existence, but are themselves the manifestation & presence of that elsewhere, & that this is indeed the life of their life. ~ A. Schmemann,
10:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
11:The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 2.15,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove
2:If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove
3:I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.   ~ nelson-mandela, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Epiphany smiled, ~ William Hjortsberg,
2:The Four Steps to the Epiphany ~ Eric Ries,
3:I had an epiphany: I was a loser. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,
4:In the moment, an epiphany feels like hell. ~ Anonymous,
5:Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. ~ Thomas Merton,
6:Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany. ~ Huston Smith,
7:And that was the closest I've ever come to an epiphany. ~ Ned Vizzini,
8:Every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder ~ Kim Stanley,
9:An epiphany is a visceral understanding of something you already know. ~ Jen Sincero,
10:It was an epiphany, the kind only a horrible trauma can induce. ~ Jacquelyn Mitchard,
11:I realised that in my epiphany of Win El Over, I had grown a fucking vagina. ~ Anonymous,
12:The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany. ~ Rebecca Solnit,
13:Becoming is not a contradiction of being but the epiphany of being. ~ Ananda Coomaraswamy,
14:I always liked those moments of epiphany, when you have the next destination. ~ Brad Pitt,
15:Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany. ~ Atul Gawande,
16:Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson,
17:Becoming is not a contradiction of being but the epiphany of being. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy,
18:It hit me then, my epiphany. Death is a constant, but love? It is rare. ~ Ilsa Madden Mills,
19:What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth. ~ Azar Nafisi,
20:Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. ~ Christian Wiman,
21:Shh," I interrupted him. "Hold on a second. I think I'm having an epiphany here. ~ Stephenie Meyer,
22:Mrs. Olinski was the first teacher Epiphany ever had who taught from a wheelchair. ~ E L Konigsburg,
23:And, for some, closeness to death brings an epiphany which alters their lives forever. ~ Sharan Newman,
24:Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany. ~ Scott Berkun,
25:It's a wonderful epiphany: with a lie I can change reality; with a lie I can change the world. ~ Brady Udall,
26:Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany. ~ Rabih Alameddine,
27:That’s it? You’ve been standing there thinking for twenty minutes and your big epiphany is roses? ~ Tessa Bailey,
28:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
29:The epiphany of it all was in knowing my solution might very well be a lie, and accepting that as okay. ~ Bobby Adair,
30:It’s funny how some things are just words until one day, it happens to you, and it’s like an epiphany. ~ Cheryl McIntyre,
31:I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany. ~ Erica Jong,
32:I awoke to the epiphany that I was the driver of my life and my problems were the consequences of my choices. ~ M J DeMarco,
33:I have no idea what to do with myself. And while I wait for my epiphany, I feel the toxins collecting in my body. ~ Inio Asano,
34:I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. ~ Donna Tartt,
35:I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level. ~ Diane Paulus,
36:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
37:And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany. ~ Augusten Burroughs,
38:Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. ~ Ryan Holiday,
39:If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness. ~ John F Kennedy,
40:She scowled at him until a light appeared in her intelligent eyes, as if she had had an epiphany. "Are you an illegal alien? ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,
41:The epiphany for me was that I wasnt a writer, and I had to do something with these texts. I put them in the streets as posters. ~ Jenny Holzer,
42:Know that the world is like Mount Sinai, and we like Moses are seekers; every moment an epiphany arrives and cleaves the mountain asunder ~ Rumi,
43:And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the slow absorption of a bruise. ~ Joan Wickersham,
44:two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. ~ Steven Johnson,
45:Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good. ~ Chuck Close,
46:And then it was gone. I tried to make it come back ... I replayed the song. I reread the passage. Nothing. You can't stage an epiphany. ~ Patton Oswalt,
47:I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ~ Nick Hornby,
48:When things suck, time stands still, but when you have an epiphany and you're having the time of your life, it goes by in fast forward. ~ Brent Crawford,
49:Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band. ~ Bob Geldof,
50:I think the biggest shift has been in realizing how much more we are creating our life than we realize. That was sort of the epiphany to me. ~ Lauren Bowles,
51:Spirituality is not just about having a flash of insight or epiphany; it is about building a foundation that will change you inside and out. ~ T Thorn Coyle,
52:The old chestnut is true: Jacob has always liked babies, but the love he feels for his own is an epiphany, shocking in its irreversibility. ~ Maggie Shipstead,
53:Discovering your calling is not an epiphany but a series of intentional decisions. It looks less like a giant leap and more like building a bridge. ~ Jeff Goins,
54:Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany. ~ Anonymous,
55:Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany. ~ Atul Gawande,
56:It’s a strange thing to realize that you’re willing to die. It doesn’t come in a flash, a sudden epiphany. It happens slowly, a balloon leak in reverse ~ Nicola Yoon,
57:Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. ~ Dan Harris,
58:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,
59:One day you wake up and you realize something, you see something in a way that you never saw it before, and boom, epiphany. Something is different forever. ~ John Green,
60:Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn’t exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood? ~ Meg Wolitzer,
61:Unique Value Proposition: A single, clear compelling message that states why you are different and worth buying. ” - Steve Blank The Four Steps to the Epiphany ~ Anonymous,
62:I don't have a story about an epiphany in which I suddenly realised I wanted to be an actor. It was much more a case of the idea dawning on me gradually. ~ Elizabeth Debicki,
63:I had at some point the epiphany that if I wanted to be a writer, maybe I should stop thinking about writing, or stop writing about writing, and actually write. ~ Matt Fraction,
64:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,
65:A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal,
66:Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. ~ Tom Robbins,
67:A person must have principles, Epiphany. That's the one thing no one can take from you. The only way you can lose your principles is to give them up. Remember that. ~ Lisa Wingate,
68:The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
69:I had a conversation with somebody. It was an epiphany.” His voice was rueful. He rocked her. “From that point on I swore I would never eat something that could talk. ~ Thea Harrison,
70:An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany. ~ Nick Cave,
71:Uh-oh.” Shane’s chuckle startled me out of my epiphany. “What?” “I know that look.” “What ‘look’?” Shane smirked. “That screw-the-world-I’m-about-to-write-a-chart-topper look. ~ Kelly Oram,
72:A dutiful soldier, I retreated to the ditches as ordered and hunkered down there. In those ditches, I had an epiphany. People treat you as badly as you let them treat you. ~ Karen Marie Moning,
73:At that moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one blessed by eternity. ~ Roberto Bola o,
74:I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends. ~ Moby,
75:But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
76:For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock. ~ William H Gass,
77:I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night ~ Khaled Hosseini,
78:I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
79:I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
80:Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. ~ Azar Nafisi,
81:Getting slugged changed everything. It was an awakening, an epiphany, and hurt like hell to boot. Not as bad as the beating he gave her when she announced she was leaving during their argument. ~ Ciana Stone,
82:I was as real to him as he was to me and it struck me just then that I meant something to him. In whatever capacity he was able, I meant something. The irony of that epiphany made my gut twist. ~ C J Roberts,
83:Terror,” said Lymond, “is our daily bread in the Wuthenheer. We eat it, we live by it and we disseminate it; and not only between Christmas and Epiphany: there is no close season for fright. ~ Dorothy Dunnett,
84:That was when he'd fully understood that neither of them had every understood the other. A marriage couldn't survive that sort of epiphany, and their had been over just a few weeks later. ~ Christopher Golden,
85:And it is: a true temple of suffering, and tonight we are its priest, master of the rites, and we will lead him through our ritual and into the last epiphany, to the final release into grace. We ~ Jeff Lindsay,
86:William Stoner felt a kinship that he had not suspected; he knew that Lomax had gone through a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words, ~ John Williams,
87:I played music practically my entire life. But the first time I ever really played music was with John and Robby and Jim That's where it happened. it was an epiphany, a moment of profound clarity ~ Ray Manzarek,
88:I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top. ~ Tim Cahill,
89:That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion. ~ Paul Theroux,
90:Andrew: Uh, do I need to remind you about the sexual epiphany you had last night?
Sadie: Is that what you're calling it?
Andrew: I figured that was better than an orgasmic oracle from the penis prophecy. ~ Meghan Quinn,
91:...do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. ~ Azar Nafisi,
92:I know what people want to hear is the connection with the son, Roger, when you have a child. I would love to tell that there was an epiphany as to what it is to be a mom, but I didn't feel any difference there. ~ Laura Linney,
93:I've made my best personal investments when I've been a user of the product. Like Apple. The epiphany for me came when I purchased my fifth iPod and I hadn't unwrapped my fourth. It was still in the plastic case. ~ Mary Meeker,
94:WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. ~ Jon Gertner,
95:Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
96:Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. ~ Paul Kalanithi,
97:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,
98:The Notion Of A Contemporary Epiphany To Me Is Very Exciting, Because It's A Sort Of Biblical Thing. It's Something That Has Happened To People In Other Centuries Or In The Context Of Religious Experience...!!! ~ Pamela Stephenson,
99:I sailed a bit as a child, but it wasn't until I was around 40, when I was halfway through Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and Commander' novels, that I had the sudden epiphany that I had to go sail on a square-rig ship. ~ Billy Campbell,
100:...as I gulped down the rest of my soda, I had my first epiphany: just because a person says something is true doesn't mean it is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to keep you from doing something fun. ~ Katie Henry,
101:Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery. ~ Karen Armstrong,
102:I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with. ~ Lucy Lawless,
103:They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power. ~ Robert Dunbar,
104:Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there. ~ Anonymous,
105:Yous scared, Uncle Kale? ’Cause Cap’in ’merica is never scared.” She tapped her little finger to her chin like she’d just been struck with an epiphany. “Wait a minute . . . maybe he is scared, and he saves all the people anyway. ~ A L Jackson,
106:Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there. ~ Ryan Holiday,
107:For that smile, I'll forgive you for sleeping with any bastard." He almost went mad thinking about the chaos in his family, until in a moment of strange epiphany he took his mother's side. He couldn't deny her a little happiness. ~ Eka Kurniawan,
108:I had an epiphany where I realised that there are song titles everywhere - in advertising, in conversations with people at the grocery store - and every time I open my mind to that and find titles, I then weave a story around that. ~ Bonnie McKee,
109:Contentedly adrift in the cosmos. That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last? ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
110:For rich people, holiday festivities were only beginning on December 25. They would continue enjoying feasts and gifts through Epiphany on January 6—these were the twelve days of Christmas. Poor people went back to work on December 26. ~ Jeff Guinn,
111:My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God's presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first [compost] heap. ~ Bette Midler,
112:It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people. ~ Caitl n R Kiernan,
113:Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction. ~ Edward St Aubyn,
114:I had a real epiphany. I guess it was during and after the operation. I did what's a common thing; I kind of raised above the table and could look at me and listen to all the people talking and understand what they were saying and so forth. ~ Larry Hagman,
115:But this wasn't a movie. In life, we didn't get to have credits roll to tell us when we'd come to the end of our epiphany arc. To know when to applaud. In life, there were no credits, no sound tracks. In life, things often didn't work out. ~ Kim Culbertson,
116:They are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually, hedonic refugees have an epiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. ~ Eric Weiner,
117:I got a job as a children's librarian at PS 175 in Harlem, and that changed everything. That was an epiphany. I didn't know Harlem existed. I didn't know there was such a place, because I grew up in white Queens, where five miles is 100 miles. ~ Lynne Stewart,
118:Watching Desiree's breasts rise as her lashes lowered, Felix had an epiphany. She was a dominant, yes, and pushy with it at times, but that didn't mean she had endless self-confidence. She had doubts and worries just like him, needed reassurance. ~ Nalini Singh,
119:When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated. ~ Steven Johnson,
120:Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it. ~ Paul Kalanithi,
121:We’d all be happier and more successful if we could learn to be chefs more often—which just takes some self-awareness of the times we’re being a cook and an epiphany that it’s not actually as scary as it seems to reason independently and act on it. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
122:There used to be places called prisons before the Epiphany, where the demerited were restrained against their will."

"It sounds hideously barbaric"

"Prisons are still with us; only the walls are constructed of fear, taboo and the unknown. ~ Jasper Fforde,
123:You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you. ~ Joyce Carol Oates,
124:I also decided I want to have a meaningful relationship. But only with one person. And then stay with that person for a long time. Like, uh, monography."
Stephen types a few keys in a quick rhythm. "It's shame your epiphany wasn't accompanied by a thesaurus. ~ Valerie Z Lewis,
125:Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. “I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb! ~ Michael Lewis,
126:My epiphany has been that none of you deserve me. You can look. You can fantasize. Like I've had to. Try to bring home a woman, and I'll make farting noises while wearing a dolphin costume and acting like I'm humping each of you. See how long you can hold an erection then. ~ Kristy Cunning,
127:And here I'm struck by an epiphany so monstrous in its scale, so blinding in its effect that I feel my skin has turned inside out under the sun, that my innards possess magnetic qualities able to call vast fortunes together. And it's this: anything can happen if I want it to. ~ D B C Pierre,
128:Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it. My brother Jeevan had arrived ~ Paul Kalanithi,
129:To put it simply, failure and epiphany are inextricably linked. When we come up with a brilliant idea, when it pops into our mind, it has often emerged from a period of gestation. It is a consequence of engaging with a problem, sometimes, as in the case of Dyson, for many years. ~ Matthew Syed,
130:Don-Keun was a new man. The moment they arrived, he vanished for a second. We heard muffled ecstatic screaming coming from somewhere in the back of the Waffle House kitchen, then he reappeared, his face shining with the kind of radiance usually associated with religious epiphany. ~ Maureen Johnson,
131:I hope I reach the point where epiphanies become so commonplace that I scarcely bother to register them: “Oh look, another epiphany—as we acquire knowledge we become mired in the ignorance of the educated, delivered from the wisdom of innocence by a corrupted midwife. Now what’s on telly? ~ Anonymous,
132:What I don't like is when I see stuff that I know has had a lot of improv done or is playing around where there's no purpose to the scene other than to just be funny. What you don't want is funny scene, funny scene, funny scene, and now here's the epiphany scene and then the movie's over. ~ Paul Feig,
133:I’ve had an epiphany and decided to completely dedicate my existence to a full-court press for the truth. All else is now irrelevant. Everything in my life up to this point has been bullshit, and everything afterward will just be epilogue.” “What’s ‘epilogue’?” “Bullshit that comes later. ~ Tim Dorsey,
134:the story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, the story of Jesus becomes a disclosure of God, the revelation and epiphany of God. As a ~ Marcus J Borg,
135:All Christians had celebrated the birth of Christ on January 6. In the 4th century A.D., however, the Roman Catholic Church decided to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25 and the Feast of the Epiphany (Christ’s Baptism) on January 6. Armenians still celebrate Christ’s birth on January 6. [ ~ Keri Topouzian,
136:He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking her for a single reason, the cause. But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
137:I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me. ~ Ted Allen,
138:A friend of mine who was a founding father of the Church of Satan, who later I compared notes with, said when he was a kid, he too managed to get into Sallys Nude Ranch, and in the corral he saw his Sunday school teacher!!! That was a real epiphany for him. From that moment on he was a Satanist. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey,
139:We wouldn't even be where we are had it not been that 70% of Hispanics voted for President Obama, voted Democratic in the last election. That caused an epiphany in the Senate, that's for sure. So all of a sudden we have already passed comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. That's a big victory. ~ Barack Obama,
140:One of the earliest memories I have of feeling the power of film music was watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. That was a really clear epiphany for me, when I realized that each film has its own music, and that there was someone out there who wrote this very specific music for just this one film. ~ Geoff Zanelli,
141:An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of creation. ~ Abraham Isaac Kook,
142:I think a lot of people have unreasonable expectations because they never stop to consider what life actually has to offer them. They're always looking for some great epiphany from the skies. They never stop to consider the fact which human beings find hardest to recognize: "Maybe I'm not worthy of an epiphany. ~ Robertson Davies,
143:Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. ~ Donna Tartt,
144:So what—there’s plenty of time: for the two weeks of Christmastime there’s no marrying—you find me a match during that time, and on Epiphany, in the evening, we’ll get married and leave.” “My dear man,” I say, “you must have gone a bit out of your mind from boredom.” (The word “psychopath” was not yet in use among us.) ~ Nikolai Leskov,
145:And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith,
146:So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet. ~ Molly Antopol,
147:[Don Beck] said, after hearing about the three stages of epiphany, "There's a word in the Bantu languages that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu has used to help bring the entire country of South Africa together: ubuntu, meaning 'Today I share with you because tomorrow you share with me.'" The word can also be translated "I am because we are. ~ Dave Logan,
148:It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection. ~ Gail Caldwell,
149:Noon bells sang out with their usual ignorance of mood, marking out moments of grief and worry, elation and confusion. The bells said that at its core, human life was fundamentally a sort of organic clockwork, while the winds and skylarks that swept against the sound of metronomic iron timekeeping argued for variety, subtlety, epiphany. ~ Gregory Maguire,
150:I'll never forget the moment when I saw a red light go on, on the camera, and that image translated to the monitor, and then a different light went on and the shot changed, and I went, "Wow, that's how it's done! That's how that gets to my TV! This is what I want to do with my life!" I literally had that moment of epiphany, at eight years old. ~ Susanna White,
151:TO-DO LIST
1. Buy broccoli
2. Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
3. Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
4. Convince Will to love me again.
5. Get Birdie to talk to me.
6. Bury Louise once and for all.
7. Have a religious epiphany so # 8 is going to be okay with me.
8. Die. ~ Lesley Kagen,
152:By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. ~ James Joyce,
153:I want to make you weep. I want all your pleasure, Iris, all your pain, everything you are. Come for me."
And she felt herself bow with the stark white bliss of her epiphany, the shattering realization of his words and his hands and his mouth. She was gasping for breath, shaking, lost, unseeing. The center of her being pulsing with pleasure. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,
154:I felt like if I could get the epiphany out of the way in my drafting process, through my eighth or tenth draft, then that can just be part of how I've assembled the character, and then we can move on and move forward with it. In general, I don't ever want to feel smarter than my characters, because I just feel like that's not a great way to write a story. ~ Molly Antopol,
155:One night I was on my [Navy] ship... on my first cruise crossing the North Atlantic in a horrible storm, chained to the rails so I wouldn't fall overboard. In this lightning and thunder and hail, in this misery, I shouted at the heavens with my little squeaky voice and said, Someday I'm going to be a photographer! It was as big an epiphany as any man ever had. ~ Ralph Gibson,
156:We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. ~ Donna Tartt,
157:And it was knowing that I could still be...still be afraid of everything, but not letting that fear stop me from living.

The realization wasn't due to some kind of earth-stopping epiphany. It was subtle and slow, a combination of a thousand moments rolled into one, but as I sat at the kitchen table with Rosa, I knew it was true.

I'd changed. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,
158:In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash. ~ David Foster Wallace,
159:Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our business, buttering the toast, choosing gray socks over brown. But here's the thing: just because we haven't understood something doesn't mean we haven't been shaped by it. ~ Mark Slouka,
160:What shall we drink to, Ned? To England?"

"I've a better thought than that. It is not precisely the season for it, with Epiphany still four days hence, and I daresay our lady mother would never forgive me for saying it! But blasphemy or not, I think it fitting, nonetheless."

He touched his cup to the one Richard now held. "To the Resurrection," he said. ~ Sharon Kay Penman,
161:We’re all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that’s the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we’re riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. So it’s an epiphany after all. You have it in your hand the whole time. ~ Darin Strauss,
162:my epiphany has been that none of you deserve me. You can look. You can fantasize. Like I’ve had to. Try to bring home a woman, and I’ll make farting noises while wearing a dolphin costume and acting like I’m humping each of you. See how long you can hold an erection then,” I carry on, feeling a little proud of that threat as they all eye me like the psychotic girl in the room. ~ Kristy Cunning,
163:Anyways, the epiphany I just had was this. Maybe guys like me who write with bad grammar and all and sound like what you might think a dipshit should sound like, actually aren’t dipshits. We’re just regular Joes, makin’ the world go ‘round. It’s those fucks who talk and write so smooth and perfect that they make you feel like a dumbass because you don’t. Maybe they’re the dipshits. ~ Bobby Adair,
164:We often leave this aspect of the creative process out of the picture. We focus on the moment of epiphany, the detonation of insight that happened when Newton was hit by the apple or Archimedes was taking a bath. That is perhaps why creativity seems so ethereal. The idea is that such insights could happen anytime, anywhere. It is just a matter of sitting back and letting them flow. ~ Matthew Syed,
165:Cumulatively, taking the pre-Easter Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God suggests a massive subversion of the monarchical model of God and the way of life (individually and socially) to which it leads. God is not a distant being but is near at hand. God is not primarily a lawgiver and judge but the compassionate one. The religious life is not about requirements but about relationship. ~ Marcus J Borg,
166:In the Spanish-speaking Americas, Christmas is much more than a one-day event followed by a staggering credit card bill. The festivities last for weeks, beginning well before Christmas, and continuing straight through to the arrival of the Three Kings and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Las Navidades involves a lot more partying and a lot less shopping than a US. Christmas. ~ Esmeralda Santiago,
167:In fiction classes... you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence... But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare... The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do much noticing. ~ Darin Strauss,
168:I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to
happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this
past year I've still been waiting for the same big
cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened... ~ Douglas Coupland,
169:But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
170:Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. In him we see God’s passion. ~ Marcus J Borg,
171:Later that next night, I had an epiphany. Forget bipolar disorder: it was the antiseizure medication Keppra. The Keppra must be causing my insomnia, forgetfulness, anxiety, hostility, moodiness, numbness, loss of appetite. It didn’t matter that I had been on the drug for only twenty-four hours. It was all the Keppra. An Internet search proved it. These were all side effects of that toxic drug. ~ Susannah Cahalan,
172:And this filmmaker has the most extraordinary epiphany! He realizes that there is as much merit in trying to ease people’s suffering for a moment as there is in “focusing” on it. To ease someone’s pain through a distracting, silly, joyous laugh is his lesson. I know there is suffering, so to escape it for a second is truly powerful. That is one church I am staying loyal to. The Church of Laughing. ~ Drew Barrymore,
173:Most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was - it's a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm's X journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam's racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that's the story everybody knows. ~ Manning Marable,
174:Dominika kept her face impassive, but inwardly she was amazed to hear a Russian speak the truth, and give voice to her own indignant rage that had pushed her to CIA and a mortally dangerous life as a spy. She, Dominika, was working in the shadows, underground, while Repina was standing on the ramparts, in full sight. Her heart raced; this was an epiphany: she wasn’t alone; her countrymen were with her. ~ Jason Matthews,
175:I don't really know how dating works," Jared told her. "High school for me was mostly musical numbers. That's how it is in the States, you've seen the movies. Every time someone had an emotional dilemma or epiphany, they would burst into song, and we would all have to break out into perfectly choreographed dance sequences. It took a lot of intensive training. So many jazz squares, no time for love. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,
176:savored the bizarre moment of epiphany; he had a sister, of sorts. And he had a wife, too, and a father, a legal one, and he had brothers. He was like any other man. The out-of-reach normal life that had tormented him was now fully his. It was wonderful, even if very few beings had a family as strife-prone, heavily armed, and bizarre as this. “But he never forgets his kids.” “I always knew he’d come back. ~ Karen Traviss,
177:[True beauty] seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite. It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly...you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are. ~ Justina Chen,
178:She, who had felt she saw so clearly that it hurt, had felt that the truth, crystalline, was, with Murray, granted her (though not through his help, or anything he did: but just by his presence; as though, indeed, he were but a part of her that had been lost, a magnificent platonic epiphany repeated, and daily repeated: this, surely, was love!), felt, now, that the weight of emotion lay like a veil, a fine mist. ~ Claire Messud,
179:The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel,
180:I had been living the life that society tends to dictate for women of a certain age. You marry the person who asks you, even though he may or may not be the best one for you. Around the time that I got divorced, I had an epiphany that there is no blue ribbon or gold medal for living someone else's life, for fulfilling someone else's dreams. It's doesn't make you happy. You just end up with a life that's not yours. ~ Gabrielle Union,
181:A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the overwhelming anxiety—anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about loved ones, anxiety about finances,” she explained. “There are many worries and real terrors.” No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany. ~ Atul Gawande,
182:This is where I had the epiphany, Danny Boy. I would come up here to sit every morning and this is where I received the calling. I knew what mankind needed. We needed to harness the power of the mind, the most powerful weapon a man possesses. If we can control the mind, Danny Boy, we get what we want. That’s your answer, son. If you could have anything in the world, it should be the power of the mind.” The mind is a weapon. ~ Tony Bertauski,
183:But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman’s screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks. ~ Peter Heller,
184:Violence always came too easy to you, that's the problem. It always felt too good. Remember the first time you trod on an ant, and with an infant stamp made the moving still, the present past? Wasn't that a sickly sweet epiphany? Such power in your feet and at your fingertips such temptation! It would take some act of charity to give all that good stuff away. You'd need to be something greater that just another invention of a spiteful god. ~ Stephen Kelman,
185:Most people you'd tell "I'm gonna be a musician," they'd say, "you're crazy, you're gonna starve, you're gonna be poor, a drug addict, go to jail, you'll never make it, there's too much competition, it's a terrible business," etc. But my chorus teacher in high school said, "you've got what it takes to be a really good professional musician, you should consider it." That was an epiphany for me. So I thought, well, maybe I can help somebody, too. ~ Billy Joel,
186:I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise. ~ Nelson Mandela,
187:Earl, you can’t walk around with a lead slug up your bottom. It’s bound to affect your outlook.” Tool jerked his hand away. “I’ll get it took care of, I swear.” “It could well be the turning point in your life,” she said. “What they call an epiphany. Or at least a catharsis.” He assumed those to be the surgical terms for a bullet removal, and he promised Maureen he would schedule the operation as soon as he got a break in his bodyguarding schedule. ~ Carl Hiaasen,
188:One of the secrets to life, Epiphany, is to find your gifts and focus on those. Leave your liabilities in the dust of the road not taken. The world is an imperfect place. Everyone struggles. Successful people see trials as growth experiences, rather than stumbling blocks. You have everything you need for success. You're a beautiful young woman, and you're strong, and you have a clever mind. If you let anyone convince you otherwise, you steal from yourself. ~ Lisa Wingate,
189:In all, it took an astonishing 5,127 prototypes before Dyson believed the technology was ready to go in the vacuum cleaner. The creative leap may have been a crucial and precious thing, but it was only the start of the creative process. The real hard yards were done patiently evolving the design via bottom-up iteration. To put it another way, with the epiphany he had vaulted onto a taller mountain in a new landscape; now he was systematically working toward this new summit. ~ Matthew Syed,
190:There is such a magic inside of you, Tegan. Your breath carries magic onto the zephyr, your pores ooze magic onto your skin, your soul thrums with magic, indeed, your very bones vibrate with it. And still you do not believe, not in yourself. It is up to you to accept the gifts given you, child. It is up to you to revel in your own unique power. And when you do, when that moment of epiphany comes, you will be all that you can be. You will be Tegan Hedfan—The Fair One Who Flies. ~ Paula Brackston,
191:It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. ~ Rebecca Solnit,
192:It seemed that I had worked passionately for nineteen years on a beautiful product and, in the end, he had become something entirely different than I intended. I did not recognize him at all. How could I go on creating beautiful pottery pieces if they weren't going to turn out as I had intended or hoped? Until one day I had an epiphany. I was not the potter. A potter was shaping my children, but it was not me. . .My son was not my product. He was the work of a great artist: the Creator of all ~ Cindy Rollins,
193:Life is sometimes … memorable, wet (and beautiful), a racing heart, like a dream, tingly and covered with goose bumps, gentlemanly, sexy, imperfect, consumed with guilt, bruised and broken, over-thought, destined, an epiphany, mind-blowing, dead, whatever your heart tells you, incessant, finding something to live for, just a series of goodbyes, auspicious, enduring, just right, your past and your future, ceremonious, burning, a waiting game, a gift, looking back, just life … and death … never-ending. ~ Kim Holden,
194:When T. E. Lawrence was fighting the Turks in the deserts of the Middle East during World War I, he had an epiphany: It seemed to him that conventional warfare had lost its value. The old-fashioned soldier was lost in the enormous armies of the time, in which he was ordered about like a lifeless pawn. Lawrence wanted to turn this around. For him, every soldier's mind was a kingdom he had to conquer. A committed, psychologically motivated soldier would fight harder and more creatively than a puppet. ~ Robert Greene,
195:I can't relate to the idea of suicide. I guess I'm just one of those people that is always optimistic and upbeat. But one day, I sat down. I said 'You know what? Just to kind of purge myself, I want to see what its like to feel that low'. So I decided to write a suicide note. Yeah, just to kinda flush it out there and put it on a page. And I started to do this, and I had an epiphany. I'll share this with you: a suicide note that is written by somebody that is not suicidal is called an autobiography. I am on Chapter 58. ~ Dane Cook,
196:No doubt some ingenious hunter-gatherer stumbled across the cleansing properties of ashes mixed with animal fat, or dreamed of building aqueducts in those long eons before the rise of cities, and we simply have no record of his epiphany. But the lack of a record is exactly the point. In a low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations. ~ Steven Johnson,
197:One way to think about epiphany is to imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you put the last piece into place, is there anything special about that last piece or what you were wearing when you put it in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place. If you jumbled up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece. Epiphany works the same way: it’s not the apple or the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after ~ Scott Berkun,
198:The encompassing silence and the ease(or difference) of my companions have left my soul free to contemplate, to drink in the wonder of this place. How fitting it is that it should have been here that Moses heard the word of God! For here,where Man -if he is to live-lives perforce so close to Nature and by her Grace, I feel so much closer to the entire mystery of Creation that it would not surprise me at all were I to be vouchsafed a vision or a revelation; indeed it would seem in the very order of things that such an epiphany would happen. ~ Ahdaf Soueif,
199:After years of disbelief and argument from other scientists, Hayflick’s paper on cell limits became one of the most widely cited in his field. It was an epiphany: scientists had been trying for decades to grow immortal cell lines using normal cells instead of malignant ones, but it had never worked. They thought their technique was the problem, when in fact it was simply that the lifespan of normal cells was preprogrammed. Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal. Scientists ~ Rebecca Skloot,
200:Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds, say, engineering and business, you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. ~ Justine Musk,
201:I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that’s no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you’re 14, you’re basically on drugs all the time - the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you’re experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn’t have to do with you and you’re just some dummy boy for me to project on. ~ Tavi Gevinson,
202:It came as a belated epiphany to me when I learned that the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud. ~ Tim Kreider,
203:The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. ~ John Donne,
204:made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things* and now he’s trying to figure out whether it is like Turing’s bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise). ~ Neal Stephenson,
205:Because of what I experienced when I was a kid, I want kids to have that kind of an epiphany moment, that little jolt, that little spark that they see when Dusty ['Planes'] flies higher than he has before. That scene where he flies straight up, and he's starting to get dizzy, and then finally it comes together. We forget as adults. We get jaded and we think that's kids' stuff, but for a kid who doesn't know about anything technical or how a movie is made, they're just going to see this and hear this beautiful score and see this dynamic, fantastical thing happening in front of them. ~ Dane Cook,
206:Healing is not a straight and narrow road
that leads from darkness to light.
There's no sudden epiphany to take
us from despair to serenity, no orchestrated
steps to move us from hurting to healed.
Healing is a winding mountain road with steep
climbs and sudden descents, breathtaking views
and breath-stealing drop-offs, dark tunnels
and blinding exposures, dead ends and
endless backtracks, rest stops and break downs,
sheer rock walls and panoramic vistas.
Healing is a journey with no destination,
because healing is the journey of every lifetime. ~ L R Knost,
207:I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better. ~ Jaron Lanier,
208:I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don't all fall down and you can eat up poisoned food that someone grew, is immediately palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what we can all love.

And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better. ~ Jaron Lanier,
209:Father in heaven,
Please take up the struggle where I have failed in it. Please do not let this journey have been for naught. I need to know the truth before I die, and I need to leave things well with Deborah and with Epiphany. If I've lacked anything in life, it has been in the asking for help when I needed it and in the believing of things I could not prove.
I'm asking now, which ultimately means that I do believe.
And perhaps that I am at the point of desperation.
You accept prayers from both perspectives, I suspect. Thank you for accepting this one.
The end...
I mean ... Amen. ~ Lisa Wingate,
210:Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
211:After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto “Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,” which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book (A Soldier in the Great War) that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul. ~ Sam Sheridan,
212:It would be fun to think that after such a short time with my children she wanted to give them back—and more fun still if she’d had an incredibly illuminating insight into the error of her ways and she wanted to beg my forgiveness and make up. But as stubborn as I knew her to be, it would have to be an epiphany on the order of Saul on the road to Damascus—and Debs in the fast lane of I-95 didn’t sound like it even belonged in the same league. So ruling out the ridiculous, that she had suddenly forgiven me, I could think of absolutely no reason in the world why she would call. And therefore no reason I should answer. ~ Jeff Lindsay,
213:..by honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and reinforces our cuntpower. ~ Inga Muscio,
214:As an epiphany of God, Jesus discloses that at the center of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well-being, both as individuals and as individuals within society. As an image of God, Jesus challenges the most widespread image of reality in both the ancient and modern world, countering conventional wisdom’s understanding of God as one with demands that must be met by the anxious self in search of its own security. In its place is an image of God as the compassionate one who invites people into a relationship which is the source of transformation of human life in both its individual and social aspects. ~ Marcus J Borg,
215:Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt. ~ Stephen King,
216:Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He’s already made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things1 and now he’s trying to figure out whether it is like Türing’s bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise). ~ Neal Stephenson,
217:To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. ~ Emmanuel Levinas,
218:Sonnets At Christmas I
This is the day His hour of life draws near,
Let me get ready from head to foot for it
Most handily with eyes to pick the year
For small feed to reward a feathered wit.
Some men would see it an epiphany
At ease, at food and drink, others at chase
Yet I, stung lassitude, with ecstasy
Unspent argue the season's difficult case
So: Man, dull critter of enormous head,
What would he look at in the coiling sky?
But I must kneel again unto the Dead
While Christmas bells of paper white and red,
Figured with boys and girls spilt from a sled,
Ring out the silence I am nourished by.
~ Allen Tate,
219:Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.' I chance a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: 'It connect you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise on a clear blue day of the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly'--my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air--'you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are. ~ Justina Chen,
220:He is only one of a million no, a billion stories you could tell about the living beings on just this side of the mountain. The fact is that there are more stories in the space of a single second, in a single square foot of dirt and air and water, then we could tell in a hundred years. The word amazing isn't much of a word for how amazing it is. The fact is that there are more stories in the world than there are fish in the sea or birds in the air or lies among politicians. You could be sad at how many stories go untold, but you could also be delighted at how many stories we catch and share in delight and wonder and astonishment and illumination and sometimes even epiphany. ~ Brian Doyle,
221: The Hidden Plan
However long Night's hour, I will not dream
That the small ego and the person's mask
Are all that God reveals in our life-scheme,
The last result of Nature's cosmic task.

A greater Presence in her bosom works;
Long it prepares its far epiphany:
Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks,
A bright Persona of eternity.

It shall burst out from the limit traced by Mind
And make a witness of the prescient heart;
It shall reveal even in this inert blind
Nature, long veiled in each inconscient part,
Fulfilling the occult magnificent plan,
The world-wide and immortal spirit in man.

~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Hidden Plan
,
222: Divine Sight
Each sight is now immortal with Thy bliss:
My soul through the rapt eyes has come to see;
A veil is rent and they no more can miss
The miracle of Thy world-epiphany.

Into an ecstasy of vision caught
Each natural object is of Thee a part,
A rapture-symbol from Thy substance wrought,
A poem shaped in Beauty's living heart,
A master-work of colour and design,
A mighty sweetness borne on grandeur's wings;
A burdened wonder of significant line
Reveals itself in even commonest things.

All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,
O Absolute, O vivid Infinite.
624

Pondicherry, c. 1927 - 1947
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Divine Sight
,
223:Times have changed, Miss Donovan. Mankind has evolved. We are more enlightened thinkers than our ancestors.” “I’ve heard that before.” He raised his brows. “You don’t believe we are evolving as a species?” She thought of her earlier epiphany, that she wasn’t superior to her nineteenth-century compatriots. And she thought of the countless murder boards she’d stood before, centuries from now, detailing man’s depravity toward man, and shook her head. “We might be becoming more civilized as a whole—and I’m not even sure about that—but I don’t think mankind ever really changes. We’re not smarter, better, kinder people, Doctor.” She paused, grim. “We’re just inventing better technology.” Aldridge ~ Julie McElwain,
224:There's a moment when you realise all your worst fears have come true. When the fat girl stuffing her face in the corner finally recognises food gives her the comfort she can't find in anyone else. When the gorgeous man with the body of a god realises he changes women like shoes because he's scared one won't find enough reason to stay. When you see the world for what it really is, see it for all the horrors the news can't or won't report. There's a moment when you realise and accept that you are the worthless piece of shit your father always said you were, because even a diseased crack-head wouldn't kill their own sister. It was a moment Kerestyan, a defining moment...an epiphany of imperfection. ~ Jennifer Turner,
225:Hey!” she said suddenly, her voice rising with her epiphany. “I know how we can make some room at the Infinity Hotel without making everyone move. I’ve officially solved the paradox. Call it Bonnie Rae’s Solution.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We’ll all double up. Problem solved. You wanna double up, Infinity Clyde?” Finn was sure if he could see her face she would be waggling her eyebrows. She liked to tease. And she was damn good at it.

Yeah. He wanted to double up. Instead he decided to poke back a little. “The problem is, when people double up, they start to multiply.”

She giggled, and Finn found himself smiling in the dark.

“And then we’re right back at square one,” he whispered. ~ Amy Harmon,
226:I used to eat people, you know.”

If he meant to shock her out of crying, he succeeded. A snort burst out of her. “That’s awful,” she said. Her nose was clogged. “I mean it, that’s awful. It’s not funny. I’m not laughing.”

He sighed. “It was a long time ago. Thousands of years. Once I really was the beast the Elves call me.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath and rubbed her fingers along the seam of his T-shirt. “What made you stop?”

“I had a conversation with somebody. It was an epiphany.” His voice was rueful.He rocked her. “From that point on I swore I would never eat something that could talk.”

“Hey, that’s kind of your version of turning vegetarian, isn’t it? ~ Thea Harrison,
227:Do you want my jacket?” Jared asked. He was taking it off as he spoke, a little awkwardly as he still had to hang onto her.
“Yes,” said Kami instantly. He drew it close around her shoulders. “Also your pin and your class ring. That’s how you do dating in America, isn’t it? You see, I know the ways of your people.”
“I don’t really know how dating works,” Jared told her. “High school for me was mostly musical numbers. That’s how it is in the States, you’ve seen the movies. Every time someone had an emotional dilemma or epiphany, they would burst into song, and we would all have to break out into perfectly choreographed dance sequences. It took a lot of intensive training. So many jazz squares, no time for love. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,
228:This is the epiphany, the gift, from those who have crossed over to the realm beyond the veil: We don’t have to carry around the pain, the shame, or the belief that somehow what happened to us was our fault or that we are unworthy of what we desire—love, joy, acceptance, expression, and belonging. We are powerful co-creators with Spirit. We no longer have to go by the old, familiar maps that were etched into being by those experiences. When we’re lost, we all want a map—but maps can only tell us where we’ve been. They can only reflect the past and our memories of experiences. But we are headed into places uncharted, into an unknown future that has not yet been imagined. Where are you going? What do you want to co-create? ~ Colette Baron Reid,
229:Homo proponit et Deus disponit. ~ And governeth alle goode virtues. ~ William Langland, Vision of Piers Ploughman (Ed. 1824), Volume II, p. 427, line 13,984. John Gerson is credited with same. Saying quoted in Chronicles of Battel Abbey (1066 to 1177). Translation by Lower, 1851, p. 27. Homer, Iliad, XVII. 515. Pindar, Olymp, XIII. 149. Demosthenes, De Corona., 209. Plautus, Bacchid. I, 2, 36. Ammianus Marcellinus, Hist, XXV. 3. Francois Fenelon, Sermon on the Epiphany, 1685. Montaigne, Essay, Book II, Chapter XXXVII. Seneca the Younger, Epistles, 107. Cleanthus, Fragment. Cervantes, Don Quixote, I. 22. Dante, Paradise, VIII, line 134. Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein's Death, I, 7. 32. Ordericus Vitalis, Ecclesiastica Historia, Book III (1075),
230:It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not—at first—be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we’re quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that’ve been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba ‘across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower. ~ Inga Muscio,
231:But in the name of the most holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?"

Because I’d been hoarding words for years, buying them from pedlars and carving them secretly on to bits of bark so I wouldn’t forget them, and then he turned up using words like ‘epiphany’ and ‘amaranth’. Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn’t since they burned my father’s books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers . . .

Mosca shrugged. "He’s got a way with words. ~ Frances Hardinge,
232:But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.

Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers..."

Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words. ~ Frances Hardinge,
233:As he recalled the fervor years later, “by means of systematized effort, large numbers of people of all ages, but especially the young, were converted” to born-again Christianity. “So great was the alarm awakened in the minds of some of these converts, that they became victims of religious frenzy….Many thousands of our citizens were influenced by the religious enthusiasm which was sweeping like a tornado through our land.” That young man was Phineas Barnum, known as P.T., who by his early twenties was earning a living in Connecticut selling lottery tickets. Coming of age during this period of avid belief in the unbelievable, Barnum had had his career-making, world-changing epiphany: he realized “the perfect good-nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug. ~ Kurt Andersen,
234:This was a pivotal event in his career, as well as a personal epiphany.

Often, when a man is young and idealistic, he believes that if he works hard and does the right thing, success will follow. This was what Boyd’s mother and childhood mentors had told him. But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system.

Those who do not conform will one day realize that the path of doing the right thing has diverged from the path of success, and then they must decide which path they will follow through life. Almost certainly, he realized that if he was not promoted early to lieutenant colonel after all that he had done, he would never achieve high rank. ~ Robert Coram,
235:Savannah gave little thought to her habit during the journey, except toward the end when she pictured herself as a smoking gargoyle. “You know how gargoyles look, crouched down with their shoulders hunched? That’s how I felt and saw myself, a little golem creature smoking, pulling in the smoke and not letting it out, until my chest hurts and I’m choking. It was powerful and disgusting. I can still see it now, that hideous coughing gargoyle, whenever I picture myself as a smoker.” Months later, she says the image is still helpful when the inevitable cravings arise. In the middle of her session, Savannah suddenly sat up and announced she had discovered something important, an “epiphany” that her guides needed to write down so it wouldn’t be lost to posterity: “Eat right. Exercise. Stretch. ~ Michael Pollan,
236:I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously. This was better than religion, or this was what people meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing ever worked the way substances worked, nothing ever fucking delivered the way they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood. ~ Iain Banks,
237:Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie. ~ Sarah Hepola,
238:You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”2 When Giles read Godin’s book, he had an epiphany: For his mission to build a sustainable career, it had to produce purple cows, the type of remarkable projects that compel people to spread the word. But this left him with a second question: In the world of computer programming, where does one launch remarkable projects? He found his second answer in a 2005 career guide with a quirky title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job.3 The book was written by Chad Fowler, a well-known Ruby programmer who also dabbles in career advice for software developers. ~ Cal Newport,
239:When an experience is so powerful that it motivates people to change the whole pattern of their lives, we call that a breakthrough, or an epiphany. The value of an epiphany doesn’t lie just in some new or exciting insight. You might be walking down the street and pass a stranger. Your eyes meet, and for some reason there is a connection. It isn’t sexual or romantic or even a suspicion that this person could mean something in your life. Instead, the epiphany is that you are that stranger—your experiencer merges with his. Call this a feeling or a thought, it doesn’t matter which—it’s the sudden expansion that counts. You are flung outside your narrow boundaries, if only for a moment, and that makes all the difference. You have tasted a hidden dimension. Compared to the habit of shutting yourself behind the walls of ego, this new dimension feels freer and lighter. You have a sense that your body can’t contain you anymore. ~ Deepak Chopra,
240:Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears. ~ Neal Stephenson,
241:I began to laugh uncontrollably, so hard I nearly fell off the swing, because I knew then for sure he saw the same thing I did. More than that: we were creating it. Whatever the drug was making us see, we were constructing it together. And, with that realization, the virtual-reality simulator flipped into color. It happened for both of us at the same time, pop! We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gymand showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. For hours, we watched the clouds rearranging themselves into intelligent patterns; rolled in the dirt, believing it was seaweed; lay on our backs and sang "Dear Prudence" to the welcoming and appreciative stars. It was a fantastic night: one of the great nights of my life. ~ Donna Tartt,
242:What do you do?” she asked again. And that’s when I had the epiphany: Sarging is for losers. Somewhere along the line, sarging became seen as the goal of pickup. But the point of the game is not to get good at sarging. When you sarge, every night is a new one. You’re not building anything but a skillset. What got me laid on my birthday was not sarging but lifestyle. And building a lifestyle is cumulative. Everything you do counts and brings you closer to your goal. The right lifestyle is something that is worn, not discussed. Money, fame, and looks, though helpful, are not required. It is, rather, something that screams: Ladies, abandon your boring, mundane, unfulfilled lives and step into my exciting world, full of interesting people, new experiences, good times, easy living, and dreams fulfilled. Sarging was for students, not players, of the game. It was time to take this brotherhood to the next level, time to pool our resources and design a lifestyle in which the women came to us. It was time for Project Hollywood. ~ Neil Strauss,
243:MARTIN SHEEN: Terry called me one night, and he had done so after finally making a decision. His gut hunch was to hire me, but he had other considerations, or an obligation to sort through his casting agent’s suggestions. He asked me if I was still interested. I got up just before sunrise and started driving the Pacific Coast Highway to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Road.” It was one of the most profound moments of my life. Dylan, who was one of my personal heroes, had cracked something wide open inside of me. I was experiencing an epiphany. There was a realization of what just happened to me. I started to weep, and pulled the car over on the highway and reflected on this. My happiness. Before that phone call, I would have never thought that such a thing would happen to me. I realized that acting was no joke. You don’t show up on a set and just decide that you are going to throw yourself out there without preparation. Me being there was no accident. The stars had aligned and Badlands was a role of a lifetime. I have Terry Malick to thank for it. ~ Paul Maher Jr,
244:The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible. ~ Dan Barker,
245:As I watched and observed, day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, one day I had an epiphany: “Oh my gosh! Adults believe what they think! That’s why they suffer! That’s why they get into conflict. That’s why they behave strangely, in ways that I don’t understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head.”

What I realized was that adults spent a lot of time thinking, and more important than that—and more odd, it seemed to me—they actually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.

All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one’s thinking and beliefs. ~ Adyashanti,
246:This aspect of the creative process, the fact that it emerges in response to a particular difficulty, has spawned its own terminology. It is called the “problem phase” of innovation. “The damn thing had been bugging me for years,” Dyson says of the conventional vacuum cleaner. “I couldn’t bear the inefficiency of the technology. It wasn’t so much a ‘problem phase’ as a ‘hatred phase.’” We often leave this aspect of the creative process out of the picture. We focus on the moment of epiphany, the detonation of insight that happened when Newton was hit by the apple or Archimedes was taking a bath. That is perhaps why creativity seems so ethereal. The idea is that such insights could happen anytime, anywhere. It is just a matter of sitting back and letting them flow. But this leaves out an indispensable feature of creativity. Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot. As Dyson puts it: “Creativity should be thought of as a dialogue. You have to have a problem before you can have the game-changing riposte. ~ Matthew Syed,
247:Holidays: Imagine if the great holidays and seasons of the Christian year were redesigned to emphasize love. Advent would be the season of preparing our hearts to receive God’s love. Epiphany would train us to keep our eyes open for expressions of compassion in our daily lives. Lent would be an honest self-examination of our maturity in love and a renewal of our commitment to grow in it. Instead of giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, we would stop criticizing or gossiping about or interrupting others. Maundy Thursday would refocus us on the great and new commandment; Good Friday would present the suffering of crucifixion as the suffering of love; Holy Saturday would allow us to lament and grieve the lack of love in our lives and world; and Easter would celebrate the revolutionary power of death-defying love. Pentecost could be an “altar call” to be filled with the Spirit of love, and “ordinary time” could be “extraordinary time” if it involved challenges to celebrate and express love in new ways—to new people, to ourselves, to the earth, and to God—including time to tell stories about our experiences of doing so. ~ Brian D McLaren,
248:including salutary effects on the following: • major depression • drug addiction • binge eating • smoking cessation • stress among cancer patients • loneliness among senior citizens • ADHD • asthma • psoriasis • irritable bowel syndrome Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind. This research boom got its start with a Jew-Bu named Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Manhattan-raised, MIT-trained microbiologist who claimed to have had an elaborate epiphany—a “vision,” he called it—while on a retreat in 1979. The substance of the vision was that he could bring meditation to a much broader audience by stripping it of Buddhist metaphysics. Kabat-Zinn designed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course that taught secularized meditation to tens of thousands of people around America and the world. Having a simple, replicable meditation protocol made it easy to test the effects on patients. ~ Dan Harris,
249:...a flood of reality. I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I'm startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. For the first time I see her as uninhibited; she seems stronger, less controllable, wanting to take me into a new and unfamiliar land - the dreaded uncertainty of a totally different world. I sense she wants to rearrange my life in a significant way - her eyes tell me this and though I see truth in them, I also know that one day, sometime very soon, she too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity. All I have to do is keep silent about this and not bring it up - yet she weakens me, it's almost as if she's making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. ~ Bret Easton Ellis,
250:The Chicago literary tradition is born not out of its Universities, but out of the sports desk and the city desk of its newspapers. Hemingway revolutionized English prose. His inspiration was the telegraph, whose use, at Western Union, taught this: every word costs something,
This, of course, is the essence of poetry, which is the essence of great prose. Chicagoan literature came from the newspaper, whose purpose, in those days, was to Tell What Happened. Hemingway's epiphany was reported, earlier, by Keats as " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' --that is all ye know earth, and all ye need to know." I would add to Keats' summation only this: "Don't let the other fellow piss on your back and tell you it's raining."
I believe one might theoretically forgive one who cheats at business, but never one who cheats at cards; for business adversaries operate at arm's length, the cardplayer under the strict rules of the game, period.
That was my first political epiphany.
And now, I have written a political book.
What are the qualifications for a Political Writer?
They are, I believe, the same as those of an aspiring critic: an inability to write for the Sports Page. ~ David Mamet,
251:doesn't matter to the universe, it should matter one hell of a lot to YOU. In fact, it should matter to you more than it currently does. If you knew how small you are and how short a time you have to do what you can, you wouldn't waste time watching five fucking hours of TV a day. You wouldn't waste time doing a job you hate. You wouldn't waste the little time you have dealing with assholes, feeling sorry for yourself, or being timid about the things you'd really like to do. I'm 35, and it dawned on me just recently that it's not at all long before I'll be forty. And forty is FUCKING OLD in the mind of a guy with the mentality and sense of humor of a teenager. I mean, hell, you can make an argument for 30 being young despite the fact that the MTV crowd says different, but forty-something is what your grandmother was. When I had this epiphany, a succession of uncomfortable and incredibly obvious realizations followed. If I can turn 40, I can turn 50. If I can turn 50, I can turn 60. Once, I was a kid and everyone else was old. The tables will turn. I'll be the guy that kids look at and see as old. Me. Fucking ME. Me, who was once out cruising on Friday nights, staying up until dawn. Me, ~ Johnny B Truant,
252:Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma. ~ Nick Miller,
253:Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky.
She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe… ~ William Boyd,
254:The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 2.15,
255:I AM NOT SO INTELLIGENT The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. Besides, I believe that I need my emotions to formulate my ideas and get the energy to execute them. I am just intelligent enough to understand that I have a predisposition to be fooled by randomness—and to accept the fact that I am rather emotional. I am dominated by my emotions—but as an aesthete, I am happy about that fact. I am just like every single character whom I ridiculed in this book. Not only that, but I may be even worse than them because there may be a negative correlation between beliefs and behavior (recall Popper the man). The difference between me and those I ridicule is that I try to be aware of it. No matter how long I study and try to understand probability, my emotions will respond to a different set of calculations, those that my unintelligent genes want me to handle. If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such unintelligent behavior does not just cover probability and randomness. I do not think I am reasonable enough to avoid getting angry when a discourteous driver blows his horn at me for being one nanosecond late after a traffic light turns green. I am fully aware that such anger is self-destructive and offers no benefit, and that if I were to develop anger for every idiot around me doing something of the sort, I would be long dead. These small daily emotions are not rational. But we need them to function properly. We are designed to respond to hostility with hostility. I have enough enemies to add some spice to my life, but I sometimes wish I had a few more (I rarely go to the movies and need the entertainment). Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
256:We can understand why one of the titles given to Jesus is that of ‘prophet.’ Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than all of them. He is the prophet of the last, but also of the best, chance. With him there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic – a shift that follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well. This is the complete elimination of the sacrificial for the first time – the end of divine violence and the explicit revelation of all that has gone before. It calls for a complete change of emphasis and a spiritual metamorphosis without precedent in the whole history of mankind. It also amounts to an absolute simplification of the relations between human beings, in so far as all the false differences between doubles are annulled – a simplification in the sense in which we speak of an algebraic simplification.
Throughout the texts of the Old Testament it was impossible to conclude the deconstruction of myths, rituals and law since the plenary revelation of the founding murder had not yet taken place. The divinity may be to some extent stripped of violence, but not completely so. That is why there is still an indeterminate and indistinct future, in which the resolution of the problem by human means alone – the face-to-face reconciliation that ought to result when people are alerted to the stupidity and uselessness of symmetrical violence – remains confused to a certain extent with the hope of a new epiphany of violence that is distinctively divine in origin, a ‘Day of Yahweh’ that would combine the paroxysm of God’s anger with a no less God-given reconciliation. However remarkably the prophets progress toward a precise understanding of what it is that structures religion and culture, the Old Testament never tips over into the complete rationality that would dispense with this hope of a purgation by violence and would give up requiring God to take the apocalyptic solution by completely liquidating the ‘evil’ in order to ensure the happiness of the chosen. ~ Ren Girard,
257: Epiphany
Immortal, moveless, calm, alone, august,
A silence throned, to just and to unjust
One Lord of still unutterable love,
I saw Him, Shiva, like a brooding dove
Close-winged upon her nest. The outcasts came,
The sinners gathered to that quiet flame,
The demons by the other sterner gods
Rejected from their luminous abodes
Gathered around the Refuge of the lost
Soft-smiling on that wild and grisly host.

All who were refugeless, wretched, unloved,
The wicked and the good together moved
Naturally to Him, the shelterer sweet,
And found their heaven at their Master's feet.

The vision changed and in its place there stood
A Terror red as lightning or as blood.

His strong right hand a javelin advanced
And as He shook it, earthquake stumbling danced
Across the hemisphere, ruin and plague
Rained out of heaven, disasters swift and vague
Neighboured, a marching multitude of ills.

His foot strode forward to oppress the hills,
And at the vision of His burning eyes
The hearts of men grew faint with dread surmise
Of sin and punishment. Their cry was loud,
"O master of the stormwind and the cloud,
Spare, Rudra, spare! Show us that other form
Auspicious, not incarnate wrath and storm."
The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. Alone
Who towers above fear and plays with grief,
Defeat and death, inherits full relief
From blindness and beholds the single Form,
Love masking Terror, Peace supporting Storm.
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280

Calcutta and Chandernagore, 1907 - 1910
The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.

He feels the joy of the immortal play;
He has the silence and the unflinching force,
He knows the oneness and the eternal course.

He too is Rudra and thunder and the Fire,
He Shiva and the white Light no shadows tire,
The Strength that rides abroad on Time's wide wings,
The Calm in the heart of all immortal things.

~ Sri Aurobindo, - Epiphany
,
258:Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand. Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving. “If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ” “Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important.” This was another attack on my work style. I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano’s point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. This was a practical complement to Joseph’s “is this useful?” mantra. It was the opposite of zoning out, it was zoning in. In fact, I looked into it and found there was science to suggest that pausing could be a key ingredient in creativity and innovation. Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain. This, too, was massively counterintuitive for me. My impulse when presented with a thorny problem was to bulldoze my way through it, to swarm it with thought. But the best solutions often come when you allow yourself to get comfortable with ambiguity. This is why people have aha moments in the shower. It was why Kabat-Zinn had a vision while on retreat. It was why Don Draper from Mad Men, when asked how he comes up with his great slogans, said he spends all day thinking and then goes to the movies. Janice Marturano was on ~ Dan Harris,
259:If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog. ~ Thomas Pynchon,
260:To “Who would not be a poet?” thus I read
In thy proud sonnet, my poetic friend;
And unto this my full assent was given:
“There is not, cannot be, under all heaven,
Aught happier in itself than the witch, poetry.”
But “Who’d not be a poet?” here I pause
Forebodingly, my poet-friend,—because
“To see all beauty with his gifted sight,”
To love, like him, with all the soul,
To be, when life is morning-bright
The very creature of delight,—
Delight beyond control,—
Is still to be, in like degree,
Too sensible of misery
And loss and slight, and all the weeping shapes of dole.
And this is truth too, that with saddened heart
Oft must he from his fellows live apart;
For how can men whose every breath of life
Is drawn in the hot air, and mid the strife
Of pettiest interest, have a kindred heart
With him who hath built heavenward and apart
The structures of his mind, and looking thence
Over this world-thronged universe immense,
Is wont all such embroilments to deplore
As light-obscuring vapours—nothing more?
What ladder of experience can they build,
To mount with—up, into a nature filled
With beauty, or by mighty truths inspired,
Or one even with a bold ambition fired?
But least of all in such men can there be
Devotions chiming into sympathy
With some pure soul, unsuccoured and alone,
Struggled in weariness unwearied on—
Unwearied, day and night, and night and day,
Towards the far Mecca of its faith always.
Yet thus the poet, armed only with the right,
To life’s dishonest battle oft must come,
256
To front instead of valour, mean despite,
With envy aye in emulation’s room,
Blotting heaven’s sacred light!
To see unblushing fortune’s minions doom
To obloguy, through some repute unholy,
Or to some vile and miserable estate,
All such as would not trample on the lowly,
And basely glorify the falsely great.
Yet if a thought like this
Should mar at times they tuneful bliss,
Stronger within thine earnest will
Be the spirit of sone, that still
Thou mayest sing of eloquent eyes
That are of sunny thoughts the every sunny skies;
Sweet dreams that swarm round honeyed lips,
Like honey-loving bees;
Glad birds, fresh flowers, clear streams, and trees
All starry bright with golden pips;
Or with a loud bold chime,
Sing of that braver time,
When world-wide justice from her Alpine chair
Shall read at length in the rich reddening skies
The gospel of her advent, and declare
The sacred sign of her epiphany there,
Amid the purple dyes;
While all true men, the bravely wise,
Shall seek her there with fearless feet and free
Where the prophet-peaks arise
Out of the shattering mist, the phantom sea
Of old iniquity!
Through dense and rare, shall seek her there,
Breathing with lion-lungs the clear keen mountain air
Of a supreme up-climbing, God-great liberty.
Then envy not the splendid wretchedness
Of Mammon’s dupes! Sing thy great rhymes
For those diviner spiritual times
Our country yet shall know, and, wisely knowing, bless.
Downward, through the blooming roofage
Of a lonely forest bower,
Come the yellow sunbeams,—falling
257
Like a burning shower:
So through heaven’s starry ceiling
To the hermit soul’s abode,
Comes the Holy Spirit,—earthward
Raying down from God.
~ Charles Harpur,
261:We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie. ~ Ed Catmull,
262:It’s all right, Alera. I don’t need a family.”
“Maybe you don’t need one,” I said with a shrug, playing with the fabric of the quilt that lay between us. “But you deserve one.”
I thought for a moment I had hit a nerve, but instead he made a joke out of it.
“Just think--if I’d had Koranis as my father, I might have turned into him by now. I’d be brutish and pretentious, but at least my boastful garb would distract you from those flaws. Oh, and this hair you love? It would be gone.”
I laughed at the ounce of truth in his statement, then fell silent, for some reason feeling sadder about his situation than he was. He reclined upon the pillows, considering me.
“You know, in Cokyri, fathers don’t raise their children. I think maybe it’s better that way.”
“How can you think that?” I asked, troubled by the decided tenor of his voice, and he sat up again, not having expected this reaction from me.
“Your father controlled you and forced you to marry Steldor. How can you disagree with me after living through that?”
“Because…” I faltered. “Because I love my father for all the good things he’s done. Because he made me laugh when I was a child. That’s what I think about when I see him. Not his mistakes.”
“I couldn’t forgive him like you do.”
“Could you forgive me? I mean, if I did something awful.”
Narian did not immediately respond, unsettling me, but it was in his nature to weigh all things.
“I don’t know,” he slowly answered. “But I would still love you.”
He looked at me, an epiphany in his eyes, finally understanding my connection to my family. Then his expression changed, and I knew he was going to raise a difficult issue.
“Explain this then. If that is how families are supposed to function, and you would forgive your father anything, and clearly my mother would forgive me anything, then Koranis fails because he won’t accept me. The women, you and my mother, are loving, but the man fails.”
“Yes, but not all men fail.”
“Prove it. Your father sold you into marriage, and the only father figures I’ve known have respectively made my life hell and rejected me.”
He lay back once more, watching me, and though he had caught me off guard, I was determined to make my point.
“Cannan is a just and fair man.”
“Whose son is Steldor.
“Who has faults, yes--”
“As all men do.”
Frustrated, I threw my hands in the air. “Are you going to keep interrupting me?”
“No, he said apologetically. “Go on.”
“What about you? Am I, the woman who is in love with you, supposed to believe you’re a terrible person when I know better?”
“I would be a terrible father,” he said, shifting onto his side.
What?
“Come, Alera, you have to admit it.”
“I don’t have to admit anything, especially when I think you’re wrong.”
“On what grounds?”
I was so exasperated I wanted to tear my hair out. And his bemused visage only made it worse.
“Because I saw you with that little girl this afternoon! You were perfect with her. And if you can be perfect with a stranger’s child, how could you be any different with our own?”
“It’s different raising a child than talking with one,” he contended. “I never had a father, Alera. No one taught me how to be one.”
“And did anyone teach you how to love me?”
This stopped him short. “No.”
“Well, you’re pretty good at it. So be quiet, and accept that our children are going to love you.”
Narian’s eyebrows rose, and I started laughing. Taking my hand, he pulled me toward him and I lay down beside him, mirroring his position.
“I’m sorry for yelling at you,” I murmured, giving him a light kiss.
“You never know where a conversation is going to take you,” he said, gazing into my dark eyes. “I’m rather glad you did. ~ Cayla Kluver,
263:The Epiphany
Deep in Sabea's fragrant groves retired,
Long had the Eastern Sages studious dwelt,
By love sublime of sacred science fired:
Long had they trained the' inquiring youth,
With liberal hand the bread of wisdom dealt,
And sung in solemn verse mysterious truth.
The sacred characters they knew to trace
Derived from Egypt's elder race;
And all that Greece, with copious learning fraught,
Thro' different schools by various masters taught;
And all Arabia's glowing store
Of fabled truths and rich poetic lore:
Stars, plants and gems, and talismans they knew,
And far was spread their fame and wide their praises grew.
The' admiring East their praises spread:
But with uncheated eyes themselves they viewed;
Mourning they sat with dust upon their head,
And oft in melancholy strain
The fond complaint renewed,
How little yet they knew, how much was learned in vain.
For human guilt and mortal woe
Their sympathizing sorrows flow;
Their hallowed prayers ascend in incense pure;
They mourned the narrow bounds assigned
To the keen glances of the searching mind,
They mourned the ills they could not cure,
They mourned the doubts they could not clear,
They mourned that prophet yet, nor seer,
The great Eternal had made known,
Or reached the lowest step of that immortal throne.
And oft the starry cope of heaven beneath,
When day's tumultuous sounds had ceased to breathe,
With fixed feet, as rooted there,
Through the long night they drew the chilly air;
While sliding o'er their head,
In solemn silence dread,
The' ethereal orbs their shining course pursued,
128
In holy trance enwrapt the sages stood,
With folded arms laid on their reverend breast,
And to that Heaven they knew, their orisons addresst.
A Star appears; they marked its kindling beam
O'er night's dark breast unusual splendours stream:
The lesser lights that deck the sky,
In wondering silence softly gliding by,
At the fair stranger seemed to gaze,
Or veiled their trembling fires and half withdrew their rays.
The blameless men the wonder saw,
And hailed the joyful sign with pious awe;
They knew 'twas none of all the train
With which in shadowy forms and shapes uncouth,
Monsters of earth and of the main,
Remote from nature as from truth,
Their learned pens the sky had figured o'er:
No star with such kind aspect shone before;
Nor e'er did wandering planet stoop so low
To guide benighted pilgrims through this vale of woe.
The heavenly impulse they obey,
The new-born light directs their way;
Through deserts never marked by human tread,
And billowy waves of loose, unfaithful sand,
O'er many an unknown hill and foreign strand
The silver clue unerring led,
And peopled towns they pass, and glittering spires;
No cloud could veil its light, no sun could quench its fires.
Thus passed the venerable pilgrims on,
Till Salem's stately towers before them shone,
And soon their feet her hallowed pavements presst;
Not in her marble courts to rest,—
From pomp and royal state aloof,
Their shining guide its beams withdrew;
And points their path, and points their view,
To Bethlehem's rustic cots, to Mary's lowly roof.
There the bright sentinel kept watch,
While other stars arose and set;
For there, within its humble thatch,
129
Weakness and power, and heaven and earth were met.
Now, sages, now your search give o'er,
Believe, fall prostrate, and adore!
Here spread your spicy gifts, your golden offerings here;
No more the fond complaint renew,
Of human guilt and mortal woe,
Of knowledge checked by doubt, and hope with fear:
What angels wished to see, ye view;
What angels wished to learn, ye know;—
Peace is proclaimed to man, and heaven begun below.
~ Anna Laetitia Barbauld,
264:1000
The Menologium. (Preface To The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles)
CHRIST WAS BORN, KING OF GLORY
in midwinter, mighty prince,
eternal, almighty, on the eighth day,
Healer, called, heaven's ward;
so at the same time singing praises
countless folk begin the year,
for the awaited time comes to town,
the first month, famous January.
Five nights later the Lord's baptism,
and eternal God's epiphany comes;
the twelve-days' time to blessed men known,
by us in Britain called Twelfthnight.
Four weeks later February falls,
Sol-month brighter settles in town,
a month minus two days;
so February's way was reckoned by the wise,
One night more is Mary's mass,
the King's mother; for on that day Christ,
the child of the Ruler, she revealed in the temple.
After five nights winter was fared,
and after seventeen he suffered death:
the Saviour's man, great Matthew,
when spring has come to stay in town.
And to the folk after five nights
-- unless it is Leap Year, when it comes one night later -by his cold clothes of frost and hail
wild March is known throughout the world,
Hlyda-month, blowing loud,
Eleven nights later, holy and noble,
Gregory shone in God's service,
honoured in Britain. So Benedict,
nine nights passing, sought the Preserver,
the resolute man celebrated in writings
by men under his rule. So the wise in reckoning
at that time count the equinox,
because, wielding power, God at the beginning
made on the same day sun and moon.
1001
Four nights after the Father
sent the equinox, his archangel announced
the mighty salvation to great Mary,
that she the Shaper of all should bear
bring to birth the best of kings,
as it was widely told through the world;
that was a great destiny delivered to us.
So after seven nights the Saviour sends
the month of April, most often bringing
the mighty time of comfort to mankind,
the Lord's resurrection, when joy is rightly
celebrated everywhere, as that wise one sang:
'This is the day which the Lord hath made;
we will rejoice and be glad in it.'
Nor may we hold that time by tally
of a length of days, nor the Lord's
ascension to heaven, for always it changes
within the rules known to the wise man,
old in winters; in the cycle
he can with craft find the holy days.
The martyrs' memory we must yet recount,
say in words, sing with wisdom,
that after nineteen nights and five
from Easter's blessed coming to us,
men begin to raise the relics,
holy treasures; that is a high day,
when Rogation is held. Quickly to men's homes,
six nights further in the fine gear,
in groves and flowers comes glorious, shining,
strongly to men as it must,
the fulness of May through many lands.
On the same day the noble disciples
Philip and James gave up their lives,
mighty warriors, for the maker's love.
After two nights was taken by God
to blessed Helen the noblest of beams,
on which lay suffering the Lord of angels
for love of man, the maker on a gallows
by the Father's leave. After the first week
minus one night, to men are brought
sun-bright days by summer to town,
warm weather. Woods and fields as soon
1002
bloom and blossom; so beauty is called up
over middle-earth, as in his manner
each kind of creature declares the King's love,
the Almighty's. After eight nights
and days turning, the Lord took up
Augustine into the other light,
embraced the blessed man who in Britain
gladly inspired men's obedience
within the will of God as wise Gregory bade.
Nor have I heard before of a better man
anywhere bringing better teaching,
a more celebrated bishop over the sea;
by the king's seat in Kent he rests near the church
after six long days the month draws near,
earlier by us called Litha,
now called June, and the gem rises
in the heavens the highest in the year,
then sinks from his place and sets;
he will not for long travel late,
the fairest light over the fields.
After thirteen nights and ten the glorious thane
loved by the Lord, John the Baptist, was born,
whom we celebrate in midsummer.
And widely it is held throughout the world,
widely honoured as well it should be,
that holy day in the homes of men,
when Peter and Paul the apostles,
loyal servants, suffered in Rome
five nights on from midsummer's day
glorious martyrdom; miracles they worked,
many for men among the nations,
countless, manifest and clear through the Maker's Son.
Then after two nights, timely to us,
comes July, in which James
on the twenty-fourth night took up his life,
wise and truthful, teacher of the people,
Zebedee's son. Summer on the seventh night
brings the weed-month brightly to town;
everywhere August comes to the earth,
and Lammas-time. Later coming,
one week minus one day,
is high autumn, heavy with harvest;
1003
then wealth is found that is fair on earth.
On the third day the glorious deacon
was martyred and went forth, mighty man,
Lawrence, who now has life
with the wonder-Father in reward for his works.
After five nights the fairest of virgins,
the wondrous woman, went to the God of hosts
for her son's mothering, to the victory-seat,
a home in heaven; the Saviour has so
repaid forever that perfect fostering.
Then on the tenth night in the turning of time,
Bartholomew here in Britain
is honoured far and wide for his fate.
So also after four nights,
the noble's death-day is known to men:
he who baptized the glorious Boy,
the worthy warrior of the Word,
of whom God said no greater man
was born on earth between man and woman.
And after three nights throughout the nations,
the month that is held by men as holy
fares to the people as it was foreseen,
as the old astronomers ere found,
September's way; and it was on the seventh day
that the best queens came to birth,
the Lord's mother. Then more days pass,
thirteen in number, and the blameless thane
clear-sighted in God's word sent up his spirit:
Matthew to his Maker
went in eternal joy. Then arrives
after three nights to the nations,
the day of equinox to the children of earth;
and here we count worthy, far and wide,
the archangel's time in the autumn,
Michael, known to the multitude,
five nights after the equinox-day.
Two nights later, the tenth month
comes to men with wise counsel,
October arrives among men with abundance:
Winterfylleth was the old word
among the island-dwellers, Angles and Saxons,
men and women. So the warriors' time comes
1004
on the twenty-seventh, and the two noble ones
on the same day are celebrated:
we have heard how long ago
Simon and Jude, shining with glory,
did great deeds. For that their doom
was a blessed uplifting. Then arrives quickly,
after four nights, to the folk with plenty,
Blotmonath in town, and brings feasting to men:
November, a time of blessedness
like no other month, by the Lord's mercy.
The same day we celebrate the feast of All Saints,
who worked in the world the will of God.
Then winter's day opens wide
in six nights, seizes the sun,
ravages the harvest with rime and snow,
chains them with frost at the Lord's command;
the green meadows may not stay with us,
the fields' covering. And four nights later
it was that the mighty one, Martin, departed,
the stainless servant sought the Lord;
and on the twelfth night Clement was taken,
sunk in the grey sea, strong in victory,
called on by name by many in need.
On the seventh night after, dear to the Saviour,
noble Andrew arose into heaven,
gave his ghost into God's keeping,
eager depart in earthly death,
Then morning to men brings in the month
called December by the Redeemer's children,
the old Yule. So in eight nights and twelve
the Saviour himself, strong in purpose,
gave with difficulty an eternal kingdom to Thomas,
and to the bold man his blessing.
Then after four nights the Father of angels
sent his Son into creation's expanse
to comfort mankind. Now you can find
the holy days, that man shall hold
throughout Britain at the bidding
of the Saxon's king at the same time.
~ Anonymous Olde English,
265:Alma Venus! [excerpt]
Trembling Creation's omnipresent sun,
Immanent Harmonist, Whose rhythms run.
Alike where midge pursues his swift romance,
Or grave stars cluster for their midnight dance 1
Bringer of fire, from what far fane despoiled?
Potter of grace, by what fell finger soiled?
In temple throned of old, or here in shame
Lurking, to Deathless YOU, of many a namePaphia, Freya, Aphrodite, Fand,
Cabiri vague, or in the fairy band
Titania, Niamh, or that Morgan fay
Our simpler eyes in. Sicily to-day
Catch at her sorcery-to YOU, whose breath
To a rippling rapture stirs the pool of Death,
I bring this coronal of rose and rue,
With golden wattle twined-and she-oak too.
The living wheels we call Creation roll
Whither and while You lead. Who are their soul!
Wheels within wheels, and whose the whirl of eyes
But Love's, Who was. Who is. Who never dies?
Wheels within wheels, but ever at the nave
Venus Pandemos, She for Whom we crave!
Wheels within wheels, but glowing from the tires
Venus Immaculate's Uranian fires!
If lovelight played not round the misty bourn
Could Life her marshy perils thread unworn?
Were Heaven's many mansions built to hold
Women and men seraphically cold?
Or does annihilation mean but this'Tristram no more desires Isolda's kiss'?
Fountains of Art that keep this old Earth fresh
Ascend to God from cisterns of the flesh:
Angel and phoenix flowered from the fires
Of virgin Ishtar's ravenous desires:
In good Nile mud incestuous Isis set
Many a tree of knowledge bearing yet:
Austere Mohammed meets at Heaven's door
Fond phantoms of his desert dreams of yore:
The shrine, the song, the picture and the bust
Are diamonds doubles of the charcoal, lust. . .
Your ruby billows floated to our ken
Many a rite that soothes the souls of men;
Swastik of Ind as once Egyptian Tau
In shining symbol utters yet Your law:
And coldest fanes for eunuch gods designed
Reveal Your girdle with their chaplets twined.
Around the Maypole, aeon-old, they dance,
Maiden and youth of Britain and of France,
Obedient to the law, forgot to-day,
That fertile gods, unshackled by their play,
From winter death will duly be reborn
And with their foison fill the ears of corn:
Or where, horizonward, Australian sand
Billows monotonous, behold Your band
Of leaf-clad lubras, swaying to the hum
Of droning wizard and barbaric drum,
In strange Unthippa dance to conjure there,
With warm wild posturing and coy despair,
Some dream-time god of golden ages dim,
That with the drama of their love for him
The waste in sympathy will fertile grow,
Emu be plentiful, the dry creeks flow,
And all the wild be rich with nut and plant,
Witchetty grub and root and honey-ant:
Virgins and boys, who with the bridal pair
And hymeneal chant through Athens bear
That casket strange, unknowing that inside
The mysteries of Aphrodite hide,
Ye will acknowledge too, in turn, ere long,
Omnipotent the goddess of my song:
And, childless ones of Ind, with prayer ye pour
Oil on that shrine to-day, as wives of yore
On wayside Jahv or god of boundary,
For benison of grudged fertility. . . .
Let pale usurpers of Your old domain
In crumbling book and vapid hymn maintain
That You, great Queen, are dead, that nevermore
Shall devotee Your majesty adore,
Or sad Meander wail as long ago
For torn Adonis and Your helpless woe:
We hear in beating hearts another rune,
In hymn of man and maid another tune:
On every road Your living creatures draw,
Whither You list, the Tables of Your Law:
Wherever tree hath sap or being breath,
Ubiquitous, You bruise the head of Death:
Here, pallid cuckoo's great crescendos call
His coy companion to Your festival:
There, magpie warbles to the morning star
The advent of the rapture that You are:
And desolate the spirit unaware
Of quivering enchantment in the air
When August struggles from his gaoler's power,
And gleaming envoys from each wooing flower
Cajole the bees to waft his tender dues
To some dear tabernacle's secret cruse;
When listening almonds weary of the night
Hearing You coming blossom into white;
When wattle waking from her torpor cold
Knowing You near her trembles into gold;
When, ancient symbols realizing here,
Gabriel Spring announces every year
To expectant Nature's myriad maidenhood,
In rolling plain or solitary wood,
The miracle that maketh Life complete,
The brooding Presence of the Paraclete.
*
Magi profounder than the Eastern Three
Followed the Star of Your Epiphany:
Isis had hidden with a sullen pall
The secret of the Universe from all,
Until Lucretius wondering found a fold,
It swayed to Goethe's eyes, and, growing bold,
Darwin stooped down and groping patiently
Out of the dust lifted the hem, till we
Staggering saw against the eternal blue
The secret Builder of Creation-You I ...
'When Love was driven from the world by stark
And sexless mattoids of the Ages Dark,
Disgusted lore to Moorish havens fled,
The Muses nine with eunuch monks were wed:
Primordial terror to the day returned,
The witch in hordes and great Servetus burned:
Celibate piety with thumb uncouth
Plastered a fig-leaf over Plato's truth:
Aquinas thinned, to make a draught divine,
With holy water, Aristotle's wine;
Round every comer eft or devil stares,
And very Dante mumbles craven prayers;
The childish painter daubs his maudlin fears,
And song forgets to sing a thousand years.
Yet You had lingered cunningly concealed
Now in an altar-piece, now in a field
With shards of pillared grandeur buried deep,
Until the nightmare passed. Yea, did You peep
A moment now and then, ere rose the sun,
Under the hood of a rose-hearted nun
At Abelard, or told the tale so well
Of Launcelot that even glowering hell
Drove not Francesca from her lover's wraith;
Yea, visored chivalry unhorsed his faith,
And far Jerusalem and Paynim tryst
Forgot, for victory in a gender list
Where with the provocation of a smile
Your ambushed omnipresence would beguile
Crusader sullen to a softer creed,
Knight errant to an errant knight indeed....
As what strange god did You entice the King
Through brave Uriah's comely wife to fling
Harp and the psaltery aside to plan
As mean a deed as had polluted man
Till Sextus lusted, or her father's knife
Rescued Virginia from the hell of life?
Yea, there is that in You man dare not face:
A dark star dogs Your limpid planet's grace:
Jetsam from old pollution stales Your shore:
Lewd gargoyles grin above Your temple door. ...
Wormwood is waiter at Your choicest feast,
Your Beauty shadowed ever by the Beast.
Yon feudal lord of mediaeval France,
Your devotee of many a Rose Romance,
Hath on his peasants' daughters' bridal nights
Exacted to the full his shameful rights:
Your cuckoo calling Spring into the wood
Was stark nest-brother to a robin's brood:
And, tragi-comedy of humble life,
That doting husband of the buxom wife
Is fondling (while You laugh) the child she gave
At Your still altar to some passing knave. . ..
Was it a glimpse of phases fell that mar
The radiant round of Your auspicious star,
That drove the hermit to the wilderness
From demons lurking in Your least caress,
And bade the nun, as once the vestal too,
Renounce Your works and all Your pomps-and You?
Yea, those whose eyes can pierce the dazzling veil
Of Light that is Your mask have told a tale
Of how we in the world were once expelled
From Paradise, and now, in prison held,
On moaning treadmills of repeated lives
Work out our crimes, until the hour arrives
For life to cease on earth and You to fade
With all the woe Your temptress wiles have made.
You are the gaoler of that prison, Who
(For so they say) inveigle all to woo,
Be won, that so by our own ardours we
Keep lit Your hell, yea, for eternity,
Unless, until, ignoring all You say,
As monk, as nun, we dare to disobey.
If so it be, then were the barren one
Blest of all women underneath the sun,
An angel of the Lord sent here to ray
The midnight of the soul with coming day;
The tower impregnable that masters Fate
Is not the Caesar but the celibate;
And he at whom no woman ever smiled
Is everlasting Heaven's favoured child
Ordained (who knows?) in what benignant star
As Baptist of some glorious Avatar,
Whose Word shall cause all flesh to cease to be
And man be one again with Deity!. . .
Or when the veil we call Reality
Rifts, and the meaning of it all we see,
Will Good and Evil kiss and understand?
God walk with brother Satan hand in hand?
The cool-haired Night repose beside the Sun?
Pandemos prove with Love Uranian one?
The Tree of Life mature its golden fruits
From bark so sinister and those wan roots?
Slowly our interrogating eyes
Sobered with long deception recognize,
'Mid older clues dissolved to flecks, at last
One signal flashing from the Outer Vast,
Fell or benign (as falls or rises faith),
Comet or guiding star-Your rosy wraith!
Your rosy wraith that both in man and weed
'Writes deep and undeniable Your creed'Beget or hear, though ye to-morrow die,
Beget or bear, nor ask the reason why 1
Though sun and earth shall duly pass away,
Though all the gods shall ripen and decay,
It is Their Will Who bade the world exist:
And woe to him or her who doth not list
The sole clear mandate from the Otherwhere
Flushed through the Universe-Beget or bear 1'
Love we or dread we may not all ignore
The single beacon on the circling shore
Where Being laps upon the caverned steep
Wherefrom we drifted and whereto we creep.
Beacon 1 although You lead us but to gloom!
A guiding star, it may be, to the tomb!
Comet flung from the Void through trackless Light!
Yet is Your rosy flame in ion mite
And great pathetic man the only trace
Of something more than chance in Time and Space,
That purpose dimly threads the crazy web,
That tides of anguish ultimately ebb,
That green hope signals underground a Nile,
That faith is wiser than an ostrich wile,
That there is something in us will elude
The withering fingers of vicissitude,
And man's ripe earth by a guttering sun betrayed
Will not in cold and useless ruin fade.
Question the sibyl grottoes near or far
Whither or whence we sail or why we are!
Listen at Nature's beating heart for clue,
And every oracle we know or knew!
From Zodiac round of older destiny,
From tiny orbit of an atomy,
From Pythoness or oak or Magian fire,
Augur antique or wizard new inquire,
Austral churinga or the crystal ball,
'Wherefore does anything exist at all?'
Of star or fungus seek, of life or death,
Whence Being came and whither wandereth!
10
Ask of the gloom that locks the secret in,
Ask of the light that saw the world begin!
The day, the night, and death and life are dumb:
From fungus, star or ball no answers come:
Silent, churinga, table, passing bird:
From fire or Druid oak no guiding word:
The Pythoness ambiguously sighs:
Orbit minute nor Zodiac house replies:
But dim the beating heart amid its sobs
With 'Alma Venus!' 'Alma Venus!' throbs;
While on two sibyl leaves, by a world-wind strange
Blown to our shore across the gulf of Change,
'Increase and multiply' on one is scrolled
In ochre crude, on one, in glowing gold
Around the pearly nimbus of a dove,
The script imperishable-'God is Love.'
~ Bernard O'Dowd,
266:Jeanette Speaks
1.
A bright and barefoot little girl
with a garland of cherry blossoms
enters the unattended village church.
She makes a shorthand cross
upon the makeshift wooden amulet
attached to her leather necklace.
She then runs her bony fingers
through the long, black locks
parted above her forehead.
She walks past the empty benches
towards the peaceful altar
and her petite, russet-clad figure
stoops to kneel there.
She clasps her delicate hands
in front of a wooden statue
and casts her large, green eyes
upon the Saint’s figurine.
She whispers
in a soft but confident voice:
– Sister Catherine. I didn’t give you
the spring’s gift yesterday.
Mama told me to donate
my pickings to Mother Mary.
It’s Jeannette speaking, sister
in case you’ve forgotten me.
Please don’t be mad.
Here, I hope you like these.
42
She places the crimson wreath
at the pedestal of the religious icon
and stands up to leaves the chapel
glowing with a heart-felt grin.
2.
I think
she liked the flowers.
I know I would
if I was a saint.
I wonder how
a girl gets to become a saint?
My Godmother, old Madame Agnes
says before there were saints
there used to be sacred women called High Priestesses
or Goddesses in this land. But Mama says
Madame Agnes is a witch
and I shouldn’t listen to her.
Now I should go and do my chores.
Afterwards, if there’s time
I’ll go with my friends
to the slopes near the Fairies’ Tree.
The Tree, they say, is a hundred years old.
We’ll pick lilies-of-the-valley and camellia
for wreaths to put on the branches of the Tree at Lent
and I’ll get some jasmine
for Mama’s vase at home.
The jasmine have such an amazing
smell now
in early spring.
The best mushrooms grow on the paddocks
behind the Virgin Spring.
43
I’ve heard the nuns at the Hermitage say
the Spring has healing powers.
I’ve even seen a leper and a blind monk
come all the way from Nancy to drink its water.
I wonder if any of them is cured. I’m lucky
to be “strong and healthy,” Mama says.
She reckons
I was born in winter, on the night of Epiphany
about nine or ten years ago. She says
Epiphany was when Lord Jesus
was first recognised as the Son of God by
people. But
Madame Agnes says my birthday
was on the same day as Le Jour des Rois,
Day of the Kings, an ancient celebration
when the rich baked a cake for the beggars
and the last beggar to get a piece
was named the Bean-King, or something like
that.
Mama says
it’s blessed for girls
to go down the Valley to pick
blossoms and weave garlands
for the images of saints in our Church
and for those in the Hermitage behind the Bois
Chesnu
Oak Forest. I love
Saint Catherine’s statue, and Saint Margaret
too.
She sometimes looks
straight at my praying and
when feeling the kindness of her eyes
I wonder why Papa says
the statue is a lifeless thing.
Mama calls Papa sacrilegious
whenever he makes fun of our praying. Why
does he call the statue
lifeless? Doesn’t wood
come from the living trees?
44
My dress today
is the colour of oak. It’s made of
rough wool cut out of Mama’s old dress.
She’s given it
puffy sleeves and stitched pretty
blue ribbons
on the skirt
making it look like the dress
of a rich city girl. She says
I’m short like her but have Papa’s
legs.
I’m not sure what she means.
My hair’s black like Papa’s
and really messy today
I’ll have to get Mama to brush it
once I’ve been to the well
and drawn water. Now
she’s making lunch for Papa and the
boys
and putting the bundle of bread and fruit
into the saddle of the mule they’ll take with
them
to the farms.
Sometimes they take me with them
to help with sowing the seeds, pruning the
plants
or ploughing. I like
digging furrows between the rows of grape
and corn.
I like using a sharp spade
and getting my hands dirty, but
being a girl, and “little”
Papa usually makes me take the sheep
to the meadows near the Village of Maxey.
I have to sit there and watch them
stuff their mouths with grass and leaves.
I use my spinning distaff
for handling the silly animals when they don’t
45
listen to me.
I have wound a bit of wool
on top of my staff. When I get bored with being
a shepherdess
I spin the wool
around the stick. I use it
like a cane when climbing a steep hillock
and it’s a weapon
if the Maxey kids come to annoy my flock.
I know I’m supposed to act like a girl
and scream and cry if there’s
trouble
but sometimes I can’t help
chasing the bullies, or at least yelling at
them.
Mama gets upset sometimes
telling me I’m too much like a boy
but I’m very good at spinning wool
and sing with the girls
the Maiden Melodies
at the dances and celebrations.
And today
after visiting Saint Catherine,
getting water and milking the
cows,
I’m in the kitchen with Mama
with canvas aprons over our
skirts.
She’s teaching me to make
the dish she calls
“Our great region’s most famous cuisine.”
I don’t really like Quiche Lorraine.
I prefer fresh bread and creamy cheese.
46
But Mama is very keen
and doesn’t give up until I’ve beaten my eggs
and made them as foamy as hers. She tells me
with pride in her voice:
“Ah, Jeannette, have I told you about my pilgrimage to
Rome?”
(She has. About a hundred times)
“There I presented a slice of our cherished pastry
to our Holy Father, the Pope himself.
That’s why they call me
Isabelle Romee, because I’ve been to the
Holy City.”
After pouring the mixture
into the vessels covered with pastry
we take the clay pots
to the communal village oven.
Mama’s worried I could burn myself
and lets me go before
kindling the fire herself. I return home
take off the apron, put an apple
in my pocket and fasten the clog sandals
to my ankles. I take my distaff
and go out into our back garden…
the silly rabbits
have made it through the fence again.
I step over the leftovers of our baby carrots
and yell at the neighbour’s cottage:
– Margarette! Margarette! You
wanna go
graze the sheep?
My oldest friend quickly runs out.
Her golden hair is so beautiful
and her teeth are much nicer than mine.
She throws herself at me
and giggles: “Let’s run! I’m so sick of my baby sister!
47
She’s crying all the time!”
And we lock arms
and skip in our heavy clogs
to where the animals are caged
in a fenced field behind our cottages.
3.
We open the strong gates
and my cattle dog Claude
a big wolfy breed called Alsatian
barks the sleepy sheep into action.
The lazy beasts bleat unhappily.
I yell: “OHOY OHOY” and poke my distaff
into the stubborn ones refusing to move
accidentally hitting the grumpy ram
Papa’s told me to stay away from.
I stand still and see the horned beast
huff and shiver with anger.
My heart beats fast and I go
to call for Margarette but how
could she help?
The ram attacks me.
I jump out of his way
over the lazy sheep.
But he hasn’t forgiven me
and shoves the others out of his
way
spotting me with his furious eyes
and bolting towards me again.
And all of a sudden
a gilded image
I’ve seen painted on the walls of the
48
Hermitage
flashes across my mind:
Saint Michael the Archangel
Hero of the Battle of Heaven
and Hell
a winged, armoured knight
pushing his lance into the
throat
of a vicious serpent.
All of a sudden my distaff
becomes the Angel’s holy lance
and I firmly aim it
at the oncoming monster
pushing it into his thick fleece
making him stop. The ram
angrily stamps his short legs
pushing against the tip
of my hard distaff.
I clench my teeth and groan
against his force
holding the distaff with both hands
when Claude, my strong wolf-dog
jumps over the other sheep
into the scene of my battle
and furiously barks at the ram
who’s been outnumbered
and begins to set back.
I pat Claude’s hairy neck
when the ram has been pushed
into the flow of sheep
exiting the fenced area for the pastures.
I plant my distaff into the ground
to catch my breath while putting my messy hair
into a horsetail. I notice
Margarette staring at me from the other side of the
fence.
49
I say:
– Stupid ram! What was his problem?!
Margarette doesn’t laugh
at my smart remark
like she usually would. Her blue eyes
are bulging with fear. She speaks
hesitantly:
“Jeannette…
how did you do that?”
– How did I do what, Margarette?
“Fight! How did you
fight like a…
like a…
boy! You looked
so mean…so angry! Why didn’t
you
cry for help?”
– I… dunno…
Margarette hitches her skirt
and steps carefully over the fence
coming over and giving me a hug
her beautiful eyes breaking into tears:
“I was so worried... Oh sister... I was so
scared...”
I giggle and boast: – It was only a sheep! By God!
It wasn’t a wild boar or anything!
She sniffs her nose and says:
“No it wasn’t… it was… it was…
terrible… you… you
scared me… don’t do that again. Promise me!”
Feeling confused and uncomfortable
I push her away and run towards a wandering lamb
who’s left the others
50
yelling:
on…
– C’mon Margarette! I wanna pick mushrooms later
we’re gonna run out of time. C’mon!
That night after the Campanile
when Papa and the boys return from the farms
Mama serves the quiche
she’s made. My quiche
“didn’t have the proper consistency” she reckons
and was given to the parish priest instead.
Papa teases me:
“You won’t find a husband if you can’t cook properly!
We’ll have to send you to a bloody convent! How about
that?!”
I stick my tongue out at him.
He laughs and ruffles my head.
4.
A few months later, on Saint Jean the Baptist’s Eve
everyone in the village brings a log
or a bundle of sticks. Jeannette has a twig
for the bonfire lit every year near the Fairies’ Tree.
Madame Agnes has told her that this ritual is actually
a pagan salute to summer called Midsummer,
symbolising the passage of spring
with a bonfire that consumes the flowers. But
Jeannette’s mother, Isabelle, believes
that the fire is a reminder of Hell for the sinful
and the vain; she’s told her daughter to burn
something precious to her, so Jeannette’s tied a fresh lily
to her twig.
The evening begins with the chiming of church bells
51
and the villagers, in their best dresses and tunics
walk cheerfully up the hill towards the primeval Tree.
Jeannette and the children sing:
“This is Saint Jean’s night
The great occasion
When lovers delight
And burn with passion
The moon has risen.”
Madame Agnes, despite her frail legs,
has climbed the hillock ahead of the others
instructing the young men and girls
to arrange the wood in a pyramid
that would last long and look prominent.
She whispers to Jeannette’s oldest brother, Joe
quietly so that the parish priest can’t hear:
“You’ll see, dear boy, once the flames have risen
the fairy folk will come to dance beneath the Tree.”
5.
Jeannette is full of verve
running ahead of the other children
her singing is the loudest
noise after the ringing of the bells.
The thin girl hops like a stag
and her green eyes radiate
with anticipation. The elders choose her
as “Saint Jean’s Queen”
to light the bonfire. She’s hoisted
on the shoulders of her uncle, Durand,
and Isabelle holds the torch that sets fire
to her daughter’s twig. Jeannette brushes
the unruly black hair off her pink face
52
and throws the ignited flower
at the hay stacked beneath the tower of wood.
The villagers crack open the barrels of wine
and the priest begins playing his lyre.
Margarette is holding the hands of a boy
called Collot and Joe has his eyes on a girl
he hasn’t met before. Jeannette, having drunk
a cup of wine diluted with water,
is almost shouting at Madame Agnes:
– The Goddess of Moon?!!!
I wanna see her! And the fairies!
Where are they! You promised!
Jacques and Isabelle watch their children
from a distance. She tells him: “Jacques
could we go to Toul, please. I wanna give alms
at the cathedral there. We must thank our Lord
for our children, the harvest, oh…for everything!
We’re so blessed…Can we Jacques?”
Jacques kisses her and empties another goblet
into his mouth before saying: “Sure, sweetheart.
We should thank God, and our lucky stars.”
6.
Now everyone’s smeared with the orange glow
of the flames. Some are dancing in a circle around the pyre.
Some of them believe that this dance will prevent
illness and bad luck for the next year. As is
and has been customary for centuries,
the night ends with the younger couples jumping the subsiding blaze
holding hands to strengthen their romance. Jeannette
who has no interest in boys yet
has decided to take part in this closing ritual alone
53
because Madame Agnes has told her that her father’s crops
will grow as tall as her leap tonight. She’s rolled up her skirt
above her calves and kneecaps, watching impatiently
as the others hesitate to brave the fire. She yells:
– My turn! My turn!
and runs towards the flames. Her legs heave
and fly over the bonfire. She swims through
the smoky air. The flames brush the soles of her feet
but can’t hurt her. She makes it and joyously screams
upon landing, but her excitement
quickly dissipates. She’s exhausted; her large eyes close
and her body collapses into the grass. By the time
Jacques has come to her side, she’s fast asleep.
She’s so bloody adorable, he thinks
and lifts his snoring daughter carefully. He places her
on the bed at their house and himself returns
to have a few more drinks with the other farmers.
7.
Jeannette’s tiny lips shiver in sleep
and her cheeks tremble as she breathes
heavily; she dreams
of the villagers drinking and being merry
a year of joy descends upon the Valley
her white sheep flying through the blue sky
the crops weaving into crowns for her head
ghosts twist into the tubers of the Fairies’ Tree
Archangel Michael and Saint Catherine get
married
a bouquet of daisies burns in the sacred fire
the sun mixes with the soil and plants are
54
born
and far behind the Oak Forest
a flood
of identical men
wielding axes
cut down the trees and crush the farms
they’re thousands and their stampede rattles the
Valley
they’re soldiers of the greatest army in the world
their faces are eyeless and their feet are hooves
they have black crosses tattooed on the
forehead…
Jeannette wakes up
next to her parents and brothers under the blanket.
They’re deep asleep
and the girl’s shivering figure doesn’t wake them.
Outside, a few farmers
strew the ashes of the fire over the vegetation
to banish bad omens.
~ Ali Alizadeh,
267: The Rishi
King Manu in the former ages of the world, when the
Arctic continent still subsisted, seeks knowledge from the Rishi of the Pole, who after long baffling him with conflicting side-lights of the knowledge, reveals to him what it chiefly concerns man to know.

MANU
Rishi who trance-held on the mountains old
Art slumbering, void
Of sense or motion, for in the spirit's hold
Of unalloyed
Immortal bliss thou dreamst protected! Deep
Let my voice glide
Into thy dumb retreat and break thy sleep
Abysmal. Hear!
The frozen snows that heap thy giant bed
Ice-cold and clear,
The chill and desert heavens above thee spread
Vast, austere,
Are not so sharp but that thy warm limbs brook
Their bitter breath,
Are not so wide as thy immense outlook
On life and death:
Their vacancy thy silent mind and bright
Outmeasureth.

But ours are blindly active and thy light
We have forgone.

RISHI
Who art thou, warrior armed gloriously
Like the sun?
Thy gait is as an empire and thine eye
Dominion.
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
MANU
King Manu, of the Aryan peoples lord,
Greets thee, Sage.

RISHI
I know thee, King, earth to whose sleepless sword
Was heritage.

The high Sun's distant glories gave thee forth
On being's edge:
Where the slow skies of the auroral North
Lead in the morn
And flaming dawns for ever on heaven's verge
Wheel and turn,
Thundering remote the clamorous Arctic surge
Saw thee born.

There 'twas thy lot these later Fates to build,
This race of man
New-fashion. O watcher with the mountains wild,
The icy plain,
Thee I too, asleep, have watched, both when the Pole
Was brightening wan
And when like a wild beast the darkness stole
Prowling and slow
Alarming with its silent march the soul.

O King, I know
Thy purpose; for the vacant ages roll
Since man below
Conversed with God in friendship. Thou, reborn
For men perplexed,
Seekest in this dim aeon and forlorn
With evils vexed
The vanished light. For like this Arctic land
Death has annexed
To sleep, our being's summits cold and grand
Where God abides,
Repel the tread of thought. I too, O King,

221

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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
In winds and tides
Have sought Him, and in armies thundering,
And where Death strides
Over whole nations. Action, thought and peace
Were questioned, sleep,
And waking, but I had no joy of these,
Nor ponderings deep,
And pity was not sweet enough, nor good
My will could keep.

Often I found Him for a moment, stood
Astonished, then
It fell from me. I could not hold the bliss,
The force for men,
My brothers. Beauty ceased my heart to please,
Brightness in vain
Recalled the vision of the light that glows
Suns behind:
I hated the rich fragrance of the rose;
Weary and blind,
I tired of the suns and stars; then came
With broken mind
To heal me of the rash devouring flame,
The dull disease,
And sojourned with this mountain's summits bleak,
These frozen seas.

King, the blind dazzling snows have made me meek,
Cooled my unease.

Pride could not follow, nor the restless will
Come and go;
My mind within grew holy, calm and still
Like the snow.

MANU
O thou who wast with chariots formidable
And with the bow!
Voiceless and white the cold unchanging hill,

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
Has it then
A mightier presence, deeper mysteries
Than human men?
The warm low hum of crowds, towns, villages,
The sun and rain,
The village maidens to the water bound,
The happy herds,
The fluting of the shepherd lads, the sound
Myriad of birds,
Speak these not clearer to the heart, convey
More subtle words?
Here is but great dumb night, an awful day
Inert and dead.

RISHI
The many's voices fill the listening ear,
Distract the head:
The One is silence; on the snows we hear
Silence tread.

MANU
What hast thou garnered from the crags that lour,
The icy field?
RISHI
O King, I spurned this body's death; a Power
There was, concealed,
That raised me. Rescued from the pleasant bars
Our longings build,
My winged soul went up above the stars
Questing for God.
223

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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
MANU
Oh, didst thou meet Him then? in what bright field
Upon thy road?
RISHI
I asked the heavenly wanderers as they wheeled
For His abode.

MANU
Could glorious Saturn and his rings of hue
Direct thy flight?
RISHI
Sun could not tell, nor any planet knew
Its source of light,
Nor could I glean that knowledge though I paced
The world's beyond
And into outer nothingness have gazed.

Time's narrow sound
I crossed, the termless flood where on the Snake
One slumbers throned,
Attempted. But the ages from Him break
Blindly and Space
Forgets its origin. Then I returned
Where luminous blaze
Deathless and ageless in their ease unearned
The ethereal race.

MANU
Did the gods tell thee? Has Varuna seen
The high God's face?

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
RISHI
How shall they tell of Him who marvel at sin
And smile at grief?
MANU
Did He not send His blissful Angels down
For thy relief?
RISHI
The Angels know Him not, who fear His frown,
Have fixed belief.

MANU
Is there no heaven of eternal light
Where He is found?
RISHI
The heavens of the Three have beings bright
Their portals round,
And I have journeyed to those regions blest,
Those hills renowned.

In Vishnu's house where wide Love builds his nest,
My feet have stood.

MANU
Is he not That, the blue-winged Dove of peace,
Father of Good?
RISHI
Nor Brahma, though the suns and hills and seas
Are called his brood.
225

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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
MANU
Is God a dream then? are the heavenly coasts
Visions vain?
RISHI
I came to Shiva's roof; the flitting ghosts
Compelled me in.

MANU ls He then God whom the forsaken seek,
Things of sin?
RISHI
He sat on being's summit grand, a peak
Immense of fire.

MANU
Knows He the secret of release from tears
And from desire?
RISHI
His voice is the last murmur silence hears,
Tranquil and dire.

MANU
The silence calls us then and shall enclose?
RISHI
Our true abode
Is here and in the pleasant house He chose
To harbour God.
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
MANU
In vain thou hast travelled the unwonted stars
And the void hast trod!
RISHI
King, not in vain. I knew the tedious bars
That I had fled,
To be His arms whom I have sought; I saw
How earth was made
Out of His being; I perceived the Law,
The Truth, the Vast,
From which we came and which we are; I heard
The ages past
Whisper their history, and I knew the Word
That forth was cast
Into the unformed potency of things
To build the suns.

Through endless Space and on Time's iron wings
A rhythm runs
Our lives pursue, and till the strain's complete
That now so moans
And falters, we upon this greenness meet,
That measure tread.

MANU
Is earth His seat? this body His poor hold
Infirmly made?
RISHI
I flung off matter like a robe grown old;
Matter was dead.
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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
MANU
Sages have told of vital force behind:
It is God then?
RISHI
The vital spirits move but as a wind
Within men.

MANU
Mind then is lord that like a sovereign sways
Delight and pain?
RISHI
Mind is His wax to write and, written, rase
Form and name.

MANU
Is Thought not He who has immortal eyes
Time cannot dim?
RISHI
Higher, O King, the still voice bade me rise
Than thought's clear dream.

Deep in the luminous secrecy, the mute
Profound of things,
Where murmurs never sound of harp or lute
And no voice sings,
Light is not, nor our darkness, nor these bright
Thunderings,
In the deep steady voiceless core of white
And burning bliss,
The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise,

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
He dwells within us all who dwells not in
Aught that is.

MANU
Rishi, thy thoughts are like the blazing sun
Eye cannot face.

How shall our souls on that bright awful One
Hope even to gaze
Who lights the world from His eternity
With a few rays?
RISHI
Dare on thyself to look, thyself art He,
O Aryan, then.

There is no thou nor I, beasts of the field,
Nor birds, nor men,
But flickerings on a many-sided shield
Pass, or remain,
And this is winged and that with poisonous tongue
Hissing coils.

We love ourselves and hate ourselves, are wrung
With woes and toils
To slay ourselves or from ourselves to win
Shadowy spoils.

And through it all, the rumour and the din,
Voices roam,
Voices of harps, voices of rolling seas,
That rarely come
And to our inborn old affinities
Call us home.

Shadows upon the many-sided Mind
Arrive and go,
Shadows that shadows see; the vain pomps wind
Above, below,
While in their hearts the single mighty God
Whom none can know,

229

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Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
Guiding the mimic squadrons with His nod
Watches it all -
Like transient shapes that sweep with half-guessed truth
A luminous wall.

MANU
Alas! is life then vain? Our gorgeous youth
Li the and tall,
Our sweet fair women with their tender eyes
Outshining stars,
The mighty meditations of the wise,
The grandiose wars,
The blood, the fiery strife, the clenched dead hands,
The circle sparse,
The various labour in a hundred lands,
Are all these shows
To please some audience cold? as in a vase
Lily and rose,
Mixed snow and crimson, for a moment blaze
Till someone throws
The withered petals in some outer dust,
Heeding not, -
The virtuous man made one with the unjust,
Is this our lot?
RISHI
O King, sight is not vain, nor any sound.

Weeds that float
Upon a puddle and the majestic round
Of the suns
Are thoughts eternal, - what man loves to laud
And what he shuns;
Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs.

O King, no thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star.

MANU
Rishi, are we both dreams and real? the near
Even as the far?
RISHI
Dreams are we not, O King, but see dreams, fear
Therefore and strive.

Like poets in a wondrous world of thought
Always we live,
Whose shapes from out ourselves to being brought
Abide and thrive.

The poet from his vast and labouring mind
Brings brilliant out
A living world; forth into space they wind,
The shining rout,
And hate and love, and laugh and weep, enjoy,
Fight and shout,
King, lord and beggar, tender girl and boy,
Foemen, friends;
So to His creatures God's poetic mind
A substance lends.

The Poet with dazzling inspiration blind,
Until it ends,
Forgets Himself and lives in what He forms;
For ever His soul
Through chaos like a wind creating storms,
Till the stars roll
Through ordered space and the green lands arise,
The snowy Pole,
Ocean and this great heaven full of eyes,
And sweet sounds heard,
Man with his wondrous soul of hate and love,
And beast and bird, -

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232

Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
Yes, He creates the worlds and heaven above
With a single word;
And these things being Himself are real, yet
Are they like dreams,
For He awakes to self He could forget
In what He seems.

Yet, King, deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams.

The dreams of God are truths and He prevails.

Then all His time
Cherish thyself, O King, and cherish men,
Anchored in Him.

MANU
Upon the silence of the sapphire main
Waves that sublime
Rise at His word and when that fiat's stilled
Are hushed again,
So is it, Rishi, with the Spirit concealed,
Things and men?
RISHI
Hear then the truth. Behind this visible world
The eyes see plain,
Another stands, and in its folds are curled
Our waking dreams.

Dream is more real, which, while here we wake,
Unreal seems.

From that our mortal life and thoughts we take.

Its fugitive gleams
Are here made firm and solid; there they float
In a magic haze,
Melody swelling note on absolute note,
A lyric maze,
Beauty on beauty heaped pell-mell to chain
The enchanted gaze,

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
Thought upon mighty thought with grandiose strain
Weaving the stars.

This is that world of dream from which our race
Came; by these bars
Of body now enchained, with laggard pace,
Borne down with cares,
A little of that rapture to express
We labour hard,
A little of that beauty, music, thought
With toil prepared;
And if a single strain is clearly caught,
Then our reward
Is great on earth, and in the world that floats
Lingering awhile
We hear the fullness and the jarring notes
Reconcile, -
Then travel forwards. So we slowly rise,
And every mile
Of our long journey mark with eager eyes;
So we progress
With gurge of revolution and recoil,
Slaughter and stress
Of anguish because without fruit we toil,
Without success;
Even as a ship upon the stormy flood
With fluttering sails
Labours towards the shore; the angry mood
Of Ocean swells,
Calms come and favouring winds, but yet afar
The harbour pales
In evening mists and Ocean threatens war:
Such is our life.

Of this be sure, the mighty game goes on,
The glorious strife,
Until the goal predestined has been won.

Not on the cliff
To be shattered has our ship set forth of old,

233

234

Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
Nor in the surge
To founder. Therefore, King, be royal, bold,
And through the urge
Of winds, the reboant thunders and the close
Tempestuous gurge
Press on for ever laughing at the blows
Of wind and wave.

The haven must be reached; we rise from pyre,
We rise from grave,
We mould our future by our past desire,
We break, we save,
We find the music that we could not find,
The thought think out
We could not then perfect, and from the mind
That brilliant rout
Of wonders marshal into living forms.

End then thy doubt;
Grieve not for wounds, nor fear the violent storms,
For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit who to these is blind.

Torture, disdain,
Defeat and sorrow give him strength and joy:
'Twas for delight
He sought existence, and if pains alloy,
'Tis here in night
Which we call day. The Yogin knows, O King,
Who in his might
Travels beyond the mind's imagining,
The worlds of dream.

For even they are shadows, even they
Are not, - they seem.

Behind them is a mighty blissful day
From which they stream.

The heavens of a million creeds are these:
Peopled they teem

Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
By creatures full of joy and radiant ease.

There is the mint
From which we are the final issue, types
Which here we print
In dual letters. There no torture grips,
Joy cannot stint
Her streams, - beneath a more than mortal sun
Through golden air
The spirits of the deathless regions run.

But we must dare
To still the mind into a perfect sleep
And leave this lair
Of gross material flesh which we would keep
Always, before
The guardians of felicity will ope
The golden door.

That is our home and that the secret hope
Our hearts explore.

To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,
And fragments of it in the human birth
We can command.

Perfect millenniums are sometimes, until
In the sweet end
All secret heaven upon earth we spill,
Then rise above
Taking mankind with us to the abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain.

He stands behind
The worlds of Sleep; He is and shall remain
When they grow blind
To individual joys; for even these
Are shadows, King,
And gloriously into that lustre cease

235

236

Baroda and Bengal, c. 1900 - 1909
From which they spring.

We are but sparks of that most perfect fire,
Waves of that sea:
From Him we come, to Him we go, desire
Eternally,
And so long as He wills, our separate birth
Is and shall be.

Shrink not from life, O Aryan, but with mirth
And joy receive
His good and evil, sin and virtue, till
He bids thee leave.

But while thou livest, perfectly fulfil
Thy part, conceive
Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong,
The drama His.

Work, but the fruits to God alone belong,
Who only is.

Work, love and know, - so shall thy spirit win
Immortal bliss.

Love men, love God. Fear not to love, O King,
Fear not to enjoy;
For Death's a passage, grief a fancied thing
Fools to annoy.

From self escape and find in love alone
A higher joy.

MANU
O Rishi, I have wide dominion,
The earth obeys
And heaven opens far beyond the sun
Her golden gaze.

But Him I seek, the still and perfect One, -
The Sun, not rays.
Poems from Ahana and Other Poems
RISHI
Seek Him upon the earth. For thee He set
In the huge press
Of many worlds to build a mighty state
For man's success,
Who seeks his goal. Perfect thy human might,
Perfect the race.

For thou art He, O King. Only the night
Is on thy soul
By thy own will. Remove it and recover
The serene whole
Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover
To God the goal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Rishi
,

IN CHAPTERS [34/34]



   10 Integral Yoga
   6 Occultism
   3 Poetry
   2 Psychology
   1 Alchemy


   23 Sri Aurobindo
   5 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   3 James George Frazer
   3 Carl Jung
   2 Satprem


   9 Savitri
   3 The Golden Bough
   3 Collected Poems
   2 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   2 The Life Divine
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02


01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Almost that day the Epiphany was disclosed
  Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;

01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Caught by a voiceless white Epiphany
  Into a vision that surpasses forms,

01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  That thrilled and fainted with the Epiphany:
  His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.

01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.
   The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."

0 1960-12-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   This throng looks more like a chaos. A dreadful confusion. But from next week people will start leaving. The crowning day will be January 6, which is Epiphany (but we have made it into a day for the offering of the material world to the Divine: the material world giving itself to the Divine)it will be the climax,2 and I shall then see you on the 7th. After that, well work hard! But until then, no workmy heads in a kind of soup Oh, if you only knew! Its dreadful what people bring me, what they ask
   (Mother sits at the harmonium)

02.04 - Two Sonnets of Shakespeare, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Shakespeare has treated love in a novel way; he has given a new figure to that common familiar sentiment. And incidentally he has given a new sense and bearing to Death. From a human carnal base there is a struggle, an effort here to rise into something extracorporeal; that is, something outside and independent of the body and impersonal. The sense of the first sonnet is this: the body decays and dies, even as bleak winter seizes upon the beauties of Nature or black Night swallows up the light of the day. But love lingers stillas the song of sweet birdsand the dying cadence of love curiously invokes and evokes a resurgent love in the beloved. The second sonnet hymns the soul's conquest over Death. The soul is that which is sinless in the sinful, it is the pure, the unsullied the immortal lovein this filth and dirt of a mortal body with its crude passions. Death eats away the body, but in this way the soul grows and eats away Death. This is the final Epiphany, the death of Death and the resurgence of the soul divine in its love divine.
   Sonnet 73

02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Into an all-fulfilling Epiphany,
  Into an utterance of the Ineffable,

02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In front of the ascending Epiphany
  World-Time's enjoyers, favourites of World-Bliss,

02.12 - The Heavens of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Climbs towards some far unseen Epiphany.
  73.22

02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Calm's wide Epiphany, wisdom's mute home,
  A lonely station of Omniscience,

04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A new Epiphany appeared in her.
  A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,

10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All there is a supreme Epiphany:
  The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,

1.04 - On blessed and ever-memorable obedience, #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
  1 I.e. the feast of the Baptism of Christ, corresponding to some extent to the Western Epiphany.
  About a certain other brother

1.06 - Wealth and Government, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Distri buted on the Feast of the Epiphany, which the Mother designated as the festival of the offering of the material world to the Divine.
  Words of the Mother III

1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  says that on the night of the Epiphany (January 5/6) the pagans
  held a great festival:

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Climbs towards some far unseen Epiphany.187
  But we can say what these planes bring to man, how they change our vision of the world when we ascend to them.

12.05 - The World Tragedy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Paradise, the svargyam lokam of the Upanishads is not necessarily utterly afar and aloof, sundered from this world. The kingdom of heaven instead of being wholly within and absolutely beyond can be and has to be brought out and down upon and into earth, established here below in the fullness of its own glory. That is the material Epiphany, the transformation of the physical nature, the ultimate and inevitable destiny of earth and mankind.
   Such is the full cycle of human lifein the beginning the birth in mortality and in ignorance, then a process of developing and purificatory consciousness, and then the entry into the full blaze of light and force of Consciousness leading to a rebirth and re-embodiment in immortality, transforming the ignorant death-bound body into the glorious luminous body upon material earth, the embodiment of love Divine.

1.37 - Oriential Religions in the West, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth
  of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has

1.48 - The Corn-Spirit as an Animal, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  Year's Day and Epiphany, before sunrise, a little of the cake is
  crumbled with salt and given to the cattle. The rest is kept till

15.09 - One Day More, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Savitri is coming back to earth to her normal life. She has done her final conquest. And the whole world of the new conquest, the embodied Life Divine within her, she enters the earth-life, but with the veil drawn upon herself and her achievement. The 'one day more' is yet to be done, the 'one day' made of material matter. She is not to disclose herself till that one day is done. The curtain is down now but behind lies the whole edifice she has built up, in its entire unflawed beauty and fulfilment. At present outwardly we see before us the arena of a grey dangerous world, as of old. The curtain will surely roll up and reveal what it hides, slowly or perhaps a shell may burst open all on a sudden and bring forth the new life full and entire. . . How will it happen... the Revelation, the Epiphany? The event will show. In the meantime, the New Creation, a "greater dawn" she holds within herself.
   Deep guarded by her mystic folds of light.

1.56 - The Public Expulsion of Evils, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  and Epiphany. Hence in some parts of Silesia the people burn
  pine-resin all night long between Christmas and the New Year in
  --
  twelve days is Epiphany or Twelfth Night, and it has been selected
  as a proper season for the expulsion of the powers of evil in

2.15 - The Cosmic Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the Epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda.
  author class:Sri Aurobindo

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an overmind or supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an Epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature, its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can only be brought about by a full emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the whole nature.
  A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, - a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic consciousness, - is another necessary condition for the supramental change. It would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-consciousness can establish itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All the inner centres must have burst open and released into action their capacities; the psychic entity must be unveiled and in control. If this first change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda, penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive.

2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made according to a single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the law of the supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there would be an infinite diversity in the manifestation of the gnostic consciousness although that consciousness would still be one in its basis, in its constitution, in its allrevealing and all-uniting order. It is evident that the triple status of the supermind would reproduce itself as a principle in this new manifestation: there would be below it and yet belonging to it the degrees of the overmind and intuitive gnosis with the souls that had realised these degrees of the ascending consciousness; there would be also at the summit, as the evolution in Knowledge proceeded, individual beings who would ascend beyond a supermind formulation and reach from the highest height of supermind to the summits of unitarian self-realisation in the body which must be the last and supreme state of the Epiphany of the Creation. But in the supramental race itself, in the variation of its degrees, the individuals would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the principle of his being. It is only this general principle of The Gnostic Being the supramental existence of which we can attempt to form an idea however diminished by the limitations of mental thought and mental language. A more living picture of the gnostic being supermind only could make; for the mind some abstract outlines of it are alone possible.
  The gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest dynamis of the spiritual existence. The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. All the trinities of the Spirit would be real to his self-awareness and realised in his inner life. All his existence would be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit; all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance of Nature.

24.05 - Vision of Dante, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Dante stopped, stood still and was asked to look ahead. Oh, what a bewitching scene! Epiphany - a world of dazzling light - circles and waves of bright gold and diamond!
   And those entrancing forms and figures! The Supreme Lord, the Supreme Trinity and the Virgin Mother - and Beatrice beside!

2 - Other Hymns to Agni, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  today most strong to bring the Epiphany of the gods.
  288

3.1.23 - The Rishi, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The bright Epiphany whom we name God,
  Towards whom we drove

3.20 - Of the Eucharist, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  after the Epiphany of Iacchus, when Countenance beholdeth Countenance.
   160

4.03 - The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  the real Epiphany of the semi-divine hero. Oddly enough, we
  have a similar modulation of themes in alchemy in the syno-

4.04 - Conclusion, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  with overweening pretensions. The Epiphany of the hero (the
  second identification) shows itself in a corresponding inflation:

4.2.04 - Epiphany, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:4.2.04 - Epiphany
  author class:Sri Aurobindo

7.5.20 - The Hidden Plan, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Long it prepares its far Epiphany:
  Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks,

r1915 05 01, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Krishna-Kali bhava is growing to the point of the firm Epiphany. Subjective kama is assured & the full subjective Ananda based on the Shuddha is present either in the subdued status or the intense movement. The oppositions of the subjective Vishaya-nirananda are being finally eliminated & exist only as external vibrations in the external mind. They are attended by the viparita
   Ananda.

The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  (16) Translators Note: This is in reference to the French tradition when on the Day of Epiphany, the 6th of
  January, day of the Three Wise Men, a cake called the cake of the kings, la galette des rois is baked to

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun epiphany

The noun epiphany has 2 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
                  
1. (2) epiphany ::: (a divine manifestation)
2. Epiphany, Epiphany of Our Lord, Twelfth day, Three Kings' Day, January 6 ::: (twelve days after Christmas; celebrates the visit of the three wise men to the infant Jesus)


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun epiphany

2 senses of epiphany                          

Sense 1
epiphany
   => manifestation
     => appearance
       => happening, occurrence, occurrent, natural event
         => event
           => psychological feature
             => abstraction, abstract entity
               => entity

Sense 2
Epiphany, Epiphany of Our Lord, Twelfth day, Three Kings' Day, January 6
   => Christian holy day
     => religious holiday, holy day
       => holiday
         => day
           => calendar day, civil day
             => time period, period of time, period
               => fundamental quantity, fundamental measure
                 => measure, quantity, amount
                   => abstraction, abstract entity
                     => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun epiphany
                                    


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun epiphany

2 senses of epiphany                          

Sense 1
epiphany
   => manifestation

Sense 2
Epiphany, Epiphany of Our Lord, Twelfth day, Three Kings' Day, January 6
   => Christian holy day




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun epiphany

2 senses of epiphany                          

Sense 1
epiphany
  -> manifestation
   HAS INSTANCE=> Second Coming, Second Coming of Christ, Second Advent, Advent, Parousia
   => epiphany
   => theophany
   => Word of God
   => tidal wave

Sense 2
Epiphany, Epiphany of Our Lord, Twelfth day, Three Kings' Day, January 6
  -> Christian holy day
   => quarter day
   => holy day of obligation
   => Saint Agnes's Eve, January 20
   => Easter Sunday, Easter Day
   => Palm Sunday
   => Passion Sunday
   => Good Friday
   => Low Sunday
   => Holy Saturday
   => Holy Innocents' Day, Innocents' Day
   => Septuagesima, Septuagesima Sunday
   => Quinquagesima, Quinquagesima Sunday
   => Quadragesima, Quadrigesima Sunday
   => Trinity Sunday
   => Rogation Day
   => Maundy Thursday, Holy Thursday
   => Corpus Christi
   => Saints Peter and Paul, June 29
   => Epiphany, Epiphany of Our Lord, Twelfth day, Three Kings' Day, January 6
   => Saint Joseph, St Joseph, March 19
   => Twelfth night
   => All Souls' Day, November 2
   => Ash Wednesday
   => Ember Day
   => Advent Sunday
   => Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, pancake day
   => Transfiguration, Transfiguration Day, August 6




--- Grep of noun epiphany
epiphany
epiphany of our lord



IN WEBGEN [10000/92]

Wikipedia - Church of the Epiphany (Roman Catholic, Manhattan)
Wikipedia - Earth Has Many a Noble City -- Christian Epiphany hymn originally written by the Roman poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius and translated by the English clergyman Edward Caswall in 1849
Wikipedia - Epiphany (Ancient Greece) -- Visions of gods in ancient Greec
Wikipedia - Epiphany (BTS song) -- song by BTS
Wikipedia - Epiphany (Christian)
Wikipedia - Epiphany Eyewear
Wikipedia - Epiphany (feast)
Wikipedia - Epiphany (feeling) -- Sudden understanding of something's essence
Wikipedia - Epiphany (holiday) -- Christian feast, public holiday in some countries
Wikipedia - Epiphany Monastery
Wikipedia - Epiphany Philosophers
Wikipedia - Epiphany season
Wikipedia - Epiphany term -- Spring term at some universities
Wikipedia - Epiphanytide
Wikipedia - Feast of the Epiphany
Wikipedia - King cake -- Type of cake associated with Epiphany or Mardi Gras
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112275.Epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15712338-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166670.Death_Comes_As_Epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18371888-an-epiphany-gift-for-robin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18883846-the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25528201-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/263288.The_3_A_M_Epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30169662-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30843244-the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34612876-breakfast-at-epiphany-s
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36509422-breakfast-at-epiphany-s
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42414259-epiphany-spring-summer-2018
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/600039.Epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762542.The_Four_Steps_to_the_Epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8463654-epiphany
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9536460-3-am-epiphany
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(holiday)
dedroidify.blogspot - i-just-had-epiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/Epiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/PsychedelicEpiphanySeries
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BelatedLoveEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpiphanyComeback
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpiphanyTherapy
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreenEyedEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IgnoredEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoveEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoveRevelationEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfCareEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLoveSlapOfEpiphany
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhoopiEpiphanySpeech
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/Epiphany
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Epiphany
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Epiphany_(feeling)
Away from Her (2006) ::: 7.5/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 50min | Drama | 25 May 2007 (USA) -- A man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer's disease faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections to another man, Aubrey, a wheelchair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home. Director: Sarah Polley Writers:
Jerry Maguire (1996) ::: 7.3/10 -- R | 2h 19min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 13 December 1996 (USA) -- When a sports agent has a moral epiphany and is fired for expressing it, he decides to put his new philosophy to the test as an independent agent with the only athlete who stays with him and his former colleague. Director: Cameron Crowe Writer:
The Dead (1987) ::: 7.3/10 -- PG | 1h 23min | Drama | 18 December 1987 (USA) -- Gabriel Conroy and wife Greta attend an early January dinner with friends at the home of his spinster aunts, an evening which results in an epiphany for both of them. Director: John Huston Writers: James Joyce (short story from "Dubliners"), Tony Huston (screenplay) Stars:
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Scoundrel's_epiphany
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Strategist's_Epiphany
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Enhance:_Epiphany
https://hellblazer.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany_Constantine
https://hellblazer.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany_Greaves
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany
https://riverdale.fandom.com/wiki/Chapter_Twelve:_The_Epiphany
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany_moon
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany
https://vertigo.fandom.com/wiki/Epiphany_Greaves
Church of Epiphany, Lucknow
Church of the Epiphany
Church of the Epiphany (Chicago)
Church of the Epiphany (Episcopal, Manhattan)
Church of the Epiphany, Gipton
Church of the Epiphany (Lincoln Heights)
Church of the Epiphany (Pittsburgh)
Church of the Epiphany (Roman Catholic, Manhattan)
Church of the Epiphany (Saint Petersburg)
Epiphany
Epiphany (Ancient Greece)
Epiphany (Angel)
Epiphany Cathedral
Epiphany (Chrisette Michele album)
Epiphany Eyewear
Epiphany (feeling)
Epiphany (holiday)
Epiphany, Inc.
Epiphany (literature)
Epiphany Monastery
Epiphany of Our Lord Co-Cathedral Parish
Epiphany Philosophers
Epiphany: The Best of Chaka Khan, Vol. 1
Epiphany (T-Pain album)
Episcopal Cathedral of the Epiphany-Union Church of Santo Domingo
Episcopal Church of the Epiphany of San Carlos, California
The Blackwell Epiphany



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