TERMS STARTING WITH
Equality ::: Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate, —far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 224-225
Equality is the chief support of the true spiritual conscious- ness and it is this from which a sadhaka deviates when he allows a vital movement to carry him away in feeling or speech or action. Equality is not the same thing as forbearance, — though undoubtedly a settled equality immensely extends, even inimit- ably, a man’s power of endurance and forbearance.
Equality means another thing — to have an equal view of men and their nature and acts and the forces that move them ; it helps one to see tlte truth about them by pushing away from the mind all personal feeling in one’s seeing and judgment and even all the mental bias. Personal feeling always distorts and makes one see in men’s actions, not only the actions themselves, but things behind them which, more often than not, are not there.
Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements,—anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest,—not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit.” Letters on Yoga
Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things satd or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feelings, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them ; it means self-mastery over the vital movements,
Equality: See Logic, formal, §§ 3, 6, 9. Equipollence: A relation of equivalence between two propositions or propositional forms or symbols for these.
Equality
equality ::: “Equality is to remain unmoved within in all conditions.” Letters on Yoga
EQUALITY. ::: Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure, by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga state of samaia, equality to all things.
equality ::: n. --> The condition or quality of being equal; agreement in quantity or degree as compared; likeness in bulk, value, rank, properties, etc.; as, the equality of two bodies in length or thickness; an equality of rights.
Sameness in state or continued course; evenness; uniformity; as, an equality of temper or constitution.
Evenness; uniformity; as, an equality of surface.
Exact agreement between two expressions or magnitudes
equality ::: samata, equality of soul and mind to all things and happenings, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere; the capacity to remain unmoved within all conditions.
equality ::: the condition of being equal; sameness; uniformity. equality"s.
TERMS ANYWHERE
3. In its historical aspect, aristocracy is a definite class or order known as hereditary nobility, which possesses prescriptive rank and privileges. This group developed from primitive monarchy, by the gradual limitation of the regal authority by those who formed the council of the king. The defense of their prerogatives led them naturally to consider themselves as a separate class fitted by birthright to monopolize government. But at the same time, they assumed a number of corresponding obligations (hence the aphorism noblesse oblige) particularly for maintaining justice, peace and security. [The characteristics of hereditary aristocracy are: descent and birthright, breeding and education, power to command, administrative and military capacities, readiness to fulfill personal and national obligations, interest in field sports, social equality of its members, aloofness and exclusiveness, moral security in the possession of real values regardless of criticism, competition or advancement.] In certain societies as in Great Britain, birth-right is not an exclusive factor: exceptional men are admitted by recognition into the aristocratic circle (circulation of the elite), after a tincture of breeding satisfying its external standards. The decline of hereditary nobility was due to economic rather than to social or political changes. Now aristocracy can claim only a social influence.
(3) Triangle inequality - ||u+v|| ≤||u||+||v|| for all u, v
3. wisdom of equality/knowledge of impartiality (S. samatājNāna; T. mnyam nyid kyi ye shes; C. pingdeng xing zhi 平等性智)
abhimukhī. (T. mngon du 'gyur ba/mngon du phyogs pa; C. xianqian [di]; J. genzen[chi]; K. hyonjon [chi] 現前[地]). In Sanskrit, "manifest" or "evident"; used with reference to a twofold classification of phenomena as manifest (abhimukhī)-viz., those things that are evident to sense perception-and hidden (S. PAROKsA, T. lkog gyur)-viz., those things whose existence must be inferred through reasoning. ¶ Abhimukhī, as "immediacy" or "face-to-face," is the sixth of the ten stages (BHuMI) of the BODHISATTVA path described in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA. The MAHAYANASuTRALAMKARA interprets this bhumi as "directly facing," or "face-to-face," implying that the bodhisattva at this stage of the path stands at the intersection between SAMSARA and NIRVAnA. The bodhisattva here realizes the equality of all phenomena (dharmasamatA), e.g., that all dharmas are signless and free of characteristics, unproduced and unoriginated, and free from the duality of existence and nonexistence. Turning away from the compounded dharmas of saMsAra, the bodhisattva turns to face the profound wisdom of the buddhas and is thus "face-to-face" with both the compounded (SAMSKṚTA) and uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) realms. This bhumi is typically correlated with mastery of the sixth perfection (PARAMITA), the perfection of wisdom (PRAJNAPARAMITA).
Abstractum (pl. abstracta): (Lat ab + trahere, to draw) An abstractum, in contrast to a concretum or existent is a quality or a relation envisaged by an abstract concept (e.g. redness, equality, truth etc.). The abstractum may be conceived either as an ideal object or as a real, subsistent universal. -- L.W. Ab
AdarsajNAna. [alt. mahAdarsajNAna] (T. me long lta bu'i ye shes; C. dayuanjing zhi; J. daienkyochi; K. taewon'gyong chi 大圓鏡智). In Sanskrit, "mirrorlike wisdom" or "great perfect mirror wisdom"; one of the five types of wisdom (PANCAJNANA) exclusive to a buddha according to the YOGACARA and tantric schools, along with the wisdom of equality (SAMATAJNANA), the wisdom of discriminating awareness (PRATYAVEKsAnAJNANA), the wisdom that one has accomplished what was to be done (KṚTYANUstHANAJNANA), and the wisdom of the nature of the DHARMADHATU (DHARMADHATUSVABHAVAJNANA). This specific type of wisdom is a transformation of the eighth consciousness, the ALAYAVIJNANA, in which the perfect interfusion between all things is seen as if reflected in a great mirror.
a ::: equality in one"s reception of the contacts of the world, consisting of titiks.a, udasinata and nati, also called negative samata: a "passive or purely receptive equality" gained by an "inhibition of the normal reactions of the mind to the touches of outward things" and a "separation of the self or spirit from the outward action of Nature".
a ::: equality in one"s reception of the contacts of the world, consisting of titiks.a, udasinata and nati, also called passive samata: "a passive or negative equality, an equality of reception which fronts impassively the impacts and phenomena of existence and negates the dualities of the appearances and reactions which they impose on us". negative santi
a ::: equality in one"s response to the contacts of the world, consisting of (sama) rasa, (sama) bhoga and (sama) ananda, also called active samata: "a positive equality which accepts the phenomena of existence, but only as the manifestation of the one divine being and with an equal response to them which comes from the divine . nature in us and transforms them into its hidden values".
a ::: equality in one"s response to the contacts of the world, consisting of (sama) rasa, (sama) bhoga and (sama) ananda, also called positive samata: an "active equality which will enable us not only to draw back from or confront the world in a detached and separated calm, but to return upon it and possess it in the power of the calm and equal Spirit".
Aghora ::: literally "not terrible" (though terrible, ghora, in appearance), an epithet of Śiva, the destroyer; a form of Tantra of the vamamarga or "left-hand path" which annuls all distinctions; a being or world characterised by samata (equality).Agner bhr bhrajante
a-hasyam ::: equality and laughter, a combination of the first and fourth members of the samata catus.t.aya.
Algebraic Logic Functional language "language" (ALF) A language by Rudolf Opalla "opalla@julien.informatik.uni-dortmund.de" which combines {functional programming} and {logic programming} techniques. ALF is based on {Horn clause} logic with equality which consists of {predicates} and Horn clauses for {logic programming}, and functions and equations for {functional programming}. Any functional expression can be used in a {goal} literal and arbitrary predicates can occur in conditions of equations. ALF uses {narrowing} and {rewriting}. ALF includes a compiler to {Warren Abstract Machine} code and {run-time support}. {(ftp://ftp.germany.eu.net/pub/programming/languages/LogicFunctional)}. ["The Implementation of the Functional-Logic Language ALF", M. Hanus and A. Schwab]. (1992-10-08)
Algebraic Logic Functional language ::: (language) (ALF) A language by Rudolf Opalla which combines functional programming and logic programming techniques.ALF is based on Horn clause logic with equality which consists of predicates and Horn clauses for logic programming, and functions and equations for functional arbitrary predicates can occur in conditions of equations. ALF uses narrowing and rewriting.ALF includes a compiler to Warren Abstract Machine code and run-time support. .[The Implementation of the Functional-Logic Language ALF, M. Hanus and A. Schwab]. (1992-10-08)
analogy ::: n. --> A resemblance of relations; an agreement or likeness between things in some circumstances or effects, when the things are otherwise entirely different. Thus, learning enlightens the mind, because it is to the mind what light is to the eye, enabling it to discover things before hidden.
A relation or correspondence in function, between organs or parts which are decidedly different.
Proportion; equality of ratios.
Analogy of proportionality: Is had when the principle of unity is found in an equality of proportions. This analogy is primarily used between material and spiritual realities. Thus sight is predicated of ocular vision and intellectual understanding "eo quod sicut visus est in oculo, ita intellectus est in mente". -- H.G.
Analogy: Originally a mathematical term, Analogia, meaning equality of ratios (Euclid VII Df. 20, V. Dfs. 5, 6), which entered Plato's philosophy (Republic 534a6), where it also expressed the epistemological doctrine that sensed things are related as their mathematical and ideal correlates. In modern usage analogy was identified with a weak form of reasoning in which "from the similarity of two things in certain particulars, their similarity in other particulars is inferred." (Century Dic.) Recently, the analysis of scientific method has given the term new significance. The observable data of science are denoted by concepts by inspection, whose complete meaning is given by something immediately apprehendable; its verified theory designating unobservable scientific objects is expressed by concepts by postulation, whose complete meaning is prescribed for them by the postulates of the deductive theory in which they occur. To verify such theory relations, termed epistemic correlations (J. Un. Sc. IX: 125-128), are required. When these are one-one, analogy exists in a very precise sense, since the concepts by inspection denoting observable data are then related as are the correlated concepts by postulation designating unobservable scientific objects. -- F.S.C.N. Analogy of Pythagoras: (Gr. analogia) The equality of ratios, or proportion, between the lengths of the strings producing the consonant notes of the musical scale. The discovery of these ratios is credited to Pythagoras, who is also said to have applied the principle of mathematical proportion to the other arts, and hence to have discovered, in his analogy, the secret of beauty in all its forms. -- G.R.M.
anandamaya nati ::: ecstatic submission; the highest form of nati anandamaya which comes when one learns "to take delight in all things even as the Lord takes delight in them", becoming "capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful equality, because we feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and Delight, the happiness absolute that hides . ever in the heart of things".
— anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, — not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of thesS things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit. It is not easy to have this equality in any full perfect measure, but one should always try more and more to make it the basis of one's inner state and outer movements.
arithmetic-geometric mean inequality: An inequality which states that the geometric mean of 2 positive numbers is always less than or equal to the arithmetic mean of the same 2 numbers.
as ::: adv. & conj. --> Denoting equality or likeness in kind, degree, or manner; like; similar to; in the same manner with or in which; in accordance with; in proportion to; to the extent or degree in which or to which; equally; no less than; as, ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil; you will reap as you sow; do as you are bidden.
In the idea, character, or condition of, -- limiting the view to certain attributes or relations; as, virtue considered as virtue; this actor will appear as Hamlet.
asamata ::: inequality; lack of equanimity; defect or failing of samata; asamata sometimes restricted to passive / negative asamata.
asinata ::: inert indifference; udasinata due to the influence of tamas, part of "the movement of tamasic equality" which "is a generalisation of Nature"s principle of jugupsa or self-protecting recoil extended from the shunning of particular painful effects to a shunning of the whole life of Nature itself as in sum leading to pain and self-tormenting and not to the delight which the soul demands". tamasic vair vairagya
asinata ::: udasinata due to a predominance of sattva: "a high intellectual indifference seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone", a "philosophic equality" that can come "with the perception of the world either as an illusion [maya] or a play [lila] and of all things as being equal in the Brahman".
ASL+ "language, specification" An {algebraic specification language} by David Aspinall of the {University of Edinburgh}. ASL+ has rules for proving the satisfaction of specifications. It can also be viewed as a {type theory} with {subtyping}, featuring {contravariant refinement} for {Pi-abstracted} specifications and a notion of {stratified equality} for {higher-order objects}. (1994-09-14)
ASL+ ::: (language, specification) An algebraic specification language by David Aspinall of the University of Edinburgh. ASL+ has rules for proving the subtyping, featuring contravariant refinement for Pi-abstracted specifications and a notion of stratified equality for higher-order objects. (1994-09-14)
Associative law: Any law of the form, x o (y o z) = (x o y) o z, where o is a dyadic operation (function) and x o y is the result of applying the operation to x and y (the value of the function for the arguments x and y). Instead of the sign of equality, there may also appear the sign of the biconditional (in the propositional calculus), or of other relations having properties similar to equality in the discipline in question.
ava ::: enjoyment, cheerfulness, the .. urge to work, equality.
Balance - 1. the difference between total debits and total credits in an account. Or 2.the equality of total debits and total credits of all accounts in a general ledger in the preparation of a trial balance. Or 3. the equality of a control account in the general ledger (e.g., accounts receivable) and the total balance of all accounts in the subsidiary ledger (e.g., customer accounts). Or 4. balance in a bank account. Or 5. balance of a loan.
balance ::: n. **1. A state of equilibrium or equipoise; mental, psychological or emotional. 2. A weighing device, especially one consisting of a rigid beam horizontally suspended by a low-friction support at its center, with identical weighing pans hung at either end, one of which holds an unknown weight while the effective weight in the other is increased by known amounts until the beam is level and motionless. 3. An undecided or uncertain state in which issues are unresolved. v. 4. To have an equality or equivalence in weight, parts, etc.; be in equilibrium. adj. 5. Being in harmonious or proper arrangement or adjustment, proportion. 6. Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behaviour, judgement. balanced, balancing.**
balance ::: n. --> An apparatus for weighing.
Act of weighing mentally; comparison; estimate.
Equipoise between the weights in opposite scales.
The state of being in equipoise; equilibrium; even adjustment; steadiness.
An equality between the sums total of the two sides of an account; as, to bring one&
Equality ::: Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate, —far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 224-225
Equality is the chief support of the true spiritual conscious- ness and it is this from which a sadhaka deviates when he allows a vital movement to carry him away in feeling or speech or action. Equality is not the same thing as forbearance, — though undoubtedly a settled equality immensely extends, even inimit- ably, a man’s power of endurance and forbearance.
"Equality is the chief support of the true spiritual consciousness and it is this from which a sadhak deviates when he allows a vital movement to carry him away in feeling or speech or action. Equality is not the same thing as forbearance, — though undoubtedly a settled equality immensely extends, even illimitably, a man"s power of endurance and forbearance. Letters on Yoga
“Equality is the chief support of the true spiritual consciousness and it is this from which a sadhak deviates when he allows a vital movement to carry him away in feeling or speech or action. Equality is not the same thing as forbearance,—though undoubtedly a settled equality immensely extends, even illimitably, a man’s power of endurance and forbearance. Letters on Yoga
Equality means another thing — to have an equal view of men and their nature and acts and the forces that move them ; it helps one to see tlte truth about them by pushing away from the mind all personal feeling in one’s seeing and judgment and even all the mental bias. Personal feeling always distorts and makes one see in men’s actions, not only the actions themselves, but things behind them which, more often than not, are not there.
::: Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements, — anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, — not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit.” *Letters on Yoga
Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements,—anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest,—not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit.” Letters on Yoga
Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things satd or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feelings, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them ; it means self-mastery over the vital movements,
Equality: See Logic, formal, §§ 3, 6, 9. Equipollence: A relation of equivalence between two propositions or propositional forms or symbols for these.
Equality
b) The usual meaning of the term the doctrine of the Trinitarians who hold that the nature of God is one in substance and three in embodiment (Latin: persona). Upon the basis of Platonic realism (q.v.) which makes the universal fundamental and the particulars real in terms of the universal, the Christian Trinitarians made philosophically clear their doctrine of one Godhead and three embodiments, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three and yet one. The doctrine was formulated to make religiously valid the belief in the complete Deity of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit (referred to in the New and the Old Testaments) and to avoid the pitfalls of polytheism. Jesus had become the object of Christian worship and the revealer of God and thus it was felt necessary to establish (together with the H.S.) his real Deity along with monotheistic belief. A long controversy over the relationship of the three led to the formulation by the Council of Nicea in 325, and after further disputes, by the Council of Constantinople in 381 of the orthodox Trinitarian creed (the Niceno-Constantinopolitan). Roman and Greek Catholicism split on the doctrine of the status of the H.S. The Western church added the expression "filioque" (the H.S. proceeding "and from the Son") making more explicit the complete equality of the three; the Eastern church maintained the original text which speaks of the H.S. as "proceeding from thet Father." Orthodox Protestantism maintains the Trinitarian conception. -- V.F.
Buddhabhumisutra. (T. Sangs rgyas kyi sa'i mdo; C. Fodi jing; J. Butsujikyo; K. Pulchi kyong 佛地經). In Sanskrit, "Scripture on the Stage of Buddhahood," an important MAHAYANA scripture on the experience of enlightenment. The sutra begins with a description of the PURE LAND in which the scripture is taught and its audience of BODHISATTVAs, mahAsrAvakas, and MAHASATTVAs. The text goes on to describe the five factors that exemplify the stage of buddhahood (buddhabhumi). The first of these is (1) the wisdom of the DHARMADHATU, which is likened to space (AKAsA) itself, in that it is all-pervasive and uncontained. The next two factors are (2) mirror-like wisdom, or great perfect mirror wisdom (ADARsAJNANA), in which the perfect interfusion between all things is seen as if reflected in a great mirror, and (3) the wisdom of equality, or impartial wisdom (SAMATAJNANA), which transcends all dichotomies to see everything impartially without coloring by the ego. The scripture then describes (4) the wisdom of specific knowledge (PRATYAVEKsAnAJNANA) and (5) the wisdom of having accomplished what was to be done (KṚTYANUstHANAJNANA), both of which are attained as a result of the subsequently attained wisdom (TATPṚstHALABDHAJNANA); these two types of knowledge clarify that the dharmadhAtu is a realm characterized by both emptiness (suNYATA) and compassion (KARUnA). Finally, similes are offered to elucidate the nature of these wisdoms. The Chinese translation, in one roll, was made by XUANZANG and his translation team in 645 CE. In tantric Buddhism, these five wisdoms or knowledges (JNANA) are linked with the five "buddha families" (see PANCATATHAGATA).
Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism and Taoism have been the dual basis of Chinese thought, with Buddhism presenting a strong challenge in medieval times. The former two, the priority of either of which is still controversial, rivaled each other from the very beginning to the present day. Taoism (tao chia) opposed nature to man, glorifying Tao or the Way, spontaneity (tzu jan), "inaction" (wu wei) in the sense of non-artificiality or following nature, simplicity (p'u), "emptiness," tranquillity and enlightenment, all dedicated to the search for "long life and lasting vision" (in the case of Lao Tzu, 570 B.C.?), for "preserving life and keeping the essence of our being intact" (in the case of Yang Chu, c. 440-360 B.C.), and for "companionship with nature" (in the case of Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.). The notes of the "equality of things and opinions" (ch'i wu) and the "spontaneous and unceasing transformation of things" (tzu hua) were particularly stressed in Chuang Tzu.
Ch'in: Personal experience, or knowledge obtained through the contact of one's knowing faculty and the object to be known. (Neo-Mohists.) Parents. Kinship, as distinguished from the more remote relatives and strangers, such distinction being upheld by Confucians as essential to the social structure but severely attacked by the Mohists and Legalists as untenable in the face of the equality of men. Affection, love, which it is important for a ruler to have toward his people and for children toward parents. (Confucianism.)
Ch'i wu: The equality of things and opinions, the identity of contraries. "Viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction; construction is the same as destruction." Therefore the sages harmonize the systems of right and wrong, and rest in the equilibrium of nature (t'ien chun). "This is called following two courses at the same time." (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.) -- W.T.C.
cittasaMprayuktasaMskAra. (T. sems dang mtshungs ldan gyi 'du byed; C. xin xiangying fa; J. shinsoobo; K. sim sangŭng pop 心相應法). In Sanskrit, "conditioned forces associated with thought"; an ABHIDHARMA term synonymous with the mental concomitants (CAITTA), the dharmas that in various combinations accompany mind or thought (CITTA). The ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, for example, explains that mind and its concomitants always appear in conjunction with one another and cannot be independently generated. These factors are "associated" because of five equalities that they share with mind, i.e., equality as to (1) support (AsRAYA), in this context, meaning the six sensory bases; (2) object (ALAMBANA), viz., the six sensory objects; (3) aspect (AKARA), the aspects of sensory cognition; (4) time (kAla), because they occur simultaneously; and (5) the number of their substance (DRAVYA), because mind and its concomitants are in a one-to-one association. The different schools of ABHIDHARMA enumerate various lists of such forces. The VAIBHAsIKA school of SARVASTIVADA abhidharma lists forty-six cittasamprayuktasaMskAras, while the mature YOGACARA system of MAHAYANA scholasticism gives a total of fifty-one, listed in six categories. The VaibhAsika and YogAcAra schools also posited a contrasting category of "conditioned forces dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKARA), which served to account for specific types of complex moral and mental processes (such as where both physicality and mentality were temporarily suspended in higher meditative absorptions), and anomalous doctrinal problems. (The PAli equivalent cittasaMpayuttasankhAra is attested, but only rarely, in PAli commentarial literature; it does not appear in canonical ABHIDHAMMA texts. This doctrinal category therefore has no significance in the THERAVADA abhidhamma.) For more detailed discussion, see CAITTA; and for the complete lists, see SEVENTY-FIVE DHARMAS OF THE SARVASTIVADA SCHOOL and ONE-HUNDRED DHARMAS OF THE YOGACARA SCHOOL in the List of Lists.
coequal ::: a. --> Being on an equality in rank or power. ::: n. --> One who is on an equality with another.
coequality ::: n. --> The state of being on an equality, as in rank or power.
coequally ::: adv. --> With coequality.
Commutative law is any law of the form x o y = y o x, or with the biconditional, etc., replacing equality -- compare Associative law. Commutative laws of addition and multiplication hold in arithmetic, also in the theory of real numbers, etc. In the propositional calculus there are commutative laws of conjunction, both kinds of disjunction, the biconditional, alternative denial and its dual; also corresponding laws in the algebra of classes. -- A.C.
Condignity: A characteristic of merit which implies equality and proportionality between service rendered and its recompense, to which there is a claim on the ground of justice. Merit of this description is called condign merit, or meritum de condigno. -- J.J.R.
conditional inequality: An inequality that is only true under certain conditions.
Conditions lor equality ::: Complete samata takes long to establish and it is dependent on three things ::: the soul’s self- giving to the Divine by an inner surrender, the descent of the spiritual calm and peace from above and the steady, long and persistent rejection of all egoistic, rajasic and other feelings that contradict samata.
constraint "programming, mathematics" A {Boolean} {relation}, often an equality or {ineqality} relation, between the values of one or more mathematical {variables}. E.g. x"3 is a constraint on x. The process of {constraint satisfaction} attempts to assign values to variables so that all constraints are true. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.constraints}. {FAQ (http://cs.unh.edu/ccc/archive/)}. (2002-06-08)
constraint ::: (programming, mathematics) A Boolean relation, often an equality or ineqality relation, between the values of one or more mathematical variables (often two). E.g. x>3 is a constraint on x. constraint satisfaction attempts to assign values to variables so that all constraints are true.Usenet newsgroup: comp.constraints. .(2002-06-08)
coordinateness ::: n. --> The state of being coordinate; equality of rank or authority.
cotidal ::: a. --> Marking an equality in the tides; having high tide at the same time.
Declaration of Independence ::: Proclamation read in Tel Aviv by David Ben Gurion on May 14, 1948, declaring Eretz Yisrael, the historical and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, to be an independent state founded on democracy and equality with nondiscriminatory treatment of its Arab citizens, and known as the State of Israel.
decreasing function: A function where x < y implies and is implied by f(x) > f(y). Depending on the author, the second inequality may be ≥ so that a decreasing function is allowed to "level" as well as decrease. In which case, most authors are likely to call the first type strictly decreasing functions. Note that monotonic(-ally) decreasing functions do not mean that the inquality signs are strict but that the decreass is uninterrupted (without exceptions).
Definition: In the development of a logistic system (q. v.) it is usually desirable to introduce new notations, beyond what is afforded by the primitive symbols alone, by means of syntactical definitions or nominal definitions, i.e., conventions which provide that certain symbols or expressions shall stand (as substitutes or abbreviations) for particular formulas of the system. This may be done either by particular definitions, each introducing a symbol or expression to stand for some one formula, or by schemata of definition, providing that any expression of a certain form shall stand for a certain corresponding formula (so condensing many -- often infinitely many -- particular definitions into a single schema). Such definitions, whether particular definitions or schemata, are indicated, in articles herein by the present writer, by an arrow →, the new notation introduced (the definiendum) being placed at the left, or base of the arrow, and the formula for which it shall stand (the definiens) being placed at the right, or head, of the arrow. Another sign commonly employed for the same purpose (instead of the arrow) is the equality sign = with the letters Df, or df, appearing either as a subscript or separately after the definiens.
dharmadhātusvabhāvajNāna. [alt. dharmadhātuprakṛtijNāna] (T. chos dbyings ye shes; C. fajie tixingzhi; J. hokkai taishochi; K. popkye ch'esongji 法界體性智). In Sanskrit, "the wisdom of the essential nature of the reality-realm"; one of five wisdoms of a buddha. The five are the wisdom of the essential nature of the DHARMADHĀTU (dharmadhātuprakṛtijNāna or dharmadhātusvabhāvajNāna), the mirror-like wisdom (ADARsAJNĀNA), the wisdom of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA), the wisdom of specific knowledge (PRATYAVEKsAnAJNĀNA), and the wisdom of having accomplished what was to be done (KṚTYĀNUstHĀNAJNĀNA). The five wisdoms are considered to derive from specific transformations of the nine types of consciousness (VIJNĀNA), which occur when a cultivator consummates one's practice: dharmadhātuprakṛtijNāna is derived from the transformation of the ninth consciousness, the "immaculate consciousness" (AMALAVIJNĀNA); adarsajNāna from the eighth, the "storehouse consciousness" (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA); samatājNāna from the seventh, "defiled mental consciousness" (KLIstAMANAS); the pratyaveksanajNāna from the sixth, "mental consciousness" (MANOVIJNĀNA); and kṛtyānusthānajNāna from the five sensory consciousnesses. The YOGĀCĀRA school initially discussed only the latter four types of wisdom, without the dharmadhātuprakṛtijNāna that derived from amalavijNāna. The full list of five wisdoms appears to derive from the "Sutra of the Buddha Stage" (S. BUDDHABHuMISuTRA; C. Fodi jing), which refers to five kinds of dharmas that are incorporated in the stage of great enlightenment, viz., the four earlier types of wisdom listed in Yogācāra materials, plus the pure dharmadhātu, corresponding to dharmadhātuprakṛtijNāna. In esoteric Buddhism, these wisdoms are personified as the five buddhas depicted in the diamond-realm MAndALA (vajradhātumandala). The five wisdoms of the diamond-realm (S. vajradhātu; see KONGoKAI) represent the aspect of wisdom of the DHARMAKĀYA buddha, Mahāvairocana (see VAIROCANA). In contrast, the womb-realm (garbhadhātu; see TAIZoKAI) is interpreted as the store or womb of Mahāvairocana Buddha, that is, the fundamental principle underlying those five types of wisdom. These are represented by Mahāvairocana in the center, AKsOBHYA in the east, RATNASAMBHĀVA in the south, AMITĀBHA in the west and AMOGHASIDDHI or sĀKYAMUNI in the north.
disparity ::: n. --> Inequality; difference in age, rank, condition, or excellence; dissimilitude; -- followed by between, in, of, as to, etc.; as, disparity in, or of, years; a disparity as to color.
Distribution of income - The amount of income and wealth different groups have in a particular country. Inequality of income can be illustrated with the Lorenz curve.
Distributive Justice: Justice as exhibited in the distribution of honor, money, rights and privileges among the members of a community; characterized by Aristotle as requiring equality of proportion between persons and rewards. See Corrective Justice. -- G.R.M.
egality ::: n. --> Equality.
EQLOG ::: Equality, types and generic modules for logic programming. A language using Horn clauses. J.A. Goguen, J. Meseguer.
EQLOG Equality, types and generic modules for logic programming. A language using Horn clauses. J.A. Goguen, J. Meseguer.
EQLog OBJ2 plus logic programming based on Horn logic with equality. "EQLog: Equality, Types and Generic Modules for Logic Programming", J. Goguen et al in Functional and Logic Programming, D. DeGroot et al eds, pp.295-363, P-H 1986.
equalities ::: pl. --> of Equality
equality ::: “Equality is to remain unmoved within in all conditions.” Letters on Yoga
". . . equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“… equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
EQUALITY. ::: Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure, by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga state of samaia, equality to all things.
equality ::: n. --> The condition or quality of being equal; agreement in quantity or degree as compared; likeness in bulk, value, rank, properties, etc.; as, the equality of two bodies in length or thickness; an equality of rights.
Sameness in state or continued course; evenness; uniformity; as, an equality of temper or constitution.
Evenness; uniformity; as, an equality of surface.
Exact agreement between two expressions or magnitudes
equality ::: samata, equality of soul and mind to all things and happenings, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere; the capacity to remain unmoved within all conditions.
equality ::: the condition of being equal; sameness; uniformity. equality"s.
equalness ::: n. --> Equality; evenness.
equate ::: 1. To consider, treat, or depict as equal or equivalent. 2. To state the equality of or between (things). equates, equating.
equational logic ::: (logic) First-order equational logic consists of quantifier-free terms of ordinary first-order logic, with equality as the only predicate symbol. The al. [Birkhoff, Gratzer, Cohn]. It was later made into a branch of category theory by Lawvere (algebraic theories). (1995-02-21)
equational logic "logic" First-order equational logic consists of {quantifier}-free terms of ordinary {first-order logic}, with equality as the only {predicate} symbol. The {model theory} of this logic was developed into {Universal algebra} by Birkhoff et al. [Birkhoff, Gratzer, Cohn]. It was later made into a branch of {category theory} by Lawvere ("algebraic theories"). (1995-02-21)
equation ::: n. --> A making equal; equal division; equality; equilibrium.
An expression of the condition of equality between two algebraic quantities or sets of quantities, the sign = being placed between them; as, a binomial equation; a quadratic equation; an algebraic equation; a transcendental equation; an exponential equation; a logarithmic equation; a differential equation, etc.
A quantity to be applied in computing the mean place or other element of a celestial body; that is, any one of the several
equilibrity ::: n. --> The state of being balanced; equality of weight.
equilibrium ::: n. --> Equality of weight or force; an equipoise or a state of rest produced by the mutual counteraction of two or more forces.
A level position; a just poise or balance in respect to an object, so that it remains firm; equipoise; as, to preserve the equilibrium of the body.
A balancing of the mind between motives or reasons, with consequent indecision and doubt.
equipoise ::: equality in distribution, as of weight, relationship, or emotional forces; equilibrium.
equipoise ::: n. --> Equality of weight or force; hence, equilibrium; a state in which the two ends or sides of a thing are balanced, and hence equal; state of being equally balanced; -- said of moral, political, or social interests or forces.
Counterpoise.
equipollency ::: n. --> Equality of power, force, signification, or application.
Sameness of signification of two or more propositions which differ in language.
equiponderancy ::: n. --> Equality of weight; equipoise.
equity ::: n. --> Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality.
An equitable claim; an equity of redemption; as, an equity to a settlement, or wife&
equivalence ::: n. --> The condition of being equivalent or equal; equality of worth, value, signification, or force; as, an equivalence of definitions.
Equal power or force; equivalent amount.
The quantity of the combining power of an atom, expressed in hydrogen units; the number of hydrogen atoms can combine with, or be exchanged for; valency. See Valence.
The degree of combining power as determined by
Euler diagram: The elementary operations upon and relations between classes -- complementation, logical sum, logical product, class equality, class inclusion -- may sometimes advantageously be represented by means of the corresponding operations upon and relations between regions in a plane. (Indeed, if regions are considered as classes of points, the operations and relations for regions become particular cases of those for classes.) By using regions of simple character, such as interiors of circles or ellipses, to stand for given classes, convenient diagrammatic representations are obtained of the possible logical relationships between two or more classes. These are known as Euler diagrams, although their employment by Euler in his Letters to a German Princess (vol. 2, 1772) was not their first appearance. Or the diagram may be so drawn as to show all possible intersections (2n intersections in the case of classes), and then intersections known to be empty may be crossed out, and intersections known not to be empty marked with an asterisk or otherwise (Venn diagram). -- A.C.
evection ::: --> The act of carrying up or away; exaltation.
An inequality of the moon&
evenhand ::: n. --> Equality.
extensional equality ::: (Or extensionality). Functions, f and g are extensionally equal if and only if f x = g x for all x. reduction strategy) or they both terminate with the same basic value.Two functions may be extensionally equal but not inter-convertible (neither is reducible to the other). E.g. \ x . x+x and \ x . 2*x. See also observational equivalence, referential transparency.
extensional equality (Or extensionality). Functions, f and g are extensionally equal if and only if f x = g x for all x. where "=" means both expressions fail to terminate (under some given {reduction strategy}) or they both terminate with the same basic value. Two functions may be extensionally equal but not inter-convertible (neither is reducible to the other). E.g. \ x . x+x and \ x . 2*x. See also {observational equivalence}, {referential transparency}.
extensional ::: Extensional properties, e.g. extensional equality, relate to the black-box behaviour of an object, i.e. how its output depends on its input. The opposite is intensional which concerns how the object is implemented.
extensional Extensional properties, e.g. extensional equality, relate to the "black-box" behaviour of an object, i.e. how its output depends on its input. The opposite is intensional which concerns how the object is implemented.
extensionality {extensional equality}
feminism ::: A diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms of their social, political, and economic situation. As a social movement, feminism largely focuses on limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting women's rights, interests, and issues in society.
feminist criticism: A discourse which addresses what it considers to be the patriarchal nature of society and literature, and attempts to think about equality of men and women.
Finally we mention a variant form of the functional calculus of first order, the functional calculus of first order with equality, in which the list of functional constants includes the dyadic functional constant =, denoting equality or identity of individuals. The notation [X] = [Y] is introduced as an abbreviation for [=] (X, Y), and primitive formulas are added as follows to the list already given: if X is any individual variable, X = X is a primitive formula; if X and Y are any individual variables, and B results from the substitution of Y for a particular free occurrence of X in A, which is not in a sub-formula of A of the form (Y)[C], then [X = Y] ⊃ [A ⊃ B] is a primitive formula. We speak of the pure functional calculus of first order with equality when the lists of propositional variables and functional variables are complete and the only functional constant is =; we speak of a simple applied functional calculus of first order with equality when the lists of propositional variables and functional variables are empty.
fudge factor A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the desired result. The terms "tolerance" and {slop} are also used, though these usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than necessary because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one direction. A good example is the "fuzz" typically allowed in {floating-point} calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import.
Furthermore, the universe is a social order, and nothing can stand by itself. At the same time, everything has its opposite. "No two of the productions of creation are alike," and the Taoist doctrine of the equality of things must be rejected. In the eternal sequence of appearance and disappearance every creation is new, and the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration must be rejected.
F. V. Huntington, Postulates for assertive conjunction, negation, and equality, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 72, no. 1, 1937.
Gini coefficient - A measure of inequality in a country's wealth distribution.
Given the relation (dyadic propositional function) ε, the relations of equality and class inclusion may be introduced by the following definitions: ZεY → ε(Z, Y). Z=Y → ZεX ⊃x YεX. Z⊂Y → XεZ ⊃x XεY. Here X, Y, and Z are to be taken as individual variables ("individual" in the technical sense of § 3), and X is to be determined according to an explicit rule so as to be different from Y and Z.
Gobineau, Arthur de: (1816-1882) A French nobleman and author of Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, in which he propounds the doctrine of "nordic supremacy". According to him, "the white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and stiength. By its union with other varieties hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength. strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly." -- R.B.W.
Hatthaka Ālavaka. An eminent lay disciple of the Buddha, declared by him to be foremost among laymen who attract followers by means of the four means of conversion (S. SAMGRAHAVASTU). According to the Pāli account, he was the son of the king of Ālavī, and received his name Hatthaka (which in Pāli means "handed over" as a child), because he had once been given to the Buddha by an ogre (S. YAKsA), who, in turn, handed him back to the king. The ogre, the yakkha Ālavaka, was going to eat the boy but was converted by the Buddha and persuaded to release him, instead. When he grew up, Hatthaka heard the Buddha preach and became a nonreturner (S. ANĀGĀMIN). A gifted preacher, Hatthaka had a following of five hundred disciples who always accompanied him. The suttapitaka records several conversations he had with the Buddha. On one occasion, after the Buddha asked him how he was able to gather such a large following around him, Hatthaka responded that it was through four means of conversion: giving gifts, kind words, kind deeds, and equality in treatment. It was for this capacity that Hatthaka won eminence. The Buddha declared him to be endowed with eight qualities: faith, virtue, conscientiousness, shame, the ability to listen, generosity, wisdom, and modesty. When he died, Hatthaka was reborn as a divinity in avihā heaven in the subtle materiality realm (RuPALOKA), where he was destined to attain final nibbāna (S. NIRVĀnA). Once, he visited the Buddha from his celestial world but collapsed in his presence, unable to support his subtle material body on earth; the Buddha instructed him to create a gross material body, by means of which he was then able to stand. He told the Buddha that he had three regrets upon his death: that he had not seen the Buddha enough, that he had not heard the DHARMA enough, and that he had not served the SAMGHA enough. Together with the householder CITTA (Cittagahapati), Hatthaka Ālavaka is upheld as an ideal layman, who is worthy of emulation.
Helvetius, Claude Adrien: (1715-1771) A French philosopher, he developed on the basis of Condillac's sensationalism his superficial materialistic philosophy. His theories of the original mental equality of individuals, of the egoism or self-interest as the sole motive of human action, and of the omnipotence of education, stress the basic determining influence of circumstances.
hongaku. (本覺). In Japanese, "original enlightenment." The notion that enlightenment was a quality inherent in the minds of all sentient beings (SATTVA) initially developed in East Asia largely due to the influence of such presumptive APOCRYPHA as the DASHENG QIXIN LUN. The Dasheng qixin lun posited a distinction between the potentiality to become a buddha that was inherent in the minds of every sentient being, as expressed by the term "original enlightenment" (C. BENJUE; pronounced hongaku in Japanese); and the soteriological process through which that potential for enlightenment had to be put into practice, which it called "actualized enlightenment" (C. SHIJUE; J. shikaku). This distinction is akin to the notion that a person may in reality be enlightened (original enlightenment), but still needs to learn through a course of religious training how to act on that enlightenment (actualized enlightenment). This scheme was further developed in numerous treatises and commentaries written by Chinese exegetes in the DI LUN ZONG, HUAYAN ZONG, and TIANTAI ZONG. ¶ In medieval Japan, this imported soteriological interpretation of "original enlightenment" was reinterpreted into an ontological affirmation of things just as they are. Enlightenment was thence viewed not as a soteriological experience, but instead as something made manifest in the lived reality of everyday life. Hongaku thought also had wider cultural influences, and was used, for example, to justify conceptually incipient doctrines of the identity between the buddhas and bodhisattvas of Buddhism and the indigenous deities (KAMI) of Japan (see HONJI SUIGAKU; SHINBUTSU SHuGo). Distinctively Japanese treatments of original enlightenment thought begin in the mid-eleventh century, especially through oral transmissions (kuden) within the medieval TENDAISHu tradition. These interpretations were subsequently written down on short slips of paper (KIRIGAMI) that were gradually assembled into more extensive treatments. These interpretations ultimately came to be attributed by tradition to the great Tendai masters of old, such as SAICHo (767-822), but connections to these earlier teachers are dubious at best and the exact dates and attributions of these materials are unclear. During the late Heian and Kamakura periods, hongaku thought bifurcated into two major lineages, the Eshin and Danna (both of which subsequently divided into numerous subbranches). This bifurcation was largely a split between followers of the two major disciples of the Tendai monk RYoGEN: GENSHIN (942-1017) of Eshin'in in YOKAWA (the famous author of the oJo YoSHu); and Kakuun (953-1007) of Danna'in in the Eastern pagoda complex at ENRYAKUJI on HIEIZAN. The Tendai tradition claims that these two strands of interpretation derive from Saicho, who learned these different approaches while studying Tiantai thought in China under Daosui (J. Dosui/Dozui; d.u.) and Xingman (J. Gyoman; d.u.), and subsequently transmitted them to his successors in Japan; the distinctions between these two positions are, however, far from certain. Other indigenous Japanese schools of Buddhism that developed later during the Kamakura period, such as the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, seem to have harbored more of a critical attitude toward the notion of original enlightenment. One of the common charges leveled against hongaku thought was that it fostered a radical antinomianism, which denied the need for either religious practice or ethical restraint. In the contemporary period, the notion of original enlightenment has been strongly criticized by advocates of "Critical Buddhism" (HIHAN BUKKYo) as an infiltration into Buddhism of Brahmanical notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAN); in addition, by valorizing the reality of the mundane world just as it is, hongaku thought was said to be an exploitative doctrine that had been used in Japan to justify societal inequality and political despotism. For broader East Asian perspectives on "original enlightenment," see BENJUE.
hotchpotch ::: n. --> A mingled mass; a confused mixture; a stew of various ingredients; a hodgepodge.
A blending of property for equality of division, as when lands given in frank-marriage to one daughter were, after the death of the ancestor, blended with the lands descending to her and to her sisters from the same ancestor, and then divided in equal portions among all the daughters. In modern usage, a mixing together, or throwing into a common mass or stock, of the estate left by a person
identity: A mathematical statement with the symbol ≡ that express the equality of the two expressions on either side of it under all circumstances, i.e. no matter what value the variables take. It is a stronger statement than an equation. For example,
Identity, law of: Given by traditional logicians as "A is A." Because of the various possible meanings of the copula (q.v.) and the uncertainty as to the range of the variable A, this formulation is ambiguous. The traditional law is perhaps best identified with the theorem x = x, either of the functional calculus of first order with equality, or in the theory of types (with equality defined), or in the algebra of classes, etc. It has been, or may be, also identified with either of the theorems of the propositional calculus, p ⊃ p, p ≡ p, or with the theorem of the functional calculus of first order, F(x) ⊃x F(x). Many writers understand, however, by the law of identity a semantical principle -- that a word or other symbol may (or must) have a fixed referent in its various occurrences in a given context (so, e.g., Ledger Wood in his The Analysis of Knowledge). Some, it would seem, confuse such a semantical principle with a proposition of formal logic. -- A.C.
If we deal only with formulas of the algebra of classes which are equations (i.e., which have the form A = B), the above description by reference to the functional calculus may be replaced by a simpler description using the applied propositional calculus (§ 1) whose fundamental proposittonal symbols are xε∨, xε∧, xεa, xεb, xεc, . . . . Given an equation, C of the algebra of classes, the corresponding formula C† of the propositional calculus is obtained by replacing equality ( = ) by the biconditional ( ≡ ), replacing complementation, logical sum, and logical product respectively by negation, inclusive disjunction, and conjunction, and at the same time replacing ∨, ∧, a, b, c, . . . respectively by xε∨, xε∧, xεa, xεb, xεc, . . . . An equation C is a theorem of the algbera of classes if and only if the inference from xε∨, ∼xε∧ to C† is a valid inference of the propositional calculus; analogously for valid inferences of the algebra of classes in which the formulas involved are equations.
If you arc free from the money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal, you will have a greater power to command the money for the divine work. Equality of mind, absence of
imparity ::: n. --> Inequality; disparity; disproportion; difference of degree, rank, excellence, number, etc.
Lack of comparison, correspondence, or suitableness; incongruity.
Indivisibility into equal parts; oddness.
implicit differentiation: A method of differentiating an implicit equation. One achieves this by differentiating both sides of the equation with respect to one of the variables in the equation, thus maintaining equality in the derivatives. The derivative of one variable with respect to the other can then be found through rearranging the terms.
In common usage, "'denotation'' has a less special meaning, denote being approximately synonymous with designate (q.v.). A proper name may be said to denote that of which it is a name. Or, e.g., in the equation 2 + 2=4, the sign + may be said to denote addition and the sign = to denote equality (even without necessarily intending to construe these signs as proper names).
increasing function A function where x > y implies and is implied by f(x) > f(y). Depending on the author, the second inequality may be ≥ so that a increasing function is allowed to "level" as well as increase. In which case, most authors are likely to call the first type strictly increasing functions. Note that monotonic(-ally) increasing functions do not mean that the inquality signs are strict but that the increase is uninterrupted (without exceptions)
inequalities ::: pl. --> of Inequality
inequality: Any mathematical sentences that states the relationship between 2 values or expressions by asserting that:
inequality ::: n. --> The quality of being unequal; difference, or want of equality, in any respect; lack of uniformity; disproportion; unevenness; disparity; diversity; as, an inequality in size, stature, numbers, power, distances, motions, rank, property, etc.
Unevenness; want of levelness; the alternate rising and falling of a surface; as, the inequalities of the surface of the earth, or of a marble slab, etc.
Variableness; changeableness; inconstancy; lack of
inequation ::: n. --> An inequality.
INSTRUMENT. ::: To be able to receive the Divine Power and let it act through you in the things of the outward life, there are three necessary conditions ::: (I) Quietude, equality — not to be disturbed by anything that happens, to keep the mind still and firm, seeing the play of forces, but itself tranquil. (2) Absolute faith — faith that what is for the best will happen, but also that if one can make oneself a true instrument, the fruit will be that which one's will guided by the Divine Light sees as the thing to be done. (3) Receptivity — the power to receive the Divine Force and to feel its presence and the presence of the Mother in it and allow it to work, guiding one’s sight and will and action.
If this power and presence can be felt and this plasticity made the habit of the consciousness in action, — but plasticity to the Divine Force alone without bringing in any foreign clement, — the eventual result is sure.
Conditions to become an instrument of the Divine ::: A receptive silence of the mind, an effacemenl of the mental ego and the reduction of the mental being to the position of a witness, a close find themselves in the Divine. It cannot be done in a spirit of levity or laxity ; the work is too high and difficult, the adverse powers in the lower Nature too ready to take advantage of the least sanction or the smallest opening, the aspiration and tapasya needed too constant and intense.
intensional "philosophy" A description of properties, e.g. intensional equality, that relate to how an object is implemented as opposed to extensional properties which concern only how its output depends on its input. (1995-01-12)
intensional ::: (philosophy) A description of properties, e.g. intensional equality, that relate to how an object is implemented as opposed to extensional properties which concern only how its output depends on its input. (1995-01-12)
In the functional calculi of second and higher orders, we may introduce the definitions: X = Y → (F)[F(X) ⊃ F(Y)], where X and Y are any two variables of the same type and F is a monadic functional variable of appropriate type. The notation X = Y may then be interpreted as denoting equality or identity.
isoclinic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to, or indicating, equality of inclination or dip; having equal inclination or dip.
isodynamic ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, having, or denoting, equality of force.
isometrical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or characterized by, equality of measure.
Noting, or conforming to, that system of crystallization in which the three axes are of equal length and at right angles to each other; monometric; regular; cubic. Cf. Crystallization.
isoperimetric inequality An inequality stating the relationship between the perimeter and area of a closed plane curve. Note that a circle satisfy the equality part of this statement.
isothermal ::: a. --> Relating to equality of temperature.
Having reference to the geographical distribution of temperature, as exhibited by means of isotherms; as, an isothermal line; an isothermal chart.
Israeli Arabs ::: Those Arabs who chose to stay in the area that became the State of Israel during the War of Independence. They include Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Druze, and Bedouins. They enjoy equality and full citizenship in Israel and participate actively in its politics.
is- ::: --> See Iso-.
A prefix or combining form, indicating identity, or equality; the same numerical value; as in isopod, isomorphous, isochromatic.
Applied to certain compounds having the same composition but different properties; as in isocyanic.
Applied to compounds of certain isomeric series in whose structure one carbon atom, at least, is connected with three other carbon atoms; -- contrasted with neo- and normal; as in isoparaffine;
It is necessary to keep equality under pain and suffering — and that means to endure firmly and calmly, not to be restless
jNāna. (P. Nāna; T. ye shes; C. zhi; J. chi; K. chi 智). In Sanskrit, "gnosis," "knowledge," "awareness," or "understanding," numerous specific types of which are described in Buddhist literature. JNāna in the process of cognition implies specific understanding of the nature of an object and is necessarily preceded by SAMJNĀ ("perception"). JNāna is also related to PRAJNĀ ("wisdom"); where prajNā implies perfected spiritual understanding, jNāna refers to more general experiences common to a specific class of being, such as the knowledge of a sRĀVAKA, PRATYEKABUDDHA, or buddha. The YOGĀCĀRA school discusses four or five specific types of knowledge exclusive to the buddhas. The four knowledges are transformations of the eighth consciousnesses (VIJNĀNA): (1) Mirror-like knowledge, or great perfect mirror wisdom (ĀDARsAJNĀNA; mahādarsajNāna), a transformation of the eighth consciousness, the ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA, in which the perfect interfusion between all things is seen as if reflected in a great mirror. (2) The knowledge of equality, or impartial wisdom (SAMATĀJNĀNA), a transformation of the seventh KLIstAMANOVIJNĀNA, which transcends all dichotomies to see everything impartially without coloring by the ego. (3) The knowledge of specific knowledge or sublime contemplation (PRATYAVEKsANĀJNĀNA), a transformation of the sixth MANOVIJNĀNA, which recognizes the unique and common characteristics of all DHARMAs, thus giving profound intellectual understanding. (4) The knowledge that one has accomplished what was to be done (KṚTYĀNUstHĀNAJNĀNA), a transformation of the five sensory consciousnesses, wherein one perfects actions that benefit both oneself and others. The fifth of the five knowledges is the "knowledge of the nature of the DHARMADHĀTU" (DHARMADHĀTUSVABHĀVAJNĀNA). Each of these knowledges is then personified by one of the PANCATATHĀGATAs, sometimes given the names VAIROCANA, AKsOBHYA, RATNASAMBHAVA, AMITĀBHA, and AMOGHASIDDHI.
Khóa Hư Lục. (課). In Vietnamese, "Instructions on Emptiness," composed by Tràn Thái Tông (1218-1277); the first prose work on Buddhism written in Vietnamese. It is a collection of sermons and essays, most of them fragmentary, on the philosophy and practice of Buddhism from the perspective of the three trainings in morality (sĪLA), concentration (SAMĀDHI), and wisdom (PRAJNĀ). It also marks one of the earliest efforts to assimilate the worldview of the Southern school (NAN ZONG) of CHAN into Vietnamese Buddhism. The Khóa Hư Lu㈱c consists of two books. The first (lit. "upper") book includes twenty-one short essays, which can be classified as follows according to their literary styles: one "verse" on the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS; two "general discourses" on the contemplation of the body and the Buddhist path; six "essays" on generating the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTA), not taking life, not stealing, not indulging in sensual pleasures, not telling lies, and not using intoxicants; five "treatises" on the topics of morality, concentration, wisdom, receiving precepts, buddha-contemplation (NIANFO), sitting in meditation, and the mirror of wisdom; four "prefaces" to longer complete works (three of which are no longer extant), viz., "A Guide to the Chan School," "A Commentary on thE VAJRASAMĀDHISuTRA," "Liturgy of the Six-Period Repentance," and "An Essay on the Equality Repentance Liturgy"; "recorded encounter dialogues with disciples" that record dialogues between Tràn Thái Tông and his students; a "verse commentary" on the ancient public cases (GONG'AN) of Chan; and an "afterword." The second (lit. "lower") book includes a complete essay entitled "Liturgy of the Six-Period Repentance," which offers a detailed instruction on the performance of the repentance liturgy.
klistamanas. [alt. klistamanovijNāna] (T. nyon yid; C. ranmona/mona shi; J. zenmana/manashiki; K. yommalla/malla sik 染末那/末那識). In Sanskrit, "afflicted mentality"; refers to the seventh of the eight categories of consciousnesses set forth in the YOGĀCĀRA school and enumerated by ASAnGA. The first six consciousnesses are the six sensory consciousnesses of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mentality; the eighth is the foundational consciousness, the "storehouse consciousness" (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA), which serves as the repository of the seeds (BĪJA) of past actions. The seventh "afflicted mentality" observes the foundational consciousness and mistakenly conceives it to be the self. Upon the achievement of buddhahood, the afflicted mentality is transformed into the wisdom of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA).
liberalism ::: In politics, a position that favors liberty as a political value. Liberalism has taken many meanings throughout history, but commonalities include a focus on individual liberty, democratic republicanism (liberal democracy), and equality under the law.
Lorenz curve - 1. a graph showing the extent of departure from equality of income distribution. Or 2) a type of cumulative frequency curve which shows the disparity between equal distribution and actual distribution. See gini coefficient.
monomial ::: n. --> A single algebraic expression; that is, an expression unconnected with any other by the sign of addition, substraction, equality, or inequality. ::: a. --> Consisting of but a single term or expression.
n. 1. The horizontal line or plane in which anything is situated, with regard to its elevation. 2. A plane or position in a graded scale; position in a hierarchy. 3. On the same plane, on an equality (with). levels. *adj. 4.** *Having a surface without slope, tilt in which no part is higher or lower than another. 5. Height, position, strength, rank, plane, etc. Also fig. v. 6. Fig. To bring persons or things to an equal level; equalize. levelled, all-levelling.**
Note that given the equality that a and b have to satify, 0 < a < 1 would mean that 1/a > 1, would in turn dictates that b be negative. Since neither is allowed to be negative, by the contrapositive of the above statement, a and b cannot be less than or equal 1. Hence, given the other conditions, stating that a and b must be positive amounts to the same effect as stating that a and b have to be larger than 1.
::: "Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga a state of samata , equality to all things.” Letters on Yoga
“Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga a state of samata , equality to all things.” Letters on Yoga
occurs check "programming" A feature of some implementations of {unification} which causes unification of a {logic variable} V and a structure S to fail if S contains V. Binding a variable to a structure containing that variable results in a cyclic structure which may subsequently cause unification to loop forever. Some implementations use extra pointer comparisons to avoid this. Most implementations of {Prolog} do not perform the occurs check for reasons of efficiency. Without occurs check the {complexity} of {unification} is O(min(size(term1), size(term2))) with occurs check it's O(max(size(term1), size(term2))) In {theorem proving} unification without the occurs check can lead to unsound inference. For example, in {Prolog} it is quite valid to write X = f(X). which will succeed, binding X to a cyclic structure. Clearly however, if f is taken to stand for a function rather than a {constructor}, then the above equality is only valid if f is the {identity function}. Weijland calls unification without occur check, "complete unification". The reference below describes a complete unification algorithm in terms of Colmerauer's consistency algorithm. ["Semantics for Logic Programs without Occur Check", W.P. Weijland, Theoretical Computer Science 71 (1990) pp 155-174]. (1996-01-11)
occurs check ::: (programming) A feature of some implementations of unification which causes unification of a logic variable V and a structure S to fail if S contains V.Binding a variable to a structure containing that variable results in a cyclic structure which may subsequently cause unification to loop forever. Some implementations use extra pointer comparisons to avoid this.Most implementations of Prolog do not perform the occurs check for reasons of efficiency. Without occurs check the complexity of unification is O(min(size(term1), size(term2))) with occurs check it's O(max(size(term1), size(term2))) unsound inference. For example, in Prolog it is quite valid to write X = f(X). constructor, then the above equality is only valid if f is the identity function.Weijland calls unification without occur check, complete unification. The reference below describes a complete unification algorithm in terms of Colmerauer's consistency algorithm.[Semantics for Logic Programs without Occur Check, W.P. Weijland, Theoretical Computer Science 71 (1990) pp 155-174]. (1996-01-11)
odds ::: a. --> Difference in favor of one and against another; excess of one of two things or numbers over the other; inequality; advantage; superiority; hence, excess of chances; probability.
Quarrel; dispute; debate; strife; -- chiefly in the phrase at odds.
omniparity ::: n. --> Equality in every part; general equality.
or troubled or depressed or despondent, to go on with a steady faith in the Divine’s Will. But equality docs not include inert acceptance. If, for instance, then? is a temporary failure of some endeavour in the sadhana, one has to keep equality, not to be troubled or despondent, but one has not to accept the failure as an indication of the Divine Will and give up the endeavour. You ought rather to find out the reason and mean- ing of the failure and go forward in faith towards victory.
osculatrix ::: n. --> A curve whose contact with a given curve, at a given point, is of a higher order (or involves the equality of a greater number of successive differential coefficients of the ordinates of the curves taken at that point) than that of any other curve of the same kind.
overbalance ::: v. t. --> To exceed equality with; to outweigh.
To cause to lose balance or equilibrium. ::: n. --> Excess of weight or value; something more than an equivalent; as, an overbalance of exports.
owelty ::: n. --> Equality; -- sometimes written ovelty and ovealty.
paNcajNāna. (T. ye shes lnga; C. wuzhi; J. gochi; K. oji 五智). In Sanskrit, "five wisdoms," "five knowledges"; five aspects of the perfect enlightenment (BODHI) of the buddhas, according to the MAHĀYĀNA tradition. They are (1) the wisdom of the DHARMADHĀTU (DHARMADHĀTUJNĀNA), (2) the mirrorlike wisdom (ĀDARsAJNĀNA), (3) the wisdom of equality or impartiality (SAMATĀJNĀNA), (4) the wisdom of specific knowledge (PRATYAVEKsAnAJNĀNA), and (5) the wisdom of accomplishing what was to be done (KṚTYĀNUstHĀNAJNĀNA). They are important especially in YOGĀCĀRA, where it is said, for example, that the foundational storehouse consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA) is transformed into the mirrorlike wisdom, and the afflicted mind (KLIstAMANAS) is transformed into the wisdom of equality. In tantric Buddhism, the five wisdoms are associated with the five buddhas (PANCATATHĀGATA): VAIROCANA, AKsOBHYA, RATNASAMBHAVA, AMITĀBHA, and AMOGHASIDDHI, respectively. It is also said that, through the practice of the tantric path, the five KLEsAs of delusion or obscuration (MOHA), hatred (DVEsA), pride (MĀNA), desire (RĀGA), and jealousy (ĪRsYĀ) are transformed into the five wisdoms in the order listed above.
paNcāmṛta. (T. bdud rtsi lnga). In Sanskrit, the "five ambrosias," one of the more graphic examples of the inversion of purity and pollution in the Buddhist TANTRAs. The five ambrosias are feces, urine, semen, menstrual blood, and marrow. In the ANUTTARAYOGATANTRAs, it is said that an advanced YOGIN is able to transform these five polluting substances into five types of ambrosia, which represent the five buddhas (PANCATATHĀGATA): VAIROCANA, AKsOBHYA, AMITĀBHA, RATNASAMBHAVA, and AMOGHASIDDHI. Once purified, the five ambrosias can then be ingested as a form of worshipping the five buddhas and as a means of speeding the attainment of the five wisdoms (PANCAJNĀNA): (1) the wisdom of the DHARMADHĀTU (DHARMADHĀTUJNĀNA), (2) the mirrorlike wisdom (ĀDARsAJNĀNA), (3) the wisdom of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA), (4) the wisdom of specific knowledge (PRATYAVEKsAnĀJNĀNA), and (5) the wisdom of accomplishing activities (KṚTYĀNUstHĀNAJNĀNA).
parage ::: n. --> Equality of condition, blood, or dignity; also, equality in the partition of an inheritance.
Equality of condition between persons holding unequal portions of a fee.
Kindred; family; birth.
parasaMbhogakāya. (C. ta shouyong shen; J. tajuyushin; K. t'a suyong sin 他受用身). In Sanskrit, "body intended for others' enjoyment"; one of the four types of buddha bodies (BUDDHAKĀYA) discussed in the BUDDHABHuMIsĀSTRA (C. Fodijing lun), the MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA (C. She dasheng lun), and the CHENG WEISHI LUN (S. *VijNaptimātratāsiddhi), along with the "self-nature body" (SVABHĀVAKĀYA), "body intended for personal enjoyment" (SVASAMBHOGAKĀYA), and "transformation body" (NIRMĀnAKĀYA). This fourfold schema of buddha bodies derives from the better-known three bodies of a buddha (TRIKĀYA)-viz., dharma body (DHARMAKĀYA), reward body (SAMBHOGAKĀYA), and transformation body (nirmānakāya)-but distinguishes between two different types of enjoyment bodies. The first, the svasaMbhogakāya, derives from the countless virtues that originate from the accumulation of immeasurable merit and wisdom over a buddha's infinitely long career; this body is a perfect, pure, eternal, and omnipresent material body that enjoys the bliss of dharma (DHARMAPRĪTI) for oneself until the end of time. By contrast, the parasaMbhogakāya is a subtle virtuous body deriving from the wisdom of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA), which resides in a PURE LAND and displays supernatural powers in order to enhance the enjoyment of the dharma by bodhisattvas at all ten stages of the bodhisattva's career (BODHISATTVABHuMI).
Parity - 1. economics, term designating a constant spread between prices; for example, having a constant relationship between domestic and world sugar prices. Or 2. labour law, salary equality among workers such as policemen and firemen.
parity ::: n. --> The quality or condition of being equal or equivalent; A like state or degree; equality; close correspondence; analogy; as, parity of reasoning.
par ::: n. --> See Parr.
Equal value; equality of nominal and actual value; the value expressed on the face or in the words of a certificate of value, as a bond or other commercial paper.
Equality of condition or circumstances. ::: prep.
Plato's theory of knowledge can hardly be discussed apart from his theory of reality. Through sense perception man comes to know the changeable world of bodies. This is the realm of opinion (doxa), such cognition may be more or less clear but it never rises to the level of true knowledge, for its objects are impermanent and do not provide a stable foundation for science. It is through intellectual, or rational, cognition that man discovers another world, that of immutable essences, intelligible realities, Forms or Ideas. This is the level of scientific knowledge (episteme); it is reached in mathematics and especially in philosophy (Repub. VI, 510). The world of intelligible Ideas contains the ultimate realities from which the world of sensible things has been patterned. Plato experienced much difficulty in regard to the sort of existence to be attributed to his Ideas. Obviously it is not the crude existence of physical things, nor can it be merely the mental existence of logical constructs. Interpretations have varied from the theory of the Christian Fathers (which was certainly not that of Plato himself) viz , that the Ideas are exemplary Causes in God's Mind, to the suggestion of Aristotle (Metaphysics, I) that they are realized, in a sense, in the world of individual things, but are apprehended only by the intellect The Ideas appear, however, particularly in the dialogues of the middle period, to be objective essences, independent of human minds, providing not only the foundation for the truth of human knowledge but afso the ontological bases for the shadowy things of the sense world. Within the world of Forms, there is a certain hierarchy. At the top, the most noble of all, is the Idea of the Good (Repub. VII), it dominates the other Ideas and they participate in it. Beauty, symmetry and truth are high-ranking Ideas; at times they are placed almost on a par with the Good (Philebus 65; also Sympos. and Phaedrus passim). There are, below, these, other Ideas, such as those of the major virtues (wisdom, temperance, courage, justice and piety) and mathematical terms and relations, such as equality, likeness, unlikeness and proportion. Each type or class of being is represented by its perfect Form in the sphere of Ideas, there is an ideal Form of man, dog, willow tree, of every kind of natural object and even of artificial things like beds (Repub. 596). The relationship of the "many" objects, belonging to a certain class of things in the sense world, to the "One", i.e. the single Idea which is their archetype, is another great source of difficulty to Plato. Three solutions, which are not mutually exclusive, are suggested in the dialogues (1) that the many participate imperfectly in the perfect nature of their Idea, (2) that the many are made in imitation of the One, and (3) that the many are composed of a mixture of the Limit (Idea) with the Unlimited (matter).
pūrn.ata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam ::: fullness, clearpurnata, ness, equality, capacity for enjoyment (the elements of pran.asakti). pūrn.ata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam, iti pran.asaktih. purnata,
(purnata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam, iti pranashaktih) ::: fullness, clearness, equality, capacity for enjoyment: these constitute the power of the life-force. purna p
ratnakula. (T. rin chen rigs; C. baobu; J. hobu; K. pobu 寳部). In Sanskrit, "jewel family," one of the "five lineages" or "five families" (PANCAKULA; PANCATATHĀGATA) of tantric Buddhism. The five are usually given as the TATHĀGATAKULA, VAJRAKULA, PADMAKULA, ratnakula, and the KARMAKULA (different tantras have different lists of these families). Those in the ratnakula become enlightened in the form of the buddha RATNASAMBHAVA. Each of the five families is associated with one of the five aggregates (SKANDHA), five wisdoms (JNĀNA), five afflictions (KLEsA), five elements, and five colors. For the ratnakula, the skandha is sensation (VEDANĀ), the wisdom is the wisdom of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA); the affliction is pride, the color yellow, and the element earth.
referential transparency ::: (programming) An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x){ return x+y; } Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result.Pure functional languages achieve referential transparency by forbidding assignment to global variables. Each expression is a constant or a function that value depends only on the definition of the function and the values of its arguments.We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y){ subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions.We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent!See also extensional equality, observational equivalence. (1997-03-25)
referential transparency "programming" An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "{side-effect}" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. {Pure functional languages} achieve referential transparency by forbidding {assignment} to global variables. Each expression is a constant or a function application whose evaluation has no side-effect, it only returns a value and that value depends only on the definition of the function and the values of its arguments. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to {formal methods} and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any {deterministic} system would be referentially transparent! See also {extensional equality}, {observational equivalence}. (1997-03-25)
Reflexivity: A dyadic relation R is called reflexive if xRx holds for all x within a certain previously fixed domain which must include the field of R (cf. logic, formal, § 8). In the propositional calculus, the laws of reflexivity of material implication and material equivalence (the conditional and biconditional) are the theorems, p ⊃ p, p ≡ p, expressing the reflexivity of these relations. Other examples of reflexive relations are equality, class inclusion, ⊂ (see logic, formal, § 7); formal implication and formal equivalence (see logic, formal, § 3); the relation not greater than among whole numbers, or among rational numbers, or among real numbers; the relation not later than among instants of time; the relation less than one hour apart among instants of time.
refusing to regard its desires and clamours as one’s own, and cultivates an entire equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the cons- ciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.
rivality ::: n. --> Rivalry; competition.
Equality, as of right or rank.
sakhya ::: friendship; the relation (bhava) with the isvara as "the divine Friend" (sakha), a relation that "admits of an equality and intimacy even in inequality and the beginning of mutual self-giving; at . its closest when all idea of other giving and taking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free and happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence".
Samabhavana: Feeling of equality.
Samata ::: Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate, —far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 224-25
samata ::: equality, equanimity.
samata ::: equality, equanimity, "the capacity of receiving with a calm samata and equal mind all the attacks and appearances of outward things", the first member of the samata / santi catus.t.aya, consisting of passive / negative samata and active / positive samata, "samata in reception of the things of the outward world and samata in reaction to them"; sometimes restricted to the first of these or extended to refer to the samata catus.t.aya as a whole; also an element of pran.asakti. samat samata a catus catustaya
samata. ::: equality; impartiality; equanimity
samatājNāna. (T. mnyam nyid ye shes; C. pingdengxing zhi; J. byodoshochi; K. p'yongdŭngsong chi 平等性智). In Sanskrit, "wisdom of equality" or "impartial wisdom"; one of the five wisdoms (PANCAJNĀNA) of a buddha. Through the samatājNāna, a buddha sees beyond all superficial distinctions and differentiations and perceives the fundamental nature of all things as emptiness (suNYATĀ). Thus, a buddha makes no distinction between one sentient being and another, and no distinction between self and other; in addition, no ultimate difference is perceived between SAMSĀRA and NIRVĀnA. Such undifferentiated perception gives rise to equality, impartiality, and compassion for all beings. In YOGĀCĀRA theory, samatājNāna is understood to arise through the cessation of attachment to conceptions of self and pride. In TANTRA, among the five buddhas (PANCATATHĀGATA), this type of wisdom is associated with RATNASAMBHAVA.
samata (shanta samata) ::: calm equality ssanta
SAMATA. ::: Yogic samata is equality of soul, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere
samatva ::: equality.
samatvam yoga ucyate ::: it is equality that is meant by yoga. [Gita 2.48]
samye sthitam manah ::: the mind established in equality. [Gita 5.19]
Sattva(Sanskrit) ::: One of the trigunas or "three qualities," the other two being rajas and tamas. Sattva is thequality of truth, goodness, reality, purity. These three gunas or qualities run all through the web or fabricof nature like threads inextricably mingled, for, indeed, each of these three qualities participates likewiseof the nature of the other two, yet each one possessing its predominant (which is its own svabhava) orintrinsic characteristic. One who desires to gain some genuine understanding of the manner in which thearchaic wisdom looks upon these three phases of human intellectual and spiritual activity must rememberthat not one of these three can be considered apart from the other two. The three are fundamentally threeoperations of the human consciousness, and essentially are that consciousness itself.
secular ::: a. --> Coming or observed once in an age or a century.
Pertaining to an age, or the progress of ages, or to a long period of time; accomplished in a long progress of time; as, secular inequality; the secular refrigeration of the globe.
Of or pertaining to this present world, or to things not spiritual or holy; relating to temporal as distinguished from eternal interests; not immediately or primarily respecting the soul, but the body; worldly.
sense: 1. The "direction" of an inequality. i.e. whether an inequality is one where the former is larger than the latter (the latter less than the former) or the former less than the latter (the latter larger than the former).
Shih fei: Right and wrong, with reference to both opinion and conduct, a distinction strongly stressed by the Confucians, Neo-Confucians, Mohists, Neo-Mohists, Sophists, and Legalists alike, except the Taoists who repudiated such distinction as superficial, relative, subjective, unreal in the eyes of Tao, and inconsistent with the Taoist idea of the absolute equality of things and opinions. To most of the ancient Chinese schools, correspondence of name to actuality, both in the social sense and the logical sense, served as the standard of right and wrong. The Sophists often employed the result of argumentation as the standard. The one who won was right and the one who lost was wrong. The Neo-Mohists emphasized logical consistency, whereas the Legalists insisted on law. The early Confucians emphasized conformity with the moral order. "Whiterer conforms with propriety is right and whatever does not conform with propriety is wrong " As Hsun Tzu (c 335-c 288 B.C.) put it, "Whatever conforms with the system of the sage-kings is right and whatever does not conform with the system of the sage-kings is wrong." To the Neo-Confucians, "Whatever is in accord with Reason (li) is right." "The right is the expression of justice and impartiality based on the Universal Reason, and the wrong is the expression of selfishness and partiality based on human desire." -- W.T.C.
Sri Aurobindo: "Equality is to remain unmoved within in all conditions.” *Letters on Yoga
State of Nature: The state of man as it would he if there were no political organization or government. The concept was used by many philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a criterion of what man's naturnl condition might be and as to what extent that condition has been spoiled or corrupted by civilization. It was used as an argument for man's original rights to liberty and equality (Hooker, Locke, Rousseau), but occasionally also as an argument for the necessity of the state and its right to control all social relations (Hobbes). -- W.E.
strict inequality: An inequality which states the relationship between two unequal quantities (as being greater or less). i.e. a mathematical sentence with the symbols > or < between 2 expressions.
Suffering in yoga ::: There are two ways to meet ::: first that of the Self, calm, equality, a spint, a will, a mind, a vital, a physical consciousness that remain resolutely turned towards the Divine and unshaken by all suggestion of doubt, desire, attachment, depression, sorrow, pain, inertia. This is possible when the inner being awakens, when one becomes conscious of the Self, of the inner Mind, the inner Vital, the inner Physical, for that can more easily attune itself to the divine Will, and then there is a division in the being as if there were two beings, one within calm, strong, equal, unperturbed, a charmel of the Divine Consciousness and
SUPPRESSION. ::: In our path the altitude is not one of force- ful suppression, but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forreful suppression (lasting comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence ; in both cases, the desire remains ; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital.
Suppression ::: In our path the attitude is not one of forceful suppression but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forceful suppression stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It is only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital,
refusing to regard its desires and clamours as one’s own, and cultivates an entire equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 1465
svasaMbhogakāya. (C. zi shouyong shen; J. jijuyushin; K. cha suyong sin 自受用身). In Sanskrit, "body intended for personal enjoyment," in contrast to the PARASAMBHOGAKĀYA, "body intended for others' enjoyment"; one of the four types of buddha bodies (BUDDHAKĀYA) discussed in the BUDDHABHuMIsĀSTRA (Fodijing lun), the MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA (She dasheng lun), and the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhisāstra), along with the "self-nature body" (SVABHĀVAKĀYA or svābhāvikakāya), the "body intended for others' enjoyment" (parasaMbhogakāya), and the "transformation body" (NIRMĀnAKĀYA). This fourfold schema of buddha bodies derives from the better-known three bodies of a buddha (TRIKĀYA)-viz., dharma body (DHARMAKĀYA), reward body (SAMBHOGAKĀYA), and transformation body (nirmānakāya)-but distinguishes between these two different types of reward bodies. The svasaMbhogakāya derives from the countless virtues that originate from the accumulation of immeasurable merit and wisdom over a buddha's infinitely-long career; this body is a perfect, pure, eternal and omnipresent material body that enjoys the bliss of dharma (DHARMAPRĪTI) for oneself until the end of time. By contrast, the parasaMbhogakāya is a subtle virtuous body deriving from the cognition of equality (SAMATĀJNĀNA), which resides in a PURE LAND and displays supernatural powers in order to enhance the enjoyment of the dharma by bodhisattvas at all ten stages of the bodhisattva's career (BODHISATTVABHuMI).
TABLOG ::: (language) A programming language based on first order predicate logic with equality that combines relational programming and functional programming. employs the Manna-Waldinger 'deductive-tableau' proof system as an interpreter instead of resolution. (1997-06-19)
TABLOG "language" A programming language based on {first order predicate logic} with equality that combines {relational programming} and {functional programming}. It has functional notation and {unification} as its binding mechanism. TABLOG supports a more general subset of standard {first order logic} than {Prolog}. It employs the Manna-Waldinger '{deductive-tableau}' proof system as an {interpreter} instead of {resolution}. (1997-06-19)
tamasic nati ::: inert submission, "weak resignation or dull acceptance"; the lowest form of nati, "an equality of disappointed resignation", an acquiescence under the influence of tamas. tamasic nidr nidra
. t.aya (samata chatusthaya; samata-chatusthaya; samatachatusthaya) ::: the first catus.t.aya, the quaternary of equality, consisting of samata, santi, sukha, and (atma)prasada or hasya; also called the santi catus.t.aya.
The change then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taVdng it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature.
"The Gita answers by presenting the Supreme as something greater even than the immutable Self, more comprehensive, one who is at once this Self and the Master of works in Nature. But he directs the works of Nature with the eternal calm, the equality, the superiority to works and personality which belong to the immutable. This, we may say, is the poise of being from which he directs works, and by growing into this we are growing into his being and into the poise of divine works. From this he goes forth as the Will and Power of his being in Nature, manifests himself in all existences, is born as Man in the world, is there in the heart of all men, reveals himself as the Avatar, the divine birth in man; and as man grows into his being, it is into the divine birth that he grows.” Essays on the Gita
“The Gita answers by presenting the Supreme as something greater even than the immutable Self, more comprehensive, one who is at once this Self and the Master of works in Nature. But he directs the works of Nature with the eternal calm, the equality, the superiority to works and personality which belong to the immutable. This, we may say, is the poise of being from which he directs works, and by growing into this we are growing into his being and into the poise of divine works. From this he goes forth as the Will and Power of his being in Nature, manifests himself in all existences, is born as Man in the world, is there in the heart of all men, reveals himself as the Avatar, the divine birth in man; and as man grows into his being, it is into the divine birth that he grows.” Essays on the Gita
There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without equality.
"The universe is certainly or has been up to now in appearance a rough and wasteful game with the dice of chance loaded in favour of the Powers of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we have to take it as it is and find out — if we reject the way out of the old sages — the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all a wide terrain of equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting into it that we can have the eye that sees and hope to gain the power that conquers.” Letters on Yoga
“The universe is certainly or has been up to now in appearance a rough and wasteful game with the dice of chance loaded in favour of the Powers of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we have to take it as it is and find out—if we reject the way out of the old sages—the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all a wide terrain of equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting into it that we can have the eye that sees and hope to gain the power that conquers.” Letters on Yoga
tie ::: v. t. --> A knot; a fastening.
A bond; an obligation, moral or legal; as, the sacred ties of friendship or of duty; the ties of allegiance.
A knot of hair, as at the back of a wig.
An equality in numbers, as of votes, scores, etc., which prevents either party from being victorious; equality in any contest, as a race.
A beam or rod for holding two parts together; in railways,
Transitivity: A dyadic relation R is transitive if, whenever xRy and yRz both hold, xRz also holds. Important examples of transitive relations are the relation of identity or equality; the relation less than among whole numbers, or among rational numbers, or among real numbers, the relation precedes among instants of time (as usually taken); the relation of class inclusion, ⊂ (see logic, formal, §7); the relations of material implication and material equivalence among propositions, the relations of formal implication and formal equivalence among monadic propositional functions. In the propositional calculus, the laws of transitivity of material implication and material equivalence (the conditional and biconditional) are: [p ⊃ q][q ⊃ r] ⊃ [p ⊃ r] [p ≡ q][q ≡ r] ⊃ [p ≡ r] Similar laws of transitivity may be formulated for equality (e.g., in the functional calculus of first order with equality), class inclusion (e.g., in the Zermelo set theory), formal implication (e.g., in the pure functional calculus of first order), etc. -- A.C.
triangular inequality: The statement that a + b ≥ c for all a, b, c within a set of mathematical objects.
unbalanced ::: a. --> Not balanced; not in equipoise; having no counterpoise, or having insufficient counterpoise.
Not adjusted; not settled; not brought to an equality of debt and credit; as, an unbalanced account; unbalanced books.
Being, or being thrown, out of equilibrium; hence, disordered or deranged in sense; unsteady; unsound; as, an unbalanced mind.
unequalness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being unequal; inequality; unevenness.
unison ::: n. --> Harmony; agreement; concord; union.
Identity in pitch; coincidence of sounds proceeding from an equality in the number of vibrations made in a given time by two or more sonorous bodies. Parts played or sung in octaves are also said to be in unison, or in octaves.
A single, unvaried.
Sounding alone.
Sounded alike in pitch; unisonant; unisonous; as, unison
variable ::: (programming) (Sometimes var /veir/ or /var/) A named memory location in which a program can store intermediate results and from which it can read it assignment statement. The value is obtained by evaluating an expression and then stored in the variable. For example, the assignment x = y + 1 is only true in the program until the value of x or y changes. Furthermore, statements like x = x + 1 are common. This means add one to x, which only makes sense as a state changing operation, not as a mathematical equality.The simplest form of variable corresponds to a single-word of memory or a CPU register and an assignment to a load or store machine code operation.A variable is usually defined to have a type, which never changes, and which defines the set of values the variable can hold. A type may specify a single different types. A common aggregate type is the array - a set of values, one of which can be selected by supplying a numerical index.Languages may be untyped, weakly typed, strongly typed, or some combination. Object-oriented programming languages extend this to object types or classes.A variable's scope is the region of the program source within which it represents a certain thing. Scoping rules are also highly language dependent but Subroutine and function formal arguments are special variables which are set automatically by the language runtime on entry to the subroutine.In a functional programming language, a variable's value never changes and change of state is handled as recursion over lists of values.(2004-11-16)
variable "programming" (Sometimes "var" /veir/ or /var/) A named memory location in which a program can store intermediate results and from which it can read it them. Each {programming language} has different rules about how variables can be named, typed, and used. Typically, a value is "assigned" to a variable in an {assignment} statement. The value is obtained by evaluating an expression and then stored in the variable. For example, the assignment x = y + 1 means "add one to y and store the result in x". This may look like a mathematical equation but the mathematical equality is only true in the program until the value of x or y changes. Furthermore, statements like x = x + 1 are common. This means "add one to x", which only makes sense as a state changing operation, not as a mathematical equality. The simplest form of variable corresponds to a single-{word} of {memory} or a {CPU} {register} and an assignment to a {load} or {store} {machine code} operation. A variable is usually defined to have a {type}, which never changes, and which defines the set of values the variable can hold. A type may specify a single ("atomic") value or a collection ("aggregate") of values of the same or different types. A common aggregate type is the {array} - a set of values, one of which can be selected by supplying a numerical {index}. Languages may be {untyped}, {weakly typed}, {strongly typed}, or some combination. {Object-oriented programming} languages extend this to {object} types or {classes}. A variable's {scope} is the region of the program source within which it represents a certain thing. Scoping rules are also highly language dependent but most serious languages support both {local variables} and {global variables}. {Subroutine} and {function} {formal arguments} are special variables which are set automatically by the language runtime on entry to the subroutine. In a {functional programming} language, a variable's value never changes and change of state is handled as recursion over lists of values. (2004-11-16)
Vide Equality.
Whatever the unpleasantness of circumstances, however disagree- able the conduct of otheis, you must learn to receive them with a perfect calm and without any disturbing reaction. These things are the test of equality. It is easy to be calm and equal when things go well and people and circumstances are pleasant ; it is when they are the opposite that the completeness of the calm, peace, equality can bo tested, reinforced, made perfect.
When there is an attack from the human instruments of adverse forces, one should try to overcome it not in a spirit of personal hatred or anger or wounded egoism, but with a calm spirit of strength and equality and a call to the Divine Force to act.
Wild_LIFE Logic, Inheritance, Functions and Equations parts: interpreter, manual, tests, libraries, examples Paradise Project, DEC Paris Research Laboratory. {(ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/plan/Life.tar.Z)} - Wild_LIFE interpreter from Paradise project at DEC's Paris Research Lab LIFE is an experimental programming language with a powerful facility for structured type inheritance. It reconciles styles from functional programming, logic programming, and object-oriented programming. LIFE implements a constraint logic programming language with equality (unification) and entailment (matching) constraints over order-sorted feature terms. The Wild_LIFE interpreter has a comfortable user interface with incremental query extension ability. It contains an extensive set of built-in operations as well as an X Windows interface. A semantic superset of LOGIN and LeFun. Syntax is similar to prolog. bugs: "life-bugs@prl.dec.com" ports: MIPS-Ultrix Mailing list: life-request@prl.dec.com E-mail: Peter Van Roy "vanroy@prl.dec.com" (1992-12-14)
x = y, the identity or equality of x and y, "x equals y." See logic, formal, §§ 3, 6, 9.
YOGIC ATTITUDE. ::: Not one of forceful suppression, but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire.
Yogic equality ::: The equality of soul, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere — seeing the One in spite of all differences, degrees, disparities in the manifestation. The mental principle of equality tries to ignore or else to destroy the differences, degrees and disparities, to act as if all were equal or to try and make all equal,
Young's inequality: An inequality class="d-title" named for English mathematician William Henry Young. It states that for a and b positive such that 1/a + 1/b = 1, then
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47 Sri Aurobindo
2 Friedrich Nietzsche
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1 Essential Integral
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1:Aversion is not equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
2:Equality is the very sign of liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
3:To be equal is to be infinite and universal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Action of Equality, #KEYS
4:There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without equality, samata.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
5:They have conquered the creation, whose mind is settled in equality. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
6:Equality does not include inert acceptance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Equality - The Chief Support, #KEYS
7:The wise in joy and in sorrow depart not from the equality of their souls. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
8:The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
9:Equality, not indifference is the basis. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #KEYS
10:All error is a disfiguration of some misunderstood fragments of truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #KEYS
11:The joy of the soul in the dualities is the secret of the mind's pleasure in living. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Equality, #KEYS
12:One who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
13:Absolute equality is non-existent in this world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Formation of the Nation-Unit - The Three Stages, #KEYS
14:The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
15:To see all things as oneself and to see all things in God and God in all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #KEYS
16:The perfection of virtue consists in a certain equality of soul and of conduct which should remain un-alterable. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
17:The claim to equality like the thirst for liberty is individualistic in its origin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #KEYS
18:All grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Action of Equality, #KEYS
19:Desire is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain of bondage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
20:Equality like individualistic liberty may turn out to be not a panacea but an obstacle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #KEYS
21:Then, accomplished in knowledge, he shakes from him good and evil, and, stainless, reaches that supreme Equality. ~ Mundaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
22:Equality is not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #KEYS
23:If we have not equality, it is a sign that we are still pursued by the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #KEYS
24:Equality of soul created by the surrender to the universal Wisdom gives us a supreme peace and calm. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Agni, the Illumined Will, #KEYS
25:A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
26:The Twelve Powers of the Mother manifested for Her Work: Sincerity, Peace, Equality, Generosity, Goodness, Courage, Progress, Receptivity, Aspiration, Perserverance, Gratitude, Humility
~ The Mother?,#KEYS
27:Christianity was an assertion of human equality in the spirit, a great assertion of the unity of the divine spirit in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Asiatic Democracy, #KEYS
28:The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
29:This equality and this oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
30:To get the universal Ananda all our instruments must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential joy of all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #KEYS
31:Ten high virtues: benevolence; spiritual life; intelligence; renunciation; perseverance; energy; patience; truthfulness; love for others; equality of soul. ~ Sangiti Sutta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
32:Two kinds of joy are there, O my brothers, and what are they? The joy of the sated senses and the joy of the equal soul; but nobler is the joy of equality. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
33:The reactions of the normal mind are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this degradation make this truth evident to us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #KEYS
34:A free equality founded upon spontaneous cooperation, not on governmental force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic ideal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #KEYS
35:A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Religion of Humanity, #KEYS
36:Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
37:Physical troubles always come as lessons to teach equality and to reveal what in us is pure and luminous enough to remain unaffected. It is in equality that one finds the remedy. An important point: equality does not mean indifference.
~ ?,#KEYS
38:three first approaches of Karma Yoga :::
Equality, renunciation of all desire for the fruit of our works, action done as a sacrifice to the supreme Lord of our nature and of all nature, - these are the three first Godward approaches in the Gita's way of Karmayoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [105],#KEYS
39:Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga a state of samata, equality to all things. It is of immense importance in sadhana to be able to reach this state. It helps the mental quietude and silence as well as the vital to come. It means indeed that the vital itself and the vital mind are already falling silent and becoming quiet. The thinking mind is sure to follow.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
40:Freedom from pride and arrogance, harmlessness, patience, sincerity, purity, constancy, self-control, indifference to the objects of sense, absence of egoism,...freedom from attachment to son and wife and house, constant equality of heart towards desirable or undesirable events, love of solitude and withdrawal from the crowd, perpetual knowledge of the Supreme and study of the principles of things, this is knowledge; what is contrary in nature to this, is ignorance. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
41:The centre of the Mother's symbol represent the Divine Consciousness, the Supreme Mother, the Mahashakti.
The four petals of the Mother's symbol represent the four Aspects or Personalities of the Mother; Maheshwari (Wisdom), Mahalakshmi(Harmony), Mahakali(Strength) and Mahasaraswati (Perfection).
The twelve petals of the Mother's symbol represent; Sincerity, Humility, Gratitude, Perseverance, Aspiration, Receptivity, Progress, Courage, Goodness, Generosity, Equality, Peace.
~ ?, https://www.auroville.com/silver-ring-mother-s-symbol.html, [T5],#KEYS
42:There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without equality, samata. Whatever the unpleasantness of circumstances, however disagreeable the conduct of others, you must learn to receive them with a perfect calm and without any disturbing reaction. These things are the test of equality. It is easy to be calm and equal when things go well and people and circumstances are pleasant; it is when they are the opposite that the completeness of the calm, peace, equality can be tested, reinforced, made perfect.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
43:the first period of endurance :::
Ordinarily we have to begin with a period of endurance; for we must learn to confront, to suffer and to assimilate all contacts. Each fiber must be taught not to wince away from that which pains and repels and not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but rather to accept, to face, to bear and to conquer. ... This is the stoical period of the preparation of equality, its most elementary and yet its heroic age.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation Of Ego,#KEYS
44:Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
45:the philosophic second period of indifference :::
There is next a period of high-seated impartiality and indifference in which the soul becomes free from exultation and depression and escapes from the snare of eagerness of joy as from the dark net of the pangs of grief and suffering. All things and persons and forces, all thoughts and feelings and sensations and actions, one's own no less than those of others, are regarded from above by a spirit that remains intact and immutable and is not disturbed by these things.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego,#KEYS
46:To be free from all preference and receive joyfully whatever comes from the Divine Will is not possible at first for any human being. What one should have at first is the constant idea that what the Divine wills is always for the best when the mind does not see how it is so, to accept with resignation what one cannot yet accept with gladness and so to arrive at a calm equality which is not shaken even when on the surface there may be passing movements of a momentary reaction to outward happenings, If that is once firmly founded, the rest can come.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Equality - The Chief Support [134],#KEYS
47:What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of consciousness, equality and oneness. The kernel of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine, supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness. The kernal of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine, supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [95],#KEYS
48:the best we can conceive as the thing to be done :::
The work itself is at first determined by the best light we can command in our ignorance. It is that which we conceive as the thing that should be done. And whether it be shaped by our sense of duty, by our feeling for our fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of the world or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all works in whom we believe but whom we do not yet know, the principle is the same. The essential of the sacrifice of works must be there and the essential is the surrender of all desire for the fruit of our works, the renunciation of all attachment to the result for which yet we labour. For so long as we work with attachment to the result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our ego...
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego,#KEYS
49:To be able to receive the Divine Power and let act through you in the things of the outward life, there are three necessary conditions:
(i) Quietude, equality - not to be disturbed by anything that happens, to keep the mind still and firm, seeing the play of forces, but itself tranquil.
(ii) Absolute faith - faith that what is for the best will happen, but also that if one can make oneself a true instrument, the fruit will be that which one's will guided by the Divine Light sees as the thing to be done - kartavyam karma.
(iii) Receptivity - the power to receive the Divine Force and to feel its presence and the presence of the Mother in it and allow it to work, guiding one's sight and will and action. If this power and presence can be felt and this plasticity made the habit of the consciousness in action, - but plasticity to the Divine force alone without bringing in any foreign element, - the eventual result is sure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
50:the supreme third period of greater divine equality :::
If we can pass through these two stages of the inner change without being arrested or fixed in either, we are admitted to a greater divine equality which is capable of a spiritual ardour and tranquil passion of delight, a rapturous, all-understanding and all-possessing equality of the perfected soul, an intense and even wideness and fullness of its being embracing all things. This is the supreme period and the passage to it is through the joy of a total self-giving to the Divine and to the universal Mother. For strength is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace deepens into bliss, the possession of the divine calm is uplifted and made the ground for the possession of the divine movement. But if this greater perfection is to arrive, the soul's impartial high-seatedness looking down from above on the flux of forms and personalities and movements and forces must be modified and change into a new sense of strong and calm submission and a powerful and intense surrender. ...
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego,#KEYS
51:the first necessity :::
An entire self-consecration, a complete equality, an unsparing effacement of the ego, a transforming deliverance of the nature from its ignorant modes of action are the steps by which the surrender of all the being and nature to the Divine Will can be prepared and achieved, -- a self-giving true, total and without reserve. The first necessity is an entire spirit of self-consecration in our works; it must become first the constant will, then the ingrained need in all the being, finally its automatic but living and conscious habit, the self-existent turn to do all action as a sacrifice to the Supreme and to the veiled Power present in us and in all beings and in all the workings of the universe. Life is the altar of this sacrifice, works are our offerings; a transcendent and universal Power and Presence as yet rather felt or glimpsed than known or seen by us is the Deity to whom they are offered. This sacrifice, this self-consecration has two sides to it; there is the work itself and there is the spirit in which it is done, the spirit of worship to the Master of Works in all that we see, think and experience.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego,#KEYS
52:on cultivating equality :::
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [103-104],#KEYS
53:Our highest insights must - and should! - sound like stupidities, or possibly crimes, when they come without permission to people whose ears have no affinity for them and were not predestined for them. The distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric, once made by philosophers, was found among the Indians as well as among Greeks, Persians, and Muslims. Basically, it was found everywhere that people believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights. The difference between these terms is not that the exoteric stands outside and sees, values, measures, and judges from this external position rather than from some internal one.What is more essential is that the exoteric sees things up from below - while the esoteric sees them down from above! There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects; and who would dare to decide whether the collective sight of the world's many woes would necessarily compel and seduce us into a feeling of pity, a feeling that would only serve to double these woes?... What helps feed or nourish the higher type of man must be almost poisonous to a very different and lesser type. The virtues of a base man could indicate vices and weaknesses in a philosopher. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, The Free Spirit, #KEYS
54:Instruction about Sadhana to a disciple:
Disciple: What is the nature of realisation in this yoga?
Sri Aurobindo: In this yoga we want to bring down the Truth-consciousness into the whole being - no part being left out. This can be done by the Higher Power itself. What you have to do is to open yourself to it.
Disciple: As the Higher Power is there why does it not work in all men - consciously?
Sri Aurobindo: Because man, at present, is shut up in his mental being, his vital nature and physical consciousness and their limitations. You have to open yourself. By an opening I mean an aspiration in the heart for the coming down of the Power that is above, and a will in the Mind, or above the Mind, open to it.
The first thing this working of the Higher Power does is to establish Shanti - peace - in all the parts of the being and an opening above. This peace is not mere mental Shanti, it is full of power and, whatever action takes place in it, Samata, equality, is its basis and the Shanti and Samata are never disturbed. What comes from Above is peace, power and joy. It also brings about changes in various parts of our nature so that they can bear the pressure of the Higher Power.
Knowledge also progressively develops showing all in our being that is to be thrown out and what is to be retained. In fact, knowledge and guidance both come and you have constantly to consent to the guidance. The progress may be more in one direction than in another. But it is the Higher Power that works. The rest is a matter of experience and the movement of the Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO, RECORDED BY A B PURANI (28-09-1923),#KEYS
55:The sign of the immersion of the embodied soul in Prakriti is the limitation of consciousness to the ego. The vivid stamp of this limited consciousness can be seen in a constant inequality of the mind and heart and a confused conflict and disharmony in their varied reactions to the touches of experience. The human reactions sway perpetually between the dualities created by the soul's subjection to Nature and by its often intense but narrow struggle for mastery and enjoyment, a struggle for the most part ineffective. The soul circles in an unending round of Nature's alluring and distressing opposites, success and failure, good fortune and ill fortune, good and evil, sin and virtue, joy and grief, pain and pleasure. It is only when, awaking from its immersion in Prakriti, it perceives its oneness with the One and its oneness with all existences that it can become free from these things and found its right relation to this executive world-Nature. Then it becomes indifferent to her inferior modes, equal-minded to her dualities, capable of mastery and freedom; it is seated above her as the high-throned knower and witness filled with the calm intense unalloyed delight of his own eternal existence. The embodied spirit continues to express its powers in action, but it is no longer involved in ignorance, no longer bound by its works; its actions have no longer a consequence within it, but only a consequence outside in Prakriti. The whole movement of Nature becomes to its experience a rising and falling of waves on the surface that make no difference to its own unfathomable peace, its wide delight, its vast universal equality or its boundless God-existence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
56:The first cause of impurity in the understanding is the intermiscence of desire in the thinking functions, and desire itself is an impurity of the Will involved in the vital and emotional parts of our being. When the vital and emotional desires interfere with the pure Will-to-know, the thought-function becomes subservient to them, pursues ends other than those proper to itself and its perceptions are clogged and deranged. The understanding must lift itself beyond the siege of desire and emotion and, in order that it may have perfect immunity, it must get the vital parts and the emotions themselves purified. The will to enjoy is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right functioning of the life in obedience to the working of the divine Will and to rid itself of craving and attachment. Similarly the heart must be freed from subjection to the cravings of the life-principle and the senses and thus rid itself of the false emotions of fear, wrath, hatred, lust, etc, which constitute the chief impurity of the heart. The will to love is proper to the heart, but here also the choice and reaching after love have to be foregone or tranquillised and the heart taught to love with depth and intensity indeed, but with a calm depth and a settled and equal, not a troubled and disordered intensity. The tranquillisation and mastery of these members is a first condition for the immunity of the understanding from error, ignorance and perversion. This purification spells an entire equality of the nervous being and the heart; equality, therefore, even as it was the first word of the path of works, so also is the first word of the path of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding,#KEYS
57:meta-systemic operations ::: As the 1950's and 60s begin to roll around the last stage of first tier emerged as a cultural force. With the Green Altitude we see the emergence of Pluralistic, Multicultural, Post-Modern world-views.
Cognition is starting to move beyond formal-operations into the realm of co-ordinating systems of abstractions, in what is called Meta-systemic Cognition. While formal-operations acted upon the classes and relations between members of classes. Meta-systemic operations start at the level of relating systems to systems. The focus of these investigations is placed upon comparing, contrasting, transforming and synthesizing entire systems, rather than components of one system. This emergent faculty allows self-sense to focus around a heightened sense of individuality and an increased ability for emotional resonance. The recognition of individual differences, the ability to tolerate paradox and contradiction, and greater conceptual complexity all provide for an understanding of conflict as being both internally and externally caused. Context plays a major role in the creation of truth and individual perspective. With each being context dependent and open to subjective interpretation, meaning each perspective and truth are rendered relative and are not able to be judged as better or more true than any other. This fuels a value set that centers on softness over cold rationality. Sensitivity and preference over objectivity.
Along with a focus on community harmony and equality which drives the valuing of sensitivity to others, reconcilation, consensus, dialogue, relationship, human development, bonding, and a seeking of a peace with the inner-self. Moral decisions are based on rights, values, or principles that are agreeable to all individuals composing a society based on fair and beneficial practices. All of this leads to the Equality movements and multiculturalism. And to the extreme form of relativitism which we saw earlier as context dependant nature of all truth including objective facts.
Faith at the green altitude is called Conjunctive, and allows the self to integrate what was unrecognized by the previous stages self-certainty and cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. New features at this level of faith include the unification of symbolic power with conceptual meaning, an awareness of ones social unconscious, a reworking of ones past, and an opening to ones deeper self. ~ Essential Integral, 4.1-52, Meta-systemic Operations,#KEYS
58:It is then by a transformation of life in its very principle, not by an external manipulation of its phenomena, that the integral Yoga proposes to change it from a troubled and ignorant into a luminous and harmonious movement of Nature. There are three conditions which are indispensable for the achievement of this central inner revolution and new formation; none of them is altogether sufficient in itself, but by their united threefold power the uplifting can be done, the conversion made and completely made. For, first, life as it is is a movement of desire and it has built in us as its centre a desire-soul which refers to itself all the motions of life and puts in them its own troubled hue and pain of an ignorant, half-lit, baffled endeavour: for a divine living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive-power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide and mentor; for a divine life the mind and the life-impulse must cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic being must take their place as the leader on the path and the indicator of a divine guidance. Last, life as it is is turned towards the satisfaction of the separative ego; ego must disappear and be replaced by the true spiritual person, the central being, and life itself must be turned towards the fulfilment of the Divine in terrestrial existence; it must feel a Divine Force awaking within it and become an obedient instrumentation of its purpose.
There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, - to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 176,#KEYS
59:on purifying ego and desire :::
The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation, the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consummation we desire. And since in the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego; for otherwise we shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage.These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate.
In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all is the vital selfs craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, -wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama karma. ...
The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [102],#KEYS
60:There is no invariable rule of such suffering. It is not the soul that suffers; the Self is calm and equal to all things and the only sorrow of the psychic being is the sorrow of the resistance of Nature to the Divine Will or the resistance of things and people to the call of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. What is affected by suffering is the vital nature and the body. When the soul draws towards the Divine, there may be a resistance in the mind and the common form of that is denial and doubt - which may create mental and vital suffering. There may again be a resistance in the vital nature whose principal character is desire and the attachment to the objects of desire, and if in this field there is conflict between the soul and the vital nature, between the Divine Attraction and the pull of the Ignorance, then obviously there may be much suffering of the mind and vital parts. The physical consciousness also may offer a resistance which is usually that of a fundamental inertia, an obscurity in the very stuff of the physical, an incomprehension, an inability to respond to the higher consciousness, a habit of helplessly responding to the lower mechanically, even when it does not want to do so; both vital and physical suffering may be the consequence. There is moreover the resistance of the Universal Nature which does not want the being to escape from the Ignorance into the Light. This may take the form of a vehement insistence on the continuation of the old movements, waves of them thrown on the mind and vital and body so that old ideas, impulses, desires, feelings, responses continue even after they are thrown out and rejected, and can return like an invading army from outside, until the whole nature, given to the Divine, refuses to admit them. This is the subjective form of the universal resistance, but it may also take an objective form - opposition, calumny, attacks, persecution, misfortunes of many kinds, adverse conditions and circumstances, pain, illness, assaults from men or forces. There too the possibility of suffering is evident. There are two ways to meet all that - first that of the Self, calm, equality, a spirit, a will, a mind, a vital, a physical consciousness that remain resolutely turned towards the Divine and unshaken by all suggestion of doubt, desire, attachment, depression, sorrow, pain, inertia. This is possible when the inner being awakens, when one becomes conscious of the Self, of the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical, for that can more easily attune itself to the divine Will, and then there is a division in the being as if there were two beings, one within, calm, strong, equal, unperturbed, a channel of the Divine Consciousness and Force, one without, still encroached on by the lower Nature; but then the disturbances of the latter become something superficial which are no more than an outer ripple, - until these under the inner pressure fade and sink away and the outer being too remains calm, concentrated, unattackable. There is also the way of the psychic, - when the psychic being comes out in its inherent power, its consecration, adoration, love of the Divine, self-giving, surrender and imposes these on the mind, vital and physical consciousness and compels them to turn all their movements Godward. If the psychic is strong and master...
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, 669,#KEYS
61::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#KEYS
62:The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule.It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit's impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego.
If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, 206,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Love either finds equality or makes it. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 2:Liberty and equality are magical words. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 3:Equality is what does not exist among mortals. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 4:If there is equality it is in His love, not in us. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 5:Without equality there can be no democracy. ~ eleanor-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 6:There cannot be friendship without equality. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 7:Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 8:Disease generally begins that equality which death completes. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 9:In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 10:Equality should be the chief basis of the education of youth. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 11:Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes. ~ kahlil-gibran, @wisdomtrove 12:The best way to make every one poor is to insist on equality of wealth. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 13:Jah come to break downpression, rule equality, wipe away transgression, set the captives free. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 14:Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 15:Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority; perfect equality affords no temptation. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 16:All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 17:I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 18:If we are going to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of Socialism. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 19:By nonviolent resistance, the Negro can also enlist all men of good will in his struggle for equality. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 20:The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 21:With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 22:Prison is a Socialist paradise where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 23:Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 24:No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 25:Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 26:The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 27:Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 28:With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 29:It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 30:To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 31:It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 32:Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 33:The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 34:People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 35:The woman has the right to be emancipated from the position of a drudge or a toy. She is entitled to a full equality in rights with man. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 36:I have a dream, one dream, keep dreaming. Dream of freedom, justice dreaming, dreaming of equality and hopefully no longer required to dream them ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 37:The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 38:Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 39:He struck a mighty blow for equality, freedom and the American way of life. Jackie Robinson was a good citizen, a great man, and a true American champion. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 40:Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 41:Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 42:If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 43:Thought of equality- as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself- as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 44:I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 45:I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 46:Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 47:I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 48:If human equality is to be forever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 49:It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 50:I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 51:Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 52:We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 53:While much remains to be done to achieve full equality of economic opportunity-for the average woman worker earns only 60 percent of the average wage for men-this legislation is a significant step forward. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 54:Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been: A career open to talent without distinction of birth. It is this system of equality for which the European oligarchy detests me ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 55:Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 56:When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared... . To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 57:For my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich from destroying the poor ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 58:Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men;... . Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 59:We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate. ~ reinhold-niebuhr, @wisdomtrove 60:Freemasonry teaches not merely temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, brotherly love, relief, and truth, but liberty, equality, and fraternity, and it denounces ignorance, superstition, bigotry, lust tyranny and despotism. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 61:Equality comes in realizing that we are all doing different jobs for a common purpose. That is the aim behind any community. The very name community means let's come together to recognize the unity. Come ... unity. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove 62:I am grateful to those Members of Congress who worked so diligently to guide the Equal Pay Act through. It is a first step. It affirms our determination that when women enter the labor force they will find equality in their pay envelopes. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 63:I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 64:Popular privileges are consistent with a state of society in which there is great inequality of position. Democratic rights, on the contrary, demand that there should be equality of condition as the fundamental basis of the society they regulate. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 65:For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 66:There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 67:War is obsolete You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict Famine is disappearing You are at more risk of obesity than starvation Death is just a technical problem Equality is out – but immortality is in What does our future hold? ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 68:The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. ~ booker-t-washington, @wisdomtrove 69:I stand for the square deal. I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 70:If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 71:The legal subordination of one sex to another - is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 72:Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 73:You don't impress the officials at NASA with a paper airplane. You don't boast about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Einstein because you can write & 74:We have all been hearing from childhood of such things as love, peace, charity, equality, and universal brotherhood; but they have become to us mere words without meaning, words which we repeat like parrots, and it has become quite natural for us to do so. We cannot help it. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 75:I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 76:If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 77:Undoubtedly equality of goods is just; but, being unable to cause might to obey justice, men has made it just to obey might. Unable to strengthen justice, they have justified might& 78:I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide? ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 79:There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded; some men never leave the country, some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 80:This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy - a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 81:The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 82:Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 83:This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy - a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few... . ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 84:Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life"... It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed... None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 85:Washington is dead! This great man fought against Tyranny; he established the liberty of his country. His memory will always be dear to the French people, as it will be to all free men of the two worlds; and especially to French soldiers, who, like him and the American soldiers, have combated for liberty and equality. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 86:There is an unbroken chain of opposition to the introduction of economic freedom and to the capitalist autonomy of the economic sphere... In every case the opposition could only be overcome - peacefully or by force - because of the promise of capitalism to establish equality... That this promise was an illusion we all know. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 87:As property, honestly obtained, is best secured by an equality of rights, so ill-gotten property depends for protection on a monopoly of rights. He who has robbed another of his property, will next endeavor to disarm him of his rights, to secure that property; for when the robber becomes the legislator he believes himself secure. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 88:Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 89:What we are entering is a power age, and the importance of the power age lies in its ability, rightly used with the wage motive behind it, to increase and cheapen production so that all of us may have more of this world's goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 90:I am not a & 91:We see many persons talking the most wonderfully fine things about charity and about equality and the rights of other people and all that, but it is only in theory. I was so fortunate as to find one who was able to carry theory into practice. He had the most wonderful faculty of carrying everything into practice which he thought was right. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 92:To me, racial barriers do not exist in reality. If I say that & 93:The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 94:What the Negro wants - and will not stop until he gets - is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 95:I closed the gulf of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I rewarded merit regardless of birth or wealth, wherever I found it. I abolished feudalism and restored equality to all regardless of religion and before the law. I fought the decrepit monarchies of the Old Regime because the alternative was the destruction of all this. I purified the Revolution. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 96:Contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting around a large long table... Perfect equality is to be the rule; no rising or notice taken when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks; if he cannot smoke... let him at least affect to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 97:A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessities, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 98:It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 99:The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 100:Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 101:When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 102:In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 103:The Negro who experiences bitter and agonizing circumstances as a result of some ungodly white person is tempted to look upon all white persons as evil, if he fails to look beyond his circumstances. But the minute he looks beyond his circumstances and sees the whole of the situation, he discovers that some of the most implacable and vehement advocates of racial equality are consecrated white persons. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 104:And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 105:Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism& 106:THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 107:It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgment sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater from lesser, from equality and inequality. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 108:the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 109:The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three... And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere! ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 110:The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 111:If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 112:I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 113:Children, we may go to the temple, reverently circumambulate the sanctum sanctorum and put our offering in the charity box, but on our way out if we kick the beggar at the door, where is our devotion? Compassion towards the poor is our duty to God. Mother is not saying that we should give money to every beggar that sits in front of a temple, but do not despise them. Pray for them as well. When we hate others, it is our own mind that becomes impure. Equality of vision is God. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 114:In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately. ... Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and privilege: one part of the people rule over the rest: there is a part whose fair and equal share of influence in the representation is withheld from them, contrary to all just government, but, above all, contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 115:But, historians, and even common sense, may inform us, that, however specious these ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 116:Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 117:He is neither number nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor similarity nor dissimilarity; neither is He still, nor moving, nor at rest; neither has He power nor is power, nor is light; neither does He live nor is He life; neither is He essence, nor eternity nor time; nor is He subject to intelligible contact; nor is He science nor truth, nor a king, nor wisdom; neither one nor oneness, nor godhead nor goodness; nor is He spirit according to our understanding, nor a son, nor a father; nor anything else known to us or to any other of the beings or creatures that are or are not; ... ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 118:According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 119:A PRAYER The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous, powerful, or good, but simply to be radiant. I desire to radiate health, cheerfulness, calm courage and good will. I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected—ready to say I do not know, if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality—to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid. I wish others to live their lives, too—up to their highest, fullest and best. To that end I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate, give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not needed. If I can help people, I’ll do it by giving them a chance to help themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example, inference, and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 120:Again, ascending, we say that He is neither soul nor intellect; nor has He imagination, nor opinion or reason; He has neither speech nor understanding, and is neither declared nor understood; He is neither number nor order, nor greatness nor smallness, nor equality nor likeness nor unlikeness; He does not stand or move or rest; He neither has power nor is power; nor is He light, nor does He live, nor is He life; He is neither being nor age nor time; nor is He subject to intellectual contact; He is neither knowledge nor truth. nor royalty nor wisdom; He is neither one nor unity, nor divinity, nor goodness; nor is He spirit, as we understand spirit; He is neither sonship nor fatherhood nor anything else known to us or to any other beings, either of the things that are or the things that are not; nor does anything that is, know Him as He is, nor does He know anything that is as it is; He has neither word nor name nor knowledge; He is neither darkness nor light nor truth nor error; He can neither be affirmed nor denied; nay, though we may affirm or deny the things that are beneath Him, we can neither affirm nor deny Him; for the perfect and sole cause of all is above all affirmation, and that which transcends all is above all subtraction, absolutely separate, and beyond all that is. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Misery begets equality. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
2:Equality is a proven myth. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
3:I believe in gender equality. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
4:Equality is truly sweet. ~ Kristin Chenoweth, #NFDB
5:Visibility is not equality. ~ Chelsea Manning, #NFDB
6:Equality is a mortuary word. ~ Christopher Fry, #NFDB
7:I thought equality was non-negotiable. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
8:In 1965, I marched for equality. ~ Alphonso Jackson, #NFDB
9:Nothing is so unequal as equality. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
10:Love either finds equality or makes it. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
11:teach us
equality through empathy ~ Michelle Frost,#NFDB
12:to create true equality of opportunity, ~ Jean Tirole, #NFDB
13:Liberty, Humanity, Justice, Equality ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
14:Justice is Equality...but equality of what? ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
15:The cry of equality pulls everyone down. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
16:Equality is a myth to protect the weak, ~ Drew Karpyshyn, #NFDB
17:I feel like a feminist is gender equality. ~ Ilana Glazer, #NFDB
18:Inequality is a fact. Equality is a value. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
19:My main fight is for freedom and equality. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
20:We deserve quality lives with equality. ~ Sarah Silverman, #NFDB
21:I tasted the bread and wine of equality. ~ Anzia Yezierska, #NFDB
22:Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
23:The sole equality on earth is death. ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
24:Every seeming equality conceals a hierarchy. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
25:I love liberty, I hate equality. ~ John Randolph of Roanoke, #NFDB
26:Nobody really believes in equality anyway. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
27:Equality begins with economic empowerment. ~ George H W Bush, #NFDB
28:Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
29:Liberty and equality are magical words. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
30:Socialism values equality more than liberty. ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
31:Utopias of equality are biologically doomed[.] ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
32:Equality is what does not exist among mortals. ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
33:Men don't have the benefits of equality either. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
34:A world with one month is a world of equality. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
35:If there is equality it is in His love, not in us. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
36:Equality for women is progress for all. ~ Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka, #NFDB
37:Gender equality must become a lived reality. ~ Michelle Bachelet, #NFDB
38:There cannot be friendship without equality. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
39:Without equality, I say, there cannot be liberty. ~ Harold Laski, #NFDB
40:Liberty and equality--lovely and sacred words! ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
41:Men of culture are the true apostles of equality ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
42:...without equality there can be no democracy. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
43:Equality cannot be reached if fought in a divisive way. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
44:What we need is equality without conformity. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
45:Equality today means "sameness" rather than "oneness". ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
46:92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
47:Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
48:Equality today means ‘sameness’, rather than ‘oneness’. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
49:Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
50:The political struggle against marriage equality is war ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
51:We ought to be respecting the principle of equality. ~ Lawrence Lessig, #NFDB
52:Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
53:Marriage is a language of love, equality, and inclusion. ~ Evan Wolfson, #NFDB
54:To me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. ~ Alice Paul, #NFDB
55:What is equality of rights between a giant and a dwarf? ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
56:When there is no equality there can not be equivalency. ~ Morgan Jerkins, #NFDB
57:Women must have economic and social equality with men. ~ Margaret Sanger, #NFDB
58:Canada is the homeland of equality, justice and tolerance. ~ Kim Campbell, #NFDB
59:Equality of sexes does not mean equality of occupations. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
60:Men of quality are not threatened by women of equality ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
61:All sports must be treated on the basis of equality. ~ Pierre de Coubertin, #NFDB
62:Equality is a nice idea, but it's entirely impossible to prove. ~ Jim Goad, #NFDB
63:I am still fully committed to male-female equality. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
64:I believe there is complete equality between men and women. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
65:Pedagogy and Equality are always trumped by Maternity. ~ Jessica Brockmole, #NFDB
66:Women won't have total equality until men can get pregnant. ~ Diana Palmer, #NFDB
67:A man of quality is never threatened by a woman of equality. ~ Jill Briscoe, #NFDB
68:Each country has a soul, and France's soul is equality. ~ Francois Hollande, #NFDB
69:He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
70:Justice means equality for equals, and inequality for unequals. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
71:The promise of equality is not the same as true equality. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
72:You don't have to live next to me / Just give me my equality. ~ Nina Simone, #NFDB
73:Courage consists in equality to the problem before us. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
74:. . . equality is a political theory not a practical policy. . . ~ P D James, #NFDB
75:I prefer to think of marriage as an equality of give and take. ~ Mary Balogh, #NFDB
76:Life question reflects nation's nature & equality of humans. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
77:Equality, because without it there can be no liberty. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
78:Equality under the law is the slow triumph of hope over history. ~ Jim Cooper, #NFDB
79:We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity. ~ Ferdinand Mount, #NFDB
80:Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
81:Disease generally begins that equality which death completes. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
82:Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
83:I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck. ~ Bill Hicks, #NFDB
84:Modern science has vindicated the natural equality of man. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
85:Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority. ~ William James, #NFDB
86:equality, you’re a shit human.”65 It became such a controversy ~ Kirsten Powers, #NFDB
87:If you believe in equality, you're a feminist. Sorry to tell you. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
88:Economic equality is the master-key to nonviolent independence. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
89:Equality of two domestic powers Breeds scrupulous faction. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
90:Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
91:Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality. ~ Mel White, #NFDB
92:Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
93:Religion rarely fights for the equality of all in material life. ~ Romila Thapar, #NFDB
94:Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
95:For privileged people, equality in an unequal world is a bonanza. ~ Vijay Prashad, #NFDB
96:Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. ~ Robert Galbraith, #NFDB
97:I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB
98:In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
99:One needs either equality or political and economic superiority. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
100:Women are well on the road to equality but we haven't arrived yet. ~ Gloria Feldt, #NFDB
101:Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition. ~ Mercy Otis Warren, #NFDB
102:Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man, ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
103:Equality should be the chief basis of the education of youth. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
104:For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold. A ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
105:I'm a Christian and a supporter of marriage equality under the law. ~ Bill Shorten, #NFDB
106:I want for myself what I want for other women, absolute equality. ~ Agnes Macphail, #NFDB
107:Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
108:Gender equality is more successful than armed force. ~ Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, #NFDB
109:They have conquered the creation, whose mind is settled in equality. ~ Bhagavad Gita, #NFDB
110:Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
111:Let knowledge be guessed by the sign of equality to all beings. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
112:No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
113:We've chosen the path to equality, don't let them turn us around. ~ Geraldine Ferraro, #NFDB
114:...when equality is given to unequal things, the resultant will be unequal... ~ Plato, #NFDB
115:You can't pick and chose whose equality you support. That's not equality. ~ Jen Wilde, #NFDB
116:BDSM is not liberating nor does it promote equality between men and women. ~ J F Kelly, #NFDB
117:Equality before the enemy—first precondition for an honest duel. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
118:Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
119:Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions. ~ Slobodan Milosevic, #NFDB
120:Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality. ~ Winifred Holtby, #NFDB
121:The Left is not interested in prosperity, it is interested in equality ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
122:You can’t pick and choose whose equality you support. That’s not equality. ~ Jen Wilde, #NFDB
123:Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk. ~ Peggy Noonan, #NFDB
124:Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
125:Equality is a lie. Understanding this is the basis of all great decisions. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
126:I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
127:Gender equality will only be reached if we are able to empower women. ~ Michelle Bachelet, #NFDB
128:The Left neither cares about prosperity nor jobs. It cares about equality ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
129:Though I'm a big believer in gender equality, chivalry scores high in my book. ~ Amy Plum, #NFDB
130:Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
131:The real meaning of economic equality is "To each according to his need." ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
132:There's a beauty in being part of a band, when there's equality and trust. ~ Scott Weiland, #NFDB
133:The wise in joy and in sorrow depart not from the equality of their souls. ~ Buddhist Text, #NFDB
134:But true equality won't come until boys learn to embrace girl stuff as well. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
135:Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it. ~ Frances Wright, #NFDB
136:Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
137:Our objective is complete freedom, justice and equality by any means necessary. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
138:There is nothing like widespread poverty to boost a country's equality index. ~ Bob Tyrrell, #NFDB
139:The strategy of providing quality while refusing equality was vulnerable. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
140:The best way to make every one poor is to insist on equality of wealth. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
141:You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
142:As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
143:Aversion is not equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
144:It is equality of monotony which makes the strength of the British Isles. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
145:The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
146:Free trade is very important if we respect equality among nations. ~ Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, #NFDB
147:Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
148:The way the Democrats go about seeking equality is to lower people at the top. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
149:As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
150:A woman needs independence, not equality. In most cases, equality is a step down. ~ Coco Chanel, #NFDB
151:Only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
152:What's absolutely impossible to prove is the idea of innate and everlasting equality. ~ Jim Goad, #NFDB
153:American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
154:Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and equality among men. ~ George Sand, #NFDB
155:Boxing remains an important living metaphor of the struggle for equality. ~ George Elliott Clarke, #NFDB
156:Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can turn it into a fact. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
157:Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality. ~ Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, #NFDB
158:In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
159:Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
160:Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
161:Any serious shift towards more sustainable societies has to include gender equality. ~ Helen Clark, #NFDB
162:Because equality is sameness—and the last thing the world needs is sameness. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
163:Equality is about achievement: whoever achieves the most gets treated the most equal. ~ Snoop Dogg, #NFDB
164:It is dangerous to maintain equality at the cost of placing the pieces passively. ~ Anatoly Karpov, #NFDB
165:The Netherlands became the first country ever to legalize marriage equality in 2001. ~ Sarah Prager, #NFDB
166:The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
167:To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
168:And as for equality, are the fingers on one hand equal in length? Each has its place. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
169:More countries have understood that women's equality is a prerequisite for development. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
170:Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit stand out. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
171:Our goal was not freedom. Freedom was the necessary prerequisite to get to equality. ~ Jesse Jackson, #NFDB
172:A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
173:equality is best when you’re the one with the guns, or at least on the winning side. ~ Jack L Chalker, #NFDB
174:Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB
175:I believe in gender equality and I love that I can represent strong modern-day women. ~ Katie Cassidy, #NFDB
176:I think you have to take the whole idea of wage equality out of the film industry. ~ Jessica Chastain, #NFDB
177:the oppressed becomes the oppressor. All his talk about equality is mere eyewash. ~ Anand Neelakantan, #NFDB
178:Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
179:Equality must be won — by every generation — because it will never be freely granted. ~ Charles M Blow, #NFDB
180:for someone who’s lived with privilege their whole life, equality feels like a loss. ~ Chelsea Handler, #NFDB
181:How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of ~ Ralph Ellison, #NFDB
182:It has been a long march to equality. We have cracked the door, and opened the window. ~ Donna Brazile, #NFDB
183:The revolution of equality between men and women has began, there is no going back ~ Gertrude Mongella, #NFDB
184:[Fighting for equality for women] that's what my mission has been for the last years. ~ Paula Broadwell, #NFDB
185:Fishing is a... discipline in the equality of men - for all men are equal before fish. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
186:I believe in unconditional love and equality. Jesus Christ exemplified these qualities. ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
187:The fight for equality on any front does not equate to the oppression of the oppressors. ~ Luvvie Ajayi, #NFDB
188:Virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
189:In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges... ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
190:Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention. ~ Jacques Barzun, #NFDB
191:[on marriage equality] It literally is a threat to the nation's survival in the long run. ~ Trent Franks, #NFDB
192:Pressure or violence will ever move us to relinquish our honor or our equality of rights. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
193:The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
194:Demands for equality for women are threats to men's self-esteem and sense of sexual turf. ~ Alice S Rossi, #NFDB
195:Happy that New York passed marriage equality tonight. A victory for human rights. Progress. ~ John Legend, #NFDB
196:If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn't that a kind of equality? No, he says. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
197:No country will reach its full potential if its female citizens do not enjoy full equality. ~ Helen Clark, #NFDB
198:The only way to ensure equality for women is to clearly declare it in our Constitution. ~ Carolyn Maloney, #NFDB
199:Vote Love means vote equality. It means vote change. It means vote whats right for humanity. ~ Macklemore, #NFDB
200:Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address. ~ Reni Eddo Lodge, #NFDB
201:Achieving gender equality is about disrupting the status quo - not negotiating it. ~ Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka, #NFDB
202:All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality. ~ David Allan Coe, #NFDB
203:Enforcing equality to compensate for the monstrous unfairness of nature destroys liberty. ~ Peter J Carroll, #NFDB
204:Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. ~ Andrew Jackson, #NFDB
205:It’s not enough to say that you want equality, Ro. What do you intend to do about it? ~ Jacqueline Winspear, #NFDB
206:Jah come to break downpression, rule equality, wipe away transgression, set the captives free. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
207:The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
208:The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
209:Equality is the very sign of liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
210:Feminism is equality: politically; culturally; socially; economically. That's it, that simple. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
211:Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
212:The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
213:To be equal is to be infinite and universal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Action of Equality, #NFDB
214:You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that. ~ Arthur Ashe, #NFDB
215:How could I insist on equality when I was unwilling to do what life demanded to be equal? ~ Charlie Courtland, #NFDB
216:I believe the only people who truly experience and test the application of equality are twins. ~ Janis Joplin, #NFDB
217:No republic can long exist unless a substantial equality in the wealth of citizens prevails. ~ Edward Bellamy, #NFDB
218:Our country was built on a foundation of equality and togetherness, not prejudice and hatred. ~ Marissa Meyer, #NFDB
219:Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth. ~ Benjamin Tucker, #NFDB
220:There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without equality, samata.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#NFDB
221:There is no equality. The only thing people all have in common is that they are all going to die. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
222:They can never hope to fight for equality if the very weapons they have to fight are not equal. ~ David Estes, #NFDB
223:True socialism is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
224:We have the data to prove to men that gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win. ~ Michael Kimmel, #NFDB
225:Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? ~ Peggy Orenstein, #NFDB
226:Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking? ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski, #NFDB
227:Great minds defend values—like justice in the case of Victor Hugo, and equality for Emile Zola. ~ Maude Julien, #NFDB
228:Human rights means that each individual should be treated with respect, dignity and equality. ~ Tony Fernandes, #NFDB
229:Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
230:I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more. ~ Thaddeus Stevens, #NFDB
231:I'm a Christian. I want the world of justice and equality. This is the only way to achieve peace. ~ Hugo Chavez, #NFDB
232:We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
233:All I asked for was equality and independence. A rotating chairmanship might have been the answer. ~ D J Enright, #NFDB
234:Equality does not include inert acceptance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Equality - The Chief Support, #NFDB
235:Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
236:Nobody can give you freedom, nobody can give you equality or justice. If you are a man, you take it. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
237:We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty. ~ William Graham Sumner, #NFDB
238:An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
239:Emancipation of women? Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender-equality rankings. ~ Rutger Bregman, #NFDB
240:Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it. ~ Anthony Daniels, #NFDB
241:If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
242:I'm an activist for gay marriage equality and children's rights. I'm the face of Share Our Strength. ~ Sandra Lee, #NFDB
243:Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB
244:The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals ~ Plato, #NFDB
245:Will there be a time when equality will exist? I think given human nature there will always be conflict. ~ Hozier, #NFDB
246:Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity. ~ Irving Kristol, #NFDB
247:If Britain were honest, which I dispute, she would then embrace all nations on terms of equality. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
248:Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
249:There is a tremendous rise now in feminine awareness and wishing for equality, equal opportunities. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
250:There's no such thing as equality. No two people are the same. You will not have the same clothes. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
251:The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone. ~ Pope John XXIII, #NFDB
252:[A]lthough the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
253:Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
254:the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness. ~ Susan Faludi, #NFDB
255:Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority, perfect equality affords no temptation. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
256:Where there are no distinctions there can be no superiority; perfect equality affords no temptation. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
257:from that standpoint I have to tell you that equality has nothing to do with marriage. ~ Natalia Sanmart n Fenollera, #NFDB
258:There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes,- the quality and the equality. ~ Owen Wister, #NFDB
259:Economic equality of my conception does not mean that every one will literally have the same amount. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
260:There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
261:The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
262:To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war. ~ Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, #NFDB
263:[Woman's] life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred her conception of the meaning of equality. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
264:It is clear that not in one thing alone, but in many ways equality and freedom of speech are a good thing. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
265:She hadn't ascribed to this modern notion of equality between the sexes. Woman were patently superior. ~ Laura Kinsale, #NFDB
266:An attitude that really works against people is the desire for equality that feeds petty jealousy. For ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
267:Equality ... like freedom, exists only where you are now. Only as an egg in the womb are we all equal. ~ Oriana Fallaci, #NFDB
268:Equality of Ugliness: If we can't all live in a beautiful place we must all live in an ugly place. ~ Theodore Dalrymple, #NFDB
269:Equality? They ought to play the women's final on opening day. Everybody knows who's going to be in it. ~ Jimmy Connors, #NFDB
270:Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
271:When I was young, I used to go to Baha'i camp, and they taught me a lot about the equality of religions. ~ Cass McCombs, #NFDB
272:All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
273:Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality. ~ Jonathan Kozol, #NFDB
274:Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
275:Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination. ~ Mary Douglas, #NFDB
276:The religion of that prophet [Karl Marx] who knew not the truth, is founded upon equality of the belly. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
277:There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
278:Equality, not indifference is the basis. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #NFDB
279:His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall. ~ James M Barrie, #NFDB
280:I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
281:Marriage equality does not diminish the worth of your relationships; it simply recognises the worth of ours. ~ Penny Wong, #NFDB
282:The perfection of virtue consists in a certain equality of soul and of conduct which should remain un-alterable. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
283:They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
284:Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity-and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
285:An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men. ~ Ignazio Silone, #NFDB
286:Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
287:Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. My ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
288:If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
289:Marriage equality is about more than just marriage. It's about something greater. It's about acceptance. ~ Charlize Theron, #NFDB
290:Proper distribution does not imply an equal share but an equitable share. Equity is the essence of equality. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
291:Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
292:A few British suffragettes everybody laughed at started the cause of equality between men and women. ~ Antonio Munoz Molina, #NFDB
293:America's corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do. ~ Lloyd Blankfein, #NFDB
294:And the basic sort of thrust of Star Trek being about equality and tolerance and things I believe in deeply. ~ Brent Spiner, #NFDB
295:As so often in history, equality for some can only be achieved by discriminating against all the rest. ~ Martin van Creveld, #NFDB
296:Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that's the way he shows his passion for equality ~ Charles de Gaulle, #NFDB
297:Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. My ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
298:I have never been prouder to be a lifelong New Yorker than I am today with the passage of marriage equality. ~ Cyndi Lauper, #NFDB
299:I'm personally supportive of marriage equality for gay couples and I believe that it will happen over time. ~ Steve Schmidt, #NFDB
300:Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
301:Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying. ~ Mikhail Bakunin, #NFDB
302:Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors. ~ Cato the Elder, #NFDB
303:The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
304:A substantial extension of public ownership is an essential pre-requisite of greater equality of earned income ~ Roy Jenkins, #NFDB
305:f you love science and equality but hate leprosy (and who doesn’t?), Alice Ball is 100 percent your kind of gal. ~ Sam Maggs, #NFDB
306:Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
307:In fact, I think that's my favorite word and the most important word when it comes to relationships: equality. ~ Alicia Keys, #NFDB
308:The more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
309:The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
310:With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
311:Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
312:Conviction of a movie star sends out an important message of equality before law. But it took a long time coming. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
313:Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
314:Equality means equality for all - no exceptions, no 'yes, buts', no asterisked footnotes imposing limits. ~ Hubert H Humphrey, #NFDB
315:Equality! Where is it, if not in education? Equal rights! They cannot exist without equality of instruction. ~ Frances Wright, #NFDB
316:If we are going to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of Socialism. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
317:The new rule shall rule as the soul rules, and as the love and justice and equality that are in the soul rule. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
318:By nonviolent resistance, the Negro can also enlist all men of good will in his struggle for equality. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
319:Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
320:However much some people may resent the fact, in nature inequality and not equality seems to be the rule. ~ Martin van Creveld, #NFDB
321:I'm trying to create the world around myself to be a place of as much equality and openheartedness as possible. ~ Robin Thicke, #NFDB
322:No truth, no equality. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. No peace, no love. No love, only darkness. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
323:The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals. ~ Felix Frankfurter, #NFDB
324:All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression! ~ Maria W Stewart, #NFDB
325:I think that whatever nationality you are, you should be treated equally, otherwise you don't have equality. ~ Philip Vera Cruz, #NFDB
326:Love makes us similar, it creates equality, it breaks down walls and eliminates distances. God did this with us. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
327:Nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
328:Prison is a Socialist paradise where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
329:The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
330:A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
331:Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
332:How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
333:Mark Twain is a voice of truth and a voice of equality and a voice of tolerance. Which means he is a voice of love. ~ Val Kilmer, #NFDB
334:Progress stems from education, culture, freedom and equality. Without these fundamentals, mankind will flounder. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
335:Relationships are all about trust and equality. If one person shares, then the other person should share, too. ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
336:Social Unity theory spoke about equality, using it so the State could plunder the production of the individual. ~ Vaughn Heppner, #NFDB
337:We ask only for justice and equal rights-the right to vote, the right to our own earnings, equality before the law. ~ Lucy Stone, #NFDB
338:Yoga exercises are the best connecting tools for unity, human dignity, health, equality, global peace and compassion. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
339:Achieving gender equality requires the engagement of women and men, girls and boys. It is everyones responsibility. ~ Ban Ki moon, #NFDB
340:All the great religions of the world inculcate equality and brotherhood of mankind and the virtue of toleration. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
341:A woman's never too old to make an idiot of herself. It goes along with equality of the sexes and potty parity. ~ Janet Evanovich, #NFDB
342:Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you really want it, you take it. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
343:There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work. ~ Ken Livingstone, #NFDB
344:Jackie Robinson, as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality, he was exemplary. ~ Kareem Abdul Jabbar, #NFDB
345:Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
346:My fight is not for racial sameness but for racial equality and against racial prejudice and discrimination. ~ John Oliver Killens, #NFDB
347:Only way you’re gonna have a world with universal equality is if you got one where there’s only one guy left standing. ~ Glen Cook, #NFDB
348:The word 'equality' shows up too much in our founding documents for anyone to pretend it's not the American way. ~ Martha Plimpton, #NFDB
349:All error is a disfiguration of some misunderstood fragments of truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #NFDB
350:Environmental challenges have the power to deny equality of opportunity and hold back the progress of communities. ~ Lisa P Jackson, #NFDB
351:I am influenced more than ever before by the conviction that social equality is the only basis of human happiness. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
352:I think men are allowed to be fat and bald and ugly and women aren't. And it's just not - there is no equality there ~ Connie Chung, #NFDB
353:I think the most important thing for any driver is to know that he's getting equality of equipment and priority. ~ Christian Horner, #NFDB
354:The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. ~ Edmund Barton, #NFDB
355:The joy of the soul in the dualities is the secret of the mind’s pleasure in living. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Equality, #NFDB
356:Don't you just hate it when the war on terrorism interferes with political correctness and liberalism's equality fetish? ~ Don Feder, #NFDB
357:Marriage equality is the law of the land. Officials should be held to their duty to uphold the law - end of story. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
358:One who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
359:Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
360:The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
361:Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. ~ Alice Paul, #NFDB
362:How is it women have equality when it comes to taking a hit but the rest of the time they're just some guy's property? ~ Joanna Wylde, #NFDB
363:Rule Punjab and the rest of India as a superior race, dismissing any notion of equality between rulers and subjects ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
364:Then, accomplished in knowledge, he shakes from him good and evil, and, stainless, reaches that supreme Equality. ~ Mundaka Upanishad, #NFDB
365:what no one articulated for me: what it means to be a poor child in a rich country founded on the promise of equality. ~ Sarah Smarsh, #NFDB
366:Dear Hip Hop, we can't scream 'murder, misogyny, lawlessness' in our music & then turn around and ask for equality & justice. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
367:Equality is the share of every one at their advent upon earth, and equality is also theirs when placed beneath it. ~ Ninon de L Enclos, #NFDB
368:If we say we believe in equality for all then we must fight for equality for all, not betray our immigrant sisters. ~ Christine Pelosi, #NFDB
369:Let us give practical recognition to the injustices of the past,by building a future based on equality&social justice ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
370:Republicans many times can't get the words 'equality of opportunity' out of their mouths. Their lips do not form that way. ~ Jack Kemp, #NFDB
371:There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that's one of the great achievements. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
372:Absolute equality is non-existent in this world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Formation of the Nation-Unit - The Three Stages, #NFDB
373:I'm 100 percent serious. I've been fighting for equality for women's issues my entire life, in the military included. ~ Paula Broadwell, #NFDB
374:In all societies that have applied a form of socialism, a certain degree of social economic equality has been achieved. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
375:Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
376:Equality of opportunity in education aims to insure us against disparities arising from the situation in which we are born ~ Jean Tirole, #NFDB
377:Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
378:I couldn't be in a relationship without equality, generosity, integrity, spirit, kindness and humor. And awesomeness. ~ Jennifer Aniston, #NFDB
379:I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people. ~ Rosa Parks, #NFDB
380:[On the Adam and Eve story:] They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke, #NFDB
381:Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
382:The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
383:the worth of the soul is so much greater than what is first perceived. Equality and love for all became the founding basis ~ Jenni James, #NFDB
384:Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
385:A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike! ~ Plato, #NFDB
386:Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick, #NFDB
387:If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed. ~ Howard Mumford Jones, #NFDB
388:Primary aim of quantum artificial intelligence is to improve human freedom, dignity, equality, security, and total well-being. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
389:Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
390:Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
391:I always go with the dictionary definition of feminism, which is just social, political and economic equality for women. ~ Jessica Valenti, #NFDB
392:I was soon drawn to the Republican Party because I realized that it truly, not just rhetorically, believed in equality. ~ Alphonso Jackson, #NFDB
393:Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
394:The summer that marriage equality passed in New York, we saw the number of homeless kids looking for shelter go up 40 percent, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
395:Free milk will be provided in Hoxton and Shoredith, in Eton and Harrow. What more social equality can you have than that? ~ Ellen Wilkinson, #NFDB
396:Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers.. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
397:No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
398:The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
399:...when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel... ~ Thucydides, #NFDB
400:Equality is a myth to protect the weak. some of us are strong in the Force, others are not. Only a fool believes otherwise. ~ Drew Karpyshyn, #NFDB
401:[On the ERA Equality March:] It's the funniest thing. I don't feel there's any discrimination. I know my husband feels that way. ~ Pat Nixon, #NFDB
402:Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
403:Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality. ~ Plato, #NFDB
404:The vegan lifestyle is a compassionate way to live that supports life, supports fairness and equality, and promotes freedom. ~ Robert Cheeke, #NFDB
405:The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
406:Those fighting to be included in the ideal of equality are not divisive.
Those fighting to keep those people out - are. ~ Jon Stewart,#NFDB
407:Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
408:How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? ~ Nancy Isenberg, #NFDB
409:It PASSED! Marriage equality in NY!! Yes!! Progress!! Thank you everyone who worked so hard on this!! A historic night! ~ Neil Patrick Harris, #NFDB
410:Mockery when done without prejudice or discretion, can be a form of respect. It's the closest we'll ever come to true equality. ~ Paul Neilan, #NFDB
411:The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times. ~ Charles de Gaulle, #NFDB
412:The turning point in my career came with the realization that Black should play to win instead of just steering for equality. ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
413:To see all things as oneself and to see all things in God and God in all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #NFDB
414:As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
415:Don't let anyone tell you that great things can't happen in America... Barriers can come down. Justice and equality can win. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
416:For example, justice is considered to mean equality, It does mean equality- but equality for those who are equal, and not for all. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
417:Freedom demands that we struggle for an extension of both equality and free expression, not regard one as inimical to the other. ~ Kenan Malik, #NFDB
418:I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
419:It is no accident that greater cultural acceptance of lying in this society coincided with women gaining greater social equality. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
420:Observe the life by cause and consequence. Explore the life by wisdom. Treat the life by equality. Complete the life by love. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
421:The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
422:The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
423:All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate. But I want to be able to control my vision. ~ Joni Mitchell, #NFDB
424:Equity literally means “the quality of being fair” or “impartiality.” Equality, on the other hand, means “the state of being equal. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
425:Friends, haters, it's Twitter poll time. What do you think most holds back justice and equality for women? All thoughts welcome! ~ Olivia Wilde, #NFDB
426:I'm still convinced. We all fight for freedom, but the foundation of freedom is equality and justice. And we are all on the road. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
427:I never did believe in the equality of the sexes, but no girl is the weaker vessel if she gets first grip of the kitchen poker. ~ Edgar Wallace, #NFDB
428:Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
429:Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
430:A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and beauty. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
431:In order to achieve that end goal of equality it is a very gendered oppression primarily affecting women that needs to be tackled. ~ Laura Bates, #NFDB
432:German equality of rights is the prerequisite for any participation on Germany's part in international conventions and agreements. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
433:I am fiscally prudent and socially progressive. I believe in protecting a woman's right to choose. I believe in marriage equality. ~ Andrew Cuomo, #NFDB
434:In Nicaragua, liberty, equality and the rule of law were the stuff of dreams. But in Paris I discovered the value of those words. ~ Bianca Jagger, #NFDB
435:Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
436:Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It’s a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
437:No one is born with equality. We all come here with varying degrees of opportunities, qualities, strengths, weaknesses, IQ, etc. ~ Brandi L Bates, #NFDB
438:Sinn Fein has demonstrated the ability to play a leadership role as part of a popular movement towards peace, equality and justice. ~ Gerry Adams, #NFDB
439:The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
440:Esteem incites friendship, but not love; the former is the twin brother of Reverence; the latter is the child of Equality. ~ Alphonse de Lamartine, #NFDB
441:In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
442:So grass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for children, and for God, and for hope. ~ John Green, #NFDB
443:Welcome to Israel, where chanting “Death to Arabs” is democracy, running over children is equality, and firing on funerals is peace. ~ Remi Kanazi, #NFDB
444:Fairness is a myth among a fallen humankind, but equality of struggle can be maintained, even if it is only a pale ghost of true ~ G Norman Lippert, #NFDB
445:I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality. ~ Colin Woodard, #NFDB
446:It's annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain. ~ Bono, #NFDB
447:Our doctrine of equality and liberty and humanity comes from our belief in the brotherhood of man, through the fatherhood of God. ~ Calvin Coolidge, #NFDB
448:There is no such mischievous nonsense in all the world as equality. That is what father says. What men ought to want is liberty. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
449:Whether consciously or not, sexist God language undermines the human equality of women made in the divine image and likeness. ~ Elizabeth A Johnson, #NFDB
450:For [Karl] Marx it is socialist society which realizes "concretely" the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and freedom. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
451:In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
452:Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. ~ Steve Sailer, #NFDB
453:Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom. ~ Francis Picabia, #NFDB
454:The claim to equality like the thirst for liberty is individualistic in its origin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #NFDB
455:The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
456:The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
457:There is still nothing like equality for women in jobs, in family. There's just an awareness that inequality is not acceptable. ~ Alix Kates Shulman, #NFDB
458:Tradition is never said to be “God-breathed”[6] and is never exalted to a place of equality with (or supremacy over) the Scriptures. ~ James R White, #NFDB
459:X isn’t a pillar of Islam; ignore it.”
Neither are equality, social justice, human rights, or the many things you place over X. ~ Musa Furber,#NFDB
460:All grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Action of Equality, #NFDB
461:For what people have always sought is equality before the law. For rights that were not open to all alike would be no rights. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
462:If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
463:I'm just about equality, period. It's not like, I'm a woman, women should be in charge! I just want there to be equality for everybody. ~ Miley Cyrus, #NFDB
464:James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59–82. ~ Eric Foner, #NFDB
465:No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
466:Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
467:With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
468:Desire is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain of bondage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
469:Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
470:Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
471:The first step in providing economic equality for women is to ensure a stable economy in which every person who wants to work can work. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
472:The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike from pissing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
473:There's been a sort of mini-revolution, an uprising, as was long overdue, about these subject matters: ethnicity and gender equality. ~ Natalie Dormer, #NFDB
474:Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
475:A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers, #NFDB
476:All America is divided into two classes - the quality and the equality. The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. ~ Owen Wister, #NFDB
477:A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
478:Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
479:Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB
480:His cap may be emblazoned with equality, but Anderson’s pen smacks of racism, which was true also of the undoubtedly great Karl Marx. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
481:Equality like individualistic liberty may turn out to be not a panacea but an obstacle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #NFDB
482:I don't think that one can ever smile too much. Someone who knows how to smile in all circumstances is very close to true equality of soul. ~ The Mother, #NFDB
483:In our democracy, near equality is no equality. Government either treats everyone the same, or it doesn't. And right now it doesn't. ~ Michael Bloomberg, #NFDB
484:It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
485:The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
486:Today, the voice of populist infantile politics is amplified by social media allowing the ignorant to claim equality with the informed. ~ Ece Temelkuran, #NFDB
487:To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
488:True equality means holding everyone accountable in the same way, regardless of race, gender, faith, ethnicity - or political ideology. ~ Monica Crowley, #NFDB
489:All my life I've believed that men and women have equal capacities and talents...consequently there should be equality in life's chances. ~ Julia Gillard, #NFDB
490:I believe I've always been a big believer in equality. No one has ever been able to tell me I couldn't do something because I was a girl. ~ Anne Hathaway, #NFDB
491:I’d like every man who doesn’t call himself a feminist to explain to the women in his life why he doesn’t believe in equality for women. ~ Louise Brealey, #NFDB
492:The future of peace and prosperity that we seek for all the world's peoples needs a foundation of tolerance, security, equality and justice. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
493:The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
494:The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
495:There is nothing like coming within a hairsbreadth of losing the capital to inspire our leaders to espouse their own ideals of equality. ~ Aimie K Runyan, #NFDB
496:To me, feminism means equality between men and women. I want to make people laugh and also point out some injustices or inequalities I see. ~ Amy Schumer, #NFDB
497:An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men". ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
498:Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address. The question is: who do we want to be equal to? ~ Reni Eddo Lodge, #NFDB
499:If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
500:It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
501:A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
502:Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
503:I agree with people who say we want more income equality; we want more consumer protection; and we want sounder banks. I agree with all that. ~ Jamie Dimon, #NFDB
504:I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan ~ Mary Daly, #NFDB
505:Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
506:President Obama and Democrats won a mandate to move us forward with jobs, healthcare reform, equality, and nation building here at home. ~ Christine Pelosi, #NFDB
507:Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
508:The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
509:The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
510:Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it. ~ Slobodan Milosevic, #NFDB
511:Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining. ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB
512:Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. ~ Rowan Williams, #NFDB
513:He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
514:If socialism means that we live well, that there is equality and justice, and that we have no social and economic problems, then I welcome it. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
515:It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
516:The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognizing women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale. ~ Johanna Sigurðardottir, #NFDB
517:Democracy is in the blood of the Muslims, who look upon complete equality of mankind, and believe in fraternity, equality, and liberty. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
518:Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: "Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
519:Fairness is a myth among a fallen humankind, but equality of struggle can be maintained, even if it is only a pale ghost of true fairness. ~ G Norman Lippert, #NFDB
520:If a single man demanded as much as a man with a wife and four children, then that would be a violation of the concept of economic equality. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
521:Our obsession is how we can use technology to reach our big goals, first peace, which will allow us more equality and better education. ~ Juan Manuel Marquez, #NFDB
522:People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
523:The happy and the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
524:The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it. ~ Joan Jett, #NFDB
525:The woman has the right to be emancipated from the position of a drudge or a toy. She is entitled to a full equality in rights with man. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
526:We've got to understand that all disenfranchised people have something in common...The pursuit of justice really is about equality for everyone. ~ Anita Hill, #NFDB
527:When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
528:As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
529:Equal partners aren't always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations. ~ Ben Kingsley, #NFDB
530:Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. —MALCOLM X, Malcolm X Speaks ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
531:You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
532:Democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is corrupted, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
533:Do away with emperors, kings, and artificial government; establish true equality; abolish capitalism; live in God’s heart, simply and purely! ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
534:Equality is not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #NFDB
535:If we have not equality, it is a sign that we are still pursued by the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #NFDB
536:The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
537:The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
538:a society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
539:Equality is of two kinds, numerical and proportional; by the first I mean sameness of equality in number or size; by the second, equality of ratios. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
540:how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
541:I didn't change the Constitution; the equality principle was there from the start. I just was an advocate for seeing its full realization. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
542:In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. ~ Catharine MacKinnon, #NFDB
543:Maggie knew Betsy was a female crusader, but also knew that many times crusaders like her were only interested in their own personal equality. ~ Beverly Jenkins, #NFDB
544:My hope for America and the activists is that they never, ever go back to sleep, and they keep fighting for social justice, equality, and decency. ~ Nina Turner, #NFDB
545:The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engages in gestures of superficial equality. ~ William Rehnquist, #NFDB
546:there really is no such thing as equality, just different levels of inequality, and how hard are you willing to fight for it all? Fuck. Did ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
547:The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
548:The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
549:Three-dimensional, complex women get an audience engaged as much as the men. I’m a feminist in the true sense of the word. It’s about equality. ~ Natalie Dormer, #NFDB
550:Until both men and women are allowed to be who we are rather than who we are supposed to be, it will be impossible to achieve freedom and equality. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
551:We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained. ~ Derrick Bell, #NFDB
552:Justice has always evoked ideas of Equality, of proportion of compensation. In short, Justice is another name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB
553:Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
554:One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man. ~ Marlo Thomas, #NFDB
555:The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”16 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
556:The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision. . . ~ Bayard Rustin, #NFDB
557:And when I say equality, I mean equality for everybody. Who are you telling who they can marry and who they can’t? What is this? This is 2014. ~ Pharrell Williams, #NFDB
558:In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. ~ Catharine A MacKinnon, #NFDB
559:Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality. ~ Nicol s G mez D vila, #NFDB
560:the key imperatives of modernity: freedom of conscience, tolerance of difference, equality of the sexes, and an investment in life before death. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
561:We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained. ~ Derrick A Bell, #NFDB
562:From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots. ~ Mikhail Bakunin, #NFDB
563:The rights of one sex, political and otherwise, are the same as those of the other sex, and this equality of rights ought to be fully recognized. ~ Leland Stanford, #NFDB
564:The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
565:Equality before the law in a true democracy is a matter of right. It cannot be a matter of charity or of favor or of grace or of discretion. ~ Wiley Blount Rutledge, #NFDB
566:I believe one day a 'ban on gay marriage' will sound totally ridiculous. In the meantime, I will continue to speak out for equality for all of us. ~ Ellen DeGeneres, #NFDB
567:I wanted to get far away from those who believed in cruelty, so then I went to France, a land of true freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity. ~ Josephine Baker, #NFDB
568:There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free. This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
569:Women have talent and intelligence but due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality. ~ Pratibha Patil, #NFDB
570:Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
571:Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power! ~ Jennifer Worth, #NFDB
572:Democracy is in the blood of Musalmans, who look upon complete equality of manhood [mankind]…[and] believe in fraternity, equality and liberty. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
573:Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
574:The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
575:The highest measure of democracy is neither the 'extent of freedom' nor the 'extent of equality', but rather the highest measure of participation. ~ Alain de Benoist, #NFDB
576:The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone. ~ Dan Savage, #NFDB
577:We need marriage equality in every state in this nation. Otherwise, no state really has marriage equality, and we will not rest until it is a reality. ~ Andrew Cuomo, #NFDB
578:Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks ~ William Makepeace Thackeray, #NFDB
579:I support equality. Everyone should feel free to live out the parts of their personality that correspond to the classic male or female image. ~ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, #NFDB
580:I think that equality needs to be broadened to include equal access to comprehensive healthcare, equal access to jobs, and equal rights in the workplace. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
581:White women, include women of color in your agenda as you fight for equality. Don’t leave us behind and then only call on us when you need our numbers. ~ Luvvie Ajayi, #NFDB
582:Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other? ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
583:Equality of soul created by the surrender to the universal Wisdom gives us a supreme peace and calm. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Agni, the Illumined Will, #NFDB
584:If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction. ~ James L Farmer Jr, #NFDB
585:Reality has changed, and we changed with it. However, I never changed sides. I have always been on the side of justice, democracy and social equality. ~ Dilma Rousseff, #NFDB
586:The large majority of faith-based people are decent, fair-minded people. We should not characterize people of faith as the adversaries of GLBT equality. ~ George Takei, #NFDB
587:There shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
588:Young people are meant to go off the rails politically, aren’t they? And there are certainly far worse things one can do than dream about equality. ~ David Lagercrantz, #NFDB
589:Again, it may be said, that to love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves. ~ Maximilien Robespierre, #NFDB
590:I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. ~ Carol Anderson, #NFDB
591:NO TRUTH, NO LIGHT
No truth, no equality.
No equality, no justice.
No justice, no peace.
No peace, no love.
No love, only darkness. ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
592:un-Hobbesain, Spinozistic idea that the equality of man in the state of nature, far from being dissolved, is carried over and reinforced in society. ~ Jonathan I Israel, #NFDB
593:We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races. ~ Josephine St Pierre Ruffin, #NFDB
594:We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man. ~ W H Auden,#NFDB
595:We know that equality of individual ability has never existed and never will, but we do insist that equality of opportunity still must be sought. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
596:What the champions of suffrage understood was that the vote is not just a symbol of our equality, but that it can be, if used, a guarantee of results. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
597:As a public person, I've always tried to reflect what is embodied in our defining ideals as a nation about equality and fairness and justice and so forth. ~ John F Kerry, #NFDB
598:Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
599:I have a dream, one dream, keep dreaming. Dream of freedom, justice dreaming, dreaming of equality and hopefully no longer required to dream them ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
600:The boundaries of democracy have to be widened so as to include economic equality also. This is the great revolution through which we are all passing. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
601:The Supreme Court has also issued and never reversed a number of decisions that are repugnant to the Constitution's vision of human dignity and equality. ~ Sam Brownback, #NFDB
602:Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality. ~ Adam Clayton Powell Jr, #NFDB
603:Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
604:He struck a mighty blow for equality, freedom and the American way of life. Jackie Robinson was a good citizen, a great man, and a true American champion. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
605:He wasn't someone fighting for racial equality. He was the leader of a violent, Communist revolution that has nearly succeeded in all of its grisly horror. ~ Joseph Farah, #NFDB
606:I am going to ensure that LGBTQ Americans have full equality under the law and address the urgent crisis of violence against transgender women of color. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
607:If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years. ~ Nancy Friday, #NFDB
608:I think there is a total equality for me between painting a literary figure or Kate Moss or my Mum or a dog or a bird. To me, they are all absolutely equal. ~ Stella Vine, #NFDB
609:Okay, when you start to fight for equality, like Anand did in 1995, you could end up losing game 10, like he did, without putting up any kind of fight. ~ Vladimir Kramnik, #NFDB
610:So, why do you write these strong female characters?
Because you’re still asking me that question."
[Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006] ~ Joss Whedon,#NFDB
611:The argument about marriage equality will one day seem as arcane and shocking to us as the fact that Rosa Parks had to get up and go to the back of the bus. ~ Uma Thurman, #NFDB
612:When we foster appreciation for and love ourselves, we start to contribute to the world in a way that allows equality, inclusivity, and all forms of kindness. ~ Jes Baker, #NFDB
613:Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power. ~ Murray Rothbard, #NFDB
614:Clearly, I'm committed to women's issues and stories and promoting gender equality. I have two incredible role models in Jenji [Kohan] and Shonda [Rhimes]. ~ Alysia Reiner, #NFDB
615:Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
616:Equality, therefore, becomes the criterion because we can handle all that in process, but we can't handle that as principle without infringing on freedom. ~ Francis George, #NFDB
617:I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
618:I want a Supreme Court that will stick with Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose, and I want a Supreme Court that will stick with marriage equality. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
619:Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities. ~ Katherine Dunn, #NFDB
620:[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible. ~ P D James, #NFDB
621:Ten high virtues: benevolence; spiritual life; intelligence; renunciation; perseverance; energy; patience; truthfulness; love for others; equality of soul. ~ Sangiti Sutta, #NFDB
622:The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
623:The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
624:To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism. ~ Herbert Read, #NFDB
625:I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman's equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
626:OK, in all seriousness, I would say I couldn't be in a relationship without equality, generosity, integrity, spirit, kindness and humor. And awesomeness. ~ Jennifer Aniston, #NFDB
627:Two kinds of joy are there, O my brothers, and what are they? The joy of the sated senses and the joy of the equal soul; but nobler is the joy of equality. ~ Buddhist Texts, #NFDB
628:You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
629:A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
630:[Banning marriage equality is] discrimination, plain and simple. It's really not about votes. It's about people. I think it's the right thing to do as a human being. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
631:I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
632:It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
633:Property and royalty have been crumbling ever since the beginning of the world. As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
634:Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality. ~ Kenan Malik, #NFDB
635:I believe the Republican Party is the party of the open door. Our party is the party of opportunity and freedom and equality, and it always will remain such. ~ Reince Priebus, #NFDB
636:I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
637:Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
638:None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
639:Rev says, “pretending people aren’t black is not the way to equality. It’s not even possible, first of all. Any more than I can pretend you aren’t who you are. ~ Attica Locke, #NFDB
640:There is equality before God and there is equality here on earth. There is natural equality and there is the kind of equality that human society creates. ~ Martin van Creveld, #NFDB
641:Caste taboos had been broken, and a measure of equality introduced. But they had also become a distinct community, which for writing used a new script called ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
642:There can never be equality, so long the heavens have decided together with the darkness in the heart of men, such idealistic desire will never come to fruition. ~ Lolah Runda, #NFDB
643:We can do better. ...We can't ignore the inequalities that persist in our justice system that undermine our most deeply held values of fairness and equality. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
644:We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us. ~ Muriel Rukeyser, #NFDB
645:When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
646:As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
647:I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
648:I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
649:Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not; however, the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously. ~ Bashar al Assad, #NFDB
650:(Men without ambition are boring) And that attitude, mistress, is why the females of your kind continue to struggle for equality. And why they continue to fail. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
651:There's a huge difference in the attitude of the people of the United States of America toward women in politics. It has taken an enormous turn toward equality. ~ Barbara Boxer, #NFDB
652:The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
653:Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
654:Democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty. ~ Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn, #NFDB
655:House passes #dadt (don't ask don't tell) repeal. A step fwd on equality 4 gay Americans in military. History will judge those who tried 2 block passage on this. ~ Frank Pallone, #NFDB
656:I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality and love. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
657:O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
658:Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say ‘Yes, sir,’ his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true. ~ Patrick O Brian, #NFDB
659:Christianity was an assertion of human equality in the spirit, a great assertion of the unity of the divine spirit in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Asiatic Democracy, #NFDB
660:God forbid Donald Trump gets elected president; think about how many people are going to get f**ked over or how much harder we're going to have to fight for equality. ~ Jim James, #NFDB
661:Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
662:I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those were there to be saved, and those who did the saving. ~ Esi Edugyan, #NFDB
663:Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
664:Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
665:The unionists also for their part, want to minimise the potential for change, not only on the equality agenda but on the issues of sovereignty and ending the union. ~ Gerry Adams, #NFDB
666:(Men without ambition are boring)
And that attitude, mistress, is why the females of your kind continue to struggle for equality. And why they continue to fail. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
667:Of Equality--as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
668:The 2010 global gender gap report by the World Economic Forum shows that countries with better gender equality have faster-growing, more competitive economies. ~ Michelle Bachelet, #NFDB
669:The goal of equality seems to disproportionately burden women, since it's assumed that they have to assume more responsibility, while men can remain the status quo. ~ Amy Richards, #NFDB
670:Feminism is just about equality, really, and there's so much stuff attached to the word, when it's actually so simple. I don't know why it's always so bogged down. ~ Mia Wasikowska, #NFDB
671:He has written about equality, the perfectibility of human nature, and the essential goodness of mankind for many years -- he judges others by himself, poor soul. ~ Patrick O Brian, #NFDB
672:in Christ, and because of Christ, we are invited to participate in the Kingdom of God through redemptive movement—for both men and women—toward equality and freedom. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
673:I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. ~ Alice Paul, #NFDB
674:It was a national disgrace to lose the ERA, but of course we will start, and have done so, all over again. ... There is no deadline for equality in our society. ~ Marguerite Rawalt, #NFDB
675:Now it’s up to all of us, women and men alike, to make the next big push toward equality between men and women. We’ll have to start by changing how we think. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
676:Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa, #NFDB
677:The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
678:This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
679:You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
680:I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
681:It’s a myth that pleases the powerful. Women have all this equality and opportunity now, but we can’t handle it. Maybe we weren’t meant to have it in the first place. ~ Laurie Penny, #NFDB
682:It's not equality that counts, it's reprocity that counts. Love is not like a balance sheet. There's no such thing as double-entry accounting when it comes to love. ~ Debra Ollivier, #NFDB
683:Every major feature of the modern United States—from racial equality to Social Security, from the Pentagon to the suburb—represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism. ~ Bernard Bailyn, #NFDB
684:Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
685:For 2015, the Equality Index found that blacks had on average only 56 percent of the economic well-being and 61 percent of social justice benefits that whites enjoy. ~ Robert P Jones, #NFDB
686:If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
687:Inequality is the very basis of creation. At the same time the forces struggling to obtain equality are as much a necessity of creation as those which destroy it. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
688:I've always been hopeful about Scotland's prospects. And I now believe more than ever that Scotland is within touching distance of achieving independence and equality. ~ Sean Connery, #NFDB
689:The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
690:As a first step there must be an offer to achieve equality of rights in disarmament by abolishing the weapons forbidden to the Central Powers by the Peace Treaties. ~ Arthur Henderson, #NFDB
691:It was not all quite so simple, that real equality between women and men was still a thing of the future, and that there were causes for anger as well as for celebration. ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
692:Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy; love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
693:What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it. ~ Valerie Solanas, #NFDB
694:...all power inebriates weak man; and its abuse proves that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
695:Do not be downcast, but marshal all your powers; Make an effort; be the master of yourself! Practice the equality of self and other; Practice the exchange of self and other. ~ ntideva, #NFDB
696:Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
697:Jews were, are, and will remain ideological dope dealers smart enough not to smoke their own stash. They sell equality heroin to you, but they never inject it themselves. ~ Alex Linder, #NFDB
698:THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
699:Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted. ~ Sara Sheridan, #NFDB
700:All this talk of equality between the sexes is merely an expression of sex-hate.
Men and women should learn tenderness to each other
and to leave one another alone. ~ D H Lawrence,#NFDB
701:Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
702:The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality. Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
703:A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
704:Gender equality and women's empowerment have been a top priority for me from day one as Secretary-General. And I am committed to making sure that the U.N. leads by example. ~ Ban Ki moon, #NFDB
705:It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
706:Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
707:My idea is that we've worked so many years for equality, but the only area where we've achieved equality, with men, is in job loss. We are still 77 cents to the dollar. ~ Carolyn Maloney, #NFDB
708:The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
709:A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
710:Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
711:Freedom, justice and equality are three principles of life are with us before the fast, they should be with us during the fast and they should be with us after the fast. ~ Louis Farrakhan, #NFDB
712:Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
713:The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
714:The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #NFDB
715:Thought Of equality- as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself- as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
716:A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
717:A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” – Milton Friedman, Free to Choose ~ Eamonn Butler, #NFDB
718:...but gay rights advocates' interest in blending in with the broader society and their narrow focus on marriage equality have resulted in the neglect of other pressing issues. ~ Ryan Berg, #NFDB
719:By equality, one once understood equality in the very same sense in which the Bible speaks of equality: that we are all equal, inasmuch as we are created in the image of God. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
720:I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
721:I'm pushing for citizen equality not because of some moral idea, but because this is the essential way to crack the corruption that now makes it so Washington can't work. ~ Lawrence Lessig, #NFDB
722:Mankind will find strength in itself to live for virtue, even without believing in the immortality of the soul! Find it in the love of liberty, equality, fraternity... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
723:My work is heavily influenced by critiques that many critical intellectual traditions, especially Critical Race Theory, have made of reform projects focused on legal equality. ~ Dean Spade, #NFDB
724:This equality and this oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
725:True community is based on upon equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. It affirms the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together. ~ Pauli Murray, #NFDB
726:Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
727:Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings. ~ Robert M Hutchins, #NFDB
728:Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences. ~ Murray Rothbard, #NFDB
729:Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn't the same as equality... ~ Andi Zeisler, #NFDB
730:If a man look upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other’s birthright – that of equality. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
731:If supporters of equality for women want to vote for the best candidate, they must look to a person regardless of gender and must disregard the gender of political opponents. ~ Karen DeCrow, #NFDB
732:I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
733:I want to stay on the subject of marriage equality because this is the part of the show that everybody loves but you hate if you're the one who has to hear your own voice. ~ Dahlia Lithwick, #NFDB
734:Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
735:Real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
736:The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things...among democratic nations they are two unequal things. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
737:Because we have accepted the view that there is a trade-off between equality and liberty, we think we have to choose. Lately, we have come, as a people, to choose liberty. ~ Danielle S Allen, #NFDB
738:Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. ~ Harlan F Stone, #NFDB
739:Equality, absolutely, that's what defines us. It's what makes us great. If it doesn't sit well with your religion, let your God sort it out in the end, but that's us. We're equal ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
740:From this observed behavior a major psychological truth about this race of forked destroyers may be deduced: that, just as nature abhors a vacuum, "mankind abhors equality." ~ Soseki Natsume, #NFDB
741:If a man looks upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other's birthright - that of equality. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
742:It was not just time, however, that healed partisan wounds. Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
743:No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step. ~ Angela Davis, #NFDB
744:No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. ~ Maria Semple, #NFDB
745:We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
746:We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation. ~ Robert A Caro, #NFDB
747:A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
748:For a modern woman it is important to be supported and that there is equality in every aspect, and that it's not two halves that make a whole - it's two wholes that make a whole. ~ Katy Perry, #NFDB
749:Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
750:I’ll look at why LGBT groups in Washington have asked for so little for so many years—and gotten nothing—and why and how we must change that and demand full equality. ~ Michelangelo Signorile, #NFDB
751:In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
752:It is our sacred duty," says Napoleone, "to instil into all the European peoples the idea of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And if necessary - with the help of cannon! ~ Annemarie Selinko, #NFDB
753:Strength and power are the words Cal has been raised to know. Not goodness. Not kindness. Not empathy or bravery or equality or anything else that a ruler should strive for ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
754:Women cannot serve two masters at once who are urgently beaming antithetical orders.... Either we believe in patriarchy the rule of men over women - or we believe in equality. ~ Sonia Johnson, #NFDB
755:Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
756:Evelyn suspected there was never true equality in marriage. Someone always had stronger feelings, or held the purse strings, or was more persuasive, powerful, and pushy. ~ Victoria Helen Stone, #NFDB
757:Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality. ~ Chris Hayes, #NFDB
758:the fact remains that it is the fight itself, standing up against the hate because we dare to demand equality, that changes the culture and brings people to the cause. ~ Michelangelo Signorile, #NFDB
759:... we should be miserable but for the consciousness that we have done all in our power to help forward every measure for the freedom and equality of the races and the sexes. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
760:When we are honest, we admit how agreeable it can feel to be singled out for favored treatment. The biggest barrier to equality for all is that inequality for some feels good. ~ Philip Gulley, #NFDB
761:As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one. Equally ~ Angela Nagle, #NFDB
762:For hundreds of years we have been told that the path to freedom from racial oppression lies in our virtue, that our humanity must be earned. We simply don’t deserve equality yet. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
763:However, because death is the only absolute equality among human beings on earth, even the ignoblest and the most welcome instance of it deserves a little ceremonious thought. ~ Glenway Wescott, #NFDB
764:If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
765:It's not just a question of numbers. There will be more women (in parliament) who are conscious of women's rights ... There will also be women who are not committed to equality. ~ Hanan Ashrawi, #NFDB
766:The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality fo result. Its equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference. ~ Robert Reich, #NFDB
767:There are social democrats and others who are marching more in the direction of equality, whether you call them socialists or communists... Capitalism has only hurt Latin America. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
768:To get the universal Ananda all our instruments must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential joy of all things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #NFDB
769:You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'. ~ Anthony Browne, #NFDB
770:How came the people to err? How happens it that, when seeking liberty and equality, they fell back into privilege and slavery? Always through copying the ancient régime. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
771:I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
772:In short, between men and women you want..."
"Equality."
"Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures."
"I said equality. I didn't say identity. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
773:In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
774:No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
775:Professor Sengupta had the self-satisfied habit common to many academics of pretending an intellectual equality with his audience in order to happily demonstrate his own superiority. ~ Ben Elton, #NFDB
776:The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about ~ John Hume, #NFDB
777:To every woman who gave birth, to every citizen and taxpayer, it's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women of the United States of America! ~ Patricia Arquette, #NFDB
778:Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
779:from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough. ~ Harry G Frankfurt, #NFDB
780:I too mean to be out of politics. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gives me the boon of equality before the law, terminates my enlistment, and discharges me cured. ~ Rutherford B Hayes, #NFDB
781:Now I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
782:(protocapitalist) feminism concerned with “women’s advancement” up the corporate and nation-state ladder. This is a feminism that focuses on financial “equality” between ~ Chandra Talpade Mohanty, #NFDB
783:She was an expert at this subterfuge, he realized. At making every person in her scope feel as though they were singular to her, all the while treating them with abject equality. ~ Kerrigan Byrne, #NFDB
784:Whatever reforms are carried out in the economy, without deep going changes in men?s mentality ? in their opinion about femininity ? women?s equality may not be possible. ~ Velupillai Prabhakaran, #NFDB
785:Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
786:His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing. ~ Ruth Rendell, #NFDB
787:I argue that legal equality has failed resistance movements aimed at transforming material conditions of violence, and that trans activists should take a decidedly different approach. ~ Dean Spade, #NFDB
788:I believe in the 12 Jewels and try to provide my childrem with them. That is Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom, Justice, Equality, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Love, Peace and Happiness. ~ RZA, #NFDB
789:I do not want to be the angel of any home: I want for myself what I want for other women, absolute equality. After that is secured, then men and women can take turns being angels. ~ Agnes Macphail, #NFDB
790:In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men; its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
791:I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
792:I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
793:She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real. ~ Irin Carmon, #NFDB
794:The basic Buddhist stand on the question of equality between the genders is age-old. At the highest tantric levels, at the highest esoteric level, you must respect women: every woman. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
795:We are all different. Yet we are all God's children. We are all united behind this country and the common cause of freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. That is what unites us. ~ Barbara Boxer, #NFDB
796:You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
797:Disrespecting one's ethnicity or their religious preference, on and on and on, if they have a disability, is not anything that has to do with when we talk about democracy. Equality. ~ Stevie Wonder, #NFDB
798:Gender equality, historically has been predominantly a women's movement for women. But I think the impact of gender inequality and how it's affecting men hasn't really been addressed. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
799:In a passage that foreshadows criticisms of equality from his time to the present, he also mentions the “despotism” of the law required to enforce equality and maintain it.[37] ~ Martin van Creveld, #NFDB
800:Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.” Union ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
801:The idea of equality is still how I define feminism. I think it's a broad definition that encompasses the variety of experiences women and men have with the word and the movement. ~ Julie Zeilinger, #NFDB
802:The marriage-equality issue should be recognized for what it truly is - a civil rights issue that must be approved to assure that every citizen is treated equally under the law. ~ Bruce Springsteen, #NFDB
803:As an energetic Socialist, I do my best to see the good that is in him, but it's hard. Comrade Bristow's the most striking argument against the equality of man I've ever come across. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
804:Catholics can in no way convince themselves that so enormous and unjust an in equality in the distribution of this world's goods truly conforms to the designs of the all-wise Creator. ~ Pope Pius XI, #NFDB
805:I do not find fault with equality for drawing men into the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, but for absorbing them entirely in the search for the pleasures that are permitted. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
806:I don't want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes. ~ Elizabeth Warren, #NFDB
807:In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
808:I want to take human rights out of their box. I want to show the relevance of the universal principles of human rights to the basic needs of health, security, education and equality. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
809:Love wasn’t selfless, and it wasn’t selfish either. Love was equality. It was saying that another person’s self was just as important as yours, and expecting them to feel the same way. ~ Rose Lerner, #NFDB
810:This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. ~ Vladimir Bukovsky, #NFDB
811:You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
812:And think of how we challenged the idea of a male dominated Parliament with All-Women shortlists and made the cause of gender equality central to our government. We were right to do so. ~ Ed Miliband, #NFDB
813:If I can mean to people - if I can symbolize the ability to pursue gender equality, racial equality, and to be truthful about our experiences, then, absolutely, that's what I want to be. ~ Anita Hill, #NFDB
814:I would point out that Japan's proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference on the principle of racial equality was rejected by delegates such as those from Britain and the United States ~ Hideki Tojo, #NFDB
815:The more equality women have, the fairer, more civilized and tolerant society will be. Sexual equality is a lot more effective against terrorism than military strength. ~ Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, #NFDB
816:Today, we talk a lot about equality, but I think what most people mean by it is sameness - that everybody is the same - and they are afraid if they are not the same, they are not equal. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
817:Were women to "unsex" themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection. ~ Queen Victoria, #NFDB
818:America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
819:And when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
820:The reactions of the normal mind are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this degradation make this truth evident to us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Equality, #NFDB
821:Using human rights commitments more effectively, either as part of negotiations in the WTO or as part of the trade policy review process, poses issues of equality in a practical venue. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
822:It's not enough to vent about what you don't like on social media. I would ask everyone who can, men included, to get involved in an organisation actively working for gender equality. ~ Catherine Mayer, #NFDB
823:On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn. ~ Emanuel Celler, #NFDB
824:The focus of tolerance education is to deal with the concept of equality and fairness. We need to establish confidence with children that there is more goodness than horror in this world. ~ Morris Dees, #NFDB
825:You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don't make as much money as men do. I don't understand that. Why do we have to take a backseat? ~ Beyonce Knowles, #NFDB
826:A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
827:A free equality founded upon spontaneous cooperation, not on governmental force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic ideal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #NFDB
828:I believe that the trans movement is at a crossroads. We have achieved an unprecedented level of visibility in the last couple of years. However, that's not the same thing as equality. ~ Chelsea Manning, #NFDB
829:I was born pretty lucky, an Aryan Australian, friendly girl, that gives you a lot of advantages in the world. I was unaware of people's fights or struggles for equality. I was really naive. ~ Sia Furler, #NFDB
830:The Twelve Powers of the Mother manifested for Her Work: Sincerity, Peace, Equality, Generosity, Goodness, Courage, Progress, Receptivity, Aspiration, Perserverance, Gratitude, Humility
~ The Mother?,#NFDB
831:Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
832:While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence—that no one should be hurt. ~ Carol Gilligan, #NFDB
833:An equality of nation will never exist in our lifetime. Why? Because peace, freedom, and justice are deceptive concepts. Hidden beneath their surface are the instincts of the peking order. ~ Howard Bloom, #NFDB
834:Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. —Thomas Sowell (2016) ~ George Gilder, #NFDB
835:[I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality? 82 ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB
836:Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
837:Thus for Webster “the very soul of a republic” was to be found in “an equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families. ~ Lewis Hyde, #NFDB
838:We want to be brothers and sisters. We want respect and equality. Simon Bolivar, our father, said a balanced world - a universe - a balanced universe in order to have peace and development. ~ Hugo Chavez, #NFDB
839:A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Religion of Humanity, #NFDB
840:If human equality is to be forever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
841:In a world where people are equal, I feel it's important to have strong male characters, counterparts. Equality is important. It's about compatibility and compassion. And it's amazing. ~ Haifaa al Mansour, #NFDB
842:its moral compass that had at one time, guided the West, but now had been pushed aside, in the name of the new morality of political correctness and the assumption of cultural equality. ~ J Robert Kennedy, #NFDB
843:Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
844:The movie industry had it better in the '30s and '40s, in terms of gender equality, than it does now, both in payment and in job ratios. It's ludicrous. Are we in the modern world, or what? ~ Daryl Hannah, #NFDB
845:The repeated demand for “justice,” incorporated into the names of many Islamist parties, reflects not so much a demand for social equality as a demand for equal treatment under the law. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
846:The social compact sets up among the citizens as equality of such kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
847:Abortion is defended today as a means of ensuring the equality and independence of women, and as a solution to the problems of single parenting, child abuse, and the feminization of poverty. ~ Robert Casey, #NFDB
848:As that wise Indian, André Béteille, always points out, what we must strive for is reasonable equality of opportunity, not absolute equality of result. That we have plainly not achieved, ~ Ramachandra Guha, #NFDB
849:At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered. ~ Carol Gilligan, #NFDB
850:Bethany Martin, another Hope College senior, put it like this: "If i could have equality and fulfillment with a woman, but I couldn't with a man - then why wouldn't I choose a woman? ~ Jennifer Baumgardner, #NFDB
851:Equality was not freedom, it had only been the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom. ~ Nadine Gordimer, #NFDB
852:So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality. ~ Bono, #NFDB
853:We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work. ~ Vijay Prashad, #NFDB
854:Also, somehow, there doesn't seem to be any old-fashioned gender roles in place, or any gender roles at all. The priest who condemned me to the mob was a woman. I'll cheer for equality later. ~ Claudia Gray, #NFDB
855:Elections are also about the future - the pledges that we are making for this country. For those who care about equality and fairness in the UK, and beyond, Labour really is the only choice. ~ Anne Campbell, #NFDB
856:Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.” I look at her. “The first one sounds fair. The second one is fair. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
857:In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
858:No. What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up raise America up. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer, #NFDB
859:Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. ~ Allen West, #NFDB
860:To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
861:Did you not say the most highly regarded virtues of this republic were liberty and equality? How highly regarded can they be, when they discriminate and stare so at those who are different? ~ Kyung Sook Shin, #NFDB
862:Here are the values that I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values. ~ Ellen DeGeneres, #NFDB
863:If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
864:Similarly, gender-equality, supremacy of law, political participation, civil society, and transparency are among the indispensable elements that are the imperatives of democratization. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan, #NFDB
865:that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
866:Though magical communities believe in the God and the Goddess - the equally balanced male and female sides of Spirit - they also believe this equality brings wholeness and creates the One. ~ Silver RavenWolf, #NFDB
867:A few hours' mountain climbing make of a rogue and a saint two fairly equal creatures. Tiredness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity - and sleep finally adds to them liberty. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
868:Historically, women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone any promise of equality. ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
869:Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
870:The enemy of feminism isn’t men. It’s patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality. ~ Justine Musk, #NFDB
871:Thought
Of equality- as if it harm'd me,
giving others the same chances
and rights as myself-
as if it were not indispensable
to my own rights
that others possess the same. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
872:For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.' ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
873:If there was anything I could say or do that would convince someone that I or people like me don't deserve justice or equality, then they never believed in justice and equality in the first place. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
874:We know that the only way to achieve equality is if both men and women want to achieve equality. We also know that equality is not just the right thing to do for men, it is a good thing to do. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
875:A little child may find companionship in many strange and simple creatures, but to a grown man there must be some semblance of equality in intellect as the basis for agreeable association. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs, #NFDB
876:All distinctions of birth or of rank have been abolished. All citizens, whether native or adopted, are placed upon terms of precise equality. All are entitled to equal rights and equal protection. ~ James K Polk, #NFDB
877:For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality. ~ Nancy Pelosi, #NFDB
878:Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
879:Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve someone's slavery. They do not want equality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having things that others have not. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
880:Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo.Image Courtesy: Arup Mitr, #NFDB
881:The Left, laid bare of its ideological façade wrapped about by theories on economics and sociology, is simply a means of dragging humanity down to the lowest denominator in the name of ‘equality’. ~ Kerry Bolton, #NFDB
882:There is very little truth in the old refrain that one cannot legislate equality. Laws not only provide concrete benefits, they can even change the hearts of men—some men, anyhow—for good or evil. ~ Gilbert King, #NFDB
883:The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
884:We seek a peaceful world, a prosperous world, a free world, a world of good neighbors, living on terms of equality and mutual respect, as Canada and the United States have lived for generations. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
885:Balance” is a luxury. Equality is a necessity. When we stop talking about work-life balance and start talking about discrimination against care and caregiving, we see the world differently. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
886:Humanistic values of equality and equal rights for all nations and individuals as crystallized in the principles of the United Nations Charter are mankind's great achievements in the 20th century. ~ Tran uc Luong, #NFDB
887:In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski, #NFDB
888:The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
889:Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
890:If the Bible teaches the equality of women, why does the church refuse to ordain women to preach the gospel, to fill the offices of deacons and elders, and to administer the Sacraments...? ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
891:I'm an American for marriage equality. I believe that love comes in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. So whether you're LGBT or straight, your love is valid, beautiful, and an incredible gift. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
892:Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#NFDB
893:Equality is an important element in hygge – a trait that is deeply rooted in the Danish culture – and also manifests itself in the fact that everybody takes part in the chores of the hyggelig evening. ~ Meik Wiking, #NFDB
894:I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity. ~ Janet Yellen, #NFDB
895:Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive. ~ Chris Hayes, #NFDB
896:We understand the concept of equality, that we all want to be equal. But I think this is absolutely not true. I don't think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski, #NFDB
897:Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. —PHILIPPIANS 2:6 ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
898:A woman can only satisfy and fulfil herself, I understood, when she establishes her own authority, and see beyond equality, realising how terrible and damaging her own power - if unleashed - might be. ~ Ronald Frame, #NFDB
899:I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
900:Khadi to me is the symbol of unity of Indian humanity, of its economic freedom and equality and, therefore, ultimately, in the poetic expression of Jawaharlal Nehru, 'the livery of India's freedom'. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
901:Yes, gay marriage is about symbolically blessing a relationship, but the larger issue is about transmitting a fundamental message about equality. Gay people should have equality in law everywhere. ~ Daniel Radcliffe, #NFDB
902:America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law. ~ Marco Rubio, #NFDB
903:I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
904:Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
905:A belief in God's universal love to all his creatures, and that he will finally restore all of them that are miserable to happiness, is a polar truth. . . It establishes the equality of [humanity]. . . ~ Benjamin Rush, #NFDB
906:Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
907:Public attitudes follow real life experience, and as marriage equality has spread to more communities, Americans have seen more freedom, stronger families, more protection for children and more fairness. ~ Ken Mehlman, #NFDB
908:The essence of all human rights is the equality of the entire human race, which the Qur’ān assumed, affirmed, and confirmed. It obliterated all distinctions among men except goodness and virtue (taqwā) ~ Fazlur Rahman, #NFDB
909:there always have been and always will be men who wish to dominate women, the peculiar iniquity of religion is to turn misogyny into a part of the divine order: to make sexism a virtue and equality a sin. ~ Nick Cohen, #NFDB
910:We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
911:As of now, the draft is over." - Kai
...
His speech had been about equality. Rights. Moving past the hatred.
... Kai had begun to unravel decades of cyborg prejudice.
Had he done it for her? ~ Marissa Meyer,#NFDB
912:He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on. ~ Christina Stead, #NFDB
913:It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
914:Lakshmi massages Vishnu’s feet. Is this male domination? Kali stands on Shiva’s chest. Is this female domination? Shiva is half a woman. Is this gender equality? Why then is Shakti never half a man? ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
915:Men think it's a women's word. But what it means is that you believe in equality, and if you stand for equality, then you're a feminist. Sorry to tell you. You're a feminist. You're a feminist. That's it. ~ Emma Watson, #NFDB
916:Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
917:how far do equal rights extend? Do they simply guarantee the right to enter into free contract—the equality of the market, which at the time of the French Revolution actually seemed quite revolutionary? ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
918:I’ve also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible. ~ Anderson Cooper, #NFDB
919:The chief significance of Alpha Phi Alpha lies in its purpose to stimulate, develop, and cement an intelligent, trained leadership in the unending fight for freedom, equality and fraternity. Our task is endless. ~ Jewel, #NFDB
920:Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
921:And yet, Burke might have countered, once the masses were fated by the laws of political economy to toil in misery, what else was the idea of equality but a cruel bait to goad mankind into self-destruction? ~ Karl Polanyi, #NFDB
922:Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
923:If you want to have a career, my advice is don't get married. You think things have changed and there's some kind of gender equality now, that men are different, but I've got news for you. They're not. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
924:I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
925:Permanent peace and balance is an impossible goal. Far better would be to strive for a general state of equality, so that no matter what evils one kingdom might conjure, they would never be undefeatable. And ~ Sara Raasch, #NFDB
926:The core strands of my involvement in public life are a belief in the need to strive wherever possible for equality of treatment and opportunity, to ensure all people have the means to a decent livelihood. ~ Peter Garrett, #NFDB
927:There are some discrepencies in the writings of Paul. Some Christians chose those ones that say that women should be restricted in their services. I choose to emphasize the equality of people in God's eyes. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
928:We talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom - and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God - and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
929:I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
930:In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known. ~ Thomas Malthus, #NFDB
931:The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines. ~ Henry Giroux, #NFDB
932:The other states look to New York for the progressive direction. New York made a powerful statement [legalizing marriage equality], not just for the people of New York, but for people all across this nation. ~ Andrew Cuomo, #NFDB
933:While much remains to be done to achieve full equality of economic opportunity-for the average woman worker earns only 60 percent of the average wage for men-this legislation is a significant step forward. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
934:Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
935:Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been: A career open to talent without distinction of birth. It is this system of equality for which the European oligarchy detests me ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
936:Devoted to principles of liberty, equality, and religious tolerance -- which, dear internet, is not necessarily the same thing as satanism -- Masonic lodge became the de facto clubhouses of the Age of Reason. ~ Sarah Vowell, #NFDB
937:For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome ~ Paul Bloom, #NFDB
938:People are realizing that being gay is just as defining as the color of our skin and it's not a choice. I'm really encouraged. I think in my lifetime we will achieve equality. I'm honored to be a part of it. ~ Leslie Jordan, #NFDB
939:The foundation on which (our government is) built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every pre-eminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a pre-eminence by birth. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
940:The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
941:While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice. ~ Nancy Gibbs, #NFDB
942:Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
943:If freedom led to wider inequality, I would prefer that to a world in which I got artificial equality at the expense of freedom. My objective, my god... is freedom of individuals to pursue their own values. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
944:I never liked the Hierarchy of the Church-an equality in the teacher of Religion, and a dependence on the people, are republican sentiments-but if the Clergy combine, they will have their influence on Government ~ Rufus King, #NFDB
945:The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the opposite. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
946:The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
947:How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government. ~ Pankaj Mishra, #NFDB
948:One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian. ~ Shirley Chisholm, #NFDB
949:Seeking social equality for disabilities doesn't come from bullying or militancy, seeking social equality for disabilities comes is from realising the open-mindedness and acknowledgement of each person's reality ~ Paul Isaacs, #NFDB
950:Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this? ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
951:Until we command the exact same salary as every male counterpart, I feel a political desire to stand by other women. If we don't stand together, that equality will never be fully realized, and that bothers me. ~ Shirley Manson, #NFDB
952:We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality. ~ Enrique Penalosa, #NFDB
953:I think Peter Norman recuperated in the sense that people who knew who Peter Norman was, he built his character around the legacy of his family, in terms of what they taught him about equality and justice for all. ~ John Carlos, #NFDB
954:Many believe that Hillary Clinton was channeling President Obama during her recent speech in New York City. She focused on equality, justice, and how hard it was for her growing up as a young black man in Hawaii. ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
955:The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue. ~ Josip Novakovich, #NFDB
956:There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
957:There are many white people in this country who realize that the system itself - as it is constructed - is not so constructed that it can produce freedom and equality for the negro, and the system has to be changed. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
958:Accountability” is the word the comes up most in conversations with the new insurrectionist activists. We cannot achieve equality without first achieving some measure of accountability for those at the top. ~ Christopher L Hayes, #NFDB
959:As I have heretofore said, one can know many things which he cannot sense. One can, therefore, KNOW that balance in Nature's polarization principle DEMANDS equality of division in all of her paired effects. It ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
960:I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity. ~ Boris Johnson, #NFDB
961:I know that for a lot of people, including a lot of women, the movement for women’s equality exists largely in the past. They’re wrong about that. It’s still happening, still as urgent and vital as ever. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
962:Olga was in full combat gear with a balaclava against bites to the neck. “Let’s check out the rest. You lead.” “You’re such a gentleman,” Olga said. “I’m a firm believer in female equality,” Thomas said. “After you. ~ John Ringo, #NFDB
963:When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.... To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
964:The anti-equality right wing has interests. We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
965:The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality (isonomia), and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
966:This is the cycle of a dynamic society. Equality is never a final state, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task is now to recognize that that struggle is ours. ~ Christopher L Hayes, #NFDB
967:We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible. ~ Beyonce Knowles, #NFDB
968:A woman is human.
She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man.
Likewise, she is never less.
Equality is a given.
A woman is human. ~ Vera Nazarian,#NFDB
969:Either one is factually equal, and consequently morally equal as well; on the other hand, if one is morally equal, there is no reason why one should contest factual equality of rights or simply refuse to grant them. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
970:Equality works. Extreme inequality does not. Out of the grotesque opportunism that we’ve seen among owners of great wealth in the past ten years has come a colossal waste of financial capital and human energy. ~ David Cay Johnston, #NFDB
971:To get a sense of how equality is contested in politics, consider the constant struggle between liberals and conservatives over what equality means: equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Conservatives ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
972:Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
973:—Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
974:Mormons... are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command. ~ Mary Douglas, #NFDB
975:Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.O ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
976:Even angry intellectuals realised how irresponsible it was to preach that all ideas are created equal. For in the end, postmodernist multiculturalism has no standard by which to elevate gender equality over sharia. ~ Eric P Kaufmann, #NFDB
977:If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man. ~ Andrew Johnson, #NFDB
978:I think what happens sometimes is, unfortunately, it's a scary thing for men to admit that they want equality or even to say the word feminist because there's a lot of fear that they're going to say the wrong thing. ~ Justin Baldoni, #NFDB
979:It is a commonly observed fact that the enslavement of women is invariably associated with a low type of social life, and that, conversely, her elevation towards an equality with man uniformly accompanies progress. ~ Herbert Spencer, #NFDB
980:Leadership must come from the developing world itself, and that is beginning to happen. In India, Africa, and the Middle East, men and women alike are pushing for greater equality. These people need our support. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
981:Our world needs brutality and cruelty to sustain its equality and justice. Without it, handsome guys and beautiful ladies will fuck everyone they want. And we all ugly people will wait holding our dicks in our hands. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
982:Politicians talk about wage equality, but my father has made it a practice at his company throughout his entire career. He will fight for equal pay for equal work, and I will fight for this too right alongside of him. ~ Ivanka Trump, #NFDB
983:Stronger than all the armies is an idea thats time has come. ... The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here! ~ Everett Dirksen, #NFDB
984:An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
985:Equality before the enemy -that is the main condition to fight a fair duel. Where you have contempt, you cannot wage war; where you are in command, where you can see someone beneath you, you should not wage war. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
986:Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
987:These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not. ~ Plato, #NFDB
988:When I talk with women who have had wonderful experiences in the military it's because their commanders treated them with respect and dignity and gave them equality with their peers that was unparalleled in their lives. ~ Amy Ziering, #NFDB
989:A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood - a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
990:I believe in the equality of man and woman,” Rulan insisted.
“Ah,” Madame Wu said, “two equals are nevertheless not the same two things. They are equal in importance, equally necessary to life, but not the same, ~ Pearl S Buck,#NFDB
991:Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other. ~ Mary Douglas, #NFDB
992:The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that's charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I'll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality. ~ Jonathan Kozol, #NFDB
993:All across my home state, throughout the South, and around the country, LGBT people and their families are seeking basic respect and dignity. This victory is an essential step on the journey toward full equality for all. ~ Chad Griffin, #NFDB
994:If there be a human being who is freer than I, then I shall necessarily become his slave. If I am freer than any other, then he will become my slave. Therefore equality is an absolutely necessary condition of freedom. ~ Mikhail Bakunin, #NFDB
995:It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans. ~ Jeffrey Rosen, #NFDB
996:Loyalty to the principles upon which our Government rests positively demands that the equality before the law which it guarantees to every citizen should be justly and in good faith conceded in all parts of the land. ~ Grover Cleveland, #NFDB
997:There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
998:There is one lesson from the past, in particular, that we cannot afford to ignore: You cannot make progress on gender equality or broader human development, without safeguarding women's reproductive health and rights. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
999:Way to equality.—A few hours of mountain climbing turn a villain and a saint into two rather equal creatures. Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity—and liberty is added eventually by sleep. 297 ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1000:Equality comes in realizing that we are all doing different jobs for a common purpose. That is the aim behind any community. The very name community means let's come together to recognize the unity. Come ... unity. ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
1001:Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men;.... Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
1002:Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. ~ Joseph E Stiglitz, #NFDB
1003:The orthodox environmental theories [of heredity] have been accepted not because they have stood up under proper scientific investigations, but because they harmonize so well with our democratic belief in human equality. ~ Arthur Jensen, #NFDB
1004:We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice - and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic - we show our prejudice in our paternalism - we downgrade their dignity. ~ John Howard Griffin, #NFDB
1005:While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers. ~ Friedrich A Hayek, #NFDB
1006:[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
1007:For my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich from destroying the poor ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
1008:If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
1009:It's clear that equality doesn't quite cut it. Asking for a sliver of disproportionate power is too polite a request. I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. ~ Reni Eddo Lodge, #NFDB
1010:Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality. ~ Alan Greenspan, #NFDB
1011:The whole art of making experiments in chemistry is founded on the principle: we must always suppose an exact equality or equation between the principles of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
1012:Fidel Castro rhetorically championed the poor. He also held the Cuban economy in a kind of arrested state. He called for racial equality but often cracked down - but did crack down on the press and dissidents and Cuban gays. ~ Scott Simon, #NFDB
1013:We ought to be free to meet and mingle, --to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
1014:By picking a few winners, the Race to the Top competition abandoned the traditional idea of equality of educational opportunity, where federal aid favored districts and schools that enrolled students with the highest needs. ~ Diane Ravitch, #NFDB
1015:by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
1016:Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1017:Many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice. ~ Noah Feldman, #NFDB
1018:Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
1019:Grounded in international human rights, gender equality doesn’t just improve the lives of individual women, girls, and their families; it makes economic sense, strengthens democracy, and enables long-term sustainable progress. ~ Helen Clark, #NFDB
1020:Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who? ~ Darryl Pinckney, #NFDB
1021:When we talk about feminism - equality without apology for ALL - we can't be talking about for all white women or all highly educated women but all women, regardless of color, class, creed, sexual orientation or identity. ~ Christine Pelosi, #NFDB
1022:I don't believe that if I came out as bisexual the world will change. But it's really important for people to be truthful about who they are and fight for equality. We need to help the world usher itself into the next phase. ~ Olivia Thirlby, #NFDB
1023:Napoleon is great because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1024:Our times might emphasize equality, which we then mistake for the need for everyone to be the same, but what we really mean by this is the equal chance for people to express their differences, to let a thousand flowers bloom. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1025:Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
1026:Peter [Norman] never denounced us, he never turned his back on us, he never walked away from us, he never said one thing against what he stood for in Mexico City, and that was freedom, justice and equality for all God's people. ~ John Carlos, #NFDB
1027:Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
1028:Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1029:If we want truth and justice to rule our global village, there must be no hypocrisy. If there is no truth, then there will be no equality. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. No peace, no love. No love, only darkness. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1030:One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation’s original sin, the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery? ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1031:Physical troubles always come as lessons to teach equality and to reveal what in us is pure and luminous enough to remain unaffected. It is in equality that one finds the remedy. An important point: equality does not mean indifference.
~ ?,#NFDB
1032:There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1033:There's a lot that needs to be fixed in dating for men and women in the U.S. - there's a lot of pressure on women to do things they may not want to do. And if you start out unequal, you are not going to end up with equality. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
1034:We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
1035:Idea is a noble one — an idea that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of equality — the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws. ~ William H Seward, #NFDB
1036:Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them. ~ B R Ambedkar, #NFDB
1037:Poly isn’t about being completely fair for most people. There are some who run it with a near perfect equality, but for most of us there are primary relationships, there are secondary, and even ones less serious than that. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
1038:... the danger of illicit sex influences is, and always has been, in inverse proportion to the degree to which women approximatedto equality with men, in social dignity and in opportunity for public responsibility. ~ Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, #NFDB
1039:The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. ... Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality. ~ Rory Stewart, #NFDB
1040:This is the paradoxical tyranny of any extremist left-wing belief system. When equality becomes one’s God Value, differences in belief cannot be abided. And the only way to destroy difference in belief is through totalitarianism. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1041:Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1042:He also lied about where he stood on slavery. He told the American public and political allies that he didn’t believe in political equality for slaves because he didn’t want to get too far ahead of public opinion, Mott says.45 ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer, #NFDB
1043:Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them. ~ Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, #NFDB
1044:Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation's pockets of poverty. ~ Jack Kemp, #NFDB
1045:The Constitution under which we live and which has not only blessed us but has become a model for other constitutions, is our God-inspired national safeguard ensuring freedom and liberty, justice and equality before the law. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
1046:The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society. ~ William Howard Taft, #NFDB
1047:Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned. ~ Lawrence Lessig, #NFDB
1048:A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism. ~ Susan Faludi, #NFDB
1049:From a democratization perspective, the policy question of universal service revolves around the extent to which economic efficiency must be balanced against social objectives of inclusion and equality of opportunity (Dordick, 1995). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1050:[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all. ~ Michael Palin, #NFDB
1051:While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
1052:Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
1053:Freemasonry teaches not merely temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, brotherly love, relief, and truth, but liberty, equality, and fraternity, and it denounces ignorance, superstition, bigotry, lust tyranny and despotism. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1054:Marriage equality is a term so ridiculous on its face that when you hear it mentioned, you would think you were in Riyadh. Years from now, perhaps we can lose the equality part, the same-sex part and call it what it is - marriage. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
1055:Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
1056:The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white folks for two contradictory reasons. First, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don’t. Second, he has a high IQ, but they don’t. ~ Steve Sailer, #NFDB
1057:Well I mean... I thought peace and equality was the point of the truce. Obviously equality was a bunch of crap, but there was this big 'togetherness' campaign which, while being totally dorky, was admittedly at the root a nice idea ~ Liz Maverick, #NFDB
1058:What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
1059:Word: I'm not saying the races don't have a common human bond. I'm just saying that bond isn't about compassion and equality and tolerance. What we all share together is the drive to get what's ours and keep it for as long as we can. ~ Snoop Dogg, #NFDB
1060:As a result of America's efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks. ~ David Horowitz, #NFDB
1061:But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1062:We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions-bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
1063:Equality is a receding dream. No level playing fields exist. With apologies to the great Jean Jacques Rousseau, man is not born free. Equality between human beings is impossible, although they could achieve a measure of fraternity. ~ K Natwar Singh, #NFDB
1064:Equality,' said Steerpike,' is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power. ~ Mervyn Peake, #NFDB
1065:Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism — that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1066:Nobody believes that the man who says, 'Look, lady, you wanted equality,' to explain why he won't give up his seat to a pregnant woman carrying three grocery bags, a briefcase, and a toddler is seized with the symbolism of idealism. ~ Judith Martin, #NFDB
1067:The equality that we are all entitled to, as citizens of this democracy, can't be avoided by some religious dogma of a President who's is supposed to believe in the notion of separation of church and state. And he frankly doesn't. ~ Rosie O Donnell, #NFDB
1068:We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically. ~ Mikhail Bakunin, #NFDB
1069:As black people we were out to further our equality. I don't pay attention to the controversial connotations put on by media and the undermining labels they place on us. We pay attention to what our community situation is and what we need. ~ Chuck D, #NFDB
1070:But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory. The ~ Angela Y Davis, #NFDB
1071:I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke, #NFDB
1072:The search for justice and security, the struggle for equality of opportunity, the quest for tolerance and harmony, the pursuit of human dignity - these are moral imperatives which we must work towards and think about on a daily basis. ~ Aga Khan IV, #NFDB
1073:To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
1074:We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. ~ Shirley Chisholm, #NFDB
1075:As Western Muslims and American Muslims, we need to understand that the values and principles we promote are not only Muslim values. American Muslims live in a country where justice, dignity, freedom and equality are essential values. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1076:Equality today means “sameness,” rather than “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1077:Far too often our Asian American friends and neighbors are not offered a seat at the equality and anti-racism table, and far too often their own efforts at combating anti-Asian racism are ignored by the broader social justice community. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
1078:For there to be harmony and peace, everything must be balanced. And for there to be balance, there must be equality. Where there is equality, there will be justice. And where justice is honored and preserved, there will always be truth. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1079:I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us. ~ Angela Davis, #NFDB
1080:It has come as a great revelation to me that abolitionist is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
1081:Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
1082:MMI brothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm's X entourage. ~ Manning Marable, #NFDB
1083:Some cultures tried to stop people from expressing themselves. In Mao's China, for example, the Communists tried to stop individual expression. For them the payoff was a society of equality. The problem of course is that it didn't work. ~ Frank Gehry, #NFDB
1084:The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state. ~ David Horowitz, #NFDB
1085:There's a wonderful cartoon of Reagan in a Western hat and he's saying, "A pregnant woman in every home, a gun in every holster. Make America a man again." That sums up his attitudes: pro-military, anti-equality, pro-rich, anti-poor. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
1086:Consider the four primary ideals of social justice: Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, and Progress. They are not even remotely complementary, as Equality and Diversity are mutually exclusive as well as standing directly in the way of Progress. ~ Vox Day, #NFDB
1087:Isocrates: “Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1088:It may have been the 32nd century, but the ladies still get a raw deal in the galaxy. Too many macho planets with macho races that were afraid their little dingles would fall off if the females of their species were allowed some equality. ~ Jake Bible, #NFDB
1089:Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women’s equality hasn’t always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future. ~ Stephanie Dray, #NFDB
1090:To have a stable economy, to have a stable democracy, and to have a modern government is not enough. We have to build new pillars of development. Education, science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more equality. ~ Sebastian Pinera, #NFDB
1091:We do not need to import any foreign economic ideas or any foreign government. We had better stick to the American brand of government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American ~ Calvin Coolidge, #NFDB
1092:What would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices - if no one held out for those things because they were impossible? ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
1093:Fishing is the chance to wash one's soul with pure air. It brings meekness and inspiration, reduces our egoism, soothes our troubles and shames our wickedness. It is discipline in the equality of men--for all men are equal before fish. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
1094:It's like what you might call Goldilocks' dilemma in the old fairy tale. Young men see women as "less than" or "better than," but never their equals. And studies indicate that equality is the best foundation for a healthy relationship. ~ Michael Kimmel, #NFDB
1095:Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
1096:So far as laws and institutions avail, men should have equality of opportunity for happiness; that is, of education, wealth, power. These make happiness secure. An equal diffusion of happiness so far as laws and institutions avail. ~ Rutherford B Hayes, #NFDB
1097:The eye of true equality often seems to have some degree of disrespect for the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty to the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty, although in reality, it's simply irrespectiveness. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1098:The growth of equality… calls for decisions, mechanisms and processes directed to a better distribution of wealth, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor, which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1099:Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of birds coming home to roost. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1100:Educational equality doesn't guarantee equality on the labor market. Even the most developed countries are not gender-equal. There are still glass ceilings and 'leaky pipelines' that prevent women from getting ahead in the workplace. ~ Michelle Bachelet, #NFDB
1101:I believe in equality for everyone. I believe everyone should have the right to love and commit to whomever they want. [...] All I know is that in God's eyes we are all the same. I just wish we could see through the eyes of God more often. ~ LeAnn Rimes, #NFDB
1102:it’s not enough just to say “equality” or “responsibility” in a speech, because conservatives and progressives each have their own understanding of what these values mean. You have to talk about your understanding of each of these words. ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
1103:TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
1104:Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence. ~ Bernadette Devlin, #NFDB
1105:Scotland is my country, the nation that shaped me, that taught me my values. A nation whose achievements inspired and inspire me, a community whose failings drive me - drive my overwhelming desire to fight for social justice and equality. ~ Johann Lamont, #NFDB
1106:The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1107:Although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1108:Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
1109:Earlier feminists were almost universally pro-choice and have dominated political debate until now. Having access to abortion was viewed as the only way women could have full equality with men, who, until recently, couldn't get pregnant. ~ Kathleen Parker, #NFDB
1110:I am grateful to those Members of Congress who worked so diligently to guide the Equal Pay Act through. It is a first step. It affirms our determination that when women enter the labor force they will find equality in their pay envelopes. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1111:I feel like I'm trying to speak in a very loving way or a very nonspecific way. I really just want to talk about peace and love and equality. The fact that anybody couldn't get behind equality or love - those are things that are their problem. ~ Jim James, #NFDB
1112:I feel like it's important to be forthright about equality. If you're doing the same work, you should get the same amount of money, and you should get the same respect. It's about valuation. It's about not being afraid to ask for those things. ~ Anna Gunn, #NFDB
1113:People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion. ~ Jay Michaelson, #NFDB
1114:The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
1115:The root reason for this is the denial of the human essence, the human equality, the human family—judging people’s worth only by how efficiently or intelligently or quickly they function. This is confusing the essence with the nonessential. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
1116:We call upon all communities to be tolerant, to reject prejudice based on caste, creed, sect, colour, religion or agenda to ensure freedom and equality for women so they can flourish. We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
1117:Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital. ~ Louis O Kelso, #NFDB
1118:I personally think that people should get the book because it is like a blueprint. It shows you the work that needs to be done if we're ever going to get economic equality, health, reproductive health, violence. I mean, it's every category. ~ Eleanor Smeal, #NFDB
1119:As long as these ideas prevail, it is clear that the responsibility of government is enormous. Good fortune and bad fortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality, virtue and vice – all then depend upon political administration. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
1120:Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1121:Founded on the principles of private initiative, entrepreneurship and self-employment, underpinned by the values of democracy, equality and solidarity, the co-operative movement can help pave the way to a more just and inclusive economic order. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
1122:I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1123:The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there's upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy. ~ Robert Reich, #NFDB
1124:The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1125:The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1126:The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved. ~ Steven Levitsky, #NFDB
1127:This formal system of racial preference was codified from the 1600s until at least the mid-to-late ’60s, when the nation passed civil rights legislation, at least theoretically establishing equality in employment, voting, and housing opportunity. ~ Tim Wise, #NFDB
1128:On the walls hung black-and-white portraits of men—it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes. These ~ Olga Tokarczuk, #NFDB
1129:The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of religion, of special revelation from God; but it is also a book which teaches man his own individual responsibility, his own dignity, and his equality with his fellow - man. ~ Daniel Webster, #NFDB
1130:The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality. ~ Robert Mugabe, #NFDB
1131:You got to fight for quality art and equality and all the things that we're fighting for, the things we believe in. Choice and preference and all those things that we support. We don't want to give up that fight. You got to keep doing it. ~ Christopher Cross, #NFDB
1132:another important aspect of the marriage-equality movement that gives us some guidance moving forward is that it was driven not by the Beltway but by average Americans who wanted equality and who worked with visionary legal advocates. ~ Michelangelo Signorile, #NFDB
1133:He believed that there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law and morality, a class acutely adaptable and immoral; a class bent on achieving, not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top, of the superman. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1134:It doesn't matter how much companies talk about equality and inclusiveness. What matters are the incentives it creates for employees. Those incentives speak louder than any speeches by the CEO, or bias training workshops, or posters on a wall. ~ Joanne Lipman, #NFDB
1135:Laws which legitimize the direct killing of innocent human beings through abortion or euthanasia are in complete opposition to the inviolable right to life proper to every individual; they thus deny the equality of everyone before the law. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
1136:That is why, in order to arrive at a suitable message for the coming millennium, Buddhism has reached clear back to its beginnings to reclaim a belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of all life and bring that teaching back to the fore. ~ Clark Strand, #NFDB
1137:Feminism is lesbian in the sense that lesbians have always hated the female role and coveted the male role. It is based on Marxist notions of "equality" and class conflict that have no relevance to mystical and biological phenomenon such as love. ~ Henry Makow, #NFDB
1138:I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
1139:I'm not pretending I can give advice to every single person or every single couple for every situation; I'm making the point that we are not going to get to equality in the workforce before we get to equality in the home. Not going to happen. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
1140:It continues to defy explanation why liberals who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe. ~ Mona Charen, #NFDB
1141:Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1142:Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents. ~ Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka, #NFDB
1143:The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box. ~ Christine Pelosi, #NFDB
1144:The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles. ~ Benjamin Cardozo, #NFDB
1145:You could paper the globe with evidence that there are demonstrable cognitive and physical disparities between what are crudely called human "races." But you could fit all the evidence of innate equality on your pinkie fingernail with room to spare. ~ Jim Goad, #NFDB
1146:You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism - so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving. ~ Paloma Faith, #NFDB
1147:Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
1148:He leaned forward and opened his door, politely standing aside to let me by before following me in. There are some advantages to dating a guy from another era, I thought. Though I am a big believer in gender equality, chivalry scores high in my book. ~ Amy Plum, #NFDB
1149:In Canada, women's rights are a vital part of our effort to build a society of real equality - not just for some, but for all Canadians. A society in which women no longer encounter discrimination nor are shut out from opportunities open to others ~ Paul Martin, #NFDB
1150:Norway is pretty forward thinking in terms of gender equality, but we don't seem to practice it as well as we think. I'm constantly thinking: How much power have we really gained? We have to keep fighting to even keep what we've fought for already. ~ Jenny Hval, #NFDB
1151:We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22) ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1152:Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1153:It is at least a small comfort to me, as a gay rights and marriage equality advocate, to know that like any marriage, gay and lesbian couples are subject to the same complications and hardships that afflict marriages between heterosexual couples. ~ Gene Robinson, #NFDB
1154:The civilization of any country may always be measured by the degree of equality between men and women; and society will never come truly into order until there is perfect equality and copartnership between them in every department of human life. ~ Lydia M Child, #NFDB
1155:Trump provides a more direct and arrogant persona that produces the ugliness of a society ruled entirely by finance capital and savage market values, one that prides itself on the denigration of others as well as of justice, passion, and equality. ~ Henry Giroux, #NFDB
1156:I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
1157:It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
1158:This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit. ~ Betty Friedan, #NFDB
1159:Do you ask why I am unwilling to marry a rich wife? It is because I am unwilling to be taken to husband by my wife. The mistress of the house should be subordinate to her husband, for in no other way, Priscus, will the wife and husband be on an equality. ~ Martial, #NFDB
1160:Have you ever seen a demonstrable example of equality in your entire life? Can it be glimpsed in any dog show or classroom? In any ping pong game or chess match? Of course not. It is a philosophical abstraction, something nowhere to be found in nature. ~ Boyd Rice, #NFDB
1161:How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? Twenty-first-century Americans need to confront this enduring conundrum. Let us recognize the existence of our underclass. ~ Nancy Isenberg, #NFDB
1162:If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1163:Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality. ~ Elizabeth Lesser, #NFDB
1164:Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1165:Does rejecting feminism mean rejecting women's equality? No, because that's not what feminism is about. Rejecting feminism means recognizing that women don't need feminism to make them equal to men because they already are equal--just not the same. ~ Suzanne Venker, #NFDB
1166:Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. ~ Barry Goldwater, #NFDB
1167:Nevertheless, in order to produce more equality and uniformity in the defence of any doctrine, its fundamental principles must be committed to writing. May these two volumes therefore serve as the building stones which I contribute to the joint work. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1168:A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
1169:All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary. ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1170:And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
1171:I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” —Thomas Paine ~ Zig Ziglar, #NFDB
1172:I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
1173:Popular privileges are consistent with a state of society in which there is great inequality of position. Democratic rights, on the contrary, demand that there should be equality of condition as the fundamental basis of the society they regulate. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
1174:This country was founded on principles of equality and fairness, and you would do well to remember that. I don’t think it would help your business to have people think you harbor negative feelings toward any one group.” “I certainly will remember ~ Martha Hall Kelly, #NFDB
1175:This is a proud day and an important step forward in the fight for equality in Britain. The overwhelming majority of Labour MPs supported this change to make sure marriage reflects the value we place on long-term, loving relationships whoever you love. ~ Ed Miliband, #NFDB
1176:We do know for sure that good Irish Catholics followed their faith in the direction of inclusion, compassion, equality, justice, and a host of other Catholic values when they voted with the majority despite some clergymen’s efforts to lead them astray. ~ Mary E Hunt, #NFDB
1177:I am leaving this legacy to all of you...to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace. ~ Rosa Parks, #NFDB
1178:I am very proud of the role I played in getting legal equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and in helping get rid of the prejudice by being visible about it, helping to block the conviction of Bill Clinton of impeachment. ~ Barney Frank, #NFDB
1179:I believe in equality. But I don't like the word feminist, because it's such a rational belief to think that women are equal to men, and I'm a rational person. You shouldn't be labeled for being reasonable. You should be labeled if you're f-cking crazy. ~ Michael Che, #NFDB
1180:is for equality. Someone to feel for me the way I feel for them. I have that with Sid, thank God for her. My parents have practically been nonexistent in my adult life. I don’t want someone to have to sacrifice for me...” I trailed off, not exactly sure ~ Rene Folsom, #NFDB
1181:It was a lot easier to be optimistic about equality when you didn’t have to confront the Neanderthals on a daily basis. When you could imagine that people were actually changing their minds because they’d stopped groping secretaries at the photocopier. ~ Val McDermid, #NFDB
1182:The strictly theoretical and so attractive dream of possible equality had been traded for the worst authoritarian nightmare in history when it was applied to reality, understood, with good reason (more, in this case), as the only criterion of truth. ~ Leonardo Padura, #NFDB
1183:Very sad to hear about the passing of Nelson Mandela. He was a true inspiration for human rights and equality for South Africa and the reason apartheid no longer exists there. The world will never forget his capacity for forgiveness and magnanimity. RIP ~ Bryan Adams, #NFDB
1184:White men,” wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, “have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1185:But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.48 The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1186:I joined the Labour party because I believed in equality, in freedom of speech and in tolerance, compassion and understanding for people, irrespective of their background and views. In whatever I decide to do in the future I will hold to those principles. ~ Geoff Hoon, #NFDB
1187:Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
1188:Number one comes freedom first for my people and equality. And this is what I plan to do after I'm through fighting - working with nothing but the people, the little people in the alleys: the downtrodden people, going out and helping them with my image. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
1189:The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it. ~ Harvey Cox, #NFDB
1190:For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1191:It wasn't so much that she and Penn set out to practice Zen marriage equality and perfect-balance parenting. It was just that there was way more to do than two could manage, but by their both filling every spare moment, some of what needed to got done. ~ Laurie Frankel, #NFDB
1192:The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1193:We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass’s heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the principle of racial equality—might now come to fruition. ~ David W Blight, #NFDB
1194:Find areas of the movement for equality with which you feel confident that the main goal is equality and within which you do not feel you are violating your principles. Do work there and where that work coincides with the work of others, join hands. ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
1195:Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverance for truth and justice, for equality and liberty, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. ~ Calvin Coolidge, #NFDB
1196:The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1197:Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. “But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
1198:God allows unjust disparities between rich and poor because He does not miraculously intervene to establish justice against human wills. Also, discrepancies are not unjust by themselves; justice does not mean equality of result but equality of opportunity. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
1199:The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom,education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold. ~ Tupac Shakur, #NFDB
1200:There is no such thing as equality for some. Equality must be for all. That is what freedom is. That is what liberty is. No human being is born more or less important than any other. How can we allow ourselves to forget that? What simpler truth is there? ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1201:There was no gradual, consensual, conflict-free evolution toward greater equality. In the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society to begin anew with a clean slate. What ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1202:Ultimately, our tangled views of ambition come down to word choice. Just as many women reject the word 'feminist' but believe in opportunity and equality for all, many women reject the word 'ambition' but believe in trying to achieve difficult goals. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand, #NFDB
1203:But American group blindness abroad is also rooted in some of our noblest ideals: tolerance, equality, individualism, the power of reason to triumph over irrational hatred, and the conviction that all men are united by their common humanity and love of liberty. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
1204:fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1205:It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you’ll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You’ll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. And ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
1206:Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1207:The Lord has a plan for us. It takes time. Sixty-six years is not long in historical terms. It took the United States 200 years to tackle slavery and work toward equality. Here we’re integrating people from all over the world, all backgrounds. We’re a miracle. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1208:The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1209:Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1210:<...> this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose. ~ David Brion Davis, #NFDB
1211:Women have always struggled with their men-folk for the abolition of slavery, the liberation of countries from colonialism, the dismantling of apartheid and the attainment of peace. It is now the turn of men to join women in their struggle for equality. ~ Gertrude Mongella, #NFDB
1212:A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent. ~ Douglas MacArthur, #NFDB
1213:Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1214:I genuinely believe that we will look back on today as a landmark for equality in Britain ... No matter who you are and who you love, we are all equal. Marriage is about love and commitment, and it should no longer be denied to people just because they are gay. ~ Nick Clegg, #NFDB
1215:Life is like a ship. There's people dancing on a ship.There's a lot of money on the ship, but I cannot integrate on the ship or get equality on the ship.And I never could. I'm just in the galley working and I never could get up to see the captain of the ship. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
1216:Nevertheless, I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
1217:Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit. ~ Alveda King, #NFDB
1218:Forget what you may have heard about a digital divide or worries that the world is splintering into 'info haves' and 'info have-nots.' The fact is, technology fosters equality, and it's often the relatively cheap and mundane devices that do the most good. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
1219:The bottom line is, if you stay home, your message stays home with you. If you stand for justice and equality, you have an obligation to find the biggest possible megaphone to let your feelings be known. Don't let your message be buried and don't bury yourself. ~ John Carlos, #NFDB
1220:Everyone is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities. ~ Henry Giroux, #NFDB
1221:How could he have treated me so, he who congratulated himself on his belief that I was his equal? I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those did the saving. ~ Esi Edugyan, #NFDB
1222:I think that once we get to that point where our generation is running things, I truly believe we'll look back at this time and question why we were ever so complacent withholding something as universal as the freedom of equality and marrying someone that you love. ~ Josh Gad, #NFDB
1223:One way to identify a relationship of inequality is to determine whether or not the couple can set mutual goals and discuss them together. In an abusive relationship, the couple does not really plan together. Planning together requires mutuality and equality. ~ Patricia Evans, #NFDB
1224:The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. ~ Alex Pentland, #NFDB
1225:The people of Canada have worked hard to build a country that opens its doors to include all, regardless of their differences; a country that respects all, regardless of their differences; a country that demands equality for all, regardless of their differences. ~ Paul Martin, #NFDB
1226:The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. ~ Booker T Washington, #NFDB
1227:But don't you ever tell me the Revolution will bring equality, because men'll never be equal. It's just not possible. They can turn the country upside down and inside out, there'll always be the big people and the little people, the fat ones and the thin ones. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
1228:For the worship of the Master of works demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment of him in ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality is the sign of this adoration; it is the soul's ground on which true sacrifice and worship can be done. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
1229:In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres. ~ Eric Foner, #NFDB
1230:I think there’s a ton of fear in the perception of romance in part because there’s something very realistic in great romance — namely, that women have the right to demand relationships that are based on equality and honesty and trust and, yes, a great sex life. ~ Sarah MacLean, #NFDB
1231:In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can't buy love with gifts or favors, you can't hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can't be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
1232:In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
1233:In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
1234:I think, for one, the LGBTQ community is just a paragon of leadership, of standing up and saying "these are our rights, and we deserve them." As a model of activism, it's so wonderful what the community has been able to achieve towards goals like marriage equality. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
1235:With Bolivia, I had hope that a discriminated African-American, with another discriminated indigenous peasant leader, I hoped that together we could work for justice and equality. Not only for just two countries, Bolivia and USA, but for equality around the world. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
1236:Habitat gives us an opportunity which is very difficult to find: to reach out and work side by side with those who never have had a decent home-but work with them on a completely equal basis. It's not a big-shot, little-shot relationship. It's a sense of equality. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
1237:I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch, #NFDB
1238:She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases. It wasn’t fair. Jek had grown up in the Six Duchies, and claimed this equality as her birthright. Consequently, men usually ceded it to her. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
1239:The liberation of women has brought a lot of equality to the man, in the emancipation of the man as a bulldog; we can also be soft. It's interesting, because sometimes I maybe push the men a little bit more than the women, because it's a little bit less expected. ~ Mario Testino, #NFDB
1240:The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this - justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms. ~ James Fitzjames Stephen, #NFDB
1241:This simple truth is the essence of my message to Muslims throughout the world: know who you are, who you want to be, and start talking and working with whom you are not. Find common values and build with fellow citizens a society based on diversity and equality. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1242:We will never know peace in the world without balance. And we will never know balance without justice for all. Yet justice exists only where there is fairness and equality, when every man is treated and viewed equally. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1243:Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life. ~ Michael J Sandel, #NFDB
1244:Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. ~ Frank Chodorov, #NFDB
1245:In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
1246:In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
1247:I stand for the square deal. I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1248:Republican patience with how unionism deals with the political institutions, and with key issues like equality and human rights, will be tested because, obviously, there will be a battle a day on these matters. So lets face up to all of this with our eyes wide open. ~ Gerry Adams, #NFDB
1249:The messaging campaign that stigmatized the term feminist definitely worked on me when I was a teenager. I always believed in equality, but there's such intense pressure to be cool and not alienate boys, to not be a pain in the ass - to not be "that kind of woman." ~ Lindy West, #NFDB
1250:There were many who went in huddled procession,They knew not wither,But, at any rate, success or calamityWould attend all in equality.There was one who sought a new road,He went into direful thickets,And ultimately he died thus, alone;But they said he had courage. ~ Stephen Crane, #NFDB
1251:Before I die I want to have kids. Live in London. Own a pet giraffe. Skydive. Divide by zero. Play the piano. Speak French. Write a book. Travel to a different planet. Be a better dad than mine was. Feel good about myself. Go to New York City. Know equality. Live. ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
1252:I am convinced most Americans - yes even white Americans - are committed to justice and equality for all people. I am convinced that most Americans are disgusted and even ashamed that Nazism is alive and well in this country that fought to defeat its evil ideology. ~ Erwin McManus, #NFDB
1253:I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1254:Policies change, and programs change, according to time.But objective never changes. You might change your method of achieving the objective, but the objective never changes. Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
1255:We're evolving as a culture as well and as more equality gets supplanted in society, well, in the U.S. anyway, it's only helping women. We do have much more work to do though, in spreading awareness about where we fall short in our culture and in other cultures. ~ Barbara Crampton, #NFDB
1256:The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
1257:Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1258:After lengthy consideration, my views have evolved sufficiently to support marriage equality legislation. This position doesn't require any religious denomination to alter any of its tenets; it simply forbids government from discrimination regarding who can marry whom. ~ Tim Johnson, #NFDB
1259:a quote from the ancient orator Isocrates: “Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1260:Even if we change practices or behaviors, we are seeking transformed hearts. We must know in our bones God's heart for equality and wholeness in the Body of Christ then live our lives out of that truth, with invitation and joy, as living prophets of God's way of life. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
1261:Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens. ~ David Cameron, #NFDB
1262:Marriage, especially at my age, is not to be undertaken without full–er–consideration. Equality of birth, similarity of tastes, general suitability, and the same religious creed–all these things are necessary and the pros and cons have to be weighed and considered. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
1263:The Violence Against Women Act protects the lives of tens of thousands of domestic violence victims. But the U.S. must also support gender equality around the world, and that means acknowledging that some nations we consider to be our friends are no friends to women. ~ Barbara Boxer, #NFDB
1264:How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers. ~ Frances Wright, #NFDB
1265:I think anyone who wants the social, political and economic equality for women can call themselves a feminist. It does get trickier, of course, when you see anti-woman politicians or pundits claiming the feminist label while working hard to dismantle feminist gains. ~ Jessica Valenti, #NFDB
1266:It is in the faculty of noble, disinterested, unselfish love that lies the true gift and power of womanhood,--a power which makes us, not the equal of men (I never care to claim such equality), but their equivalents; more than their equivalents in a moral sense. ~ Frances Power Cobbe, #NFDB
1267:She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors. ~ Thorstein Veblen, #NFDB
1268:We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith. ~ Jane Addams, #NFDB
1269:We must continue to show tolerance for those whose opinions and sincerely held beliefs differ from our own. We must lead by example, finding a way to respect one another and to celebrate a culture that protects religious freedom while promoting equality under the law. ~ Carly Fiorina, #NFDB
1270:In life you may be poor or rich, but death is the great equalizer. The greatest communism is in death. Howsoever you live, it makes no difference; death happens equally. In life, equality is impossible; in death, inequality is impossible. Become aware of it, contemplate it. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1271:It wouldn't be fair to say that conservatives cherish property the way liberals cherish equality. But it would be fair to say that the takings clause is the conservatives recipe for judicial activism just as they say liberals have misused the equal protection clause. ~ Michael Kinsley, #NFDB
1272:So when people say that they don’t like my tone, or when they say they can’t support the “militancy” of Black Lives Matter, or when they say that it would be easier if we just didn’t talk about race all the time—I ask one question: Do you believe in justice and equality? ~ Ijeoma Oluo, #NFDB
1273:the one as much as it advances that of the other. If a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the motion of the other, that body also (because of the equality of the mutual pressure) will undergo an equal change, in its own motion, towards the contrary part. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
1274:Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
1275:If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
1276:The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1277:The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate - and probably did not imagine - that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God. ~ Elaine Pagels, #NFDB
1278:When women and blacks were let in, the system didn't miss a beat. When gays are given their equality, the system will be as stable/unstable as it was before. And when animals are liberated one day, the world will be a beautiful place and the system will still function. ~ Gary Yourofsky, #NFDB
1279:You don't impress the officials at NASA with a paper airplane. You don't boast about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Einstein because you can write 'H20.' And you don't boast about your goodness in the presence of the Perfect. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
1280:Any practice of business which would dominate the country by its own selfish interest is a destruction of equality of opportunity. Government in business, except in emergency, is also a destruction of equal opportunity and the incarnation of tyranny through bureaucracy. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
1281:as in Heinrich Heine’s (a contemporary of Kierkegaard’s) well-known saying that one should value above everything else ‘freedom, equality and crab soup’. ‘Crab soup’ stands here for all the small pleasures in the absence of which we become (mental, if not real) terrorists, ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
1282:But they didn’t. Because simply being able to vote isn’t the same as true equality. It’s difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly. In ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
1283:Democrats since the 1960s, in contrast, seemed narrow, too focused on helping victims and fighting for the rights of the oppressed. The Democrats offered just sugar (Care) and salt (Fairness as equality), whereas Republican morality appealed to all five taste receptors. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1284:If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
1285:People often ask me: Who has influenced you the most? Your father? Mahatma Gandhi? Yes, my choices were fundamentally influenced by them, by the spirit of equality they infused in me - my obsession for justice comes from my father, who in turn got it from Mahatma Gandhi. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
1286:We cannot talk with [animals] as we can with human beings, yet we can communicate with them on mental and emotional levels. They should, however, be accorded equality in that they should receive both compassion and respect; it is unworthy of us to exploit them in any way. ~ Rebecca Hall, #NFDB
1287:If in the past, after every lost war, the unlucky vanquished were divested forever of their honor and their equality of rights, the League of Nations would even now have to be satisfied with a whole series of non-equal and thus ultimately dishonorable and inferior nations. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1288:Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems. ~ Richard Heinberg, #NFDB
1289:Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1290:By seeing a same-sex couple in ordinary situations, that it might make people think twice about if they have, you know, questions about acceptance of LGBT equality, it's one way to just say that, you know, 'We're members of your family and gay people are like anybody else.' ~ George Takei, #NFDB
1291:I want to live a life of respect and equality. Of partnership. I want someone to love me for who I am, not what I can do for him. I want someone who keeps his promises. Who doesn’t see me as a conquest.” I sighed and stared down at the pattern in the rock. “I want to be happy. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1292:My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj; my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
1293:One must remember equality, yet also be aware of difference, for if the people are allowed to act as it pleases them without coming up against displeasure, if one gives rein to its desires without setting [any] limit, it becomes confused and can no longer take delight in anything. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
1294:The legal subordination of one sex to another - is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1295:We must appreciate that all over the world, right down the centuries, there have been great religions that have encouraged the idea of giving - of fighting poverty and of promoting the equality of human beings - whatever their background, whatever their political beliefs. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
1296:As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1297:Eisenhower was aware that the rest of the world was avidly watching as the United States, which regarded itself as the beacon of light for democracy and freedom, came to recognize the double standard that allowed two races to operate on such opposite standards of equality. ~ Hourly History, #NFDB
1298:Every single human civilization has failed over time, and my belief is that it's due to a lack of rational empathy, of understanding that if you don't have equality in your society, the conflicts you breed (whether internally or externally) will eventually cause its collapse. ~ Chris Kluwe, #NFDB
1299:If you believe in equality, if you believe in standing up for the rights of all, especially for people most affected by bigotry and discrimination, then you have no choice but to be present and accounted for when it comes to standing up for gays and lesbians in our society. ~ Michael Moore, #NFDB
1300:I never saw a distinction between a man and a woman. My grandparents and my mother were great examples of men and women, and they taught me equality. So I would fight with boys and wear my cousin's clothes. I would do whatever I wanted, and that's where I still stand today. ~ Jhene Aiko, #NFDB
1301:Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development and peace ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
1302:Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
1303:Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: “The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process.” Interviewed ~ Claudia Rankine, #NFDB
1304:The Malays are spiritually inclined, tolerant and easy-going. The non-Malays, and especially the Chinese, are materialistic, aggressive and have an appetite for work. For equality to come about, it is necessary that these strikingly contrasting races adjust to each other. ~ Mahathir Mohamad, #NFDB
1305:We have the history of slavery or inequality to women, and now the civil rights movement of the 21st century is the struggle for equality for the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And I think it's important for Americans to know about the times that we failed. ~ George Takei, #NFDB
1306:When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
1307:[A] crucial part of justice is equality, and that means, among other things, experiencing criminal justice equally. People who favor policies like Stop and Frisk should experience it themselves. Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
1308:Although it may be difficult in theory to know what is just and equal, the practical difficulty of inducing those to forbear who can, if they like, encroach, is far greater, for the weaker are always asking for equality and justice, but the stronger care for none of these things. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1309:I'll tell you how I'd like to be remembered: As a black man who won the heavyweight title - Who has humorous and who never looked down on those who looked up to him - A man who stood for freedom, justice and equality - And I wouldn't even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
1310:None of this was his fault, but it wasn't equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who'd alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
1311:One of the factors a country's economy depends on is human capital. If you don't provide women with adequate access to healthcare, education and employment, you lose at least half of your potential. So, gender equality and women's empowerment bring huge economic benefits. ~ Michelle Bachelet, #NFDB
1312:Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
1313:Real equality in films is going to take time and will directly reflect our society. So ladies, please speak up at home, at work, at school, everywhere. As more women continue to find their place in Hollywood we have to keep pushing for more dynamic and strong women's roles. ~ Barbara Crampton, #NFDB
1314:The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free. ~ Anthony Daniels, #NFDB
1315:The mandate I have received and for which I will speak with heart and head to implement over the next seven years had its four pillars - an inclusive citizenship, equality and participation and respect in a creative society creating an excellence in everything we Irish do. ~ Michael D Higgins, #NFDB
1316:We don't believe in equality. We believe in distinction of gender and distinction of responsibility. So, in a certain respect, a woman is more important and has a greater role than a man, and, in other respects, the man has a greater role and is more important than the woman. ~ Anjem Choudary, #NFDB
1317:All of this strife on the political front might just be the death throes of another set of [less-honorable] American beliefs, that have, at their core, the notion that equality is something the privileged group "gives" to those not so privileged - a reaching down, as it were. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
1318:Until our world decides that every human matters, that everyone has a right to food and safety and freedom and healthcare and equality, it is the obligation of those privileged to have food and safety and freedom and healthcare and equality to fight tirelessly for those who do not. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
1319:We will never know peace in the world without balance. And we will never know balance without justice for all. Yet justice exists only where there is fairness and equality, when every man is treated and viewed equally. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. -- Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1320:When I had arrived at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream, and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade. By the ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
1321:Political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere. ~ Mortimer Adler, #NFDB
1322:There are no demands - undue demands... There are many questions we get? Why China? Why now and the answer is why not?... There is no any hidden agenda in our cooperation with China, it is a relationship based on mutual understanding and equality; they understand our situation. ~ Jakaya Kikwete, #NFDB
1323:Though Emerson is a firm believer in the equality of the female sex, he has some secret reservations, and one of them involves the car. (There is something about these machines that makes men want to pound their chests and roar like gorillas. I speak figuratively, of course.) ~ Elizabeth Peters, #NFDB
1324:We admit of no government by divine right, believing that so far as power is concerned the Beneficent Creator has made no distinction amongst men; that all are upon an equality, and that the only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed. ~ William Henry Harrison, #NFDB
1325:We have all been hearing from childhood of such things as love, peace, charity, equality, and universal brotherhood; but they have become to us mere words without meaning, words which we repeat like parrots, and it has become quite natural for us to do so. We cannot help it. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1326:Iceland's Women's Day Off in 1975 saw 90% of Icelandic women take time off from their paid and unpaid work, an experience that not only showed women how much they contribute but turned Icelandic men into supporters of gender equality. I aim to achieve the same impact in the UK. ~ Catherine Mayer, #NFDB
1327:Pay 2 Play vividly tells the story of the threat posed to our political process by big money interests and what we can do to fight back to defend our Republic. This is a must-see movie for anyone who cares about the cause of democracy and the promise of political equality for all. ~ John Bonifaz, #NFDB
1328:The truth is that there is no such thing as equality. It does not exist in any physical, material, legal, philosophical, or spiritual sense. One might as usefully attempt to direct the entire efforts of a society's people and institutions towards the well-being of unicorns and fairies. ~ Vox Day, #NFDB
1329:A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
1330:Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1331:Any time you know you're within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don't die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
1332:I'm excited that more people, especially men, are understanding that equality is good for them. I don't want men to want equality for women because they're being nice to their colleagues and daughters. I want men to want it because it's better for their companies and their lives. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
1333:The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1334:A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1335:But a crucial part of justice is equality. And that means, among many other things, experiencing criminal justice equally. People who favor policies like stop and frisk should experience it themselves. Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
1336:Undoubtedly equality of goods is just; but, being unable to cause might to obey justice, men has made it just to obey might. Unable to strengthen justice, they have justified might--so that the just and the strong should unite, and there should be peace, which is the sovereign good. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1337:I believe in a real democratic system, with a state of law and freedom of the press. I believe in a free, open-market economy integrated with the world. And I believe in equality of opportunity. Those are my basic beliefs. On top of that, of course, I believe in some moral values. ~ Sebastian Pinera, #NFDB
1338:If you want to get power, listen carefully. Don't be impulsive. Don't arrogantly insert your opinion. Express gratitude. Cultivate a culture of respect. Show your respect for other people's efforts. Promote a culture of equality, too, where everybody's opinion matters. Tell stories. ~ Dacher Keltner, #NFDB
1339:I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
1340:I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1341:[Professor Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms. ~ Henry Edward Armstrong, #NFDB
1342:The liberals who demanded equality of taxation on behalf of the poor, for instance, did not imagine that they would obtain progressive taxation to the disadvantage of the well-off, and that they would end up with an arrangement in which taxes are voted by those who do not pay them. ~ Vilfredo Pareto, #NFDB
1343:A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
1344:Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8. ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
1345:Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice—many female abolition societies refused to allow black members. ~ Gail Collins, #NFDB
1346:Females of all ages acted as though concern for or rage at male domination or gender equality was all that was needed to make one a “feminist.” Without confronting internalized sexism women who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their interactions with other women. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1347:If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1348:It took me quite a while to even admit that I was a feminist because I was ignorant of what it meant to be a feminist. I grew up believing in equality - believing that women and men were created equal and that we could be stronger together - but I didn't know that made me a feminist. ~ Justin Baldoni, #NFDB
1349:So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
1350:The liberal philosophy of race relations emphasized the stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a government that celebrates freedom and equality yet denies both on account of race. This philosophy, born in the North, never gained much traction among Southern whites or blacks. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1351:When equality is treated...as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1352:Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.... The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1353:I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age. ~ Phyllis McGinley, #NFDB
1354:Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1355:It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be nonracist. Few people outside the clan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra step. They must become anti-racist. ~ Clarence Page, #NFDB
1356:There's going to be a demand for perfectionism on the part of Hillary Clinton, or any other pro-equality woman candidate, that would not be made of men. There are going to be attacks based on different standards of morality and different standards of dress and physical attractiveness. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
1357:We fought for equality for all, for women too. For freethinking, fighting the lies of church and state, for what Nat called the Republic of Letters. That was what we believed in twenty years ago. But now, seems like all that has gone. It’s church and Sunday best, and votes for men.” “What ~ M J Carter, #NFDB
1358:For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King’s side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin’s memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1359:I don't consider myself a feminist, but I feel very empowered as a woman, and I've used all my resources widely. I believe in equality, but that's just naturally happening. I still want a door opened for me, to be treated like a lady, but I also want equal rights for women, of course. ~ Pamela Anderson, #NFDB
1360:People have foolishly mistaken equality for sameness. Equality of the genders means that both have equal value and worth, and one is not better than the other. But it doesn't mean we're all exactly the same. And many of us who still believe in gender separation say, 'Vive la difference! ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
1361:Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law. ~ Barney Frank, #NFDB
1362:Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams. ~ Bella Abzug, #NFDB
1363:Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB
1364:Jealousy is the foundation of equality, but not of liberty ; putting man constantly on his guard against the encroachments of his neighbors. It prevents affability between different classes. There is no society without affection, without tradition, without respect, without mutual amenity. ~ Ernest Renan, #NFDB
1365:The power of an idea whose time has come is really the power of Spirit at work. Equality for all is how God is, for instance, and we seek to be like God. When enough of us, along with one or two at visionary consciousness, begin to contemplate these in-Spirit ideas, they can't be stopped. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1366:Earth is our birth, our death, enveloping us within its component spheres of biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, technosphere, and noösphere. Planet Earth becomes our god, inspiration, truth, perfection, equality, and source of power. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind, #NFDB
1367:Germans Francis Grund, and Francis Lieber, and the Pole Adam G. de Gurowski all wrote about the striking social equality they found in America, the absence of differences in status. They all noted the American obsession with work and the restless quest for the “almighty dollar.”18 ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1368:True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth, universal brotherhood and good will, and a constant and earnest striving toward the principles and ideals on which this country was founded. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
1369:We live in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe - liberty, equality and justice for all - are encountering extraordinary challenges, ... But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
1370:Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
1371:few things subvert true gender equality in the workplace more than a micro-aggressions mentality that condemns normal male behavior and “rescues” a particular young woman even when she hasn’t been harmed. Resentment follows among most males and even many females, and productivity declines. ~ Michael Gurian, #NFDB
1372:There was indeed a clear difference between the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats on the issue of race and racial equality. Southern Democrats had been willing to form an entire nation on the foundation of white supremacy – and there was no doubt that the South was strongly Democratic. ~ David Barton, #NFDB
1373:The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
1374:Without classifying radical thought as a Spinozistic tendency, combining one-substance doctrine or philosophical monism with democracy and a purely secular moral philosophy based on equality, the basic mechanics of eighteenth-century controversy, thought, and polemics cannot be grasped. ~ Jonathan I Israel, #NFDB
1375:Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery. ~ James F Cooper, #NFDB
1376:I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide? ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
1377:The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: 'Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry coal.' ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
1378:The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake. ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB
1379:We're more concerned about climate or economic equality or racial justice or anything else that is good for people and the planet, we simply must also spend some time wresting back our money-marinated democracy. This will require getting money out of politics and then getting people back in. ~ Annie Leonard, #NFDB
1380:Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1381:I observed that equality of condition, though it has not there reached the extreme limit which it seems to have attained in the United States, is constantly approaching it; and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1382:Another black woman, Margaret Wright, said she was not fighting for equality with men if it meant equality in the world of killing, the world of competition. "I don't want to compete on no damned exploitative level. I don't want to exploit nobody. . . . I want the right to be black and me. . . . ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
1383:As far as male and female are concerned, difference is a biological fact, whereas equality is a political, ethical and social concept. No rule of nature or of social organization says that the sexes have to be the same or do the same things in order to be social, political and economic equals. ~ Alice S Rossi, #NFDB
1384:Being a sanctuary city, for the people of organize and run it, is a great source of pride. 'Social justice! Fairness, equality, diversity!" All the things that make liberals great people and make you a schlub. The more pressures and demands on their social services, the better people they are. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1385:Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery. ~ James F Cooper, #NFDB
1386:it must be known that the affection and attachment which the soul has for creatures renders the soul like to these creatures; and, the greater is its affection, the closer is the equality and likeness between them; for love creates a likeness between that which loves and that which is loved. ~ Juan de la Cruz, #NFDB
1387:Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal—some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father’s estates, not the younger—so why should men and women be treated equally? ~ Ian Mortimer, #NFDB
1388:There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded; some men never leave the country, some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1389:Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting--even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but struck, with rough equality and little regard to position, achievement, or moral desert. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB
1390:People need to free their minds of racial prejudice and believe in equality for all and freedom regardless of race. It would be a good thing if all people were treated equally and justly and not be discriminated against because of race or religion or anything that makes them different from others. ~ Rosa Parks, #NFDB
1391:The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success). ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1392:The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
1393:Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy.92 For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it “arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1394:And if the love of political equality rests on the Liberty/oppression and Care/harm foundations rather than the Fairness/cheating foundation, then the Fairness foundation no longer has a split personality; it’s no longer about equality and proportionality. It is primarily about proportionality. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1395:I sincerely wish you may find it convenient to come here. the pleasure of the trip will be less than you expect, but the utility greater. it will make you adore your own country, it's soil, it's climate, it's equality, liberty, laws, people & manners. my god! how little do my countrymen know. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1396:Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1397:The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1398:The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation. ~ Wendy Brown, #NFDB
1399:There were many who went in huddled procession,
They knew not wither,
But, at any rate, success or calamity
Would attend all in equality.
There was one who sought a new road,
He went into direful thickets,
And ultimately he died thus, alone;
But they said he had courage. ~ Stephen Crane,#NFDB
1400:Americans had to work around the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment, and more broadly around their announced traditions of equality; and in consequence their law was a law of covert devices and legal subterfuges. American law, as Krieger wrote, was a law of Umwege, devious legal pathways. ~ James Q Whitman, #NFDB
1401:In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself. ~ Vartan Gregorian, #NFDB
1402:let’s make them work for us. Let’s keep them busy in committees defending our full civil rights in return for our full support and let them use it as a wedge issue against the GOP. The last thing leading Republicans want to do, after all, is have an open conversation about LGBT equality. ~ Michelangelo Signorile, #NFDB
1403:Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions. The present moment finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father's. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1404:It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I dont really expect any credit for going in that direction. Its the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people dont see that as so patently obvious as it should be? ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
1405:There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equakity will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
1406:What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule. ~ Pankaj Mishra, #NFDB
1407:With increasing frequency in recent times, people have confused privileges with rights, objectivity with subjectivity, wishing with willing, wanting with needing, price with value, affluence with fulfillment, reality with appearance, and sameness with equality. Not to mention dis-ease with disease. ~ Lou Marinoff, #NFDB
1408:As a result of our [my campaign's] discussions and other interactions with gay and lesbian voters across the state, I am more convinced than ever that as we seek to establish full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent [Ted Kennedy]. ~ Mitt Romney, #NFDB
1409:It needs to be emphasized that the Church vigorously advocated and defended democracy in northern Italy. Not only did the Church unequivocally assert moral equality, but it also ventured into the political arena, with bishops and cardinals playing a leading role on behalf of expanding the franchise. ~ Rodney Stark, #NFDB
1410:The value of "one person, one vote," the value of equality, is a value that was given to us more than 50 years ago as a central part of our constitutional tradition. So, under that principle, we ought to be applying the same standard today that I would have said we should have applied a year ago. ~ Lawrence Lessig, #NFDB
1411:Based on Locke’s ideas of knowledge, and Coke’s ideas of law, the antiauthoritarian equality of all men in their ability to use reason to discern the truth for themselves is logically self-evident. It is intuitive knowledge. And that’s the heart of—and the most powerful argument for—democracy. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
1412:Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery. ~ James Fenimore Cooper, #NFDB
1413:I personally believe that gender equality underlines every other equality, and certainly the issue of sexuality. For instance, if we didn’t distinguish between gender, in terms of giving different genders disparate values and attributes, what problem would we have with two men loving each other? ~ Abigail Tarttelin, #NFDB
1414:I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR. ~ Thaddeus Stevens, #NFDB
1415:Ironically, the Democrats’ great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto “all men are created equal,” Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal. ~ Daniel Walker Howe, #NFDB
1416:No principle of general law is more universally acknowledged, than the perfect equality of nations. Russia and Geneva have equal rights. It results from this equality, that no one can rightfully impose a rule on another....As no nation can prescribe a rule for others, none can make a law of nations. ~ John Marshall, #NFDB
1417:Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform. As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over. ~ Bernd Heinrich, #NFDB
1418:These two sentiments, "liberty and equality," do not necessarily lead to calumny, rapine, assassination, poisoning, and devastation of the lands of neighbors; but, the towering ambition and thirst for power of the great precipitate them head-long into every species of crime in all periods and all places. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
1419:To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
1420:When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
1421:Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s and famously proclaimed the emergence of Homo democraticus, a cheeky creature whose passion for equality and self-interest was tempered only by his ability to join fellow citizens in all manner of mutual associations for pragmatic benefit. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1422:Sweden opted for the latter, deciding that the only correct course was to work toward eliminating prostitution and creating a society based on gender equality, a society in which prostitution is seen as incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human being and the equal rights of women and men. ~ Victor Malarek, #NFDB
1423:Thinking about the world writ large, I am more optimistic than not that we will tackle our most pressing challenges, whether poverty or equality for women and girls or climate change; but I also know we'll only tackle them if people are really informed about the challenge and what's proven to work. ~ Chelsea Clinton, #NFDB
1424:When people can get away with crimes just because they are wealthy or have the right connections, the scales are tipped against fairness and equality. The weight of corruption then becomes so heavy that it creates a dent that forces the world to become slanted, so much so — that justice just slips off. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1425:All men are created equal and all women are created equal as well, but [equality] seems much clearer when it comes to race issues. In the realms of man/woman, man/man, woman/woman love, it seems all up for grabs now. We are exploring so much, but I think we gotta go for the fight for all equality first. ~ Carly Simon, #NFDB
1426:Education is key. We have to keep girls in school and give them the same opportunities that boys have. They need access to vocational training and mentorship, as well. It's an issue of gender equality, which is fortunately a hot topic right now, but we need to keep at it and not rest on our laurels. ~ Gillian Anderson, #NFDB
1427:I always go with the dictionary definition of feminism, which is just social, political and economic equality for women. And that's kind of a strategic thing on my part, because I think that it's the hardest definition to argue with. You know, who doesn't want that? Everyone wants equality for women. ~ Jessica Valenti, #NFDB
1428:So many marriages crumble because humility is lacking. As believers, isn’t that a little sad? We strive for control and equality, caught up in a power struggle rather than the humble self-sacrifice of Christ. So many women focus on what submission does not mean, and they never embrace what it does mean. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
1429:The movement of Pakistan which the Quaid-e-Azam launched was ethical in inspiration and ideological in content. The story of this movement is a story of the ideals of equality, fraternity and social and economic justice struggling against the forces of domination, exploitation, intolerance and tyranny. ~ Fatima Jinnah, #NFDB
1430:Americans' deepest religion is often equality. The notion that Christ alone is God-superior, authoritative, supernatural-and that Christ's teaching and person is far greater than Buddha's, or Muhammad's, or Moses's, no matter how much great and good wisdom may be contained in those others, is scandalous. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
1431:Even the Declaration of Independence starts out all men are created equal, so I see my advocacy as part of an effort to make the equality principle everything the founders would have wanted it to be if they weren't held back by the society in which they lived and particularly the shame of slavery. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, #NFDB
1432:Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies. ~ Estelle Freedman, #NFDB
1433:I think that, if we are to feel at home in the world after the present war, we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes this will bring about, I do not know, but I am convinced that they will be profound and of the greatest importance. 1 ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1434:Something as important as marriage equality, which is now a constitutional right [in the USA], is something that cannot be denied. It's also very un-Christian, if you think about the way Christ was and Christ's teachings. This is not loving. This is anger. This is hatred. This is bigotry. And it's wrong. ~ Margaret Cho, #NFDB
1435:The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1436:When people can get away with crimes just because they are wealthy or have the right connections, the scales are immediately tipped against fairness and equality. The weight of corruption then becomes so heavy that it creates a dent that forces the world to become so slanted — that justice just slips off. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1437:Women will not return to sexual and political subjection without a fight to the death. But some people are still unaccountably angry that that sweeping social change was ever thought of, and have hung screaming on to our ankles every step of the long, slow trudge to gender equality. We are not there yet. ~ Laurie Penny, #NFDB
1438:One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1439:The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God, whether we call him Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, or Jah. ~ Afrika Bambaataa, #NFDB
1440:We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn't a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. ~ Beyonce Knowles, #NFDB
1441:But that's exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike." For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. "No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"...Like and equal are two entirely different things. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
1442:I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that's difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who's there to give me an afterlife? ~ Michael Emerson, #NFDB
1443:May you, gentlemen, desire equality as I myself desire it; may you, for the eternal happiness of our country, become its propagators and its heralds; may I be the last of your pensioners! Of all the wishes that I can frame, that, gentlemen, is the most worthy of you and the most honorable for me. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
1444:My father offered his life so our democracy could live. My mother devoted her life to nurturing that democracy. I will dedicate my life to making our democracy reach its fullest potential: that of ensuring equality for all. My family has sacrificed much and I am willing to do this again if necessary. ~ Benigno Aquino III, #NFDB
1445:Organized religion is in substance a mystification, a means of hiding the wickedness of the social system. If the Christian principles of love, equality, and freedom were really practiced instead of only preached, there would be no need for a special institution(the church) to take care of those principles. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1446:Political and social justice requires, not the disintegration of a country and destruction or humiliation of a class which shows initiative, intelligence and drive, but equality of opportunity for all, genuine freedom for self-fulfilment, in which all men irrespective of caste or creed may share. ~ Syama Prasad Mukherjee, #NFDB
1447:The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1448:To benefit from this resource in our midst,
blacks must supplement the forms and patterns of striving for racial equality with innovative forms of personal self-image, group organization, resource collection and distribution, and strategic planning, using the concept of racial fortuity as a guideline. ~ Derrick A Bell,#NFDB
1449:Americans have swapped the awkward phrase “same-sex marriage” for the term “marriage equality.” The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1450:On July 11, Wilson asked why, if slaves were admitted as people, they weren’t “admitted as Citizens.” And “then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens?” And, if they weren’t admitted as people, “Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation? ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1451:So I think it is demonstrated that the God being good, and the Lord powerful, they save with a righteousness and equality which extend to all that turn to Him, whether here or elsewhere. For it is not here alone that the active power of God is beforehand, but it is everywhere and is always at work. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
1452:The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
1453:The idea of being a feminist-so many women have come to this idea of it being anti-male and not able to connect with the opposite sex-but what feminism is about is equality and human rights. For me that is just an essential part of my identity. I hope [Girls] contributes to a continuance of feminist dialogue ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
1454:The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands. ~ Laura Chinchilla, #NFDB
1455:The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
1456:This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy - a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1457:A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956 Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1458:Equality is a lie,” Bane told her. “A myth to appease the masses. Simply look around and you will see the lie for what it is! There are those with power, those with the strength and will to lead. And there are those meant to follow—those incapable of anything but servitude and a meager, worthless existence. ~ Drew Karpyshyn, #NFDB
1459:If the immigrant is responsible for assimilation of the country, and some of these people are in fact are born there. But if you find it unwelcoming to your own barbaric notions of equality, that is not on the country, that is on you. If you leave a horrible place, please leave your horrible practices behind. ~ Greg Gutfeld, #NFDB
1460:We are conditioned to be consumers since birth. I still think it's kind of incumbent on us as consumers to know the difference between something that's truly progressive and something that's just trying to get us to buy a product. Capitalism, ultimately, it's not about equality, it's not about social justice. ~ Andi Zeisler, #NFDB
1461:And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."
"So grass is death too-it grows out of our buried bodies. The grass was so many different things at once, it was bewildering.
So grass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for God, and for hope. ~ John Green,#NFDB
1462:Based on Locke’s ideas of knowledge, and Coke’s ideas of law, the antiauthoritarian equality of all men in their ability to use reason to discern the truth for themselves is logically self-evident. It is intuitive knowledge. And that’s the heart of—and the most powerful argument for—democracy. Jefferson ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
1463:A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.9 ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
1464:Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. ~ Susan J Douglas, #NFDB
1465:From the standpoint of modern political science the slave holders were right in declaring that liberty can be given only to those who have political capacity enough to use it, and they were also right in maintaining that two greatly unequal races cannot exist side by side on terms of perfect equality. ~ Charles Edward Merriam, #NFDB
1466:In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it or he would be obviously below it. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1467:You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. ~ Bono, #NFDB
1468:A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1469:Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal. Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God. ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick, #NFDB
1470:I've come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the respected, and the privileged among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1471:France placed the state above society , democracy above constitutionalism, and equality above liberty. As a result, for much of the nineteenth century it was democratic, with broad suffrage and elections, but hardly liberal. it was certainly a less secure home for individual freedom than was England or America. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
1472:If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality. ~ Tibor R Machan, #NFDB
1473:It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun. There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women…Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically. ~ Alice Paul, #NFDB
1474:I've been a staunch advocate of women's empowerment, and I've worked hard throughout my career to advance the cause. It is heartening to see that gender equality is really becoming more of a reality. There is still much more to be done, and I'm confident that, by working together, we can empower women worldwide. ~ Madhuri Dixit, #NFDB
1475:But even when the principle of equal treatment was betrayed, American leaders in every era have emphatically affirmed it, not so much out of hypocrisy as out of aspiration. Indeed, for those who were devoted to justice, the persistence of inequality was precisely what made equality before the law so imperative. ~ Glenn Greenwald, #NFDB
1476:Does God require so much of us, and leave others without burdens? {324} Is this equality? Are we to be thus hurried on from one care to another, one part of the work to another, and have but little time to bring up our children? Many nights, while others have been sleeping, have been spent by me in bitter weeping. ~ James White, #NFDB
1477:I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide. ~ Ian Mckellen, #NFDB
1478:Wherever there is evil and wherever there is ignorance and want of knowledge, I have found out by experience that all evil comes, as our scriptures say, relying upon differences, and that all good comes from faith in equality, in the underlying sameness and oneness of things. This is the great Vedantic ideal. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1479:A shared choice movement sees the fetus as the genes of a woman and the genes of a man; the flesh of the woman, the flesh of the man; the bone of a woman, the bone of a man; the responsibility of a woman, the responsibility of a man; the rights of a woman, the rights of a man. It desires a transition to equality. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
1480:God is like “Look, dude, I made you a chick.
She is made of your rib, so she might be kinda dumb
I tried just making one out of clay, like how I made you
but she was harboring all these problematic delusions of equality
so I had to find a workaround
anyway, she’s totally hot, so don’t worry about it. ~ Cory O Brien,#NFDB
1481:His life’s words had mostly been spoken now, his speeches and letters, his books and protest chants, already etched not just into his story but into humanity’s as a whole. I could feel all of it in the brief moment I had with him—the dignity and spirit that had coaxed equality from a place where none had existed. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
1482:If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
1483:If you can't bring them down economically you kill them, that's how you promote equality. You build a wall to keep them in the country. Socialism, communism, build walls to make sure people can't get out. In a country that's communist and builds a wall, there's nobody trying to get in. Works every time it's tried. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1484:Indeed, under the protocols of contemporary progressivism, in the abstract being loudly for equality means in the concrete having a lot more things than most anyone else. Modern liberalism has descended into the art of rich people blaming the lower middle class for not being generous enough with money they don’t have. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1485:It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically. In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very dangerous nucleus for a political movement. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1486:I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races: that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1487:No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature. ~ Susan B Anthony, #NFDB
1488:The gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact. It has the essential characteristics of one: it is universal, durable, and daily proves itself to be beyond the reach of man’s powers. Not a single event, not a single individual, fails to contribute to its development. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1489:And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
1490:A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1491:[Giving] is the essence of the great religions of the world - whether you are discussing the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Christian religion. It is an essential fundamental principle of all religions, whatever stage of development a society has reached, to sympathize with others and to promote that spirit of equality. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
1492:It’s time to slam the door shut on that era. And to open another door, through which we can welcome equality: between genders, among marital partners, for everyone in every circumstance. Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It’s a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1493:Senator Sessions has opposed protections for LGBT individuals. He's spoken out against Freedom Corps' marriage equality decision. He opposed the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He opposed the nomination of Loretta Lynch, the nation's first African-American woman to serve as attorney general. These things worry me. ~ Patrick Leahy, #NFDB
1494:So let us recognise our shame and guilt; let us ache with self-reflection; let us eradicate the repetition of suffering and resist anger; let us learn to concretely tend to the suffering of an individual, of our common citizens, with equality; let us learn to live life with honour and dignity and a wealth of humanity. ~ Xiaobo Liu, #NFDB
1495:There is no such thing as equality, other than of opportunity and before the law. But there is no equality of what's gonna happen to you when you engage or pursue your opportunity, and there's no guarantee that's what's gonna happen to you once you have your equality before the law. There is no equality of outcome. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1496:I cannot imagine why it is that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical? ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1497:I’m sorry, but eeeeeeeww. A woman telling another woman that she’s not likable because she’s smart is gross. It’s a big F-U to all the women who have fought and continue to fight for ladies’ equality, and furthermore, it continues the cycle of discouraging women from being as well rounded as men are allowed to be. ~ Phoebe Robinson, #NFDB
1498:The doctrine of equality! ... But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice ... "Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal" that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, "never make the unequal equal". ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1499:[T]his is the land of liberty and equality, where a man sees and feels that he is a man merely, and that he can no longer exist, [except if] he can himself procure the means of support. —Robert Stuart, journal postscript for October 13, 1812, while starving in today’s Wyoming, shortly before discovering the South Pass ~ Peter Stark, #NFDB
1500:Cooperation called fraternity in the classic French formula is as much a part of the democratic ideal as is personal initiative. That cultural conditions were allowed to develop (markedly so in the economic phase) which subordinated cooperativeness to liberty and equality serves to explain the decline in the two latter. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
109 Integral Yoga
20 Poetry
17 Philosophy
11 Christianity
7 Occultism
6 Psychology
3 Yoga
3 Buddhism
1 Science
1 Mythology
1 Mysticism
1 Kabbalah
1 Integral Theory
1 Fiction
1 Cybernetics
1 Alchemy
147 Sri Aurobindo
44 The Mother
23 Satprem
17 Nolini Kanta Gupta
11 A B Purani
8 Walt Whitman
6 Plotinus
5 Plato
5 Friedrich Nietzsche
3 William Wordsworth
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Saint Augustine of Hippo
3 James George Frazer
3 Carl Jung
2 Sri Ramakrishna
2 Jordan Peterson
2 John Keats
2 Bokar Rinpoche
2 Aleister Crowley
2 Aldous Huxley
40 The Synthesis Of Yoga
18 Essays On The Gita
13 Letters On Yoga II
12 Letters On Yoga IV
11 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
8 Whitman - Poems
8 Record of Yoga
8 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
7 The Life Divine
6 The Human Cycle
6 Agenda Vol 03
5 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
5 Talks
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
4 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
4 Agenda Vol 06
4 Agenda Vol 04
3 Wordsworth - Poems
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Golden Bough
3 Some Answers From The Mother
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
3 Letters On Yoga I
3 Isha Upanishad
3 Essays Divine And Human
3 City of God
3 Agenda Vol 11
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
2 Tara - The Feminine Divine
2 Savitri
2 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
2 Questions And Answers 1956
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
2 Maps of Meaning
2 Liber ABA
2 Keats - Poems
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
2 Agenda Vol 09
2 Agenda Vol 08
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Even when man descends from this dizzy height, he is devoid of ideas of "I" and "mine"; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of Equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he — that is to say, his body — is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brahman that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of Light. In the Vedanta books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for the world can return
from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
This transformation of the human personality into the Divine perhaps even the mere connection of the human with the Divine is probably regarded as a chimera by the modern mind. To the modern mind it would appear as the apotheosis of a human personality which is against its idea of Equality of men. Its difficulty is partly due to the notion that the Divine is unlimited and illimitable while a 'personality', however high and grand, seems to demand imposition, or assumption, of limitation. In this connection Sri Aurobindo said during an evening talk that no human manifestation can be illimitable and unlimited, but the manifestation in the limited should reflect the unlimited, the Transcendent Beyond.
This possibility of the human touching and manifesting the Divine has been realised during the course of human history whenever a great spiritual Light has appeared on earth. One of the purposes of this book is to show how Sri Aurobindo himself reflected the unlimited Beyond in his own self.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For you I want consciousness, knowledge, artistic capacity, selfmastery in peace and perfect Equality, and the happiness that is
the result of spiritual realisation. Is this too grand and vast a
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
perfect Equality of soul.
Mother, my life is dry, it was always so; the dryness of
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is and holds fast to it, refusing to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself, to do what his inmost nature demands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed there may be much difference in the forms that different souls take. But because each is itself, therefore each is grounded upon the fundamental Equality of things. All our valuations are in reference to some standard or other set up with a particular end in view, but that is a question of the practical world which in no way takes away from the intrinsic value of the greatness of the soul. So long as the thing is there, the how of it does not matter. Infinite are the ways of manifestation and all of them the very highest and the most sublime, provided they are a manifestation of the soul itself, provided they rise and flow from the same level. Whether it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine inflatus.
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out, effectuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure, aspectBhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and shine in its opal clarity and translucency.
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The best way to prepare oneself for the spiritual life when one has to live in the ordinary occupations and surroundings is to cultivate an entire Equality and detachment and the samata of the Gita with the faith that the Divine is there and the Divine Will at work in all things even though at present under the conditions of a world of Ignorance. Beyond this are the Light and Ananda towards which life is working, but the best way for their advent and foundation in the individual being and nature is to grow in this spiritual Equality. That would also solve your difficulty about things unpleasant and disagreeable. All unpleasantness should be faced with this spirit of samata.
I may say briefly that there are two states of consciousness in either of which one can live. One is a higher consciousness which stands above the play of life and governs it; this is variously called the Self, the Spirit or the Divine. The other is the normal consciousness in which men live; it is something quite superficial, an instrument of the Spirit for the play of life. Those who live and act in the normal consciousness are governed entirely by the common movements of the mind and are naturally subject to grief and joy and anxiety and desire or to everything else that makes up the ordinary stuff of life.
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The French Revolution wanted to remould human society and its ideal was liberty, Equality and fraternity. It pulled down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" remained always in effect a cry in the wilderness. Another wave of idealism is now running over the earth and the Bolshevists are its most fiercely practical exponents. Instead of dealing merely with the political machinery, the Socialistic Revolution tries to break and remake, above all, the social machinery. But judged from the results as yet attained and the tendencies at work, few are the reasons to hope but many to fear the worst. Even education does not seem to promise us anything better. Which nation was better educatedin the sense we understood and still commonly understand the wordthan Germany?
And yet we have no hesitation today to call them Huns and Barbarians. That education is not giving us the right thing is proved further by the fact that we are constantly changing our programmes and curriculums, everyday remodelling old institutions and founding new ones. Even a revolution in the educational system will not bring about the desired millennium, so long as we lay so much stress upon the system and not upon man himself. And finally, look to all the religions of the worldwe have enough of creeds and dogmas, of sermons and mantras, of churches and templesand yet human life and society do not seem to be any the more worthy for it.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
this calm and indifference through a very intense sadhana resulting in a perfect Equality for which good and bad, pleasant
and unpleasant no longer exist. But in that case, mental activity
0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first sign is perfect Equality as Sri Aurobindo has described it (you must know it, theres a whole chapter on Equality, samat, in The Synthesis of Yoga)exactly as he described it with such wonderful precision! But this Equality (which is not equanimity) is a particular STATE where one relates to all things, outer and inner, and to each individual thing, in the same way. That is truly perfect Equality: vibrations from things, from people, from contacts have no power to alter that state.
In my reply I mentioned this first, though I didnt give him all these explanations. I put it in a few words as a kind of test of his intelligence, and in a somewhat cryptic form to see if he would understand.
--
All this [the world, the Ashram] is held in my consciousness with a kind of essential compassion applying equally to all things, all difficulties, all obstacles. I receive letters by the dozens, as you know, and each person comes to me with his own little misery or problem, inner or outer (a tiny pimple becomes a mountain). When people come to me, my inner consciousness always responds in the same way, with a kind of Equality and compassion for all. But when people are talking to me or I am reading a letter and my body grows conscious of what it calls the to-do they make over their miseries, it has a kind of feeling (I mean there is a feeling in the cells): Why do they take things like that! They are making things much more difficult. The body understands. It understands that their way of taking the least little difficulty in such a blind, egotistical and self-centered manner, increases its difficulties furiously!
Its a rather amusing sensation, a combination of sensation and feeling, that the ordinary human attitude towards things multiplies and magnifies the difficulties to FANTASTIC proportions; while if they simply had the true attitudea NORMAL attitude, quite simple, uncomplicatedahh, all life would be much easier. For the body feels the vibrations (those very vibrations which concentrate to form a body), it feels their nature and sees that its normal reaction, a peaceful and confident reaction, makes things so much easier! But as soon as this agitation of anxiety, fear, discontent comes in, the reaction of a will that doesnt want any of it oh, right away it becomes like water boiling: pff! pff! pff! like a machine. While if the difficulty is accepted with confidence and simplicity, its reduced to its minimum, and I mean purely materially, in the material vibration itself.
--
1) A perfect and constant Equality
2) An absolute certainty in knowledge.
To be perfect, the Equality must be invariable and spontaneous, effortless, towards all circumstances, all happenings, all contacts, material or psychological, irrespective of their character and impact.
The absolute and indisputable certainty of an infallible knowledge through identity.
--
'There is no longer this kind of opposition between what is an agreeable impact and what is a disagreeable one. There are no more "agreeable" things and "disagreeable" things: they are simply vibrations one registers. Usually when people receive a shock they do this (gesture of recoil), then they reflect, concentrate, and finally restore peace. But Equality does not mean that! That's not what it is. The state must be SPONTANEOUS, constant and invariable.'
Atman: the Self or Spirit.
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It gets much less winded, of course, when you have the inner Equality of the divine Presence. So much fatigue is due to excess tension produced by desire or effort or struggle, by the constant battle against all opposing forces. All that can go.
We tire ourselves out quite needlessly.
0 1962-01-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Perfect Equality
abolishing all possibility
0 1962-01-12 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I mentioned the principal psychological requirement in my answer to that American: a state of perfect Equality. This is an ABSOLUTE condition. Over the years since that experience I have observed that no supramental vibration whatsoever can be transmitted without this perfect Equality. The slightest contradiction of that Equalityin other words, the least movement of ego, of egoistic preference and everything is blocked, transmission stops. This is already quite a large stumbling block.
And, over and above this, for the realization to be total, there are two other conditions, which arent easy either. Intellectually, theyre not too difficult; in fact, for someone who has practiced yoga, followed a discipline (I am not speaking here of just anyone), theyre relatively easy. Psychologically too, given this Equality, theres no great difficulty. But as soon as you come to the material plane the physical plane and then to the body, it isnt easy. These two conditions are first, the power to expand, to widen almost indefinitely, enabling you to widen to the dimensions of the supramental consciousness which is total. The supramental consciousness is the consciousness of the Supreme in his totality. By totality, I mean the Supreme in his aspect of Manifestation. Naturally, from a higher point of view, from the viewpoint of the essence the essence of that which in Manifestation becomes the Supermindwhats necessary is a capacity for total identification with the Supreme, not only in his aspect of Manifestation, but in his static or nirvanic aspect, outside of the Manifestation: Nonbeing. But in addition, one must be capable of identifying with the Supreme in the Becoming. And that implies both these things: an expansion that is nothing less than indefinite, and that should simultaneously be a total plasticity enabling one to follow the Supreme in his Becoming. You dont merely have to be as vast as the universe at one point in time, but indefinitely in the Becoming. These are the two conditions. They must be potentially present.
Down to the vital, we are still in the realm of things that are more than feasible they are done. But on the material level it results in my misadventures of the other day.2
--
So we can say that the Supermind can express itself through a terrestrial consciousness only when there is a constant state of perfect Equality Equality arising out of spiritual identification with the Supreme: all becomes the Supreme in perfect Equality. And it must be automatic, not an Equality obtained through conscious will or intellectual effort or an understanding preceding the state itselfnone of that. It has to be spontaneous and automatic; one must no longer react to what comes from outside as though it were coming from outside. That pattern of reception and reaction must be replaced by a state of constant perception and (I dont mean identical in all cases, because each thing necessarily calls forth its own particular reaction) but practically free from all rebound, you might say. Its the difference between something coming from outside and striking you, making you react, and something freely circulating and quite naturally generating the vibrations needed for the overall action. I dont know if I am making myself clear. Its the difference between a vibratory movement circulating within an IDENTICAL field of action, and a movement from an outside source, touching you and getting a reaction (this is the usual state of human consciousness). But once the consciousness is identified with the Supreme, all movements are, so to speak, innerinner in the sense that nothing comes from outside; there are only things circulating, which, through similarity or necessity, naturally generate or change the vibrations within the circulatory milieu.
I am very familiar with this, because I am now constantly in that state. I never have the feeling of something coming from outside and bumping into me; theres rather the sense of multiple and sometimes contradictory inner movements, and of a constant circulation generating the inner changes necessary to the movement.
0 1962-03-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He mentions it when he explains mental Equality3that a state is reached where one is unable to initiate any activity; only the stimulus of an impulsion from above can move you. So you do nothing, you just stay like that, perfectly immobile in your mind (not only physicallyespecially in your mind): you dont initiate anything.
Before, the mind was always creating, setting actions, wills and movements into motion, producing consequences; and its very frightening when that stopsyou feel youre becoming an idiot. But its quite the opposite! No more ideas, no more will, no more impulsions, nothing. You act only when something makes you act, without knowing why or how.
0 1962-05-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres such a wonderful passage in The Synthesis of Yoga (The Yoga of Self-Perfection), where he mentions four things (you surely remember this), four things the disciple needs (I have just translated it). I knew this, of course, but the passage is especially timely nowparticularly after that last experience, which is a jolt for a physical being. The fourth thing is wonderful. The first three we know: Equality, peace and (a hard one) a spiritual ease in all circumstances. He added the word spiritual so people wouldnt think only of material easeits an ease in feelings, in sensations, in everything. But when you have a lot of pain its obviously not so easy! When physical pain keeps you from sleeping and eating, when you are plagued by constant physical painor rather by a whole host of physical pains!well, that bodily ease becomes difficult. Its the one thing thathas seemed difficult to me; but anyway, its being investigated I think it was sent for me to investigate.
But the last thing he mentions is a marvel the joy and laughter of the soul. And its so true, so true! Always, all the time, no matter what happens, even when this body is in dreadful pain, the soul is laughing joyously within. Always, always, always.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You say that what is needed is maddening enthusiasm, to fill the country with emotional excitement. In the time of the Swadeshi [fight for independence, boycott of English goods] we did all that in the field of politics, but what we did is all now in the dust. Will there be a more favorable result in the spiritual field? I do not say there has been no result. There has been. Any movement will produce some result, but for the most part in terms of an increase of possibility. This is not the right method, however, to steadily actualize the thing. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement or any intoxication of the mind the base. I wish to make a large and strong equanimity the foundation of the yoga. I want established on that Equality a full, firm and undisturbed Shakti in the system and in all its movements. I want the wide display of the light of Knowledge in the ocean of Shakti. And I want in that luminous vastness the tranquil ecstasy of infinite Love, Delight and Oneness. I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God. I have no faith in the customary trade of the guru. I do not wish to be a guru. If anybody wakes and manifests from within his slumbering godhead and gets the divine lifebe it at my touch or at anothersthis is what I want. It is such men that will raise the country.
You must not think from all this lecture that I despair of the future of Bengal. I too hope, as they say, that this time a great light will manifest itself in Bengal. Still I have tried to show the other side of the shield, where the fault is, the error, the deficiency. If these remain, the light will not be a great light and it will not be permanent.
0 1963-03-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only one thing (which is not even absolute): a sort of Equality that has come into the bodynot an Equality of soul (laughing): an Equality in the cells! It has come into the body. There is no longer that clash of joy and painalways and for everything, every minute, every reaction, You, Lord, to You, Lord. As though the cells were chanting, To You Lord, to You Lord, to You Lord. And well, thats how it is.
There are enough physical miseries to experience what people call physical painquite enough (!) Yet, materially, everything is organized to give every possible joy! For example (ever since the age of five it has been like that), whenever the body felt, Oh, if I had this. Oh, it would be nice to have that, the thing would come in no time. Fantastic! It has always been that way, only it has become more conscious. Before, it would happen without my noticing it, quite naturally. Now, of course, the body has changed, its no longer a baby, it no longer has a childs fancies. But when that kind of Rhythm comes, when something says, Oh, this is fine! mon petit, it comes in TORRENTS from all sides without my saying a word. Just like that. There was a time when the body enjoyed it, it was delighted by it, made very happy by it (even two years ago, a little more perhaps), very happy, it found that amusingit was lovely, you see. But now: To You Lord. Only this, a sort of quiet, constant joy: To You Lord, to You Lord, to You Lord. And on both accounts: for physical pain as well. In that regard, the body is making progress. Although to tell the truth, its life is made so easy! So easy that it would have to be quite hard to please not be satisfied the Lord is full of infinite grace.
0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
93Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next Equality of soul, last ecstasy.
I am still in a period of conflict.
--
You suffer from, say, a physical trouble, purely physical (morally speaking, it goes without saying, the thing is quite clear; I mean something purely material). Something is disorganized in the working or the structure of the organs. The result is pain. At first you endure, then out of endurance comes perfect Equality, and out of perfect Equality comes ecstasyits perfectly possible; its not only possible, it has been proved. But the experiment should be carried through TO THE END to know whether ecstasy has the power to restore the bodys order, or whether it ends in dissolution: you are in ecstasy and die in ecstasy. That is, you leave your body while in ecstasy. Is that so? Its not only possible, its perfectly obvious. But thats not what we want! We want to restore order, to eliminate disorder IN MATTERdoes ecstasy have the power to restore order in the physical working and triumph over the forces of dissolution?
The only way to find out is to make the experiment!
0 1963-08-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
93Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next Equality of soul, last ecstasy.
As long as we are dealing with moral things, this is absolutely obvious and indisputable: all moral pain, when you know how to take it, shapes your character and leads you straight to ecstasy. But when it comes to the body
0 1963-12-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To them, the Supermind would be the reign of a harmonious Equality of all classes and all countriesat the most, a union of all countries and all classes. Thats the summit of their dream.
I like this letter, because he says, I have NEVER promised anything of the kind. This is to me the important point.
0 1965-07-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is still a bit of friction, but anyway its better. Just before you came You know, there are two, three of them hurling at me everyones demands, the work to be done, the answers to be given, the checks to be signed; its quite a task you are harassed, mauled as though by claws. And there is this fatigue I feel every day, always, and because of which I need to be left absolutely undisturbed (you seem to be clawed); and I saw it was because all the work this body is made to do doesnt come from That to which it aspiresit doesnt come from up above: it comes from here, from all around, and thats why it grates, as if something were being ground. Then, very consciously, this mind called on that aspiration and on equanimity, on cellular Equality: Well, this is the time to be in Equality, and instantly a sort of quiet immobility was established, and things were better, I was able to go to the end.
I feel as if the tail of the solution had been caught.1 Now, naturally, we must work it out.
0 1965-07-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With this sort of work to establish perfect Equality, I never drive something away immediately, saying, No, thats not possible. One must be calm and collected in the face of all things. I was calm and collected, thinking, Let us see, let me wait for two days, and if he has really broken his head (laughing), Ill find out! Of course, nothing happened. And when I got your letter, I had the feeling it was the same thing, but I thought, Let us see, let us wait. I looked, and didnt see anything. Through your letter and your words I looked, but didnt see anything. And I had the feeling it was this same physical mind that made contact with a formationa malicious formation, because such is the habit of the physical mind.
Now that the work is to rectify our way of being, we realize what it is! Its really disgusting. It works constantly and is constantly defeatist. As you say, you feel a little painoh, is it going to be a cancer?
0 1965-08-07, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Recently there was a sort of will for Equality towards activities that had been tolerated or accepted only as an effect of the consecration and in obedience to the supreme Will. And then, all of a sudden they became something very positive, with a sense of freedom and a spontaneity of state, and a beginning of understanding of the attitude with which the action must be done. All this came very, very progressively. And then this morning, there was the experience.
(silence)
0 1965-11-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have noticed something very interesting. Suppose there is a pain, some sign or other that something in the body is out of order. In the consciousness in the consciousness you are absolutely indifferent, which means that whether its life or death, disease or health, there is Equality; but if the body reacts according to its old habit, What should be done to get over it? and all that it involves (I am not speaking of a reaction in the mind, but here, in the body), the thing takes root. Why? Because it has to stay there (laughing) to enable you to study it! If, on the other hand, the cells have learned their lesson and say right away, Lord, Your presence (without words the attitude), pfft! the thing goes.
Its no use if the thought does it, if the psychic consciousness, EVEN THE PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS, does it: it must be the cells that do it. So the one who does it in the thought says, Here, I give myself to the Divine, I am ready for anything, I am in a state of perfect Equality, and still I am ill! So what am I to believe? Thats not the point. In order to have an instantaneous action HERE (instantaneous, meaning what looks like a miracle, which isnt a miracle at all), there should instantaneously be, wherever a disorder has occurred for some reason or other, this: LordLord, this is You; Lord, we are You; Lord, You are hereeverything flies away. A sensation, an attitudeinstantaneously, hup! its over.
I have had hundreds upon hundreds of experiences like that.
0 1967-10-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And since how many years? Since something like 1915, I feltconstantly felt I was acting on the Command: the Command from above. The personal impulsion had disappeared. Since as long as that, 1915, and in that condition, there has been a whole evolution and transformation. And now, when I look back, not only all I used to do, but the way of looking at things, especially the way of looking at things [seems childish to me]. The reaction was already like this (wide-open, even gesture), because great care had been taken to correct any ignorant reaction; the reaction was already very much like this (same wide open gesture), but it was VOLUNTARILY so, not spontaneously so. Thats the great difference. You understand, that sort of universal Equality like this (same gesture) was voluntary, it was the effect of a constant vigilance and a constant will. Now also the vigilance is constant, but its replaced by the vigilance and will to be constantly like this (Mother turns the two palms of her hands upward, like a bowl and forming an upside-down triangle at the level of her forehead), all the time like this inwardly, turned inward, as though each cell were turned inward, towards its centre of light thats how it is. And there is still a vigilance not to forget, not to flagall the cells turned inward towards That. So all that outward play, oh, how childish it all looks! And now I do things that are far more childish, lots of little things that are, to the ordinary human outlook, totally useless and quite childish but all that isnt the same thing its (a vast, supple, slow gesture) like the waves and rhythm of a divine Harmony expressing itself.
I might put it like this: at the time of this declaration (of 1954), I was still taking things seriously. At the time of the classes, when I spoke, I was taking all those things seriously.
0 1967-12-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The true part is that every human being has the right (but its not a right ). The organization must be such, must be arranged in such a way, that everyones material needs should be guaranteed, not according to notions of right and Equality, but on the basis of the most elementary necessities; then, once that is established, everyone must be free to organize his life, not according to his monetary means, but according to his inner capacities.
No rules or laws are being framed. Things will get formulated as the underlying Truth of the township emerges and takes shape progressively. We do not anticipate.
0 1968-02-10, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then, two things, which seem to be contradictory (in the ordinary consciousness they are), but which in fact are only complementary. A surrender (theres no other word), a total abdicationtotal, immediate, complete. That is to say, Equality and acceptancenot even acceptance: everything, everything is good, everything is good. Which means that if death were to come tomorrow, it would cause no trouble, and if life must last forever, it causes no troublelike that, you understand (perfectly equal and sovereign gesture): SPONTANEOUS, spontaneous, effortless acceptance, without reasoning, without spontaneous and total, like that (same gesture). Thats the second point.
And the third: a tre-men-dous will! Every moment it expresses itself as For instance, something is thrown out of gear, it hurts; then, with that background it isnt a background, its a BASE, a base of Equality ( Equality is still seen from the other side! Its not that, it is an adherence, a spontaneous adherence), on that base, there is a tremendous willtremendousto be WHAT THE DIVINE WILLS, but not with the idea that it might be like this or like that. Well, to express it truly, we should say, To be divineto be divine. That is, to dominate all situations, all wills, all circumstances, like that (same perfectly equal and sovereign gesture).
So those three things are simultaneous and constantly present. And all that is going on in the body.
0 1968-11-27, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"...Pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy." See also Thoughts and Aphorisms: 93"Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next Equality of soul, last ecstasy."
***
0 1970-02-11, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
324Freedom, Equality, brotherhood, cried the French revolutionists, but in truth freedom only has been practised with a dose of Equality; as for brotherhood, only a brotherhood of Cain was founded and of Barabbas. Sometimes it calls itself a Trust or Combine and sometimes the Concert of Europe.
325Since liberty has failed, cries the advanced thought of Europe, let us try liberty cum Equality or, since the two are a little hard to pair, Equality instead of liberty. For brotherhood, it is impossible; therefore we will replace it by industrial association. But this time also, I think. God will not be deceived.
(Satprem reads out Mothers answer)
For the moment still, liberty, Equality, fraternity are nothing but words loudly proclaimed but never put into practice yet. They cannot be, so long as men remain as they are, governed by their ego and all its desires instead of being governed solely by the One Supreme and supremely Divine.
And I added:
--
Equality cannot be manifested until all men are conscious of the Supreme Lord.
Fraternity cannot be manifested until all men feel equally issued from the Supreme Lord and one in His Unity
0 1970-03-25, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conditions to organizeto be an organizer (its not to govern, its to ORGANIZE)the conditions to be an organizer should be these: no more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsionsa perfect Equality for all things. Sincerity, of course, but that goes without saying: wherever insincerity enters, poison enters at the same time. And then, only those who are themselves in that condition can discern whether another is in it or not.
At present, all human organizations are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood! (Mother laughs) So
0 1970-06-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
to accept with resignation what one cannot yet accept with gladness and so to arrive at a calm Equality which is not shaken even when on the surface there may be passing movements of a momentary reaction to outward happenings. If that is once firmly founded, the rest can come.
Letters on Yoga, 23.597
0 1971-06-23, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Ashram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what is ones own but what already belongs to the Divine. There is no question of payment or return, no bargain, no room for demand and desire. The Mother is in sole charge and arranges things as best they can be arranged within the means at her disposal and the capacities of her instruments. She is under no obligation to act according to the mental standards or vital desires and claims of the Sadhaks; she is not obliged to use a democratic Equality in her dealings with them. She is free to deal with each according to what she sees to be his true need or what is best for him in his spiritual progress. No one can be her judge or impose on her his own rule and standard; she alone can make rules, and she can depart from them too if she thinks fit, but no one can demand that she shall do so. Personal demands and desires cannot be imposed on her. If anyone has what he finds to be a real need or a suggestion to make which is within the province assigned to him, he can do so; but if she gives no sanction, he must remain satisfied and drop the matter. This is the spiritual discipline of which the one who represents or embodies the Divine Truth is the centre. Either she is that and all this is the plain common sense of the matter; or she is not and then no one need stay here. Each can go his own way and there is no Ashram and no Yoga.
April 11, 1930
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The absolute in its triple or triune status (not in its supreme being but as we see it prior to manifestation) is in essence and principle an infinity and unity. Indeed, it is the infinite unity, and its fundamental character is a supreme and utter Equalitysamam brahma. It is then a status or statis, that is to say, a state of perfectly stable equilibrium in which there is no movement of difference or distinction, no ripple of high and low or ebb and flow, no mark of quantity or quality. It is a stilled sea of self-identity, a vast limitless or pure consciousness brooding in trance and immobility. And yet in the bosom of this ineffable and inviolable Equality, in the very hush and lull there lies secreted an urge, a pressure, a possibility towards activity, variation and even an eventual in Equality. For the presence and possibility of dynamism is posited by the very infinity of the Infinite, since without it, the Infinite would be incapable of motion, expression and fulfilment of its Force.
There is thus inherent in the vast inalienable Equality of the absolute Reality, a Force which can bring out centres of pressure, nuclei of dynamism, nodes of modulation. It is precisely round these centres of precipitation that the original and basic unity crystallises itself and weaves a pattern of harmonious multiplicity. Consciousness, by self-pressure,tapas taptv turns its even and undifferentiated pristine equanimity into ripples and swirls, eddies and vortices of delight, matrices of creative activity. Thus the One becomes Many by a process of self-concentration and self-limitation.
At the very outset when and where the Many has come out into manifestation in the Onehere also it must be remembered that we are using a temporal figure in respect of an extra-temporal factthere and then is formed a characteristic range of reality which is a perfect equation of the one and the many: that is to say, the one in becoming many still remains the same immaculate one in and through the many, and likewise the many in spite of its manifoldnessand because of the special quality of the manifoldnessstill continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, ta cit, in Vedic terminology. They are seed-truths, the original mother-truths in the Divine Consciousness. They comprise the fundamental essential many aspects and formulations of an infinite Infinity. At this stage these do not come into clash or conflict, for here each contains all and the All contains each one in absolute unity and essential identity. Each individual formation is united with and partakes of the nature of the one supreme Reality. Although difference is born here, separation is not yet come. Variety is there, but not discord, individuality is there, not egoism. This is the first step of Descent, the earliest one-not, we must remind ourselves again, historically but psychologically and logically the descent of the Transcendent into the Cosmic as the vast and varied Supermindcitra praketo ajania vibhw of the Absolute into the relational manifestation as Vidysakti (Gnosis).
02.09 - The Way to Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To have union, one must unitedivision can never lead to unity. Also this unity is established automatically and irrevocably, not by any abstract sense of justice and Equality, nor by any romantic or imaginative feeling of fraternity, but by a dynamic living together. A common political and civic and economic life creates a field of force that can draw together into a harmonious working the most contrary and refractory elements.
We have said, however, time and again, that the present war is a great opportunity offered by Nature and Providence, opportunity that comes only once in a way; it is precisely the field of which we speak, the field par excellence, which can compel all centrifugal elements to come together, labour together, enjoy and suffer together and turn and transmute them into the very strongest centripetal components.
02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
True, there are contrary voices. But as one swallow does not make a summer, even so, many such voices cannot perpetuate the past. The name, even the form of Imperialism is there, but the substance of it is how much changed, if one goes behind! The British Empire, as it stands today, is composed of three strands, we may say: the first, the front line, consists of Canada and Australia, the second, of Ireland, Egypt and Irak, and the third, mainly of India. This graded pattern shows that it is something fluid and even progressive, there is nothing rigid and final about it. The very nature of the composition seems to exert a pressure working for an Equality, an equilibrium of partnership building up a genuine Commonwealth. The model is catching. An Imperialistic Russia, that has found a new avatara in Stalin, has become a champion of federalism, as the best way of preserving the imperial integrity!
India should consider the present situation with calmness, detachment and wisdom, not hark back to the past, brooding over the mistakes and misdeeds of her erstwhile masters they are no longer masters; yes, forgiving and forgetting, one must face squarely the new situation and make the best use of it. India, that claims a spiritual heritage and a high and hoary civilisation, can afford to be idealistic even and envisage a deeper and higher law of Nature, of universal harmony and solidarity, of conscious co-operation. Apart from that, if as practical men, we look to our self-interest, then also it will be wise for us to take up the same line of procedure, viz., what idealism demands. A nation too, like the individual, can be swayed by pride, prejudice, passion, a false sense of prestige and a spirit of vengeance. However natural these reactions may seem to be, in view of the conditions of their incidence, they possess, more often than not, the property of the boomerang, they hit back the originating source itself. It has been said, for example, that the origin of the present war the rise of Hitleris due to the Versailles Treaty that ended the last war, which was, in its turn a war of revenge having its origin on the field of Sedan; this campaign of 1870 again was the natural and inevitable outcome of the Napoleonic conquest. Thus there has been a seesaw movement in national relations without a definite issue. And pessimists of today aver that we are not come to the end of the spiral.
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is one of the great errors of the human mind to take Equality as identical with uniformity. When Rousseau started the revolutionary slogan "Men are born equal", men were carried away in the vehemence of the new spirit and thought that there was absolutely no difference between man and man, all difference must be due to injustice, tyranny and corruption in the social system. Rousseau's was a necessary protest and corrective against the rank in Equality that was the order of the day. All men are, however, equal not in the sense that all material particlessea-sands or molecules or atoms, for examplemay be equal, that is to say, same in dimension and mass and energy. That is the materialistic mechanistic view, imposed by the first discoveries and conclusions of modern Science, but which has lost much of its cogency in recent times even in respect of the physical world. All men are equal, not in the sense that all have the same uniform value, but that each has his own value. It is the recognition of the personal worth of each individual that gives him true Equality with others and not the casting of all into the same mould and pattern, fitting all on to the Procrustean bed, which indeed would mean just the negation of Equality. This variability is the very basis of a living Equality. Physically all men have not the same height or weight or growth, even so internally too all have not the same magnitude of being or similar power of consciousness.
A social organization must have two fundamental objects. The central purpose is to serve and help the individual. That is the first thing to be remembered. Organization for the sake of organization is not the end. Organization for the sake of perpetuating a system, however laudable it may be, is not the end either. It is, as I say, by the service that an organization renders to its individual members, and not merely by its mechanical order and efficiency that it is to be judged. This service, I have said, is twofold. First, each individual must find his proper vocation: the right man in the right place. The function of each man must be in accordance with his nature and character. Secondly, each person, while fulfilling his Dharma, (that is the right word) must be trained, must have the opportunity to grow and increase in his being and consciousness. First of all, a prosperous, at least an adequately equipped outer life, and then as adequate a lebensraum for the inner personality to have its free and full play and expression.
A totalitarian Equality takes men as blocks or chunks of wood and also cuts and clips them as such whenever and wherever needed, thrusts them indiscriminately into any nook and corner of the social framework for the sake of its upkeep and maintenance. It is something that is characteristic of a modern armythoroughly mechanisedin which men are not different from the nuts and bolts of a machine, all forming a stream-lined massive unity, where persons and individuals as such have no value or consideration, they are dumb and almost dead materials and when worn out just simply to be replaced by others. If it is to be compared to any living thing, we can think of only the regimentation that obtains in an ant-hill or a bee-hive.
Mechanical and totalitarian Equality does injustice, to say the least, to the individual, for it does not take into account the variable value and the particularity of each individual. It usually gives him a position and function in the society to which his inner nature and character do not at all respond. The result of such indifference to individuality is evident also in a modern society based as it is on so-called freedom, that is to say, on open competition and struggle. The tragedy of a Bankim eking out his subsistence as a bureaucratic official is not a rare spectacle but the very rule of the social system in vogue. Indeed the so-called steel-frame of governmental organization of our days sucks in all the best brains and few can survive this process of "evisceration, deprivation, destitution, desiccation and evacuation", to use the glowing and graphic words of T. S. Eliot, although in another connection; few can maintain or express after passing through this grinding or sucking machine their inner reality, the truth and beauty personal to them. The poet1 regrets:
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
03.01 - The New Year Initiation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So far as the World War is concerned all nations and peoples and groups on our side who have felt and proclaimed that they stand for Equality, fraternity and freedom, the priests and prophets of a new future, of a happier humanity, all such warriors are also facing a solemn ordeal. For them also the time has come to be on their guard and be watchful. They must see that they give exact expression in their actions to what they have thought, felt and proclaimed. They have to prove by every means, by thought, word and deed, that their entire being is really one, whole and indivisible, in ideal and in intention.
Today at the beginning of the New Year we have to bear in mind what aim, what purpose inspired us to enter into this tremendous terrible work, what force, what strength has been leading us to victory. They who consider themselves as collaborators in the progressive evolution of Nature must constantly realise the truth that if victory has come within the range of possibility, it has done so in just proportion to their sincerity, by the magic grace of the Mahashakti, the grace which the aspiration of their inner consciousness has called down. And what is now but possible will grow into the actual if we keep moving along the path we have so far followed. Otherwise, if we falter, fail and break faith, if we relapse into the old accustomed track, if under pressure of past habits, under the temptation of immediate selfish gain, under the sway of narrow parochial egoism, we suppress or maim the wider consciousness of our inner being or deny it in one way or another, then surely we shall wheel back and fall into the clutches of those very hostile powers which it has been our determined effort to overthrow. Even if we gain an outward victory it will be a disastrous, moral and spiritual defeat. That will mean a tragic reversalto be compelled to begin again from the very beginning. Nature will not be baulked of her aim. Another travail she will have to undergo and that will be far more agonising and terrible.
03.05 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We ask for freedom, liberty of the individual, self-determinationwell and good. But that does not mean the licence to do as one pleases, impelled by one's irrational idiosyncrasies. The individual must be truly individual, not a fractional being, the self must be the real self, not a shadow or surface formulation in order to have the full right to unfettered movement. Liberty, yes; but that means liberty for all which means again the other two terms of the great trinity, Equality and fraternity. Individuality, yes; that means every individuality, in other words, solidarity. The two sides of the equation must be given equal value and equal emphasis. If the stress upon one leads to Nazism, Fascism or Stalinism, steam-rollered uniformity or streamlined regimentation, the death of the individual, the other emphasis leads to disintegration and disruption, to the same end in a different way. But in the world of today, after the victory in the last war over the Nazi conception of humanity, it seems as though the spirit of disruption has gone abroad, human consciousness has been atom-bombed into flying fragments; so we have the spectacle of all manner of parochialism pullulating on the earth, regional and ideologicalimperial blocs, nations, groups, parties have chequered ad infinitum, have balkanised human commonalty.
We badly needed a United Nations Organisation, but we are facing the utmost possible disunity. The lesson is that politics alone will not save us, nor even economics. The word has gone forth: what is required is a change of heart. The leaders of humanity must have a new heart grafted in place of the old. That is the surgical operation imperative at the moment. That heart will declare in its beats that the cosmos is not atomic but one and indivisible,ekam sat, neha nnsti kicana.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In wide Equality's impartial joy,
These sages breathed for God's delight in things.
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Against the flat Equality of Death
And the all-levelling insurgent Night
07.26 - Offering and Surrender, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Prayer and Aspiration Equality of the Body Equality of the Soul
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part SevenOffering and Surrender
07.27 - Equality of the Body, Equality of the Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:07.27 - Equality of the Body, Equality of the Soul
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Equality of the Body Equality of the Soul
Equality of the external being means good health, a solid body, controlled nerveswhen you are not shaken by the least shock, when you are calm, quiet, poised, balanced. In that condition you can receive into you a great force in yourself from above (or, from the environing energy around you) and yet not get upset. If one of you at any time had received some such force, he must have known by experience that without a perfectly sound physical health, one could not contain or hold it. You cannot remain still, you are restless, you move about, talk, cry, weep, jump or dance, just to throw out the energy you are unable to hold. You scatter about what it is not possible for you to gather and assimilate. In order to be able to gather and assimilate the force, the body and the nerves must be quiet and strong.
Equality of the soul is different; it is psychological, not physical. It is the power to bear the impact of things, good or bad, without being grieved or elated, discouraged or enthused, without any upsetting or disturbance. Whatever happens you remain serene and at peace. But both the equalities are necessary. There are many equalities, in fact. Apart from the Equality of the vital and the Equality of the body, there is also the Equality of the mind proper. That is to say, all ideas from all quarters may come into your head, even the most contradictory: yet you remain quiet, untroubled, and even unconcerned. You are a witness, you see them, sort them, arrange them, put each idea in its proper place, appreciate the value of each, determine the relation of each to the other, and to the whole, but you are not swayed by any particular one.
***
07.28 - Personal Effort and Will, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Equality of the Body Equality of the Soul How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part SevenPersonal Effort and Will
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Equality of the Body Equality of the Soul How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe. Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of Equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice,even as this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea,to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship.
Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of the fourfold order, caturvara, miscalled the system of the four castes,for caste is a conventional, vara a symbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;1 but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and looked always first and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears in the Purushasukta of the Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Sury, would have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefa thers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in Gods house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creators body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
that surround us. Perfect Equality5 of soul is established.
THE VISION OF THE SELF IN ITS BECOMINGS
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
merely excess and defect, wrong placement, inharmonious action and reaction. By its Equality, by its inaction even while it
supports all action, the conscious Soul retains its eternal freedom
--
of Prakriti and her works. An absolute calm and passivity, purity and Equality within, a sovereign and inexhaustible activity
without is the nature of Brahman as we see it manifested in the
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The excess of the reaction would consist in the establishment of Equality of powers between the two sexes to the detriment of the diversity in their duties. That would be another way of misunderstanding Nature and would bring woman again under the dominion of the arbitrary masculine principle by identifying her with man under pretence of liberating her. We shall find the truth of Nature not by a double use in the same sense but by an equilibrium of the two complementary Principles.
It is true that these human complements, however dissimilar in their functions, are identical in their deeper essence. But the identity is of a purely spiritual character and represents the identity of the two principles which form the world, two in their work, one in their unknowable origin. It brings us back to the primary unity of the Indiscernable, beyond all differentiation, outside the manifested world.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
He distinguished him and conferred upon him double Equality with the gods,
So that he was highly exalted and surpassed them in everything.
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have his whole life and action determined for him at every step and in every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.1 We might then have a curious new version, with very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakara the scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation the line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with its powers, privileges and duties there will be established an initial Equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination of function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves and choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation and the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra. For each man there will be a long stage of work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps in the end a period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovator two important concessions. There was for the individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic and rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, there would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom and a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed to question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since that would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we should have a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function, guakarma, and rapidly petrifying by the inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long last be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probably by the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.
On the other hand, there are in operation forces which seem likely to frustrate or modify this development before it can reach its menaced consummation. In the first place, rationalistic and physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same time the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such as Nietzsches Will-to-live, Bergsons exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths. Already another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice which promise to give the succession of the individualistic age of society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which may well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be doubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle.
10.35 - The Moral and the Spiritual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian discipline, on the other hand, teaches that to rise to a higher state of consciousness one need not have, one must not have, any feeling of revulsion or hatred. There is no such thing as saintly hatred. One must be free from attachment to the movements of inferior nature, one must cultivate detachment from them, but not necessarily through hatred or horror. The spiritual discipline bases itself upon a sense of perfect Equality.
When you have hatred or horror for a thing it means you are on the same plane with it, your consciousness is level with the consciousness of the opposite feelings. You have to rise above the status of the lower nature and this can be done only by a calm detachment, a quiet withdrawal. One need not entertain repulsion or hatred for animal life in order to rise superior to it, one automatically rises superior to it when one links oneself to the higher status, when one is imbued with the superior consciousness. The animal consciousness is not a wrong consciousness in itself, it is a life of the animal; the human consciousness may regard it as such and may still discover a superior consciousness looking at the movements of the lower world dispassionately, indifferently, or even appreciatively, for a thing of beauty is there even in the animal life, for the Divine is everywhere.
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To cure the modern malady we have to go back again to something of the ancient mentality. We have to cultivate a consciousness, now forgotten and alienated but once natural to the human mind, the consciousness and status of a transcendence built with the sense of absolute calm, an Equality, all serene and all englobing, that is God's consciousness.
Credo quia impossibile is actually a phrase of Tertullian vide his De Carne Christi, Vthough often ascribed to St. Augustine
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The first thing this working of the Higher Power does is to establish Shanti, peace, in all the parts of the being and an opening above. This peace is not mere mental Shanti, it is hill of power and, whatever action takes place in it, Samata, Equality, is its basis, and the Shanti and Samata are never disturbed. What comes from above is peace, power and joy. It also brings about changes in various parts of our nature so that they can bear the pressure of the Higher Power.
Knowledge also progressively develops showing all in our being that is to be thrown out and what is to be retained. In fact, knowledge and guidance both come and you have constantly to consent to the guidance. The progress may be more in one direction than in another. But it is the Higher Power that works. The rest is a matter of experience and the movement of the Shakti.
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The sadhak must make the calm and Equality absolutely secure so that whatever may happen the inner detachment and Equality cannot be broken.
17 AUGUST 1924
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of consciousness, Equality and oneness. The kernel of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to Equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine, supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness.
But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies of Nature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its secret, - free expression out of a supreme inward silence.
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For then we get back to our true self and become the spirit; in the spirit we are above the impulsion of Nature, superior to her modes and forces. Attaining to a perfect Equality in the soul, mind and heart, we realise our true self of oneness, one with all beings, one too with That which expresses itself in them and in all that we see and experience. This Equality and this oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action. Not one with all, we are not spiritual, not divine. Not equal-souled to all things, happenings and creatures, we cannot see spiritually, cannot know divinely, cannot feel divinely towards others. The Supreme Power, the one Eternal and Infinite is equal to all things and to all beings; and because it is equal, it can act with an absolute wisdom according to the truth of its works and its force and according to the truth of each thing and of every creature.
This is also the only true freedom possible to man, - a freedom which he cannot have unless he outgrows his mental separativeness and becomes the conscious soul in Nature. The only free will in the world is the one divine Will of which Nature is the executrix; for she is the master and creator of all other wills. Human free-will can be real in a sense, but, like all things that belong to the modes of Nature, it is only relatively real.
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The embodied spirit continues to express its powers in action, but it is no longer involved in ignorance, no longer bound by its works; its actions have no longer a consequence within it, but only a consequence outside in Prakriti. The whole movement of Nature becomes to its experience a rising and falling of waves on the surface that make no difference to its own unfathomable peace, its wide delight, its vast universal Equality or its boundless God-existence.3
3 It is not indispensable for the Karmayoga to accept implicitly all the philosophy of the Gita. We may regard it, if we like, as a statement of psychological experience useful as a practical basis for the Yoga; here it is perfectly valid and in entire consonance with a high and wide experience. For this reason I have thought it well to state it here, as far as possible in the language of modern thought, omitting all that belongs to metaphysics rather than to psychology.
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The test it lays down is an absolute Equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga!
There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must not be mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual Equality which the Gita teaches. There is an Equality of disappointed resignation, an Equality of pride, an Equality of hardness and indifference: all these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the Equality of the stoic, the Equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the Equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but they are at most early soul-phases only or imperfect mental preparations for our entry into the true and absolute self-existent wide evenness of the spirit.
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire Equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
But how then shall we continue to act at all? For ordinarily the human being acts because he has a desire or feels a mental, vital or physical want or need; he is driven by the necessities of the body, by the lust of riches, honours or fame, or by a craving for the personal satisfactions of the mind or the heart or a craving for power or pleasure. Or he is seized and pushed about by a moral need or, at least, the need or the desire of making his ideas or his ideals or his will or his party or his country or his gods prevail in the world. If none of these desires nor any other must be the spring of our action, it would seem as if all incentive or motive power had been removed and action itself must necessarily cease. The Gita replies with its third great secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness; our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and in the end a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only motive. This transformation of the motive force and very character of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its initiative.
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of Equality.
From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues
1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Divine alone. Arjuna is not satisfied: he wishes to know how the change to this state will affect the outward action of the man, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, his state, what difference it will make in this acting, living human being. Krishna persists merely in enlarging upon the ideas he has already brought forward, on the soul-state behind the action, not on the action itself. It is the fixed anchoring of the intelligence in a state of desireless Equality that is the one thing needed.
Arjuna breaks out impatiently, - for here is no rule of conduct such as he sought, but rather, as it seems to him, the negation of all action, - "If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than action, why then dost thou appoint me to an action terrible in its nature? Thou bewilderest my understanding with a mingled
1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[29] Thus the changefulness of the moon is paralleled by the transformation of the pre-existent Christ from a divine into a human figure through the emptying, that passage in Philippians (2 : 6) which has aroused so much comment: . . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not count Equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (RSV / DV).195 Even the most tortuous explanations of theology have never improved on the lapidary paradox of St. Hilary: Deus homo, immortalis mortuus, aeternus sepultus (God-man, immortaldead, eternal-buried).196 According to Ephraem Syrus, the kenosis had the reverse effect of unburdening Creation: Because the creatures were weary of bearing the prefigurations of his glory, he disburdened them of those prefigurations, even as he had disburdened the womb that bore him.197
[30] St. Ambroses reference to the kenosis makes the changing of the moon causally dependent on the transformation of the bridegroom. The darkening of Luna then depends on the sponsus, Sol, and here the alchemists could refer to the darkening of the beloveds countenance in Song of Songs 1 : 45. The sun, too, is equipped with darts and arrows. Indeed, the secret poisoning that otherwise emanates from the coldness and moisture of the moon is occasionally attributed to the cold dragon, who contains a volatile fiery spirit and spits flames. Thus in Emblem L of the Scrutinium198 he is given a masculine role: he wraps the woman in the grave in a deadly embrace. The same thought occurs again in Emblem V, where a toad is laid on the breast of the woman so that she, suckling it, may die as it grows.199 The toad is a cold and damp animal like the dragon. It empties the woman as though the moon were pouring herself into the sun.200
1.04 - Money, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:If you are free from the money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal, you will have a greater power to comm and the money-force for the divine work. Equality of mind, absence of demand and the full dedication of all you possess and receive and all your power of acquisition to the Divine Shakti and her work are the signs of this freedom. Any perturbation of mind with regard to money and its use, any claim, any grudging is a sure index of some imperfection or bondage.
7:The ideal Sadhaka in this kind is one who if required to live poorly can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the full inner play of the divine consciousness, and if he is required to live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates. The divine Will is all for him and the divine Ananda.
1.04 - The Core of the Teaching, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the book and by a certain arrangement of stress in following out its argument, especially if we shut our eyes to the peculiar way in which it uses such a word as sannyasa, renunciation; but it is quite impossible to persist in this view on an impartial reading in face of the continual assertion to the very end that action should be preferred to inaction and that superiority lies with the true, the inner renunciation of desire by Equality and the giving up of works to the supreme Purusha.
Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotion were its whole teaching and put in the background its monistic elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in the one self of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion, its insistence on the aspect of the Divine as Lord and Purusha and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable and who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are the most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.
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Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach the Equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil, but only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the most pernicious consequences. On the contrary it affirms that the doers of evil shall not attain to God. Therefore if Arjuna simply seeks to fulfil in the best way the ordinary law of man's life, disinterested performance of what he feels to be a sin, a thing of Hell, will not help him, even though that sin be his duty as a soldier. He must refrain from what his conscience abhors though a thousand duties were shattered to pieces.
We must remember that duty is an idea which in practice rests upon social conceptions. We may extend the term beyond its proper connotation and talk of our duty to ourselves or we may, if we like, say in a transcendent sense that it was Buddha's duty to abandon all, or even that it is the ascetic's duty to sit motionless in a cave! But this is obviously to play with words.
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The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive stress on the first three or four chapters and in those on the idea of Equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that is to be done, which they render by duty, and on the phrase "Thou hast a right to action, but none to the fruits of action" which is now popularly quoted as the great word, mahavakya, of the
Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy are given a secondary importance, except indeed the great vision in the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mind which is, or has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of
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The Equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness, - the great comm and to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built,
"Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom," has not the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the "work that is to be done," a phrase which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all works, sarvakarman.i, and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit the great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For the Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the "right to action" is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works.
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Gita. The Equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are only means for entering with the mind and the heart and the understanding into the divine consciousness and living in it; and the Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as a means as long as the disciple is unable so to live or even to seek by practice the gradual development of this higher state. And
The Core of the Teaching
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Prakriti that acts, foundation of the one, master of the other, the Lord of whom all is the manifestation, who even in our present subjection to Maya sits in the heart of His creatures governing the works of Prakriti, He by whom the armies on the field of Kurukshetra have already been slain while yet they live and who uses Arjuna only as an instrument or immediate occasion of this great slaughter. Prakriti is only His executive force. The disciple has to rise beyond this Force and its three modes or gun.as; he has to become trigun.atta. Not to her has he to surrender his actions, over which he has no longer any claim or "right", but into the being of the Supreme. Reposing his mind and understanding, heart and will in Him, with selfknowledge, with God-knowledge, with world-knowledge, with a perfect Equality, a perfect devotion, an absolute self-giving, he has to do works as an offering to the Master of all selfenergisings and all sacrifice. Identified in will, conscious with that consciousness, That shall decide and initiate the action. This is the solution which the Divine Teacher offers to the disciple.
What the great, the supreme word of the Gita is, its mahavakya, we have not to seek; for the Gita itself declares it in its last utterance, the crowning note of the great diapason.
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First, by the renunciation of desire and a perfect Equality works have to be done as a sacrifice by man as the doer, a sacrifice to
Essays on the Gita
1.04 - The Praise, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
PEACE: wisdom of Equality
PEACE BEYOND SUFFERING: dharma datu wisdom
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For it is behind the mystery of the presence of personality in an apparently impersonal universeas in that of consciousness manifesting out of the Inconscient, life out of the inanimate, soul out of brute Matter that is hidden the solution of the riddle of existence. Here again is another dynamic Duality more pervading than appears at first view and deeply necessary to the play of the slowly self-revealing Power. It is possible for the seeker in his spiritual experience, standing at one pole of the Duality, to follow Mind in seeing a fundamental Impersonality everywhere. The evolving soul in the material world begins from a vast impersonal Inconscience in which our inner sight yet perceives the presence of a veiled infinite Spirit; it proceeds with the emergence of a precarious consciousness and personality that even at their fullest have the look of an episode, but an episode that repeats itself in a constant series; it arises through experience of life out of mind into an infinite, impersonal and absolute Superconscience in which personality, mind-consciousness, life-consciousness seem all to disappear by a liberating annihilation, Nirvana. At a lower pitch he still experiences this fundamental impersonality as an immense liberating force everywhere. It releases his knowledge from the narrowness of personal mind, his will from the clutch of personal desire, his heart from the bondage of petty mutable emotions, his life from its petty personal groove, his soul from ego, and it allows them to embrace calm, Equality, wideness, universality, infinity. A Yoga of works would seem to require Personality as its mainstay, almost its source, but here too the impersonal is found to be the most direct liberating force; it is through a wide egoless impersonality that one can become a free worker and a divine creator. It is not surprising that the overwhelming power of this experience from the impersonal pole of the Duality should have moved the sages to declare this to be the one way and an impersonal Superconscience to be the sole truth of the Eternal.
But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very life-force, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A multiple innumerable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
1.05 - Buddhism and Women, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
allow women Equality with men in the practice of
dharma. However, the gates were not closed to
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
value the notion of mutual respect which means simultaneous appreciation of Equality and mutual
value, among individuals within (and, much more radically, between) social groups.
1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the whole root of the German error lies in its mistaking life and the body for the self. It has been said that this gospel is simply a reversion to the ancient barbarism of the religion of Odin; but this is not the truth. It is a new and a modern gospel born of the application of a metaphysical logic to the conclusions of materialistic Science, of a philosophic subjectivism to the objective pragmatic positivism of recent thought. Just as Germany applied the individualistic position to the realisation of her communal subjective existence, so she applied the materialistic and vitalistic thought of recent times and equipped it with a subjective philosophy. Thus she arrived at a bastard creed, an objective subjectivism which is miles apart from the true goal of a subjective age. To show the error it is necessary to see wherein lies the true individuality of man and of the nation. It lies not in its physical, economic, even its cultural life which are only means and adjuncts, but in something deeper whose roots are not in the ego, but in a Self one in difference which relates the good of each, on a footing of Equality and not of strife and domination, to the good of the rest of the world.
There has been a rude set-back to this development in totalitarian States whose theory is that the individual does not exist and only the life of the community matters, but this new larger view still holds its own in freer countries.
1.06 - Gestalt and Universals, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
which one point, the directions of the axes, and the Equality of
scale in all directions are preserved; the transformations preserv-
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attraction of all the myriad forms and presences that surround us, by which mentally and emotionally man escapes from the first limits of his ego, has to be taken up into a unifying divine love for the universal Divine. Adoration fulfilled in love, love in Ananda, - the surpassing love, the self-wrapped ecstasy of transcendent delight in the Transcendent which awaits us at the end of the path of Devotion, - has for its wider result a universal love for all beings, the Ananda of all that is; we perceive behind every veil the Divine, spiritually embrace in all forms the All-Beautiful. A universal delight in his endless manifestation flows through us, taking in its surge every form and movement, but not bound or stationary in any and always reaching out to a greater and more perfect expression. This universal love is liberative and dynamic for transformation; for the discord of forms and appearances ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind them all and understood their perfect significance. The impartial Equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embracing ecstasy and million-bodied beatitude. All things become bodies and all movements the playings of the divine Beloved in his infinite house of pleasure. Even pain is changed and in their reaction and even in their essence things painful alter; the forms of pain fall away, there are created in their place the forms of Ananda.
1- param bhavam.
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It is the inner offering of the heart's adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal Equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature.
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tend - when not consciously, then by automatic habit - to bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Natureforces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
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Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect Equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual Equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, - to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. It is not a mental quiet, aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a passivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these
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And yet this transformation into a large strength and Equality is insufficient; for if it opens to us the instrumentation of a
Divine Life, it does not provide its government and initiative. It is here that the presence of the released psychic being intervenes; it does not give the supreme government and direction, - for that is not its function, - but it supplies during the transition from ignorance to a divine Knowledge a progressive guidance for the inner and outer life and action; it indicates at each moment the method, the way, the steps that will lead to that fulfilled spiritual condition in which a supreme dynamic initiative will be always there directing the activities of a divinised Life-Force.
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As an inner Equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the Equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the
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Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the Equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes
The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2
1.06 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Compassion is the love one feels for all beings of the world. It is an attitude of Equality.
If you see anywhere an instance of compassion, as in Vidyasagar, know that it is due to the grace of God. Through compassion one serves all beings. Maya also comes from God. Through maya God makes one serve one's relatives. But one thing should be remembered: maya keeps us in ignorance and entangles us in the world, whereas daya makes our hearts pure and gradually unties our bonds.
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of tolerable Equality. But with the growth of his knowledge man
learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his own
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gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old sense of Equality with
the gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of
1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The next passage to which I shall turn is the eighth verse of the eighth hymn, also to Indra, in which occurs the expression , a passage which when taken in the plain and ordinary sense of the epithets sheds a great light on the nature of Mahi. Sunrita means really true and is opposed to anrita, false for in the early Aryan speech su and s would equally signify, well, good, very; and the euphonic n is of a very ancient type of sandhioriginally, it was probably no more than a strong anuswartraces of which can still be found in Tamil; in the case of su this n euphonic seems to have been dropped after the movement of the literary Aryan tongue towards the modern principle of Sandhi,a movement the imperfect progress of which we see in the Vedas; but by that time the form an, composed of privative a and the euphonic n, had become a recognised alternative form to a and the omission of the n would have left the meaning of words very ambiguous; therefore n was preserved in the negative form, omitted from the affirmative where its omission caused no inconvenience,for to write gni instead of anagni would be confusing, but to write svagni instead of sunagni would create no confusion. In the pair sunrita and anrita it is probable that the usage had become so confirmed, so much of an almost technical phraseology, that confirmed habit prevailed over new rule. The second meaning of the word is auspicious, derived from the idea good or beneficent in its regular action. The Vedic scholars give a third sense, quick, active; but this is probably due to confusion with an originally distinct word derived from the root , to move on rapidly, to be strong, swift, active from which we have to dance, & strong and a number of other derivatives, for although ri means to go, it does not appear that rita was used in the sense of motion or swiftness. In any case our choice (apart from unnecessary ingenuities) lies here between auspicious and true. If we take Mahi in the sense of earth, the first is its simplest & most natural significance.We shall have then to translate the earth auspicious (or might it mean true in the sense observing the law of the seasons), wide-watered, full of cows becomes like a ripe branch to the giver. This gives a clear connected sense, although gross and pedestrian and open to the objection that it has no natural and inevitable connection with the preceding verses. My objection is that sunrita and gomati seem to me to have in the Veda a different and deeper sense and that the whole passage becomes not only ennobled in sense, but clearer & more connected in sense if we give them that deeper significance. Gomatir ushasah in Kutsas hymn to the Dawn is certainly the luminous dawns; Saraswati in the third hymn who as chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam shines pervading all the actions of the understanding, certainly does so because she is the impeller to high truths, the awakener to right thoughts, clear perceptions and not because she is the impeller of things auspiciousa phrase which would have no sense or appropriateness to the context. Mahi is one of the three goddesses Ila, Saraswati and Mahi who are described as tisro devir mayobhuvah, the three goddesses born of delight or Ananda, and her companions being goddesses of knowledge, children of Mahas, she also must be a goddess of knowledge, not the earth; the word mahi also bears the sense of knowledge, intellect, and Mahas undoubtedly refers in many passages to the vijnana or supra-rational level of consciousness, the fourth Vyahriti of the Taittiriya Upanishad. What then prevents us from taking Mahi, here as there, in the sense of the goddess of suprarational knowledge or, if taken objectively, the world of Mahat? Nothing, except a tradition born in classical times when mahi was the earth and the new Nature-worship theory. In this sense I shall take it. I translate the line For thus Mahi the true, manifest in action, luminous becomes like a ripe branch to the giveror, again in better English, For thus Mahi the perfect in truth, manifesting herself in action, full of illumination, becomes as a ripe branch to the giver. For the Yogin again the sense is clear. All things are contained in the Mahat, derived from the Mahat, depend on theMahat, but we here in the movement of the alpam, have not our desire, are blinded & confined, enjoy an imperfect, erroneous & usually baffled & futile activity. It is only when we regain the movement of the Mahat, the large & uncontracted consciousness that comes from rising to the infinite,it is only then that we escape from this limitation. She is perfect in truth, full of illumination; error and ignorance disappear; she manifests herself virapshi in a wide & various activity; our activities are enlarged, our desires are fulfilled. The connection with the preceding stanzas becomes clear. The Vritras, the great obstructors & upholders of limitation, are slain by the help of Indra, by the result of the yajnartham karma, by alliance with the armed gods in mighty internal battle; Indra, the god within our mental force, manifests himself as supreme and full of the nature of ideal truth from which his greatness weaponed with the vajra, vidyut or electric principle, derives (mahitwam astu vajrine). The mind, instinct with amrita, is then full of Equality, samata; it drinks in the flood of activity of all kinds as the sea takes in the rivers. For the condition then results in which the ideal consciousness Mahi is like a ripe branch to the giver, when all powers & expansions of being at once (without obstacle as the Vritras are slain) become active in consciousness as masterful and effective knowledge or awareness (chit). This is the process prayed for by the poet. The whole hymn becomes a consecutive & intelligible whole, a single thought worked out logically & coherently and relating with perfect accuracy of ensemble & detail to one of the commonest experiences of Yogic fulfilment. In both these passages the faithful adherence to the intimations of language, Vedantic idea & Yogic experience have shed a flood of light, illuminating the obscurity of the Vedas, bringing coherence into the incoherence of the naturalistic explanation, close & strict logic, great depth of meaning with great simplicity of expression, and, as I shall show when I take up the final interpretation of the separate hymns, a rational meaning & reason of existence in that particular place for each word & phrase and a faultless & inevitable connection with what goes before & with what goes after. It is worth noticing that by the naturalistic interpretation one can indeed generally make out a meaning, often a clear or fluent sense for the separate verses of the Veda, but the ensemble of the hymn has almost always about it an air bizarre, artificial, incoherent, almost purposeless, frequently illogical and self-contradictoryas in Max Mullers translation of the 39th hymn, Kanwas to the Maruts,never straightforward, self-assured & easy. One would expect in these primitive writers,if they are primitive,crudeness of belief perhaps, but still plainness of expression and a simple development of thought. One finds instead everything tortuous, rugged, gnarled, obscure, great emptiness with great pretentiousness of mind, a labour of diction & development which seems to be striving towards great things & effecting a nullity. The Vedic singers, in the modern version, have nothing to say and do not know how to say it. I sacrifice, you drink, you are fine fellows, dont hurt me or let others hurt me, hurt my enemies, make me safe & comfortablethis is practically all that the ten Mandalas have to say to the gods & it is astonishing that they should be utterly at a loss how to say it intelligibly. A system which yields such results must have at its root some radical falsity, some cardinal error.
I pass now to a third passage, also instructive, also full of that depth and fine knowledge of the movements of the higher consciousness which every Yogin must find in the Veda. It is in the 9th hymn of the Mandala and forms the seventh verse of that hymn. Sam gomad Indra vajavad asme prithu sravo brihat, visvayur dhehi akshitam. The only crucial question in this verse is the signification of sravas.With our modern ideas the sentence seems to us to demand that sravas should be translated here fame. Sravas is undoubtedly the same word as the Greek xo (originally xFo); it means a thing heard, rumour, report, & thence fame. If we take it in that sense, we shall have to translate Arrange for us, O universal life, a luminous and solid, wide & great fame unimpaired. I dismiss at once the idea that go & vaja can here signify cattle and food or wealth. A herded & fooded or wealthy fame to express a fame for wealth of cattle & food is a forceful turn of expression we might expect to find in Aeschylus or in Shakespeare; but I should hesitate, except in case of clear necessity, to admit it in the Veda or in any Sanscrit style of composition; for such expressions have always been alien to the Indian intellect. Our stylistic vagaries have been of another kind. But is luminous & solid fame much better? I shall suggest another meaning for sravas which will give as usual a deeper sense to the whole passage without our needing to depart by a hairs breadth from the etymological significance of the words. Sruti in Sanscrit is a technical term, originally, for the means by which Vedic knowledge is acquired, inspiration in the suprarational mind; srutam is the knowledge of Veda. Similarly, we have in Vedic Sanscrit the forms srut and sravas. I take srut to mean inspired knowledge in the act of reception, sravas the thing acquired by the reception, inspired knowledge. Gomad immediately assumes its usual meaning illuminated, full of illumination. Vaja I take throughout the Veda as a technical Vedic expression for that substantiality of being-consciousness which is the basis of all special manifestation of being & power, all utayah & vibhutayahit means by etymology extended being in force, va or v to exist or move in extension and the vocable j which always gives the idea of force or brilliance or decisiveness in action or manifestation or contact. I shall accept no meaning which is inconsistent with this fundamental significance. Moreover the tendency of the old commentators to make all possible words, vaja, ritam etc mean sacrifice or food, must be rejected,although a justification in etymology might always be made out for the effort. Vaja means substance in being, substance, plenty, strength, solidity, steadfastness. Here it obviously means full of substance, just as gomad full of luminousness,not in the sense arthavat, but with another & psychological connotation. I translate then, O Indra, life of all, order for us an inspired knowledge full of illumination & substance, wide & great and unimpaired. Anyone acquainted with Yoga will at once be struck by the peculiar & exact appropriateness of all these epithets; they will admit him at once by sympathy into the very heart of Madhuchchhandas experience & unite him in soul with that ancient son of Visvamitra. When Mahas, the supra-rational principle, begins with some clearness to work in Yoga, not on its own level, not swe dame, but in the mind, it works at first through the principle of Srutinot Smriti or Drishti, but this Sruti is feeble & limited in its range, it is not prithu; broken & scattered in its working even when the range is wide, not unlimited in continuity, not brihat; not pouring in a flood of light, not gomat, but coming as a flash in the darkness, often with a pale glimmer like the first feebleness of dawn; not supported by a strong steady force & foundation of being, Sat, in manifestation, not vajavad, but working without foundation, in a void, like secondh and glimpses of Sat in nothingness, in vacuum, in Asat; and, therefore, easily impaired, easily lost hold of, easily stolen by the Panis or the Vritras. All these defects Madhuchchhanda has noticed in his own experience; his prayer is for an inspired knowledge which shall be full & free & perfect, not marred even in a small degree by these deficiencies.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
31:If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; Equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
32:In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance.
1.07 - The Process of Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The law is the same for the mass as for the individual. The process of human evolution has been seen by the eye of inspired observation to be that of working out the tiger and the ape. The forces of cruelty, lust, mischievous destruction, pain-giving, folly, brutality, ignorance were once rampant in humanity, they had full enjoyment; then by the growth of religion and philosophy they began in periods of satiety such as the beginning of the Christian era in Europe to be partly replaced, partly put under control. As is the law of such things, they have always reverted again with greater or less virulence and sought with more or less success to re-establish themselves. Finally in the nineteenth century it seemed for a time as if some of these forces had, for a time at least, exhausted themselves and the hour for sayama and gradual dismissal from the evolution had really arrived. Such hopes always recur and in the end they are likely to bring about their own fulfilment, but before that happens another recoil is inevitable. We see plenty of signs of it in the reeling back into the beast which is in progress in Europe and America behind the fair outside of Science, progress, civilisation and humanitarianism, and we are likely to see more signs of it in the era that is coming upon us. A similar law holds in politics and society. The political evolution of the human race follows certain lines of which the most recent formula has been given in the watchwords of the French Revolution, freedom, Equality and brotherhood. But the forces of the old world, the forces of despotism, the forces of traditional privilege and selfish exploitation, the forces of unfraternal strife and passionate self-regarding competition are always struggling to reseat themselves on the thrones of the earth. A determined movement of reaction is evident in many parts of the world and nowhere perhaps more than in England which was once one of the self-styled champions of progress and liberty. The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution. It rises only to be defeated and crushed again. On the other hand the force of the democratic tendency is not a force which is spent but one which has not yet arrived, not a force which has had the greater part of its enjoyment but one which is still vigorous, unsatisfied and eager for fulfilment. Every attempt to coerce it in the past reacted eventually on the coercing force and brought back the democratic spirit fierce, hungry and unsatisfied, joining to its fair motto of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the terrible addition or Death. It is not likely that the immediate future of the democratic tendency will satisfy the utmost dreams of the lover of liberty who seeks an anarchist freedom, or of the lover of Equality who tries to establish a socialistic dead level, or of the lover of fraternity who dreams of a world-embracing communism. But some harmonisation of this great ideal is undoubtedly the immediate future of the human race. On the old forces of despotism, in Equality and unbridled competition, after they have been once more overthrown, a process of gradual sayama will be performed by which what has remained of them will be regarded as the disappearing vestiges of a dead reality and without any further violent coercion be transformed slowly and steadily out of existence.
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1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
This move from causal unmanifest to nondual embrace, Ramana refers to as the development from nirvikalpa to sahaj samadhi, which means "unbroken and spontaneously so," a "state" in which "the whole cosmos [Kosmos] is contained in the Heart, with perfect Equality of all, for grace is all-pervading and there is nothing that is not the Self.
All this world is Brahman."58
1.09 - Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.09 - Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
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1:AN ENTIRE self-consecration, a complete Equality, an unsparing effacement of the ego, a transforming deliverance of the nature from its ignorant modes of action are the steps by which the surrender of all the being and nature to the Divine Will can be prepared and achieved, - a self-giving true, total and without reserve. The first necessity is an entire spirit of self-consecration in our works; it must become first the constant will, then the ingrained need in all the being, finally its automatic but living and conscious habit, the self-existent turn to do all action as a sacrifice to the Supreme and to the veiled Power present in us and in all beings and in all the workings of the universe. Life is the altar of this sacrifice, works are our offering; a transcendent and universal Power and Presence as yet rather felt or glimpsed than known or seen by us is the Deity to whom they are offered. This sacrifice, this self-consecration has two sides to it; there is the work itself and there is the spirit in which it is done, the spirit of worship to the Master of Works in all that we see, think and experience.
2:The work itself is at first determined by the best light we can comm and in our ignorance. It is that which we conceive as the thing that should be done. And whether it be shaped by our sense of duty, by our feeling for our fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of the world or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all works in whom we believe but whom we do not yet know, the principle is the same. The essential of the sacrifice of works must be there and the essential is the surrender of all desire for the fruit of our works, the renunciation of all attachment to the result for which yet we labour. For so long as we work with attachment to the result, the sacrifice is offered not to the Divine, but to our ego. We may think otherwise, but we are deceiving ourselves; we are making our idea of the Divine, our sense of duty, our feeling for our fellow-creatures, our idea of what is good for the world or others, even our obedience to the Master a mask for our egoistic satisfactions and preferences and a specious shield against the demand made on us to root all desire out of our nature.
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4:The renunciation of attachment to the work and its fruit is the beginning of a wide movement towards an absolute Equality in the mind and soul which must become all-enveloping if we are to be perfect in the spirit. For the worship of the Master of works demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment of him in ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality is the sign of this adoration; it is the soul's ground on which true sacrifice and worship can be done. The Lord is there equally in all beings, we have to make no essential distinctions between ourselves and others, the wise and the ignorant, friend and enemy, man and animal, the saint and the sinner. We must hate none, despise none, be repelled by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised or manifested at his pleasure. He is a little revealed in one or more revealed in another or concealed and wholly distorted in others according to his will and his knowledge of what is best for that which he intends to become in form in them and to do in works in their nature. All is ourself, one self that has taken many shapes. Hatred and disliking and scorn and repulsion, clinging and attachment and preference are natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage: they attend upon or they help to make and maintain Nature's choice in us. But to the Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of the Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The child-soul needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult in the divine culture. In the God-nature to which we have to rise there can be an adamantine, even a destructive severity but not hatred, a divine irony but not scorn, a calm, clear-seeing and forceful rejection but not repulsion and dislike. Even what we have to destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised and temporary movement of the Eternal.
5:And since all things are the one Self in its manifestation, we shall have Equality of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the good and the evil. Here also there will be no hatred, scorn and repulsion, but instead the equal eye that sees all things in their real character and their appointed place. For we shall know that all things express or disguise, develop or distort, as best they can or with whatever defect they must, under the circumstances intended for them, in the way possible to the immediate status or function or evolution of their nature, some truth or fact, some energy or potential of the Divine necessary by its presence in the progressive manifestation both to the whole of the present sum of things and for the perfection of the ultimate result. That truth is what we must seek and discover behind the transitory expression; undeterred by appearances, by the deficiencies or the disfigurements of the expression, we can then worship the Divine for ever unsullied, pure, beautiful and perfect behind his masks. All indeed has to be changed, not ugliness accepted but divine beauty, not imperfection taken as our resting-place but perfection striven after, the supreme good made the universal aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a spiritual understanding and knowledge, and it is a divine good, beauty, perfection, pleasure that has to be followed after, not the human standards of these things. If we have not Equality, it is a sign that we are still pursued by the Ignorance, we shall truly understand nothing and it is more than likely that we shall destroy the old imperfection only to create another: for we are substituting the appreciations of our human mind and desire-soul for the divine values.
6: Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate, - far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil.
7:And so too we shall have the same Equality of mind and soul towards all happenings, painful or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune. For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master of all works and results and a step in the evolving expression of the Divine. He manifests himself, to those who have the inner eye that sees, in forces and their play and results as well as in things and in creatures. All things move towards a divine event; each experience, suffering and want no less than joy and satisfaction, is a necessary link in the carrying out of a universal movement which it is our business to understand and second. To revolt, to condemn, to cry out is the impulse of our unchastened and ignorant instincts. Revolt like everything else has its uses in the play and is even necessary, helpful, decreed for the divine development in its own time and stage; but the movement of an ignorant rebellion belongs to the stage of the soul's childhood or to its raw adolescence. The ripened soul does not condemn but seeks to understand and master, does not cry out but accepts or toils to improve and perfect, does not revolt inwardly but labours to obey and fulfil and transfigure. Therefore we shall receive all things with an equal soul from the hands of the Master. Failure we shall admit as a passage as calmly as success until the hour of the divine victory arrives. Our souls and minds and bodies will remain unshaken by acutest sorrow and suffering and pain if in the divine dispensation they come to us, unoverpowered by intensest joy and pleasure. Thus supremely balanced we shall continue steadily on our way meeting all things with an equal calm until we are ready for a more exalted status and can enter into the supreme and universal Ananda.
8:This Equality cannot come except by a protracted ordeal and patient self-discipline; so long as desire is strong, Equality cannot come at all except in periods of quiescence and the fatigue of desire, and it is then more likely to be an inert indifference or desire's recoil from itself than the true calm and the positive spiritual oneness. Moreover, this discipline or this growth into Equality of spirit has its necessary epochs and stages. Ordinarily we have to begin with a period of endurance; for we must learn to confront, to suffer and to assimilate all contacts. Each fibre in us must be taught not to wince away from that which pains and repels and not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but rather to accept, to face, to bear and to conquer. All touches we must be strong to bear, not only those that are proper and personal to us but those born of our sympathy or our conflict with the worlds around, above or below us and with their peoples. We shall endure tranquilly the action and impact on us of men and things and forces, the pressure of the Gods and the assaults of Titans; we shall face and engulf in the unstirred seas of our spirit all that can possibly come to us down the ways of the soul's infinite experience. This is the stoical period of the preparation of Equality, its most elementary and yet its heroic age. But this steadfast endurance of the flesh and heart and mind must be reinforced by a sustained sense of spiritual submission to a divine Will: this living clay must yield not only with a stern or courageous acquiescence, but with knowledge or with resignation, even in suffering, to the touch of the divine Hand that is preparing its perfection. A sage, a devout or even a tender stoicism of the God-lover is possible, and these are better than the merely pagan self-reliant endurance which may lend itself to a too great hardening of the vessel of God: for this kind prepares the strength that is capable of wisdom and of love; its tranquillity is a deeply moved calm that passes easily into bliss. The gain of this period of resignation and endurance is the soul's strength equal to all shocks and contacts.
9:There is next a period of high-seated impartiality and indifference in which the soul becomes free from exultation and depression and escapes from the snare of the eagerness of joy as from the dark net of the pangs of grief and suffering. All things and persons and forces, all thoughts and feelings and sensations and actions, one's own no less than those of others, are regarded from above by a spirit that remains intact and immutable and is not disturbed by these things. This is the philosophic period of the preparation of Equality, a wide and august movement. But indifference must not settle into an inert turning away from action and experience; it must not be an aversion born of weariness, disgust and distaste, a recoil of disappointed or satiated desire, the sullenness of a baffled and dissatisfied egoism forced back from its passionate aims. These recoils come inevitably in the unripe soul and may in some way help the progress by a discouragement of the eager desire-driven vital nature, but they are not the perfection towards which we labour. The indifference or the impartiality that we must seek after is a calm superiority of the high-seated soul above the contacts of things;1 it regards and accepts or rejects them but is not moved in the rejection and is not subjected by the acceptance. It begins to feel itself near, kin to, one with a silent Self and Spirit self-existent and separate from the workings of Nature which it supports and makes possible, part of or merged in the motionless calm Reality that transcends the motion and action of the universe. The gain of this period of high transcendence is the soul's peace unrocked and unshaken by the pleasant ripplings or by the tempestuous waves and billows of the world's movement.
10:If we can pass through these two stages of the inner change without being arrested or fixed in either, we are admitted to a greater divine Equality which is capable of a spiritual ardour and tranquil passion of delight, a rapturous, all-understanding and all-possessing Equality of the perfected soul, an intense and even wideness and fullness of its being embracing all things. This is the supreme period and the passage to it is through the joy of a total self-giving to the Divine and to the universal Mother For strength is then crowned by a happy mastery, peace deepens into bliss, the possession of the divine calm is uplifted and made the ground for the possession of the divine movement. But if this greater perfection is to arrive, the soul's impartial high-seatedness looking down from above on the flux of forms and personalities and movements and forces must be modified and change into a new sense of strong and calm submission and a powerful and intense surrender. This submission will be no longer a resigned acquiescence but a glad acceptance: for there will be no sense of suffering or of the bearing of a burden or cross; love and delight and the joy of self-giving will be its brilliant texture. And this surrender will be not only to a divine Will which we perceive and accept and obey, but to a divine Wisdom in the Will which we recognise and a divine Love in it which we feel and rapturously suffer, the wisdom and love of a supreme Spirit and Self of ourselves and all with which we can achieve a happy and perfect unity. A lonely power, peace and stillness is the last word of the philosophic Equality of the sage; but the soul in its integral experience liberates itself from this self-created status and enters into the sea of a supreme and allembracing ecstasy of the beginningless and endless beatitude of the Eternal. Then we are at last capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful Equality, because we feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and Delight, the happiness absolute that hides ever in the heart of things. The gain of this culmination in a universal and equal rapture is the soul's delight and the opening gates of the Bliss that is infinite, the Joy that surpasses all understanding.
11:Before this labour for the annihilation of desire and the conquest of the soul's Equality can come to its absolute perfection and fruition, that turn of the spiritual movement must have been completed which leads to the abolition of the sense of ego. But for the worker the renunciation of the egoism of action is the most important element in this change. For even when by giving up the fruits and the desire of the fruits to the Master of the Sacrifice we have parted with the egoism of rajasic desire, we may still have kept the egoism of the worker. Still we are subject to the sense that we are ourselves the doer of the act, ourselves its source and ourselves the giver of the sanction. It is still the "I" that chooses and determines, it is still the "I" that undertakes the responsibility and feels the demerit or the merit.
12:An entire removal of this separative ego-sense is an essential aim of our Yoga. If any ego is to remain in us for a while, it is only a form of it which knows itself to be a form and is ready to disappear as soon as a true centre of consciousness is manifested or built in us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one Existence. A support for the individual manifestation and action of the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti.2
13:Here too, in this movement by which the soul divests itself gradually of the obscure robe of the ego, there is a progress by marked stages. For not only the fruit of works belongs to the Lord alone, but our works also must be his; he is the true lord of our actions no less than of our results. This we must not see with the thinking mind only, it must become entirely true to our entire consciousness and will. The sadhaka has not only to think and know but to see and feel concretely and intensely even in the moment of the working and in its initiation and whole process that his works are not his at all, but are coming through him from the Supreme Existence. He must be always aware of a Force, a Presence, a Will that acts through his individual nature. But there is in taking this turn the danger that he may confuse his own disguised or sublimated ego or an inferior power with the Lord and substitute its demands for the supreme dictates. He may fall into a common ambush of this lower nature and distort his supposed surrender to a higher Power into an excuse for a magnified and uncontrolled indulgence of his own self-will and even of his desires and passions. A great sincerity is asked for and has to be imposed not only on the conscious mind but still more on the subliminal part of us which is full of hidden movements. For there is there, especially in our subliminal vital nature, an incorrigible charlatan and actor. The sadhaka must first have advanced far in the elimination of desire and in the firm Equality of his soul towards all workings and all happenings before he can utterly lay down the burden of his works on the Divine. At every moment he must proceed with a vigilant eye upon the deceits of the ego and the ambushes of the misleading Powers of Darkness who ever represent themselves as the one Source of Light and Truth and take on them a simulacrum of divine forms in order to capture the soul of the seeker.
14:Immediately he must take the further step of relegating himself to the position of the Witness. Aloof from the Prakriti, impersonal and dispassionate, he must watch the executive Nature-Force at work within him and understand its action; he must learn by this separation to recognise the play of her universal forces, distinguish her interweaving of light and night, the divine and the undivine, and detect her formidable Powers and Beings that use the ignorant human creature. Nature works in us, says the Gita, through the triple quality of Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the quality of passion and desire and the quality of obscurity and inertia. The seeker must learn to distinguish, as an impartial and discerning witness of all that proceeds within this kingdom of his nature, the separate and the combined action of these qualities; he must pursue the workings of the cosmic forces in him through all the labyrinth of their subtle unseen processes and disguises and know every intricacy of the maze. As he proceeds in this knowledge, he will be able to become the giver of the sanction and no longer remain an ignorant tool of Nature. At first he must induce the NatureForce in its action on his instruments to subdue the working of its two lower qualities and bring them into subjection to the quality of light and good and, afterwards, he must persuade that again to offer itself so that all three may be transformed by a higher Power into their divine equivalents, supreme repose and calm, divine illumination and bliss, the eternal divine dynamis, Tapas. The first part of this discipline and change can be firmly done in principle by the will of the mental being in us; but its full execution and the subsequent transformation can be done only when the deeper psychic soul increases its hold on the nature and replaces the mental being as its ruler. When this happens, he will be ready to make, not only with an aspiration and intention and an initial and progressive self-abandonment but with the most intense actuality of dynamic self-giving, the complete renunciation of his works to the Supreme Will. By degrees his mind of an imperfect human intelligence will be replaced by a spiritual and illumined mind and that can in the end enter into the supramental Truth-Light; he will then no longer act from his nature of the Ignorance with its three modes of confused and imperfect activity, but from a diviner nature of spiritual calm, light, power and bliss. He will act not from an amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with the drive of a still more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire of the life-being and the urge and instinct of the flesh, but first from a spiritualised self and nature and, last, from a supramental Truth-consciousness and its divine force of supernature.
1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
flat and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine of Equality!
... But there is no more deadly poison than this; for it _seems_ to
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the curtain down on all justice.... "To equals Equality, to unequals
in Equality"--that would be the real speech of justice and that which
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much horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of Equality,
has lent this "modern idea" _par excellence_ such a halo of fire and
1.1.01 - The Divine and Its Aspects, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even one may put some sattwic control, by tapasya, over the action of the Prakriti; but the impersonal Self has no power to change or divinise the Nature. For that one has to go beyond the impersonal Self and seek after the Divine who is both personal and impersonal and beyond these two aspects. If, however, you practise living in the impersonal Self and can achieve a certain spiritual impersonality, then you grow in Equality, purity, peace, detachment, you get the power of living in an inner freedom not touched by the surface movement or struggle of the mental, vital and physical nature, and this becomes a great help when you have to go beyond the impersonal and to change the troubled nature also into something divine.
The Divine and the Atman
1.1.02 - The Aim of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(4) To talk about the supramental and think of bringing it down in yourself is the most dangerous of all. It may bring an entire megalomania and loss of balance. What the sadhak has to seek is the full opening to the Divine, the psychic change of his consciousness, the spiritual change. Of that change of consciousness, selflessness, desirelessness, humility, bhakti, surrender, calm, Equality, peace, quiet, sincerity are necessary constituents. Until he has the psychic and spiritual change, to think of being supramental is an absurdity and an arrogant absurdity.
All these egoistic ideas, if indulged, can only aggrandise the ego, spoil the sadhana and lead to serious spiritual dangers. They should be rejected altogether.
1.10 - The Yoga of the Intelligent Will, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For evidently there are two possibilities of the action of the intelligent will. It may take its downward and outward orientation towards a discursive action of the perceptions and the will in the triple play of Prakriti, or it may take its upward and inward orientation towards a settled peace and Equality in the calm and immutable purity of the conscious silent soul no longer subject to the distractions of Nature. In the former alternative the subjective being is at the mercy of the objects of sense, it lives in the outward contact of things. That life is the life of desire. For the senses excited by their objects create a restless or often violent disturbance, a strong or even headlong outward movement towards the seizure of these objects and their enjoyment, and they carry away the sense-mind, "as the winds carry away a ship upon the sea"; the mind subjected to the emotions, passions, longings, impulsions awakened by this outward movement of the senses carries away similarly the intelligent will, which loses therefore its power of calm discrimination and mastery. Subjection of the soul to the confused play
The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
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is a particular intensity, not the essential sign. The test is the expulsion of all desires, their inability to get at the mind, and it is the inner state from which this freedom arises, the delight of the soul gathered within itself with the mind equal and still and highpoised above the attractions and repulsions, the alternations of sunshine and storm and stress of the external life. It is drawn inward even when acting outwardly; it is concentrated in self even when gazing out upon things; it is directed wholly to the Divine even when to the outward vision of others busy and preoccupied with the affairs of the world. Arjuna, voicing the average human mind, asks for some outward, physical, practically discernible sign of this great Samadhi; how does such a man speak, how sit, how walk? No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacher attempt to supply them; for the only possible test of its possession is inward and that there are plenty of hostile psychological forces to apply. Equality is the great stamp of the liberated soul and of that Equality even the most discernible signs are still subjective. "A man with mind untroubled by sorrows, who has done with desire for pleasures, from whom liking and wrath and fear have passed away, such is the sage whose understanding has become founded in stability." He is "without the triple action of the qualities of Prakriti, without the dualities, ever based in his true being, without getting or having, possessed of his self."
For what gettings and havings has the free soul? Once we are possessed of the Self, we are in possession of all things.
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claim for the satisfaction of the restless and energetic mind by a constant activity, the claim made by the practical or the kinetic man, which is here enjoined. "Fixed in Yoga do thy actions, having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failure and success; for it is Equality that is meant by Yoga." Action is distressed by the choice between a relative good and evil, the fear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? But the liberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine, casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both good doing and evil doing; for he rises to a higher law beyond good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Such desireless action can have no decisiveness, no effectiveness, no efficient motive, no large or vigorous creative power? Not so; action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, the most potent and efficient even for the affairs of the world; for it is informed by the knowledge and will of the Master of works:
"Yoga is skill in works." But all action directed towards life leads away from the universal aim of the Yogin which is by common consent to escape from bondage to this distressed and sorrowful human birth? Not so, either; the sages who do works without desire for fruits and in Yoga with the Divine are liberated from the bondage of birth and reach that other perfect status in which there are none of the maladies which afflict the mind and life of a suffering humanity.
1.1.1.03 - Creative Power and the Human Instrument, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the parts of a poem come from different planes, it is because one starts from some high plane but the connecting consciousness cannot receive uninterruptedly from there and as soon as it flickers or wavers it comes down to a lower, perhaps without noticing it, or the lower comes in to supply the continuation of the flow or on the contrary the consciousness starts from a lower plane and is lifted in the vea, perhaps occasionally, perhaps more continuously higher for a time or else the higher force attracted by the creative will breaks through or touches or catches up the less exalted inspiration towards or into itself. I am speaking here especially of the overhead planes where this is quite natural; for the Overmind for instance is the ultimate source of intuition, illumination or heightened power of the planes immediately below it. It can lift them up into its own greater intensity or give out of its intensity to them or touch or combine their powers together with something of its own greater poweror they can receive or draw something from it or from each other. On the lower planes beginning from the mental downwards there can also be such variations or combinations, but the working is not the same, for the different powers here stand more on a footing of Equality whether they stand apart from each other, each working in its own right, or cooperate.
29 April 1937
11.14 - Our Finest Hour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
On the contrary, the prison need not be altogether a prison, it may be an occasion, an opportunity for the human consciousness to make a break-through to create a new dimension. Here is then our immediate workto conquer inner domains, the inner truths: for all truths are found first within the consciousness, established there before they become facts. So then let us harness our power and prowess, our aspiration and sincerity, all our life energy to the labour of the inner conquest. Let us stop awhile from the temptation and the urge for destruction and turn it round towards a higher inner adventure that of construction. Yes, the truth that we want to see established in the outer world, let us establish it in ourselves, in each one of us, in our consciousness, in our impulses and activities. We always wanted liberty and Equality and fraternity in the world at large, the ideal has not been realised because we did not care to realise it in the consciousness and life of each one of us. In the collective life of mankind that truth will alone become a fact which is a fact in the inner existence and consciousness of every human being.
The inner discovery is indeed a battle and here too a victory has to be won. It needs more than in any physical battle a complete contingent of courage and bravery, calm strength and persevering endurance, skill and energy to gain an absolute success. And there the field is free and vast, one can deploy oneself as largely as possible, move in any direction to any distance as one likes. It is no longer a prison,it is a region where one meets one's soul.
1.1.1 - The Mind and Other Levels of Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The less pet ideas are petted and cherished, the better for the supramental Yoga. The mind is always building up ideas, some of which are wrong, some a mixture of truth and error, some true in their way, but true only in a certain field or in certain conditions or for some people, and it proceeds not only to make pets of them, but to try to impose them as universal and absolute truths or general standards which everybody must follow. The mind is a rigid instrument: it finds it difficult to adapt itself to the greater plasticity of the play of life or the freedom of the play of the Spirit. It wants to catch hold of either or both of these spontaneous powers and cut them into its own measures. It poses as the mediator and interpreter between life and the spirit; but it knows neither; it only knows itself and its own constructions out of life and its own deformations or half reflections of the truth of the Spirit. Only the supermind can be a true mediator and interpreter. But if you want the supramental Light, you must not tie yourself to mental ideas, but draw back from them and observe them with an impartial Equality in the silence of the spirit. When the supramental Light touches them, it will put them in their place and finally replace them by the true truth of things.
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1.11 - Works and Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HE YOGA of the intelligent will and its culmination in the Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of the second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching of the Gita, - its doctrine of desireless works, of Equality, of the rejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine; but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most strongly emphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinary motive of human activities, desire, from man's normal temperament of the sense-seeking thought and will with its passions and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled manybranching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity and passionless serenity of the Brahmic poise. So much Arjuna has understood. He is not unfamiliar with all this; it is the substance of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way of perfection. The intelligence withdrawing from sense and desire and human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to the actionless Purusha, to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman, that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no room here for works, since works belong to the Ignorance; action is the very opposite of knowledge; its seed is desire and its fruit is bondage. That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, and
Krishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works are far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works are insisted upon as part of the Yoga; so that there seems to be in this teaching a radical inconsistency. Not only so; for some kind of work no doubt may persist for a while, the minimum, the most inoffensive; but here is a work wholly inconsistent with knowledge, with serenity and with the motionless peace of the self-delighted soul, - a work terrible, even monstrous, a bloody strife, a ruthless battle, a giant massacre. Yet it is this that is
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enjoined, this that it is sought to justify by the teaching of inner peace and desireless Equality and status in the Brahman! Here then is an unreconciled contradiction. Arjuna complains that he has been given a contradictory and confusing doctrine, not the clear, strenuously single road by which the human intelligence can move straight and trenchantly to the supreme good. It is in answer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to develop more clearly its positive and imperative doctrine of Works.
The Teacher first makes a distinction between the two means of salvation on which in this world men can concentrate separately, the Yoga of knowledge, the Yoga of works, the one implying, it is usually supposed, renunciation of works as an obstacle to salvation, the other accepting works as a means of salvation. He does not yet insist strongly on any fusion of them, on any reconciliation of the thought that divides them, but begins by showing that the renunciation of the Sankhyas, the physical renunciation, Sannyasa, is neither the only way, nor at all the better way. Nais.karmya, a calm voidness from works, is no doubt that to which the soul, the Purusha has to attain; for it is Prakriti which does the work and the soul has to rise above involution in the activities of the being and attain to a free serenity and poise watching over the operations of Prakriti, but not affected by them. That, and not cessation of the works of Prakriti, is what is really meant by the soul's nais.karmya.
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free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection. Do action thus self-controlled, says Krishna, niyatam kuru karma tvam: I have said that knowledge, the intelligence, is greater than works, jyayas karman.o buddhih., but I did not mean that inaction is greater than action; the contrary is the truth, karma jyayo akarman.ah.. For knowledge does not mean renunciation of works, it means Equality and non-attachment to desire and the objects of sense; and it means the poise of the intelligent will in the Soul free and high-uplifted above the lower instrumentation of Prakriti and controlling the works of the mind and the senses and body in the power of self-knowledge and the pure objectless self-delight of spiritual realisation, niyatam karma.2 Buddhiyoga is fulfilled by karmayoga; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelligent will finds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works.
Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless works, nis.kama karma, and unites the subjective practice of the Sankhyas - rejecting their merely physical rule - with the practice of Yoga.
1.12 - Delight of Existence - The Solution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:Since the nature of suffering is a failure of the consciousforce in us to meet the shocks of existence and a consequent shrinking and contraction and its root is an in Equality of that receptive and possessing force due to our self-limitation by egoism consequent on the ignorance of our true Self, of Sachchidananda, the elimination of suffering must first proceed by the substitution of titiks.a, the facing, enduring and conquest of all shocks of existence for jugupsa, the shrinking and contraction: by this endurance and conquest we proceed to an Equality which may be either an equal indifference to all contacts or an equal gladness in all contacts; and this Equality again must find a firm foundation in the substitution of the Sachchidananda consciousness which is All-Bliss for the ego-consciousness which enjoys and suffers. The Sachchidananda consciousness may be transcendent of the universe and aloof from it, and to this state of distant Bliss the path is equal indifference; it is the path of the ascetic. Or the Sachchidananda consciousness may be at once transcendent and universal; and to this state of present and all-embracing Bliss the path is surrender and loss of the ego in the universal and possession of an all-pervading equal delight; it is the path of the ancient Vedic sages. But neutrality to the imperfect touches of pleasure and the perverse touches of pain is the first direct and natural result of the soul's self-discipline and the conversion to equal delight can, usually, come only afterwards. The direct transformation of the triple vibration into Ananda is possible, but less easy to the human being.
16:Such then is the view of the universe which arises out of the integral Vedantic affirmation. An infinite, indivisible existence all-blissful in its pure self-consciousness moves out of its fundamental purity into the varied play of Force that is consciousness, into the movement of Prakriti which is the play of Maya. The delight of its existence is at first self-gathered, absorbed, subconscious in the basis of the physical universe; then emergent in a great mass of neutral movement which is not yet what we call sensation; then further emergent with the growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and indifference originating from the limitation of the force of consciousness in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and standard; finally, the conscious emergence of the full Sachchidananda in its creations by universality, by Equality, by self-possession and conquest of Nature. This is the course and movement of the world.
17:If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence - in its mutable becoming, not in its immutable being, - lies precisely in the variable realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of Sachchidananda in that which seems to be its own opposite and its self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. Infinite being loses itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance of a finite Soul; infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of a vast indeterminate inconscience and emerges in the appearance of a superficial limited consciousness; infinite selfsustaining Force loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the appearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference; infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other. In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge. Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things; his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the harmony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.
1.12 - The Divine Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
for the soul after liberation and to what purpose? Equality has
been seated in the nature or governs the whole nature; there has
1.12 - The Significance of Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nature, nistraigun.ya. The Brahman is one but self-displayed in two aspects, the immutable Being and the creator and originator of works in the mutable becoming, atman, sarvabhutani; it is the immobile omnipresent Soul of things and it is the spiritual principle of the mobile working of things, Purusha poised in himself and Purusha active in Prakriti; it is aks.ara and ks.ara. In both of these aspects the Divine Being, Purushottama, manifests himself in the universe; the immutable above all qualities is His poise of peace, self-possession, Equality, samam brahma; from that proceeds His manifestation in the qualities of Prakriti and their universal workings; from the Purusha in Prakriti, from this
Brahman with qualities, proceed all the works1 of the universal energy, Karma, in man and in all existences; from that work proceeds the principle of sacrifice. Even the material interchange between gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typified in the dependence of rain and its product food on this working and on them the physical birth of creatures. For all the working of Prakriti is in its true nature a sacrifice, yajna, with the Divine
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But he may be known in an inferior action through the devas, the gods, the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and in the eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mutually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raising each other's workings and satisfaction, a commerce in which man rises towards a growing fitness for the supreme good. He recognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Nature and not a thing separate and to be held and pursued for its own sake. He regards his enjoyments and the satisfaction of his desires as the fruit of sacrifice and the gift of the gods in their divine universal workings and he ceases to pursue them in the false and evil spirit of sinful egoistic selfishness as if they were a good to be seized from life by his own unaided strength without return and without thankfulness. As this spirit increases in him, he subordinates his desires, becomes satisfied with sacrifice as the law of life and works and is content with whatever remains over from the sacrifice, giving up all the rest freely as an offering in the great and beneficent interchange between his life and the worldlife. Whoever goes contrary to this law of action and pursues works and enjoyment for his own isolated personal self-interest, lives in vain; he misses the true meaning and aim and utility of living and the upward growth of the soul; he is not on the path which leads to the highest good. But the highest only comes when the sacrifice is no longer to the gods, but to the one allpervading Divine established in the sacrifice, of whom the gods are inferior forms and powers, and when he puts away the lower self that desires and enjoys and gives up his personal sense of being the worker to the true executrix of all works, Prakriti, and his personal sense of being the enjoyer to the Divine Purusha, the higher and universal Self who is the real enjoyer of the works of Prakriti. In that Self and not in any personal enjoyment he finds now his sole satisfaction, complete content, pure delight; he has nothing to gain by action or inaction, depends neither on gods nor men for anything, seeks no profit from any, for the self-delight is all-sufficient to him, but does works for the sake of the Divine only, as a pure sacrifice, without attachment or desire. Thus he gains Equality and becomes free from the
The Significance of Sacrifice
1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression c the coloured peoples. For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Christian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant. Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organization. Moreover their eternity-philosophy preserved them from the materialistic apocalypticism of that progress-worship which in recent times has justified every kind of iniquity from war and revolution to sweated labour, slavery and the exploitation of savages and childrenhas justified them on the ground that the supreme good is in future time and that any temporal means, however intrinsically horrible, may be used to achieve that good. Because Quaker theology was a form of eternity-philosophy, Quaker political theory rejected war and persecution as means to ideal ends, denounced slavery and proclaimed racial Equality. Members of other denominations had done good work for the African victims of the white mans rapacity. One thinks, for example, of St. Peter Claver at Cartagena. But this heroically charitable slave of the slaves never raised his voice against the institution of slavery or the criminal trade by which it was sustained; nor, so far as the extant documents reveal, did he ever, like John Woolman, attempt to persuade the slave-owners to free their human chattels. The reason, presumably, was that Claver was a Jesuit, vowed to perfect obedience and constrained by his theology to regard a certain political and ecclesiastical organization as being the mystical body of Christ. The heads of this organization had not pronounced against slavery or the slave trade. Who was he, Pedro Claver, to express a thought not officially approved by his superiors?
Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Christianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of mans temporal ends. Even St. Francis attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick mans craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciples intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property. It was not until the nineteenth century, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruthless with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex hypothesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically.
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There is therefore a catholic spirit, a communion of saints in the love of God and all goodness, which no one can learn from that which is called orthodoxy in particular churches, but is only to be had by a total dying to all worldly views, by a pure love of God, and by such an unction from above as delivers the mind from all selfishness and makes it love truth and goodness with an Equality of affection in every man, whether he is Christian, Jew or Gentile. He that would obtain this divine and catholic spirit in this disordered, divided state of things, and live in a divided part of the church without partaking of its division, must have these three truths deeply fixed in his mind. First, that universal love, which gives the whole strength of the heart to God, and makes us love every man as we love ourselves, is the noblest, the most divine, the Godlike state of the soul, and is the utmost perfection to which the most perfect religion can raise us; and that no religion does any man any good but so far as it brings this perfection of love into him. This truth will show us that true orthodoxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbour. Second, that in this present divided state of the church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and that, therefore, he can be the only true catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. This truth will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the church. Thirdly, he must always have in mind this great truth, that it is the glory of the Divine Justice to have no respect of parties or persons, but to stand equally disposed to that which is right and wrong as well in the Jew as in the Gentile. He therefore that would like as God likes, and condemn as God condemns, must have neither the eyes of the Papist nor the Protestant; he must like no truth the less because Ignatius Loyola or John Bunyan were very zealous for it, nor have the less aversion to any error, because Dr. Trapp or George Fox had brought it forth.
William Law
1.14 - The Principle of Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Purushottama which as yet is not developed, - we find it set forth clearly only much later in the eighteen chapters, - and therefore we have had to anticipate, at whatever cost of infidelity to the progressive method of the Gita's exposition, that central teaching. At present the Teacher simply gives a hint, merely adumbrates this supreme presence of the Purushottama and his relation to the immobile Self in whom it is our first business, our pressing spiritual need to find our poise of perfect peace and Equality by attainment to the Brahmic condition. He speaks as yet not at all in set terms of the Purushottama, but of himself, - "I", Krishna, Narayana, the Avatar, the God in man who is also the Lord in the universe incarnated in the figure of the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra. "In the Self, then in
Me," is the formula he gives, implying that the transcendence of the individual personality by seeing it as a "becoming" in the impersonal self-existent Being is simply a means of arriving at that great secret impersonal Personality, which is thus silent, calm and uplifted above Nature in the impersonal Being, but also present and active in Nature in all these million becomings.
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Therefore the quietistic tendency in man must be got to recognise its own incompleteness and admit on an Equality with itself the truth which lies behind the kinetic tendency, - the fulfilment of God in man and the presence of the Divine in all the action of the human race. God is there not only in the silence, but in the action; the quietism of the impassive soul unaffected by Nature and the kinetism of the soul giving itself to Nature so that the great world-sacrifice, the Purusha-Yajna, may be
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1.15 - The Supreme Truth-Consciousness, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
14:In that spacious Equality of oneness the Being is not divided and distributed; equably self-extended, pervading its extension as One, inhabiting as One the multiplicity of forms, it is everywhere at once the single and equal Brahman. For this extension of the Being in Time and Space and this pervasion and indwelling is in intimate relation with the absolute Unity from which it has proceeded, with that absolute Indivisible in which there is no centre or circumference but only the timeless and spaceless One. That high concentration of unity in the unextended Brahman must necessarily translate itself in the extension by this equal pervasive concentration, this indivisible comprehension of all things, this universal undistributed immanence, this unity which no play of multiplicity can abrogate or diminish. "Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman" is the triple formula of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of self-manifestation in three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its self-view as the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the cosmos.
15:But what then is the origin of mentality and the organisation of this lower consciousness in the triple terms of Mind, Life and Matter which is our view of the universe? For since all things that exist must proceed from the action of the allefficient Supermind, from its operation in the three original terms of Existence, Conscious-Force and Bliss, there must be some faculty of the creative Truth-Consciousness which so operates as to cast them into these new terms, into this inferior trio of mentality, vitality and physical substance. This faculty we find in a secondary power of the creative knowledge, its power of a projecting, confronting and apprehending consciousness in which knowledge centralises itself and stands back from its works to observe them. And when we speak of centralisation, we mean, as distinguished from the equable concentration of consciousness of which we have hitherto spoken, an unequal concentration in which there is the beginning of self-division - or of its phenomenal appearance.
1.16 - THE ESSENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
erty Equality Fraternity which are indissolubly associated in our
minds with the idea of any government of the people by the peo-
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a Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was in 1789 that this famous slo-
gan electrified the Western world: but as events have shown, its
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erty to do anything? Equality in all respects? Fraternity based
on what common bonds? . . . Even today the magical words are
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Liberty, Equality, Fraternity no longer indeterminate, amor-
phous and inert, but directed, guided, dynamized by the growth of
1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Hinduism which rejected Buddha, his sangha and his dharma, bears the ineffaceable imprint of the social and ethical influence of Buddhism and its effect on the ideas and the life of the race, while in modern Europe, Christian only in name, humanitarianism is the translation into the ethical and social sphere and the aspiration to liberty, Equality and fraternity the translation into the social and political sphere of the spiritual truths of
Christianity, the latter especially being effected by men who aggressively rejected the Christian religion and spiritual discipline and by an age which in its intellectual effort of emancipation tried to get rid of Christianity as a creed. On the other hand the life of Rama and Krishna belongs to the prehistoric past which has come down only in poetry and legend and may even be regarded as myths; but it is quite immaterial whether we regard them as myths or historical facts, because their permanent truth and value lie in their persistence as a spiritual form, presence, influence in the inner consciousness of the race and the life of the human soul. Avatarhood is a fact of divine life and consciousness which may realise itself in an outward action, but must persist, when that action is over and has done its work, in a spiritual influence; or may realise itself in a spiritual influence and teaching, but must then have its permanent effect, even when the new religion or discipline is exhausted, in the thought, temperament and outward life of mankind.
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is therefore the taking up of all human relations into a higher divine meaning; starting from the established ethical, social and religious rule which binds together the whole community in which the God-seeker lives, it lifts it up by informing it with the Brahmic consciousness; the law it gives is the law of oneness, of Equality, of liberated, desireless, God-governed action, of
God-knowledge and self-knowledge enlightening and drawing to itself all the nature and all the action, drawing it towards divine being and divine consciousness, and of God-love as the supreme power and crown of the knowledge and the action.
1.18 - The Divine Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The result of this knowledge, this desirelessness and this impersonality is a perfect Equality in the soul and the nature.
Equality is the fourth sign of the divine worker. He has, says the Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvatta. We have seen that he regards with equal eyes, without any disturbance of feeling, failure and success, victory and defeat; but not only these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled.
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the cause of the good and just against the cause of the evil and oppressive. The liberated soul looks beyond these conflicting standards; he sees simply what the supreme Self demands from him as needful for the maintenance or for the bringing forward of the evolving Dharma. He has no personal ends to serve, no personal loves and hatreds to satisfy, no rigidly fixed standard of action which opposes its rock-line to the flexible advancing march of the progress of the human race or stands up defiant against the call of the Infinite. He has no personal enemies to be conquered or slain, but sees only men who have been brought up against him by circumstances and the will in things to help by their opposition the march of destiny. Against them he can have no wrath or hatred; for wrath and hatred are foreign to the divine nature. The Asura's desire to break and slay what opposes him, the Rakshasa's grim lust of slaughter are impossible to his calm and peace and his all-embracing sympathy and understanding. He has no wish to injure, but on the contrary a universal friendliness and compassion, maitrah. karun.a eva ca: but this compassion is that of a divine soul overlooking men, embracing all other souls in himself, not the shrinking of the heart and the nerves and the flesh which is the ordinary human form of pity: nor does he attach a supreme importance to the life of the body, but looks beyond to the life of the soul and attaches to the other only an instrumental value. He will not hasten to slaughter and strife, but if war comes in the wave of the Dharma, he will accept it with a large Equality and a perfect understanding and sympathy for those whose power and pleasure of domination he has to break and whose joy of triumphant life he has to destroy.
For in all he sees two things, the Divine inhabiting every being equally, the varying manifestation unequal only in its temporary circumstances. In the animal and man, in the dog, the unclean outcaste and the learned and virtuous Brahmin, in the saint and the sinner, in the indifferent and the friendly and the hostile, in those who love him and benefit and those who hate him and afflict, he sees himself, he sees God and has at heart for all the same equal kindliness, the same divine affection.
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conflict, but can never affect his equal eye, his open heart, his inner embrace of all. And in all his actions there will be the same principle of soul, a perfect Equality, and the same principle of work, the will of the Divine in him active for the need of the race in its gradually developing advance towards the Godhead.
Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is central to the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary man depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these things can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind of dependence, nitya-tr.pto nirasrayah.; for its delight, its divine ease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained in itself, atma-ratih., antah.-sukho 'ntar-aramas tathantar-jyotir eva yah.. What joy it takes in outward things is not for their sake, not for things which it seeks in them and can miss, but for the self in them, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is eternal in them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment to their outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that it finds in itself, because its self is theirs, has become one self with the self of all beings, because it is united with the one and equal
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That Equality, impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works. The
Gita insists repeatedly on the difference between the inward and
1.19 - Equality, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.19 - Equality
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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INCE knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, Equality, the inner self-existent peace and bliss, freedom from or at least superiority to the tangled interlocking of the three modes of Nature are the signs of the liberated soul, they must accompany it in all its activities. They are the condition of that unalterable calm which this soul preserves in all the movement, all the shock, all the clash of forces which surround it in the world. That calm reflects the equable immutability of the Brahman in the midst of all mutations, and it belongs to the indivisible and impartial Oneness which is for ever immanent in all the multiplicities of the universe. For an equal and all-equalising spirit is that Oneness in the midst of the million differences and inequalities of the world; and Equality of the spirit is the sole real Equality. For in all else in existence there can only be similarity, adjustment and balance; but even in the greatest similarities of the world we find difference of in Equality and difference of unlikeness and the adjusted balancings of the world can only come about by a poising of combined unequal weights.
Hence the immense importance attached by the Gita in its elements of Karmayoga to Equality; it is the nodus of the free spirit's free relations with the world. Self-knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, bliss, freedom from the modes of Nature, when withdrawn into themselves, self-absorbed, inactive, have no need of Equality; for they take no cognisance of the things in which the opposition of Equality and in Equality arises. But the moment the spirit takes cognisance of and deals with the multiplicities, personalities, differences, inequalities of the action of Nature, it has to effectuate these other signs of its free status by this one manifesting sign of Equality. Knowledge is the consciousness of unity with the One; and in relation with the many different beings and existences of the universe it must
Equality
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Traigun.attya, transcendence of the gunas, is the unperturbed spirit's superiority to that flux of action of the modes of Nature which is in its constant character perturbed and unequal; if it has to enter into relations with the conflicting and unequal activities of Nature, if the free soul is to allow its nature any action at all, it must show its superiority by an impartial Equality towards all activities, results or happenings.
Equality is the sign and also for the aspirant the test. Where there is in Equality in the soul, there there is in evidence some unequal play of the modes of Nature, motion of desire, play of personal will, feeling and action, activity of joy and grief or that disturbed and disturbing delight which is not true spiritual bliss but a mental satisfaction bringing in its train inevitably a counterpart or recoil of mental dissatisfaction. Where there is in Equality of soul, there there is deviation from knowledge, loss of steadfast abiding in the all-embracing and all-reconciling
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oneness of the Brahman and unity of things. By his Equality the
Karmayogin knows in the midst of his action that he is free.
It is the spiritual nature of the Equality enjoined, high and universal in its character and comprehension, which gives its distinctive note to the teaching of the Gita in this matter. For otherwise the mere teaching of Equality in itself as the most desirable status of the mind, feelings and temperament in which we rise superior to human weakness, is by no means peculiar to the Gita. Equality has always been held up to admiration as the philosophic ideal and the characteristic temperament of the sages. The Gita takes up indeed this philosophic ideal, but carries it far beyond into a higher region where we find ourselves breathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophic poise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascension out of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to a serenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic Equality, making character its pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; the happier and serener philosophic Equality prefers self-mastery by knowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifference seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone, udasnavad asnah., as the Gita expresses it; there is also the religious or Christian Equality which is a perpetual kneeling or a prostrate resignation and submission to the will of God. These are the three steps and means towards divine peace, heroic endurance, sage indifference, pious resignation, titiks.a, udasnata, namas or nati. The Gita takes them all in its large synthetic manner and weaves them into its upward soul-movement, but it gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a more universal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives the values of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strain of character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding, beyond the stress of the emotions.
The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customary disturbances of its nature-life; it is because it has this pleasure and because, having it, it gives a sanction to the troubled play of the lower nature that the play continues perpetually; for the
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The movement which will lead us out of the disturbances of the lower nature must be necessarily a movement towards Equality in the mind, in the emotional temperament, in the soul.
But it is to be noted that, although in the end we must arrive at a superiority to all the three gunas of the lower nature, it is yet in its incipience by a resort to one or other of the three that the movement must begin. The beginning of Equality may be sattwic, rajasic or tamasic; for there is a possibility in the human nature of a tamasic Equality. It may be purely tamasic, the heavy equability of a vital temperament rendered inertly irresponsive to the shocks of existence by a sort of dull insensibility undesirous of the joy of life. Or it may result from a weariness of the emotions and desires accumulated by a surfeit and satiety of the pleasure or else, on the contrary, a disappointment and a disgust and shrinking from the pain of life, a lassitude, a fear and horror and dislike of the world: it is then in its nature a mixed movement, rajaso-tamasic, but the lower quality predominates.
Or, approaching the sattwic principle, it may aid itself by the intellectual perception that the desires of life cannot be satisfied, that the soul is too weak to master life, that the whole thing is nothing but sorrow and transient effort and nowhere in it is there any real truth or sanity or light or happiness; this is the sattwotamasic principle of Equality and is not so much Equality, though it may lead to that, as indifference or equal refusal. Essentially, the movement of tamasic Equality is a generalisation of Nature's principle of jugupsa or self-protecting recoil extended from the shunning of particular painful effects to a shunning of the whole life of Nature itself as in sum leading to pain and self-tormenting and not to the delight which the soul demands.
In tamasic Equality by itself there is no real liberation; but it can be made a powerful starting-point, if, as in Indian asceticism, it is turned into the sattwic by the perception of the greater existence, the truer power, the higher delight of the immutable Self above Nature. The natural turn of such a movement, however, is towards Sannyasa, the renunciation of life and works, rather
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Still, in this movement, the Equality consists only in an equal recoil from all that constitutes the world; and it arrives at indifference and aloofness, but does not include that power to
Equality
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accept equally all the touches of the world pleasurable or painful without attachment or disturbance which is a necessary element in the discipline of the Gita. Therefore, even if we begin with the tamasic recoil, - which is not at all necessary, - it can only be as a first incitement to a greater endeavour, not as a permanent pessimism. The real discipline begins with the movement to mastery over these things from which we were first inclined merely to flee. It is here that the possibility of a kind of rajasic Equality comes in, which is at its lowest the strong nature's pride in selfmastery, self-control, superiority to passion and weakness; but the Stoic ideal seizes upon this point of departure and makes it the key to an entire liberation of the soul from subjection to all weakness of its lower nature. As the tamasic inward recoil is a generalisation of Nature's principle of jugupsa or self-protection from suffering, so the rajasic upward movement is a generalisation of Nature's other principle of the acceptance of struggle and effort and the innate impulse of life towards mastery and victory; but it transfers the battle to the field where alone complete victory is possible. Instead of a struggle for scattered outward aims and transient successes, it proposes nothing less than the conquest of Nature and the world itself by a spiritual struggle and an inner victory. The tamasic recoil turns from both the pains and pleasures of the world to flee from them; the rajasic movement turns upon them to bear, master and rise superior to them. The Stoic self-discipline calls desire and passion into its embrace of the wrestler and crushes them between its arms, as did old Dhritarashtra in the epic the iron image of Bhima. It endures the shock of things painful and pleasurable, the causes of the physical and mental affections of the nature, and breaks their effects to pieces; it is complete when the soul can bear all touches without being pained or attracted, excited or troubled.
It seeks to make man the conqueror and king of his nature.
The Gita, making its call on the warrior nature of Arjuna, starts with this heroic movement. It calls on him to turn on the great enemy desire and slay it. Its first description of Equality is that of the Stoic philosopher. "He whose mind is undisturbed in the midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from
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- it must have above it the sattwic vision of knowledge, at its root the aim at self-realisation and in its steps the ascent to the divine Nature. A Stoic discipline which merely crushed down the common affections of our human nature, - although less dangerous than a tamasic weariness of life, unfruitful pessimism and sterile inertia, because it would at least increase the power and self-mastery of the soul, - would still be no unmixed good, since it might lead to insensibility and an inhuman isolation without giving the true spiritual release. The Stoic Equality is justified as an element in the discipline of the Gita because it can be associated with and can help to the realisation of the free immutable Self in the mobile human being, param dr.s.t.va, and to status in that new self-consciousness, es.a brahm sthitih..
"Awakening by the understanding to the Highest which is beyond even the discerning mind, put force on the self by the self to make it firm and still, and slay this enemy who is so hard to assail, Desire." Both the tamasic recoil of escape and the rajasic movement of struggle and victory are only justified when they look beyond themselves through the sattwic principle to the self-knowledge which legitimises both the recoil and the struggle.
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He starts from the sattwic Equality. He too observes the transitoriness of the material and external world and its failure to satisfy the desires or to give the true delight, but this causes in him no grief, fear or disappointment. He observes all with an eye of tranquil discernment and makes his choice without repulsion or perplexity. "The enjoyments born of the touches of things are
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He sees, as the Gita puts it, that he is himself his own enemy and his own friend, and therefore he takes care not to dethrone himself by casting his being into the hands of desire and passion, natmanam avasadayet, but delivers himself out of that imprisonment by his own inner power, uddhared atmanatmanam; for whoever has conquered his lower self, finds in his higher self his best friend and ally. He becomes satisfied with knowledge, master of his senses, a Yogin by sattwic Equality, - for Equality is
Yoga, samatvam yoga ucyate, - regarding alike clod and stone and gold, tranquil and self-poised in heat and cold, suffering and happiness, honour and disgrace. He is equal in soul to friend and enemy and to neutral and indifferent, because he sees that these are transitory relations born of the changing conditions of life.
Even by the pretensions of learning and purity and virtue and the claims to superiority which men base upon these things, he is not led away. He is equal-souled to all men, to the sinner and the saint, to the virtuous, learned and cultured Brahmin and the fallen outcaste. All these are the Gita's descriptions of the sattwic Equality, and they sum up well enough what is familiar to the world as the calm philosophic Equality of the sage.
Where then is the difference between this and the larger Equality taught by the Gita? It lies in the difference between the intellectual and philosophic discernment and the spiritual, the Vedantic knowledge of unity on which the Gita founds its teaching. The philosopher maintains his Equality by the power of the buddhi, the discerning mind; but even that by itself is a doubtful foundation. For, though master of himself on the whole by a constant attention or an acquired habit of mind, in reality he is not free from his lower nature, and it does actually assert itself in many ways and may at any moment take a violent revenge for its rejection and suppression. For, always, the play of the lower nature is a triple play, and the rajasic and tamasic qualities are ever lying in wait for the sattwic man. "Even the mind of the
Equality
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And the philosopher's Equality is like the Stoic's, like the world-fleeing ascetic's, inwardly a lonely freedom, remote and aloof from men; but the man born to the divine birth has found the Divine not only in himself, but in all beings. He has realised his unity with all and his Equality is therefore full of sympathy and oneness. He sees all as himself and is not intent on his lonely salvation; he even takes upon himself the burden of their happiness and sorrow by which he is not himself affected or subjected. The perfect sage, the Gita more than once repeats, is ever engaged with a large Equality in doing good to all creatures and makes that his occupation and delight, sarvabhutahite ratah.. The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in his ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but yuktah. kr.tsna-karma-kr.t, a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for
God in the world. For he is a bhakta, a lover and devotee of the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves
God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere; and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action carry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceed from the One in him and to the One in all they are directed. The Equality of the Gita is a large synthetic Equality in which all is lifted up into the integrality of the divine being and the divine nature.
1.19 - The Curve of the Rational Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This process has to continue until the reason can find a principle of society or else a combination and adjustment of several principles which will satisfy it. The question is whether it will ever be satisfied or can ever rest from questioning the foundation of established things,unless indeed it sinks back into a sleep of tradition and convention or else goes forward by a great awakening to the reign of a higher spirit than its own and opens into a suprarational or spiritual age of mankind. If we may judge from the modern movement, the progress of the reason as a social renovator and creator, if not interrupted in its course, would be destined to pass through three successive stages which are the very logic of its growth, the first individualistic and increasingly democratic with liberty for its principle, the second socialistic, in the end perhaps a governmental communism with Equality and the State for its principle, the thirdif that ever gets beyond the stage of theoryanarchistic in the higher sense of that much-abused word, either a loose voluntary cooperation or a free communalism with brotherhood or comradeship and not government for its principle. It is in the transition to its third and consummating stage, if or whenever that comes, that the power and sufficiency of the reason will be tested; it will then be seen whether the reason can really be the master of our nature, solve the problems of our interrelated and conflicting egoisms and bring about within itself a perfect principle of society or must give way to a higher guide. For till this third stage has its trial, it is Force that in the last resort really governs. Reason only gives to Force the plan of its action and a system to administer.
We have already seen that it is individualism which opens the way to the age of reason and that individualism gets its impulse and its chance of development because it follows upon an age of dominant conventionalism. It is not that in the pre-individualistic, pre-rational ages there were no thinkers upon society and the communal life of man; but they did not think in the characteristic method of the logical reason, critical, all-observing, all-questioning, and did not proceed on the constructive side by the carefully mechanising methods of the highly rationalised intelligence when it passes from the reasoned perception of a truth to the endeavour after its pure, perfect and universal orderly application. Their thought and their building of life were much less logical than spontaneously intelligent, organic and intuitive. Always they looked upon life as it was and sought to know its secret by keen discernment, intuition and insight; symbols embodying the actual and ideal truth of life and being, types setting them in an arrangement and psychological order, institutions giving them a material fixity in their effectuation by life, this was the form in which they shaped their attempt to understand and mentalise life, to govern life by mind, but mind in its spontaneously intuitive or its reflectively seeing movements before they have been fixed into the geometrical patterns of the logical intelligence.
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The individualistic democratic ideal brings us at first in actual practice to the more and more precarious rule of a dominant class in the name of democracy over the ignorant, numerous and less fortunate mass. Secondly, since the ideal of freedom and Equality is abroad and cannot any longer be stifled, it must lead to the increasing effort of the exploited masses to assert their down-trodden right and to turn, if they can, this pseudodemocratic falsehood into the real democratic truth; therefore, to a war of classes. Thirdly, it develops inevitably as part of its process a perpetual strife of parties, at first few and simple in composition, but afterwards as at the present time an impotent and sterilising chaos of names, labels, programmes, war-cries. All lift the banner of conflicting ideas or ideals, but all are really fighting out under that flag a battle of conflicting interests. Finally, individualistic democratic freedom results fatally in an increasing stress of competition which replaces the ordered tyrannies of the infrarational periods of humanity by a sort of ordered conflict. And this conflict ends in the survival not of the spiritually, rationally or physically fittest, but of the most fortunate and vitally successful. It is evident enough that, whatever else it may be, this is not a rational order of society; it is not at all the perfection which the individualistic reason of man had contemplated as its ideal or set out to accomplish.
The natural remedy for the first defects of the individualistic theory in practice would seem to be education; for if man is not by nature, we may hope at least that he can be made by education and training something like a rational being. Universal education, therefore, is the inevitable second step of the democratic movement in its attempt to rationalise human society. But a rational education means necessarily three things, first, to teach men how to observe and know rightly the facts on which they have to form a judgment; secondly, to train them to think fruitfully and soundly; thirdly, to fit them to use their knowledge and their thought effectively for their own and the common good. Capacity of observation and knowledge, capacity of intelligence and judgment, capacity of action and high character are required for the citizenship of a rational order of society; a general deficiency in any of these difficult requisites is a sure source of failure. Unfortunately,even if we suppose that any training made available to the millions can ever be of this rare character,the actual education given in the most advanced countries has not had the least relation to these necessities. And just as the first defects and failures of democracy have given occasion to the enemy to blaspheme and to vaunt the superiority or even the quite imaginary perfection of the ideal past, so also the first defects of its great remedy, education, have led many superior minds to deny the efficacy of education and its power to transform the human mind and driven them to condemn the democratic ideal as an exploded fiction.
Democracy and its panacea of education and freedom have certainly done something for the race. To begin with, the people are, for the first time in the historical period of history, erect, active and alive, and where there is life, there is always a hope of better things. Again, some kind of knowledge and with it some kind of active intelligence based on knowledge and streng thened by the habit of being called on to judge and decide between conflicting issues and opinions in all sorts of matters have been much more generalised than was formerly possible. Men are being progressively trained to use their minds, to apply intelligence to life, and that is a great gain. If they have not yet learned to think for themselves or to think soundly, clearly and rightly, they are at least more able now to choose with some kind of initial intelligence, however imperfect as yet it may be, the thought they shall accept and the rule they shall follow. Equal educational equipment and equal opportunity of life have by no means been acquired; but there is a much greater equalisation than was at all possible in former states of society. But here a new and enormous defect has revealed itself which is proving fatal to the social idea which engendered it. For given even perfect Equality of educational and other opportunity, and that does not yet really exist and cannot in the individualistic state of society,to what purpose or in what manner is the opportunity likely to be used? Man, the half infrarational being, demands three things for his satisfaction, power, if he can have it, but at any rate the use and reward of his faculties and the enjoyment of his desires. In the old societies the possibility of these could be secured by him to a certain extent according to his birth, his fixed status and the use of his capacity within the limits of his hereditary status. That basis once removed and no proper substitute provided, the same ends can only be secured by success in a scramble for the one power left, the power of wealth. Accordingly, instead of a harmoniously ordered society there has been developed a huge organised competitive system, a frantically rapid and one-sided development of industrialism and, under the garb of democracy, an increasing plutocratic tendency that shocks by its ostentatious grossness and the magnitudes of its gulfs and distances. These have been the last results of the individualistic ideal and its democratic machinery, the initial bankruptcies of the rational age.
The first natural result has been the transition of the rational mind from democratic individualism to democratic socialism. Socialism, labouring under the disadvantageous accident of its birth in a revolt against capitalism, an uprising against the rule of the successful bourgeois and the plutocrat, has been compelled to work itself out by a war of classes. And, worse still, it has started from an industrialised social system and itself taken on at the beginning a purely industrial and economic appearance. These are accidents that disfigure its true nature. Its true nature, its real justification is the attempt of the human reason to carry on the rational ordering of society to its fulfilment, its will to get rid of this great parasitical excrescence of unbridled competition, this giant obstacle to any decent ideal or practice of human living. Socialism sets out to replace a system of organised economic battle by an organised order and peace. This can no longer be done on the old lines, an artificial or inherited in Equality brought about by the denial of equal opportunity and justified by the affirmation of that injustice and its result as an eternal law of society and of Nature. That is a falsehood which the reason of man will no longer permit. Neither can it be done, it seems, on the basis of individual liberty; for that has broken down in the practice. Socialism therefore must do away with the democratic basis of individual liberty, even if it professes to respect it or to be marching towards a more rational freedom. It shifts at first the fundamental emphasis to other ideas and fruits of the democratic ideal, and it leads by this transference of stress to a radical change in the basic principle of a rational society. Equality, not a political only, but a perfect social Equality, is to be the basis. There is to be Equality of opportunity for all, but also Equality of status for all, for without the last the first cannot be secured; even if it were established, it could not endure. This Equality again is impossible if personal, or at least inherited right in property is to exist, and therefore socialism abolishesexcept at best on a small scale the right of personal property as it is now understood and makes war on the hereditary principle. Who then is to possess the property? It can only be the community as a whole. And who is to administer it? Again, the community as a whole. In order to justify this idea, the socialistic principle has practically to deny the existence of the individual or his right to exist except as a member of the society and for its sake. He belongs entirely to the society, not only his property, but himself, his labour, his capacities, the education it gives him and its results, his mind, his knowledge, his individual life, his family life, the life of his children. Moreover, since his individual reason cannot be trusted to work out naturally a right and rational adjustment of his life with the life of others, it is for the reason of the whole community to arrange that too for him. Not the reasoning minds and wills of the individuals, but the collective reasoning mind and will of the community has to govern. It is this which will determine not only the principles and all the details of the economic and political order, but the whole life of the community and of the individual as a working, thinking, feeling cell of this life, the development of his capacities, his actions, the use of the knowledge he has acquired, the whole ordering of his vital, his ethical, his intelligent being. For so only can the collective reason and intelligent will of the race overcome the egoism of individualistic life and bring about a perfect principle and rational order of society in a harmonious world.
It is true that this inevitable character of socialism is denied or minimised by the more democratic socialists; for the socialistic mind still bears the impress of the old democratic ideas and cherishes hopes that betray it often into strange illogicalities. It assures us that it will combine some kind of individual freedom, a limited but all the more true and rational freedom, with the rigours of the collectivist idea. But it is evidently these rigours to which things must tend if the collectivist idea is to prevail and not to stop short and falter in the middle of its course. If it proves itself thus wanting in logic and courage, it may very well be that it will speedily or in the end be destroyed by the foreign element it tolerates and perish without having sounded its own possibilities. It will pass perhaps, unless guided by a rational wisdom which the human mind in government has not yet shown, after exceeding even the competitive individualistic society in its cumbrous incompetence.1 But even at its best the collectivist idea contains several fallacies inconsistent with the real facts of human life and nature. And just as the idea of individualistic democracy found itself before long in difficulties on that account because of the disparity between lifes facts and the minds idea, difficulties that have led up to its discredit and approaching overthrow, the idea of collectivist democracy too may well find itself before long in difficulties that must lead to its discredit and eventual replacement by a third stage of the inevitable progression. Liberty protected by a State in which all are politically equal, was the idea that individualistic democracy attempted to elaborate. Equality, social and political Equality enforced through a perfect and careful order by a State which is the organised will of the whole community, is the idea on which socialistic democracy stakes its future. If that too fails to make good, the rational and democratic Idea may fall back upon a third form of society founding an essential rather than formal liberty and Equality upon fraternal comradeship in a free community, the ideal of intellectual as of spiritual Anarchism.2
In fact the claim to Equality like the thirst for liberty is individualistic in its origin,it is not native or indispensable to the essence of the collectivist ideal. It is the individual who demands liberty for himself, a free movement for his mind, life, will, action; the collectivist trend and the State idea have rather the opposite tendency, they are self-compelled to take up more and more the compulsory management and control of the mind, life, will, action of the community and the individuals as part of ituntil personal liberty is pressed out of existence. But similarly it is the individual who demands for himself Equality with all others; when a class demands, it is still the individual multiplied claiming for himself and all who are of his own grade, political or economic status an equal place, privilege or opportunity with those who have acquired or inherited a superiority of status. The social Reason conceded first the claim to liberty, but in practice (whatever might have been the theory) it admitted only so much Equality Equality before the law, a helpful but not too effective political Equality of the voteas was necessary to ensure a reasonable freedom for all. Afterwards when the injustices and irrationalities of an unequalised competitive freedom, the enormity of the gulfs it created, became apparent, the social Reason shifted its ground and tried to arrive at a more complete communal justice on the basis of a political, economic, educational and social Equality as complete as might be; it has laboured to make a plain level on which all can stand together. Liberty in this change has had to undergo the former fate of Equality; for only so much libertyperhaps or for a timecould survive as can be safely allowed without the competitive individual getting enough room for his self-assertive growth to upset or endanger the equalitarian basis. But in the end the discovery cannot fail to be made that an artificial Equality has also its irrationalities, its contradictions of the collective good, its injustices even and its costly violations of the truth of Nature. Equality like individualistic liberty may turn out to be not a panacea but an obstacle in the way of the best management and control of life by the collective reason and will of the community.
But if both Equality and liberty disappear from the human scene, there is left only one member of the democratic trinity, brotherhood or, as it is now called, comradeship, that has some chance of survival as part of the social basis. This is because it seems to square better with the spirit of collectivism; we see accordingly the idea of it if not the fact still insisted on in the new social systems, even those in which both liberty and Equality are discarded as noxious democratic chimeras. But comradeship without liberty and Equality can be nothing more than the like association of allindividuals, functional classes, guilds, syndicates, soviets or any other unitsin common service to the life of the nation under the absolute control of the collectivist State. The only liberty left at the end would be the freedom to serve the community under the rigorous direction of the State authority; the only Equality would be an association of all alike in a Spartan or Roman spirit of civic service with perhaps a like status, theoretically equal at least for all functions; the only brotherhood would be the sense of comradeship in devoted dedication to the organised social Self, the State. In fact the democratic trinity, stripped of its godhead, would fade out of existence; the collectivist ideal can very well do without them, for none of them belong to its grain and very substance.
This is indeed already the spirit, the social reasonor rather the social gospelof the totalitarianism whose swelling tide threatens to engulf all Europe and more than Europe. Totalitarianism of some kind seems indeed to be the natural, almost inevitable destiny, at any rate the extreme and fullest outcome of Socialism or, more generally, of the collectivist idea and impulse. For the essence of Socialism, its justifying ideal, is the governance and strict organisation of the total life of the society as a whole and in detail by its own conscious reason and will for the best good and common interest of all, eliminating exploitation by individual or class, removing internal competition, haphazard confusion and waste, enforcing and perfecting coordination, assuring the best functioning and a sufficient life for all. If a democratic polity and machinery best assure such a working, as was thought at first, it is this that will be chosen and the result will be Social Democracy. That ideal still holds sway in northern Europe and it may there yet have a chance of proving that a successful collectivist rationalisation of society is quite possible. But if a non-democratic polity and machinery are found to serve the purpose better, then there is nothing inherently sacrosanct for the collectivist mind in the democratic ideal; it can be thrown on the rubbish-heap where so many other exploded sanctities have gone. Russian communism so discarded with contempt democratic liberty and attempted for a time to substitute for the democratic machine a new sovietic structure, but it has preserved the ideal of a proletarian Equality for all in a classless society. Still its spirit is a rigorous totalitarianism on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariate, which amounts in fact to the dictatorship of the Communist party in the name or on behalf of the proletariate. Non-proletarian totalitarianism goes farther and discards democratic Equality no less than democratic liberty; it preserves classes for a time only, it may be,but as a means of social functioning, not as a scale of superiority or a hierarchic order. Rationalisation is no longer the turn; its place is taken by a revolutionary mysticism which seems to be the present drive of the Time Spirit.
This is a symptom that can have a considerable significance. In Russia the Marxist system of Socialism has been turned almost into a gospel. Originally a rationalistic system worked out by a logical thinker and discoverer and systematiser of ideas, it has been transformed by the peculiar turn of the Russian mind into something like a social religion, a collectivist mystique, an inviolable body of doctrines with all denial or departure treated as a punishable heresy, a social cult enforced by the intolerant piety and enthusiasm of a converted people. In Fascist countries the swing away from Rationalism is marked and open; a surface vital subjectivism has taken its place and it is in the name of the national soul and its self-expression and manifestation that the leaders and prophets teach and violently enforce their totalitarian mystique. The essential features are the same in Russia and in Fascist countries, so that to the eye of the outsider their deadly quarrel seems to be a blood-feud of kinsmen fighting for the inheritance of their slaughtered parentsDemocracy and the Age of Reason. There is the seizure of the life of the community by a dominant individual leader, Fhrer, Dux, dictator, head of a small active minority, the Nazi, Fascist or Communist party, and supported by a militarised partisan force; there is a rapid crystallisation of the social, economic, political life of the people into a new rigid organisation effectively controlled at every point; there is the compulsory casting of thought, education, expression, action, into a set iron mould, a fixed system of ideas and life-motives, with a fierce and ruthless, often a sanguinary repression of all that denies and differs; there is a total unprecedented compression of the whole communal existence so as to compel a maximum efficiency and a complete unanimity of mind, speech, feeling, life.
1.2.03 - Purity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Aspiration for peace and calm and a perfect Equality.
Purification and a basis of calm are the first necessary steps in the spiritual life.
1.2.05 - Aspiration, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the psychic that gives the true aspiration - if the vital is purified and subjected to the psychic, then the vital gives intensity - but if it is unpurified it brings in a rajasic intensity with impatience and reactions of depression and disappointment. As for the calm and Equality needed, it must come down from above through the mind.
That [fiery aspiration] is all right, that is the psychic aspiration, the psychic fire. Where the vital comes in is in the impatience for result and dissatisfaction if the result is not immediate. That must cease.
1.2.06 - Rejection, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The peace and the Equality are there above you, you have to call them down into the mind and the vital and the body. And whenever something disturbs you have to reject the thing that disturbs and the disturbance.
What do you mean by active means [to overcome inertia]? The power to refuse, to reject is always there in the being and to go on rejecting till the rejection is effective. Nothing can obstruct a quiet aspiration except one's own acquiescence in the inertia.
1.20 - Equality and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.20 - Equality and Knowledge
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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OGA and knowledge are, in this early part of the Gita's teaching, the two wings of the soul's ascent. By Yoga is meant union through divine works done without desire, with Equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the
Supreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness, this Equality, this power of sacrifice is founded. The two wings indeed assist each other's flight; acting together, yet with a subtle alternation of mutual aid, like the two eyes in a man which see together because they see alternately, they increase one another mutually by interchange of substance. As the works grow more and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, the knowledge increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soul becomes firmer in the desireless, sacrificial Equality of its works.
The sacrifice of knowledge, says the Gita therefore, is greater than any material sacrifice. "Even if thou art the greatest doer of sin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the crookedness of evil in the ship of knowledge. . . . There is nothing in the world equal in purity to knowledge." By knowledge desire and its first-born child, sin, are destroyed. The liberated man is able to do works as a sacrifice because he is freed from attachment through his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded in selfknowledge, gata-sangasya jnanavasthita-cetasah.. All his work disappears completely as soon as done, suffers laya, as one might say, in the being of the Brahman, pravilyate; it has no reactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. The work is done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longer personal to the human instrument. The work itself becomes but power of the nature and substance of the being of the Brahman.
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The result is, says the Gita, a perfect Equality to all things and all persons; and then only can we repose our works completely in the Brahman. For the Brahman is equal, samam brahma, and it is only when we have this perfect Equality, samye sthitam manah., "seeing with an equal eye the learned and cultured Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste" and knowing all as one Brahman, that we can, living in that oneness, see like the Brahman our works proceeding from the nature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or bondage. Sin and stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creation full of desire and its works and reactions which belongs to the ignorance, tair jitah. sargah., and living in the supreme and divine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in our works; for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The equal Brahman is faultless, nirdos.am hi samam brahma, beyond the confusion of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we
The Rigveda so speaks of the streams of the Truth, the waters that have perfect knowledge, the waters that are full of the divine sunlight, r.tasya dharah., apo vicetasah., svarvatr apah.. What are here metaphors, are there concrete symbols.
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Karma. When we are freed by knowledge, the Lord, no longer hidden in our hearts, but manifest as our supreme self, takes up our works and uses us as faultless instruments, nimitta-matram, for the helping of the world. Such is the intimate union between knowledge and Equality; knowledge here in the buddhi reflected as Equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane of consciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, Equality as the stuff of the Nature.
Always in this sense of a supreme self-knowledge is this word jnana used in Indian philosophy and Yoga; it is the light by which we grow into our true being, not the knowledge by which we increase our information and our intellectual riches; it is not scientific or psychological or philosophic or ethical or aesthetic or worldly and practical knowledge. These too no doubt help us to grow, but only in the becoming, not in the being; they enter into the definition of Yogic knowledge only when we use them as aids to know the Supreme, the Self, the
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The Gita in describing how we come by this knowledge, says that we get first initiation into it from the men of knowledge who have seen, not those who know merely by the intellect, its essential truths; but the actuality of it comes from within ourselves: "the man who is perfected by Yoga, finds it of himself in the self by the course of Time," it grows within him, that is to say, and he grows into it as he goes on increasing in desirelessness, in Equality, in devotion to the Divine. It is only of the supreme knowledge that this can altogether be said; the knowledge which the intellect of man amasses, is gathered laboriously by the senses and the reason from outside. To get this other knowledge, self-existent, intuitive, self-experiencing, self-revealing, we must have conquered and controlled our mind and senses, samyatendriyah., so that we are no longer subject to their delusions, but rather the mind and senses become its pure mirror; we must have fixed our whole conscious being on the truth of that supreme reality in which all exists, tat-parah., so that it may display in us its luminous self-existence.
Finally, we must have a faith which no intellectual doubt can be allowed to disturb, sraddhavan labhate jnanam. "The ignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition; neither this world, nor the supreme world, nor any happiness is for the soul full of doubts." In fact, it is true that without faith nothing decisive can be achieved either in this world or for possession of the world above, and that it is only by laying hold of some sure basis and positive support that man can attain any measure of terrestrial or celestial success and satisfaction and happiness; the merely sceptical mind loses itself in the void. But still in the lower knowledge doubt and scepticism have their temporary uses; in the higher they are stumbling-blocks: for there the whole secret is not the balancing of truth and error, but a constantly progressing realisation of revealed truth. In
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"Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self. He who sees Me everywhere and all and each in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has reached oneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever he lives and acts, is living and acting in Me. O Arjuna, he who sees all equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happiness or suffering, I hold him to be the supreme Yogin." That is the old Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads which the Gita holds up constantly before us; but it is its superiority to other later formulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge into a great practical philosophy of divine living. Always it insists on the relation between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga, and therefore on the knowledge of oneness as the basis of a liberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks of knowledge, it turns at once to speak of Equality which is its result; whenever it speaks of Equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledge which is its basis. The Equality it enjoins does not begin and end in a static condition of the soul useful only for self-liberation; it is always a basis of works. The peace of the Brahman in the liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, worldwide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the power which proceeds from that peace; these two made one synthesise divine works and God-knowledge.
We see at once what a profound extension we get here for the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common with other systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living. Endurance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said, the foundation of three kinds of Equality; but the Gita's truth of knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but gives them an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance.
The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul's power of self-mastery by fortitude, an Equality attained by a struggle with one's nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its natural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness, but not the supreme joy of the liberated self living not by a rule, but in the pure, easy, spontaneous perfection of its divine being, so that "however it may act and live, it acts and lives
Equality and Knowledge
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vanity of the world's differences and distinctions, the superiority of the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an Equality of philosophic indifference; it brings a high calm, but not the greater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like that of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-top whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous waters from which he has escaped, - in the end something after all aloof and ineffective. The Gita admits the philosophic motive of indifference as a preliminary movement; but the indifference to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can be at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It is indeed a position as of one seated above, udasnavat, but as the Divine is seated above, having no need at all in the world, yet he does works always and is present everywhere supporting, helping, guiding the labour of creatures. This Equality is founded upon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to the philosophic Equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it is the soul of love. It sees all beings without exception in the Divine, it is one self with the Self of all existences and therefore it is in supreme sympathy with all of them. Without exception, ases.en.a, not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing and no one, however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance, can be excluded from this universal, this whole-souled sympathy and spiritual oneness. Here there is no room, not merely for hatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness, disdain or any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for the ignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth on it all light and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for the apparent man; but for the divine Soul within him there will be more, there will be adoration and love. For from all, from the thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and the sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, "This is I." "He who loves Me in all beings," - what greater word of power for the utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universal love, has been uttered by any philosophy or any religion?
Resignation is the basis of a kind of religious Equality, submission to the divine will, a patient bearing of the cross, a
Equality and Knowledge
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God, but, eventually at least, of such a complete renunciation both of the consciousness and the works to him that our being becomes one with his being and the impersonalised nature only an instrument and nothing else. All result good or bad, pleasing or unpleasing, fortunate or unfortunate, is accepted as belonging to the Master of our actions, so that finally not only are grief and suffering borne, but they are banished: a perfect Equality of the emotional mind is established. There is no assumption of personal will in the instrument; it is seen that all is already worked out in the omniscient prescience and omnipotent effective power of the universal Divine and that the egoism of men cannot alter the workings of that Will. Therefore, the final attitude is that enjoined on Arjuna in a later chapter, "All has been already done by Me in my divine will and foresight; become only the occasion, O Arjuna," nimitta-matram bhava savyasacin. This attitude must lead finally to an absolute union of the personal with the Divine Will and, with the growth of knowledge, bring about a faultless response of the instrument to the divine Power and Knowledge. A perfect, an absolute Equality of self-surrender, the mentality a passive channel of the divine Light and Power, the active being a mightily effective instrument for its work in the world, will be the poise of this supreme union of the
Transcendent, the universal and the individual.
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conflict with personal wills which seek rather their own egoistic satisfaction. Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to conquer; but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personal enmity or antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelings are impossible. To act for the lokasangraha, impersonally, for the keeping and leading of the peoples on the path to the divine goal, is a rule which rises necessarily from the oneness of the soul with the Divine, the universal Being, since that is the whole sense and drift of the universal action. Nor does it conflict with our oneness with all beings, even those who present themselves here as opponents and enemies. For the divine goal is their goal also, since it is the secret aim of all, even of those whose outward minds, misled by ignorance and egoism, would wander from the path and resist the impulsion. Resistance and defeat are the best outward service that can be done to them. By this perception the Gita avoids the limiting conclusion which might have been drawn from a doctrine of Equality impracticably overriding all relations and of a weakening love without knowledge, while it keeps the one thing essential unimpaired. For the soul oneness with all, for the heart calm universal love, sympathy, compassion, but for the hands freedom to work out impersonally the good, not of this or that person only without regard to or to the detriment of the divine plan, but the purpose of the creation, the progressing welfare and salvation of men, the total good of all existences.
Oneness with God, oneness with all beings, the realisation of the eternal divine unity everywhere and the drawing onwards of men towards that oneness are the law of life which arises from the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater, wider, more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, to help mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhile to do all works for God and help man also to do with joy and acceptance all the works to which he is called, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t, sarvakarman.i jos.ayan, no greater or more liberal rule of divine works can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secret goal of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existence of the race. It is that to which it must turn for the happiness all
1.20 - The End of the Curve of Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The rational collectivist idea of society has at first sight a powerful attraction. There is behind it a great truth, that every society represents a collective being and in it and by it the individual lives and he owes to it all that he can give it. More, it is only by a certain relation to the society, a certain harmony with this greater collective self that he can find the complete use for his many developed or developing powers and activities. Since it is a collective being, it must, one would naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reason and will which should find more and more its right expression and right working if it is given a conscious and effective means of organised self-expression and execution. And this collective will and intelligence, since it is according to the original idea that of all in a perfect Equality, might naturally be trusted to seek out and work out its own good where the ruling individual and class would always be liable to misuse their power for quite other ends. The right organisation of social life on a basis of Equality and comradeship ought to give each man his proper place in society, his full training and development for the common ends, his due share of work, leisure and reward, the right value of his life in relation to the collective being, society. Moreover it would be a place, share, value regulated by the individual and collective good and not an exaggerated or a depressed value brought to him fortuitously by birth or fortune, purchased by wealth or won by a painful and wasteful struggle. And certainly the external efficiency of the community, the measured, ordered and economical working of its life, its power for production and general well-being must enormously increase, as even the quite imperfect development of collective action in the recent past has shown, in a well-organised and concentrated State.
If it be objected that to bring about this result in its completeness the liberty of the individual will have to be destroyed or reduced to an almost vanishing quantity, it might be answered that the right of the individual to any kind of egoistic freedom as against the State which represents the mind, the will, the good and interest of the whole community, sarva brahma, is a dangerous fiction, a baneful myth. Individual liberty of life and actioneven if liberty of thought and speech is for a time conceded, though this too can hardly remain unimpaired when once the socialistic State has laid its grip firmly on the individual,may well mean in practice an undue freedom given to his infrarational parts of nature, and is not that precisely the thing in him that has to be thoroughly controlled, if not entirely suppressed, if he is to become a reasonable being leading a reasonable life? This control can be most wisely and effectively carried out by the collective reason and will of the State which is larger, better, more enlightened than the individuals; for it profits, as the average individual cannot do, by all the available wisdom and aspiration in the society. Indeed, the enlightened individual may well come to regard this collective reason and will as his own larger mind, will and conscience and find in a happy obedience to it a strong delivery from his own smaller and less rational self and therefore a more real freedom than any now claimed by his little separate ego. It used already to be argued that the disciplined German obeying the least gesture of the policeman, the State official, the military officer was really the freest, happiest and most moral individual in all Europe and therefore in the whole world. The same reasoning in a heightened form might perhaps be applied to the drilled felicities of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The State, educating and governing the individual, undertakes to intellectualise, ethicise, practicalise and generally perfect him and to see to it that he remains, whether he will or no, always and in all thingsstrictly on the lines approved by the Stateintellectual, ethical, practical and thoroughly perfect.
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But it is at the same time clear that the more the outer law is replaced by an inner law, the nearer man will draw to his true and natural perfection. And the perfect social state must be one in which governmental compulsion is abolished and man is able to live with his fellow-man by free agreement and cooperation. But by what means is he to be made ready for this great and difficult consummation? Intellectual anarchism relies on two powers in the human being of which the first is the enlightenment of his reason; the mind of man, enlightened, will claim freedom for itself, but will equally recognise the same right in others. A just equation will of itself emerge on the ground of a true, self-found and unperverted human nature. This might conceivably be sufficient, although hardly without a considerable change and progress in mans mental powers, if the life of the individual could be lived in a predominant isolation with only a small number of points of necessary contact with the lives of others. Actually, our existence is closely knit with the existences around us and there is a common life, a common work, a common effort and aspiration without which humanity cannot grow to its full height and wideness. To ensure coordination and prevent clash and conflict in this constant contact another power is needed than the enlightened intellect. Anarchistic thought finds this power in a natural human sympathy which, if it is given free play under the right conditions, can be relied upon to ensure natural cooperation: the appeal is to what the American poet calls the love of comrades, to the principle of fraternity, the third and most neglected term of the famous revolutionary formula. A free Equality founded upon spontaneous cooperation, not on governmental force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic ideal.
This would seem to lead us either towards a free cooperative communism, a unified life where the labour and property of all is there for the benefit of all, or else to what may better be called communalism, the free consent of the individual to live in a society where the just freedom of his individuality will be recognised, but the surplus of his labour and acquisitions will be used or given by him without demur for the common good under a natural cooperative impulse. The severest school of anarchism rejects all compromise with communism. It is difficult to see how a Stateless Communism which is supposed to be the final goal of the Russian ideal, can operate on the large and complex scale necessitated by modern life. And indeed it is not clear how even a free communalism could be established or maintained without some kind of governmental force and social compulsion or how it could fail to fall away in the end either on one side into a rigorous collectivism or on the other to struggle, anarchy and disruption. For the logical mind in building its social idea takes no sufficient account of the infrarational element in man, the vital egoism to which the most active and effective part of his nature is bound: that is his most constant motive and it defeats in the end all the calculations of the idealising reason, undoes its elaborate systems or accepts only the little that it can assimilate to its own need and purpose. If that strong element, that ego-force in him is too much overshadowed, cowed and depressed too much rationalised, too much denied an outlet, then the life of man becomes artificial, top-heavy, poor in the sap of vitality, mechanical, uncreative. And on the other hand, if it is not suppressed, it tends in the end to assert itself and derange the plans of the rational side of man, because it contains in itself powers whose right satisfaction or whose final way of transformation reason cannot discover.
1.21 - The Ascent of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:The inert incapacity of atomic existence to possess itself, the subjection of the material individual to the not-self, belongs to the first status of life. The consciousness of limitation and the struggle to possess, to master both self and the not-self is the type of the secondary status. Here, too, the development to the third status brings a transformation of the original terms into a fulfilment and a harmony which repeat the terms while seeming to contradict them. There comes about through association and through love a recognition of the not-self as a greater self and therefore a consciously accepted submission to its law and need which fulfils the increasing impulse of aggregate life to absorb the individual; and there is a possession again by the individual of the life of others as his own and of all that it has to give him as his own which fulfils the opposite impulse of individual possession. Nor can this relation of mutuality between the individual and the world he lives in be expressed or complete or secure unless the same relation is established between individual and individual and between aggregate and aggregate. All the difficult effort of man towards the harmonisation of self-affirmation and freedom, by which he possesses himself, with association and love, fraternity, comradeship, in which he gives himself to others, his ideals of harmonious equilibrium, justice, mutuality, Equality by which he creates a balance of the two opposites, are really an attempt inevitably predetermined in its lines to solve the original problem of Nature, the very problem of Life itself, by the resolution of the conflict between the two opposites which present themselves in the very foundations of Life in Matter. The resolution is attempted by the higher principle of Mind which alone can find the road towards the harmony intended, even though the harmony itself can only be found in a Power still beyond us.
11:For, if the data with which we have started are correct, the end of the road, the goal itself can only be reached by Mind passing beyond itself into that which is beyond Mind, since of That the Mind is only an inferior term and an instrument first for descent into form and individuality and secondly for reascension into that reality which the form embodies and the individuality represents. Therefore the perfect solution of the problem of Life is not likely to be realised by association, interchange and accommodations of love alone or through the law of the mind and the heart alone. It must come by a fourth status of life in which the eternal unity of the many is realised through the spirit and the conscious foundation of all the operations of life is laid no longer in the divisions of body, nor in the passions and hungers of the vitality, nor in the groupings and the imperfect harmonies of the mind, nor in a combination of all these, but in the unity and freedom of the Spirit.
1.22 - ON THE GIFT-GIVING VIRTUE, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
from revenge." In this chapter, the claim of human Equality
is criticized as an expression of the ressentiment of the subequal.
1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:In the view of old philosophies pleasure and pain are inseparable like intellectual truth and falsehood and power and incapacity and birth and death; therefore the only possible escape from them would be a total indifference, a blank response to the excitations of the world-self. But a subtler psychological knowledge shows us that this view which is based on the surface facts of existence only, does not really exhaust the possibilities of the problem. It is possible by bringing the real soul to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, an all-embracing personal-impersonal delight. The lover of Nature does this when he takes joy in all the things of Nature universally without admitting repulsion or fear or mere liking and disliking, perceiving beauty in that which seems to others mean and insignificant, bare and savage, terrible and repellent. The artist and the poet do it when they seek the rasa of the universal from the aesthetic emotion or from the physical line or from the mental form of beauty or from the inner sense and power alike of that from which the ordinary man turns away and of that to which he is attached by a sense of pleasure. The seeker of knowledge, the God-lover who finds the object of his love everywhere, the spiritual man, the intellectual, the sensuous, the aesthetic all do this in their own fashion and must do it if they would find embracingly the Knowledge, the Beauty, the Joy or the Divinity which they seek. It is only in the parts where the little ego is usually too strong for us, it is only in our emotional or physical joy and suffering, our pleasure and pain of life, before which the desire-soul in us is utterly weak and cowardly, that the application of the divine principle becomes supremely difficult and seems to many impossible or even monstrous and repellent. Here the ignorance of the ego shrinks from the principle of impersonality which it yet applies without too much difficulty in Science, in Art and even in a certain kind of imperfect spiritual living because there the rule of impersonality does not attack those desires cherished by the surface soul and those values of desire fixed by the surface mind in which our outward life is most vitally interested. In the freer and higher movements there is demanded of us only a limited and specialised Equality and impersonality proper to a particular field of consciousness and activity while the egoistic basis of our practical life remains to us; in the lower movements the whole foundation of our life has to be changed in order to make room for impersonality, and this the desire-soul finds impossible.
10:The true soul secret in us - subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, - this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the existence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcendence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul, caitya purus.a, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting by their development and experience. These other person-powers in man, these beings of his being, are also veiled in their true entity, but they put forward temporary personalities which compose our outer individuality and whose combined superficial action and appearance of status we call ourselves: this inmost entity also, taking form in us as the psychic Person, puts forward a psychic personality which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and death and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold and changing vesture. The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine. It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. On the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-developed, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in character and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an apparent lord and victor. It is then the outer desire-soul, the pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience.7 If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature of mind, life and body, then these can be cast into soul images of what is true, right and beautiful and in the end the whole nature can be turned towards the real aim of life, the supreme victory, the ascent into spiritual existence.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: It is unity in diversity. The universe is now seen to be diverse. See the common factor (sama) in all the objects. When that is done Equality in the pairs of opposites (dwandwani) naturally follows. It is the latter which is however spoken of as equanimity ordinarily.
D.: How is the common factor to be perceived in the diversity?
1.24 - The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If a subjective age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to find its outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the emergence of mankind on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough that certain ideas favourable to that turn of human life should take hold of the general mind of the race, permeate the ordinary motives of its thought, art, ethics, political ideals, social effort, or even get well into its inner way of thinking and feeling. It is not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner Equality and harmony and not merely an outward and mechanical equalisation and associationshould become definitely an ideal of life; it is not enough that this ideal should be actively held as possible, desirable, to be sought and striven after, it is not enough even that it should come forward as a governing preoccupation of the human mind. That would evidently be a very great step forward,considering what the ideals of mankind now are, an enormous step. It would be the necessary beginning, the indispensable mental environment for a living renovation of human society in a higher type. But by itself it might only bring about a half-hearted or else a strong but only partially and temporarily successful attempt to bring something of the manifest spirit into human life and its institutions. That is all that mankind has ever attempted on this line in the past. It has never attempted to work out thoroughly even that little, except in the limits of a religious order or a peculiar community, and even there with such serious defects and under such drastic limitations as to make the experiment nugatory and without any bearing on human life. If we do not get beyond the mere holding of the ideal and its general influence in human life, this little is all that mankind will attempt in the future. More is needed; a general spiritual awakening and aspiration in mankind is indeed the large necessary motive-power, but the effective power must be something greater. There must be a dynamic re-creating of individual manhood in the spiritual type.
For the way that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only as an aspiration, accepted only as a partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould the whole life, but only more or less to colour it; it is often used even as a cover and a plea for things that are diametrically opposed to its real spirit. Institutions are created which are supposed, but too lightly supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is held, the fact that men live under its institutions is treated as sufficient. The holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living according to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But spirituality is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is nothing if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient. A spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised is realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its spirit and become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould into which spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and may become a prison in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea is a power, but only when it is both inwardly and outwardly creative. Here we have to enlarge and to deepen the pragmatic principle that truth is what we create, and in this sense first, that it is what we create within us, in other words, what we become. Undoubtedly, spiritual truth exists eternally beyond independent of us in the heavens of the spirit; but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth of earth, truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.
1.27 - CONTEMPLATION, ACTION AND SOCIAL UTILITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
He who is strong in concentration, weak in energy, is overcome by idleness, since concentration partakes of the nature of idleness. He who is strong in energy, weak in concentration, is overcome by distractions, since energy partakes of the nature of distraction. Therefore they should be made equal to one another, since from Equality in both comes contemplation and ecstasy.
Mindfulness should be strong everywhere, for mindfulness keeps the mind away from distraction, into which it might fall, since faith, energy and understanding partake of the nature of distraction: and away from idleness, into which it might fall, since concentration partakes of the nature of idleness.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: It is unity in diversity. The universe is now seen to be diverse. See the common factor (sama) in all the objects. When that is done Equality in the pairs of opposites (dwandwani) naturally follows. It is the latter which is however spoken of as equanimity ordinarily.
D.: How is the common factor to be perceived in the diversity?
1.3.01 - Peace The Basis of the Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The depression and vital struggle must have been due to some defect of over-eagerness and straining for a result in your former effort - so that when a fall in the consciousness came it was a depressed, disappointed and confused vital that came to the surface giving full entry to the suggestions of doubt, despair and inertia from the adverse side of Nature. You have to move towards a firm basis of calm and Equality in the vital and
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physical no less than in the mental consciousness; let there be the full downflow of Power and Ananda, but into a firm adhara capable of containing it - it is a complete Equality that gives that capacity and firmness.
When the peace of the higher consciousness descends, it brings always with it this tendency towards Equality, samata, because without samata peace is always liable to be attacked by the waves of the lower nature.
1.3.02 - Equality The Chief Support, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.3.02 - Equality The Chief Support
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without Equality, samata. Whatever the unpleasantness of circumstances, however disagreeable the conduct of others, you must learn to receive them with a perfect calm and without any disturbing reaction.
These things are the test of Equality. It is easy to be calm and equal when things go well and people and circumstances are pleasant; it is when they are the opposite that the completeness of the calm, peace, Equality can be tested, reinforced, made perfect.
Yogic Samata is Equality of soul, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere - seeing the
One in spite of all differences, degrees, disparities in the manifestation. The mental principle of Equality tries to ignore or else to destroy the differences, degrees and disparities, to act as if all were equal there or to try and make all equal. It is like Hriday, the nephew of Ramakrishna, who when he got the touch from Ramakrishna began to shout, "Ramakrishna, you are the Brahman and I too am the Brahman; there is no difference between us", till Ramakrishna, as he refused to be quiet, had to withdraw the power. Or like the disciple who refused to listen to the Mahout and stood before the elephant, saying, "I am
Brahman", until the elephant took him up in his trunk and put him aside. When he complained to his Guru, the Guru said,
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Equality is not the same thing as forbearance, - though undoubtedly a settled Equality immensely extends, even illimitably, a man's power of endurance and forbearance.
Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital; it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements, anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit. It is not easy to have this Equality in any full and perfect measure, but one should always try more and more to make it the basis of one's inner state and outer movements.
Equality means another thing - to have an equal view of men and their nature and acts and the forces that move them; it helps one to see the truth about them by pushing away from the mind all personal feeling in one's seeing and judgment and even all mental bias. Personal feeling always distorts and makes one see in men's actions, not only the actions themselves, but things behind them which, more often than not, are not there. Misunderstanding and misjudgment which could have been avoided are the result; things of small consequence assume
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Falsehood that attacks, to be unflinchingly loyal and against the hostiles and the attackers, is not inconsistent with Equality. It is personal and egoistic feeling that has to be thrown away; hatred and vital ill-will have to be rejected. But loyalty and refusal to compromise with the assailants and the hostiles or to dally with their ideas and demands and say, "After all we can compromise with what they ask from us", or to accept them as companions and our own people - these things have a great importance. If the attack were a physical menace to the work and the leaders and doers of the work, one would see this at once. But because the attack is of a subtler kind, can a passive attitude be right?
It is a spiritual battle inward and outward; by neutrality and compromise or even passivity one may allow the enemy Forces to pass and crush down the Truth and its children. If you look at it from this point you will see that if the inner spiritual Equality is right, the active loyalty and firm taking of sides is as right, and the two cannot be incompatible.
I have of course treated it as a general question apart from all particular cases or personal questions. It is a principle of
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As for the detachment of which you speak, it comes by attaining the poise of the Spirit, the Equality of which the Gita speaks always, but also by sight, by knowledge. For instance, looking at what happened in 1914 - or for that matter at all that is and has been happening in human history - the eye of the Yogin sees not only outward events and persons and causes, but the enormous forces which precipitate them into action. If the men who fought were instruments in the hands of rulers and financiers etc., these in turn were mere puppets in the clutch of these forces. When one is habituated to see the things behind, one is no longer prone to be touched by the outward aspects - or to expect any remedy from political, institutional or social changes; the only way out is through the descent of a consciousness which is not the puppet of these forces but is greater than they are and can force them either to change or disappear.
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The Yogic attitude consists in calm, detachment, Equality, universality - added to this the psychic element, bhakti, love, devotion to the Divine.
Equality in Times of Trouble and Difficulty
Equality is a very important part of this Yoga; it is necessary to keep Equality under pain and suffering - and that means to endure firmly and calmly, not to be restless or troubled or depressed or despondent, to go on in a steady faith in the Divine Will. But Equality does not include inert acceptance. If, for instance, there is temporary failure of some endeavour in the sadhana, one has to keep Equality, not to be troubled or despondent, but one has not to accept the failure as an indication of the Divine Will and give up the endeavour. You ought rather to find out the reason and meaning of the failure and go forward in faith towards victory. So with illness - you have not to be troubled, shaken or restless, but you have not to accept illness as the Divine Will, but rather look upon it as an imperfection of the body to be got rid of as you try to get rid of vital imperfections or mental errors.
To be free from all preference and receive joyfully whatever comes from the Divine Will is not possible at first for any human being. What one should have at first is the constant idea that what the Divine wills is always for the best even when the mind does not see how it is so, to accept with resignation what one cannot yet accept with gladness and so to arrive at a calm Equality which is not shaken even when on the surface there may be passing movements of a momentary reaction to outward happenings. If that is once firmly founded, the rest can come.
It is very good that you have had this experience; for this kind of consciousness full of Equality (samata) is just the thing that
Equality - The Chief Support
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Through an Equality gained by strong mental control [the worldly man is able to bear all kinds of difficulty] - but that is not samata, it is titiks.a, the power to bear which is only a first step or a first element of samata.
It is not enough to have that Equality and silence and freedom only when you are in communion with the sky and sea. It is at all times that you must be able to receive it from above - then there will be a true foundation of the sadhana.
You must establish a basis of equanimity within - the peace of the inner being which these surface movements cannot touch, - then if they come on the surface, there will be no violent reaction and they can be rejected with more ease.
1.3.03 - Quiet and Calm, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The inner spiritual progress does not depend on outer conditions so much as on the way we react to them from within - that has always been the ultimate verdict of spiritual experience. It is why we insist on taking the right attitude and persisting in it, on an inner state not dependent on outer circumstances, a state of Equality and calm, if it cannot be at once of inner happiness, on going more and more within and looking from within outwards instead of living in the surface mind which is always at the mercy of the shocks and blows of life. It is only from that inner state that one can be stronger than life and its disturbing forces and hope to conquer.
To remain quiet within, firm in the will to go through, refusing to be disturbed or discouraged by difficulties or fluctuations, that is one of the first things to be learned on the Path. To do otherwise is to encourage the instability of consciousness, the difficulty of keeping experience of which you complain. It is only if you keep quiet and steady within that the lines of experience can go on with some steadiness - though they are never without periods of interruption and fluctuation; but these, if properly treated, can then become periods of assimilation and exhaustion of difficulty rather than denials of sadhana.
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This state of emptiness and quietude and absence of reactions is regarded by Yogins as a great step in advance, especially the Equality and indifference to what is said or done. For the moment it is a neutral condition only, but that it is usually at first.
Afterwards it changes into peace or even into an equal Ananda undisturbed by anything that can happen.
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What you have written about your condition seems to be correct as a whole. There is certainly a greater calm within and a freedom of the inner being which was not there once. It is this which gives you the Equality you feel there and the capacity to escape from the more serious disturbances. When one has this basis of inner calm, the difficulties and imperfections of the surface can be dealt with without upsets, depressions, etc. The power to go among others without any invasion is also due to the same cause.
Do not attach so much importance to mistakes or insist on your non-receptiveness and unconsciousness. You have only to turn always to the Force that gives you calmness and in the calmness you will become progressively more and more conscious and receptive.
1.3.04 - Peace, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are two conditions, one of Ananda, another of great calm and Equality in which there is no joy or grief. If one attains the latter, afterwards a greater more permanent Ananda becomes possible.
The active Ananda can culminate in the shanta Ananda. Also when the shanta Ananda is established, it is the base from which active Ananda arises without disturbing its calmness.
1.3 - Mundaka Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6 Or, "pure of all staining tinge he reaches to a supreme Equality."
Mundaka Upanishad
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Mahatma Gandhi also admits Equality...
M.: Gandhi is not here.
--
M.: Why not? If they could speak they would claim Equality with you and dispute your claims no less vigorously than human beings.
D.: But we cannot help it. It is Gods work.
--
Gandhiji also tries to bring about Equality. He is also up against the barrier of inferiority complex afflicting the lower orders. He cannot enforce his views on others. He observes non-violence. So matters stand as they are.
D.: We must work to obliterate caste-distinctions.
1.53 - The Propitation of Wild Animals By Hunters, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
on a footing of Equality with man, the act of killing and eating an
animal must wear a very different aspect from that which the same
1912 12 05p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and the Eternal will manifest; have perfect Equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there. Yes, we should not put too much intensity, too much effort into our seeking for Thee; the effort and intensity become a veil in front of Thee; we must not desire to see Thee, for that is still a mental agitation which obscures Thy Eternal Presence; it is in the most complete Peace, Serenity and Equality that all is Thou even as Thou art all, and the least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle to Thy manifestation. No haste, no inquietude, no tension, Thou, nothing but Thou, without any analysis or any objectivising, and Thou art there without a possible doubt, for all becomes a Holy Peace and a Sacred Silence.
And that is better than all the meditations in the world.
1951-02-12 - Divine force - Signs indicating readiness - Weakness in mind, vital - concentration - Divine perception, human notion of good, bad - Conversion, consecration - progress - Signs of entering the path - kinds of meditation - aspiration, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because it is too strong for them. It is as though you were in the midst of a big cyclone. It happens at times that the wind is so violent that you are not able to standyou have to lie down and wait till it blows over. Now, the divine forces are a thousand times stronger than a cyclonic wind. If you do not have in you a very wide receptivity, an extremely solid basis of calmness, of Equality of soul and inner peace, they come and carry you away like a gale and you cannot resist them. It is the same thing with light; some people get a pain in the eyes when they look at the sun and are obliged to put on dark glasses because sunlight is too strong for them. But this is merely sunlight. When you are able to look at the supramental light, it appears to you so brilliant that sunlight seems like a black stain in comparison. One must have strong eyes and a solid brain to bear that, one must be well prepared, established in something extremely calm and vastit is as though one had such a strong basis of tranquillity that when the storm passes, when the light comes with a great intensity, one is able to remain immobile and receive what one can without being knocked over. But there is not one being in a million who can do it. Only those who have had a foretaste of inner experience can know what this means. But even if you enter consciously into the psychic, it is dazzling; and it is within your reach because it is your own psychic being, and yet it is so different from your external consciousness that the first time you enter it consciously, it seems to you truly dazzling, something infinitely more brilliant than the most brilliant sunlight.
The psychic is what may be called the Divine within the reach of man.
--
Yes, the most important indication is a perfect Equality of soul in all circumstances. It is an absolutely indispensable basis; something very quiet, calm, peaceful, the feeling of a great force. Not the quietness that comes from inertia but the sensation of a concentrated power which keeps you always steady, whatever happens, even in circumstances which may appear to you the most terrible in your life. That is the first sign.
A second sign: you feel completely imprisoned in your ordinary normal consciousness, as in something extremely hard, something suffocating and intolerable, as though you had to pierce a hole in a brass wall. And the torture becomes almost unbearable, it is stifling; there is an inner effort to break through and you cannot manage to break through. This also is one of the first signs. It means that your inner consciousness has reached a point where its outer mould is much too small for it the mould of ordinary life, of ordinary activities, ordinary relations, all that becomes so small, so petty; you feel within you a force to break all that.
1953-04-15, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What is the difference between outer Equality and the Equality of the soul?
The Equality of the soul is a psychological thing. It is the power to bear all happenings, good or bad, without being sad, discouraged desperate, upset. Whatever happens, you remain serene, peaceful.
The other is the Equality in the body. It is not psychological, it is something material; to have a physical poise, to receive forces without being troubled.
The two are equally necessary if one wants to progress on the path. And other things still. For example, a mental poise; such that all possible ideas, even the most contradictory, may come from all sides without ones being troubled. One can see them and put each in its place. That is mental poise.
1954-09-29 - The right spirit - The Divine comes first - Finding the Divine - Mistakes - Rejecting impulses - Making the consciousness vast - Firm resolution, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is good for the physical to be more and more conscious, but it should not be overpowered by these ordinary human reactions of which it becomes aware or badly affected or upset by them. A strong Equality and mastery and detachment must come, in the nerves and body as in the mind, which will enable the physical to know and contact these things without feeling any disturbance; it should know and be conscious and reject and throw away the pressure of the movements in the atmosphere, not merely feel them and suffer.
Sweet Mother, how can the physical throw away the pressure of the movements in the atmosphere?
1955-03-09 - Psychic directly contacted through the physical - Transforming egoistic movements - Work of the psychic being - Contacting the psychic and the Divine - Experiences of different kinds - Attacks of adverse forces, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sweet Mother, here it is said: a complete Equality and peace and a complete dedication free from personal demand or desire in the physical and the lower vital parts are the thing to be established.
Well, so what?
1955-05-18 - The Problem of Woman - Men and women - The Supreme Mother, the new creation - Gods and goddesses - A story of Creation, earth - Psychic being only on earth, beings everywhere - Going to other worlds by occult means, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, not that, but Secretary of State; there was one. In fact I say this because France was one of the most backward countries, and it is still so. And this is something very interesting: it is perhaps the country which had the most advanced ideas from the political point of view; it is from France that the ideas of Equality, Fraternity and Liberty have come; it is there that this has taken birth and from there it has spread over the world, but from the point of view of the relations between man and woman, it was certainly the most backward of all. There are psychological reasons for this, but I dont want to speak about them here. There, then!
Sweet Mother, here it is said: All men are feminine in many respects and all women are masculine in many traits, especially in modern societies.
1956-02-22 - Strong immobility of an immortal spirit - Equality of soul - Is all an expression of the divine Will? - Loosening the knot of action - Using experience as a cloak to cover excesses - Sincerity, a rare virtue, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1956-02-22 - Strong immobility of an immortal spirit - Equality of soul - Is all an expression of the divine Will? - Loosening the knot of action - Using experience as a cloak to cover excesses - Sincerity, a rare virtue
author class:The Mother
--
Mother, is this the same as the Equality of soul Sri Aurobindo has spoken about?
Equality of soul is a way. It is a means, it is a wayit can be a goal also. But it is not the consummation.
For example, there are those who say, who profess that everything that happens is the expression of the divine Will (I spoke about this last time, I think), there is an entire way of looking at life, understanding life, which is like that, which says, All that is, the world as it is, all that happens, is the expression of the divine Will; therefore wisdom wants us, if we want to be in relation with the Divine, to accept without flinching and without the slightest emotion or reaction all that happens, since it is the expression of the divine Will, and it is understood that we should bow down before it. This is a conception which tends precisely to help people to acquire this Equality of soul. But if you adopt this idea without adopting its opposite and making a synthesis of the two, well, naturally, you have only to sit through life and do nothingor, in any case, never try to make the world progress.
I remember having read in a class, before our present class starteda class which also used to be held on Wednesdays, perhaps, I dont quite know, in which I used to read books I read a book by Anatole France, who had a very subtle wit I think it was Le Livre de Jerome Coignard but I am not absolutely surewhere he says that men would be perfectly happy if they were not so anxious to improve life. I am not quoting the exact words but the idea. Unhappiness begins with this will to make men and things better! (Mother laughs) That is his way of saying exactly the same thing I was just telling you in another form. If you want to be peaceful, happy, always satisfied, to have perfect Equality of soul, you must tell yourself, Things are as they should be, and if you are religious you should tell yourself, They are as they should be because they are the expression of the divine Will, and we have only one thing to do, that is to accept them as they are and be very quiet, because it is better to be quiet than to be restless. He turns the thing round and puts it in another way; he says life is very comfortable and very tolerable and very acceptable, if men dont begin to wish that it should be different. And the minute they are not happy, naturally nobody is happy! Since they find that it is not what it should be, well, they begin to be unhappy and others too.
But if everyone had the good sense to say, Things are as they should be; one dies because one has to die, and one is ill because one has to be ill, one is separated from those one loves because one has to be separated, and then, etc and one is in poverty because one has to be poor, one, you know, there is no end to it. Well, if completely, totally, one says, Things are as they should be, it makes no sense to grieve or to revolt, its foolish! Ah! one must be logical. So we say that misery begins with the will to make things better than they are. Why do you not want to be ill when you are ill? You are much more ill when, being ill, you dont want to be ill, than if you tell yourself, All right, it is Gods Will, I accept my illness! At least you are quiet, that helps you to recover, perhaps. And poor peoplewhy do they want to be rich? And people who lose their children or their parentswhy dont they want it to be like that? If everybody wanted things to be as they are, everybody would be happy.
--
I have met many people who claimed they had perfect Equality of soul and perfect freedom, and hid themselves behind these theories: All is the divine Will, and who, in fact, in their thought, were substituting their own will for the divine Will, and were very far from realising what they claimed. They were idlers who didnt want to make any effort and preferred keeping their nature as it was, rather than working to transform it. Voil!
Sweet Mother, do these people have powers?
1956-10-17 - Delight, the highest state - Delight and detachment - To be calm - Quietude, mental and vital - Calm and strength - Experience and expression of experience, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I dont need to tell you that this is not delight as it is understood in the ordinary human consciousness. Indeed, that delight is beyond the states which are generally considered as the highest from the yogic point of view, as for instance, the state of perfect serenity, of perfect Equality of soul, of absolute detachment, of identity with the infinite and eternal Divine, which necessarily raises you above all contingencies. Parallel to this state there can be another which is the state of perfect, integral, universal love, which is the very essence of compassion and the most perfect expression of the Grace which wipes out the consequences of all error and all ignorance. These two states have always been considered as the summit of consciousness; they are what could be called the frontier, the extreme limit of what the individual consciousness can attain in its union with the Divine.
But there is something which lies beyond; it is precisely a state of perfect delight which is not static: delight in a progressive manifestation, a perfect unfolding of the supreme Consciousness.
--
But as long as this detachment is not realised, one can easily confuse Delight with an exalted state of ordinary human happiness, and this would not at all be the true thing nor even a perversion of the thing, for the nature of the two is so different, almost opposite, that you cannot pass from one to the other. So, if one wants to be safe on the path, it seems to me that to seek for peace, for perfect calm, perfect Equality, for a widening of the consciousness, a vaster understanding and liberation from all desire, all preference, all attachment, is certainly an indispensable preliminary condition.
It is the guarantee of both inner and outer equipoise.
1957-03-22 - A story of initiation, knowledge and practice, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All of you who have come here have been told many things; you have been put into contact with a world of truth, you live within it, the air you brea the is full of it; and yet how few of you know that these truths are valuable only if they are put into practice, and that it is useless to talk of consciousness, knowledge, Equality of soul, universality, infinity, eternity, supreme truth, the divine presence and of all sorts of things like that, if you make no effort yourselves to live these things and feel them concretely within you. And dont tell yourselves, Oh, I have been here so many years! Oh, I would very much like to have the result of my efforts! You must know that very persistent efforts, a very steadfast endurance are necessary to master the least weakness, the least pettiness, the least meanness in ones nature. What is the use of talking about divine Love if one cant love without egoism? What is the use of talking about immortality if one is stubbornly attached to the past and the present and if one doesnt want to give anything in order to receive everything?
You are still very young, but you must learn right away that to reach the goal you must know how to pay the price, and that to understand the supreme truths you must put them into practice in your daily life.
1957-04-10 - Sports and yoga - Organising ones life, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And above all, set them the right example. Be yourself what you would like them to be. Give them the example of disinterestedness, patience, self-control, constant good humour, the overcoming of ones little personal dislikes, a sort of constant goodwill, an understanding of others difficulties; and that Equality of temper which makes children free from fear, for what makes children deceitful and untruthful, and even cunning, is the fear of being punished. If they feel secure, they will hide nothing and you will then be able to help them to be loyal and honest. Of all things the most important is good example. Sri Aurobindo speaks of that, of the invariable good humour one must have in all circumstances, this self-forgetfulness: not to throw ones own little troubles on others; when one is tired or uncomfortable, not to become unpleasant, impatient. This asks for quite some perfection, a self-control which is a great step on the path of realisation. If one fulfilled the conditions needed to be a true leader, even if only a leader of a small group of children, well, one would already be far advanced in the discipline needed for the accomplishment of the yoga.
It is from this aspect that the problem should be seen, the aspect of self-mastery, of control, of the endurance which will not allow your personal condition to react on your group-work or collective action. To forget oneself is one of the most essential conditions for being a true leader: to have no selfish interests, to want nothing for oneself, to consider only the good of the group, of the whole, the totality that depends on one; to act only with that aim in mind, without wanting any personal profit from ones action.
1960 05 25, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But ultimately the true attitude, the sign and proof that we are near the goal, is a perfect Equality which enables us to accept success and failure, fortune and misfortune, happiness and sorrow with the same tranquil joy; for all these things become marvellous gifts that the Lord in his infinite solicitude showers upon us.
25 May 1960
1962 01 12, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
First of all, from the psychological point of view, there must be the condition I spoke about in the story of the stag: perfect Equality. It is an absolute condition. I have observed since 1956, for years, that no supramental vibration can be transmitted except in this perfect Equality. If there is the least opposition to this Equalityin fact the least movement of ego, any preference of the ego, it does not come through, it is not transmitted. This is already difficult enough.
Added to this, there are two conditions for the realisation to become total and they are not easily fulfilled. It is not very difficult on the intellectual plane I am not speaking here of just anyone at all but of people who have already practised yoga and followed a disciplineit is relatively easy; on the psychological plane too, if you bring in this Equality, it is not very difficult. But as soon as you come to the material plane, that is, the physical and then the body, it is not easy. The two conditions are: first, a power of expansion, of widening, that is unlimited, so to say, so that you can widen yourself to the dimension of the supramental consciousness, which is total. The supramental consciousness is the consciousness of the Supreme in His totality when I say His totality, I mean the Supreme in His aspect of Manifestation. Naturally, from the higher point of view, the point of view of the essence the essence of what becomes the Supermind in the Manifestation there must be a capacity for total identification with the Supreme, not only in His aspect of Manifestation, but also in his static or nirvanic aspect, beyond the ManifestationNon-Being. But in addition to this, one must be able to identify oneself with the Supreme in the Becoming. This implies two things: first a widening that is at least unlimited, as I have said, and at the same time a total plasticity in order to be able to follow the Supreme in His Becoming. It is not at one particular moment that one must be as wide as the universe, but indefinitely, in the Becoming. These are the two conditions; they must be there potentially.
So long as there is no question of physical transformation, the psychological and, in a large measure, subjective point of view is sufficient. And that is relatively easy. But when it comes to including Matter in the work, Matter as it is in this world, where the very starting-point itself is wrongwe start from Inconscience and Ignorance then it is very difficult. Because, in fact, so that this Matter could reach the individualisation needed to recover the lost Consciousness, it was made with a certain fixity indispensable to make forms last and precisely to maintain this possibility of individuality. And that is the chief obstacle to the widening, the plasticity, the suppleness needed to be able to receive the supermind. I am constantly faced with this problem, which is a very concrete, absolutely material one, when one is dealing with these cells which must remain cells and not evaporate into a reality which is no longer physical. And at the same time, they must have this suppleness, this lack of fixity which enables them to widen indefinitely.
--
One could say that the constant state that is needed for the Supermind to be able to express itself through a terrestrial consciousness is the perfect Equality that comes from spiritual identification with the Supreme. Everything becomes the Supreme in a perfect Equality. And it is automaticnot the Equality achieved by the conscious will, by intellectual effort or an understanding prior to the state; it is not that. It must be spontaneous and automatic; one should no longer respond to everything that comes from outside as if one were responding to something coming from outside. This kind of reflection and response should be replaced by a state of constant perceptionwhich I cannot call identical because each thing necessarily calls for a special response but free from any rebound, if one may say so. It is the difference that exists between something coming from outside, that strikes you and that you respond to, and something which is circulating and which quite naturally brings with it the vibrations needed for the general action. I do not know whether I am making myself clearly understood. It is the difference between a vibratory movement circulating in a unitary field of action and a movement coming from something outside, striking from outside and obtaining a response that is the usual state of human consciousness. On the other hand, when the consciousness is identified with the Supreme, the movements are internal, so to say, in the sense that nothing comes from outside; there are only things that circulate and naturally bring about certain vibrations in the course of their circulation, by similarity and necessityor that change the vibrations in the medium of circulation.
It is something very familiar to me, because it is my constant state at present I never have the impression of things coming from outside and striking, but of inner, multiple and sometimes contradictory movements, and of a constant circulation bringing about the inner changes needed for the movement.
1963 08 10, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
93-Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to hear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next Equality of soul, last ecstasy.
As far as moral things are concerned, this is absolutely obvious, it is indisputableall moral suffering moulds your character and leads you straight to ecstasy, when you know how to take it. But when it comes to the body
1963 08 11? - 94, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have itwhen the whole consciousness is centralised in union; at any time, in the midst of anything, with this movement of concentration of the consciousness on union, the rapture comes. But I must say that it disappears when I am working. It is a worlda very chaotic world of work, where I act on everything around me; and necessarily, I am obliged to receive what is around me, so as to be able to act on it. I have reached a state in which all that I receive, even the things that are considered most painful, leave me absolutely calm and indifferentindifferent, not an inactive indifference: without any painful reaction of any kind, absolutely neutral (gesture turned towards the Eternal), with perfect Equality. But in this Equality there is a precise knowledge of what is to be done, of what is to be said, of what is to be written, of what is to be decided, in short, everything that action entails. All that happens in a state of perfect neutrality, with the sense of Power at the same time: the Power flows, the Power acts, and the neutrality remains but there is no rapture. I do not have the enthusiasm, the delight, the fullness of action.
And I must say that this rapturous state of consciousness would be dangerous in the present condition of the world. Because it produces reactions that are almost absolute I see that this state of rapture has a formidable power. But I insist on the word formidable, in the sense that it is intolerant or intolerableintolerable ratherto everything that is unlike it. It is the same thing or almostnot quite the same, but almostas the supreme divine Love; the vibration of this ecstasy or rapture is a small beginning of the vibration of divine Love, and that is absolutelyyes, there is no other word for itintolerant, in the sense that it will not permit the presence of anything that is contrary to it
1969 11 08?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But we shall try to teach them to truly love peace and to try to practise Equality.
What I meant was involuntary poverty and begging.
1970 01 07, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
276The Theosophists are wrong in their circumstances but right in the essential. If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snows dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and Equality.
This is simply to show us that the power of the spirit is far greater than all material powers. But both are indispensable for the realisation.
1970 02 08, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
325Freedom, Equality, brotherhood, cried the French revolutionists, but in truth freedom only has been practised with a dose of Equality; as for brotherhood, only a brotherhood of Cain was founded and of Barabbas. Sometimes it calls itself a Trust or Combine and sometimes the Concert of Europe.
326Since liberty has failed, cries the advanced thought of Europe, let us try liberty cum Equality or, since the two are a little hard to pair, Equality instead of liberty. For brotherhood, it is impossible; therefore we will replace it by industrial association. But this time also, I think, God will not be deceived.
As yet liberty, Equality, fraternity are only words loudly proclaimed but never yet put into practice, and they cannot be put into practice so long as men remain what they are, ruled by their ego and all its desires instead of being ruled only by the One Supreme and supremely Divine.
8 February 1970
1970 02 09, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Equality can only be manifested when all men become conscious of the Supreme Lord.
Fraternity can only be manifested when men feel that they are equally born of the Supreme Lord and one in His Oneness.
1.fs - The Lay Of The Bell, #Schiller - Poems, #Friedrich Schiller, #Poetry
"Freedom! Equality!"to blood
Rush the roused people at the sound!
1.jk - Spenserian Stanza. Written At The Close Of Canto II, Book V, Of The Faerie Queene, #Keats - Poems, #John Keats, #Poetry
"The copy of Spenser which Keats had in daily use, contains the following stanza, inserted at the close of Canto II, Book V. His sympathies were very much on the side of the revolutionary 'Gyant,' who 'undertook for to repair' the 'realms and nations run awry,' and to suppress 'tyrants that make men subject to their law', 'and lordings curbe that commons over-aw,' while he grudged the legitamate victory, as he rejected the conservative philosophy, of the 'righteous Artegall' and ex post facto prophecy, his conviction of the ultimate triumph of freedom and Equality by the power of transmitted knowledge."
I have no data whereby to fix the period of this commentary of Keats on the political attitude of Spenser; but I should judge it to belong to the end of 1818 or thereabouts. The copy of Spenser in which the stanza was written is not now forthcoming: it passed into the hands of Miss Brawne, and was lost, with other books, many years after Keats's death.'
1.jk - Stanzas To Miss Wylie, #Keats - Poems, #John Keats, #Poetry
'These stanzas, which are from the series of transcripts made by George Keats, are addressed to the object of the Sonnet to G. A. W. published in Keats's volume of 1817 -- to wit the lady who was afterwards the wife of George Keats. Though not so good as the Sonnet, they are on an Equality with the verses in Keats's Tom Moore manner addressed to some ladies who sent him a shell and a copy of verses. They belong to the year 1816.'
~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
1.nrpa - The Summary of Mahamudra, #Naropa - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Non-dual Equality is dharmakaya.
Like the continuous flow of a great river,
1.pbs - The Revolt Of Islam - Canto I-XII, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
Of mild Equality and peace, succeeds
To faiths which long have held the world in awe,
--
A rite to attest the Equality of all
Who live. So to their homes, to dream or wake
--
'Eldest of things, divine Equality!
Wisdom and Love are but the slaves of thee,
1.wby - Blood And The Moon, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
Cast but dead leaves to mathematical Equality;
And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a
1.whitman - Apostroph, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
O Equality! O organic compacts! I am come to be your born poet!
O whirl, contest, sounding and resounding! I am your poet, because I
1.whitman - As I Sat Alone By Blue Ontarios Shores, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Here the flowing trainshere the crowds, Equality, diversity, the
Soul loves.
--
The perfect Equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement
of the population,
--
Without extinction is Liberty! without retrograde is Equality!
They live in the feelings of young men, and the best women;
--
Not to justify science, nor the march of Equality,
Nor to feed the arrogant blood of the brawn beloved of time.
1.whitman - Great Are The Myths, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Great is Liberty! great is Equality! I am their follower;
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft! where you sail, I sail,
--
Equality in the Soul rule.
Great is Lawgreat are the few old land-marks of the law,
1.whitman - Over The Carnage, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.
These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron;
1.whitman - Poem Of Remembrance For A Girl Or A Boy, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
life, liberty, Equality of man,
Remember what was promulged by the founders, ratified by The States,
1.whitman - Respondez!, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Equality with man and woman!
Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those
1.whitman - So Long, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
I announce uncompromising liberty and Equality;
I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of
1.whitman - States!, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.
These shall tie and band stronger than hoops of iron,
1.ww - Book Tenth {Residence in France continued], #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
From popular government and Equality,"
I clearly saw that neither these nor aught
1.ww - The Excursion- VII- Book Sixth- The Churchyard Among the Mountains, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
The natural feeling of Equality
Is by domestic service unimpaired;
1.ww - The Excursion- X- Book Ninth- Discourse of the Wanderer, and an Evening Visit to the Lake, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Wanderer asserts that an active principle pervades the Universe, its noblest seat the human soul--How lively this principle is in Childhood--Hence the delight in old Age of looking back upon Childhood--The dignity, powers, and privileges of Age asserted-- These not to be looked for generally but under a just government-- Right of a human Creature to be exempt from being considered as a mere Instrument--The condition of multitudes deplored--Former conversation recurred to, and the Wanderer's opinions set in a clearer light--Truth placed within reach of the humblest-- Equality--Happy state of the two Boys again adverted to--Earnest wish expressed for a System of National Education established universally by Government--Glorious effects of this foretold--Walk to the Lake--Grand spectacle from the side of a hill--Address of Priest to the Supreme Being--In the course of which he contrasts with ancient Barbarism the present appearance of the scene before him--The change ascribed to Christianity--Apostrophe to his flock, living and dead--Gratitude to the Almighty--Return over the Lake-- Parting with the Solitary--Under what circumstances.
"TO every Form of being is assigned,"
--
Ponders this true Equality, may walk
The fields of earth with gratitude and hope;
20.01 - Charyapada - Old Bengali Mystic Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The creation is a stringed musical instrument. Knowledge is its base, the delight is the row of strings tied to the base, the inner silence is the body (rod) on which the strings are laid. The woman is the inspiration of the inner soul, creating the music, she is the mate of the singer, the poet himself. What kind of music is it? It is the music of the Void pouring out the light of compassion all over the creation. The strings are in two layers; the vowels (beginning with aalpha series) are the top series, the consonants the series below (Indian K series, European beta series). That marks the echoing and the re-echoing of the melody, also the right hand and the left hand movements of the consciousness (Knowledge and Power) according to the occultistsit means the total encircling consciousness, the global music. The bridge tightens and maintains the poise of the strings. We may remember here the two subtle nervous lines of 'Ida' and 'Pingala' and the middle one, 'Sushumna' that balances the two. The psychological sense is that the dualities of the world-experience are resolved in the consciousness of the sadhak by a supreme sense of Equality. The elephant may mean the strength of physical resolution. The fingers pressing indicate the same thing, the pressure of almost physical consciousness to bring out the vast music that is Nirvana. The Gods and Goddesses are all happy for the curtain is rung down on the play, it is the endNirvana.
You have to cross the three worldsphysical, vital and mental, pass through the three states of consciousness jgrat (waking), swapna (dreaming) and suupta (sleeping)-to enjoy the transcendent delight. It is the ecstasy of union with one's soul, the divine Beloved secreted within our inner heart. This divinity, this beloved deity is utter freedomno mental reservations or restrictions, no vital preferences or prejudices, no physical rules or regulations.
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
It is true that in Napoleon's time the Assembly was only a shadow, but the full Republic, though delayed for a time, was already established, because politics is only a show at the top. The real changes that matter are the changes that come into society. From that point of view, the social changes introduced by Napoleon have continued to this day without any material alteration. The Equality of all men before the law was realised then for the first time. His Code bridged the gulf between the extremely poor and the rich. It is now very natural, but it was revolutionary when it was introduced. It may not be democracy governed by the masses, but it is democracy governed by the middle-class, the bourgeoisie....
The portion containing Huxleys ideas about war was noticed.
2.01 - The Therapeutic value of Abreaction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
have the right to the freest criticism, and a true sense of human Equality.
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2.02 - On Letters, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. That is one way; or, as Isaid, if you can establish peace, Equality and calm right down to your physical consciousness, so that nothing in you stirs whatever happens, then you can be free from ambition.
These things, as I said, are very difficult to get rid of. When I had the Nirvana experience at Baroda I thought at that time that I had no ambition left at least personal ambition in the work that I was doing for the country. Then I used to hear a voice within me telling me all about my inner movement. When I reached Calcutta I heard this voice pointing out things within me which showed that there was personal ambition of which I was till then quite unconscious. So, you see, these things can hide for a very long time.
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
motto of the Revolution we know, liberty, Equality & fraternity;
the spirit it professed but could not attain we know, humanity.
In liberty the union of the individual moral liberty of Christianity with the civic liberty of Greece; in Equality, the democratic
spiritual Equality of Christianity applied to society; fraternity,
the aspiration to universal brotherhood, which is the peculiar
2.02 - The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukr.t, and then to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, to the light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where he gets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandvamoha. There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasure or shuns his personal suffering or pain, for by these things he is no longer affected, nor says any longer, "I am virtuous," "I am sinful," but acts in his own high spiritual nature by the will of the Divine for the universal good. We have already seen that for this end self-knowledge, Equality, impersonality are the first necessities, and that that is the way of reconciliation between knowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in the world, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless self and the eternal play of the pragmatic energy of Nature. But
Obviously, by the true inner pun.ya, a sattwic clarity in thought, feeling, temperament, motive and conduct, not a merely conventional or social virtue.
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- or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all growth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a high quietude, Equality and transcendence, - it is necessary to rise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one self with the Immutable, one self with all existences. This process of growing into the spirit completes our purification. But while this is being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, it has also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in a large spirit of Equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, to that Godhead in all beings which it does not yet know perfectly, but which it will be able so to know, integrally, samagram mam,
The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge
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when it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in all existences. Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, te dvandva-moha-nirmuktah., a supreme bhakti, an all-embracing devotion to the Divine, becomes the whole and the sole law of the being. All other law of conduct merges into that surrender, sarva-dharman parityajya. The soul then becomes firm in this bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration of all its being, knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its absolute foundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, the unifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajante mam dr.d.ha-vratah..
From the ordinary point of view any return towards bhakti or continuation of the heart's activities after knowledge and impersonality have been gained, might seem to be a relapse. For in bhakti there is always the element, the foundation even of personality, since its motive-power is the love and adoration of the individual soul, the Jiva, turned towards the supreme and universal Being. But from the standpoint of the Gita, where the aim is not inaction and immergence in the eternal Impersonal, but a union with the Purushottama through the integrality of our being, this objection cannot at all intervene. In this Yoga the soul escapes indeed its lower personality by the sense of its impersonal and immutable self-being; but it still acts and all action belongs to the multiple soul in the mutability of Nature.
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: But with the abolition of class-distinction there is now perhaps a sense of Equality among all nobody is superior or inferior.
Sri Aurobindo: How? At first the leaders, the generals and others went to run the machines and industrial organisations in Russia. But they found it was not possible; then they had to bring in specialists and pay them highly. The condition of the working class in Russia is no better than that of the similar class in England or France. They certainly have done some good things with regard to women and children, and about medical help. But that is being done in many other countries like France and England.
2.03 - The Purified Understanding, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first cause of impurity in the understanding is the intermiscence of desire in the thinking functions, and desire itself is an impurity of the Will involved in the vital and emotional parts of our being. When the vital and emotional desires interfere with the pure Will-to-know, the thought-function becomes subservient to them, pursues ends other than those proper to itself and its perceptions are clogged and deranged. The understanding must lift itself beyond the siege of desire and emotion and, in order that it may have perfect immunity, it must get the vital parts and the emotions themselves purified. The will to enjoy is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right functioning of the life in obedience to the working of the divine Will and to rid itself of craving and attachment. Similarly the heart must be freed from subjection to the cravings of the life-principle and the senses and thus rid itself of the false emotions of fear, wrath, hatred, lust, etc, which constitute the chief impurity of the heart. The will to love is proper to the heart, but here also the choice and reaching after love have to be foregone or tranquillised and the heart taught to love with depth and intensity indeed, but with a calm depth and a settled and equal, not a troubled and disordered intensity. The tranquillisation and mastery299 of these members is a first condition for the immunity of the understanding from error, ignorance and perversion. This purification spells an entire Equality of the nervous being and the heart; Equality, therefore, even as it was the first word of the path of works, so also is the first word of the path of knowledge.
The second cause of impurity in the understanding is the illusion of the senses and the intermiscence of the sense-mind in the thinking functions. No knowledge can be true knowledge which subjects itself to the senses or uses them otherwise than as first indices whose data have constantly to be corrected and overpassed. The beginning of Science is the examination of the truths of the world-force that underlie its apparent workings such as our senses represent them to be; the beginning of philosophy is the examination of the principles of things which the senses mistranslate to us; the beginning of spiritual knowledge is the refusal to accept the limitations of the sense-life or to take the visible and sensible as anything more than phenomenon of the Reality.
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A third cause of impurity has its source in the understanding itself and consists in an improper action of the will to know. That will is proper to the understanding, but here again choice and unequal reaching after knowledge clog and distort. They lead to a partiality and attachment which makes the intellect cling to certain ideas and opinions with a more or less obstinate will to ignore the truth in other ideas and opinions, cling to certain fragments of a truth and shy against the admission of other parts which are yet necessary to its fullness, cling to certain predilections of knowledge and repel all knowledge that does not agree with the personal temperament of thought which has been acquired by the past of the thinker. The remedy lies in a perfect Equality of the mind, in the cultivation of an entire intellectual rectitude and in the perfection of mental disinterestedness. The purified understanding as it will not lend itself to any desire or craving, so will not lend itself either to any predilection or distaste for any particular idea or truth, and will refuse to be attached even to those ideas of which it is most certain or to lay on them such an undue stress as is likely to disturb the balance of truth and depreciate the values of other elements of a complete and perfect knowledge.
An understanding thus purified would be a perfectly flexible, entire and faultless instrument of intellectual thought and being free from the inferior sources of obstruction and distortion would be capable of as true and complete a perception of the truths of the Self and the universe as the intellect can attain. But for real knowledge something more is necessary, since real knowledge is by our very definition of it supra-intellectual. In order that the understanding may not interfere with our attainment to real knowledge, we have to reach to that something more and cultivate a power exceedingly difficult for the active intellectual thinker and distasteful to his proclivities, the power of intellectual passivity. The object served is double and therefore two different kinds of passivity have to be acquired.
2.03 - The Supreme Divine, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Bhakti. Our first experience of what is beyond our normal status, concealed behind the egoistic being in which we live, is still for the Gita the calm of a vast impersonal immutable self in whose Equality and oneness we lose our petty egoistic personality and cast off in its tranquil purity all our narrow motives of desire and passion. But our second completer vision reveals to us a living
Infinite, a divine immeasurable Being from whom all that we are proceeds and to which all that we are belongs, self and nature, world and spirit. When we are one with him in self and spirit, we do not lose ourselves, but rather recover our true selves in him poised in the supremacy of this Infinite. And this is done at one and the same time by three simultaneous movements, - an integral self-finding through works founded in his and our spiritual nature, an integral self-becoming through knowledge of the Divine Being in whom all exists and who is all, and - most sovereign and decisive movement of all - an integral selfgiving through love and devotion of our whole being to this All and this Supreme, attracted to the Master of our works, to the
2.04 - Agni, the Illumined Will, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Truth and the Law. Equality of soul6 created by the surrender to the universal Wisdom gives us a supreme peace and calm. And since that Wisdom guides all our steps in the straight paths of the Truth we are carried by it beyond all stumblings (duritani).
Moreover, with Agni conscious in our humanity, the creation of the gods in us becomes a veritable manifestation and no longer a veiled growth. The will within grows conscious of the increasing godhead, awakens to the process, perceives the lines of the growth. Human action intelligently directed and devoted to the universal Powers, ceases to be a mechanical, involuntary or imperfect offering; the thinking and observing mind participates and becomes the instrument of the sacrificial will.
2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Inconscience - of a greater perfection in the manifesting of the hidden divinity. But at the same time our present feeling of this evil and imperfection, the revolt of our consciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have first to face and endure them, the ultimate comm and on us is to reject, to overcome, to transform the life and the nature. It is for that end that their insistence is not allowed to slacken; the soul must learn the results of the Ignorance, must begin to feel their reactions as a spur to its endeavour of mastery and conquest and finally to a greater endeavour of transformation and transcendence. It is possible, when we live inwardly in the depths, to arrive at a state of vast inner Equality and peace which is untouched by the reactions of the outer nature, and that is a great but incomplete liberation, - for the outer nature too has a right to deliverance.
But even if our personal deliverance is complete, still there is the suffering of others, the world travail, which the great of soul cannot regard with indifference. There is a unity with all beings which something within us feels and the deliverance of others must be felt as intimate to its own deliverance.
2.04 - The Secret of Secrets, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Teacher has had in view all along and therefore insisted on the sacrifice of works, the recognition of the Supreme as the master of our works and the doctrine of the Avatar and the divine birth, has yet been at first kept subordinate to the primary necessity of a quietistic liberation. Only the truths which lead to spiritual calm, detachment, Equality and oneness, in a word, to the perception and becoming of the immutable self, have been fully developed and given their largest amplitude of power and significance. The other great and necessary truth, its complement, has been left in a certain obscurity of a lesser or relative light; it has been hinted at constantly, but not as yet developed. Now in these successive chapters it is being rapidly released into expression.
Throughout Krishna, the Avatar, the Teacher, the charioteer of the human soul in the world-action, has been preparing the revelation of the secret of himself, Nature's deepest secret. He has kept one note always sounding across his preparatory strain and insistently coming in as a warning and prelude of the larger ultimate harmony of his integral Truth. That note was the idea of a supreme Godhead which dwells within man and Nature,
2.05 - Apotheosis, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Andfindeth ne'er the time to know Equality:
Avoid, 0 my son, likes and dislikes.
2.06 - Works Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Karma has imposed even the very worst of births, the outcaste, the Pariah, the Chandala, find at once the gates of God opening before them. In the spiritual life all the external distinctions of which men make so much because they appeal with an oppressive force to the outward mind, cease before the Equality of the divine Light and the wide omnipotence of an impartial Power.10
The earthly world preoccupied with the dualities and bound to the immediate transient relations of the hour and the moment is for man, so long as he dwells here attached to these things
2.07 - On Congress and Politics, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
There was a reference to a letter of Lord Reading to the Nizam of Hyderabad in which he says: "No Indian State can deal with the British on terms of political Equality" and that "the British are the Paramount Power in India."
Disciple: This time the Indian Government has been outspoken to the Indian princes probably because other princes also have begun to insist on the terms of their treaties being observed. The Gaekwad, for instance, asked back Kathiawad the other day. The Indian Government wants to prevent such a movement among the princes.
2.07 - ON THE TARANTULAS, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
souls whirl, you preachers of Equality. To me you are
tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your
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all whose equals we are not"-thus do the tarantulahearts vow. "And 'will to Equality' shall henceforth be
the name for virtue; and against all that has power we
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You preachers of Equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for Equality: your most
secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves
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are at the same time preachers of Equality and tarantulas. Although they are sitting in their holes, these
poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they
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these preachers of Equality. For, to me justice speaks
thus: "Men are not equal." Nor shall they become
2.07 - The Supreme Word of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
separative and egoistic mechanism of our mental and vital experience. But still here also all is from the supreme Godhead, a birth, a becoming, an evolution,3 a process of development through action of Nature out of the Transcendent. Aham sarvasya prabhavo mattah. sarvam pravartate; "I am the birth of everything and from me all proceeds into development of action and movement." Not only is this true of all that we call good or praise and recognise as divine, all that is luminous, sattwic, ethical, peace-giving, spiritually joy-giving, "understanding and knowledge and freedom from the bewilderment of the Ignorance, forgiveness and truth and self-government and calm of inner control, non-injuring and Equality, contentment and austerity and giving." It is true also of the oppositions that perplex the mortal mind and bring in ignorance and its bewilderment,
"grief and pleasure, coming into being and destruction, fear and fearlessness, glory and ingloriousness" with all the rest of the interplay of light and darkness, all the myriad mixed threads that quiver so painfully and yet with a constant stimulation through the entanglement of our nervous mind and its ignorant subjectivities. All here in their separate diversities are subjective becomings of existences in the one great Becoming and they get their birth and being from Him who transcends them.
2.08 - On Non-Violence, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It is absurd to make food such an important thing in the spiritual life. It is a secondary matter whether one takes vegetarian or non-vegetarian diet, so far as the spiritual life is concerned. The real thing is Equality or Samata. If that is there then it is immaterial whether one takes fish or vegetarian diet. Philosophically, it is meaningless to say this has more life and that has less.
Disciple: But the animals have a more evolved life than the trees.
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Disciple: You spoke of Samata. Why should one establish Equality in the Prana, the Vital, before one does it in the mind?
Sri Aurobindo: Why should he not, if he can? It is not that one has to wait and establish Equality on all planes at once, at one time.
Disciple: Is it necessary to wait till the Yoga is perfect in order to take fish?
2.08 - The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As with action and inaction, so it is with this dual possibility of indifference and calm on the one side and active joy and love on the other. Equality, not indifference is the basis. Equal endurance, impartial indifference, calm submission to the causes of joy and grief without any reaction of either grief or joy are the preparation and negative basis of Equality; but Equality is not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight. The sense-mind must find the equal rasa of the All-Beautiful, the heart the equal love and Ananda for all, the psychic Prana the enjoyment of this rasa, love and Ananda. This, however, is the positive perfection that comes by liberation; our first object on the path of knowledge is rather the liberation that comes by detachment from the desire-mind and by the renunciation of its passions.
The desire-mind must also be rejected from the instrument of thought and this is best done by the detachment of the Purusha from thought and opinion itself. Of this we have already had occasion to speak when we considered in what consists the integral purification of the being. For all this movement of knowledge which we are describing is a method of purification and liberation whereby entire and final self-knowledge becomes possible, a progressive self-knowledge being itself the instrument of the purification and liberation. The method with the thought-mind will be the same as with all the rest of the being. The Purusha, having used the thought-mind for release from identification with the life and body and with the mind of desire and sensations and emotions, will turn round upon the thought-mind Itself and will say "This too I am not; I am not the thought or the thinker; all these ideas, opinions, speculations, strivings of the intellect, its predilections, preferences, dogmas, doubts, self-corrections are not myself; all this is only a working of prakriti which takes place in the thought-mind." Thus a division is created between the mind that thinks and wills and the mind that observes and the Purusha becomes the witness only; he sees, he understands the process and laws of his thought, but detaches himself from it. Then as the master of the sanction he withdraws his past sanction from the tangle of the mental undercurrent and the reasoning intellect and causes both to cease from their importunities. He becomes liberated from subjection to the thinking mind and capable of the utter silence.
2.09 - Human representations of the Divine Ideal of Love, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The next type of love is Sakhya (sOy), friendship Thou art our beloved friend. Just as a man opens his heart to his friend and knows that the friend will never chide him for his faults, but will always try to help him, just as there is the idea of Equality between him and his friend, so equal love flows in and out between the worshipper and his friendly God. Thus God becomes our friend, the friend who is near, the friend to whom we may freely tell all the tales of our lives! The innermost secrets of .our hearts we may place before Him with the great assurance of safety and support; He is the friend whom the devotee accepts as an equal; God is viewed here as our playmate. We may well say that we are all playing in this universe. Just as children play their games, just as the most glorious kings and emperors play their own games, so is the Beloved Lord Himself in sport with this universe. He is perfect; He does not want anything.
Why should He create? Activity is always with us for the fulfilment of a certain want, and want always presupposes imperfection. God is perfect; He has no wants. Why should He go on with this work of an ever-active creation? What purpose has He in view? The stories about God creating this world, for some end or other that we imagine, are good as stories, but not otherwise. It is all really in sport; the universe is His play going on. The whole universe must, after all, be a big piece of pleasing fun to Him. If you are poor, enjoy that as fun; if you are rich, enjoy the fun of being rich; if dangers come, it is also good fun; if happiness comes, there is more good fun. The world is just a playground; and we are here having good fun, having a game; and God is with us playing all the while; and we are with Him playing.
2.0 - THE ANTICHRIST, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the Equality of souls; and if
the belief in the "privilege of the greatest number" creates and will
2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is a miraculous opening to an always richer and wider expression, there is a new illuminating of the creation and a dynamic heightening of its significances. There is in this world we live in no Equality of all on a flat level, but a hierarchy of ever-increasing precipitous superiorities pushing their mountainshoulders upwards towards the Supreme.
Plant-life is a most significant progress upon the mineral, but the difference is as nothing compared with the gulf that divides the dumb vitality of the plant from the conscious experience of the animal. The hiatus between the animal and the human is so great in consciousness, however physically small, that the scientists' alleged cousinship of monkey and man looks psychologically almost incredible. And yet the difference between vital animal and mental man is as nothing to that which will be between man's mind and the superman's vaster consciousness and richer powers. That past step will be to this new one as the snail's slow march in the grass to a Titan's sudden thousand league stride from continent to continent.
2.12 - The Way and the Bhakta, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To this question Krishna replies with an emphatic decisiveness. "Those who found their mind in Me and by constant union, possessed of a supreme faith, seek after Me, I hold to be the most perfectly in union of Yoga." The supreme faith is that which sees God in all and to its eye the manifestation and the non-manifestation are one Godhead. The perfect union is that which meets the Divine at every moment, in every action and with all the integrality of the nature. But those also who seek by a hard ascent after the indefinable unmanifest Immutable alone, arrive, says the Godhead, to Me. For they are not mistaken in their aim, but they follow a more difficult and a less complete and perfect path. At the easiest, to reach the unmanifest Absolute they have to climb through the manifest Immutable here. This manifest Immutable is my own all-pervading impersonality and silence; vast, unthinkable, immobile, constant, omnipresent, it supports the action of personality but does not share in it. It offers no hold to the mind; it can only be gained by a motionless spiritual impersonality and silence and those who follow after it alone have to restrain altogether and even draw in completely the action of the mind and senses. But still by the Equality of their understanding and by their seeing of one self in all things and by their tranquil benignancy of silent will for the good of all existences they too meet me in all objects and creatures. No less than those who unite themselves with the Divine in all ways of their existence, sarva-bhavena, and enter largely and fully into the unthinkable living fountainhead of universal things, divyam purus.am acintya-rupam, these seekers too who climb through this more difficult exclusive oneness towards a relationless unmanifest Absolute find in the end the same Eternal. But this is a less direct and more arduous way; it is not the full and natural movement of the spiritualised human nature.
And it must not be thought that because it is more arduous, therefore it is a higher and more effective process. The easier way of the Gita leads more rapidly, naturally and normally to
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What then will be the divine nature, what will be the greater state of consciousness and being of the bhakta who has followed this way and turned to the adoration of the Eternal? The Gita in a number of verses rings the changes on its first insistent demand, on Equality, on desirelessness, on freedom of spirit. This is to be the base always, - and that was why so much stress was laid on it in the beginning. And in that Equality bhakti, the love and
404
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adoration of the Purushottama must rear the spirit towards some greatest highest perfection of which this calm Equality will be the wide foundation. Several formulas of this fundamental equal consciousness are given here. First, an absence of egoism, of Iness and my-ness, nirmamo nirahankarah.. The bhakta of the
Purushottama is one who has a universal heart and mind which has broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universal love dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from it like an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity for all beings and hate for no living thing: for he is patient, longsuffering, enduring, a well of forgiveness. A desireless content is his, a tranquil Equality to pleasure and pain, suffering and happiness, the steadfast control of self and the firm unshakable will and resolution of the Yogin and a love and devotion which gives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord, to the Master of his consciousness and knowledge. Or, simply, he will be one who is freed from the troubled agitated lower nature and from its waves of joy and fear and anxiety and resentment and desire, a spirit of calm by whom the world is not afflicted or troubled, nor is he afflicted or troubled by the world, a soul of peace with whom all are at peace.
Or he will be one who has given up all desire and action to the Master of his being, one pure and still, indifferent to whatever comes, not pained or afflicted by any result or happening, one who has flung away from him all egoistic, personal and mental initiative whether of the inner or the outer act, one who lets the divine will and divine knowledge flow through him undeflected by his own resolves, preferences and desires, and yet for that very reason is swift and skilful in all action of his nature, because this flawless unity with the supreme will, this pure instrumentation is the condition of the greatest skill in works. Again, he will be one who neither desires the pleasant and rejoices at its touch nor abhors the unpleasant and sorrows at its burden. He has abolished the distinction between fortunate and unfortunate happenings, because his devotion receives all things equally as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and
Master. The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide Equality,
The Way and the Bhakta
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He will have no attachment to person or thing, place or home; he will be content and well-satisfied with whatever surroundings, whatever relation men adopt to him, whatever station or fortune. He will keep a mind firm in all things, because it is constantly seated in the highest self and fixed for ever on the one divine object of his love and adoration. Equality, desirelessness and freedom from the lower egoistic nature and its claims are always the one perfect foundation demanded by the Gita for the great liberation. There is to the end an emphatic repetition of its first fundamental teaching and original desideratum, the calm soul of knowledge that sees the one self in all things, the tranquil egoless Equality that results from this knowledge, the desireless action offered in that Equality to the Master of works, the surrender of the whole mental nature of man into the hands of the mightier indwelling spirit. And the crown of this Equality is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action, extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and allcontaining love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master of the universe, suhr.dam sarva-bhutanam sarva-loka-mahesvaram.
This is the foundation, the condition, the means by which the supreme spiritual perfection is to be won, and those who have it in any way are all dear to me, says the Godhead, bhaktiman me priyah.. But exceedingly dear, atva me priyah., are those souls nearest to the Godhead whose love of me is completed by the still wider and greatest perfection of which I have just shown to you the way and the process. These are the bhaktas who make the Purushottama their one supreme aim and follow out with a perfect faith and exactitude the immortalising Dharma described in this teaching. Dharma in the language of the Gita means the innate law of the being and its works and an action proceeding from and determined by the inner nature, svabhava-niyatam karma. In the lower ignorant consciousness of mind, life and body there are many dharmas, many rules, many standards and laws because there are many varying determinations and types
2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The sadhak must make the calm and Equality absolutely secure so that whatever may happen the inner detachment and Equality cannot be broken.
30 AUGUST 1925
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Sri Aurobindo: One of the logical conclusions of the Theory of Illusion was the idea that you must reject everything violently and that you can't get the Truth unless you are disgusted with everything in the world. That is what is understood to be Vairagya. But I don't see any reason why one should be disgusted with everything before one can take to the spiritual life. What we do is that we see the imperfection in the world and we do not accept the ordinary life which is subject to ignorance and falsehood. But we do not despise it we do not look upon it with disgust and contempt. We look upon it with calm and Equality Samata and try to understand what it is and what place it occupies in the Lila and its purpose.
Disciple: Generally, it is supposed that aman takes to the spiritual life as a result of dissatisfaction. Is the dissatisfaction a psychic dissatisfaction in its nature?
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Sri Aurobindo: First of all, you have to remain calm; that is, establish perfect Equality of temperament, and not be moved by them. Whenever a movement of ignorance or imperfection comes you have to watch and see from where it comes: whether from without or from inside your nature. Then you have to refer it to the Higher Knowledge. You will find the Light. But in the beginning it will be mixed up with your mental movements. In the light of that knowledge you have to reject what is false and give consent only to the highest movement. As you progress more and more you will find a higher light and a higher power which shows the way of meeting these forces and of mastering them.
Ultimately, when you have got the highest movement, you become too strong for the difficulties. Of course, the higher protection is given to you. But the first condition for getting the protection is that one should constantly open oneself to the Higher Power. Secondly, one must have a firm resolution and sincerity. Thirdly, a complete faith in the protection of the Higher Power.
2.14 - On Movements, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
But this Bahaism is just what suits the common mind. There are now two sects run by Baha Ullahs two sons. Abdul Baha is the younger one. He has some vital force from his father and he used to see some kind of Light in meditation and so he began to think of himself as the incarnation of the Light on earth, and whoever was received in the fold was supposed to be influenced by it. Bahaism has included certain mental concepts also, e.g., toleration, universal brotherhood, Equality of man and woman, etc. The other day he included Buddhism also, though he seems to know nothing about it. He has about eleven million followers, of which two million are in Europe.
If the Mahomedans get a religion of that sort it is much better than what they are having now.
2.15 - On the Gods and Asuras, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It is the immutable, impersonal Brahmic Consciousness it is the basis of calm and Equality and universal passivity. It is an aspect of the Transcendent, the Puruottama.
Disciple: What is the gain in attaining this consciousness in Sadhana?
Sri Aurobindo: An impersonal attitude, calm and Equality it can give you complete freedom from nature, from all bondage.
Disciple: Why does the Supreme take up the impersonal status or attitude?
2.15 - The Cosmic Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By entering into the cosmic consciousness we participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particular action of divine knowledge, strength and weakness and incapacity into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force, joy and grief, pleasure and pain into a mastering and a suffering of divine delight, struggle into a balancing of forces and values in the divine harmony. We do not suffer by the limitations of our mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these but in the infinity of the Spirit, and these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the manifestation, as degrees of the supreme being, conscious-force and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself in the cosmos. We cease to judge men and things by their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see, the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature, and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force, and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite Equality. It is this consummation of which the Upanishad speaks when it says "He in whom the self has become all existences, how shall he have delusion, whence shall he have grief who knows entirely397 and sees in all things oneness."
But this is only when there is perfection in the cosmic consciousness, and that is difficult for the mental being. The mentality when it arrives at the idea or the realisation of the Spirit, the Divine, tends to break existence into two opposite halves, the lower and the higher existence. It sees on one side the Infinite, the Formless, the One, the Peace and Bliss, the Calm and Silence, the Absolute, the Vast and Pure; on the other it sees the finite, the world of forms, the jarring multiplicity, the strife and suffering and imperfect, unreal good, the tormented activity and futile success, the relative, the limited and vain and vile. To those who make this division, this opposition, complete liberation is only attainable in the peace of the One, the featurelessness of the Infinite, the non-becoming of the Absolute which is to them the only real being; to be free all values must be destroyed, all limitations not only transcended but abolished. They have the liberation of the divine rest, but not the liberty of the divine action; they enjoy the peace of the Transcendent, but not the cosmic bliss of the Transcendent. Their liberty depends upon abstention from the cosmic movement, it cannot dominate and possess cosmic existence itself. But it is also possible for them to realise and participate in the immanent as well as the transcendent peace. Still the division is not cured. The liberty they enjoy is that of the silent unacting Witness, not the liberty of the divine Masterconsciousness which possesses all things, delights in all, casts itself into all forms of existence without fear of fall or loss or bondage or stain. All the rights of the spirit are not yet possessed; there is still a denial, a limitation, a holding back from the entire oneness of all existence. The workings of Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of the allmastering Spirit.
2.16 - Oneness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But at the same time the integral knowledge gives us the awareness of that infinite existence as the conscious-force which creates and governs the worlds and manifests itself in their works; it reveals the Self-existent in his universal conscious-will as the Lord, the Ishwara. It enables us to unite our will with His, to realise His will in the energies of all existences and to perceive the fulfilment of these energies of others as part of our own universal self-fulfilment. Thus it removes the reality of strife and division and opposition and leaves only their appearances. By that knowledge therefore we arrive at the possibility of a divine action, a working which is personal to our nature, but impersonal to our being, since it proceeds from That which is beyond our ego and acts only by its universal sanction. We proceed in our works with Equality, without bondage to works and their results, in unison with the Highest, in unison with the universal, free from separate responsibility for our acts and therefore unaffected by their reactions. This which we have seen to be the fulfilment of the path of Works becomes thus an annexe and result of the path of Knowledge.
The integral knowledge again reveals to us the Self-existent as the All-blissful who, as Sachchidananda manifesting the world, manifesting all beings, accepts their adoration, even as He accepts their works of aspiration and their seekings of knowledge, leans down to them and drawing them to Himself takes all into the joy of His divine being. Knowing Him as our divine Self, we become one with Him, as the lover and beloved become one, in the ecstasy of that embrace. Knowing Him too in all beings, perceiving the glory and beauty and joy of the Beloved everywhere, we transform our souls into a passion of universal delight and a wideness and joy of universal love. All this which, as we shall find, is the summit of the path of Devotion, becomes also an annexe and result of the path of Knowledge.
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: They arc common and found everywhere. They are given in the Gita: Equality, love for others, even-mindedness, etc.
Sri Aurobindo: These are, rather, conditions for realisation. All experiences are true and have their place. But because one is true one can't say that the other is false. Truth is infinite. There are so many ways to come to the Truth. The wider you become, the higher you go, the more you find that there is still more and more. For instance, the Maharshi has his experience of 'I'. But when I had the Nirvana experience I could not think of an 'I' however much I tried I could not think of any 'I'. It simply got displaced. One can't speak of it as 'I'. It is either 'He' or 'That' I call it Laya. Realisation of the Self is all right; Laya is a part of a realisation which is much more comprehensive. When I do not accept Mayavada it is not that I have not realised the Truth behind it or that I don't know "the One in All" and "All in the One", but because I have other realisations which are equally strong and which cannot be shut out. The Maharshi is right and everybody else is also right.
2.2.01 - Work and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sdhanunless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the substance of the Gitas teaching. The cessation of desire of the fruit, of the attachment to the work itself, the growth of Equality to all beings, to all happenings, to good repute or ill repute, praise or blame, to good fortune or ill fortune, the dropping of the ego which are necessary for the loss of all attachments can come completely only when all work becomes a spontaneous sacrifice to the Divine, the heart is offered up to Him and one has the settled experience of the Divine in all things and all beings. This consciousness or experience must come in all parts and movements of the being, sarvabhvena, not only in the mind and idea; then the falling away of all attachments becomes easy. I speak of the Gitas way of yoga, for in the ascetic life one obtains the same object differently, by cutting away from the objects of attachment and the consequent atrophy of the attachment itself through rejection and disuse.
***
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Work here and work done in the world are of course not the same thing. The work there is not in any way a divine work in specialit is ordinary work in the world. But still one must take it as a training and do it in the spirit of karmayogawhat matters there is not the nature of the work in itself but the spirit in which it is done. It must be in the spirit of the Gita, without desire, with detachment, without repulsion, but doing it as perfectly as possible, not for the sake of the family or promotion or to please the superiors, but simply because it is the thing that has been given in the hand to do. It is a field of inner training, nothing more. One has to learn in it three things, Equality, desirelessness, dedication. It is not the work as a thing for its own sake, but ones doing of it and ones way of doing it that one has to dedicate to the Divine. Done in that spirit it does not matter what the work is. If one trains oneself spiritually like that, then one will be ready to do in the true way whatever special work directly for the Divine (such as the Asram work) one may any day be given to do.
***
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For the sadhak outward struggles, troubles, calamities are only a means of surmounting ego and rajasic desire and attaining to complete surrender. So long as one insists on success, one is doing the work partly at least for the ego; difficulties and outward failures come to warn one that it is so and to bring complete Equality. This does not mean that the power of victory is not to be acquired; but it is not success in the immediate work that is all-important; it is the power to receive and transmit a greater and greater correct vision and inner Force that has to be developed and this must be done quite coolly and patiently without being elated or disturbed by immediate victory or failure.
***
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This is the right inner attitude, of Equalityto remain unmoved whatever may outwardly happen. But what is needed for success in the outward field (if you do not use human means, diplomacy or tactics) is the power to transmit calmly a Force that can change mens attitude and the circumstances and make any outward action taken at once the right thing to do and effective.
***
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Self-dedication does not depend on the particular work you do, but on the spirit in which all work, of whatever kind it may be, is done. Any work, done well and carefully as a sacrifice to the Divine, without desire or egoism, with Equality of mind and calm tranquillity in good or bad fortune, for the sake of the Divine and not for the sake of any personal gain, reward or result, with the consciousness that it is the Divine Power to which all work belongs, is a means of self-dedication through Karma.
***
2.2.03 - The Divine Force in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1) Quietude, Equalitynot to be disturbed by anything that happens, to keep the mind still and firm, seeing the play of forces, but itself tranquil.
2) Absolute faithfaith that what is for the best will happen, but also that if one can make oneself a true instrument, the fruit will be that which ones will guided by the Divine Light sees as the thing to be donekartavya karma.
2.2.04 - Practical Concerns in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The difficulty rises from a certain excess of sensitiveness in the vital nature which feels strongly any want of harmony or opposition in the work or any untoward happening and, when that comes, one is apt to feel it as if a personal opposition and on the other side also a similar feeling arises and so the difficulty becomes prolonged and leads to conflict. As a matter of fact the difficulty often arises from circumstances, e.g. the B. S. [Building Service] with its much reduced staff and a rush of work using up all its men may find it more difficult to accommodate you than before. Or it may arise from people acting according to their view of a matter which does not accord with yours. Or again it may come from the person following his own ideas, view of what is convenient and effective and thus coming up against yours. There need be no personal feeling in all that and it is best not to look for any and not to see it from that point of view. What is needed is always to take a calm view of the thing and a clear visionnot only from ones own standpoint which may be eventually right and yet need modification in detail, but with a vision that sees also the standpoint of others. This broad seeing, quiet and impersonal, is needed in the full Yogic consciousness. Having it one can insist on what has to be insisted on with firmness but at the same time with a consideration and understanding of the other that removes the chance of any clash of personal feeling. Naturally if the other is unreasonable, he may still resent, but then it will be his own fault entirely and it will fall back on him only. It is here that we see the necessity of some change. Loyalty, fidelity, capacity, strength of will and other qualities in the work you have in plentya full calm and Equality not only in the inner being where it can exist already, but in the outer nervous parts is a thing you have to get completely.
***
2.21 - Towards the Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The impersonal self looks on all action as done not by it but by Prakriti; it regards with a pure Equality all the working of her qualities, modes and forces: the soul impersonalised in the self must similarly regard all our actions as done not by itself but by the qualities of Prakriti; it must be equal in all things, sarvatra.
And at the same time in order that we may not stop here, in order that we may eventually go forward and find a spiritual rule and direction in our works and not only a law of inner immobility and silence, we are asked to impose on the intelligence and will the attitude of sacrifice, all our action inwardly changed and turned into an offering to the Lord of Nature, to the Being of whom she is the self-power, sva prakr.tih., the supreme Spirit. Even we have eventually to renounce all into his hands, to abandon all personal initiation of action, sarvarambhah., to keep our natural selves only as an instrument of his works and his purpose. These things have been already explained fully and the Gita does not here insist, but uses simply without farther qualification the common terms, sannyasa and nais.karmya.
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This first pursuit of impersonality as enjoined by the Gita brings with it evidently a certain completest inner quietism and is identical in its inmost parts and principles of practice with the method of Sannyasa. And yet there is a point at which its tendency of withdrawal from the claims of dynamic Nature and the external world is checked and a limit imposed to prevent the inner quietism from deepening into refusal of action and a physical withdrawal. The renunciation of their objects by the senses, vis.ayams tyaktva, is to be of the nature of Tyaga; it must be a giving up of all sensuous attachment, rasa, not a refusal of the intrinsic necessary activity of the senses. One must move among surrounding things and act on the objects of the sense-field with a pure, true and intense, a simple and absolute operation of the senses for their utility to the spirit in divine action, kevalair indriyais caran, and not at all for the fulfilment of desire. There is to be vairagya, not in the common significance of disgust of life or distaste for the world action, but renunciation of raga, as also of its opposite, dves.a. There must be a withdrawal from all mental and vital liking as from all mental and vital disliking whatsoever. And this is asked not for extinction, but in order that there may be a perfect enabling Equality in which the spirit can give an unhampered and unlimited assent to the integral and comprehensive divine vision of things and to the integral divine action in Nature. A continual resort to meditation, dhyana-yogaparo nityam, is the firm means by which the soul of man can realise its self of Power and its self of silence. And yet there must be no abandonment of the active life for a life of pure meditation; action must always be done as a sacrifice to the supreme Spirit.
This movement of recoil in the path of Sannyasa prepares an absorbed disappearance of the individual in the Eternal, and renunciation of action and life in the world is an indispensable step in the process. But in the Gita's path of Tyaga it is a preparation rather for the turning of our whole life and existence and of all action into an integral oneness with the serene and immeasurable being, consciousness and will of the Divine, and it preludes and makes possible a vast and total passing upward of the soul out of the lower ego to the inexpressible perfection of the supreme spiritual nature, para prakr.ti.
2.2.2 - Sorrow and Suffering, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is dangerous to have a heart insisting on its own vital emotions. Not to be the slave of vital joy or sorrow is a condition one has to pass through in order to arrive at true Anandam. If people are right [that a heart indifferent to joy and sorrow is not desirable] then there can never be any Equality and we have even to say that Equality is a bad thing. If so, then the whole of the Gita is a mass of nonsense.
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2.24 - The Message of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Calm, untouched by her workings, it regards them with a perfect Equality and knows itself to be other than these things. This spiritual state brings with it a still peace and freedom but not the dynamic divinity, not the integral perfection; it is a great step,
The Message of the Gita
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"The result will be an absolute Equality and the power of unshakable calm that the universal spirit maintains in front of its creations, facing ever the manifold action of Nature. Look with equal eyes; receive with an equal heart and mind all that comes to you, success and failure, honour and dishonour, the esteem and love of men and their scorn and persecution and hatred, every happening that would be to others a cause of joy and every happening that would be to others a cause of sorrow. Look with equal eyes on all persons, on the good and the wicked, on the wise and the foolish, on the Brahmin and the outcaste, on man at his highest and every pettiest creature.
Meet equally all men whatever their relations to you, friend and ally, neutral and indifferent, opponent and enemy, lover and hater. These things touch the ego and you are called to be free from ego. These are personal relations and you have to observe all with the deep regard of the impersonal spirit. These are temporal and personal differences which you have to see but not be influenced by them; for you must fix not on these differences but on that which is the same in all, on the one self which all are, on the Divine in every creature and on the one working of Nature which is the equal will of God in men and things and energies and happenings and in all endeavour and
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"The first step on this free, this equal, this divine way of action is to put from you attachment to fruit and recompense and to labour only for the sake of the work itself that has to be done. For you must deeply feel that the fruits belong not to you but to the Master of the world. Consecrate your labour and leave its returns to the Spirit who manifests and fulfils himself in the universal movement. The outcome of your action is determined by his will alone and whatever it be, good or evil fortune, success or failure, it is turned by him to the accomplishment of his world purpose. An entirely desireless and disinterested working of the personal will and the whole instrumental nature is the first rule of Karmayoga. Demand no fruit, accept whatever result is given to you; accept it with Equality and a calm gladness: successful or foiled, prosperous or afflicted, continue unafraid, untroubled and unwavering on the steep path of the divine action.
"This is no more than the first step on the path. For you must be not only unattached to results, but unattached also to
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"Next know that you are an eternal portion of the Eternal and the powers of your nature are nothing without him, nothing if not his partial self-expression. It is the Divine Infinite that is being progressively fulfilled in your nature. It is the supreme power-to-be, it is the Shakti of the Lord that shapes and takes shape in your swabhava. Give up then all sense that you are the doer; see the Eternal alone as the doer of the action. Let your natural being be an occasion, an instrument, a channel of power, a means of manifestation. Offer up your will to him and make it one with his eternal will: surrender all your actions in the silence of your self and spirit to the transcendent Master of your nature. This cannot be really done or done perfectly so long as there is any ego sense in you or any mental claim or vital clamour. Action done in the least degree for the sake of the ego or tinged with the desire and will of the ego is not a perfect sacrifice. Nor can this great thing be well and truly done so long as there is in Equality anywhere or any stamp of ignorant shrinking and preference. But when there is a perfect Equality to all works, results, things and persons, a surrender to the Highest and not to desire or ego, then the divine Will determines without stumbling or deflection and the divine Power executes freely without any nether interference or perverting reaction all works in the purity and safety of your transmuted nature. To allow
588
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Done in a perfect Equality and an unmoved calm and peace, but without any divine passion, it is at first the fine yoke of a spiritual obligation, kartavyam karma, then the uplifting of a divine sacrifice; at its highest it can be the expression of a calm and glad acquiescence in active oneness. The oneness in love will do much more: it will replace the first impassive calm by a strong
590
2.25 - Mercies and Judgements of Knowledge, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
is very great, He granted us this Equality. This is the
idea behind the tenth position of the feminine polarity,
2.27 - Hathayoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The body, thus liberated from itself, purified from many of its disorders and irregularities, becomes, partly by Asana, completely by combined Asana and Pranayama, a perfected instrument. It is freed from its ready liability to fatigue; it acquires an immense power of health; its tendencies of decay, age and death are arrested. The Hathayogin even at an age advanced beyond the ordinary span, maintains the unimpaired vigour, health and youth of the life in the body; even the appearance of physical youth is sustained for a longer time. He has a much greater power of longevity, and from his point of view, the body being the instrument, it is a matter of no small importance to preserve it long and to keep it for all that time free from impairing deficiencies. It is to be observed, also, that there is an enormous variety of Asanas in Hathayoga, running in their fullness beyond the number of eighty, some of them of the most complicated and difficult character. This variety serves partly to increase the results already noted, as well as to give a greater freedom and flexibility to the use of the body, but it serves also to alter the relation of the physical energy in the body to the earth energy with which it is related. The lightening of the heavy hold of the latter, of which the overcoming of fatigue is the first sign and the phenomenon of utthapana or partial levitation the last, is one result. The gross body begins to acquire something of the nature of the subtle body and to possess something of its relations with the life-energy; that becomes a greater force more powerfully felt and yet capable of a lighter and freer and more resolvable physical action, powers which culminate in the Hathayogic Siddhis or extraordinary powers of garima, mahima, anima and laghima. Moreover, the life ceases to be entirely dependent on the action of the physical organs and functionings, such as the heart-beats and the breathing. These can in the end be suspended without cessation of or lesion to the life. All this, however, the result in its perfection of Asana and Pranayama, is only a basic physical power and freedom. The higher use of Hathayoga depends more intimately on Pranayama. Asana deals more directly with the more material part of the physical totality, though here too it needs the aid of the other; Pranayarna, starting from the physical immobility and self-holding which is secured by Asana, deals more directly with the subtler vital parts, the nervous system. This is done by various regulations of the breathing, starting from Equality of respiration and inspiration and extending to the most diverse rhythmic regulations of both with an interval of inholding of the breath. In the end the keeping in of the breath, which has first to be done with some effort, and even its cessation become as easy and seem as natural as the constant taking in and throwing out which is its normal action. But the first objects of the Pranayama are to purify the nervous system, to circulate the life-energy through all the nerves without obstruction, disorder or irregularity, and to acquire a complete control of its functionings, so that the mind and will of the soul inhabiting the body may be no longer subject to the body or life or their combined limitations. The power of these exercises of breathing to bring about a purified and unobstructed state of the nervous system is a known and well established fact of our physiology. It helps also to clear the physical system, but is not entirely effective at first on all its canals and openings; therefore the Hathayogin uses supplementary physical methods for clearing them out regularly of all their accumulations. The combination of these with Asana, -particular Asanas have even an effect in destroying particular diseases, -- and with Pranayama maintains perfectly the health of the body. But the principal gain is that by this purification the vital energy can be directed anywhere, to any part of the body and in any way or with any rhythm of its movement.
The mere function of breathing into and out of the lungs is only the most sensible, outward and seizable movement of the Prana, the Breath of Life in our physical system. The Prana has according to Yogic science a fivefold movement pervading all the nervous system and the whole material body and determining all its functionings. The Hathayogin seizes on the outward movement of respiration as a sort of key which opens to him the control of all these five powers of the Prana. He becomes sensibly aware of their inner operations, mentally conscious of his whole physical life and action. He is able to direct the Prana through all the Nadis or nerve-channels of his system. He becomes aware of its action in the six Chakras or ganglionic centres of the nervous system, and is able to open it up in each beyond its present limited, habitual and mechanical workings. He gets, in short, a perfect control of the life in the body in its most subtle nervous as well as in its grossest physical aspects, even over that in it which is at present involuntary and out of the reach of our observing consciousness and will. Thus a complete mastery of the body and the life and a free and effective use of them established upon a purification of their workings is founded as a basis for the higher aims of Hathayoga.
2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In all spiritual living the inner life is the thing of first importance; the spiritual man lives always within, and in a world of the Ignorance that refuses to change he has to be in a certain sense separate from it and to guard his inner life against the intrusion and influence of the darker forces of the Ignorance: he is out of the world even when he is within it; if he acts upon it, it is from the fortress of his inner spiritual being where in the inmost sanctuary he is one with the Supreme Existence or the soul and God are alone together. The gnostic life will be an inner life in which the antinomy of the inner and the outer, the self and the world will have been cured and exceeded. The gnostic being will have indeed an inmost existence in which he is alone with God, one with the Eternal, self-plunged into the depths of the Infinite, in communion with its heights and its luminous abysses of secrecy; nothing will be able to disturb or to invade these depths or bring him down from the summits, neither the world's contents nor his action nor all that is around him. This is the transcendence aspect of the spiritual life and it is necessary for the freedom of the spirit; for otherwise the identity in Nature with the world would be a binding limitation and not a free identity. But at the same time God-love and the delight of God will be the heart's expression of that inner communion and oneness, and that delight and love will expand itself to embrace all existence. The peace of God within will be extended in the gnostic experience of the universe into a universal calm of Equality not merely passive but dynamic, a calm of freedom in oneness dominating all that meets it, tranquillising all that enters into it, imposing its law of peace on the supramental being's relations with the world in which he is living. Into all his acts the inner oneness, the inner communion will attend him and enter into his relations with others, who will not be to him others but selves of himself in the one existence, his own universal existence. It is this poise and freedom in the spirit that will enable him to take all life into himself while still remaining the spiritual self and to embrace even the world of the Ignorance without himself entering into the Ignorance.
For his experience of cosmic existence will be, by its form of nature and by an individualised centration, that of one living in the universe but, at the same time, by self-diffusion and extension in oneness, that of one who carries the universe and all its beings within him. This extended state of being will not only be an extension in oneness of self or an extension in conceptive idea and vision, but an extension of oneness in heart, in sense, in a concrete physical consciousness. He will have the cosmic consciousness, sense, feeling, by which all objective life will become part of his subjective existence and by which he will realise, perceive, feel, see, hear the Divine in all forms; all The Gnostic Being forms and movements will be realised, sensed, seen, heard, felt as if taking place within his own vast self of being. The world will be connected not only with his outer but with his inner life. He will not meet the world only in its external form by an external contact; he will be inwardly in contact with the inner self of things and beings: he will meet consciously their inner as well as their outer reactions; he will be aware of that within them of which they themselves will not be aware, act upon all with an inner comprehension, encounter all with a perfect sympathy and sense of oneness but also an independence which is not overmastered by any contact. His action on the world will be largely an inner action by the power of the spirit, by the spiritual-supramental idea-force formulating itself in the world, by the secret unspoken word, by the power of the heart, by the dynamic life-force, by the enveloping and penetrating power of the self one with all things; the outer expressed and visible action will be only a fringe, a last projection of this vaster single total of activity.
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For the growth in consciousness is not sufficiently supported by a growth in force; the body becomes more subtle, more finely capable, but less solidly efficient in its external energy: man has to call in his will, his mental power to dynamise, correct and control his nervous being, force it to the strenuous tasks he demands from his instruments, steel it against suffering and disaster. In the spiritual ascent this power of the consciousness and its will over the instruments, the control of spirit and inner mind over the outer mentality and the nervous being and the body, increases immensely; a tranquil and wide Equality of the spirit to all shocks and contacts comes in and becomes the habitual poise, and this can pass from the mind to the vital parts and establish there too an immense and enduring largeness of strength and peace; even in the body this state may form itself and meet inwardly the shocks of grief and pain and all kinds of suffering.
Even, a power of willed physical insensibility can intervene or a power of mental separation from all shock and injury can be acquired which shows that the ordinary reactions and the debile submission of the bodily self to the normal habits of response of material Nature are not obligatory or unalterable. Still more significant is the power that comes on the level of spiritual mind The Gnostic Being or overmind to change the vibrations of pain into vibrations of Ananda: even if this were to go only up to a certain point, it indicates the possibility of an entire reversal of the ordinary rule of the reacting consciousness; it can be associated too with a power of self-protection that turns away the shocks that are more difficult to transmute or to endure. The gnostic evolution at a certain stage must bring about a completeness of this reversal and of this power of self-protection which will fulfil the claim of the body for immunity and serenity of its being and for deliverance from suffering and build in it a power for the total delight of existence. A spiritual Ananda can flow into the body and inundate cell and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda could of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical Nature.
2.28 - The Divine Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
39: According to his place in it he would know how to lead or to rule, but also how to subordinate himself; both would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit's freedom, because it is eternal, self-existent and inalienable, can be felt as much in service and willing subordination and adjustment with other selves as in power and rule. An inner spiritual freedom can accept its place in the truth of an inner spiritual hierarchy as well as in the truth, not incompatible with it, of a fundamental spiritual Equality. It is this self-arrangement of Truth, a natural order of the spirit, that would exist in a common life of different degrees and stages of the evolving gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness, mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity, harmony the inevitable power of the working of its force. Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or collective gnostic life. What forms it might take would depend upon the will of evolutionary manifestation of the Supernature, but this would be its general character and principle.
40: This is the whole sense and the inherent law and necessity of the passage from the purely mental and material being and life to the spiritual and supramental being and life, that the liberation, perfection, self-fulfilment for which the being in the Ignorance is seeking can only be reached by passing out of his present nature of Ignorance into a nature of spiritual self-knowledge and worldknowledge. This greater nature we speak of as Supernature because it is beyond his actual level of consciousness and capacity; but in fact it is his own true nature, the height and completeness of it, to which he must arrive if he is to find his real self and whole possibility of being. Whatever happens in Nature must be the result of Nature, the effectuation of what is implied or inherent in it, its inevitable fruit and consequence. If our nature is a fundamental Inconscience and Ignorance arriving with difficulty at an imperfect knowledge, an imperfect formulation of consciousness and being, the results in our being, life and action and creation must be, as they now are, a constant imperfection and insecure half result, an imperfect mentality, an imperfect life, an imperfect physical existence. We seek to construct systems of knowledge and systems of life by which we can arrive at some perfection of our existence, some order of right relations, right use of mind, right use and happiness and beauty of life, right use of the body. But what we achieve is a constructed half-rightness mixed with much that is wrong and unlovely and unhappy; our successive constructions, because of the vice in them and because mind and life cannot rest permanently anywhere in their seeking, are exposed to destruction, decadence, disruption of their order, and we pass from them to others which are not more finally successful or enduring, even if on one side or another they may be richer and fuller or more rationally plausible. It cannot be otherwise, because we can construct nothing which goes beyond our nature; imperfect, we cannot construct perfection, however wonderful may seem to us the machinery our mental ingenuity invents, however externally effective. Ignorant, we cannot construct a system of entirely true and fruitful self-knowledge or world-knowledge: our science itself is a construction, a mass, of formulas and devices; masterful in knowledge of processes and in the creation of apt machinery, but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being, it cannot perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life.
2.3.02 - Opening, Sincerity and the Mother's Grace, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That shows itself at once - when you feel the divine peace, Equality, wideness, light, Ananda, Knowledge, strength, when you are aware of the Mother's nearness or presence or the working of her Force, etc., etc. If any of these things are felt, it is the opening - the more are felt, the more complete the opening.
What is the way to open all the knots of the being?
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Do calm and Equality come down from above by the Mother's
Grace?
2.3.03 - The Mother's Presence, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yes, that is the true basis. In the perfect Equality wholly united with the Mother - so the higher consciousness can be lived and brought even into the outermost parts of the nature.
22 May 1934
2.3.07 - The Mother in Visions, Dreams and Experiences, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When one has Equality, discrimination and sufficient Yogic experience - otherwise any voice may be mistaken for the Mother's.
Can one rely solely upon the voice from within from the beginning?
2.3.08 - The Mother's Help in Difficulties, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6. When I go for food, I pray for the Mother's Force to help me to offer every morsel to the Mother, to get everything easily digested, to make a growth of complete Equality and detachment in my consciousness enabling me to take any food with equal Rasa of universal Ananda without any insistence or seeking or greed or desire.
This is again part of the sadhana.
2.3.2 - Desire, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There was and is the opening before you of a new stage in your spiritual development. For it to realise itself you must progress first in two directions. The first we have already pressed on you the surmounting of these vital temptations and desires which linked you to the lower movements and invited the pressure of a hostile Force on your lower vital and your body and the complete surrender of life and body to the One alone. The other is the descent of a full calm and strength and equanimity into these parts so that you may conquer life and its difficulties and do your work for the Divine. This calm and strength had often descended into your mind and higher vital, but these other parts were still open to much weakness and attachment and a self-indulgent movement. That must go if one wants to become a hero and master of spiritual action. In your life at Bogra these things were too much sheltered and allowed to remain; at Shillong you have a chance to be by yourself with the Divine Force and look life in the face from the souls inner strength and become master of circumstances. Outer difficulties or inconveniences you should not allow to alarm or depress you. Inner difficulties should also be met with detachment, calm Equality, the unshakable will to conquer.
For the rest, you have rightly said, I must preserve my equanimity and have faith in Divine Guidance when falsehoodor any trouble or difficultyconfronts me. The defect that opened the way to the bodily and other troubles was the faltering in your resolution to conquer the vital and follow the straight and high path and the consequent violent despair and depression it brought in its wake. Let those disappear altogether and do not allow them to rise in that way again. The path of spiritual calm and strength and the consecration of all your forces to the Divine is the one safe way for you and that you must now consistently follow.
2.4.02 - Bhakti, Devotion, Worship, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But it must become pure, founded upon spiritual peace and joy, capable of being transmuted into Ananda. Equality and calm in the mind and vital parts, an intense psychic emotion in the heart can perfectly go together.
Awake by your aspiration the psychic fire in the heart that burns steadily towards the Divine that is the one way to liberate and fulfil the emotional nature.
2.4.1 - Human Relations and the Spiritual Life, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Yoga cannot be done if Equality is not established. Personal relations must be founded on the relation with the Divine in himself and the Divine in all and they must not be ties to pull one down and keep bound to the lower nature but part of the higher unity.
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2.4.2 - Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Cultivating Equality and Goodwill
The in Equality of feelings towards others, liking and disliking, is ingrained in the nature of the human vital. This is because some harmonise with ones own vital temperament, others do not; also there is the vital ego which gets displeased when it is hurt or when things do not go or people do not act according to its preferences or its idea of what they should do. In the self above there is a spiritual calm and Equality, a goodwill to all or at a certain stage a quiet indifference to all except the Divine; in the psychic there is an equal kindness or love to all fundamentally, but there may be special relations with one but the vital is always unequal and full of likes and dislikes. By the sadhana the vital must be quieted down; it must receive from the self above its quiet goodwill and Equality to all things and from the psychic its general kindness or love. This will come, but it may take time to come. You must get rid of all inner as well as all outer movements of anger, impatience or dislike. If things go wrong or are done wrongly, you will simply say, The Mother knows and go on quietly doing or getting things done as well as you can without friction. At a later period we will show you how to use the Mothers force so that things may go better, but first you must get your inner poise in a quiet vital, for only so can the Force be used with its full possible success.
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There are two attitudes that a sadhak can haveei ther a quiet Equality to all regardless of their friendliness or hostility or a general goodwill.
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Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in Yoga a state of samat, Equality to all things. It is of immense importance in sadhana to be able to reach this state. It helps the mental quietude and silence as well as the vital to come. It means indeed that the vital itself and the vital mind are already falling silent and becoming quiet. The thinking mind is sure to follow.
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The best way to prepare oneself for the spiritual life when one has to live in the ordinary occupations and surroundings is to cultivate an entire Equality and detachment and the samat of the Gita with the faith that the Divine is there and the Divine Will at work in all things even though at present under the conditions of a world of Ignorance. Beyond this are the Light and Ananda towards which life is working, but the best way for their advent and foundation in the individual being and nature is to grow in this spiritual Equality. That would also solve your difficulty about things unpleasant and disagreeable. All unpleasantness should be faced with this spirit of samat.
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3.02 - The Motives of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even if the Supreme be capable of relations with us but only of impersonal relations, religion is robbed of its human vitality and the Path of Devotion ceases to be effective or even possible. We may indeed apply our human emotions to it, but in a vague and imprecise fashion, with no hope of a human response: the only way in which it can respond to us, is by stilling our emotions and throwing upon us its own impersonal calm and immutable Equality; and this is what in fact happens when we approach the pure impersonality of the Godhead. We can obey it as a Law, lift our souls to it in aspiration towards its tranquil being, grow into it by shedding from us our emotional nature; the human being in us is not satisfied, but it is quieted, balanced, stilled. But the Yoga of devotion, agreeing in this with Religion, insists on a closer and warmer worship than this impersonal aspiration. It aims at a divine fulfilment of the humanity in us as well as of the impersonal part of our being; it aims at a divine satisfaction of the emotional being of man. It demands of the Supreme acceptance of our love and a response in kind; as we delight in Him and seek Him, so it believes that He too delights in us and seeks us. Nor can this demand be condemned as irrational, for if the supreme and universal Being did not take any delight in us, it is not easy to see how we could have come into being or could remain in being, and if He does not at all draw us towards him, - a divine seeking of us, - there would seem to be no reason in Nature why we should turn from the round of our normal existence to seek Him.
Therefore that there may be at all any possibility of a Yoga of devotion, we must assume first that the supreme Existence is not an abstraction or a state of existence, but a conscious Being; secondly, that he meets us in the universe and is in some way immanent in it as well as its source, - otherwise, we should have to go out of cosmic life to meet him; thirdly, that he is capable of personal relations with us and must therefore be not incapable of personality; finally, that when we approach him by our human emotions, we receive a response in kind. This does not mean that the nature of the Divine is precisely the same as our human nature though upon a larger scale, or that it is that nature pure of certain perversions and God a magnified or else an ideal Man. God is not and cannot be an ego limited by his qualities as we are in our normal consciousness. But on the other hand our human consciousness must certainly originate and have been derived from the Divine; though the forms which it takes in us may and must be other than the divine because we are limited by ego, not universal, not superior to our nature, not greater than our qualities and their workings, as he is, still our human emotions and impulses must have behind them a Truth in him of which they are the limited and very often, therefore, the perverse or even the degraded forms. By approaching him through our emotional being we approach that Truth, it comes down to us to meet our emotions and lift them towards it; through it our emotional being is united with him.
3.03 - The Godward Emotions, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The relations which arise out of this attitude towards the Divine, are that of the divine Father and the Mother with the child and that of the divine Friend. To the Divine as these things the human soul comes for help, for protection, for guidance, for fruition, -- or if knowledge be the aim, to the Guide, Teacher, Giver of light, for the Divine is the Sun of knowledge, -- or it comes in pain and suffering for relief and solace and deliverance, it may be deliverance either from the suffering itself or from the world-existence which is the habitat of the suffering or from all its inner and real causes.544 In these things we find there is a certain gradation. For the relation of fatherhood is always less close, intense, passionate, intimate, and therefore it is less resorted to in the Yoga which seeks for the closest union. That of the divine Friend is a thing sweeter and more intimate, admits of an Equality and intimacy even in in Equality and the beginning of mutual self-giving; at its closest when all idea of other giving and taking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free and happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence. But closer and more intimate still is the relation of the Mother and the child, and that therefore plays a very large part wherever the religious impulse is most richly fervent and springs most warmly from the heart of man. The soul goes to the Mother Soul in all its desires and troubles, and the Divine Mother wishes that it should be so, so that she may pour out her heart of love. It turns to her too because of the self-existent nature of this love and because that points us to the home towards which we turn from our wanderings in the world and to the bosom in which we find our rest.
But the highest and the greatest relation is that which starts from none of the ordinary religious motives, but is rather of the very essence of Yoga, springs from the very nature of love itself; it is the passion of the Lover and the Beloved. Wherever there is the desire of the soul for its utter union with God, this form of the divine yearning makes its way even into religions which seem to do without it and give it no place in their ordinary system. Here the one thing asked for is love, the one thing feared is the loss of love, the one sorrow is the sorrow of separation of love; for all other things either do not exist for the lover or come in only as incidents or as results and not as objects or conditions of love. All love is indeed in its nature self-existent because it springs from a secret oneness in being and a sense of that oneness or desire of oneness in the heart between souls that are yet able to conceive of themselves as different from each other and divided. Therefore all these other relations too can arrive at their self-existent motiveless joy of being for the sake of love alone. But still they start from and to the end they, to some extent, find a satisfaction of their play in other motives. But here the beginning is love and the end is love and the whole aim is love. There is indeed the desire of possession, but even this is overcome in the fullness of the self-existent love and the final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his Bhakti may never cease nor diminish. He does not ask for heaven or for liberation from birth or for any other object, but only that his love may be eternal and absolute.
3.07 - The Formula of the Holy Grail, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
that the farther from original Equality are the two sides of the
equation, the more difficult is the operation to perform.
3.1.02 - Asceticism and the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Vairagya is certainly one way of progressing towards the goal the traditional way and a drastic if painful one. To lose the desire for human vital enjoyments, to lose the passion for literary or other success, praise, fame, to lose even the insistence on spiritual success, the inner bhoga of Yoga, have always been recognised as steps towards the goalprovided one keeps the one insistence on the Divine. I prefer myself the calmer way of Equality, the way pointed out by Krishna, than the more painful one of Vairagya. But if the compulsion in ones natureor the compulsion of ones inner being forcing its way by that means through the difficulties of the natureis on that line, it must be recognised as a valid line. What has to be got rid of in that case is the note of despair in the vital which responds to the cry you speak of that it will never gain the Divine because it has not yet got the Divine or that there has been no progress. There has certainly been a progress, the greater push of the psychic, this very detachment itself always growing somewhere in you. The thing is to hold on, not to cut the cord which is pulling you up because it hurts the hands. To keep the one insistence if all the others fall away from you.
It is evident that something in you, perhaps continuing the unfinished curve of a past life, is pushing you on this path of vairagya and the more stormy way of bhaktiin spite of our preference for a less painful one and yours also something that is determined to be drastic with the outer nature so as to make itself free to fulfil its secret aspiration. But do not listen to these suggestions of the voice that says, You shall not succeed and it is no use trying. That is a thing that need never be said in the Way of the Spirit, however difficult it may seem at the moment to be. Keep through all the aspiration which you express so beautifully in your poem; for it is certainly there and comes out from the depths, and if it is the cause of sufferingas great aspirations usually are in a world and nature where there is so much to oppose themit is also the promise and surety of emergence and victory in the future.
3.1.02 - Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The change then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect Equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another constitution of the physical consciousness that must come in by the supramental change.
Spiritual realisation can be had on any plane by contact with the Divine (who is everywhere) or by perception of the Self within, which is pure and untouched by the outer movements.
3.1.3 - Difficulties of the Physical Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I do not know that I can add anything more to what I have already written. It is only by a more constant dynamic force descending into an unalterable Equality and peace that the physical natures normal tendency can be eradicated.
The normal tendency of the physical nature is to be inert and in its inertia to respond only to the ordinary vital forces, not to the higher forces. If one has a perfect Equality and peace then one can be unaffected by the spreading of the inertia and bring down into it gradually or quickly the same peace with a force of the higher consciousness which can alter it. When that is there there can be no longer the difficulty and fluctuations with a preponderance of inertia such as you are now having.
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3.2.02 - Yoga and Skill in Works, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
OGA, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves the name of a Yogin; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a spiritual condition of universal Equality and God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Spirit in a nature liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the sense-mind.
Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the Truth of things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies in an ever higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul out of the great peril by which it had been
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The Gita tells us that Equality of soul and mind is Yoga and that this Equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high infinite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now Equality of mind means universality; for without universality of soul there may be a state of indifference or an impartial self-control or a well-governed Equality of temperament, but these are not the thing that is meant. The Equality spoken of is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception of all as the One. Such Equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the intellect justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason.
That might be the fact if the individual were the real actor and not merely an instrument or secondary agent; but we know well enough, for Science and Philosophy assure us of the same truth, that the universal is the Force which acts through the simulacrum of our individuality. The individual mind, pretending to choose for itself with a sublime ignorance and disregard of the universal, is obviously working on the basis of a falsehood and by means of an error and not in the knowledge and the will of the Truth. It cannot have any real skill in works; for to start from a falsehood or half-truth and work by means of blunders and arrive at another falsehood or half-truth which we have immediately to change, and all the while to weep and struggle
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Therefore that state of the being by which the Yogin differs from the ordinary man, is that by which he rises from the foundation of a perfect Equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or personal temperament or limited mind. Mind and life and body he sees as small enough things which happen and change and develop in his being. Nay, the whole universe is seen by him as happening within himself, not in his small ego or mind, but within this vast and infinite self with which he is now constantly identified. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will and Power.
He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences, gropings and seekings and revolts. It is evident that such an increasing wideness of vision must mean an increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is power, it must mean also an increasing force for works. Certainly, it would not be so, if the Yogin continued to act by the light of his individual reason and imagination and will; for the intellect and all that depends on it can only work by virtue of rigid limitations and exclusive determinations.
3.2.1 - Food, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If you want to do Yoga, you must take more and more in all matters, small or great, the Yogic attitude. In our path that attitude is not one of forceful suppression, but of detachment and Equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forceful suppression (fasting comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It is only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital, refusing to regard its desires and clamours as ones own, and cultivates an entire Equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.
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These things [persistent desires] still rise in you because they have been for so long prominent difficulties and, as far as the first is concerned, because you gave it much justification from the mind at one time. But if the inner consciousness is growing like that they are sure to go. Only if they rise, dont give them harbourage. Perhaps with regard to the greed for food, your attitude has not been quite correct. Greed for food has to be overcome, but it has not to be given too much thought. The proper attitude to food is a certain Equality. Food is for the maintenance of the body and one should take enough for thatwhat the body needs; if one gives less the body feels the need and hankers; if you give more, then that is indulging the vital. As for particular foods the palate likes, the attitude of the mind and vital should be, If I get, I take; if I dont get, I shall not mind. One should not think too much of food either to indulge or unduly to repress that is the best.
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As regards the progress you have made, I do not think you have given us an exaggerated impression of it; it seems to be quite real. It is no part of this Yoga to suppress taste, rasa altogether; so, if you found the ice-cream pleasant, that does not by itself invalidate the completeness of your progress. What is to be got rid of is vital desire and attachment, the greed of food, being overjoyed at getting the food you like, sorry and discontented when you do not have it, giving an undue importance to it, etc. If one wants to be a Yogin, it will not do to be like the ordinary man to whom food, sex and gain are nine-tenths of life or even to keep in any of these things the reactions to which vital human nature is prone. Equality is here the test as in so many other matters. If you can take the Ashram food with satisfaction or at least without dissatisfaction, that is already a sign that attachment and predilection are losing their old place in the nature.
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It is good for the physical to be more and more conscious, but it should not be overpowered by the things of which it becomes aware or badly affected or upset by them. A strong Equality and mastery and detachment must come in the nerves and body as in the mind, which will enable the physical to know and contact these things without feeling any disturbance; it should know and be conscious and reject and throw away the pressure of the movements in the atmosphere, not merely feel them and suffer.
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As to the question of practising to take all kinds of food with equal rasa, it is not necessary to practise nor does it really come by practice. One has to acquire Equality within in the consciousness and as this Equality grows one can extend it or apply it to the various fields of the activity of the consciousness.
***
3.21 - Of Black Magic, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
of balanceis fit to treat on Equality with Man. The proper study of
Mankind is God; with Him is his business, and with Him alone.
3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Sex (occult) stands on a fair level of Equality with ambition etc. from the point of view of danger, only its action is usually less ostensiblei.e. the Hostiles dont put it forward so openly as a thing to be followed after in the spiritual life.
***
3.3.01 - The Superman, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Knowledge into the temple and seat them beside her in a unified Equality; Power must bow its neck to the yoke of Light and Love before it can do any real good to the race.
Unity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embracing unity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillised by knowledge into a calm ecstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for the world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of knowledge accepts and transforms the heart's obscure inspirations and lends itself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded together on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and accepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man's integral self-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic self-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of supermanhood.
33.10 - Pondicherry I, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The ruffian bands - known locally as bandesin French - were a peculiar institution now almost broken up. The French regime in Pondicherry was supposed to be in theory a reign of liberty, Equality and fraternity. But in actual fact, it was the feudalism of pre-Revolution France that held sway here. Or perhaps it was something worse, namely, the arbitrary rule of three or four high officials and rich men of ill-gotten means. The "bandes" were in their pay and they were there to do their bidding; the police had neither the will nor the power to intervene. On certain occasions, during the campaigns for political elections, complete anarchy seemed to reign in Pondicherry, while rioting and murder continued for days on end and blood flowed freely. People would not dare stir out of their houses, especially after dark. We were not openly involved in politics, but some of our friends were. And Sri Aurobindo would sometimes send out some of us to meet them, even after nightfall and on purpose. The local people marvelled at our dauntless courage.
These ruffian bands - these ghouls I was going to say - turned against us too on more than one occasion. Let me explain in a little more detail.
3.3.1 - Illness and Health, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The body [experiences physical pain], naturally but the body transmits it to the vital and mental. With the ordinary consciousness the vital gets disturbed and afflicted and its forces diminished, the mind identifies and is upset. The mind has to remain unmoved, the vital unaffected, and the body has to learn to take it with Equality so that the higher Force may work.
The Self is never affected by any kind of pain. The psychic takes it quietly and offers it to the Divine for what is necessary to be done.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
All civilizations equalize the education opportunities they provide for their various age-grades or Sub-strata, from infancy to maturity, by corresponding gradings of the subject matter taught. Equality of opportunity for unequal age-groups is approached by careful provision of a corresponding in Equality of educational habitats.
So also in regard to their various psycho-social Strata: Equality of opportunity for people with unequal inborn abstraction ceilings is approached by careful provision of corresponding training situations. During the first few years (preceding and up to the attainment of the first human abstraction ceiling) a single institution, Kindergarten, and the first few grades, provides Equality of opportunity for all Strata.36 Figure IV-3 shows graphically humankind's initial state of intellectual identity (zero), and its divergence into Strata during ontogeny. As the childrens' creodes separate--as Stratum after Stratum approaches its abstraction ceiling, levels out, and is surpassed by the people with higher inborn abstraction ceilings--each Stratum enters the corresponding set of educational institutions. Namely, the kind of institution designed to provide for it the opportunity to realize its inborn capacities to the fullest degree: apprenticeships, craft schools, trade schools, secretarial schools, high schools, preparatory schools, (European) gymnasia, junior colleges, colleges, institutes of technology, graduate schools, post-doctoral training courses, institutes for advanced study, and so forth.
In Figure IV-2, Period 6 (Lower Industrialists) displays six Strata, each characterized by the corresponding number of Substrata. The highest Sub-stratum in each case (including the first one) is reached by, and only by, utilizing opportunities for continuous, persistent development of inborn capabilities.
Exceptions occur for reasons well known to geneticists, and are often important. Child prodigies appear from time to time, for whom Equality of opportunity requires skipping one age-graded school class after another; for instance, Norbert Wiener.37 Stratum prodigies occur, for whom Equality of opportunity requires the by-passing of one school-type after another; John Stewart Mill.38 Period prodigies occur, for whom Equality of opportunity requires travelling to an Industrial country and studying in its higher schools; for instance, Yomo Kenyatta.39 (These latter two kinds of exception comprise the two Majority groups mapped in Figure IV-6.)
Downward exceptions also occur, especially in the highest and most recently entered Strata. (Geneticists recognize them as "regressions toward the mean."40) But downward exceptions occur in all Strata. (Of late those who display them have been euphemistically called "retarded.") For them, Equality of opportunity requires repetition of school classes, top Stratum children's apprenticeship in trade or craft schools, and emigration to less developed regions or countries.
Since respectable institutional channels for these adjustments are inadequate or absent, considerable numbers of young people, called Hippies, are improvising Equality of opportunity by "dropping out" in all three of these ways. Many emigrate to rural parts of New Mexico, Arizona and similar regions and try unsuccessfully to simulate pre-Industrial life styles.
The term dropping out, however, is also used to denote the opposite non-institutional adjustment. Where formal institutions have broken down and deteriorated--whether actually or apparently--some among their employees who recognize this fact refuse to deteriorate with them, and "drop out," sometimes at great financial sacrifice.--See for example, "Dropping Out in Manhattan" by Colette Dowling.42
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36. It is true that in feudal societies, royal households, and in Soviet schools for "philosopher kings" not even the first few grades are shared by all Strata. Whether this does or does not further Equality of opportunity is a technical question whose answer may require more knowledge than our society yet has.
37. Wiener, Norbert, Ex prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953.
3.7.1.01 - Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The true foundation of the theory of rebirth is the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence out of the veil of Matter and its gradual self-finding. Buddhism contained this truth involved in its theory of Karma and emergence out of Karma but failed to bring it to light; Hinduism knew it of old, but afterwards missed the right balance of its expression. Now we are again able to restate the ancient truth in a new language and this is already being done by certain schools of thought, though still the old incrustations tend to tack themselves on to the deeper wisdom. And if this gradual efflorescence be true, then the theory of rebirth is an intellectual necessity, a logically unavoidable corollary. But what is the aim of that evolution? Not conventional or interested virtue and the faultless counting out of the small coin of good in the hope of an apportioned material reward, but the continual growth towards a divine knowledge, strength, love and purity. These things alone are real virtue and this virtue is its own reward. The one true reward of the works of love is to grow ever in capacity and delight of love up to the ecstasy of the spirits all-seizing embrace and universal passion; the one reward of the works of right Knowledge is to grow perpetually into the infinite Light; the one reward of the works of right Power is to harbour more and more of the Force Divine, and of the works of purity to be freed more and more from egoism into that immaculate wideness where all things are transformed and reconciled into the divine Equality. To seek other reward is to bind oneself to a foolishness and a childish ignorance; and to regard even these things as a reward is an unripeness and an imperfection.
And what of suffering and happiness, misfortune and prosperity? These are experiences of the soul in its training, helps, props, means, disciplines, tests, ordeals, and prosperity often a worse ordeal than suffering. Indeed, adversity, suffering may often be regarded rather as a reward to virtue than as a punishment for sin, since it turns out to be the greatest help and purifier of the soul struggling to unfold itself. To regard it merely as the stern award of a Judge, the anger of an irritated Ruler or even the mechanical recoil of result of evil upon cause of evil is to take the most superficial view possible of Gods dealings with the soul and the law of the worlds evolution. And what of worldly prosperity, wealth, progeny, the outward enjoyment of art, beauty, power? Good, if they be achieved without loss to the soul and enjoyed only as the outflowing of the divine Joy and Grace upon our material existence. But let us seek them first for others or rather for all, and for ourselves only as a part of the universal condition or as one means of bringing perfection nearer.
3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Him indeed in his pervading Equality may my thought too purifying and pervadingly equal even now by its power (or the will)
attain; in the action of the bliss is reflected on high, bright and
--
harmony or Equality of the different constituents of our nature,
body, life-energy, mind, pure ideation in one divine anandamaya
4.07 - Purification-Intelligence and Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Yoga of self-perfection is to make this double movement as absolute as possible. All immiscence of desire in the Buddhi is an impurity. The intelligence coloured by desire is an impure intelligence and it distorts Truth; the will coloured by desire is an impure will and it puts a stamp of distortion, pain and imperfection upon the soul's activity. All immiscence of the emotions of the soul of desire is an impurity and similarly distorts both the knowledge and the action. All subjection of the Buddhi to the sensations and impulses is an impurity. The thought and will have to stand back detached from desire, troubling emotion, distracting or mastering impulse and to act in their own right until they can discover a greater guide, a Will, Tapas or divine shakti which will take the place of desire and mental will and impulse, an Ananda or pure delight of the spirit and an illumined spiritual knowledge which will express themselves in the action of that shakti. This complete detachment, impossible without an entire self-government, Equality, calm, sama, samata, santi, is the surest step towards the purification of the Buddhi. A calm, equal and detached mind can alone reflect the peace or base the action of the liberated spirit.
The Buddhi itself is burdened with a mixed and impure action. When we reduce it to its own proper forms, we find that it has three stages or elevations of its functioning. First, its lowest basis is a habitual, customary action which is a link between the higher reason and the sense-mind, a kind of current understanding. This understanding is in itself dependent on the witness of the senses and the rule of action which the reason deduces from the sense-mind's perception of and attitude to life. It is not capable of itself forming pure thought and will, but it takes the workings of the higher reason and turns them into coin of opinion and customary standard of thought or canon of action. When we perform a sort of practical analysis of the thinking mind, cut away this element and hold back the higher reason free, observing and silent, we find that this current understanding begins to run about in a futile circle, repeating all its formed opinions and responses to the impressions of things, but incapable of any strong adaptation and initiation. As it feels more and more the refusal of sanction from the higher reason, it begins to fail, to lose confidence in itself and its forms and habits, to distrust the intellectual action and to fall into weakness and silence. The stilling of this current, running, circling, repeating thought-mind is the principal part of that silencing of the thought which is one of the most effective disciplines of Yoga.
4.09 - The Liberation of the Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But these are only predominant powers in each part of our complex system. The three qualities mingle, combine and strive in every fibre and in every member of our intricate psychology. The mental character is made by them, the character of our reason, the character of our will, the character of our moral, aesthetic, emotional, dynamic, sensational being. Tamas brings in all the ignorance, inertia, weakness, incapacity which afflicts our nature, a clouded reason, nescience, unintelligence, a clinging to habitual notions and mechanical ideas, the refusal to think and know, the small mind, the closed avenues, the trotting round of mental habit, the dark and the twilit places. Tamas brings in the impotent will, want of faith and self-confidence and initiative, the disinclination to act, the shrinking from endeavour and aspiration, the poor and little spirit, and in our moral and dynamic being the inertia, the cowardice, baseness, sloth, lax subjection to small and ignoble motives, the weak yielding to our lower nature. Tamas brings into our emotional nature insensibility, indifference, want of sympathy and openness, the shut soul, the callous heart, the soon spent affection and languor of the feelings, into our aesthetic and sensational nature the dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar spirit. Rajas contri butes our normal active nature with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of Sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion, clinging to error, the subservience of the intelligence to our desires and preferences and not to the truth, the fanatic or the sectarian mind, self-will, pride, arrogance, selfishness, ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of human nature. Rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion and desire. Sattwa produces a higher type. The gifts of Sattwa are the mind of reason and balance, clarity of the disinterested truth-seeking open intelligence, a will subordinated to the reason or guided by the ethical spirit, self-control, Equality, calm, love, sympathy, refinement, measure, fineness of the aesthetic and emotional mind, in the sensational being delicacy, just acceptivity, moderation and poise, a vitality subdued and governed by the mastering intelligence. The accomplished types of the sattwic man are the philosopher, saint and sage, of the rajasic man the statesman, warrior, forceful man of action. But in all men there is in greater or less proportions a mingling of the gunas, a multiple personality and in most a good deal of shifting and alternation from the predominance of one to the prevalence of another Guna; even in the governing form of their nature most human beings are of a mixed type. All the colour and variety of life is made of the intricate pattern of the weaving of the gunas.
But richness of life, even a sattwic harmony of mind and nature does not constitute spiritual perfection. There is a relative possible perfection, but it is a perfection of incompleteness, some partial height, force, beauty, some measure of nobility and greatness, some imposed and precariously sustained balance. There is a relative mastery, but it is a mastery of the body by life or of the life by mind, not a free possession of the instruments by the liberated and self-possessing spirit. The gunas have to be transcended if we would arrive at spiritual perfection. Tamas evidently has to be overcome, inertia and ignorance and incapacity cannot be elements of a true perfection; but it can only be overcome in Nature by the force of Rajas aided by an increasing force of Sattwa. Rajas has to be overcome, egoism, personal desire and self-seeking passion are not elements of the true perfection; but it can only be overcome by force of Sattwa enlightening the being and force of Tamas limiting the action. Sattwa itself does not give the highest or the integral perfection; Sattwa is always a quality of the limited nature; sattwic knowledge is the light of a limited mentality; sattwic will is the government of a limited intelligent force. Moreover, Sattwa cannot act by itself in Nature, but has to rely for all action on the aid of Rajas, so that even sattwic action is always liable to the imperfections of Rajas; egoism, perplexity, inconsistency, a one-sided turn, a limited and exaggerated will, exaggerating itself in the intensity of its limitations, pursue the mind and action even of the saint, philosopher and sage. There is a sattwic as well as a rajasic or tamasic egoism, at the highest an egoism of knowledge or virtue; but the mind's egoism of whatever type is incompatible with liberation. All the three gunas have to be transcended. Sattwa may bring us near to the Light, but its limited clarity falls away from us when we enter into the luminous body of the divine Nature.
4.0 - NOTES TO ZARATHUSTRA, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
contrasts and gulfs, and the elimination of Equality, together with the
creation of supremely powerful creatures.
4.10 - The Elements of Perfection, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When the self is purified of the wrong and confused action of the instrumental Nature and liberated into its self-existent being, consciousness, power and bliss and the Nature itself liberated from the tangle of this lower action of the struggling gunas and the dualities into the high truth of the divine calm and the divine action, then spiritual perfection becomes possible. Purification and freedom are the indispensable antecedents of perfection. A spiritual self-perfection can only mean a growing into oneness with the nature of divine being, and therefore according to our conception of divine being will be the aim, effort and method of our seeking after this perfection. To the Mayavadin the highest or rather the only real truth of being is the impassive, impersonal, self-aware Absolute and therefore to grow into an impassive calm, impersonality and pure self-awareness of spirit is his idea of perfection and a rejection of cosmic and individual being and a settling into silent self-knowledge is his way. To the Buddhist for whom the highest truth is a negation of being, a recognition of the impermanence and sorrow of being and the disastrous nullity of desire and a dissolution of egoism, of the upholding associations of the Idea and the successions of Karma are the perfect way. Other ideas of the Highest are less negative; each according to its own idea leads towards some likeness to the Divine, sadrsya, and each finds its own way, such as the love and worship of the Bhakta and the growing into the likeness of the Divine by love. But for the integral Yoga perfection will mean a divine spirit and a divine nature which will admit of a divine relation and action in the world; it will mean also in its entirety a divinising of the whole nature, a rejection of all its wrong knots of being and action, but no rejection of any part of our being or of any field of our action. The approach to perfection must be therefore a large and complex movement and its results and workings will have an infinite and varied scope. We must fix in order to find a clue and method on certain essential and fundamental elements and requisites of perfection, siddhi; for if these are secured, all the rest will be found to be only their natural development or particular working. We may cast these elements into six divisions, interdependent on each other to a great extent but still in a certain way naturally successive in their order of attainment. The movement will start from a basic Equality of the soul and mount to an ideal action of the Divine through our perfected being in the largeness of the Brahmic unity.
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect Equality, samata. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of Equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of Equality, the equal Brahman, samam brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify Equality and yoga, samatvam yoga ucyate. That is to say, Equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness, -- even in the most physical consciousness, -- and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine Equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of Equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of Equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness.
The next necessity of perfection is to raise all the active parts of the human nature to that highest condition and working pitch of their power and capacity, sakti, at which they become capable of being divinised into true instruments of the free, perfect, spiritual and divine action. For practical purposes we may take the understanding, the heart, the Prana and the body as the four members of our nature which have thus to be prepared, and we have to find the constituent terms of their perfection. Also there is the dynamical force in us (virya) of the temperament, character and soul nature, svabhava, which makes the power of our members effective in action and gives them their type and direction; this has to be freed from its limitations, enlarged, rounded so that the whole manhood in us may become the basis of a divine manhood, when the Purusha, the real Man in us, the divine Soul, shall act fully in this human instrument and shine fully through this human vessel. To divinise the perfected nature we have to call in the divine Power or shakti to replace our limited human energy so that this may be shaped into the image of and filled with the force of a greater infinite energy, daivi prakrti, bhagavati sakti. This perfection will grow in the measure in which we can surrender ourselves, first, to the guidance and then to the direct action of that Power and of the Master of our being and our works to whom it belongs, and for this purpose faith is the essential, faith is the great motor-power of our being in our aspirations to perfection, -- here, a faith in God and the shakti which shall begin in the heart and understanding, but shall take possession of all our nature, all its consciousness, all its dynamic motive-force. These four things are the essentials of this second element of perfection, the full powers of the members of the instrumental nature, the perfected dynamis of the soul nature, the assumption of them into the action of the divine Power, and a perfect faith in all our members to call and support that assumption, sakti, virya, daivi prakrti, sraddha.
4.11 - The Perfection of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:4.11 - The Perfection of Equality
The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect Equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality. In terms of devotion and adoration it is a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of the being of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire, -- for if there is not this likeness, this oneness of the law of the being, unity between that transcending and universal and this individual spirit is not possible. The supreme divine nature is founded on Equality. This affirmation is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence. The pure Self is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse to them, -- aversion is not Equality, nor, if that were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could the universe come at all into being or proceed upon its cycles, -- a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority to the reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent Infinite's purity and the condition of its impartial assent and support to the many-sided movement of the universe. But in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops these motions, the same Equality is a basic condition.
The Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject to them, not master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign will and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of what is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution -- to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction -- from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy-the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight in self and things which are the active universal outpourings from those infinite sources. In the strength of that light, power and joy a secret self and spirit within us accepts and transforms always into food of its perfect experience the dual letters of the mind's transcript of life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence even now within us, we could not bear the pressure of the universal force or subsist in this great and dangerous world. A perfect Equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit's eternal kingdoms, rajyam samrddham, of greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of Equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
A perfect Equality and peace of the soul is indispensable to change the whole substance of our being into substance of the self out of its present stuff of troubled mentality. It is equally indispensable if we aspire to replace our present confused and ignorant action by the self-possessed and luminous works of a free spirit governing its nature and in tune with universal being. A divine action or even a perfect human action is impossible if we have not Equality of spirit and an Equality in the motive-forces of our nature. The Divine is equal to all, an impartial sustainer of his universe, who views all with equal eyes, assents to the law of developing being which he has brought out of the depths of his existence, tolerates what has to be tolerated, depresses what has to be depressed, raises what has to be raised, creates, sustains and destroys with a perfect and equal understanding of all causes and results and working out of the spiritual and pragmatic meaning of all phenomena. God does not create in obedience to any troubled passion of desire or maintain and preserve through an attachment of partial preference or destroy in a fury of wrath, disgust or aversion. The Divine deals with great and small, just and unjust, ignorant and wise as the Self of all who, deeply intimate and one with the being, leads all according to their nature and need with a perfect understanding, power and justness of proportion. But through it all he moves things according to his large aim in the cycles and draws the soul upward in the evolution through its apparent progress and retrogression towards the higher and ever higher development which is the sense of the cosmic urge. The self-perfecting individual who seeks to be one in will with the Divine and make his nature an instrument of the divine purpose, must enlarge himself out of the egoistic and partial views and motives of the human ignorance and mould himself into an image of this supreme Equality.
This equal poise in action is especially necessary for the Sadhaka of the integral Yoga. First, he must acquire that equal assent and understanding which will respond to the law of the divine action without trying to impose on it a partial will and the violent claim of a personal aspiration. A wise impersonality, a quiescent Equality, a universality which sees all things as the manifestations of the Divine, the one Existence, is not angry, troubled, impatient with the way of things or on the other hand excited, over-eager and precipitate, but sees that the law must be obeyed and the pace of time respected, observes and understands with sympathy the actuality of things and beings, but looks also behind the present appearance to their inner significances and forward to the unrolling of their divine possibilities, is the first thing demanded of those who would do works as the perfect instruments of the Divine. But this impersonal acquiescence is only the basis. Man is the instrument of an evolution which wears at first the mask of a struggle, but grows more and more into its truer and deeper sense of a constant wise adjustment and must take on in a rising scale the deepest truth and significance -- now only underlying the adjustment and struggle -- of a universal harmony. The perfected human soul must always be an instrument for the hastening of the ways of this evolution. For that a divine power acting with the royalty of the divine will in it must be in whatever degree present in the nature. But to be accomplished and permanent, steadfast in action, truly divine, it has to proceed on the basis of a spiritual Equality, a calm, impersonal and equal self-identification with all beings, an understanding of all energies. The Divine acts with a mighty power in the myriad workings of the universe, but with the supporting light and force of an imperturbable oneness, freedom and peace. That must be the type of the perfected soul's divine works. And Equality is the condition of the being which makes possible this changed spirit in the action.
But even a human perfection cannot dispense with Equality as one of its chief elements and even its essential atmosphere. The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to deserve the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the surroundings; it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man's urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svarat and samrat, self-ruler and king. But to be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure and pain, to the tumult of his emotions and passions, to the bondage of his personal likings and dislikings, to the strong chains of desire and attachment, to the narrowness of a personal and emotionally preferential judgment and opinion, to all the hundred touches of his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his thought, feeling and action. All these things are the slavery to the lower self which the greater "I" in man must put under his feet if he is to be king of his own nature. To surmount them is the condition of self-rule; but of that surmounting again Equality is the condition and the essence of the movement. To be quite free from all these things, -- if possible, or at least to be master of and superior to them, -- is Equality. Farther, one who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. The knowledge, the will, the harmony which is necessary for this outward mastery, can come only as a crown of the inward conquest. It belongs to the self-possessing soul and mind which follows with a disinterested Equality the Truth, the Right, the universal Largeness to which alone this mastery is possible, -- following always the great ideal they present to our imperfection, while it understands and makes a full allowance too for all that seems to conflict with them and stand in the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even on the levels of our actual human mentality, where we can only get a limited perfection. But the ideal of Yoga takes up this aim of Swarajya and Samrajya and puts it on the larger spiritual basis. There it gets its full power, opens to the diviner degrees of the spirit; for it is by oneness with the Infinite, by a spiritual power acting upon finite things, that some highest integral perfection of our being and nature finds its own native foundation.
A perfect Equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of in Equality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection. The Equality of these parts of our nature comes by purification and freedom. We might say that Equality is the very sign of liberation. To be free from the domination of the urge of vital desire and the stormy mastery of the soul by the passions is to have a calm and equal heart and a life-principle governed by the large and even view of a universal spirit. Desire is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain of bondage. A free Prana means a content and satisfied life-soul which fronts the contact of outward things without desire and receives them with an equal response; delivered, uplifted above the servile duality of liking and disliking, indifferent to the urgings of pleasure and pain, not excited by the pleasant, not troubled and overpowered by the unpleasant, not clinging with attachment to the touches it prefers or violently repelling those for which it has an aversion, it will be opened to a greater system of values of experience. All that comes to it from the world with menace or with solicitation, it will refer to the higher principles, to a reason and heart in touch with or changed by the light and calm joy of the spirit. Thus quieted, mastered by the spirit and no longer trying to impose its own mastery on the deeper and finer soul in us, this life-soul will be itself spiritualised and work as a clear and noble instrument of the diviner dealings of the spirit with things. There is no question here of an ascetic killing of the life-impulse and its native utilities and functions; not its killing is demanded, but its transformation. The function of the Prana is enjoyment, but the real enjoyment of existence is an inward spiritual Ananda, not partial and troubled like that of our vital, emotional or mental pleasure, degraded as they are now by the predominance of the physical mind, but universal, profound, a massed concentration of spiritual bliss possessed in a calm ecstasy of self and all existence. Possession is its function, by possession comes the soul's enjoyment of things, but this is the real possession, a thing large and inward, not dependent on the outward seizing which makes us subject to what we seize. All outward possession and enjoyment will be only an occasion of a satisfied and equal play of the spiritual Ananda with the forms and phenomena of its own world-being. The egoistic possession, the making things our own in the sense of the ego's claim on God and beings and the world, parigraha, must be renounced in order that this greater thing, this large, universal and perfect life, may come. Tyaktena bhunjithan, by renouncing the egoistic sense of desire and possession, the soul enjoys divinely its self and the universe.
A free heart is similarly a heart delivered from the gusts and storms of the affections and the passions; the assailing touch of grief, wrath, hatred, fear, in Equality of love, trouble of joy, pain of sorrow fall away from the equal heart, and leave it a thing large, calm, equal, luminous, divine. These things are not incumbent on the essential nature of our being, but the creations of the present make of our outward active mental and vital nature and its transactions with its surroundings. The ego-sense which induces us to act as separate beings who make their isolated claim and experience the test of the values of the universe, is responsible for these aberrations. When we live in unity with the Divine in ourselves and the spirit of the universe, these imperfections fall away from us and disappear in the calm and equal strength and delight of the inner spiritual existence. Always that is within us and transforms the outward touches before they reach it by a passage through a subliminal psychic soul in us which is the hidden instrument of its delight of being. By Equality of the heart we get away from the troubled desire-soul oil the surface, open the gates of this profounder being, bring out its responses and impose their true divine values on all that solicits our emotional being. A free, happy, equal and all-embracing heart of spiritual feeling is the outcome of this perfection.
In this perfection too there is no question of a severe ascetic insensibility, an aloof spiritual indifference or a strained rugged austerity of self-suppression. This is not a killing of the emotional nature but a transformation. All that presents itself here in our outward nature in perverse or imperfect forms has a significance and utility which come out when we get back to the greater truth of divine being. Love will be not destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to its widest capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love of God, the love of man, the love of all things as ourselves and as beings and powers of the Divine; a large, universal love, not at all incapable of various relation, will replace the claimant, egoistic, self-regarding love of little joys and griefs and insistent demands afflicted with all the chequered pattern of angers and jealousies and satisfactions, rushings to unity and movements of fatigue, divorce and separation on which we now place so high a value. Grief will cease to exist, but a universal, an equal love and sympathy will take its place, not a suffering sympathy, but a power which, itself delivered, is strong to sustain, to help, to liberate. To the free spirit wrath and hatred are impossible, but not the strong Rudra energy of the Divine which can battle without hatred and destroy without wrath, because all the time aware of the things it destroys as parts of itself, its own manifestations and unaltered therefore in its sympathy and understanding of those in whom are embodied these manifestations. All our emotional nature will undergo this high liberating transformation; but in order that it may do so, a perfect Equality is the effective condition.
The same Equality must be brought into the rest of our being. Our whole dynamic being is acting under the influence of unequal impulses, the manifestations of the lower ignorant nature. These urgings we obey or partially control or place on them the changing and modifying influence of our reason, our refining aesthetic sense and mind and regulating ethical notions. A tangled strain of right and wrong, of useful and harmful, harmonious or disordered activity is the mixed result of our endeavour, a shifting standard of human reason and unreason, virtue and vice, honour and dishonour, the noble and the ignoble, things apprjved and things disapproved of men, much trouble of self-approbation and disapprobation or of self-righteousness and disgust, remorse, shame and moral depression. These things are no doubt very necessary at present for our spiritual evolution. But the seeker of a greater perfection will draw back from all these dualities, regard them with an equal eye and arrive through Equality at an impartial and universal action of the dynamic Tapas, spiritual force, in which his own force and will are turned into pure and just instruments of a greater calm secret of divine working. The ordinary mental standards will be exceeded on the basis of this dynamic Equality. The eye of his will must look beyond to a purity of divine being, a motive of divine will-power guided by divine knowledge of which his perfected nature will be the engine, yantra. That must remain impossible in entirety as long as the dynamic ego with its subservience to the emotional and vital impulses and the preferences of the personal judgment interferes in his action. A perfect Equality of the will is the power which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion to works. This Equality will not respond to the lower impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light above the mind, and will not judge and govern with the intellectual judgment, but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane of vision. As it mounts upward to the supramental being and widens inward to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will be transformed, spiritualised like the emotional and pranic, and grow into a power of the divine nature. There will be plenty of stumblings and errors and imperfections of adjustment of the instruments to their new working, but the increasingly equal soul will not be troubled overmuch or grieve at these things, since, delivered to the guidance of the Light and Power within self and above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion of the process of transformation. The promise of the Divine Being in the Gita will be the anchor of its resolution, "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve."
The Equality of the thinking mind will be a part and a very important part of the perfection of the instruments in the nature. Our present attractive self-justifying attachment to our intellectual preferences, our judgments, opinions, imaginations, limiting associations of the memory which makes the basis of our mentality, to the current repetitions of our habitual mind, to the insistences of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations even of our intellectual truth-mind, must go the way of other attachments and yield to the impartiality of an equal vision. The equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance and on truth and error, those dualities created by our limited nature of consciousness and the partiality of our intellect and its little stock of reasonings and intuitions, accept them both without being bound to either twine of the skein and await a luminous transcendence. In ignorance it will see a knowledge which is imprisoned and seeks or waits for delivery, in error a truth at work which has lost itself or got thrown by the groping mind into misleading forms. On the other side, it will not hold itself bound and limited by its knowledge or forbidden by it to proceed to fresh illumination, nor lay too fierce a grasp on truth, even when using it to the full, or tyrannously chain it to its present formulations. This perfect Equality of the thinking mind is indispensable because the objective of this progress is the greater light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual cognizance. This Equality is the most delicate and difficult of all, the least practised by the human mind; its perfection is impossible so long as the supramental light does not fall fully on the upward looking mentality. But an increasing will to Equality in the intelligence is needed, before that light can work freely upon the mental substance. This too is not an abnegation of the seekings and cosmic purposes of the intelligence, not an indifference or impartial scepticism, nor yet a stilling of all thought in the silence of the Ineffable. A stilling of the mental thought may be part of the discipline, when the object is to free the mind from its own partial workings, in order that it may become an equal channel of a higher light and knowledge; but there must also be a transformation of the mental substance; otherwise the higher light cannot assume full possession and a compelling shape for the ordered works of the divine consciousness in the human being. The silence of the Ineffable is a truth of divine being, but the Word which proceeds from that silence is also a truth, and it is this Word which has to be given a body in the conscious form of the nature.
But, finally, all this equalisation of the nature is a preparation for the highest spiritual Equality to take possession of the whole being and make a pervading atmosphere in which the light, power and joy of the Divine can manifest itself in man amid an increasing fullness. That Equality is the eternal Equality of Sachchidananda. It is an Equality of the infinite being which is self-existent, an Equality of the eternal spirit, but it will mould into its own mould the mind, heart, will, life, physical being. It is an Equality of the infinite spiritual consciousness which will contain and base the blissful flowing and satisfied waves of a divine knowledge. It is an Equality of the divine Tapas which will initiate a luminous action of the divine will in all the nature. It is an Equality of the divine Ananda which will found the play of a divine universal delight, universal love and an illimitable aesthesis of universal beauty. The ideal equal peace and calm of the Infinite will be the wide ether of our perfected being, but the ideal, equal and perfect action of the Infinite through the nature working on the relations of the universe will be the untroubled outpouring of its power in our being. This is the meaning of Equality in the terms of the integral Yoga.
author class:Sri Aurobindo
4.12 - The Way of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:4.12 - The Way of Equality
It will appear from the description of the complete and perfect Equality that this Equality has two sides. It must therefore be arrived at by two successive movements. One will liberate us from the action of the lower nature and admit us to the calm peace of the divine being; the other will liberate us into the full being and power of the higher nature and admit us to the equal poise and universality of a divine and infinite knowledge, will of action, Ananda. The first may be described as a passive or negative Equality, an Equality of reception which fronts impassively the impacts and phenomena of existence and negates the dualities of the appearances and reactions which they impose on us. The second is an active, a positive Equality which accepts the phenomena of existence, but only as the manifestation of the one divine being and with an equal response to them which comes from the divine nature in us and transforms them into its hidden values. The first lives in the peace of the one Brahman and puts away from it the nature of the active Ignorance. The second lives in that peace, but also in the Ananda of the Divine and imposes on the life of the soul in nature the signs of the divine knowledge, power and bliss of being. It is this double orientation united by the common principle which will determine the movement of Equality in the integral Yoga.
The effort towards a passive or purely receptive Equality may start from three different principles or attitudes which all lead to the same result and ultimate consequence, -- endurance, indifference and submission. The principle of endurance relics on the strength of the spirit within us to bear all the contacts, impacts, suggestions of this phenomenal Nature that besieges us on every side without being overborne by them and compelled to bear their emotional, sensational, dynamic, intellectual reactions. The outer mind in the lower nature has not this strength. Its strength is that of a limited force of consciousness which has to do the best it can with all that comes in upon it or besieges it from the greater whirl of consciousness and energy which environs it on this plane of existence. That it can maintain itself at all and affirm its individual being in the universe, is due indeed to the strength of the spirit within it, but it cannot bring forward the whole of that strength or the infinity of that force to meet the attacks of life; if it could, it would be at once the equal and master of its world. In fact, it has to manage as it can. It meets certain impacts and Is able to assimilate, equate or master them partially or completely, for a time or wholly, and then it has in that degree the emotional and sensational reactions of joy, pleasure, satisfaction, liking, love, etc., or the intellectual and mental reactions of acceptance, approval, understanding, knowledge, preference, and on these its will seizes with attraction, desire, the attempt to prolong, to repeat, to create, to possess, to make them the pleasurable habit of its life. Other impacts it meets, but finds them too strong for it or too dissimilar and discordant or too weak to give it satisfaction; these are things which it cannot bear or cannot equate with itself or cannot assimilate, and it is obliged to give to them reactions of grief, pain, discomfort, dissatisfaction, disliking, disapproval, rejection, inability to understand or know, refusal of admission. Against them it seeks to protect itself, to escape from them, to avoid or minimise their recurrence; it has with regard to them movements of fear, anger, shrinking, horror, aversion, disgust, shame, would gladly be delivered from them, but it cannot get away from them, for it is bound to and even invites their causes and therefore the results; for these impacts are part of life, tangled up with the things we desire, and the inability to deal with them is part of the imperfection of our nature. Other impacts again the normal mind succeeds in holding at bay or neutralising and to these it has a natural reaction of indifference, insensibility or tolerance which is neither positive acceptance and enjoyment nor rejection or suffering. To things, persons, happenings, ideas, workings, whatever presents itself to the mind, there are always these three kinds of reaction. At the same time, in spite of their generality, there is nothing absolute about them; they form a scheme for a habitual scale which is not precisely the same for all or even for the same mind at different times or in different conditions. The same impact may arouse in it at one time and another the pleasurable or positive, the adverse or negative or the indifferent or neutral reactions.
The soul which seeks mastery may begin by turning upon these reactions the encountering and opposing force of a strong and equal endurance. Instead of seeking to protect itself from or to shun and escape the unpleasant impacts it may confront them and teach itself to suffer and to bear them with perseverance, with fortitude, an increasing equanimity or an austere or calm acceptance. This attitude, this discipline brings out three results, three powers of the soul in relation to things. First, it is found that what was before unbearable, becomes easy to endure; the scale of the power that meets the impact rises in degree; it needs a greater and greater force of it or of its protracted incidence to cause trouble, pain, grief, aversion or any other of the notes in the gamut of the unpleasant reactions. Secondly, it is found that the conscious nature divides itself into two parts, one of the normal mental and emotional nature in which the customary reactions continue to take place, another of the higher will and reason which observes and is not troubled or affected by the passion of this lower nature, does not accept it as its own, does not approve, sanction or participate. Then the lower nature begins to lose the force and power of its reactions, to submit to the suggestions of calm and strength from the higher reason and will, and gradually that calm and strength take possession of the mental and emotional, even of the sensational, vital and physical being. This brings the third power and result, the power by this endurance and mastery, this separation and rejection of the lower nature, to get rid of the normal reactions and even, if we will, to remould all our modes of experience by the strength of the spirit. This method is applied not only to the unpleasant, but also to the pleasant reactions; the soul refuses to give itself up to or be carried away by them; it endures with calm the impacts which bring joy and pleasure, refuses to be excited by them and replaces the joy and eager seeking of the mind after pleasant things by the calm of the spirit. It can be applied too to the thought-mind in a calm reception of knowledge and of limitations of knowledge which refuses to be carried away by the fascination of this attractive or repelled by dislike for that unaccustomed or unpalatable thought-suggestion and waits on the Truth with a detached observation which allows it to grow on the strong, disinterested, mastering will and reason. Thus the soul becomes gradually equal to all things, master of itself, adequate to meet the world with a strong front in the mind and an undisturbed serenity of the spirit.
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The third way is that of submission, which may be the Christian resignation founded on submission to the will of God, or an unegoistic acceptance of things and happenings as a manifestation of the universal Will in time, or a complete surrender of the person to the Divine, to the supreme Purusha. As the first was a way of the will and the second a way of knowledge, of the understanding reason, so this is a way of the temperament and heart and very intimately connected with the principle of Bhakti. If it is pushed to the end, it arrives at the same result of a perfect Equality. For the knot of the ego is loosened and the personal claim begins to disappear, we find that we are no longer bound to joy in things pleasant or sorrow over the unpleasant; we bear them without either eager acceptance or troubled rejection, refer them to the Master of our being, concern ourselves less and less with their personal result to us and hold only one thing of importance, to approach God, or to be in touch and tune with the universal and infinite Existence, or to be united with the Divine, his channel, instrument, servant, lover, rejoicing in him and in our relation with him and having no other object or cause of joy or sorrow. Here too there may be for some time a division between the lower mind of habitual emotions and the higher psychical mind of love and self-giving, but eventually the former yields, changes, transforms itself, is swallowed up in the love, joy, delight of the Divine and has no other interests or attractions. Then all within is the equal peace and bliss of that union, the one silent bliss that passes understanding, the peace that abides untouched by the solicitation of lower things in the depths of our spiritual existence.
These three ways coincide in spite of their separate starting-points, first, by their inhibition of the normal reactions of the mind to the touches of outward things, bahya-sparsan, secondly, by their separation of the self or spirit from the outward action of Nature. Bat it is evident that our perfection will be greater and more ernbracingly complete, if we can have a more active Equality which will enable us not only to draw back from or confront the world in a detached and separated calm, but to return upon it and possess it in the power of the calm and equal Spirit. This is possible because the world, Nature, action are not in fact a quite separate thing, but a manifestation of the Self, the All-Soul, the Divine. The reactions of the normal mind are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this degradation make this truth evident to us, --a falsification, an ignorance which alters their workings, an ignorance which starts from the involution of Self in a blind material nescience. Once we return to the full consciousness of Self, of God, we can then put a true divine value on things and receive and act on them with the calm, joy, knowledge, seeing will of the Spirit. When we begin to do that, then the soul begins to have an equal joy in the universe, an equal will dealing with all energies, an equal knowledge which takes possession of the spiritual truth behind all the phenomena of this divine manifestation. It possesses the world as the Divine possesses it, in a fullness of the infinite light, power and Ananda.
All this existence can therefore be approached by a Yoga of positive and active in place of the negative and passive Equality. This requires, first, a new knowledge which is the knowledge of unity, -- to see all things as oneself and to see all things in God and God in all things. There is then a will of equal acceptance of all phenomena, all events, all happenings, all persons and forces as masks of the Self, movements of the one energy, results of the one power in action, ruled by the one divine wisdom; and on the foundation of this will of greater knowledge there grows a strength to meet everything with an untroubled soul and mind. There must be an identification of myself with the self of the universe, a vision and a feeling of oneness with all creatures, a perception of all forces and energies and results as the movement of this energy of my self and therefore intimately my own; not, obviously, of my ego-self which must be silenced, eliminated, cast away, -- otherwise this perfection cannot come,.- but of a greater impersonal or universal self with which I am now one. For my personality is now only one centre of action of that universal self, but a centre intimately in relation and unison with all other personalities and also with all those other things which are to us only impersonal objects and forces : but in fact they also are powers of the one impersonal Person (Purusha), God, Self and Spirit. My individuality is his and is no longer a thing incompatible with or separated from universal being; it is itself universalised, a knower of the universal Ananda and one with and a lover of all that it knows, acts on and enjoys. For to the equal knowledge of the universe and equal will of acceptance of the universe will be added an equal delight in all the cosmic manifestation of the Divine.
Here too we may describe three results or powers of the method. First, we develop this power of equal acceptance in the spirit and in the higher reason and will which respond to the spiritual knowledge. But also we find that though the nature can be induced to take this general attitude, there is yet a struggle between that higher reason and will and the lower mental being which clings to the old egoistic way of seeing the world and reacting to its impacts. Then we find that these two, though at first confused, mingled together, alternating, acting on each other, striving for possession, can be divided, the higher spiritual disengaged from the lower mental nature. But in this stage, while the mind is still subject to reactions of grief, trouble, an inferior joy and pleasure, there is an increased difficulty which does not act to the same extent in a more sharply individualised Yoga. For not only does the mind feel its own troubles and difficulties, but it shares in the joys and griefs of others, vibrates to them in a poignant sympathy, feels their impacts with a subtle sensitiveness, makes them its own; not only so, but the difficulties of others are added to our own and the forces which oppose the perfection act with a greater persistence, because they feel this movement to be an attack upon and an attempt to conquer their universal kingdom and not merely the escape of an isolated soul from their empire. But finally, we find too that there comes a power to surmount these difficulties; the higher reason and will impose themselves on the lower mind, which sensibly changes into the vast types of the spiritual nature; it takes even a delight in feeling, meeting and surmounting all troubles, obstacles and difficulties until they are eliminated by its own transformation. Then the whole being lives in a final power, the universal calm and joy, the seeing delight and will of the Spirit in itself and its manifestation.
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In the matter of knowledge, there are again three reactions of the mind to things, ignorance, error and true knowledge. The positive Equality will accept all three of them to start with as movements of a self-manifestation which evolves out of ignorance through the partial or distorted knowledge which is the cause of error to true knowledge. It will deal with the ignorance of the mind, as what it is psychologically, a clouded, veiled or wrapped-up state of the substance of consciousness in which the knowledge of the all-knowing Self is hidden as if in a dark sheath; it will dwell on it by the mind and by the aid of related truths already known, by the intelligence or by an intuitive concentration deliver the knowledge out of the veil of the ignorance. It will not attach itself only to the known or try to force all into its little frame, but will dwell on the known and the unknown with an equal mind open to all possibility. So too it will deal with error; it will accept the tangled skein of truth and error, but attach itself to no opinion, rather seeking for the element of truth behind all opinions, the knowledge concealed within the error, -- for all error is a disfiguration of some misunderstood fragments of truth and draws its vitality from that and not from its misapprehension; it will accept, but not limit itself even by ascertained truths, but will always be ready for new knowledge and seek for a more and more integral, a more and more extended, reconciling, unifying wisdom. This can only come in its fullness by rising to the ideal supermind, and therefore the equal seeker of truth will not be attached to the intellect and its workings or think that all ends there, but be prepared to rise beyond, accepting each stage of ascent and the contri butions of each power of his being, but only to lift them into a higher truth. He must accept everything, but cling to nothing, be repelled by nothing however imperfect or however subversive of fixed notions, but also allow nothing to lay hold on him to the detriment of the free working of the Truth-Spirit. This Equality of the intelligence is an essential condition for rising to the higher supramental and spiritual knowledge.
The will in us, because it is the most generally forceful power of our being, --there is a will of knowledge, a will of life, a will of emotion, a will acting in every part of our nature, -- takes many forms and returns various reactions to things, such as incapacity, limitation of power, mastery, or right will, wrong or perverted will, neutral volition, -- in the ethical mind virtue, sin and non-ethical volition, -- and others of the kind. These too the positive Equality accepts as a tangle of provisional values from which it must start, but which it must transform into universal mastery, into the will of the Truth and universal Right, into the freedom of the divine Will in action. The equal will need not feel remorse, sorrow or discouragement over its stumblings; if these reactions occur in the habitual mentality, it will only see how far they indicate an imperfection and the thing to be corrected, --for they are not always just indicators, -- and so get beyond them to a calm and equal guidance. It will see that these stumblings themselves are necessary to experience and in the end steps towards the goal. Behind and within all that occurs in ourselves and in the world, it will look for the divine meaning and the divine guidance; it will look beyond imposed limitations to the voluntary self-limitation of the universal Power by which it regulates its steps and gradations, -- imposed on our ignorance, self-imposed in the divine knowledge, -- and go beyond to unity with the illimitable power of the Divine. All energies and actions it will see as forces proceeding from the one Existence and their perversions as imperfections, inevitable in the developing movement, of powers that were needed for that movement; it will therefore have charity for all imperfections, even while pressing steadily towards a universal perfection. This Equality will open the nature to the guidance of the divine and universal Will and make it ready for that supramental action in which the power of the soul in us is luminously full of and one with the power of the supreme Spirit.
The integral Yoga will make use of both the passive and the active methods according to the need of the nature and the guidance of the inner spirit, the Antaryamin. It will not limit itself by the passive way, for that would lead only to some individual quietistic salvation or negation of an active and universal spiritual being which would be inconsistent with the totality of its aim. It will use the method of endurance, but not stop short with a detached strength and serenity, but move rather to a positive strength and mastery, in which endurance will no longer be needed, since the self will then be in a calm and powerful spontaneous possession of the universal energy and capable of determining easily and happily all its reactions in the oneness and the Ananda. It will use the method of impartial indifference, but not end in an aloof indifference to all things, but rather move towards a high-seated impartial acceptance of life strong to transform all experience into the greater values of the equal spirit. It will use too temporarily resignation and submission, but by the full surrender of its personal being to the Divine it will attain to the all-possessing Ananda in which there is no need of resignation, to the perfect harmony with the universal which is not merely an acquiescence, but an embracing oneness, to the perfect instrumentality and subjection of the natural self to the Divine by which the Divine also is possessed by the individual spirit. It will use fully the positive method, but will go beyond any individual acceptance of things which would have the effect of turning existence into a field only of the perfected individual knowledge, power and Ananda. That it will have, but also it will have the oneness by which it can live in the existence of others for their sake and not only for its own and for their assistance and as one of their means, an associated and helping force in the movement towards the same perfection. It will live for the Divine, not shunning world-existence, not attached to the earth or the heavens, not attached either to a supracosmic liberation, but equally one with the Divine in all his planes and able to live in him equally in the Self and in the manifestation.
4.1.3 - Imperfections and Periods of Arrest, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(1) What I wrote about politeness had nothing to do with X or the quarrel with YI referred to that as an cart and I said that such lapses on the part of sadhaks who were far from being siddha Yogis could not be advanced as a disproof of spiritual experience or of its value. My remark was not at all meant as justification of loss of self-control in an argument and getting angry and excited if crossed in ones views. It was merely a refusal to accept that as an argument against spirituality in generalspiritual experience, as I said, does not immediately lead to perfection and you cannot expect it to do so. Equality and self-control are most necessary to Yoga, but also most difficult, one has to strive slowly after them; they are not, at least in their completeness, easily attainable. The whole being has to be pervaded by calm and peace; the nerves and cells of the body have to be full of calm and peace. Until then what one has to strive to attain is an inner calm in the inner being which remains even when the outer is disturbed by invasions of grief, unease or anger. The Yogi arrives first at a sort of division in his being in which the inner Purusha fixed and calm looks at the perturbations of the outer man as one looks at the passions of an unreasonable child; that once fixed, he can proceed afterwards to control the outer man also. Whether he can easily control the actions depends on the temperament of his outer man, whether it is vehement, emotional and passionate or comparatively sedate and quiet. But a complete control of the outer man needs a long and arduous tapasya. It cannot be expected and even the assured inner calm cannot be expected of those who are still in a very early stage of the journey, who are still sadhaks and not Yogis.
(2) I said that as regards both cases, Z and X, my remarks must be taken as limited to this proposition that you cannot expect from the raw what you can expect from the ripe, that is from the siddha Yogi.
4.13 - The Action of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:4.13 - The Action of Equality
The distinctions that have already been made, will have shown in sufficiency what is meant by the status of Equality. It is not mere quiescence and indifference, not a withdrawal from experience, but a superiority to the present reactions of the mind and life. It is the spiritual way of replying to life or rather of embracing it and compelling it to become a perfect form of action of the self and spirit. It is the first secret of the soul's mastery of existence. When we have it in perfection, we are admitted to the very ground of the divine spiritual nature. The mental being in the body tries to compel and conquer life, but is at every turn compelled by it, because it submits to the desire reactions of the vital self. To be equal, not to be overborne by any stress of desire, is the first condition of real mastery, self-empire is its basis. But a mere mental Equality, however great it may be, is hampered by the tendency of quiescence. It has to preserve itself from desire by self-limitation in the will and action. It is only the spirit which is capable of sublime undisturbed rapidities of will as well as an illimitable patience, equally just in a slow and deliberate or a swift and violent, equally secure in a safely lined and limited or a vast and enormous action. It can accept the smallest work in the narrowest circle of cosmos, but it can work too upon the whirl of chaos with an understanding and creative force; and these things it can do because by its detached and yet intimate acceptance it carries into both an infinite calm, knowledge, will and power. It has that detachment because it is above all the happenings, forms, ideas and movements it embraces in its scope; and it has that intimate acceptance because it is yet one with all things. If we have not this free unity, ekatvam anupasyatah, we have not the full Equality of the spirit. The first business of the Sadhaka is to see whether he has the perfect Equality, how far he has gone in this direction or else where is the flaw, and to exercise steadily his will on his nature or invite the will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its causes. There are four things that he must have; first Equality in the most concrete practical sense of the word, samata, freedom from mental, vital, physical preferences, an even acceptance of all God's workings within and around him; secondly, a firm peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble, santi; thirdly, a positive inner spiritual happiness and spiritual ease of the natural being which nothing can lessen, sukham; fourthly, a clear joy and laughter of the soul embracing life and existence. To be equal is to be infinite and universal, not to limit oneself, not to bind oneself down to this or that form of the mind and life and its partial preferences and desires. But since man in his present normal nature lives by his mental and vital formations, not in the freedom of his spirit, attachment to them and the desires and preferences they involve is also his normal condition. To accept them is at first inevitable, to get beyond them exceedingly difficult and not, perhaps, altogether possible so long as we are compelled to use the mind as the chief instrument of our action. The first necessity therefore is to take at least the sting out of them, to deprive them, even when they persist, of their greater insistence, their present egoism, their more violent claim on our nature.
The test that we have done this is the presence of an undisturbed calm in the mind and spirit. The Sadhaka must be on the watch as the witnessing and willing Purusha behind or, better, as soon as he can manage it, above the mind, and repel even the least indices or incidence of trouble, anxiety, grief, revolt, disturbance ill his mind. If these things come, he must at once detect their source, the defect which they indicate, the fault of egoistic claim, vital desire, emotion or idea from which they start and this he must discourage by his will, his spiritualised intelligence, his soul unity with the Master of his being. On no account must he admit any excuse for them, however natural, righteous in seeming or plausible, or any inner or outer justification. If it is the Prana which is troubled and clamorous, he must separate himself from the troubled Prana, keep seated his higher nature in the Buddhi and by the Buddhi school and reject the claim of the desire-soul in him; and so too if it is the heart of emotion that makes the clamour and the disturbance. If, on the other hand, it is the will and intelligence itself that is at fault, then the trouble is more difficult to command, because then his chief aid and instrument becomes an accomplice of the revolt against the divine Will and the old sins of the lower members take advantage of this sanction to raise their diminished heads. Therefore there must be a constant insistence on one main idea, the self-surrender to the Master of our being, God within us and in the world, the supreme Self, the universal Spirit. The Buddhi dwelling always in this master idea must discourage all its own lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that the ego, whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the Prana, has no just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being.
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The calm established in the whole being must remain the same whatever happens, in health and disease, in pleasure and in pain, even in the strongest physical pain, in good fortune and misfortune, our own or that of those we love, in success and failure, honour and insult, praise and blame, justice done to us or injustice, everything that ordinarily affects the mind. If we see unity everywhere, if we recognise that all comes by the divine will, see God in all, in our enemies or rather our opponents in the game of life as well as our friends, in the powers that oppose and resist us as well as the powers that favour and assist, in all energies and forces and happenings, and if besides we can feel that all is undivided from our self, all the world one with us within our universal being, then this attitude becomes much easier to the heart and mind. But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active Equality and calm. Even something of it, svalpam api asya dharmasya, is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance.
This calm once attained, vital and mental preference has lost its disturbing force; it only remains as a formal habit of the mind. Vital acceptance or rejection, the greater readiness to welcome this rather than that happening, the mental acceptance or rejection, the preference of this more congenial to that other less congenial idea or truth, the dwelling upon the will to this rather than to that other result, become a formal mechanism still necessary as an index of the direction in which the shakti is meant to turn or for the present is made to incline by the Master of our being. But it loses its disturbing aspect of strong egoistic will, intolerant desire, obstinate liking. These appearances may remain for a while in a diminished form, but as the calm of Equality increases, deepens, becomes more essential and compact, ghana, they disappear, cease to colour the mental and vital substance or occur only as touches on the most external physical mind, are unable to penetrate within, and at last even that recurrence, that appearance at the outer gates of mind ceases. Then there can come the living reality of the perception that all in us is done and directed by the Master of our being, yatha prayukto'smi tatha karomi, which was before only a strong idea and faith with occasional and derivative glimpses of the divine action behind the becomings of our personal nature. Now every movement is seen to be the form given by the shakti, the divine power in us, to the indications of the Purusha, still no doubt personalised, still belittled in the inferior mental form, but not primarily egoistic, an imperfect form, not a positive deformation. We have then to get beyond this stage even. For the perfect action and experience is not to be determined by any kind of mental or vital preference, but by the revealing and inspiring spiritual will which is the shakti in her direct and real initiation. When I say that as I am appointed, I work, I still bring in a limiting personal element and mental reaction. But it is the Master who will do his own work through myself as his instrument, and there must be no mental or other preference in me to limit, to interfere, to be a source of imperfect working. The mind must become a silent luminous channel for the revelations of the supramental Truth and of the Will involved in its seeing. Then shall the action be the action of that highest Being and Truth and not a qualified translation or mistranslation in the mind. Whatever limitation, selection, relation is imposed, will be self-imposed by the Divine on himself in the individual at the moment for his own purpose, not binding, not final, not an ignorant determination of the mind. The thought and will become then an action from a luminous Infinite, a formulation not excluding other formulations, but rather putting them into their just place in relation to itself, englobing or transforming them even and proceeding to larger formations of the divine knowledge and action. The first calm that comes is of the nature of peace, the absence of all unquiet, grief and disturbance. As the Equality becomes more intense, it takes on a fuller substance of positive happiness and spiritual ease. This is the joy of the spirit in itself, dependent on nothing external for its absolute existence, nirasraya, as the Gita describes it, antah-sukho'ntararamah, an exceeding inner happiness, brahmasamsparsam atyantam sukham asnute. Nothing can disturb it, and it extends itself to the soul's view of outward things, imposes on them too the law of this quiet spiritual joy. For the base of it is still calm, it is an even and tranquil neutral joy, ahaituka. And as the supramental light grows, a greater Ananda comes, the base of the abundant ecstasy of the spirit in all it is, becomes, sees, experiences and of the laughter of the shakti doing luminously the work of the Divine and taking his Ananda in all the worlds.
The perfected action of Equality transforms all the values of things on the basis of the divine anandamaya power. The outward action may remain what it was or may change, that must be as the Spirit directs and according to the need of the work to be done for the world, -- but the whole inner action is of another kind. The shakti in its different powers of knowledge, action, enjoyment, creation, formulation, will direct itself to the different aims of existence, but in another spirit; they will be the aims, the fruits, the lines of working laid down by the Divine from his light above, not anything claimed by the ego for its own separate sake. The mind, the heart, the vital being, the body itself will be satisfied with whatever comes to them from the dispensation of the Master of the being and in that find a subtlest and yet fullest spiritualised satisfaction and delight; but the divine knowledge and will above will work forward towards its farther ends. Here both success and failure lose their present meanings. There can be no failure; for whatever happens is the intention of the Master of the worlds, not final, but a step on his way, and if it appears as an opposition, a defeat, a denial, even for the moment a total denial of the aim set before the instrumental being, it is so only in appearance and afterwards it will appear in its right place in the economy of his action, -- a fuller supramental vision may even see at once or beforeh and its necessity and its true relation to the eventual result to which it seems so contrary and even perhaps its definite prohibition. Or, if -- while the light is deficient, -- there has been a misinterpretation whether with regard to the aim or the course of the action and the steps of the result, the failure comes as a rectification and is calmly accepted without bringing discouragement or a fluctuation of the will. In the end it is found that there is no such thing as failure and the soul takes an equal passive or active delight in all happenings as the steps and formulations of the divine Will. The same evolution takes place with regard to good fortune and ill fortune, the pleasant and the unpleasant in every form, mangala amangala, priya apriya.
And as with happenings, so with persons, Equality brings an entire change of the view and the attitude. The first result of the equal mind and spirit is to bring about an increasing charity and inner toleration of all persons, ideas, views, actions, because it is seen that God is in all beings and each acts according to his nature, his svabhara, and its present formulations. When there is the positive equal Ananda, this deepens to a sympathetic understanding and in the end an equal universal love. None of these things need prevent various relations or different formulations of the inner attitude according to the need of life as determined by the spiritual will, or firm furtherings of this idea, view, action against that other for the same need and purpose by the same determination, or a strong outward or inward resistance, opposition and action against the forces that are impelled to stand in the way of the decreed movement. And there may be even the rush of the Rudra energy forcefully working upon or shattering the human or other obstacle, because that is necessary both for him and for the world purpose. But the essence of the equal inmost attitude is not altered or diminished by these more superficial formulations. The spirit, the fundamental soul remain the same, even while the shakti of knowledge, will, action, love does its work and assumes the various forms needed for its work. And in the end all becomes a form of a luminous spiritual unity with all persons, energies, things in the being of God and in the luminous, spiritual, one and universal force, in which one's own action becomes an inseparable part of the action of all, is not divided from it, but feels perfectly every relation as a relation with God in all in the complex terms of his universal oneness. That is a plenitude which can hardly be described in the language of the dividing mental reason for it uses all its oppositions, yet escapes from them, nor can it be put in the terms of our limited mental psychology. It belongs to another domain of consciousness, another plane of our being.
author class:Sri Aurobindo
4.1.4 - Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is no invariable rule of such suffering. It is not the soul that suffers; the Self is calm and equal to all things and the only sorrow of the psychic being is the sorrow of the resistance of Nature to the Divine Will or the resistance of things and people to the call of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. What is affected by suffering is the vital nature and the body. When the soul draws towards the Divine, there may be a resistance in the mind and the common form of that is denial and doubtwhich may create mental and vital suffering. There may again be a resistance in the vital nature whose principal character is desire and the attachment to the objects of desire, and if in this field there is conflict between the soul and the vital nature, between the Divine Attraction and the pull of the Ignorance, then obviously there may be much suffering of the mind and vital parts. The physical consciousness also may offer a resistance which is usually that of a fundamental inertia, an obscurity in the very stuff of the physical, an incomprehension, an inability to respond to the higher consciousness, a habit of helplessly responding to the lower mechanically, even when it does not want to do so; both vital and physical suffering may be the consequence. There is moreover the resistance of the Universal Nature which does not want the being to escape from the Ignorance into the Light. This may take the form of a vehement insistence on the continuation of the old movements, waves of them thrown on the mind and vital and body so that old ideas, impulses, desires, feelings, responses continue even after they are thrown out and rejected, and can return like an invading army from outside, until the whole nature, given to the Divine, refuses to admit them. This is the subjective form of the universal resistance, but it may also take an objective formopposition, calumny, attacks, persecution, misfortunes of many kinds, adverse conditions and circumstances, pain, illness, assaults from men or forces. There too the possibility of suffering is evident. There are two ways to meet all thatfirst that of the Self, calm, Equality, a spirit, a will, a mind, a vital, a physical consciousness that remain resolutely turned towards the Divine and unshaken by all suggestion of doubt, desire, attachment, depression, sorrow, pain, inertia. This is possible when the inner being awakens, when one becomes conscious of the Self, of the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical, for that can more easily attune itself to the divine Will, and then there is a division in the being as if there were two beings, one within, calm, strong, equal, unperturbed, a channel of the Divine Consciousness and Force, one without, still encroached on by the lower Nature; but then the disturbances of the latter become something superficial which are no more than an outer ripple,until these under the inner pressure fade and sink away and the outer being too remains calm, concentrated, unattackable. There is also the way of the psychic,when the psychic being comes out in its inherent power, its consecration, adoration, love of the Divine, self-giving, surrender and imposes these on the mind, vital and physical consciousness and compels them to turn all their movements Godward. If the psychic is strong and master throughout, then there is no or little subjective suffering and the objective cannot affect either the soul or the other parts of the consciousness the way is sunlit and a great joy and sweetness are the note of the whole sadhana. As for the outer attacks and adverse circumstances, that depends on the action of the Force transforming the relations of the being with the outer Nature; as the victory of the Force proceeds, they will be eliminated; but however long they last, they cannot impede the sadhana, for then even adverse things and happenings become a means for its advance and for the growth of the spirit.
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The sufferings and distress which come to people are part of their karma, part of the experience the being has to go through on its way through life after life till it is ready for spiritual change. In the life of the sadhak all vicissitudes are part of the path and, if he is a sadhak, he will recognise them as such though he may not understand their full meaning till afterwardsgood and bad fortune, outward happiness and suffering are to be taken with an unshaken Equality and trust in the Divine Wisdom till one has attained a position in which, united with the Divine Will, one can dominate them.
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4.14 - The Power of the Instruments, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Then again there is the psychic Prana, pranic mind or desire soul; this too calls for its own perfection. Here too the first necessity is a fullness of the vital capacity in the mind, its power to do its full work, to take possession of all the impulsions and energies given to our inner psychic life for fulfilment in this existence, to hold them and to be a means for carrying them out with strength, freedom, perfection. Many of the things we need for our perfection, courage, will-power effective in life, all the elements of what we now call force of character and force of personality, depend very largely for their completest strength and spring of energetic action on the fullness of the psychic Prana. But along with this fullness there must be an established gladness, clearness and purity in the psychic life-being. This dynamis must not be a troubled, perfervid, stormy, fitfully or crudely passionate strength; energy there must be, rapture of its action it must have, but a clear and glad and pure energy, a seated and firmly supported pure rapture. And as a third condition of its perfection it must be poised in a complete Equality. The desire-soul must get rid of the clamour, insistence or un Equality of its desires in order that its desires may be satisfied with justice and balance and in the right way and eventually must rid them of the character of desire altogether and change them into impulsions of the divine Ananda. To that end it must make no demands nor seek to impose itself on heart, mind or spirit, but accept with a strong passive and active Equality whatever impulsion and comm and come into it from the spirit through the channel of a still mind and a pure heart. And it must accept too whatever result of the impulse, whatever enjoyment more or less, full or nil, is given to it by the Master of our being. At the same time, possession and enjoyment are its law, function, use, Swadharma. It is not intended to be a slain or mortified thing, dull in its receptive power, dreary, suppressed, maimed, inert or null. It must have a full power of possession, a glad power of enjoyment, an exultant power of pure and divine passion and rapture. The enjoyment it will have will be in the essence a spiritual bliss, but one which takes up into itself and transforms the mental, emotional, dynamic, vital and physical joy; it must have therefore an integral capacity for these things and must not by incapacity or fatigue or inability to bear great intensities fail the spirit, mind, heart, will and body. Fullness, clear purity and gladness, Equality, capacity for possession and enjoyment are the fourfold perfection of the psychic Prana.707 -
The next instrument which needs perfection is the citta, and within the complete meaning of this expression we may include the emotional and the pure psychical being. This heart and psychic being of man shot through with the threads of the life-instincts is a thing of mixed inconstant colours of emotion and soul vibrations, bad and good, happy and unhappy, satisfied and unsatisfied, troubled and calm, intense and dull. Thus agitated and invaded it is unacquainted with any real peace, incapable of a steady perfection of all its powers. By purification, by Equality, by the light of knowledge, by a harmonising of the will it can be brought to a tranquil intensity and perfection. The first two elements of this perfection are on one side a high and large sweetness, openness, gentleness, calm, clarity, on the other side a strong and ardent force and intensity. In the divine no less than in ordinary human character and action there are always two strands, sweetness and strength, mildness and force, saumya and ramdra, the force that bears and harmonises, the force that imposes itself and compels, Vishnu and Ishana, Shiva and Rudra. The two are equally necessary to a perfect world-action. The perversions of the Rudra power in the heart are stormy passion, wrath and fierceness and harshness, hardness, brutality, cruelty, egoistic ambition and love of violence and domination. These and other human perversions have to be got rid of by the flowering of a calm, clear and sweet psychical being.
But on the other hand incapacity of force is also an imperfection. Laxity and weakness, self-indulgence, a certain flabbiness and limpness or inert passivity of the psychical being are the last result of an emotional and psychic life in which energy and power of assertion have been quelled, discouraged or killed. Nor is it a total perfection to have only the strength that endures or to cultivate only a heart of love, charity, tolerance, mildness, meekness and forbearance. The other side of perfection is a self-contained and calm and unegoistic Rudra-power armed with psychic force, the energy of the strong heart which is capable of supporting without shrinking an insistent, an outwardly austere or even, where need is, a violent action. An unlimited light of energy, force, puissance harmonised with sweetness of heart and clarity, capable of being one with it in action, the lightning of Indra starting from the orb of the nectarous moon-rays of Soma is the double perfection. And these two things saumyatva, tejas, must base their presence and action on a firm Equality of the temperament and of the psychical soul delivered from all crudity and all excess or defect of the heart's light or the heart's power.
Another necessary element is a faith in the heart, a belief in and will to the universal good, an openness to the universal Ananda. The pure psychic being is of the essence of Ananda, it comes from the delight-soul in the universe; but the superficial heart of emotion is overborne by the conflicting appearances of the world and suffers many reactions of grief, fear, depression, passion, shortlived and partial joy. An equal heart is needed for perfection, but not only a passive Equality; there must be the sense of a divine power making for good behind all experiences, a faith and will which can turn the poisons of the world to nectar, see the happier spiritual intention behind adversity, the mystery of love behind suffering, the flower of divine strength and joy in the seed of pain. This faith, kalyana-sraddha, is needed in order that the heart and the whole overt psychic being may respond to the secret divine Ananda and change itself into this true original essence. This faith and will must be accompanied by and open into an illimitable widest arid intensest capacity for love. For the main business of the heart, its true function is love. It is our destined instrument of complete union and oneness; for to see oneness in the world by the understanding is not enough unless we also feel it with the heart and in the psychic being, and this means delight in the One and in all existences in the world in him, a love of God and all beings. The heart's faith and will in good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent in all things and leading the world. The universal love has to be founded on the heart's sight and psychical and emotional sense of the one Divine, the one Self in all existence. All four elements will then form a unity and even the Rudra power to do battle for the right and the good proceed on the basis of a power of universal love. This is the highest and the most characteristic perfection of the heart, prema-samarthya.
The last perfection is that of the intelligence and thinking mind, buddhi. The first need is the clarity and the purity of the intelligence. It must be freed from the claims of the vital being which seeks to impose the desire of the mind in place of the truth, from the claims of the troubled emotional being which strives to colour, distort, limit and falsify the truth with the hue and shape of the emotions. It must be free too from its own defect, inertia of the thought-power, obstructive narrowness and unwillingness to open to knowledge, intellectual unscrupulousness in thinking, prepossession and preference, self-will in the reason and false determination of the will to knowledge. Its sole will must be to make itself an unsullied mirror of the truth, its essence and its forms and measures and relations, a clear mirror, a just measure, a fine and subtle instrument of harmony, an integral intelligence. This clear and pure intelligence can then become a serene thing of light, a pure and strong radiance emanating from the sun of Truth. But, again, it must become not merely a thing of concentrated dry or white light, but capable of all variety of understanding, supple, rich, flexible, brilliant with all the flame and various with all the colours of the manifestation of the Truth, open to all its forms. And so equipped it will get rid of limitations, not be shut up in this or that faculty or form or working of knowledge, but an instrument ready and capable for whatever work is demanded from it by the Purusha. Purity, clear radiance, rich and flexible variety, integral capacity are the fourfold perfection of the thinking intelligence, visuddhi, prakasa, vlcitra-bodha, sarvajnana-samarthya.
4.17 - The Action of the Divine Shakti, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This supramental shakti may form itself as a spiritualised intuitive light and power in the mind itself, and that is a great but still a mentally limited spiritual action. Or it may transform altogether the mind and raise the whole being to the supramental level. In any case this is the first necessity of this part of the Yoga, to lose the ego of the doer, the ego-idea and the sense of one's own power of action and initiation of action and control of the result of action and merge it in the sense and vision of the universal shakti originating, shaping, turning to its ends the action of ourselves and others and of all the persons and forces of the world. And this realisation can become absolute and complete in all the parts of our being only if we can have that sense and vision of it in all its forms, on all the levels of our being and the world being, as the material, vital, mental and supramental energy of the Divine, but all these, all the powers of all the planes must be seen and known as self-formulations of the one spiritual shakti, infinite in being, consciousness and Ananda. It is not the invariable rule that this power should first manifest itself on the lower levels in the lower forms of energy and then reveal its higher spiritual nature. And if it does so come, first in its mental, vital or physical universalism, we must be careful not to rest content there. It may come instead at once in its higher reality, in the might of the spiritual splendour. The difficulty then will be to bear and hold the Power until it has laid powerful hands on and transformed the energies of the lower levels of the being. The difficulty will be less in proportion as we have been able to attain to a large quiet and Equality, samata, and either to realise, feel and live in the one tranquil immutable self in all or else to make a genuine and complete surrender of ourselves to the divine Master of the Yoga.
It is necessary here to keep always in mind the three powers of the Divine which are present and have to be taken account of in all living existences. In our ordinary consciousness we see these three as ourselves, the Jiva in the form of the ego. God -- whatever conception we may have of God, and Nature. In the spiritual experience we see God as the supreme Self or Spirit, or as the Being from whom we come and in whom we live and move. We see Nature as his Power or God as Power, Spirit in Power acting in ourselves and the world. The Jiva is then himself this Self, Spirit, Divine, so'ham, because he is one with him in essence of his being and consciousness, but as the individual he is only a portion of the Divine, a self of the Spirit, and in his natural being a form of the shakti, a power of God in movement and action, para prakrtir jivabhuta. At first, when we become conscious of God or of the shakti, the difficulties of our relation with them arise from the ego-consciousness which we bring into the spiritual relation. The ego in us makes claims on the Divine other than the spiritual claim, and these claims are in a sense legitimate, but so long as and in proportion as they take the egoistic form, they are open to much grossness and great perversions, burdened with an element of falsehood, undesirable reaction and consequent evil, and the relation can only be wholly right, happy and perfect when these claims become part of tile spiritual claim and lose their egoistic character. And in fact the claim of our being upon the Divine is fulfilled absolutely only then when it ceases at all to be a claim and is instead a fulfilment of the Divine through the individual, when we are satisfied with that alone, when we are content with the delight of oneness in being, content to leave the supreme Self and Master of existence to do whatever is the will of his absolute wisdom and knowledge through our more and more perfected Nature. This is the sense of the self-surrender of the individual self to the Divine, atmasamarpana. It does not exclude a will for the delight of oneness, for participation in the divine consciousness, wisdom, knowledge, light, power, perfection, for the satisfaction of the divine fulfilment in us, but the will, the aspiration is ours because it is his will in us. At first, while there is still insistence on our own personality, it only reflects that, but becomes more and more indistinguishable from it, less personal and eventually it loses all shade of separateness, because the will in us has grown identical with the divine Tapas, the action of the divine shakti.
4.18 - Faith and shakti, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This sraddha -- the English word faith is inadequate to express it -- is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from our supramental being which is calling the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming and self-exceeding. And that which receives the influence and answers to the call is not so much the intellect, the heart or the life mind, but the inner soul which better knows the truth of its own destiny and mission. The circumstances that provoke our first entry into the path are not the real index of the thing that is at work in us. There the intellect, the heart, or the desires of the life mind may take a prominent place, or even more fortuitous accidents and outward incentives; but if these are all, then there can be no surety of our fidelity to the call and our enduring perseverance in the Yoga. The intellect may abandon the idea that attracted it, the heart weary or fail us, the desire of the life mind turn to other objectives. But outward circumstances are only a cover for the real workings of the spirit, and if it is the spirit that has been touched, the inward soul that has received the call, the sraddha will remain firm and resist all attempts to defeat or slay it. It is not that the doubts of the intellect may not assail, the heart waver, the disappointed desire of the life mind sink down, exhausted on the wayside. That is almost inevitable at times, perhaps often, especially with us, sons of an age of intellectuality and scepticism and a materialistic denial of spiritual truth which has not yet lifted its painted clouds from the face of the sun of a greater reality and is still opposed to the light of spiritual intuition and inmost experience. There will very possibly be many of those trying obscurations of which even the Vedic Rishis so often complained, "long exiles from the light", and these may be so thick, the night on the soul may be so black that faith may seem utterly to have left us. But through it all the spirit within will be keeping its unseen hold and the soul will return with a new strength to its assurance which was only eclipsed and not extinguished, because extinguished it cannot be when once the inner self has known and made its resolution.747 The Divine holds our hand through all and if he seems to let us fall, it is only to raise us higher. This saving return we shall experience so often that the denials of doubt will become eventually impossible and, when once the foundation of Equality is firmly established and still more when the sun of the gnosis has risen, doubt itself will pass away because its cause and utility have ended.
Moreover, not only a faith in the fundamental principle, ideas, way of the Yoga is needed, but a day to day working faith m the power in us to achieve, in the steps we have taken on the way, in the spiritual experiences that come to us, in the intuitions, the guiding movements of will and impulsion, the moved intensities of the heart and aspirations and fulfilments of the life that are the aids, the circumstances and the stages of the enlarging of the nature and the stimuli or the steps of the soul's evolution. At the same time it has always to be remembered that we are moving from imperfections and ignorance towards light and perfection, and the faith in us must be free from attachment to the forms of our endeavour and the successive stages of our realisation. There is not only much that will be strongly raised in us in order to be cast out and rejected, a battle between the powers of ignorance and the lower nature and the higher powers that have to replace them, but experiences, states of thought and feeling, forms of realisation that are helpful and have to be accepted on the way and may seem to us for the time to be spiritual finalities, are found afterwards to be steps of transition, have to be exceeded and the working faith that supported them withdrawn in favour of other and greater things or of more full and comprehensive realisations and experiences, which replace them or into which they are taken up in a completing transformation. There can be for the seeker of the integral Yoga no clinging to resting-places on the road or to half-way houses; he cannot be satisfied till he has laid down all the great enduring bases of his perfection and broken out into its large and free infinities, and even there he has to be constantly filling himself with more experiences of the Infinite. His progress is an ascent from level to level and each new height brings in other vistas and revelations of the much that has still to be done, bhuri kartvam, till the divine shakti has at last taken up all his endeavour and he has only to assent and participate gladly by a consenting oneness in her luminous workings. That which will support him through these changes, struggles, transformations which might otherwise dishearten and baffle, -- for the intellect and life and emotion always grasp too much at things, fasten on premature certitudes and are apt to be afflicted and unwilling when forced to abandon that on which they rested, --is a firm faith in the shakti that is at work and reliance on the guidance of the Master of the Yoga whose wisdom is not in haste and whose steps through all the perplexities of the mind are assured and just and sound, because they are founded on a perfectly comprehending transaction with the necessities of our nature.
4.19 - The Nature of the supermind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Yoga of perfection necessary to this change has, so far as we have been considering it, consisted in a preparatory purification of the mental, vital and physical nature, a liberation from the knots of the lower prakriti, a consequent replacement of the egoistic state always subject to the ignorant and troubled action of the desire-soul by a large and luminous static Equality which quiets the reason, the emotional mind, the life mind and the physical nature and brings into us the peace and freedom of the spirit, and a dynamical substitution of the action of the supreme and universal divine shakti under the control of the Ishwara for that of the lower prakriti, --an action whose complete operation must be preceded by the perfection of the natural instruments. And all these things together, though not as yet the whole Yoga, constitute already a much greater than the present normal consciousness, spiritual in its basis and moved by a greater light, power and bliss, and it might be easy to rest satisfied with so much accomplished and think that all has been done that was needed for the divine conversion.
A momentous question however arises as light grows, the question, through what medium is the divine shakti to act in the human being? Is it to be always through the mind only and on the mind plane or in some greater supramental formulation which is more proper to a divine action and which will take up and replace the mental functions? If the mind is to be always the instrument, then although we shall be conscious of a diviner Power Initiating and conducting all our inner and outer human action, yet it will have to formulate its knowledge, will, Ananda and all things else in the mental figure, and that means to translate them into an inferior kind of functioning other than the supreme workings native to the divine consciousness and its shakti. The mind spiritualised, purified, liberated, perfected within its own limits may come as near as possible to a faithful mental translation, but we shall find that this is after all a relative fidelity and an imperfect perfection. The mind by its very nature cannot render with an entirely right rightness or act in the unified completeness of the divine knowledge, will and Ananda because it is an instrument for dealing with the divisions of the finite on the basis of division, a secondary instrument therefore and a sort of delegate for the lower movement in which we live. The mind can reflect the Infinite, it can dissolve itself into it, it can live in it by a large passivity, it can take its suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way always fragmentary, derivative and subject to a greater or less deformation, but it cannot be itself the direct and perfect instrument of the infinite Spirit acting in its own knowledge. The divine Will and Wisdom organising the action of the infinite consciousness and determining all things according to the truth of the spirit and the law of its manifestation is not mental but supramental and even in its formulation nearest to mind as much above the mental consciousness in its light and power as the mental consciousness of man above the vital mind of the lower creation. The question is how far the perfected human being can raise himself above mind, enter into some kind of fusing union with the supramental and build up in himself a level of supermind, a developed gnosis by the form and power of which the divine shakti can directly act, not through a mental translation, but organically in her supramental nature.
4.1 - Jnana, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
93. Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next Equality of soul, last ecstasy.
94. All renunciation is for a greater joy yet ungrasped. Some renounce for the joy of duty done, some for the joy of peace, some for the joy of God and some for the joy of self-torture, but renounce rather as a passage to the freedom and untroubled rapture beyond.
4.2 - Karma, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
275. The Theosophists are wrong in their circumstances but right in the essential. If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snows dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and Equality.
276. All speech and action comes prepared out of the eternal
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324. "Freedom, Equality, brotherhood," cried the French revolutionists, but in truth freedom only has been practised with a dose of Equality; as for brotherhood, only a brotherhood of
Cain was founded - and of Barabbas. Sometimes it calls itself a Trust or Combine and sometimes the Concert of Europe.
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Europe, "let us try liberty cum Equality or, since the two are a little hard to pair, Equality instead of liberty. For brotherhood, it is impossible; therefore we will replace it by industrial association." But this time also, I think, God will not be deceived.
326. India had three fortresses of a communal life, the village community, the larger joint family & the orders of the Sannyasins; all these are broken or breaking with the stride of egoistic conceptions of social life; but is not this after all only the breaking of these imperfect moulds on the way to a larger
4.3.3 - Dealing with Hostile Attacks, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are two things that make it impossible for them [the hostile forces] to succeed even temporarily in any attack on the mind or the vitalfirst, an entire love, devotion and confidence that nothing can shake, secondly, a calm and Equality in the vital as well as in the mind which has become the fundamental character of the inner nature. Suggestions then may still come, things go wrong outside, but the being remains invulnerable. Either of these two things is sufficient in itself and in proportion as they grow, even the existence of the hostile forces becomes less and less of a phenomenon of the inner lifethough they may still be there in the outer atmosphere.
***
5.1.03 - The Hostile Forces and Hostile Beings, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The universe is certainly or has been up to now in appearance a rough and wasteful game with the dice of chance loaded in favour of the Powers of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we have to take it as it is and find out - if we reject the way out of the old sages - the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all a wide terrain of Equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting into it that we can have the eye that sees and
The Hostile Forces and Hostile Beings
6.08 - THE CONTENT AND MEANING OF THE FIRST TWO STAGES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[747] Christianity, to return to our previous argument, was a unio mentalis in the overcoming of the body. In just this respect the rite fulfilled its purpose, so far as that is possible for fallible human beings. Ancient mans sensuous delight in the body and in nature did not disappear in the process, but found free play in the long list of sins which has never at any time diminished in scope. His knowledge of nature, however, presents a special problem. Ever since antiquity it had flourished only in secret and among the few, but it handed down certain basic conceptions through the centuries and, in the later Middle Ages, fertilized mans reawakened interest in natural bodies. Had the alchemists not had at least a secret premonition that their Christian unio mentalis had not yet realized the union with the world of the body, their almost mystical thirst for knowledge would scarcely be explicable, let alone the symbolism, rivalling that of Christianity, which began to develop already at the end of the thirteenth century. The Christ-lapis parallel shows more clearly than anything else that the world of natural bodies laid claim to Equality and hence to realization in the second stage of the coniunctio.
[748] This raised the question of the way in which the coniunctio could be effected. Dorn answered this by proposing, instead of an overcoming of the body, the typical alchemical process of the separatio, solutio, incineratio, sublimatio, etc. of the red or white wine, the purpose of this procedure being to produce a physical equivalent of the substantia coelestis, recognized by the spirit as the truth and as the image of God innate in man. Whatever names the alchemists gave to the mysterious substance they sought to produce, it was always a celestial substance, i.e., something transcendental, which, in contrast to the perishability of all known matter, was incorruptible, inert as a metal or a stone, and yet alive, like an organic being, and at the same time a universal medicament. Such a body was quite obviously not to be met with in experience. The tenacity with which the adepts pursued this goal for at least seventeen hundred years can be explained only by the numinosity of this idea. And we do indeed find, even in the ancient alchemy of Zosimos, clear indications of the archetype of the Anthropos,221 as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy; an image that pervades the whole of alchemy down to the figure of the homunculus in Faust. The idea of the Anthropos springs from the notion of an original state of universal animation, for which reason the old Masters interpreted their Mercurius as the anima mundi; and just as the original animation could be found in all matter, so too could the anima mundi. It was imprinted on all bodies as their raison dtre, as an image of the demiurge who incarnated in his own creation and got caught in it. Nothing was easier than to identify this anima mundi with the Biblical imago Dei, which represented the truth revealed to the spirit. For the early thinkers the soul was by no means a merely intellectual concept; it was visualized sensuously as a breath-body or a volatile but physical substance which, it was readily supposed, could be chemically extracted and fixed by means of a suitable procedure. This intention was served by the preparation of the phlegma vini. As I pointed out earlier, this was not the spirit and water of the wine but its solid residue, the chthonic and corporeal part which would not ordinarily be regarded as the essential and valuable thing about the wine.
7.06 - The Body (the Physical), #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ananda in the physical body: purified of all desire and all repulsion, in a perfect Equality and surrender, the physical body is ready to enjoy the divine Ananda.
Ananda in the centres: this will be one of the good results of the conversion of the physical.
7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
XXVIII. Equality of the Body Equality of the Soul 1 1 1
XXIX. Personal Effort and Will 113
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in fact. Apart from the Equality of the vital, and the
Equality of the body, there is also the Equality of the mind
proper. That is to say, all ideas from all quarters may
Big Mind (ten perfections), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
My aim, is always to bring about a state of awareness that takes into consideration that we are all one, and yet we are each absolutely unique in our differences, that true democracy is not thinking that we are all equal and neglecting the fact that we are all different. In other words, my understanding of Equality is not that we chop off the legs of someone seven feet tall and add extra inches to someone who is five feet tall to try to make them equal. I appreciate the seven footer as a seven-foot human being, and the five footer as a five-foot human being - absolutely equal, and yet uniquely different.
I appreciate and try to do my best to help people see and appreciate that parent is parent and child is child. Children in their child-ness are absolutely equal to parents in their parent-ness, and I still appreciate their differences. The same is true for teacher and student.
Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
mechanical equilibrium, involving Equality between action and reaction. In a system wherein
a piston exerts pressure on a liquid contained in two communicating vessels, the subject can
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as to change what is. At the fifth level, he values Equality of opportunity and the mechanistic,
measuring, quantitative approach to problems, including man. He thinks it is right to receive
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Bottom line: Community harmony and Equality14
Basic theme: Seek peace within the inner self and explore, with others, the caring dimensions
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to the cold rationality of Orange); harmony and Equality; reconciliation, consensus, dialogue,
participation, relationships, and networking; human development, bonding and spirituality;
--
universal principles of justice: the Equality of human rights and respect for the dignity
of human beings as individuals. These are not merely values that are recognized, but
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
. . . "While the absolute Equality of the primordial units of mass is thus an essential part
of the very foundations of the mechanical theory, the whole modern Science of
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with the first proposition of the atomo-mechanical theory -- namely, the absolute Equality of the
primordial units of mass.
Book of Genesis, #The Bible, #Anonymous, #Various
The first three chapters of Genesis are the best known of Hebrew Scripture: Chapter One presents God's creation of the world. In Genesis 1:14, God designated appointed times - - moadim - for His creation. Genesis 1:26-27 relates that God decided to make man in our image and likeness. The idea of human dignity, that we are created in the image of God (1:27), supports the theological basis for human Equality and the core principle of liberty in Western Christian civilization, as found in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Chapter Two provides further detail on the creation of man and woman. Chapter Three records the temptation and fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. The first line of Genesis is truly one of the most famous lines of Hebrew Scripture:
Genesis 1:1.
BOOK XI. - Augustine passes to the second part of the work, in which the origin, progress, and destinies of the earthly and heavenly cities are discussed.Speculations regarding the creation of the world, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
That certain angels sinned, and were thrust down to the lowest parts of this world, where they are, as it were, incarcerated till their final damnation in the day of judgment, the Apostle Peter very plainly declares, when he says that "God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment."[510] Who, then, can doubt that God, either in foreknowledge or in act, separated between these and the rest? And who will dispute that the rest are justly called "light?" For even we who are yet living by faith, hoping only and not yet enjoying Equality with them, are already called "light" by the apostle: "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord."[511] But as for these apostate angels, all[Pg 478] who understand or believe them to be worse than unbelieving men are well aware that they are called "darkness." Wherefore, though light and darkness are to be taken in their literal signification in these passages of Genesis in which it is said, "God said, Let there be light, and there was light," and "God divided the light from the darkness," yet, for our part, we understand these two societies of angels,the one enjoying God, the other swelling with pride; the one to whom it is said, "Praise ye Him, all His angels,"[512] the other whose prince says, "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me;"[513] the one blazing with the holy love of God, the other reeking with the unclean lust of self-advancement. And since, as it is written, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble,"[514] we may say, the one dwelling in the heaven of heavens, the other cast thence, and raging through the lower regions of the air; the one tranquil in the brightness of piety, the other tempest-tossed with beclouding desires; the one, at God's pleasure, tenderly succouring, justly avenging,the other, set on by its own pride, boiling with the lust of subduing and hurting; the one the minister of God's goodness to the utmost of their good pleasure, the other held in by God's power from doing the harm it would; the former laughing at the latter when it does good unwillingly by its persecutions, the latter envying the former when it gathers in its pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, dissimilar and contrary to one another, the one both by nature good and by will upright, the other also good by nature but by will depraved, as they are exhibited in other and more explicit passages of holy writ, so I think they are spoken of in this book of Genesis under the names of light and darkness; and even if the author perhaps had a different meaning, yet our discussion of the obscure language has not been wasted time; for, though we have been unable to discover his meaning, yet we have adhered to the rule of faith, which is sufficiently ascertained by the faithful from other passages of equal authority. For, though it is the material works of God which are here spoken of, they have certainly a resemblance to the spiritual, so that Paul can say, "Ye are all the children of light, and[Pg 479] the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness."[515] If, on the other hand, the author of Genesis saw in the words what we see, then our discussion reaches this more satisfactory conclusion, that the man of God, so eminently and divinely wise, or rather, that the Spirit of God who by him recorded God's works which were finished on the sixth day, may be supposed not to have omitted all mention of the angels, whether he included them in the words "in the beginning," because He made them first, or, which seems most likely, because He made them in the only-begotten Word. And, under these names heaven and earth, the whole creation is signified, either as divided into spiritual and material, which seems the more likely, or into the two great parts of the world in which all created things are contained, so that, first of all, the creation is presented in sum, and then its parts are enumerated according to the mystic number of the days.
34. Of the idea that the angels were meant where the separation of the waters by the firmament is spoken of, and of that other idea that the waters were not created.
BOOK XIX. - A review of the philosophical opinions regarding the Supreme Good, and a comparison of these opinions with the Christian belief regarding happiness, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But let us suppose a man such as poetry and mythology speak of,a man so insociable and savage as to be called rather[Pg 317] a semi-man than a man.[640] Although, then, his kingdom was the solitude of a dreary cave, and he himself was so singularly bad-hearted that he was named , which is the Greek word for bad; though he had no wife to soo the him with endearing talk, no children to play with, no sons to do his bidding, no friend to enliven him with intercourse, not even his father Vulcan (though in one respect he was happier than his father, not having begotten a monster like himself); although he gave to no man, but took as he wished whatever he could, from whomsoever he could, when he could; yet in that solitary den, the floor of which, as Virgil[641] says, was always reeking with recent slaughter, there was nothing else than peace sought, a peace in which no one should molest him, or disquiet him with any assault or alarm. With his own body he desired to be at peace; and he was satisfied only in proportion as he had this peace. For he ruled his members, and they obeyed him; and for the sake of pacifying his mortal nature, which rebelled when it needed anything, and of allaying the sedition of hunger which threatened to banish the soul from the body, he made forays, slew, and devoured, but used the ferocity and savageness he displayed in these actions only for the preservation of his own life's peace. So that, had he been willing to make with other men the same peace which he made with himself in his own cave, he would neither have been called bad, nor a monster, nor a semi-man. Or if the appearance of his body and his vomiting smoky fires frightened men from having any dealings with him, perhaps his fierce ways arose not from a desire to do mischief, but from the necessity of finding a living. But he may have had no existence, or, at least, he was not such as the poets fancifully describe him, for they had to exalt Hercules, and did so at the expense of Cacus. It is better, then, to believe that such a man or semi-man never existed, and that this, in common with many other fancies of the poets, is mere fiction. For the most savage animals (and he is said to have been almost a wild beast) encompass their own species with a ring of protecting peace. They cohabit, beget, produce, suckle, and bring up their young, though very many of them are not gregarious, but solitary,not like sheep, deer, pigeons, starlings,[Pg 318] bees, but such as lions, foxes, eagles, bats. For what tigress does not gently purr over her cubs, and lay aside her ferocity to fondle them? What kite, solitary as he is when circling over his prey, does not seek a mate, build a nest, hatch the eggs, bring up the young birds, and maintain with the mother of his family as peaceful a domestic alliance as he can? How much more powerfully do the laws of man's nature move him to hold fellowship and maintain peace with all men so far as in him lies, since even wicked men wage war to maintain the peace of their own circle, and wish that, if possible, all men belonged to them, that all men and things might serve but one head, and might, either through love or fear, yield themselves to peace with him! It is thus that pride in its perversity apes God. It abhors Equality with other men under Him; but, instead of His rule, it seeks to impose a rule of its own upon its equals. It abhors, that is to say, the just peace of God, and loves its own unjust peace; but it cannot help loving peace of one kind or other. For there is no vice so clean contrary to nature that it obliterates even the faintest traces of nature.
He, then, who prefers what is right to what is wrong, and what is well-ordered to what is perverted, sees that the peace of unjust men is not worthy to be called peace in comparison with the peace of the just. And yet even what is perverted must of necessity be in harmony with, and in dependence on, and in some part of the order of things, for otherwise it would have no existence at all. Suppose a man hangs with his head downwards, this is certainly a perverted attitude of body and arrangement of its members; for that which nature requires to be above is beneath, and vice vers. This perversity disturbs the peace of the body, and is therefore painful. Nevertheless the spirit is at peace with its body, and labours for its preservation, and hence the suffering; but if it is banished from the body by its pains, then, so long as the bodily framework holds together, there is in the remains a kind of peace among the members, and hence the body remains suspended. And inasmuch as the earthy body tends towards the earth, and rests on the bond by which it is suspended, it tends thus to its natural peace, and the voice of its own weight demands a place for it to rest; and though now lifeless and without feeling, it does[Pg 319] not fall from the peace that is natural to its place in creation, whether it already has it, or is tending towards it. For if you apply embalming preparations to prevent the bodily frame from mouldering and dissolving, a kind of peace still unites part to part, and keeps the whole body in a suitable place on the earth,in other words, in a place that is at peace with the body. If, on the other hand, the body receive no such care, but be left to the natural course, it is disturbed by exhalations that do not harmonize with one another, and that offend our senses; for it is this which is perceived in putrefaction until it is assimilated to the elements of the world, and particle by particle enters into peace with them. Yet throughout this process the laws of the most high Creator and Governor are strictly observed, for it is by Him the peace of the universe is administered. For although minute animals are produced from the carcase of a larger animal, all these little atoms, by the law of the same Creator, serve the animals they belong to in peace. And although the flesh of dead animals be eaten by others, no matter where it be carried, nor what it be brought into contact with, nor what it be converted and changed into, it still is ruled by the same laws which pervade all things for the conservation of every mortal race, and which bring things that fit one another into harmony.
BOOK XXII. - Of the eternal happiness of the saints, the resurrection of the body, and the miracles of the early Church, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But their way is to feign a scrupulous anxiety in investigating this question, and to cast ridicule on our faith in the resurrection of the body, by asking, Whether abortions shall rise? And as the Lord says, "Verily I say unto you, not a hair of your head shall perish,"[986] shall all bodies have an equal stature and strength, or shall there be differences in size? For if there is to be Equality, where shall those abortions, supposing that they rise again, get that bulk which[Pg 505] they had not here? Or if they shall not rise because they were not born but cast out, they raise the same question about children who have died in childhood, asking us whence they get the stature which we see they had not here; for we will not say that those who have been not only born, but born again, shall not rise again. Then, further, they ask of what size these equal bodies shall be. For if all shall be as tall and large as were the tallest and largest in this world, they ask us how it is that not only children but many full-grown persons shall receive what they here did not possess, if each one is to receive what he had here. And if the saying of the apostle, that we are all to come to the "measure of the age of the fulness of Christ,"[987] or that other saying, "Whom He predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son,"[988] is to be understood to mean that the stature and size of Christ's body shall be the measure of the bodies of all those who shall be in His kingdom, then, say they, the size and height of many must be diminished; and if so much of the bodily frame itself be lost, what becomes of the saying, "Not a hair of your head shall perish?" Besides, it might be asked regarding the hair itself, whether all that the barber has cut off shall be restored? And if it is to be restored, who would not shrink from such deformity? For as the same restoration will be made of what has been pared off the nails, much will be replaced on the body which a regard for its appearance had cut off. And where, then, will be its beauty, which assuredly ought to be much greater in that immortal condition than it could be in this corruptible state? On the other hand, if such things are not restored to the body, they must perish; how, then, they say, shall not a hair of the head perish? In like manner they reason about fatness and leanness; for if all are to be equal, then certainly there shall not be some fat, others lean. Some, therefore, shall gain, others lose something. Consequently there will not be a simple restoration of what formerly existed, but, on the one hand, an addition of what had no existence, and, on the other, a loss of what did before exist.
The difficulties, too, about the corruption and dissolution[Pg 506] of dead bodies,that one is turned into dust, while another evaporates into the air; that some are devoured by beasts, some by fire, while some perish by shipwreck or by drowning in one shape or other, so that their bodies decay into liquid,these difficulties give them immoderate alarm, and they believe that all those dissolved elements cannot be gathered again and reconstructed into a body. They also make eager use of all the deformities and blemishes which either accident or birth has produced, and accordingly, with horror and derision, cite monstrous births, and ask if every deformity will be preserved in the resurrection. For if we say that no such thing shall be reproduced in the body of a man, they suppose that they confute us by citing the marks of the wounds which we assert were found in the risen body of the Lord Christ. But of all these, the most difficult question is, into whose body that flesh shall return which has been eaten and assimilated by another man constrained by hunger to use it so; for it has been converted into the flesh of the man who used it as his nutriment, and it filled up those losses of flesh which famine had produced. For the sake, then, of ridiculing the resurrection, they ask, Shall this return to the man whose flesh it first was, or to him whose flesh it afterwards became? And thus, too, they seek to give promise to the human soul of alternations of true misery and false happiness, in accordance with Plato's theory; or, in accordance with Porphyry's, that, after many transmigrations into different bodies, it ends its miseries, and never more returns to them, not, however, by obtaining an immortal body, but by escaping from every kind of body.
ENNEAD 02.09 - Against the Gnostics; or, That the Creator and the World are Not Evil., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
9. No one would complain of poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth if one realized that the sage does not seek Equality in such things, because he does not consider that the rich man has any advantage over the poor man, the prince over the subject.344 The sage leaves such opinions to commonplace people, for he knows that there are two kinds of life; that of the virtuous who achieve the supreme degree (of perfection) and the intelligible world, and that of common earthly men. Even the latter life is double; for though at times they do think of virtue, and participate somewhat in the good, at other times they form only a vile crowd, and are only machines, destined to satisfy the primary needs of virtuous people.345 There is no reason to be surprised at a man committing a murder, or, through weakness, yielding to his passions, when souls, that behave like young, inexperienced persons, not indeed like intelligences, daily behave thus. It has been said346 that this life is a struggle in which one is either victor or vanquished. But is not this very condition a proof of good arrangement? What does it matter if you are wronged, so long as you are immortal? If you be killed, you achieve the fate that you desired. If you have reason to complain of how you are treated in some particular city, you can leave it.347 Besides, even here below, there evidently are rewards and punishments. Why then complain of a society within which distributive justice is exercised, where virtue is honored, and where vice meets its deserved punishment348?
MOREOVER THIS WORLD CONTAINS TRADITIONS OF DIVINITY.
ENNEAD 03.03 - Continuation of That on Providence., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
5. From first to last Providence descends from on high, communicating its gifts not according to the law of an Equality that would be numeric, but proportionate, varying its operations according to locality (or occasion). So, in the organization of an animal, from beginning to end, everything is related; every member has its peculiar function, superior or inferior, according to the rank it occupies; it has also its peculiar passions, passions which are in harmony with its nature, and the place it occupies in the system of things. So, for instance, a blow excites responses that differ according to the organ that received it; the vocal organ will produce a sound; another organ will suffer in silence, or execute a movement resultant from that passion; now, all sounds, actions and passions form in the animal the unity of sound, life and existence.89 The parts, being various, play different roles; thus there are differing functions for the feet, the eyes, discursive reason, and intelligence. But all things form one unity, relating to a single Providence, so that destiny governs what is below, and providence reigns alone in what is on high. In fact, all that lies in the intelligible world is either rational or super-rational, namely: Intelligence and pure Soul. What derives therefrom constitutes Providence, as far as it derives1085 therefrom, as it is in pure Soul, and thence passes into the animals. Thence arises (universal) Reason, which, being distributed in unequal parts, produces things unequal, such as the members of an animal. As consequences from Providence are derived the human deeds which are agreeable to the divinity. All such actions are related (to the plan of Providence); they are not done by Providence; but when a man, or another animate or inanimate being performs some deeds, these, if there be any good in them, enter into the plan of Providence, which everywhere establishes virtue, and amends or corrects errors. Thus does every animal maintain its bodily health by the kind of providence within him; on the occasion of a cut or wound the ("seminal) reason" which administers the body of this animal immediately draws (the tissues) together, and forms scars over the flesh, re-establishes health, and invigorates the members that have suffered.
THE PLANS OF PROVIDENCE LIKENED TO THE FOREKNOWLEDGE OF A PHYSICIAN.
ENNEAD 05.05 - That Intelligible Entities Are Not External to the Intelligence of the Good., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02, #Plotinus, #Christianity
12. We should not seek to perceive an object otherwise than by the faculty that is suitable to cognize it. Thus colors are perceived by the eyes, sounds by the ears, and other qualities by other senses. Analogy would assign to intelligence its proper function, so that thinking should not be identified with seeing and hearing. To act otherwise would be to resemble a man who would try to perceive colors by the ears, and who would deny the existence of sounds because he could not see them. We must never forget that men have forgotten the Principle which from the beginning until this day has excited their desires and wishes. Indeed all things aspire to the first Principle, tend thither by a natural necessity, and seem to divine that they could not exist without Him. The notion of the beautiful is given only to souls that are awake, and that already possess some knowledge; at sight of Him they are simultaneously dazed with His sublimity, and spurred on by love.270 From His very origin, on the contrary, the Good excites in us an innate desire; He is present with us even in sleep; His view never dazes us with stupor, because He is always with us. Enjoyment of His presence demands neither reminiscence nor attention,594 because one is not deprived thereof even in sleep. When the love of the beautiful overwhelms us, it causes us anxieties, because the sight of the beautiful makes us desire it. As the love excited by the beautiful is only secondary, and as it exists only in such persons as possess already some knowledge, the beautiful evidently occupies only the second rank. On the contrary, the desire of the Good is more original, and demands no preliminary knowledge. That surely demonstrates that the Good is anterior and superior to the beautiful. Besides, all men are satisfied as soon as they possess the Good; they consider that they have reached their goal. But not all think that the beautiful suffices them; they think that the beautiful is beautiful for itself, rather than for them; as the beauty of an individual is an advantage only for himself. Last, the greater number of people are satisfied with seeming beautiful, even if they are not so in reality; but they are not satisfied with seeming to possess the Good, which they desire to possess in reality. Indeed, all desire to have that which occupies the front rank; but they struggle, they engage in rivalry about the beautiful in the opinion that it is born just as they are (from development of circumstances). They resemble a person who would claim Equality with another person who holds the first rank after the king, because both depend from the king; such a person does not realize that though both are subject to the king, yet there is a great difference in hierarchical rank between them271; the cause of this error is that both participate in a same principle, that the One is superior to both of them, and that lastly the Good has no need of the beautiful, while the beautiful is in need of the Good.272 The Good is sweet, calm, and full of delights; we enjoy it at will. On the contrary, the beautiful strikes the soul with amazement, agitates it, and mingles pains with pleasures. In spite of ourselves we are thereby595 often separated from the Good, like a beloved object separates a son from the father. The Good is more ancient than the beautiful, not in time, but in reality; besides, it exerts superior power, because it is unlimited. That which is inferior to it, possesses only an inferior and dependent power, instead of having a limitless power (as belongs to Intelligence, which is inferior to the Good). The Divinity therefore is master of the power which is inferior to His own; He has no need of things that are begotten; for it is from Him that all their contents are derived. Besides, He had no need of begetting; He still is such as He was before; nothing would have been changed for Him if He had not begotten; if it had been possible for other things to receive existence (independently of Himself) He would not have opposed it through jealousy. It is now no longer possible for anything to be begotten, for the divinity has begotten all that He could beget. Nor is He the universality of things, for thus He would stand in need of them. Raised above all things, He has been able to beget them, and to permit them to exist for themselves by dominating all.
THE SUPREMACY OF THE GOOD IMPLIES HE IS SUPERIOR TO ALL POSSESSIONS.
ENNEAD 06.01 - Of the Ten Aristotelian and Four Stoic Categories., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
8. The above digression gives us the opportunity of investigating why there should be a difference between these relations, and those of which we spoke above. However, we should be glad to have the Aristotelians first state what community of existence obtains in this correlation. It would be impossible to claim that this community was anything corporeal. If then it be corporeal, it must exist either within the very subjects, or without them. If such a habituation be identical among all, it is a synonym. If it be a habituation which differs according to the subjects in which it exists, it is a homonym; for the mere name of "habituation" (in different things) does not always correspond to the existence of any genuine similarity. Should we then divide the habituations into two classes, recognizing that certain objects have an inert and inactive habituation, implying simultaneity of existence, and that other objects have a habituation always implying "potentiality" and "actualization," so that before "actualizing" the "potentiality" be already ready to exert itself, and to pass from "potentiality" to "actualization" in the approximation of relative conditions? Must we assert that in general certain things actualize, while others limit themselves to existing? Must we also assert that that which limits itself to existence only gives its correlative a name, while that which actualizes gives it existence? Of this latter850 kind of things are the father and son, the "active" and "passive," for such things exert a kind of life and action. Must we then divide habituation in several kinds, not as possessing something similar and common in the differences, but as having a nature different in each member of the division, and thus constituting a "homonym" (or, mere verbal label)? In this case, we would apply to the active habituation the names of "doing" and "suffering," because both imply an identical action. Further, we will have to posit another "habituation" which, without itself actualizing, implies something which acts in two relative terms. For example, there is Equality; which equates two objects; for it is Equality which renders things equal, just as identity makes them identical; just as the names "great" and "small" are derived one from the presence of greatness, and the other from that of smallness. But if we should consider greatness and smallness in the individuals which participate therein, it must be acknowledged that such individual is greater by the act of greatness which manifests in him, and that another is smaller because of the inherent act of littleness.
HABITUATIONS ARE REASONS THAT PARTICIPATE IN FORMS.
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As to rough, united, rare and dense269 these could not be called qualities; for they do not consist only in a relative separation or reapproximation of the parts of a body, and do not proceed everywhere from the in Equality or Equality of position; if they did, they might be regarded as qualities. Lightness and weight, also, could be correctly classified, if carefully studied. In any case, lightness is only a verbal similarity (a858 "homonym") unless it be understood to mean diminution of weight. In this same class might also be found leanness and slimness, which form a class different from the four preceding ideas.
PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF QUALITY.
ENNEAD 06.02 - The Categories of Plotinos., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
(Of the essences it contains) it possesses the number, as it is both one and many. It is many, that is, (it is) many potentialities, which are admirable powers, full of force and greatness, because they are pure; powers that are vigorous and veritable because they have no goal at which they are forced to stop; consequently being infinite, that is, supreme Infinity, and Greatness. If then we were to scrutinize this greatness and beauty of being, if by the splendor and light which surround it, we were to distinguish what Intelligence contains, then would we see the efflorescing of quality. With the continuity of actualization we would behold greatness, in quiescent condition. As we have seen one (number), two (quality), and three (greatness), greatness, as the third thing, presents itself with universal quantity. Now, as soon as quality and quantity show themselves to us, they unite, blend into one and the same figure (outward appearance). Then comes difference, which divides quality and quantity, whence arise different qualities, and differences of figure. The presence of identity produces Equality, and that of difference, in Equality, both in quantity, number, and dimension; hence the circle, the quadrilateral, and the figures composed of unequal things; hence numbers that are similar, and different, even and uneven.
THIS INTELLECTUAL LIFE POSSESSES THE REASONS OR IDEAS.
ENNEAD 06.03 - Plotinos Own Sense-Categories., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
What distinctions are admitted by continuous quantity? There is the line, the surface, and the solid; for extension may exist in one, two or three dimensions (and thus count the numerical elements of continuous size) instead of establishing species.389 In numbers thus considered as anterior or posterior to each other, there is nothing in common, which would constitute a genus. Likewise in the first, second and third increases (of a line, surface, and solid) there is nothing in common; but as far as quantity is found, there is also Equality (and in Equality), although there be no extension which is quantitative more than any other.390 However, one may have dimensions greater than another. It is therefore only in so far as they are all numbers, that numbers can have anything in common.956 Perhaps, indeed, it is not the monad that begets the pair, nor the pair that begets the triad, but it may be the same principle which begets all the numbers. If numbers be not derivative, but exist by themselves, we may, at least within our own thought, consider them as begotten (or, derivative). We conceive of the smaller number as the anterior, the greater as posterior. But numbers, as such, may all be reduced to unity.
STUDY OF GEOMETRICAL FIGURES.
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In general, the differences which complete a being should be classified along with that of which they are the differences, especially when a difference belongs to a single subject. If a difference complete the being of a subject, and do not complete the being of another, this difference should be classified along with the subject whose being it completes, leaving that whose being it does not complete for separate consideration. By this we do not mean completing the Being in general, but completing some particular being, so that the subject spoken of as a particular one admits no further essential addition. We therefore have the right to say that triangles, or that quadrilaterals, as well as surfaces and solids, are equal, and to predicate Equality or in Equality of quantitative entities. But we yet have to study whether quality only can be said to be similar or dissimilar.395
WHETHER QUALITY ONLY CAN BE CALLED SIMILAR OR DISSIMILAR.
Gorgias, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Socrates professes to have found in Callicles the philosopher's touchstone; and he is certain that any opinion in which they both agree must be the very truth. Callicles has all the three qualities which are needed in a criticknowledge, good-will, frankness; Gorgias and Polus, although learned men, were too modest, and their modesty made them contradict themselves. But Callicles is well-educated; and he is not too modest to speak out (of this he has already given proof), and his good-will is shown both by his own profession and by his giving the same caution against philosophy to Socrates, which Socrates remembers hearing him give long ago to his own clique of friends. He will pledge himself to retract any error into which he may have fallen, and which Callicles may point out. But he would like to know first of all what he and Pindar mean by natural justice. Do they suppose that the rule of justice is the rule of the stronger or of the better?' 'There is no difference.' Then are not the many superior to the one, and the opinions of the many better? And their opinion is that justice is Equality, and that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer wrong. And as they are the superior or stronger, this opinion of theirs must be in accordance with natural as well as conventional justice. 'Why will you continue splitting words? Have I not told you that the superior is the better?' But what do you mean by the better? Tell me that, and please to be a little milder in your language, if you do not wish to drive me away. 'I mean the worthier, the wiser.' You mean to say that one man of sense ought to rule over ten thousand fools? 'Yes, that is my meaning.' Ought the physician then to have a larger share of meats and drinks? or the weaver to have more coats, or the cobbler larger shoes, or the farmer more seed? 'You are always saying the same things, Socrates.' Yes, and on the same subjects too; but you are never saying the same things. For, first, you defined the superior to be the stronger, and then the wiser, and now something else;what DO you mean? 'I mean men of political ability, who ought to govern and to have more than the governed.' Than themselves? 'What do you mean?' I mean to say that every man is his own governor. 'I see that you mean those dolts, the temperate. But my doctrine is, that a man should let his desires grow, and take the means of satisfying them. To the many this is impossible, and therefore they combine to prevent him. But if he is a king, and has power, how base would he be in submitting to them! To invite the common herd to be lord over him, when he might have the enjoyment of all things! For the truth is, Socrates, that luxury and self-indulgence are virtue and happiness; all the rest is mere talk.'
Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness in saying what other men only think. According to his view, those who want nothing are not happy. 'Why,' says Callicles, 'if they were, stones and the dead would be happy.' Socrates in reply is led into a half-serious, half-comic vein of reflection. 'Who knows,' as Euripides says, 'whether life may not be death, and death life?' Nay, there are philosophers who maintain that even in life we are dead, and that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul. And some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he represents fools as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying water to a vessel, which is full of holes, in a similarly holey sieve, and this sieve is their own soul. The idea is fanciful, but nevertheless is a figure of a truth which I want to make you acknowledge, viz. that the life of contentment is better than the life of indulgence. Are you disposed to admit that? 'Far otherwise.' Then hear another parable. The life of self-contentment and self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two men, who are filling jars with streams of wine, honey, milk,the jars of the one are sound, and the jars of the other leaky; the first fils his jars, and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling them, and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you of the same opinion still? 'Yes, Socrates, and the figure expresses what I mean. For true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing in and flowing out. To be hungry and always eating, to be thirsty and always drinking, and to have all the other desires and to satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of happiness.' And to be itching and always scratching? 'I do not deny that there may be happiness even in that.' And to indulge unnatural desires, if they are abundantly satisfied? Callicles is indignant at the introduction of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are introduced, not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of pleasure and good. Will Callicles still maintain this? 'Yes, for the sake of consistency, he will.' The answer does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone. A profession of seriousness on the part of Callicles reassures him, and they proceed with the argument. Pleasure and good are the same, but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure or good, or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these statements by showing that two opposites cannot coexist, but must alternate with one anotherto be well and ill together is impossible. But pleasure and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation of them is simultaneous; e.g. in the case of drinking and thirsting, whereas good and evil are not simultaneous, and do not cease simultaneously, and therefore pleasure cannot be the same as good.
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d. A few minor points still remain to be summed up: (1) The extravagant irony in the reason which is assigned for the pilot's modest charge; and in the proposed use of rhetoric as an instrument of self-condemnation; and in the mighty power of geometrical Equality in both worlds. (2) The reference of the mythus to the previous discussion should not be overlooked: the fate reserved for incurable criminals such as Archelaus; the retaliation of the box on the ears; the nakedness of the souls and of the judges who are stript of the clothes or disguises which rhetoric and public opinion have hitherto provided for them (compare Swift's notion that the universe is a suit of clothes, Tale of a Tub). The fiction seems to have involved Plato in the necessity of supposing that the soul retained a sort of corporeal likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who says that Odysseus saw Minos in his court 'holding a golden sceptre,' which gives verisimilitude to the tale.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing 'both sides of the game,' and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only attempting to analyze the 'dramatis personae' as they were conceived by him. Neither is it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as well as a philosopher; or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern standard, but interpreted with reference to his place in the history of thought and the opinion of his time.
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CALLICLES: O Socrates, you are a regular declaimer, and seem to be running riot in the argument. And now you are declaiming in this way because Polus has fallen into the same error himself of which he accused Gorgias:for he said that when Gorgias was asked by you, whether, if some one came to him who wanted to learn rhetoric, and did not know justice, he would teach him justice, Gorgias in his modesty replied that he would, because he thought that mankind in general would be displeased if he answered 'No'; and then in consequence of this admission, Gorgias was compelled to contradict himself, that being just the sort of thing in which you delight. Whereupon Polus laughed at you deservedly, as I think; but now he has himself fallen into the same trap. I cannot say very much for his wit when he conceded to you that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer injustice, for this was the admission which led to his being entangled by you; and because he was too modest to say what he thought, he had his mouth stopped. For the truth is, Socrates, that you, who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth, are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional. Convention and nature are generally at variance with one another: and hence, if a person is too modest to say what he thinks, he is compelled to contradict himself; and you, in your ingenuity perceiving the advantage to be thereby gained, slyly ask of him who is arguing conventionally a question which is to be determined by the rule of nature; and if he is talking of the rule of nature, you slip away to custom: as, for instance, you did in this very discussion about doing and suffering injustice. When Polus was speaking of the conventionally dishonourable, you assailed him from the point of view of nature; for by the rule of nature, to suffer injustice is the greater disgrace because the greater evil; but conventionally, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For the suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; since when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of Equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with Equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth. And this I take to be the sentiment of Pindar, when he says in his poem, that
'Law is the king of all, of mortals as well as of immortals;'
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SOCRATES: And are not the many of opinion, as you were lately saying, that justice is Equality, and that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice?is that so or not? Answer, Callicles, and let no modesty be found to come in the way; do the many think, or do they not think thus?I must beg of you to answer, in order that if you agree with me I may fortify myself by the assent of so competent an authority.
CALLICLES: Yes; the opinion of the many is what you say.
SOCRATES: Then not only custom but nature also affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is Equality; so that you seem to have been wrong in your former assertion, when accusing me you said that nature and custom are opposed, and that I, knowing this, was dishonestly playing between them, appealing to custom when the argument is about nature, and to nature when the argument is about custom?
CALLICLES: This man will never cease talking nonsense. At your age, Socrates, are you not ashamed to be catching at words and chuckling over some verbal slip? do you not seehave I not told you already, that by superior I mean better: do you imagine me to say, that if a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, get together, their ipsissima verba are laws?
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And will not the temperate man do what is proper, both in relation to the gods and to men;for he would not be temperate if he did not? Certainly he will do what is proper. In his relation to other men he will do what is just; and in his relation to the gods he will do what is holy; and he who does what is just and holy must be just and holy? Very true. And must he not be courageous? for the duty of a temperate man is not to follow or to avoid what he ought not, but what he ought, whether things or men or pleasures or pains, and patiently to endure when he ought; and therefore, Callicles, the temperate man, being, as we have described, also just and courageous and holy, cannot be other than a perfectly good man, nor can the good man do otherwise than well and perfectly whatever he does; and he who does well must of necessity be happy and blessed, and the evil man who does evil, miserable: now this latter is he whom you were applaudingthe intemperate who is the opposite of the temperate. Such is my position, and these things I affirm to be true. And if they are true, then I further affirm that he who desires to be happy must pursue and practise temperance and run away from intemperance as fast as his legs will carry him: he had better order his life so as not to need punishment; but if either he or any of his friends, whether private individual or city, are in need of punishment, then justice must be done and he must suffer punishment, if he would be happy. This appears to me to be the aim which a man ought to have, and towards which he ought to direct all the energies both of himself and of the state, acting so that he may have temperance and justice present with him and be happy, not suffering his lusts to be unrestrained, and in the never-ending desire satisfy them leading a robber's life. Such a one is the friend neither of God nor man, for he is incapable of communion, and he who is incapable of communion is also incapable of friendship. And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not disorder or misrule, my friend. But although you are a philosopher you seem to me never to have observed that geometrical Equality is mighty, both among gods and men; you think that you ought to cultivate in Equality or excess, and do not care about geometry.Well, then, either the principle that the happy are made happy by the possession of justice and temperance, and the miserable miserable by the possession of vice, must be refuted, or, if it is granted, what will be the consequences? All the consequences which I drew before, Callicles, and about which you asked me whether I was in earnest when I said that a man ought to accuse himself and his son and his friend if he did anything wrong, and that to this end he should use his rhetoricall those consequences are true. And that which you thought that Polus was led to admit out of modesty is true, viz., that, to do injustice, if more disgraceful than to suffer, is in that degree worse; and the other position, which, according to Polus, Gorgias admitted out of modesty, that he who would truly be a rhetorician ought to be just and have a knowledge of justice, has also turned out to be true.
And now, these things being as we have said, let us proceed in the next place to consider whether you are right in throwing in my teeth that I am unable to help myself or any of my friends or kinsmen, or to save them in the extremity of danger, and that I am in the power of another like an outlaw to whom any one may do what he likes,he may box my ears, which was a brave saying of yours; or take away my goods or banish me, or even do his worst and kill me; a condition which, as you say, is the height of disgrace. My answer to you is one which has been already often repeated, but may as well be repeated once more. I tell you, Callicles, that to be boxed on the ears wrongfully is not the worst evil which can befall a man, nor to have my purse or my body cut open, but that to smite and slay me and mine wrongfully is far more disgraceful and more evil; aye, and to despoil and enslave and pillage, or in any way at all to wrong me and mine, is far more disgraceful and evil to the doer of the wrong than to me who am the sufferer. These truths, which have been already set forth as I state them in the previous discussion, would seem now to have been fixed and riveted by us, if I may use an expression which is certainly bold, in words which are like bonds of iron and adamant; and unless you or some other still more enterprising hero shall break them, there is no possibility of denying what I say. For my position has always been, that I myself am ignorant how these things are, but that I have never met any one who could say otherwise, any more than you can, and not appear ridiculous. This is my position still, and if what I am saying is true, and injustice is the greatest of evils to the doer of injustice, and yet there is if possible a greater than this greatest of evils (compare Republic), in an unjust man not suffering retri bution, what is that defence of which the want will make a man truly ridiculous? Must not the defence be one which will avert the greatest of human evils? And will not the worst of all defences be that with which a man is unable to defend himself or his family or his friends?and next will come that which is unable to avert the next greatest evil; thirdly that which is unable to avert the third greatest evil; and so of other evils. As is the greatness of evil so is the honour of being able to avert them in their several degrees, and the disgrace of not being able to avert them. Am I not right Callicles?
Liber 111 - The Book of Wisdom - LIBER ALEPH VEL CXI, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Equality of all Things in Our Lady Nuit, and so the high Attainment of
Universal Love. Yet in thy partial and particular Action, as thou art a
Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
banquet of fraternity and Equality! When will you be better understood?
Martyrs of humanity, all ye who have given your life in order that all
--
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," will be nothing but a threefold lie.
CHAPTER III
Phaedo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The Theory of Recollection explains that we possess some non-empirical knowledge (e.g. The Form of Equality) at birth, implying the soul existed before birth to carry that knowledge. Another account of the theory is found in Plato's Meno, although in that case Socrates implies anamnesis (previous knowledge of everything) whereas he is not so bold in Phaedo.
The Affinity Argument explains that invisible, immortal, and incorporeal things are different from visible, mortal, and corporeal things. Our soul is of the former, while our body is of the latter, so when our bodies die and decay, our soul will continue to live.
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The Platonic doctrine of reminiscence is then adduced as a confirmation of the pre-existence of the soul. Some proofs of this doctrine are demanded. One proof given is the same as that of the Meno, and is derived from the latent knowledge of mathematics, which may be elicited from an unlearned person when a diagram is presented to him. Again, there is a power of association, which from seeing Simmias may remember Cebes, or from seeing a picture of Simmias may remember Simmias. The lyre may recall the player of the lyre, and equal pieces of wood or stone may be associated with the higher notion of absolute Equality. But here observe that material equalities fall short of the conception of absolute Equality with which they are compared, and which is the measure of them. And the measure or standard must be prior to that which is measured, the idea of Equality prior to the visible equals. And if prior to them, then prior also to the perceptions of the senses which recall them, and therefore either given before birth or at birth. But all men have not this knowledge, nor have any without a process of reminiscence; which is a proof that it is not innate or given at birth, unless indeed it was given and taken away at the same instant. But if not given to men in birth, it must have been given before birththis is the only alternative which remains. And if we had ideas in a former state, then our souls must have existed and must have had intelligence in a former state. The pre-existence of the soul stands or falls with the doctrine of ideas.
It is objected by Simmias and Cebes that these arguments only prove a former and not a future existence. Socrates answers this objection by recalling the previous argument, in which he had shown that the living come from the dead. But the fear that the soul at departing may vanish into air (especially if there is a wind blowing at the time) has not yet been charmed away. He proceeds: When we fear that the soul will vanish away, let us ask ourselves what is that which we suppose to be liable to dissolution? Is it the simple or the compound, the unchanging or the changing, the invisible idea or the visible object of sense? Clearly the latter and not the former; and therefore not the soul, which in her own pure thought is unchangeable, and only when using the senses descends into the region of change. Again, the soul commands, the body serves: in this respect too the soul is akin to the divine, and the body to the mortal. And in every point of view the soul is the image of divinity and immortality, and the body of the human and mortal. And whereas the body is liable to speedy dissolution, the soul is almost if not quite indissoluble. (Compare Tim.) Yet even the body may be preserved for ages by the embalmer's art: how unlikely, then, that the soul will perish and be dissipated into air while on her way to the good and wise God! She has been gathered into herself, holding aloof from the body, and practising death all her life long, and she is now finally released from the errors and follies and passions of men, and for ever dwells in the company of the gods.
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And shall we proceed a step further, and affirm that there is such a thing as Equality, not of one piece of wood or stone with another, but that, over and above this, there is absolute Equality? Shall we say so?
Say so, yes, replied Simmias, and swear to it, with all the confidence in life.
--
And whence did we obtain our knowledge? Did we not see equalities of material things, such as pieces of wood and stones, and gather from them the idea of an Equality which is different from them? For you will acknowledge that there is a difference. Or look at the matter in another way:Do not the same pieces of wood or stone appear at one time equal, and at another time unequal?
That is certain.
But are real equals ever unequal? or is the idea of Equality the same as of in Equality?
Impossible, Socrates.
Then these (so-called) equals are not the same with the idea of Equality?
I should say, clearly not, Socrates.
And yet from these equals, although differing from the idea of Equality, you conceived and attained that idea?
Very true, he said.
--
But what would you say of equal portions of wood and stone, or other material equals? and what is the impression produced by them? Are they equals in the same sense in which absolute Equality is equal? or do they fall short of this perfect Equality in a measure?
Yes, he said, in a very great measure too.
--
And has not this been our own case in the matter of equals and of absolute Equality?
Precisely.
Then we must have known Equality previously to the time when we first saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals strive to attain absolute Equality, but fall short of it?
Very true.
And we recognize also that this absolute Equality has only been known, and can only be known, through the medium of sight or touch, or of some other of the senses, which are all alike in this respect?
Yes, Socrates, as far as the argument is concerned, one of them is the same as the other.
From the senses then is derived the knowledge that all sensible things aim at an absolute Equality of which they fall short?
Yes.
Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have had a knowledge of absolute Equality, or we could not have referred to that standard the equals which are derived from the senses?for to that they all aspire, and of that they fall short.
No other inference can be drawn from the previous statements.
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Then we must have acquired the knowledge of Equality at some previous time?
Yes.
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And if we acquired this knowledge before we were born, and were born having the use of it, then we also knew before we were born and at the instant of birth not only the equal or the greater or the less, but all other ideas; for we are not speaking only of Equality, but of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and of all which we stamp with the name of essence in the dialectical process, both when we ask and when we answer questions. Of all this we may certainly affirm that we acquired the knowledge before birth?
We may.
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Then now let us return to the previous discussion. Is that idea or essence, which in the dialectical process we define as essence or true existencewhether essence of Equality, beauty, or anything elseare these essences, I say, liable at times to some degree of change? or are they each of them always what they are, having the same simple self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of variation at all, or in any way, or at any time?
They must be always the same, Socrates, replied Cebes.
r1913 01 31, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The transition which has been for some time in process of accomplishment, completes itself today. Formerly life was regarded as a thing to be worked upon and worked out, by active mental will and bodily means,speech, writing, work etc. A thing written had to be composed. An intellectual difficulty had to be thought out, a conclusion fixed and edified. That which was undiscovered, had to be sought for by speculation, reasoning, experiment. That which was unattained, had to be constructed by labour, attempt, adaptation of means, careful manipulation of materials. The remnants of this way of seeing clung until now to the thought and action, but henceforth it is removed. Life is a great mass of existence, Sat, moulding itself through its own Tapas. All that has to be done is for the Jiva, the knowledge centre of this existence, to sit fast in his city, navadware pure, & allow the infinite Tapas to manifest through him, accepting it, sanctioning it, (anumati), giving the comm and to fulfil it to his helping devatas, (ishwara), holding up the whole system & its working, (bharta), and watching & enjoying the results. The Tapas may be with knowledge & then the results will be perfectly in accordance with what is intended, for what is intended, will be what is known to the mind as the thing that has to be done or is to happen, kartavyam karma; if it is without knowledge or with imperfect knowledge, it will still be known as the thing which God intends the individual system to lay stress upon (tapyeta), therefore to be willed, and the result, whether in accordance with the Tapas, or adverse to it, chosen or not chosen (ishta, anishta, priya apriya), favourable or adverse (mangala, amangala,) success or failure, (siddhi asiddhi, jayajayau,) will be the unseen thing that all along had to be & towards which all tapas has been contri buting, (adrishtam, bhavitavyam), therefore to be accepted with Equality of mind and with Equality of ananda. This must be the first principle of the new period of action.
The second principle, which has also been long preparing, is the renunciation of nigraha or as it used to be called, tapasya. Not that the Tapas may not have to persist under difficulties, but no violence has to be done to the Prakriti. It has to work out its own defects. This is now possible, because of the growth of the supreme or quaternary dasya, by which the very thought & feeling comes only as things impelled by the divine hand of the Master & Sarathi. Absolute Samata & passivity are now possible.
r1914 05 18, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The intensity of subjective ananda is once more attempting to reassert its universal domination & Equality & this time with greater chances of success, for it is intimately associated with the growing sense of the Anandamaya Lila & the integral dasya of the being. The satyam & brihat grow continually & take larger possession of the perceptive attitude towards the world; the ritam still fluctuates, because the truth & largeness are of the mental realm, not of the ideal consciousness; the mind receives the truths of being in action, but because it separates itself from the vijnana is unable to place them with spontaneous correctness. When it applies itself, it can place them correctly, if it rises beyond the duel of tapas & tamas neither of which can entirely justify itself or entirely refute the other. The physical siddhi fluctuates continually.
Seventh book of Veda commenced. 41-45 translated with notes. X. 1-4. read. Introduction to Veda commenced yesterday continued. Introduction to Life Divine commenced.
r1914 06 27, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1) isolated, digest Equality. (Samata).
2) travel ideality
r1914 07 09, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nevertheless swapnasamadhi in spite of apparent obstruction and suspension advances steadily towards organised perfection. Rupa is now showing a tendency to overleap the denial so long opposed to it. Vijnana & Tapas are active, but insufficiently organised. The vijnana chatusthaya is therefore on its way to Equality with the first two chatusthayas.
The over-assertions of the tapomaya devatas have continued to falsify the ritam, with the result that they are no longer believed.
r1914 12 02, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
At present exposure to rain & cold (moderate) is being persistently resorted to in order to compel Equality in the body. Ananda is assured, not yet Arogya.
***
r1918 04 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A manifest change has been the accomplishment of the Chandi personality in the Devibhava of the Prakriti. This bhava is in its nature Mahasaraswati, the Aniruddha-shakti. It has for its base Maheshwari; it is strongly coloured with Mahaluxmi. This combination was finally expressed in a strong and long-permanent personality, perfect in Equality, intense in bliss, full of universal love madhurya, but deficient in virya and shakti, . The advent of the Chandi bhava, effected in accordance with lipi and other prediction on the 2d, stabilised and completed in rudra force on the 15, since then undergoing modifications and vicissitudes, has brought the completion of the Devibhava, not yet altogether perfect, but firm fundamentally. It is Mahasaraswati personality with the Mahakali bhava; the Mahaluxmi colour, a hidden Maheswari base (pratishtha).
Defects still existent. (1) Occasionally the of the Mahasaraswati gets the better of the rudra tejas; this is mostly when things are getting on well or when the samata in shama gets the better of the samata in tapas. This however is rare. Ordinarily samata in tapas is the temperament.
r1919 07 15, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first chatusthaya is already being given its higher perfection. The positive ananda of Equality is taking up all the adverse movements and reactions.
Vishaya is again renewed with strong gandha and taste of perfume. These two vishayas may now be considered established, however small the present range of their action.
r1919 07 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the sluggish states of the system, except at night, inertia, passivity, blankness whether of tamas or of shama is becoming the exception. An activity of [ ]2 the intellectual ideality, that is, the low pitched intuitional gnosis which supports the mental world of possibility, is then the rule. When the sadhana tapas is active, inspired ideality begins to resume its work of taking up the whole consciousness; sometimes an inspired intuitional, sometimes an inspirational logistis works on the thought and to a less degree on the tapas. It is only at a high pitch that tapas and trikaldrishti join in an assured ideal Equality or oneness.
The inspired ideality is giving a more frequent decisive certitude of trikaldrishti in T and the inspired intuition for the first time a quite perfect selection of succession of detailed circumstance in time; but these things have still to be universalised. The uninspired intuition is now being cast out of the action; since it is no longer necessary in the process of the taking up of the intuition by the inspired logistis.
Symposium translated by B Jowett, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically reasoning about the probability of matters which do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a noble text: 'That without the sense of honour and dishonour neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work.' But he soon passes on to more common-place topics. The antiquity of love, the blessing of having a lover, the incentive which love offers to daring deeds, the examples of Alcestis and Achilles, are the chief themes of his discourse. The love of women is regarded by him as almost on an Equality with that of men; and he makes the singular remark that the gods favour the return of love which is made by the beloved more than the original sentiment, because the lover is of a nobler and diviner nature.
There is something of a sophistical ring in the speech of Phaedrus, which recalls the first speech in imitation of Lysias, occurring in the Dialogue called the Phaedrus. This is still more marked in the speech of Pausanias which follows; and which is at once hyperlogical in form and also extremely confused and pedantic. Plato is attacking the logical feebleness of the sophists and rhetoricians, through their pupils, not forgetting by the way to satirize the monotonous and unmeaning rhythms which Prodicus and others were introducing into Attic prose (compare Protag.). Of course, he is 'playing both sides of the game,' as in the Gorgias and Phaedrus; but it is not necessary in order to understand him that we should discuss the fairness of his mode of proceeding. The love of Pausanias for Agathon has already been touched upon in the Protagoras, and is alluded to by Aristophanes. Hence he is naturally the upholder of male loves, which, like all the other affections or actions of men, he regards as varying according to the manner of their performance. Like the sophists and like Plato himself, though in a different sense, he begins his discussion by an appeal to mythology, and distinguishes between the elder and younger love. The value which he attributes to such loves as motives to virtue and philosophy is at variance with modern and Christian notions, but is in accordance with Hellenic sentiment. The opinion of Christendom has not altogether condemned passionate friendships between persons of the same sex, but has certainly not encouraged them, because though innocent in themselves in a few temperaments they are liable to degenerate into fearful evil. Pausanias is very earnest in the defence of such loves; and he speaks of them as generally approved among Hellenes and disapproved by barbarians. His speech is 'more words than matter,' and might have been composed by a pupil of Lysias or of Prodicus, although there is no hint given that Plato is specially referring to them. As Eryximachus says, 'he makes a fair beginning, but a lame ending.'
Talks 026-050, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
(c) Increased practice of virtue - (samatva) Equality to all.
D.: Why should one adopt this self-hypnotism by thinking on the unthinkable point? Why not adopt other methods like gazing into light, holding the breath, hearing music, hearing internal sounds, repetition of the sacred syllable (Pranava) or other mantras?
Talks 125-150, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
I hesitated at first on arrival. I wondered if I would be permitted to approach you and converse with you. My doubts were soon set at rest. I find that all are equal here. You have established an Equality among all. I dined with you and others. If I should say so to my people in U.P., they would not believe it. The Brahmins would not drink water with me, nor chew pan with me. But here you have taken me and others like me in your fold. Though Gandhi is striving hard he cannot bring about such a state of affairs in the country. I am very happy in your presence.
I regard you as God. I consider Sri Krishna to be true God because
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Salvation is through me (meaning himself) only, Krishna alone is so broad-minded and has spoken like God. You observe the same kind of Equality.
4th January, 1936
Talks 500-550, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
D.: Mahatma Gandhi also admits Equality...
M.: Gandhi is not here.
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M.: Why not? If they could speak they would claim Equality with you and dispute your claims no less vigorously than human beings.
D.: But we cannot help it. It is God's work.
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Gandhiji also tries to bring about Equality. He is also up against the barrier of inferiority complex afflicting the lower orders. He cannot enforce his views on others. He observes non-violence. So matters stand as they are.
D.: We must work to obliterate caste-distinctions.
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
of Equality: nobody feels superior or inferior.
SRI AUROBINDO: How? At first, all the generals and soldiers went to run the
--
the poor. This kind of Equality seems very natural now, but when he introduced it, it was something revolutionary. The laws he laid down still hold.
What he established may not have been democracy in the sense of government by the masses, but it was democracy in the sense of government by the
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PURANI: Perhaps he means that in an ideal case there would be Equality.
NIRODBARAN: But why? There may be people, even if exceptional, who don't
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
motto will be not Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but Work, Family and Patrie.
SRI AUROBINDO: That is the Fascist motto.
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and stupid. It doesn't evoke any inner feeling at all, while "Liberty, Equality
and Fraternity" acts like a mantra.
--
only they can achieve Equality in numbers.
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, Hitler is superior on land only.
Theaetetus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
SOCRATES: Secondly, that without addition or subtraction there is no increase or diminution of anything, but only Equality.
THEAETETUS: Quite true.
The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
lundamental Equality of things. All our
valuations are in reference to some standard
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liberty, Equality and fraternity. It pulled
down the old machinery and set up a new
The Divine Names Text (Dionysis), #The Divine Names, #unset, #Zen
Chapter 9: Concerning great, small, same, different, similar, dissimilar, standing, movement, Equality.
Chapter 10: Concerning Sovereign Lord, "Ancient of days" in which also, concerning Age and Time
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This Divine Justice, then, is celebrated also even as preservation of the whole, as preserving and guarding the essence and order of each, distinct and pure from the rest; and as being genuine cause of each minding its own business in the whole. But, if any one should also celebrate this preservation, as rescuing savingly the whole from the worse, we will entirely accept this as the cantique of the manifold preservation, and we will deem him worthy to define this even as the principal preservation of the whole, which preserves all things in themselves, without change, undisturbed and unswaying to the worse; and guards all things without strife and without war, each being regulated by their own methods; and excludes all in Equality and minding others' business, from the whole; and maintains the relations of each from falling to things contrary, and from migrating. And since, without missing the mark of the sacred theology, one might celebrate this preservation as redeeming all things existing, by the goodness which is preservative of all, from falling away from their own proper goods, so far |101 as the nature of each of those who are being preserved admits; wherefore also the Theologians name it redemption, both so far as it does not permit things really being to fall away to non-existence, and so far as, if anything should have been led astray to discord and disorder, and should suffer any diminution of the perfection of its own proper goods, even this it redeems from passion and listlessness and loss; supplying what is deficient, and paternally overlooking the slackness, and raising up from evil; yea, rather, establishing in the good, and filling -up the leaking good, and arranging and adorning its disorder and deformity, and making it complete, and liberating it from all its blemishes. But let this suffice concerning these matters, and concerning Justice, in accordance with which the Equality of all is measured and defined, and every in Equality, which arises from deprivation of the Equality, in each thing severally, is excluded. For, if any one should interpret in Equality as distinctions in the whole, of the whole, in relation to the whole, Justice guards even this, not permitting the whole, when they have become mingled throughout, to be thrown into confusion, but keeping all existing things within each particular kind, in which each was intended by nature, to be. |102
CAPUT IX.
Concerning great, small, same, different, similar, dissimilar, standing, movement, Equality.
SECTION I.
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But, if any one should take the Divine Name in the Oracles, of "the same," or that of "justice," in the sense of "the equal," we must say, that Almighty God is equal, not only as indivisible and unswerving, but also as going forth to all, and through all, |109 equally; and as foundation of the self-existent Equality, in conformity with which, He equally effects the same passage, through all things mutually, and the participation of those who receive equally, according to the aptitude of each; and the equal gift distributed to all, according to due; and according as He has anticipated pre-eminently and uniquely in Himself, every Equality, intelligible, intelligent, rational, sensible, essential, physical, voluntary, as beseems the Power over all, which is productive of every Equality.
CAPUT X,
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These things, then, must be sung absolutely, respecting the Cause surpassing all, and we must add that It surpasses Holiness, and Lordship, and Kingdom, and most simplex 46 Deity. For, from It, |121 individually and collectively, were born and distributed every untarnished distinctness of every spotless purity, the whole arrangement and regulation of things existing, whilst It excludes want of harmony and want of Equality, and want of symmetry, and rejoices over the well-ordered identity and rectitude, and leads round things, deemed worthy to participate in Itself. From It is all the perfect and complete possession of all. good things, every good forethought, watching and sustaining the objects of Its forethought, imparting Itself, as befits Its goodness, for deification of those who are turned to It.
SECTION IV.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
manifestation of, truth obliges her to show herself to all in the full light of Equality, the veil,
half drawn back, must necessarily reveal the secret individuality of a second figure, artfully
the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
13) Freedom from pride and arrogance, harmlessness, patience, sincerity, purity, constancy, self-control, indifference to the objects of sense, absence of egoism,...freedom from attachment to son and wife and house, constant Equality of heart towards desirable or undesirable events, love of solitude and withdrawal from the crowd, perpetual knowledge of the Supreme and study of the principles of things, this is knowledge; what is contrary in nature to this, is ignorance. ~ Bhagavad Gita
14) One may say boldly that no man has a just perception of any truth, if that truth has not reacted on him so intensely that be is ready to be its martyr. ~ Emerson
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3) They have conquered the creation, whose mind is settled in Equality. ~ Bhagavad Gita
4) He is the happy man whose soul is superior to all happenings. ~ Seneca
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22) The perfection of virtue consists in a certain Equality of soul and of conduct which should remain un-alterable. ~ Seneca
23) The wise in joy and in sorrow depart not from the Equality of their souls. ~ Buddhist Text
24) What is the sign of a man settled in the fixity of his soul and his understanding? When he casts from him all desires that come to the mind, satisfied in himself and with himself, when his mind is undisturbed in pain and without desire in pleasure, when liking and fear and wrath have passed away from him, then a man is fixed in his understanding. He who is unaffected in all things by good or by evil happening, neither rejoices in them nor hates, in him wisdom is established. ~ Bhagavad Gita
--
6) Ten high virtues: benevolence; spiritual life; intelligence; renunciation; perseverance; energy; patience; truthfulness; love for others; Equality of soul. ~ Sangiti Sutta
7) What is the root of evil? Greed, disliking and delusion are the roots of evil. And what then are the roots of good? To be free from greed and disliking and delusion is the root of good. ~ Sangiti Sutta
--
20) Two kinds of joy are there, O my brothers, and what are they? The joy of the sated senses and the joy of the equal soul; but nobler is the joy of Equality. ~ Buddhist Texts
21) Two kinds of joy are there O my brothers, and what are they? The joy of the senses and the joy of the spirit; but nobler is the joy of the spirit. ~ Buddhist Texts
--
The Perfection of Equality View Similar A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - IX
Arya : A Philosophical ReviewVol. 06 - 15th October 1919The Eternal Wisdom The Perfect Union
--
13) Then, accomplished in knowledge, he shakes from him good and evil, and, stainless, reaches that supreme Equality. ~ Mundaka Upanishad
14) As the rivers flow into the ocean and lose their name and form, the sage losing name and form disappears into the supreme Spirit and himself becomes that Spirit. ~ Mundaka Upanishad
--
The Perfection of Equality View Similar A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - IX
A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - X View Similar New Birth or Decadence?
--
Arya : A Philosophical ReviewVol. 06 - 15th July 1920The Eternal Wisdom The Fundamental Equality of Beings
1920 Thu 15 July
The Fundamental Equality of Beings
1) One can mount higher in a singular sort when the spirit soars above Time as high as eternity and there uniting itself with God becomes one thing with him and by that union knows and loves, not what is more or less noble, but all things in all things, considering them in that Object which is infinitely noble, all eminently reunited and in an equal degree of nobility. It is there that the spirit after it has raised itself above all that is, surpasses itself also and dwells imperturbable in an eternal repose, and the more it knows and loves, the more this eternity is affirmed and it becomes there itself eternal. ~ J. Taulcr
The Logomachy of Zos, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
universal brotherhood based on Equality, there being no age-group of
experience, just the reverse. Time relates us to ability. Whatever our
The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
absolutes. For instance, Equality, which in that sense - for Yogic
Samata is a quite different thing - is a mere mental principle, the claim
--
Samata and Equality
YOGIC Samata is Equality of soul, equanimity founded on the sense of
the one Self, the one Divine everywhere - seeing the One in spite of all
--
principle of Equality tries to ignore or else to destroy the differences,
degrees and disparities, to act as if all were equal there or to try and
Timaeus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses, of swallowing, and of the hurling of bodies, are to be explained on a similar principle; as also sounds, which are sometimes discordant on account of the in Equality of them, and again harmonious by reason of Equality. The slower sounds reaching the swifter, when they begin to pause, by degrees assimilate with them: whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sense of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Streams flow, lightnings play, amber and the magnet attract, not by reason of attraction, but because 'nature abhors a vacuum,' and because things, when compounded or dissolved, move different ways, each to its own place.
I will now return to the phenomena of respiration. The fire, entering the belly, minces the food, and as it escapes, fills the veins by drawing after it the divided portions, and thus the streams of nutriment are diffused through the body. The fruits or herbs which are our daily sustenance take all sorts of colours when intermixed, but the colour of red or fire predominates, and hence the liquid which we call blood is red, being the nurturing principle of the body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled.
--
Besides general notions we seem to find in the Timaeus some more precise approximations to the discoveries of modern physical science. First, the doctrine of equipoise. Plato affirms, almost in so many words, that nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever a particle is displaced, the rest push and thrust one another until Equality is restored. We must remember that these ideas were not derived from any definite experiment, but were the original reflections of man, fresh from the first observation of nature. The latest word of modern philosophy is continuity and development, but to Plato this is the beginning and foundation of science; there is nothing that he is so strongly persuaded of as that the world is one, and that all the various existences which are contained in it are only the transformations of the same soul of the world acting on the same matter. He would have readily admitted that out of the protoplasm all things were formed by the gradual process of creation; but he would have insisted that mind and intelligencenot meaning by this, however, a conscious mind or personwere prior to them, and could alone have created them. Into the workings of this eternal mind or intelligence he does not enter further; nor would there have been any use in attempting to investigate the things which no eye has seen nor any human language can express.
Lastly, there remain two points in which he seems to touch great discoveries of modern timesthe law of gravitation, and the circulation of the blood.
--
Now, when all of them, both those who visibly appear in their revolutions as well as those other gods who are of a more retiring nature, had come into being, the creator of the universe addressed them in these words: 'Gods, children of gods, who are my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I will. All that is bound may be undone, but only an evil being would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with which ye were bound at the time of your birth. And now listen to my instructions:Three tribes of mortal beings remain to be createdwithout them the universe will be incomplete, for it will not contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it is to be perfect. On the other hand, if they were created by me and received life at my hands, they would be on an Equality with the gods. In order then that they may be mortal, and that this universe may be truly universal, do ye, according to your natures, betake yourselves to the formation of animals, imitating the power which was shown by me in creating you. The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and youof that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death.'
Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure as before, but diluted to the second and third degree. And having made it he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul to a star; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be one and the same for all,no one should suffer a disadvantage at his hands; they were to be sown in the instruments of time severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most religious of animals; and as human nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called man. Now, when they should be implanted in bodies by necessity, and be always gaining or losing some part of their bodily substance, then in the first place it would be necessary that they should all have in them one and the same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible impressions; in the second place, they must have love, in which pleasure and pain mingle; also fear and anger, and the feelings which are akin or opposite to them; if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state. Having given all these laws to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of future evil in any of them, the creator sowed some of them in the earth, and some in the moon, and some in the other instruments of time; and when he had sown them he committed to the younger gods the fashioning of their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what was still lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him all but self-inflicted evils.
--
The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses and of the swallowing of drink and of the projection of bodies, whether discharged in the air or bowled along the ground, are to be investigated on a similar principle; and swift and slow sounds, which appear to be high and low, and are sometimes discordant on account of their in Equality, and then again harmonical on account of the Equality of the motion which they excite in us. For when the motions of the antecedent swifter sounds begin to pause and the two are equalized, the slower sounds overtake the swifter and then propel them. When they overtake them they do not intrude a new and discordant motion, but introduce the beginnings of a slower, which answers to the swifter as it dies away, thus producing a single mixed expression out of high and low, whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sort of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Moreover, as to the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones,in none of these cases is there any attraction; but he who investigates rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attri butable to the combination of certain conditionsthe non-existence of a vacuum, the fact that objects push one another round, and that they change places, passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or combined.
Such as we have seen, is the nature and such are the causes of respiration,the subject in which this discussion originated. For the fire cuts the food and following the breath surges up within, fire and breath rising together and filling the veins by drawing up out of the belly and pouring into them the cut portions of the food; and so the streams of food are kept flowing through the whole body in all animals. And fresh cuttings from kindred substances, whether the fruits of the earth or herb of the field, which God planted to be our daily food, acquire all sorts of colours by their inter-mixture; but red is the most pervading of them, being created by the cutting action of fire and by the impression which it makes on a moist substance; and hence the liquid which circulates in the body has a colour such as we have described. The liquid itself we call blood, which nourishes the flesh and the whole body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled.
Verses of Vemana, #is Book, #unset, #Zen
By aid of the observances the mind is stayed. By wrath it is dissipated. The steadfast mind obtains fearlessness. Resolution puts an end to alliance. The mind that is removed from alliance suffers us to attain tranquillity. From tranquillity is Equality he himself becomes the entire world. If he be transmuted into the universe, he is Essence (tatwa). That Essence will watch its opportunity and vanquish all the senses. If he becomes thus skilled in tatwa he shall become it himself. He shall thus be a raja yogi in lustre and shine in the world.
Words are a pack of evils; to keep a matter secret is a virtue; avarice is like to death, loan a misfortune, an oath is an evil, words are arrows--all this is not in the least known to men.
--- Overview of noun equality
The noun equality has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (2) equality ::: (the quality of being the same in quantity or measure or value or status)
2. (1) equality, equivalence, equation, par ::: (a state of being essentially equal or equivalent; equally balanced; "on a par with the best")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun equality
2 senses of equality
Sense 1
equality
=> sameness
=> quality
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
equality, equivalence, equation, par
=> status, position
=> state
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun equality
2 senses of equality
Sense 1
equality
=> equatability
=> equivalence
=> evenness
=> isometry
=> balance
Sense 2
equality, equivalence, equation, par
=> egality, egalite
=> tie
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun equality
2 senses of equality
Sense 1
equality
=> sameness
Sense 2
equality, equivalence, equation, par
=> status, position
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun equality
2 senses of equality
Sense 1
equality
-> sameness
=> identity, identicalness, indistinguishability
=> similarity
=> equality
Sense 2
equality, equivalence, equation, par
-> status, position
=> face
=> election
=> equality, equivalence, equation, par
=> social station, social status, social rank, rank
=> standing
=> high status
=> high ground
=> high profile
=> Holy Order, Order
=> low status, lowness, lowliness
=> legal status
=> bastardy, illegitimacy, bar sinister
=> left-handedness
=> command
=> nationality
=> footing, terms
=> retirement
=> rank
=> caste
=> dignity
=> nobility, noblesse
=> ordination
=> pedestal
=> leadership
=> slot
=> toehold
--- Grep of noun equality
congress of racial equality
equality
equality before the law
equality state
inequality
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42526717-soldier-for-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4337180-against-democracy-and-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43561642-reducing-inequality-for-shared-growth-in-china
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43985048-economic-inequality-and-morality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4418686-reflections-on-inequality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478331.Liberalism_s_Troubled_Search_for_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4803504-rescuing-justice-and-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6047814-the-idea-of-natural-inequality-and-other-essays
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163211-the-struggle-for-black-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6688.On_Political_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/730884.Durable_Inequality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7445096-the-equality-illusion
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7501150-capabilities-freedom-and-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/777771.Freedom_Equality_and_Justice_in_Islam
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/792702.Deculturalization_and_the_Struggle_for_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/810661.Sex_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/815090.Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/839265.Animal_Equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8400163-structures-of-inequality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8801547-against-equality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90636.Respect_in_a_World_of_Inequality
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9322799-the-spirit-of-laws-on-the-origin-of-inequality-on-political-economy
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17165813.Marriage_Equality_Marriage_Equality_USA
https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/File:US_Wealth_Inequality_-_v2.png
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Equality_of_mankind
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Equality_of_women
Psychology Wiki - Category:Social_inequality
Psychology Wiki - Social_inequality
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - equality
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - justice-inequality-health
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfGenderInequality
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/SuperEquality07
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Economic_inequality
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Equality
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Fist_Bump_for_Equality.png
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:US_Wealth_Inequality_-_v2.png
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Inequality
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Social_inequality
Fantastic Planet(1973) - This film takes place on a faraway planet where giants rule, and tiny humanoids must fight for their lives and their equality. A surrealist story based on the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Elysium (2013) ::: 6.6/10 -- R | 1h 49min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi | 9 August 2013 (USA) -- In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth. A man takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds. Director: Neill Blomkamp Writer:
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Beastars 2nd Season -- -- Orange -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Psychological Drama Shounen -- Beastars 2nd Season Beastars 2nd Season -- "Beastar"—a title awarded to beasts who prove their excellence through fighting inequality to unite carnivores and herbivores in an anthropomorphic animal society. Cherryton Academy has gone five years without one such leader. However, following the murder of an alpaca within the school boundaries, the growing tension between the different species poses a greater need for a Beastar to ensure peace and harmony. -- -- When Louis, the prime candidate for this prestigious role, rejects the offer and leaves the academy, the student council declares to honor any student who captures the culprit of the aforementioned murder as Beastar. Meanwhile, Legoshi's sense of duty as a strong wolf who must protect the weak pushes him to investigate the incident. To further complicate his life, he struggles to manage his complex feelings for the white rabbit, Haru. -- -- 223,463 8.06
Byulbyul Iyagi -- -- - -- 6 eps -- - -- Psychological Drama -- Byulbyul Iyagi Byulbyul Iyagi -- Six animated shorts about discrimination and being different. -- -- 1. "Daydream" talks about dealing with people with disability. It homes in on the daily life of a father with a daughter whose hands and feet are deformed. -- -- 2. "Animal Farm" relies on the rough-and-ready feel of stop-motion clay animation to create a satire of bullying and mob dynamics. -- -- 3. "At Her House" paints a devastating picture of gender inequality within a marriage. -- -- 4. "Flesh and Bone" gently pillories superficiality and the obsession with outward appearance. -- -- 5. "Bicycle Trip" focuses on the discrimination experienced by foreign workers in Korea. -- -- 6. "Be a Human Being" looks at the way young Koreans are barely treated as human beings before they get to university. -- -- (Source: ANIWEBLOG, ASIANDB, Jeonju) -- Movie - Sep 23, 2005 -- 402 N/A -- -- Paradise -- -- - -- 1 ep -- - -- Adventure Psychological Space -- Paradise Paradise -- "A highly energetic story told from outer space, battlefields, and dentist offices, over and around time and space." -- -- (Source: Image Forum Festival 2014 program) -- Movie - ??? ??, 2013 -- 381 N/A -- -- Ninja & Soldier -- -- - -- 1 ep -- - -- Psychological -- Ninja & Soldier Ninja & Soldier -- Two eight-year-old boys compete in a game of childish bravado. Ken is a Ninja, Nito a child soldier from the Congo who was forced to kill his own mother. Their naïve game addresses cruel realities, and they talk about their differences and what they have in common. Accompanied by contrasting graphics, the film explores the types of acts of which humankind is capable. -- -- (Source: Berlinale) -- Movie - ??? ??, 2012 -- 374 5.90
Manyuu Hikenchou -- -- Hoods Entertainment -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Historical Ecchi Samurai Seinen -- Manyuu Hikenchou Manyuu Hikenchou -- The Edo period of Japan gave rise to a clan of warriors with a very specialized, magical skill. The clan was known as the Manyuu, and the skill was the ability to administer a sword strike that could shrink the size of a woman's breasts. This might not seem like an ability that could exert power over a land, but in Manyuu Hikenchou, large breasts denote status, wealth, fame, and influence. -- -- Grave concern has arisen in the Manyuu clan due to the actions of their chosen successor, Chifusa. Disgusted with the breast obsessed society that the Manyuu have created and perpetuated, Chifusa has not only deserted the clan, but also stolen the sacred scroll that details their techniques to growing and severing breasts. -- -- Fortunately, Chifusa is not completely alone. Her fellow warrior Kaede is sympathetic to her cause; a sympathy that could place her in considerable danger. Now wanted by the very clan that raised her, Chifusa must defend her life and Kaede's while seeking to undo the damage their brethren have done to the land. Along the way, Chifusa will discover that she harbors a power that goes far beyond the scope of her training, one that could help shape and change the land that she seeks to bring equality to. -- 61,109 6.22
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Inequality_(ethics)
Abel's inequality
Abhyankar's inequality
Adequality
Agmon's inequality
AhlswedeDaykin inequality
Alaskans Together for Equality
An Act Recognizing the Equality of the Two Official Linguistic Communities in New Brunswick
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
API Equality Northern California
Aristarchus's inequality
Ascriptive inequality
AskeyGasper inequality
AsureQuality Limited
Atria Institute on gender equality and women's history
Australian Equality Party (Marriage)
Azuma's inequality
BabenkoBeckner inequality
Bah Faith and gender equality
Barrow's inequality
Believers' Movement for Equality and Peace
BelmontPaul Women's Equality National Monument
Bendixson's inequality
Berger inequality
Bernoulli's inequality
Bernstein inequality
Bessel's inequality
Beyond Equality
BhatiaDavis inequality
Biaystok Equality March
BihariLaSalle inequality
Binomial sum variance inequality
BishopGromov inequality
BogomolovMiyaokaYau inequality
Bonnesen's inequality
Bonse's inequality
Boole's inequality
BorellBrascampLieb inequality
BorellTIS inequality
BrascampLieb inequality
BregmanMinc inequality
BrezisGallouet inequality
Cambridge Political Equality Association
Campaign for Homosexual Equality
Cantelli's inequality
Carleman's inequality
Cauchy's inequality
CauchySchwarz inequality
Centre for Equality and Inclusion
Centre for Gender Equality
Chebyshev's inequality
Chebyshev's sum inequality
Christians for Biblical Equality
ChristKiselev maximal inequality
CHSH inequality
ChungErds inequality
Citizen Equality Act of 2017
ClausiusDuhem inequality
Cohn-Vossen's inequality
Colonial roots of gender inequality in Africa
Commission for Racial Equality
Concentration inequality
Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus
Congress of Racial Equality
Correlation inequality
Crossing number inequality
Cumulative inequality theory
Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace
Declaration of Principles on Equality
DenjoyKoksma inequality
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth
Differential variational inequality
Discourse on Inequality
Doob's martingale inequality
Drug Equality Alliance
DvoretzkyKieferWolfowitz inequality
Economic inequality
Economic inequality in South Korea
Educational inequality
Educational inequality in Ghana
Educational inequality in Southeast Michigan
Education inequality in China
Effects of economic inequality
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Employment Equality Regulations
Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003
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Environmental inequality in the United Kingdom
Equality
Equality Act
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Equality Now
Equality of outcome
Equality of Treatment (Accident Compensation) Convention, 1925
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Equality Party
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Equality Pennsylvania
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Equality Rights Statute Amendment Act
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Equality Trust
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ErdsMordell inequality
ErdsTurn inequality
Etemadi's inequality
European Institute for Gender Equality
European Parliament Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality
Families Advocating for Campus Equality
Family Equality Council
FannesAudenaert inequality
Fano's inequality
FeketeSzeg inequality
Fischer's inequality
FishburnShepp inequality
Fisher's inequality
FKG inequality
Foreign aid for gender equality in Jordan
Forum for Equality
Fragile Equality
Freedom and Equality
Friedrichs's inequality
F-test of equality of variances
GagliardoNirenberg interpolation inequality
Grding's inequality
Gauss's inequality
Gaussian correlation inequality
Gay Alliance Toward Equality
Gay and Lesbian Equality Network
Gender equality
Gender Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud
Gender Equality and Family Development Select Committee
Gender Equality Duty in Scotland
Gender equality in Azerbaijan
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Gender-equality paradox
Gender inequality
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Gender Inequality Index
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Georgia Equality
Gibbs' inequality
GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality
GoldenThompson inequality
Griffiths inequality
Gromov's inequality
Grnwall's inequality
Grothendieck inequality
Hadamard's inequality
HadwigerFinsler inequality
Hardy's inequality
HardyLittlewood inequality
Harnack's inequality
HausdorffYoung inequality
Hawaii Marriage Equality Act
HermiteHadamard inequality
Hilbert's inequality
HitchinThorpe inequality
Hoeffding's inequality
Hlder's inequality
Housing inequality
Housing inequality in Ohio
Immigration equality
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Individual Freedoms and Equality Committee (Tunisia)
Inequality
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Inequality of arithmetic and geometric means
Inequality of bargaining power
Ingleton's inequality
International inequality
International Youth and Students for Social Equality
Internet Radio Equality Act
Intersex Campaign for Equality
IQ and Global Inequality
Isoperimetric inequality
Jackson's inequality
Janson inequality
Jarzynski equality
Jensen's inequality
Jewish Council for Racial Equality
Jordan's inequality
Jrgensen's inequality
Justice and Equality Movement
KallmanRota inequality
Kantorovich inequality
Karamata's inequality
Kentucky Equality Federation
Khintchine inequality
Kolmogorov's inequality
KraftMcMillan inequality
Krakw Equality March
KunitaWatanabe inequality
Ky Fan inequality (game theory)
Ladyzhenskaya's inequality
LandauKolmogorov inequality
Law and Inequality
Law of Equality (Spain)
Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-up Culture
LebedevMilin inequality
LeggettGarg inequality
Lesbian and Gay Equality Project
Levinson's inequality
Libertarianism Without Inequality
LiebOxford inequality
LiebThirring inequality
Linear inequality
Linear matrix inequality
List of countries by income equality
List of countries by inequality-adjusted HDI
List of countries by wealth equality
List of European Commissioners for Justice and Equality
Littlewood's 4/3 inequality
Loewner's torus inequality
Logical equality
ojasiewicz inequality
LoomisWhitney inequality
LubellYamamotoMeshalkin inequality
Maclaurin's inequality
March for Equality and Against Racism
MarcinkiewiczZygmund inequality
Markov's inequality
Marriage equality (disambiguation)
Marriage Equality (Same Sex) Act 2013
Marriage Equality USA
MashreghiRansford inequality
MassEquality
Maxmin inequality
Meadows v. Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
Measures of gender equality
Mental health inequality
Metock v Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
Milman's reverse BrunnMinkowski inequality
MilnorWood inequality
Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth
Minister for Gender Equality (Denmark)
Minister for Nordic Cooperation and Equality (Finland)
Minister for Women and Gender Equality
Ministry for Social Equality
Ministry of Equality (Spain)
Ministry of Gender Equality and Family
Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality (Sweden)
Minkowski inequality
Mongolian Gender Equality Center
Muirhead's inequality
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Home Affairs
National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Justice
National Equality March
National Rally for Democracy, Liberty and Equality
National Voices for Equality, Education and Enlightenment
Native Americans and reservation inequality
Nesbitt's inequality
Noether inequality
Occupational inequality
Ono's inequality
On the Equality of the Sexes
PaleyZygmund inequality
Participation inequality
Party of Friendship, Equality and Peace
Pedoe's inequality
Peetre's inequality
PisierRingrose inequality
Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act of 2007
PlnneckeRuzsa inequality
Poincar inequality
Polish Socialist Party Freedom, Equality, Independence
PlyaSzeg inequality
Popoviciu's inequality on variances
Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle
PrkopaLeindler inequality
President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services
Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, 2000
Pu's inequality
Pursuit of Equality
Racial equality
Racial Equality Proposal
RayleighFaberKrahn inequality
Relative index of inequality
Remez inequality
Riemannian Penrose inequality
Rights and Equality Party
Ruzsa triangle inequality
Samuelson's inequality
SC Equality
Schur's inequality
Scouts for Equality
Serre's inequality on height
Shapiro inequality
Shearer's inequality
Sobolev inequality
Social equality
Social inequality
Socialist Equality Party
Socialist Equality Party (Australia)
Socialist Equality Party (Germany)
Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
Socialist Equality Party (UK)
Special measures for gender equality in the United Nations
Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality
Statue of Equality
Steffensen's inequality
Structural inequality
Students & Administration Equality Act
Tennessee Equality Project
Testimony of equality
The Journal of Economic Inequality
Theory of pure equality
The Price of Inequality
Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality
Trace inequality
Transgender Equality Network of Ireland
Triangle inequality
TurnKubilius inequality
Union for Women's Equality
United Kingdom employment equality law
Variational inequality
Virtual Equality
Vitale's random BrunnMinkowski inequality
Vlkisch equality
Von Neumann's inequality
VysochanskijPetunin inequality
Wealth inequality in South Africa
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 19191963
Weierstrass product inequality
Weitzenbck's inequality
Weyl's inequality
Whitney inequality
Wignerd'Espagnat inequality
Wirtinger's inequality
Wirtinger inequality (2-forms)
Women's Equality Day
Women's Equality Party (New York)
Women and Gender Equality Canada
World Inequality Database
Young's convolution inequality
Young's inequality
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