TERMS STARTING WITH
Gods ::: It was the hour before the Gods awake.
GodsjA Dictionary of the Deities ofAll Lands. See Redfield.
Gods, p. 306.]
Gods ::: Personalities and Powers of the dynamic Divine.
Gods
Gods ::: The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 26
Gods ::: “The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.” The Upanishads
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
GODS. ::: Gods are Personalities or Powers put forth by the
godsend ::: n. --> Something sent by God; an unexpected acquisiton or piece of good fortune.
godship ::: n. --> The rank or character of a god; deity; divinity; a god or goddess.
godsib ::: n. --> A gossip.
GODS Individuals that are omniscient and omnipotent in their respective worlds. They are members of someone of the seven divine kingdoms; the first kingdom in the solar systemic worlds 43 and 44; the second to the seventh kingdom, in the cosmic worlds 1- 42.
In their contacts with men, the gods assume human ideal shapes, permanent envelopes of physical atomic matter, also to anchor their physical consciousness, envelopes which can easily be made visible to all. (K 1.39.3)
The gods themselves are subject to the Law. Omnipotence is possible only through absolutely faultless application of the laws in their entirety. K 1.41.3
No supreme power can reach that omnipotence of dynamis which is required to produce primordial atoms in primordial matter. This work can only be done by the dynamic energy of primordial matter. P 2.52.6
gods of the Secret Wisdom, and may be compared
gods of Vedic religion. [See Adityas.J In 3 Enoch
godson ::: n. --> A male for whom one has stood sponsor in baptism. See Godfather.
godspeed ::: n. --> Success; prosperous journeying; -- a contraction of the phrase, "God speed you."
gods ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.” *The Upanishads
gods "the necessary static elements, ::: Space, the ordered movements of the worlds, the ascending levels, the highest goal"; in later Hinduism, the Preserver of the world, one of the "three Powers and Personalities . of the One Cosmic Godhead", of which the other two are Brahma, the Creator, and Śiva or Rudra2, the Destroyer; also regarded as the Lord himself (isvara) who incarnates in the avataras, and the one deva of whom all the gods are manifestations; in the Record of Yoga, usually a subordinate aspect of Kr.s.n.a, sometimes identified with Pradyumna as the personality of the fourfold isvara whose sakti is Mahalaks.mi.Vis Visnu-Narayana
gods. The word “abracadabra” is reputedly
gods,” whose image was placed in houses to ward
TERMS ANYWHERE
Abhasvara (Sanskrit) Ābhāsvara [from ā near to, towards + the verbal root bhās to shine upon, illuminate] Brilliant, shining; a class of 64 devas or demigods representing a certain cycle of manifestation and the active phase of the evolutionary process set in motion by an act of will of Brahman, who remains transcendent while emanating forth the world.
Abhutarajas (Sanskrit) Abhūtarajas [from a not + the verbal root bhū to be born, produced + rajas passion] Those not produced by or born with the quality of passion; a class of 14 gods or divinities belonging to the “fifth manvantara,” the fifth Manu of which was Raivata (cf VP 3:1). The abhutarajasas are a hierarchy of divine beings, similar to the kumaras and manasaputras, who have passed through the material worlds in previous evolutionary periods. Having risen above all passional attractions to the lower spheres, these three classes of deities are reckoned as exempt from passion — in the sense of suffering passively, one of passion’s original connotations. These divinities are masters of themselves, not passive subjects.
adhidaiva ::: that which pertains to the Gods (non-material powers) ; the subjective phenomenon of being.
Adhidaivika (Sanskrit) Ādhidaivika [from adhi above, over + deva god] Heavenly or shining one, relating to or proceeding from the devas; celestial or spiritual beings or gods, also divine influences. When combined with duhkha (pain) the third of the three kinds of klesa (afflictions) in Hinduism: that proceeding from “divine” agencies or from nature, such as wind, rain, or sunstrokes; also unexpected accidents such as the falling of houses (cf VP 6:5). See also ADHIBHAUTIKA; ADHYATMIKA
ADHYATMA YOGA. ::: The principle of adhyātma yoga is, in knowledge, the realisation of all things that we see or do not see but are aware of, - men, things, ourselves, events, gods, titans, angels, - as one divine Brahman, and in action and attitude, an absolute self-surrender to the Paratpara Purusha, the transcendent, infinite and universal Personality who is at once personal and impersonal, finite and infinite, self-limiting and illimitable, one and many, and informs with his being not only the Gods above, but man and the worm and the cold below.
Aditi devatamayi ::: Aditi full of the gods. [cf. Katha 2.1.7]
Aditi (Sanskrit) Aditi [from a not + diti bound from the verbal root da to bind] Unbounded, free; as a noun, infinite and shoreless expanse. In the Vedas, Aditi is devamatri (mother of the gods) as from and in her cosmic matrix all the heavenly bodies were born. As the celestial virgin and mother of every existing form and being, the synthesis of all things, she is highest akasa. Aditi is identified in the Rig-Veda with Vach (mystic speech) and also with the mulaprakriti of the Vedanta. As the womb of space, she is a feminized form of Brahma. The line in the Rig-Veda: “Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha” has reference to “the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine Essence” (SD 2:247n). In one of its most mystic aspects Aditi is divine wisdom.
Aditi ::: the indivisible conscious-force and ananda of the Supreme; the Mother; the infinite Mother of the gods; supreme Nature or infinite Consciousness.
Aditi: The name (Sanskrit for boundlessness) of a Vedic goddess, mother of the gods known as Adityas; she is identified at times with the earth, at times with the sky, and at other times is hailed as a cow.
Aditi ::: the Vedic goddess of infinite being, the mother of the gods, manifested here as the earth-goddess (Pr.thivi2); the adya-sakti, the indivisible consciousness (cit), force (tapas) and bliss (ananda) of the Supreme.
Adityah (Adityas) ::: Solar gods, children of Infinity (sons of Aditi). [Ved.] ::: Adityasah [vocative], O Sons of the infinite Mother. [RV 7.52.1]
Adityas: A group of Vedic gods, sons of the goddess Aditi. Their number is variously given as six or eight, in later times also as twelve.
Adonis [from Hebrew ’ādōn lord] Title of the Babylonian god Tammuz, whose cult was imported into Asiatic Greece. A beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite, he was killed by a boar. Aphrodite was so grief-stricken that the gods of the lower world allowed him to spend half of every year with her on earth. His death and resurrection were symbolized in annual festivals.
Adyo Sakti ; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the Supramental Ishvara comes into manifestation through her — the Supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.
Aegir represents the waters of space in all their various aspects. In Norse myths he is the giant who brews the mead for the gods when they feast at the stellar and planetary “tables” — when they imbody in worlds. He and his consort Ran have nine daughters who are the waves. Aegir has two servants, Eldr (fire) and Fimafeng or Funafeng (spark), possibly St. Elmo’s fire and phosphorescence in the sea. An aspect of Aegir is Hler (lee, shelter). Blavatsky regards Ogir (Aegir) or Hler as “the highest of the Water-gods, and the same as the Greek Okeanos” (TG 239).
Aeolus (Greek) In Greek and Roman mythology, son of Hippotes, appointed by Zeus as guardian of the winds. He lived on the island of Aeolia in the far west, its steep cliffs encircled by a brazen wall. There he kept the winds confined in a cave, letting them out as he pleased or as he was commanded by the gods. Later he was said to dwell on an island north of Sicily.
Aeshma-Daeva (Avestan) Aēshma-Daēva Eesham-Diev, Hesham-Diev (Pahlavi) [from aēshma wrath, ill wish, anger from the verbal root ish desire, passion + daēvas evil spirits (originally gods); cf Sanskrit deva, Persian dievs] The fiend of the wounding spear in the Avesta. The Aryan gods or daevas having become anthropomorphic, they were denounced by the Aryan initiates who had settled in Airya-Vaeja (Eran or Iran). Zarathustra in the Gathas refers to Kavis and Karpans, the leaders of the ancient Aryan faith, as daevas because they had polluted the abstraction of Mazdean philosophy with ritualistic ceremonies.
Aesir (Icelandic) [from ass the ridgepole supporting a roof] plural ases; feminine asynja, feminine plural asynjor. Creative gods of the Norse Eddas, inhabiting Asgard (gard, yard or estate), where they retire to feast on the “mead” of experience gained in spheres of life. The twelve deities who build their mansions on various “shelves” of our universe are: Odin Allfather, who occurs on every level of life and is inherent in every living thing; his consort, Frigga; Thor, the power of life and electromagnetism, who corresponds to the Tibetan fohat and in one aspect corresponds to Jove; Balder, the sun god; Njord, the Norse Saturn; Tyr, the Norse Mars; Frey, the deity of planet Earth; Freya, of Venus; Hermod (an aspect of Odin), of Mercury. Heimdall, “the whitest Ase,” is the watcher on the rainbow bridge who sounds the gjallarhorn (loud horn) at Ragnarok when a world ends. Brage is poetic inspiration. The most mysterious and lofty ase is Ull, a cold, wintry (unmanifest) world. Paradoxically, “blessed is he who first touches the fire” of that sphere. Forsete is the god of justice who corresponds to the lipikas, agents of karma.
Aether, Ether (Greek) [from aitho shining, fire] The upper or purer air as opposed to aer, the lower air; the clear sky; the abode of the gods. In Classical antiquity it denoted primordial substance, Proteus or protyle, the unitary source both of all substances and energies, the mask of all kosmic phenomena. Often used loosely to embrace a domain which extends from the All-Father himself down to the atmosphere of our earth. Vergil speaks of “Jupiter omnipotens aether,” and Cicero describes aether as the ultimate zone of heaven encircling, embracing, and permeating all things. At one time a member of the pantheon and object of veneration, at another the quest of the alchemist in search of the “absolute element” which would give him power over nature, and finally a hypothetical medium of science for conveying light waves.
Agneyastra (Sanskrit) Āgneyāstra [from āgneya fiery weapon from agni fire + astra missile weapon, arrow] Fiery weapon; one of the magic weapons used by some of the gods and heroes of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The Vishnu-Purana (3:8) recounts that the agneyastra was given by the sage Aurva to his disciple King Sagara. A magic weapon said to have been “wielded by the adept-race (the fourth), the Atlanteans” (TG 9), and to have been built of “seven elements” (SD 2:629). It can signify a weapon of fiery character used in physical warfare, or on a cosmic scale can denote the employment of a force of nature by an intelligent being either for offensive or defensive purposes. In archaic thought fire, in its abstract sense, is almost equivalent to spirit, and permeates the sevenfold nature of the universe.
“Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” The Secret of the Veda
Agni (Sanskrit) Agni [from the verbal root ag to move tortuously, wind] Fire; as god of fire, one of the most revered of Vedic deities. As mediator between gods and humans, from whose body issue “a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame,” Agni represents the divine essence or celestial fire present in every atom of the universe. Often used synonymously with the adityas. The three chief gods of Vedas are Agni, Vayu, and Surya — fire, air, and the sun — whose elements respectively are earth, air, and sky. One of the four lokapalas or world-protectors, Agni is guardian of the southeast quarter, and in the Rig-Veda as Matarisvan, messenger of Vivasvat, the sun, Agni brought down the “hidden fire” for humankind. To “kindle a fire,” therefore, is synonymous to evoking one of the three great fire-powers or “to call on God” (SD 2:114).
*[Agni]. Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” *The Secret of the Veda
Agni-Vishnu-Surya (Sanskrit) Agni-Viṣṇu-Sūrya [from agni fire + viṣṇu from the verbal root viś or the verbal root viṣ to pervade + sūrya sun] Fire-pervader-solar deity; this triad of gods is probably a permutation of the original Vedic triad Agni-Indra-Surya, having their influence and place respectively on earth, in the atmosphere, and in the sky. Agni-Vishnu-Surya has been called the “synthesis and head, or the focus whence emanated in physics as in metaphysics, from the Spiritual as from the physical Sun, the Seven Rays, the seven fiery tongues, the seven planets or gods” (SD 2:608).
Aham Eva Parabrahma (Sanskrit) Aham eva parabrahma [from aham I + eva indeed, verily + para beyond + brahma creative deity from the verbal root bṛh to expand] Also aham asmi parabrahma. I am verily parabrahma, the Boundless; imbodies the teaching that above and within every entity whatsoever is everything that is in universal space or boundless infinitude, so that each person is fundamentally one with all that is because the same divine consciousness flows through every point in space, in that all worlds, gods, human beings, and atoms are each one derived from the same original source.
’Ahar (Hebrew) ’Aḥar After, behind, later in time; used by some Qabbalistic writers as a name for the hierarchies of gods. Over these, the Jews said that Jehovah — the Achad (’Ehad) — was the supreme God. See also ’AHATH; ’AHER
’Ahath-Ruah-’Elohim-Hayyim (Hebrew) ’Aḥath-Rūaḥ-’Elohīm-Ḥayyīm One soul, gods, lives; the Ancient of the Ancient (the cosmic originant, the hierarch of a cosmic hierarchy) which, being the source of the universe rolled out from within its own divine essence, thus becomes the universe itself; the Ancient of Days — not human days but cosmic manvantaras — or the Ancient of the Ancient is the soul (ruah), which thus expresses itself through the hierarchies of gods (’elohim) and the innumerable minor hierarchies of lives (hayyim) of which the universe as an organism is built.
’Aher (Hebrew) ’Aḥēr To be after, behind, secondary, another; the plural ’aherim, especially when used in conjunction with ’elohim, means “other or strange gods,” which were supposed to be merely idols. As the Hebrew scriptures themselves show, the ancient Hebrews never at any time denied the existence of the gods of other peoples, but being utterly and strongly tribalistic, their own god Jehovah was to them supreme. Their tribal god is the regent of the planet Saturn, who was their planetary hierarch, and consequently, to them, the supreme god — the god over all other gods. Had the Jews been born as a people under the regent of some other planet, the hierarchical regent of this other planet would then have been in their opinion the supreme god.
"Ah! Since India is the cradle of religion and since so many gods preside over her destiny, who among them will accomplish the miracle of resuscitating the city?" A. Choumel (in an article on Pondicherry in 1928) Follows response by the Mother: "Blinded by false appearances, deceived by calumnies, held back by fear and prejudice, he has passed by the side of the god whose intervention he implores and saw him not; he has walked near to the forces which will accomplish the miracle he demands and had no will to recognise them. Thus has he lost the greatest opportunity of his life—a unique opportunity of entering into contact with the mysteries and marvelswhose existence his brain has divined and to which his heart obscurely aspires. In all times the aspirant, before receiving initiation, had to pass through tests. In the schools of antiquity these tests were artificial and by that they lost the greater part of their value. But it is no longer so now. The test hides behind some very ordinary every-day circumstance and wears an innocent air of coincidence and chance which makes it still more difficult and dangerous.It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s
references and prejudices of race and education that India reveals the mystery of her treasures. Others depart disappointed, failing to find what they seek; for they have sought it in the wrong way and would not agree to pay the price of the Divine Discovery."
Ref: CWM Vol. 13, Page: 372-373
Ahura (Avestan) [from the verbal root ahu conscious life; cf Sanskrit asura] The lord of life, the one life from whom all proceed; as daevas who were originally gods of the Aryans changed to demons among the Iranian branch of the Aryans, asura also changed to demons among the Indians. In the earlier Vedas, asura is especially used for Varuna, the ruler of the heavenly sphere. “The Mazdean Scriptures of the Zend Avesta, the Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the Asuras to their legitimate place in Theogony . . .” (SD 2:60-1).
Airyanmen Vaeja, Airyena-Vaegah, Airyana-Vaeja (Avestan) Airyam-Veg (Pahlavi) “The Aryans (the noble ones) are said in the Avesta to have had their original home in the far land of Airyana Vaeja (the cradle land of the Aryans), the first among the lands created by Mazda. It was at the center of the earth and in its very center stood the mountain Harabareza. This corresponds with the Hindu descriptions of the Land of the Gods with Mount Meru at its center” (Taraporewala, The Religion of Zarathushtra). The Aryans divided the universe into seven regions or keshvars: 1) Arzah or Arzahe; 2) Shabah, Sava-Cavahe; 3) Fradadafsh, Fradadhfsha; 4) Vidadafsh, Vidadahfshu; 5) Vorubarst, Vourubaresti; 6) Vorugarst, Vourujaresti, Vouruzaresti; and 7) Khvanuras, Ganiratha, Hvaniratha. The seventh land is situated in the middle of the other six. According to the introduction of Abu-Mansouri’s Shah-Nameh (the older Shah-Nameh), the seventh land, which the kings named Iran-Shahr (Airya-Vaeja) is also in the middle of the other six.
Aja (Sanskrit) Aja [from a not + the verbal root jan to be born, produced] Unborn; title given to many of the primordial gods. In the Rig-Veda, the equivalent of the First Logos, which is a radiation or first manifestation on the plane of illusion of the cosmic One — the Absolute or cosmic paramatman. The Purusha-Sukta or Hymn of Man (RV 10:90) states that the thousand-headed Purusha is dismembered at the foundation of the world so that from his remains the universe might arise. This is the foundation of the later Christian symbol of the sacrificial lamb, for there is here a play on words: Aja the “unborn” — Purusha or manvantaric spirit — may also be derived from the verbal root aj (to drive, propel), whose meanings include a he-goat, a ram, and the sign Aries. Spirit disappears — dies, metaphorically — the more it becomes involved in cosmic matter, and hence the sacrifice of the unborn, the lamb, or the ram (cf TBL 56).
Aja when derived from the verbal root aj, is also a title given to various Vedic divinities such as Rudra, Indra, Agni, the sun, the maruts, and in post-Vedic works to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, as well as to cosmic Kama, counterpart of the Greek cosmic Eros — all these gods being considered leaders of their respective hierarchies in the sense of urging, driving, or propelling life and intelligence therein.
Ajita (Sanskrit) Ajita [from a not + the verbal root ji to conquer, triumph] The invisible, unsurpassed; in the Vayu-Purana, the highest of twelve gods, named jayas, who were created by Brahma to aid him at the beginning of the manvantara. But because they neglected his directives, Brahma “cursed” them to be born in each succeeding manvantara until the seventh, the Vaivasvata-manvantara (cf VP 1:15; n2, p. 26). These twelve jayas are the Hindu equivalent of the twelve great gods of Greco-Roman mythology. Because of their all-permeant character, on a lower scale these divinities are identical with the manasa, the jnana-devas, the rudras, and other classes of manifested deities. In these lower manifestations of their functions, they are identical with those dhyani-chohanic groups which “refuse to incarnate,” spoken of in The Secret Doctrine.
Alaya(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word: a, "not"; laya, from the verb-root li, "to dissolve"; hence "theindissoluble." The universal soul; the basis or root or fountain of all beings and things -- the universe,gods, monads, atoms, etc. Mystically identical with akasa in the latter's highest elements, and withmulaprakriti in the latter's essence as "root-producer" or "root-nature." (See also Akasa, Buddhi,Mulaprakriti)[NOTE: The Secret Doctrine (1:49) mentions Alaya in the Yogachara system, most probably referring toalaya-vijnana, but adds that with the "Esoteric 'Buddhists' . . . 'Alaya' has a double and even a triplemeaning." -- PUBLISHER]
Alexeterioi (Greek) Tutelary gods whose figures were located in the sky, that Seldenus explains were used in building the Jewish teraphim (oracles). (SD 1:394)
Allfather, Alfadir (Icelandic) [from al all + fadir father] Odin, father of gods and men. As Allfather, Odin occurs on many levels: as the indwelling divinity in a universe and in every part of the universe. He is also, together with his two brother-gods, the creative power of life on each level of existence. Odin (divine intelligence, Sanskrit mahat), Vile (will), and Vi or Ve (awe, sanctity) comprise the cosmic creative trinity. They spring from Bur, the quasi-manifest or Second Logos, which in turn emanated from Buri, the legendary king of cold. Buri was immersed in the ice of non-being until the cow Audhumla, symbol of fertility, uncovered his head when licking the ice blocks for salt.
allotheism ::: n. --> The worship of strange gods.
“All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement.
Alpha Draconis. Also Thuban. A third magnitude star, north of the constellation of the Great Bear, which was the pole star about the third millennium BC. Around 2170 BC it shone down the descending passage of the Great Pyramid at its lower meridian transit, but Egyptologists generally believe that the Pyramid is much older than that. In the previous precessional period Alpha Draconis would be in about the same position rather less than 26,000 years earlier. After it ceased to be the pole star, it shared the fate of all the fallen gods and was treated as an evil demon.
Amal: “If nothing existed except the Gods there would be no mediating passage for the spirit awaking in matter and moving towards the higher regions and reaching the glory of the Oversoul after much labour and gradual process.”
Ambhamsi (Sanskrit) Ambhāṃsi [from ambhas water, from the verbal root bhā to shine] Water; in the Vedas the celestial waters and also a synonym for gods, but in the Brahmanas and Puranas the four orders of beings that variously “shine” or flourish: deva-manushyah (gods and men), pitris (fathers or manes), and asuras (demons, not-gods). This is “because they are all the product of waters (mystically), of the Akasic Ocean . . . If the student of Esoteric philosophy thinks deeply over the subject he is sure to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhamsi, in its manifold relations to the Virgin in Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the Alchemists, and even to the ‘Waters of Grace’ of the modern Baptist” (SD 1:458n).
Ambrosia (Greek) [from ambrotos immortal from a not + mortos or brotos mortal; cf Sanskrit amṛta from a not + the verbal root mṛ to die; Latin immortalus from in not + mors death] In Classical myths variously the food, drink, or unguent of the gods or divine wisdom, connected with nectar; anything that confers or promotes immortality. Equivalent to the Sanskrit amrita and soma and the northern European mead. In a Chinese allegory, the flying Dragon drinks of ambrosia and falls to earth with his host. The laws of evolution entail a so-called curse or fall upon virtually all the hosts of monads frequently called angels, whereby they are cast down to the nether pole and undergo peregrinations in the realms of matter; in the case of many such “fallen angels,” this involves imbodiment or incarnation on earth. Man himself at a stage of his evolution experiences a similar “descent” and speeding-up, due to the impulses of the immortal urge within his breast to grow, progress, evolve, and become cognizant of larger reaches of truth. This is evident in the highly mystical Hebrew story of the forbidden Tree and in the various legends pertaining to soma in Hindu literature.
ambrosia ::: n. --> The fabled food of the gods (as nectar was their drink), which conferred immortality upon those who partook of it.
An unguent of the gods.
A perfumed unguent, salve, or draught; something very pleasing to the taste or smell.
Formerly, a kind of fragrant plant; now (Bot.), a genus of plants, including some coarse and worthless weeds, called ragweed, hogweed, etc.
ambrosia ::: Something especially delicious or delightful to taste or smell, divinely sweet; in Classical Mythology, the food of the gods.
ambrosia ("s) ::: something especially delicious or delightful to taste or smell, divinely sweet; in Classical Mythology, the food of the gods.
Ambrosia: The food of the gods of Greek mythology.
Amenti, Amentet (Egyptian) Amenti, Ȧmentet. The underworld (Tuat), the hidden place or secret region. The 15th or last house (Aat) of the Tuat, called Amentet-nefert (beautiful Amenti) and described as the dwelling place of the gods, where they live upon cakes and ale — in this respect similar to the Scandinavian Valhalla, the heaven world or devachan. The afterworlds were also referred to as Sekhet-hetep or -hetepet (the fields of peace), called in Greece the Elysian Fields, under the dominion of Osiris, lord of Amenti. Some of the texts speak of Amenti as situated far to the north of Egypt, although it is more commonly referred to as the Silent Land of the West. Other texts place it either below or above the earth, and the deceased is pictured as needing a ladder to ascend to the region.
Amitabha (Sanskrit) Amitābha [from a not + the verbal root mā to measure + ābhā (ābha) splendor, light from ā-bhā to shine, irradiate] Unmeasured splendor; mystically, as boundless light or boundless space, one of the five dhyani-buddhas of Tibetan Buddhism, more often referred to as the five tathagathas or jinas (victorious ones). Originally these dhyani-buddhas represented cosmic spiritual attributes and influences emanating from adi-buddhi, but they have become mythologized as gods, ruling over the central realm as well as the four cardinal directions.
Ammon (Greek) Ámmōn Amen (Egyptian) Ȧmen. Also Amun, Amon. In the Egyptian 5th dynasty, Amen and his consort Ament were among the primeval gods, mentioned immediately after the deities connected with primeval matter, Nau and Nen (gods of the cosmic watery abyss). He was envisaged as “All-nature,” the universe itself, especially in its occult and secret aspects. After the 12th dynasty, however, this god additionally became looked upon as having solar attributes, and therefore was called Amen-Ra — the chief deity of the powerful priesthood of Thebes, whose sway encompassed the whole of Egypt. Ammon was identified particularly with the hidden aspect of the sun, for the hymns are addressed: “he who is hidden to gods and men,” “he who is unknown,” “thy name is hidden from thy children in thy name Amen.”
Ammon-Ra (Greek) Ámmōn-Rā Amen-Ra (Egyptian) Ȧmen-Rā. When the princes of Thebes had conquered all rival claimants to the sovereignty of Egypt and established themselves as rulers of the dual Empires, they followed in religious, mystical, and occult matters the thought of the powerful priesthood of Thebes. Thus after the 12th dynasty a new manner of visioning the ancient god Ammon came into prominence, under the name Ammon-Ra, although the latter’s preeminence as chief god of Egypt did not occur until the 17th dynasty. The attributes of the hidden deity Ammon were combined with the solar god Ra, and this deity was acclaimed by the priests as the chief of the gods of Egypt. Ammon-Ra seems to be devoid of most, at least, of the mystical symbols that are present in representations of the older deities, although the hymns to the god that were carefully prepared by the priests incorporated all the attributes and phraseology prevalent in the other scriptures.
Amon-Ra: The Egyptian king of the gods, creator of the universe; originally the god of Thebes, later supreme god of all Egypt.
Amrita (Sanskrit) Amṛta [from a not + mṛta dead from the verbal root mṛ to die] Immortality; the water of life or immortality, the ambrosial drink or spiritual food of the gods. According to the Puranas, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, amrita is the elixir of life produced during the contest between the devas and asuras when churning the “milky sea” (the waters of life). It has been stolen many times, but as often recovered, and it is still preserved carefully in devaloka.
Amrita: The drink or food of the gods of the Vedic myths. Identified with the soma drink (q.v.).
amrta (Amrita) ::: 1. immortality. ::: 2. the nectar of immortality, ambrosia, the food or drink of the gods; the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy. ::: amrtam [nominative]
Amsa, Amsu (Sanskrit) Aṃśa, Aṃśu Fragment, particle, part; name of one of the adityas in the Mahabharata; also of Surya (the sun) whose solar energy was so tremendous that the divine architect Visvakarman cut off an eighth part of his glory. From the luminous fragments (amsa) which fell to earth, Visvakarman made a number of implements for the gods, including Vishnu’s discus and Siva’s trident. In the Bhagavad-Gita (15:7), Krishna emanates an amsa of himself which, becoming a jiva (monad) in the world of living beings, draws to itself manas (mind) and the five senses which originate in prakriti (nature).
Anaktes, Anakes (Greek) Also Anactes, Anaces. Kings, chiefs; applied by Homer and other Greeks to the gods, as for instance the Dioscuri. When used of creative powers, they are identified with the kabeiroi, corybantes, curetes, etc.
ananke ::: "In Greek mythology, personification of compelling necessity or ultimate fate to which even the gods must yield.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
Ananke ::: “In Greek mythology, personification of compelling necessity or ultimate fate to which even the gods must yield.” (Mother India) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works
Anastasis (Greek) Rising up; used in referring to the dead and to resurrection. However, this ancient mystical term was originally used for the rising of the initiant when, having completed the dread trials of initiation, he rose a new man, one who was reborn, or what in India was called a dvija (twice-born). Another significance belonging from earliest times to the cycle of initiation is that when a person through severe training, initiation, and a complete turning away from things of matter to things of spirit, had succeeded in becoming at one with his inner god at least on occasions, he was then considered to have arisen or to have become resurrected out of all the lower ranges of kosmic life, and to have attained self-conscious existence in the spirit. Having attained anastasis, he took his place in the hierarchy of light or compassion as one of the co-laborers with the gods.
Anatum or Antum (Chaldean) Consort of the god of heaven, Anu, supreme god of the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon. Whereas Anu represented heaven and height, Anatum represented the earth and depth. She was regarded as the mother of the gods, as well as being the mother of the god Ea or Hea. “Astronomically she is Ishtar, Venus, the Ashtoreth of the Jews” (TG 21). Anu and Anatum correspond to Ouranos and Gaia in Hesiod, and therefore in one of her mystical significances Anatum corresponds with the Hindu prakriti.
Ancestor Worship A cult variously observed around the world and usually defined as the cult of the spirits of parents and forefathers. It implies belief in the continued existence of the deceased and in certain cases in their power of being interested in and affected by the fortunes of their living descendants; the sense of a perpetual spiritual unity and moral reciprocity in obligations and services; and a dependence of the fortunes of the living on the fulfillment of these obligations. This can be seen from the ancient Roman ideas portrayed in the Aeneid, where the household gods (lares and penates) are so carefully preserved through all vicissitudes. This belief and practice point to times when death was regarded as merely an event in a continuous life. With the ancient cults, the sense of personal separateness seems merged in the more vivid sense of family unity, from whose privileges and obligations death is no discharge.
an exceeding of the law of the physical body, ::: the conquest of death, an earthly immortality"; the "ambrosia of the gods", a rejuvenating "nectar" induced by certain practices of yoga to trickle down from a subtle centre in the head; identified with soma1, "the sweetness that comes flowing from the streams of the upper hidden world, . . . the divine delight hidden in all existence which, once manifest, supports all life"s crowning activities and is the force that finally immortalises the mortal".
Angel: A living creature of the spirit world, intermediate between gods and humans, and either friendly or hostile toward humanity. Angels belong to the class properly known as demons. In the monotheistic religions, the word angel is usually applied to the benevolent agents and messengers of God.
Anu; Anum: The Babylonian and Assyrian god of heaven, ruler of destiny, king of gods, chief of the Babylonian triad of gods (the other two were Ea and Enlil).
Anu (Chaldean) Supreme god of the Babylonian pantheon, king of angels and spirits, ruler of destiny, lord of the city of Erech or Uruk — later Ur. One of the loftiest of Babylonian divinities, part of a trinity with Enlil and Ea, he was especially the god of heaven, creator of star spirits and of the demons of cold, rain, and darkness. His consort Antum or Anatum was mother of the gods. Anu was the concealed deity; in the Chaldean account of Genesis, he is the passive deity, however, “the primordial chaos, the god time and world at once, chronos, and kosmos, the uncreated matter issued from the one and fundamental principle of all things” (IU 2:423).
Anukis [Greek from Egyptian Ȧnqet from ȧnq to surround, embrace] Third of the triad of deities of Elephantine, consisting of Khnemu, Sati, and Anqet or Anukis. Her worship was common in northern Nubia, but later centered at Sahal, where her principal temple was situated. At Philae she was identified with Nephthys or Neith, it being common to regard Khnemu as a form of Osiris: hence Sati and Anqet became associated with Isis and Nephthys. However, Anqet is also represented with the disk and horned headdress of Isis and is called the lady of heaven, mistress of all the gods; giver of life and of all power, and of all health and joy of heart. The goddess is also associated with the embracing waters of the Nile, though the root itself shows that she is the embracing and all-surrounding cosmic life as well as it minor functions in manifestation. The ascriptions given to Anukis as the giver of life and of all power associate the goddess with the moon, whether in the cosmogonical or lower generative sense.
Anunnaki (Chaldean) In Babylonian mythology, a hierarchy of lower angels: the angels of earth or the underworld, star gods who had sunk below the horizon and become judges of the dead. Below the anunnaki were several classes of genii — sadu, vadukku, ekimu, gallu — some of which were represented as being good, some evil. The anunnaki are “terrestrial Elementals also” (TG 25).
Anzu or Zu (Babylonian) The lion-headed eagle, often portrayed as “master of the animals.” Plotting to assume sovereignty and command the gods, he stole the Tablet of Destinies (DUB-šima-a-ti) from the empty throne of his master, the high god Enlil, then flew off to hide in the inaccessible mountain. Warrior-god Ninurta was sent to battle Anzu, slay him, and return the Tablet. George Smith’s 1875 translation (cited in SD 2:283n) was tentative at best and is now superseded by modern translations such as in Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 1989.
Ap, Apas, Apah (Sanskrit) Ap, Apas, Āpaḥ [from ap water] Watery, water; in the plural [apaḥ, apas the waters], considered as feminine deities and mothers from whom all issue forth. Cosmically apah or apas are the waters of space, out of which the universe is produced. “Apah (the waters) assume different forms of this earth, this atmosphere, this sky, the mountains, gods and humans (deva-manushyah), beasts and birds, grass and trees, animals together with worms, flies, and ants. Apah (water) indeed is all these forms” (ChU 7:10, 1).
Apap or Apep (Egyptian) Āpep Apophis (Greek) The serpent of evil, generally denoting matter in its lower reaches of differentiation from spirit; the slayer of every soul too loosely linked to its immortal spirit. Typhon, having slain Osiris, incarnates in Apap and seeks to kill Horus (the personal ego), but is slain by Horus through the power of Horus’ father Osiris, the buddhic principle. It is also the serpent which is slain by the sun god Ra. The combat is another aspect of the myth of the battle between Horus and Set, these deities representing cosmic and physical light and cosmic and physical darkness respectively. “Apap is called ‘the devourer of the Souls,’ and truly, since Apap symbolizes the animal body, as matter left soulless and to itself. Osiris, being, like all the other Solar gods, a type of the Higher Ego (Christos), Horus (his son) is the lower Manas or the personal Ego. On many a monument one can see Horus, helped by a number of dog-headed gods armed with crosses and spears, killing Apap” (TG 26).
Aphrodite (Greek) Greek Goddess of love and beauty, in older times regarded as signifying the harmony of cosmos. Originally the daughter of Zeus and Dione, a lunar deity like Aphrodite, both being represented with the horns of the moon or of the zodiacal sign Taurus; but the same deity in ancient mystical philosophy may be at once mother, wife, and daughter — so difficult is it to find among our common notions a symbolism that will convey the full meaning anciently intended. Later, under Eastern influence, she was said to have been born from the sea foam and to have landed in a seashell on the isle of Cythera. A sea goddess as well as an earth goddess of gardens, groves, and springtime, she was the wife of Hephaestus and connected also with Ares and Adonis; mother of Eros. As Aphrodite Urania, she was identified with the goddess of heaven Astarte, and later under Platonic influence came to represent spiritual love as opposed to earthly love, represented by Aphrodite Pandemos. Among her analogs are Isis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Eve, Vach, etc., all the mother of all living beings and of the gods, cosmically. The Romans identified Aphrodite with Venus, and the Egyptians with Hathor.
Apollo (Greek) Also called Phoebus (the pure, shining); son of Zeus and Leto (Latona), the polar region or night, and twin brother of Artemis (Diana). His birth shows the emanation of light from darkness. One of the most popular gods of Greek mythology, he is primarily the god of light, and is also associated with the sun, hence a giver of life, light, and wisdom to the earth and humanity. Apollo and Artemis are the mystic sun and the higher occult moon (SD 2:771). Apollo stands for order, justice, law, and purification by penance. His attribute as a punisher of evil is shown by his bow, with which as an infant he slew Python. He is the deity who wards off evil; the healer, father of Aesculapius and often identified with him; and the god of divination, associated especially with the Oracle at Delphi. The other principal seat of his worship was at Delos, his birthplace. He was also the patron of song and music, of new civic foundations, and protector of crops and flocks. His lyre is the sacred heptachord or septenary, seen in the sevenfold manifestations of the Logos in the universe and man; he is also the sun with its seven planets. He answers in some respects to the Hindu Indra and Karttikeya and in others to the Christian archangel Michael; Janus was the Roman god of light.
apotheosis ::: n. pl. --> The act of elevating a mortal to the rank of, and placing him among, "the gods;" deification.
Glorification; exaltation.
Applied by the ancient Hebrews and Phoenicians not only to gods or divinities, but to kings and priests. See also ADONAI
Apsaras (Sanskrit) Apsaras [from ap water + saras flowing from the verbal root sṛ to flow, glide, blow (as of wind)] Moving in the waters; a class of feminine divinities known as celestial water nymphs, whose location is commonly placed in the sky between the clouds rather than in the waters of earth, although they are often described as visiting earth. These fairy-like wives of the gandharvas (celestial musicians) can change their shape at will, often appearing as aquatic birds. In Manu they are held to be the creations of the seven manus, but in the Puranas and the Ramayana their origin is attributed to the churning of the cosmic waters, and it is said that neither gods nor asuras would have them for wives. Since mythologically they were common to all, they are called Sumadatmajas (self-willed pleasurers) — 35 million of them, of whom Kama, god of love, is lord and king. One of their roles is to act as temptresses to those too ardent for divine status. Only the individual who can withstand the perfumed entreaties of the apsarasas is worthy of full enlightenment. In the Yajur-Veda the apsarasas are called sunbeams because of their connection with the gandharva who personifies the sun.
Aries (The Ram): The first sign of the zodiac. Its symbol () represents the head and horns of the ram. In astrology, it is a symbol of offensive power—a weapon of the gods, hence an implement of the will. The Babylonians sacrificed rams during the period when the Sun occupied this sign, which occurs annually from March 21 to April 20. Astrologically and astronomically it is the first thirty-degree arc beginning at the point of the Spring Equinox. It is the “leading” quality of the element Fire: positive, diurnal, movable, dry, hot, fiery, choleric and violent. Ruler: Mars. Exaltation: Sun. Detriment: Venus. Fall: Saturn. Symbolic interpretation: Sprouting seed; fire in eruption; a fountain of water; a ram’s horns.
aruspex ::: n. --> One of the class of diviners among the Etruscans and Romans, who foretold events by the inspection of the entrails of victims offered on the altars of the gods.
arya (Aryan) ::: the good and noble man; the fighter; he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance; he who does the work of sacrifice, finds the sacred word of illumination, desires the gods and increases them and is increased by them into the largeness of the true existence; he is the warrior of the light and the traveller to the Truth.
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.
"As for Vishnu being the creator, all the three gods are often spoken of as creating the universe — even Shiva who is by tradition the Destroyer.” Letters on Yoga
“As for Vishnu being the creator, all the three gods are often spoken of as creating the universe—even Shiva who is by tradition the Destroyer.” Letters on Yoga
Asgard: In Norse mythology, Odin’s headquarters, home of the gods, also housing the Valhalla, hall of the chosen among those slain in battle.
“As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man;—this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon, Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other,—invisible Personalities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood and Evil.” The Life Divine
Astrology ::: The astrology of the ancients was indeed a great and noble science. It is a term which means the "scienceof the celestial bodies." Modern astrology is but the tattered and rejected outer coating of real, ancientastrology; for that truly sublime science was the doctrine of the origin, of the nature, of the being, and ofthe destiny of the solar bodies, of the planetary bodies, and of the beings who dwell on them. It alsotaught the science of the relations of the parts of kosmic nature among themselves, and more particularlyas applied to man and his destiny as forecast by the celestial orbs. From that great and noble sciencesprang up an exoteric pseudo-science, derived from the Mediterranean and Asian practice, eventuating inthe modern scheme called astrology -- a tattered remnant of ancient wisdom.In actual fact, genuine archaic astrology was one of the branches of the ancient Mysteries, and wasstudied to perfection in the ancient Mystery schools. It had throughout all ancient time the unqualifiedapproval and devotion of the noblest men and of the greatest sages. Instead of limiting itself as modernso-called astrology does to a system based practically entirely upon certain branches of mathematics, inarchaic days the main body of doctrine which astrology then contained was transcendental metaphysics,dealing with the greatest and most abstruse problems concerning the universe and man. The celestialbodies of the physical universe were considered in the archaic astrology to be not merely time markers,or to have vague relations of a psychomagnetic quality as among themselves -- although indeed this istrue -- but to be the vehicles of starry spirits, bright and living gods, whose very existence andcharacteristics, individually as well as collectively, made them the governors and expositors of destiny.
As universal space, it is also known as Aditi, in which lies inherent the eternal and continuously active ideation of the universe producing its ever-changing aspects on the planes of matter and objectivity; and from this ideation radiates the First Logos. This is why the Puranas state that akasa has but one attribute, namely sound, for sound is but the translated symbol of logos (speech) in its mystic sense. Akasa as primordial spatial substance is thus the upadhi (vehicle) of divine thought. Further, it is the playground of all the intelligent and semi-intelligent forces in nature, the fountainhead of all terrestrial life, and the abode of the gods.
Asura: In Hindu mysticism, a fallen angel or demon, hostile to the gods (devas).
asura ::: n. --> An enemy of the gods, esp. one of a race of demons and giants.
ASURA. ::: Titan; a being of ignorant egoism as opposed to the Deva or god, who is a being of Light; sons of Darkness and Division.
Asuras are really the dark side of the mental, or more strictly, of the vital mind plane. This mind is the very field of the Asuras. Their main characteristic is egoistic strength and struggle, which refuse the higher law. The Asura has self-control, tapas, and intelligence, but all that for the sake of his ego.
There are no Asuras on the higher planes where the Truth prevails, except in the Vedic sense -“ the Divine in its strength “. The mental and vital Asuras are only a deviation of that power.
There are two kinds of Asuras - one kind were divine in their origin but have fallen from their divinity by self-will and opposition to the intention of the Divine; they are spoken in the Hindu scriptures as the former or earlier gods; these can be converted and their conversion is indeed necessary for the ultimate purpose of the universe. But the ordinary Asura is not of this character, is not an evolutionary but a typal being and represents a fixed principle of the creation which does not evolve or change and is not intended to do so. These Asuras, as also the other hostile beings, Rakshasas, Pishachas and others resemble the devils of the Christian tradition and oppose the divine intention and the evolutionary purpose in the human being; they don’t change the purpose in them for which they exist which is evil, but have to be destroyed like the evil. The Asura has no soul, no psychic being which has to evolve to a higher state; he has only an ego and usually a very powerful ego; he has a mind, sometimes even a highly intellectual mind; but the basis of his thinking and feeling is vital and not mental, at the service of his desire and not truth. He is a formation assumed by the life-principle for a particular kind of work and not a divine formation or soul.
Some kinds of Asuras are very religious, very fanatical about their religion, very strict about rules of ethical conduct. There are others who use spiritual ideas without believing in them to give them a perverted twist and delude the sadhaka.
asura ::: [Ved.]: the Lord; used in the Veda as in the Avesta for the deva, but also for the gods, his manifestations; it is only in a few hymns that it is used for the dark Titans; [Later] : the strong or mighty one, Titan; a [hostile] being of the mentalised vital.
Asvattha(Sanskrit) ::: The mystical tree of knowledge, the mystical tree of kosmical life and being, represented asgrowing in a reversed position: the branches extending downwards and the roots upwards. The branchestypify the visible kosmical universe, the roots the invisible world of spirit.The universe among the ancients of many nations was portrayed or figurated under the symbol of a tree,of which the roots sprang from the divine heart of things, and the trunk and the branches and thebranchlets and the leaves were the various planes and worlds and spheres of the kosmos. The fruit of thiskosmic tree contained the seeds of future "trees," being the entities which had attained through evolutionthe end of their evolutionary journey, such as men and the gods -- themselves universes in the small, anddestined in the future to become kosmic entities when the cycling wheel of time shall have turnedthrough long aeons on its majestic round. In fact, every living thing, and so-called inanimate things also,are trees of life, with their roots above in the spiritual realms, with their trunks passing through theintermediate spheres, and their branches manifesting in the physical realms.
Asvins (Aswins) ::: the "Riders on the Horse", the name of two Vedic Asvins gods; "twin divine powers whose special function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man in the sense of action and enjoyment".
asvins &
ayu-Aryaman ::: the three forceful gods Agni2, Vayu2 and Aryaman unified to form one deity.Agni-V Agni-Vayu-Aryaman
balder ::: n. --> The most beautiful and beloved of the gods; the god of peace; the son of Odin and Freya.
barhih. ::: in the Veda, the seat of sacred grass on which the gods are invited to sit at the sacrifice.
Gods ::: It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Gods ::: Personalities and Powers of the dynamic Divine.
Gods
Gods ::: The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 26
Gods ::: “The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.” The Upanishads
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
bhuta-bhavana bhutesa deva-deva jagatpate ::: lord of existences, cause of their becoming, God of gods, master of the universe. [Gita 10.15]
bitheism ::: n. --> Belief in the existence of two gods; dualism.
Blavatsky calls the anugraha creation a blind, “for it refers to a purely mental process: the cognition of the ‘ninth’ creation, which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the secondary of that which was a ‘Creation’ in the Primary (Prakrita) Creation. The Eighth, then, called Anugraha (the Pratyayasarga or the intellectual creation of the Sankhyas . . .), is ‘that creation of which we have a perception’ — in its esoteric aspect — and ‘to which we give intellectual assent (Anugraha) in contradistinction to organic creation.’ It is the correct perception of our relations to the whole range of ‘gods’ and especially of those we bear to the Kumaras — the so-called ‘Ninth Creation’ — which is in reality an aspect of or reflection of the sixth in our manvantara (the Vaivasvata)” (SD 1:456).
Brahma devanam prathamah sambabhuva ::: Brahma first of the Gods was born. [Mund. 1.1.1]
brahma ::: n. --> The One First Cause; also, one of the triad of Hindoo gods. The triad consists of Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Siva, the Destroyer.
A valuable variety of large, domestic fowl, peculiar in having the comb divided lengthwise into three parts, and the legs well feathered. There are two breeds, the dark or penciled, and the light; -- called also Brahmapootra.
Brhaspati (Brihaspati) ::: [Ved.]: the Master of the creative Word (the stress in the name falling upon the potency of the Word rather than upon the thought of the general soul-power which is behind it). [Later]: spiritual teacher of the gods; guardian of the planet Jupiter; chief of the high priests of the world.
Buddha(s) of Compassion ::: One who, having won all, gained all -- gained the right to kosmic peace and bliss -- renounces it so thathe may return as a Son of Light in order to help humanity, and indeed all that is.The Buddhas of Compassion are the noblest flowers of the human race. They are men who have raisedthemselves from humanity into quasi-divinity; and this is done by letting the light imprisoned within, thelight of the inner god, pour forth and manifest itself through the humanity of the man, through the humansoul of the man. Through sacrifice and abandoning of all that is mean and wrong, ignoble and paltry andselfish; through opening up the inner nature so that the god within may shine forth; in other words,through self-directed evolution, they have raised themselves from mere manhood into becominggod-men, man-gods -- human divinities.They are called Buddhas of Compassion because they feel their unity with all that is, and therefore feelintimate magnetic sympathy with all that is, and this is more and more the case as they evolve, untilfinally their consciousness blends with that of the universe and lives eternally and immortally, because itis at one with the universe. "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea" -- its origin.Feeling the urge of almighty love in their hearts, the Buddhas of Compassion advance forever steadilytowards still greater heights of spiritual achievement; and the reason is that they have become thevehicles of universal love and universal wisdom. As impersonal love is universal, their whole natureexpands consequently with the universal powers that are working through them. The Buddhas ofCompassion, existing in their various degrees of evolution, form a sublime hierarchy extending from theSilent Watcher on our planet downwards through these various degrees unto themselves, and evenbeyond themselves to their chelas or disciples. Spiritually and mystically they contrast strongly withwhat Asiatic occultism, through the medium of Buddhism, has called the Pratyeka Buddhas.
Cabiri: A group of minor deities often mentioned in ancient writings as powerful masters of magic. They were probably of Semitic origin, and their worship as gods of mysteries was widespread in Greece, especially in Samothrace, Bœotia and Thessaly.
caduceus ::: n. --> The official staff or wand of Hermes or Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It was originally said to be a herald&
Caduceus: The wand of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods. A cosmic, magic, or astronomical symbol; its significance changing with its application. Originally a triple-headed serpent, it is now a rod with two serpents twined around it, and two wings at the top. The entwined white and black serpents represent the struggle between good and evil—disease and cure. (Cf. Aaron’s Rod.)
Capricorn (The Goat): The tenth sign of the Zodiac. In Hindu astrology, Makarar—and considered by the ancients to be the most important of all the signs. Its symbol () represents the figure by which the sign is often pictured—that of the forepart of a goat, with the tail of a fish—vaguely suggesting the mermaid. Sometimes also by the sea-goat, or dolphin. It is said to have a reference to the legend of the goat and the Sun gods. The Sun is in Capricorn annually from December 22 to January 20. Astrologically it is the first thirty degrees following the Winter Solstice, marked by the passing of the Sun over the Tropic of Capricorn and occupying a position along the Ecliptic from 270° to 300°. It is the “leading” quality of the element Earth: negative, nocturnal, cold, dry, obeying. Ruler: Saturn. Exaltation: Mars. Detriment: Moon. Fall: Jupiter. Symbolic interpretation: A goat with a fish’s tail, signifying extremes of height and depth; changes wrought by time; union of the Christian and Jewish religious dispensations.
Chaos(Greek) ::: A word usually thought to mean a sort of helter-skelter treasury of original principles and seedsof beings. Well, so it verily is, in one profound sense; but it is most decidedly and emphatically nothelter-skelter. It is properly the kosmic storehouse of all the latent or resting seeds of beings and thingsfrom former manvantaras. Of course it is this, simply because it contains everything. It means space, notthe highest mystical or actual space, not the parabrahma-mulaprakriti, the Boundless -- not that. But thespace of any particular hierarchy descending into manifestation, what space for it is at that particularperiod of its beginning of development. The directive principles in chaos are the gods when they awakenfrom their pralayic sleep. Chaos in one sense may very truly be called the condition of the space of asolar system or even of a planetary chain during its pralaya. When awakening to planetary action begins,chaos pari passu ceases.
Ch’i: Chinese for force, spirit. Used in esoteric terminology also for breath, the vital fluid. Also as the name of the Spirits of Earth (the gods of the ground and the grain, mountains, rivers and valleys).
Consciousness ::: In all its forms and protean manifestations, consciousness is spirit-matter -- force and matter, or spirit andsubstance, are one -- hence consciousness is the finest and loftiest form of energy, is the root of allthings, and is coextensive with kosmic space. It is, therefore, the foundation and the essence of gods, ofmonads, and of atoms -- the three generalized degrees, kosmically speaking, of the universe. A naturalcorollary from this is that the universe therefore is imbodied consciousness, or much more correctly weshould call it a quasi-infinite aggregate of imbodied consciousnesses.
Councillor gods: A term applied, by the Chaldeans, to the three bright stars in a constellation, which served to mark the position of the ruling planet of that sign, when in the sign.
Culture hero: A historical person whose teachings, doings or accomplishments live on, usually in an idealized version, in the myths, legends and traditions of his tribe, race or people. Culture heroes are usually raised by posterity to a divine or semi-divine status or regarded to have been incarnations of high-ranking gods.
daitya ::: an enemy of the gods (devas), the "opposing or too violently forward-striving Titan"; any of the sons of Diti, meaning "the division, the separative consciousness", who is the mother of the Titans as Aditi is the mother of the gods.
demigod ::: a mythological being who is partly divine and partly human; an inferior deity. demigod"s, demigods.
demigod "person" A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognisably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include {Ken Thompson} and {Dennis Ritchie} (co-inventors of {Unix} and {C}) and {Richard Stallman} (inventor of {Emacs}). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods themselves, and more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also {net.god}, {true-hacker}. [{Jargon File}] (1994-10-27)
demonism ::: n. --> The belief in demons or false gods.
"Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit.” Essays on the Gita
“Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit.” Essays on the Gita
deva ::: a god, a divinity; "a dynamic being manifested in Prakriti for the works of the plane to which he belongs"; any of the "cosmic godheads presiding over the action of cosmic principles", brahman "representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature"; the Divine, the supreme and universal Deity (isvara, purus.a) "of whom all the gods are different Names and Powers"; the seventh of the ten types of consciousness (dasa-gavas) in the evolutionary scale: mind concentrated in vijñana, exceeding itself.
devabhasa ::: [the language of the gods, applied to the Sanskrit language].
deva-deva ::: [God of gods], universal deity.
devakridanudarsanam ::: as watching the sports of the gods. [Bhagavata Purana]
Devanagari: Literally, the letters of the gods; the characters of the Sanskrit script.
devanam adabdha (adabdhani) vratani ::: [the inviolate laws of the working of the gods]. [Ved.]
devanam dhruva-vratani ::: [the fixed laws of working of the gods]. [Ved.]
devanam prathama vratani ::: [the first laws of working of the gods]. [Ved.]
devan devayajo yanti madbhakta yanti mam api ::: [they who worship the gods go to the gods, but My devotees come to Me]. [Gita 7.23]
devaputrah ::: sons of the gods.
Deva(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning celestial being, of which there are various classes. This has been a greatpuzzle for most of our Occidental Orientalists. They cannot understand the distinctions that thewonderful old philosophers of the Orient make as regards the various classes of the devas. They say, insubstance: "What funny contradictions there are in these teachings, which in many respects are profoundand seem wonderful. Some of these devas or divine beings are said to be less than man; some of thesewritings even say that a good man is nobler than any god. And yet other parts of these teachings declarethat there are gods higher even than the devas, and yet are called devas. What does this mean?"The devas or celestial beings, one class of them, are the unself-conscious sparks of divinity, cyclingdown into matter in order to bring out from within themselves and to unfold or evolve self-consciousness,the svabhava of divinity within. They then begin their reascent always on the luminous arc, which neverends, in a sense; and they are gods, self-conscious gods, henceforth taking a definite and divine part inthe "great work," as the mystics have said, of being builders, evolvers, leaders of hierarchies. In otherwords, they are monads which have become their own innermost selves, which have passed thering-pass-not separating the spiritual from the divine.
devayana (Devayan) ::: a journeying of the gods or to the gods. ::: devayanah [plural]
Dhyana(Sanskrit) ::: A term signifying profound spiritualintellectual contemplation with utter detachment from allobjects of a sensuous and lower mental character. In Buddhism it is one of the six paramitas ofperfection. One who is adept or expert in the practice of dhyana, which by the way is a wonderfulspiritual exercise if the proper idea of it be grasped, is carried in thought entirely out of all relations withthe material and merely psychological spheres of being and of consciousness, and into lofty spiritualplanes. Instead of dhyana being a subtraction from the elements of consciousness, it is rather a throwingoff or casting aside of the crippling sheaths of ethereal matter which surround the consciousness, thusallowing the dhyanin, or practicer of this form of true yoga, to enter into the highest parts of his ownconstitution and temporarily to become at one with and, therefore, to commune with the gods. It is atemporary becoming at one with the upper triad of man considered as a septenary, in other words, withhis monadic essence. Man's consciousness in this state or condition becomes purely buddhi, or ratherbuddhic, with the highest parts of the manas acting as upadhi or vehicle for the retention of what theconsciousness therein experiences. From this term is drawn the phrase dhyani-chohans ordhyani-buddhas -- words so frequently used in theosophical literature and so frequently misconceived asto their real meaning. (See also Samadhi)
Dii adscripticii: The collective name of the minor gods of Roman mythology.
dish ::: n. --> A vessel, as a platter, a plate, a bowl, used for serving up food at the table.
The food served in a dish; hence, any particular kind of food; as, a cold dish; a warm dish; a delicious dish. "A dish fit for the gods."
The state of being concave, or like a dish, or the degree of such concavity; as, the dish of a wheel.
A hollow place, as in a field.
ditheism ::: n. --> The doctrine of those who maintain the existence of two gods or of two original principles (as in Manicheism), one good and one evil; dualism.
divine ::: a. --> Of or belonging to God; as, divine perfections; the divine will.
Proceeding from God; as, divine judgments.
Appropriated to God, or celebrating his praise; religious; pious; holy; as, divine service; divine songs; divine worship.
Pertaining to, or proceeding from, a deity; partaking of the nature of a god or the gods.
Godlike; heavenly; excellent in the highest degree;
dragon of the dark foundation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, — Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.” The Secret of the Veda
dualism ::: n. --> State of being dual or twofold; a twofold division; any system which is founded on a double principle, or a twofold distinction
A view of man as constituted of two original and independent elements, as matter and spirit.
A system which accepts two gods, or two original principles, one good and the other evil.
The doctrine that all mankind are divided by the arbitrary decree of God, and in his eternal foreknowledge, into two classes, the
Durga ::: “In Hindu religion, the goddess who is the Energy of Shiva and the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother. She is the slayer of many demons including Mahisasura. Durga is usually depicted in painting and sculpture riding a lion, having eight or ten arms, each holding the special weapon of one or another of the gods who gave them to her for her battles with demons. (A; Enc. Br). Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works.
durga ::: "In Hindu religion, the goddess who is the Energy of Shiva and the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother. She is the slayer of many demons including Mahisasura. Durga is usually depicted in painting and sculpture riding a lion, having eight or ten arms, each holding the special weapon of one or another of the gods who gave them to her for her battles with demons. (A; Enc. Br.)” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
Ea: In Babylonian and Assyrian mythology, the god of waters and of wisdom, crafts and learning, especially of the magical arts; the third member of the Babylonian triad of gods (Anu, Enlil, Ea).
edda ::: n. --> The religious or mythological book of the old Scandinavian tribes of German origin, containing two collections of Sagas (legends, myths) of the old northern gods and heroes.
Elohim: A Semitic word for gods; in Judaism, the name used instead of the ineffable name, Yahveh or Jehovah, of the One God.
Emanation ::: An emanation of the Mother is something of her consciousness and power put forth from her, which so long as it is in play is held in close connection with her and, when its play is no longer required, is withdrawn back into its source, but can always be put out and brought into play once more. But also the detaining thread of connection can be severed or loosened and that which came forth as an emanation can proceed on its way as an independent divine being with its own play in the world. All the Gods can put forth such emanations from their being, identical with them in essence of consciousness and power though not commensurate.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 105
Enceladus ::: In classical mythology, a giant with a hundred arms buried under Mt. Etna, in Sicily, by the Olympian Gods.
enceladus ::: in classical mythology, a giant with a hundred arms buried under Mt. Etna, in Sicily, by the Olympian Gods.
Enlil: The Sumerian and Babylonian god of wind and storm, second of the Babylonian triad of gods (the other two were Anu and Ea).
eros ::: n. --> Love; the god of love; -- by earlier writers represented as one of the first and creative gods, by later writers as the son of Aphrodite, equivalent to the Latin god Cupid.
Ethics ::: The theosophical teachings are essentially and wholly ethical. It is impossible to understand the sublimewisdom of the gods, the archaic wisdom-religion of the ancients, without the keenest realization of thefact that ethics run like golden threads throughout the entire system or fabric of doctrine and thought ofthe esoteric philosophy. Genuine occultism, divorced from ethics, is simply unthinkable becauseimpossible. There is no genuine occultism which does not include the loftiest ethics that the moral senseof mankind can comprehend, and one cannot weigh with too strong an emphasis upon this great fact.Ethics in the theosophical philosophy are not merely the products of human thought existing as aformulation of conventional rules proper for human conduct. They are founded on the very structure andcharacter of the universe itself. The heart of the universe is wisdom-love, and these are intrinsicallyethical, for there can be no wisdom without ethics, nor can love be without ethics, nor can there be ethicsdeprived of either love or wisdom.The philosophic reason why the ancients set so much store by what was commonly known as virtusamong the Latins, from which we have our modern word "virtue," is because by means of the teachingoriginating in the great Mystery schools, they knew that virtues, ethics, were the offspring of the moralinstinct in human beings, who derived them in their turn from the heart of the universe -- from thekosmic harmony. It is high time that the Occidental world should cast forever into the limbo of explodedsuperstitions the idea that ethics is merely conventional morality, a convenience invented by man tosmooth the asperities and dangers of human intercourse.Of course every scholar knows that the words morals and ethics come from the Latin and Greekrespectively, as signifying the customs or habits which it is proper to follow in civilized communities.But this fact itself, which is unquestionable, is in a sense disgraceful, for it would almost seem that wehad not yet brought forth a word adequately describing the instinct for right and truth and troth andjustice and honor and wisdom and love which we today so feebly express by the words ethics or morals."Theosophist is who Theosophy does," wrote H. P. Blavatsky, and wiser and nobler words she neverwrote. No one can be a theosophist who does not feel ethic-ally and think ethically and live ethically inthe real sense that is hereinbefore described. (See also Morals)
euhemerism ::: n. --> The theory, held by Euhemerus, that the gods of mythology were but deified mortals, and their deeds only the amplification in imagination of human acts.
Euhemerism: The view that explains religious myths as traditional and partially distorted accounts of historical events and personages; from Euhemerus, Cyrenaic philosopher (c. 300 B.C.), who advanced the theory that the gods of mythology were deified heroes. -- G.R.M.
Fate ::: Fate seems a more mysterious power imposing itself on men, despite all their will and endeavour, from outside them and above—daivam, a power from the Gods.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 5, Page: 353
Fenrir: In Norse mythology, a wolfish monster, offspring of Loki. One of the enemies of the Norse gods, he is to swallow Odin himself at the last day, and also to swallow the sun. (Also called Fenrisulf.)
Fire is spoken of as the Primary in the Stanzas of Dzyan: “The Spirit, beyond manifested Nature, is the fiery breath in its absolute Unity. In the manifested Universe, it is the Central Spiritual Sun, the electric Fire of all Life. In our System it is the visible Sun, the Spirit of Nature, the terrestrial god. And in, on, and around the Earth, the fiery Spirit thereof — air, fluidic fire; water, liquid fire; Earth, solid fire. All is fire — ignis, in its ultimate constitution, or I, the root of which is 0 (nought) in our conceptions, the All in nature and its mind. Pro-Mater is divine fire. It is the Creator, the Destroyer, the Preserver. The primitive names of the gods are all connected with fire, from Agni, the Aryan, to the Jewish god who ‘is a consuming fire’ ” (ibid.).
First fruits: The offering of the first produce of the earth, the first animals killed or trapped in the hunting season, the firstlings of the flock, etc., to the gods most concerned with that particular activity which produced these first fruits, etc., or to the priests of those gods. In ancient days, the practice extended sometimes also to the first child of a man.
First Tier ::: A phrase used to summarize the first six major levels of values development according to Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics: Survival Sense, Kin Spirits, Power Gods, Truth Force, Strive Drive, and Human Bond. First-Tier stages are characterized by a belief that “my values are the only correct values.” This lies in contrast to Second-Tier levels of development, wherein individuals recognize the importance of all value systems. Integral Theory uses First Tier to refer to the first six degrees or levels of developmental altitude (Infrared, Magenta, Red, Amber, Orange, and Green).
fork bomb "programming" A particular species of {wabbit} that can be written in one line of {C}: main() {for(;;)fork();} or {shell}: $0 & $0 & on any {Unix} system, or occasionally created by an egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process "explodes" by {recursive}ly spawning copies of itself using the {Unix} {system call} "{fork}(2)". Eventually it eats all the process table entries and effectively wedges the system. Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill, so creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the just wrath of the {gods} down upon the perpetrator. See also {logic bomb}. [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-14)
“For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India
For there is a continuous scale of the planes of consciousness, beginning with the psychical and other belts attached to and dependent on the earth plane and proceeding through the true independent vital and psychical worlds to the worlds of the gods and the highest supramental and spiritual planes of existence.
foundling ::: A foundling of the Gods she wanders here
Four, the ::: same as the fourfold isvara; the four Vedic gods (Varun.a,Four Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga) who "build up the whole divine state into its perfection by the natural interaction of its four essential elements", the four gods representing respectively "the all-pervading purity" of sat (Varun.a), "the all-uniting light" of cit (Mitra), "the movement and all-discerning force" of tapas (Aryaman) and "the allembracing joy" of ananda (Bhaga), thus being "practically the later
frigga ::: n. --> The wife of Odin and mother of the gods; the supreme goddess; the Juno of the Valhalla. Cf. Freya.
Frigga: Wife of Odin in Norse mythology, mother of Thor, Balder and other gods, patroness of conjugal love. Variously regarded as goddess of the earth and air.
gan.a ::: group; (in the Indian tradition) a group of attendants, especially the demigods attending on Śiva; (in the Record of Yoga) devatas acting as agents of the isvara.
Gandharva ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The Gandharvas are of the vital plane but they are vital Gods, not Asuras.” Letters on Yoga
gandharva ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Gandharvas are of the vital plane but they are vital Gods, not Asuras.” *Letters on Yoga
garden of the Gods
gentile ::: a. --> One of a non-Jewish nation; one neither a Jew nor a Christian; a worshiper of false gods; a heathen.
Belonging to the nations at large, as distinguished from the Jews; ethnic; of pagan or heathen people.
Denoting a race or country; as, a gentile noun or adjective.
gentilism ::: n. --> Hethenism; paganism; the worship of false gods.
Tribal feeling; devotion to one&
god ::: a being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions. gods, gods", God"s, Gods, God-bliss, God-born, god-chant, God-child, god-children, God-ecstasy, God-face, God-frame, God-Force, God-given, god-haunts, God-instinct"s, God-joy, God-Light, god-kind, God-knowledge, God-language, God-light, god-mind, god-phase, God-spark, god-speech, God-state, god-touch, God-vision"s, god-wings, child-god, dream-god"s, half-god, Sun-god"s.
godchild ::: n. --> One for whom a person becomes sponsor at baptism, and whom he promises to see educated as a Christian; a godson or goddaughter. See Godfather.
godhead ::: n. --> Godship; deity; divinity; divine nature or essence; godhood.
The Deity; God; the Supreme Being.
A god or goddess; a divinity.
godlings ::: minor gods; inferior deities, those imagined as possessing little power, esp. those whose influence or authority is entirely local.
GODS. ::: Gods are Personalities or Powers put forth by the
godsend ::: n. --> Something sent by God; an unexpected acquisiton or piece of good fortune.
godship ::: n. --> The rank or character of a god; deity; divinity; a god or goddess.
godsib ::: n. --> A gossip.
godson ::: n. --> A male for whom one has stood sponsor in baptism. See Godfather.
godspeed ::: n. --> Success; prosperous journeying; -- a contraction of the phrase, "God speed you."
gods ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.” *The Upanishads
gods "the necessary static elements, ::: Space, the ordered movements of the worlds, the ascending levels, the highest goal"; in later Hinduism, the Preserver of the world, one of the "three Powers and Personalities . of the One Cosmic Godhead", of which the other two are Brahma, the Creator, and Śiva or Rudra2, the Destroyer; also regarded as the Lord himself (isvara) who incarnates in the avataras, and the one deva of whom all the gods are manifestations; in the Record of Yoga, usually a subordinate aspect of Kr.s.n.a, sometimes identified with Pradyumna as the personality of the fourfold isvara whose sakti is Mahalaks.mi.Vis Visnu-Narayana
Greece. Homeric thought centered in Moira (Fate), an impersonal, immaterial power that distributes to gods and men their respective stations. While the main stream of pre-Socratic thought was naturalistic, it was not materialistic. The primordial Being of things, the Physis, is both extended and spiritual (hylozoism). Soul and Mind are invariably identified with Physis. Empedocles' distinction between inertia and force (Love and Hate) was followed by Anaxagoras' introduction of Mind (Nous) as the first cause of order and the principle of spontaneity or life in things. Socrates emphasized the ideological principle and introduced the category of Value as primary both in Nature and Man. He challenged the completeness of the mechanical explanation of natural events. Plato's theory of Ideas (as traditionally interpreted by historians) is at once a metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Ideas, forming a hierarchy and systematically united in the Good, are timeless essences comprising the realm of true Being. They are archetypes and causes of things in the realm of Non-Being (Space). Aristotle, while moving in the direction of common-sense realism, was also idealistic. Forms or species are secondary substances, and collectively form the dynamic and rational structure of the World. Active reason (Nous Poietikos), possessed by all rational creatures, is immaterial and eternal. Mind is the final cause of all motion. God is pure Mind, self-contained, self-centered, and metaphysically remote from the spatial World. The Stoics united idealism and hylozoistic naturalism in their doctrine of dynamic rational cosmic law (Logos), World Soul, Pneuma, and Providence (Pronoia).
Hathor: The cow goddess of ancient Upper Egypt, cow goddess of the sky which gives birth to the sun; the sky conceived as an immense cow with legs planted at the four corners of the earth, and upheld by the other gods.
Hera: In Greek mythology, the sister and wife of Zeus, queen of the gods, goddess of marriage.
Hermes: The ancient Greek god of herds, guardian of travellers, messenger of the gods, conductor of the dead to the underworld. The Romans identified him with Mercury. In Egypt, he was identified with Hermanubis, and chiefly with Thoth, the god of learning, and in the Roman imperial period he was worshipped as a revealer of divine wisdom by which men may become a new man, a Son of God.
Hermetic Chain ::: Among the ancient Greeks there existed a mystical tradition of a chain of living beings, one end of whichincluded the divinities in their various grades or stages of divine authority and activities, and the otherend of which ran downwards through inferior gods and heroes and sages to ordinary men, and to thebeings below man. Each link of this living chain of beings inspired and instructed the chain below itself,thus transmitting and communicating from link to link to the end of the marvelous living chain, love andwisdom and knowledge concerning the secrets of the universe, eventuating in mankind as the arts and thesciences necessary for human life and civilization. This was mystically called the Hermetic Chain or theGolden Chain.In the ancient Mysteries the teaching of the existence and nature of the Hermetic Chain was fullyexplained; it is a true teaching because it represents distinctly and clearly and faithfully true and actualoperations of nature. More or less faint and distorted copies of the teaching of this Hermetic Chain orGolden Chain or succession of teachers were taken over by various later formal and exoteric sects, suchas the Christian Church, wherein the doctrine was called the Apostolic Succession. In all the greatMystery schools of antiquity there was this succession of teacher following teacher, each one passing onthe light to his successor as he himself had received it from his predecessor; and as long as thistransmission of light was a reality, it worked enormous spiritual benefit among men. Therefore all suchmovements lived, flourished, and did great good in the world. These teachers were the messengers tomen from the Great Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. (See also Guru-parampara)
Hermetic chain: In occult teachings, a mystic chain of living entities, starting with the divine beings, and running through the demigods and sages to ordinary human beings, ending in the beings on the lower evolutionary levels.
hero ::: n. --> An illustrious man, supposed to be exalted, after death, to a place among the gods; a demigod, as Hercules.
A man of distinguished valor or enterprise in danger, or fortitude in suffering; a prominent or central personage in any remarkable action or event; hence, a great or illustrious person.
The principal personage in a poem, story, and the like, or the person who has the principal share in the transactions related; as Achilles in the Iliad, Ulysses in the Odyssey, and Aeneas in the
Hierarchy ::: The word hierarchy merely means that a scheme or system or state of delegated directive power andauthority exists in a self-contained body, directed, guided, and taught by one having supreme authority,called the hierarch. The name is used by theosophists, by extension of meaning, as signifying theinnumerable degrees, grades, and steps of evolving entities in the kosmos, and as applying to all parts ofthe universe; and rightly so, because every different part of the universe -- and their number is simplycountless -- is under the vital governance of a divine being, of a god, of a spiritual essence; and allmaterial manifestations are simply the appearances on our plane of the workings and actions of thesespiritual beings behind it.The series of hierarchies extends infinitely in both directions. If he so choose for purposes of thought,man may consider himself at the middle point, from which extends above him an unending series of stepsupon steps of higher beings of all grades -- growing constantly less material and more spiritual, andgreater in all senses -- towards an ineffable point. And there the imagination stops, not because the seriesitself stops, but because our thought can reach no farther out nor in. And similar to this series, aninfinitely great series of beings and states of beings descends downwards (to use human terms) -downwards and downwards, until there again the imagination stops, merely because our thought can gono farther.The summit, the acme, the flower, the highest point (or the hyparxis) of any series of animate and"inanimate" beings, whether we enumerate the stages or degrees of the series as seven or ten or twelve(according to whichever system we follow), is the divine unity for that series or hierarchy, and thishyparxis or highest being is again in its turn the lowest being of the hierarchy above it, and so extendingonwards forever -- each hierarchy manifesting one facet of the divine kosmic life, each hierarchyshowing forth one thought, as it were, of the divine thinkers.Various names were given to these hierarchies considered as series of beings. The generalized Greekhierarchy as shown by writers in periods preceding the rise of Christianity may be collected andenumerated as follows: (1) Divine; (2) Gods, or the divine-spiritual; (3) Demigods, sometimes calleddivine heroes, involving a very mystical doctrine; (4) Heroes proper; (5) Men; (6) Beasts or animals; (7)Vegetable world; (8) Mineral world; (9) Elemental world, or what was called the realm of Hades. TheDivinity (or aggregate divine lives) itself is the hyparxis of this series of hierarchies, because each ofthese nine stages is itself a subordinate hierarchy. This (or any other) hierarchy of nine, hangs like apendant jewel from the lowest hierarchy above it, which makes the tenth counting upwards, which tenthwe can call the superdivine, the hyperheavenly, this tenth being the lowest stage (or the ninth, countingdownwards) of still another hierarchy extending upwards; and so on, indefinitely.One of the noblest of the theosophical teachings, and one of the most far-reaching in its import, is that ofthe hierarchical constitution of universal nature. This hierarchical structure of nature is so fundamental,so basic, that it may be truly called the structural framework of being. (See also Planes)
hoc: A dubious assumption or argument arbitrarily introduced as explanation after the fact. Adeism: Max Müller coined the term which means the rejection of the devas, or gods, of ancient India; similar to atheism which denies the one God. -- J.J.R.
Hotar: Sanskrit for caller. Priest-magicians who invoke the gods by reciting ritual formulas and improvised chants.
hotr (Hotri) ::: the priest of the sacrifice, he who calls and brings the gods and gives them the offering. [Ved.] ::: hota [nominative]
Huwasi: The Hittite name of upright stones representing gods or consecrated to gods.
Hylozoism: The philosophical doctrine that life is a property of matter, that matter and life are inseparable, that life is derived from matter, or that matter has spiritual properties. The conception of nature as alive, or in the words of Thales, that “all things are full of gods.”
ichor ::: n. --> An ethereal fluid that supplied the place of blood in the veins of the gods.
A thin, acrid, watery discharge from an ulcer, wound, etc.
idolatrous ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to idolatry; partaking of the nature of idolatry; given to idolatry or the worship of false gods; as, idolatrous sacrifices.
Consisting in, or partaking of, an excessive attachment or reverence; as, an idolatrous veneration for antiquity.
idolatry ::: n. --> The worship of idols, images, or anything which is not God; the worship of false gods.
Excessive attachment or veneration for anything; respect or love which borders on adoration.
If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable…
“If we suppose a supreme consciousness, master of the world, which really conducts behind the veil all the operations the mental gods attribute to themselves, it will be obvious that that consciousness will be the entire Knower and Lord. The Upanishads
Igigi: A Babylonian term for the gods or spirits of heaven in general, or specifically, for the gods or spirits embodied in those stars which were above the horizon at any one time.
Immortality ::: A term signifying continuous existence or being; but this understanding of the term is profoundlyillogical and contrary to nature, for there is nothing throughout nature's endless and multifarious realmsof being and existence which remains for two consecutive instants of time exactly the same.Consequently, immortality is a mere figment of the imagination, an illusory phantom of reality. When thestudent of the esoteric wisdom once realizes that continuous progress, i.e., continuous change inadvancement, is nature's fundamental procedure, he recognizes instantly that continuous remaining in anunchanging or immutable state of consciousness or being is not only impossible, but in the last analysis isthe last thing that is either desirable or comforting. Fancy continuing immortal in a state of imperfection such as we human beingsexemplify -- which is exactly what the usual acceptance of this term immortality means. The highest godin highest heaven, although seemingly immortal to us imperfect human beings, is nevertheless anevolving, growing, progressing entity in its own sublime realms or spheres, and therefore as the ages passleaves one condition or state to assume a succeeding condition or state of a nobler and higher type;precisely as the preceding condition or state had been the successor of another state before it.Continuous or unending immutability of any condition or state of an evolving entity is obviously animpossibility in nature; and when once pondered over it becomes clear that the ordinary acceptance ofimmortality involves an impossibility. All nature is an unending series of changes, which means all thehosts or multitudes of beings composing nature, for every individual unit of these hosts is growing,evolving, i.e., continuously changing, therefore never immortal. Immortality and evolution arecontradictions in terms. An evolving entity means a changing entity, signifying a continuous progresstowards better things; and evolution therefore is a succession of state of consciousness and being afteranother state of consciousness and being, and thus throughout duration. The Occidental idea of staticimmortality or even mutable immortality is thus seen to be both repellent and impossible.This doctrine is so difficult for the average Occidental easily to understand that it may be advisable onceand for all to point out without mincing of words that just as complete death, that is to say, entireannihilation of consciousness, is an impossibility in nature, just so is continuous and unchangingconsciousness in any one stage or phase of evolution likewise an impossibility, because progress ormovement or growth is continuous throughout eternity. There are, however, periods more or less long ofcontinuance in any stage or phase of consciousness that may be attained by an evolving entity; and thehigher the being is in evolution, the more its spiritual and intellectual faculties have been evolved orevoked, the longer do these periods of continuous individual, or perhaps personal, quasi-immortalitycontinue. There is, therefore, what may be called relative immortality, although this phrase is confessedlya misnomer.Master KH in The Mahatma Letters, on pages 128-30, uses the phrase ``panaeonic immortality" tosignify this same thing that I have just called relative immortality, an immortality -- falsely so called,however -- which lasts in the cases of certain highly evolved monadic egos for the entire period of amanvantara, but which of necessity ends with the succeeding pralaya of the solar system. Such a periodof time of continuous self-consciousness of so highly evolved a monadic entity is to us humans actually arelative immortality; but strictly and logically speaking it is no more immortality than is the ephemeralexistence of a butterfly. When the solar manvantara comes to an end and the solar pralaya begins, evensuch highly evolved monadic entities, full-blown gods, are swept out of manifested self-consciousexistence like the sere and dried leaves at the end of the autumn; and the divine entities thus passing outenter into still higher realms of superdivine activity, to reappear at the end of the pralaya and at the dawnof the next or succeeding solar manvantara.The entire matter is, therefore, a highly relative one. What seems immortal to us humans would seem tobe but as a wink of the eye to the vision of super-kosmic entities; while, on the other hand, the span ofthe average human life would seem to be immortal to a self-conscious entity inhabiting one of theelectrons of an atom of the human physical body.The thing to remember in this series of observations is the wondrous fact that consciousness frometernity to eternity is uninterrupted, although by the very nature of things undergoing continuous andunceasing change of phases in realization throughout endless duration. What men call unconsciousness ismerely a form of consciousness which is too subtle for our gross brain-minds to perceive or to sense or tograsp; and, secondly, strictly speaking, what men call death, whether of a universe or of their ownphysical bodies, is but the breaking up of worn-out vehicles and the transference of consciousness to ahigher plane. It is important to seize the spirit of this marvelous teaching, and not allow the imperfectbrain-mind to quibble over words, or to pause or hesitate at difficult terms.
In ancient Egypt one of the great gods was called Amen or Ammon. See also AMMON
"In Greek mythology, a giant with a hundred arms, a son of Uranus and Ge, who fought against the gods. He was hurled down by Athene and imprisoned beneath Mt. Aetna in Sicily. When he stirs, the mountain shakes; when he breathes, there is an eruption. (M.I.; Web.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
“In Greek mythology, a giant with a hundred arms, a son of Uranus and Ge, who fought against the gods. He was hurled down by Athene and imprisoned beneath Mt. Aetna in Sicily. When he stirs, the mountain shakes; when he breathes, there is an eruption. (M.I.; Web). Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works
INTEGRAL YOGA ::: This yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine Supramental Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ānanda. But for that, the surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to the Higher Consciousnessis indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a Supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this yoga.
Aim of the Integral Yoga ::: It is not merely to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.
Conditions of the Integral Yoga ::: This yoga can only be done to the end by those who are in total earnest about it and ready to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to 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 tapasyā needed too constant and intense.
Method in the Integral Yoga ::: To concentrate, preferably in the heart and call the presence and power of the Mother to take up the being and by the workings of her force transform the consciousness. One can concentrate also in the head or between the eye-brows, but for many this is a too difficult opening. When the mind falls quiet and the concentration becomes strong and the aspiration intense, then there is the beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be. For the rest one must not depend on one’s own efforts only, but succeed in establishing a contact with the Divine and a receptivity to the Mother’s Power and Presence.
Integral method ::: The method we have to pursue is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform Our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sādhaka of the sādhana* as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sādhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, - the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for the weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It” makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a Succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga.
Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organised by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change. Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some elements or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefathers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and selfconscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
Key-methods ::: The way to devotion and surrender. It is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of the ego that makes it possible to surrender.
The way to knowledge. Meditation in the head by which there comes the opening above, the quietude or silence of the mind and the descent of peace etc. of the higher consciousness generally till it envelops the being and fills the body and begins to take up all the movements.
Yoga by works ::: Separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, the inner silent being from the outer active one, so that one has two consciousnesses or a double consciousness, one behind watching and observing and finally controlling and changing the other which is active in front. The other way of beginning the yoga of works is by doing them for the Divine, for the Mother, and not for oneself, consecrating and dedicating them till one concretely feels the Divine Force taking up the activities and doing them for one.
Object of the Integral Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine.
Principle of the Integral Yoga ::: The whole principle of Integral Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother all the transcendent light, power, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ānanda of the Supramental Divine.
Central purpose of the Integral Yoga ::: Transformation of our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of thinking, seeing, feeling and being into a deep and wide spiritual consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life.
Fundamental realisations of the Integral Yoga ::: The psychic change so that a complete devotion can be the main motive of the heart and the ruler of thought, life and action in constant union with the Mother and in her Presence. The descent of the Peace, Power, Light etc. of the Higher Consciousness through the head and heart into the whole being, occupying the very cells of the body. The perception of the One and Divine infinitely everywhere, the Mother everywhere and living in that infinite consciousness.
Results ::: First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sāyujya mukti, by which it becomes free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sālokya mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda ; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the divine, sādharmya mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. In integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ānanda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ānanda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Sādhanā of the Integral Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation, mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by a self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.
The yoga does not proceed by upadeśa but by inner influence.
Integral Yoga and Gita ::: The Gita’s Yoga consists in the offering of one’s work as a sacrifice to the Divine, the conquest of desire, egoless and desireless action, bhakti for the Divine, an entering into the cosmic consciousness, the sense of unity with all creatures, oneness with the Divine. This yoga adds the bringing down of the supramental Light and Force (its ultimate aim) and the transformation of the nature.
Our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. In our yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. If we do not do this double movement, we are in danger of making a tamasic and therefore unreal surrender, making no effort, no tapas and therefore no progress ; or else we make a rajasic surrender not to the Divine but to some self-made false idea or image of the Divine which masks our rajasic ego or something still worse.
Integral Yoga, Gita and Tantra ::: The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishvara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it.
The Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishvari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it.
This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the yoga.
Integral Yoga and Hatha-Raja Yogas ::: For an integral yoga the special methods of Rajayoga and Hathayoga may be useful at times in certain stages of the progress, but are not indispensable. Their principal aims must be included in the integrality of the yoga; but they can be brought about by other means. For the methods of the integral yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on physical methods or fixed psychic or psychophysical processes on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action. Integral Yoga and Kundalini Yoga: There is a feeling of waves surging up, mounting to the head, which brings an outer unconsciousness and an inner waking. It is the ascending of the lower consciousness in the ādhāra to meet the greater consciousness above. It is a movement analogous to that on which so much stress is laid in the Tantric process, the awakening of the Kundalini, the Energy coiled up and latent in the body and its mounting through the spinal cord and the centres (cakras) and the Brahmarandhra to meet the Divine above. In our yoga it is not a specialised process, but a spontaneous upnish of the whole lower consciousness sometimes in currents or waves, sometimes in a less concrete motion, and on the other side a descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force into the body.
Integral Yoga and other Yogas ::: The old yogas reach Sachchidananda through the spiritualised mind and depart into the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Non-exist- ence, absolute and eternal. Ours having realised Sachchidananda in the spiritualised mind plane proceeds to realise it in the Supramcntal plane.
The suprcfhe supra-cosmic Sachchidananda is above all. Supermind may be described as its power of self-awareness and W’orld- awareness, the world being known as within itself and not out- side. So to live consciously in the supreme Sachchidananda one must pass through the Supermind.
Distinction ::: The realisation of Self and of the Cosmic being (without which the realisation of the Self is incomplete) are essential steps in our yoga ; it is the end of other yogas, but it is, as it were, the beginning of outs, that is to say, the point where its own characteristic realisation can commence.
It is new as compared with the old yogas (1) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven and Nir- vana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object.
If there is a descent in other yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent — the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new coosdousness attain- ed by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life ; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.
(2) Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic acbievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
(3) Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods, but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive.
Integral Yoga and Patanjali Yoga ::: Cilia is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse etc.
It is these that in the Patanjali system have to be stilled altogether so that the consciousness may be immobile and go into Samadhi.
Our yoga has a different function. The movements of the ordinary consciousness have to be quieted and into the quietude there has to be brought down a higher consciousness and its powers which will transform the nature.
Intermediate Nature ::: To speak of man as a trichotomy, or as having a division into three parts -- as in the Christian NewTestament: a "natural" body, a psychical body, and a spiritual body -- is a convenient expression, but itby no means sets forth in detail the entire economy of man's inner being.Following then this trichotomy, there is first the divinespiritual element in the human constitution whichis man's own individual inner god; second, the soul or human monad, which is his human egoic self, hisintermediate or psychical or second nature; third, all the composite lower part of him which althoughcomprising several sheaths may be conveniently grouped under the one term vehicle or body. Gods,monads, and atoms collectively in nature are copied in the essential trichotomy of man, as spirit, soul,and body, and hence the latter is another way of saying man's divine-spiritual, intermediate soul, andastral-physical parts.It is the intermediate nature, offspring of the divine spark, which enshrines the ray from the divine spark,its spiritual sun so to say, and steps it down into the ordinary mentality of man. It is this intermediatenature which reincarnates. The divine-spiritual part of man does not reincarnate, for this part of man hasno need of learning the lessons that physical life can give: it is far above them all. But it is theintermediate part functioning through the various garments or sheaths of the inner man -- these garmentsmay be called astral or ethereal -- which in this manner can reach down to and touch our earthly plane;and the physical body is the garment of flesh in touch with the physical world.The intermediate nature is commonly called the human soul. It is an imperfect thing, and is that whichcomes back into incarnation, because it is drawn to this earth by attraction. It learns much needed lessonshere, in this sphere of the universal life. (See also Principles of Man)
In the Eddas the aesir are in perpetual opposition to the jotunn (giants; Icelandic jotnar), as energy is opposed to inertia. When the gods withdraw at Ragnarok, the universe ceases to be. The aesir’s reign or life was preceded by a period of quiescence, during which nothing existed. This was Ymir, the frostgiant, the transformed Bargalmer (Icelandic Bergelmir), fruitage of a previous cycle of universal life, who was “saved on a boatkeel” or “ground on the mill” to furnish substance for the succeeding world. This was to be created by All-father Odin and his two brothers, Vile and Vi (or Ve). The frost giant is killed — transformed — by the three gods, and from his substance (Orgalmer) the worlds are created. They are sustained by Trudgalmer until the gods again withdraw. In his capacity of creator Odin is named Ofner (opener), energic counterpart of Orgalmer, while at the end of a cosmic life he becomes Svafner (closer) and paired with Bargalmer.
In this simultaneous development of multitudinous independent or combined Powers or Potentials there is yet—or there is as yet—no chaos, no conflict, no fall from Truth or Knowledge. The Overmind is a creator of truths, not of illusions or falsehoods: what is worked out in any given overmental energism or movement is the truth of the Aspect, Power, Idea, Force, Delight which is liberated into independent action, the truth of the consequences of its reality in that independence. There is no exclusiveness asserting each as the sole truth of being or the others as inferior truths: each God knows all the Gods and their place in existence; each Idea admits all other ideas and their right to be; each Force concedes a place to all other forces and their truth and consequences; no delight of separate fulfilled existence or separate experience denies or condemns the delight of other existence or other experience. The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind,—although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature….
iris ::: n. --> The goddess of the rainbow, and swift-footed messenger of the gods.
The rainbow.
An appearance resembling the rainbow; a prismatic play of colors.
The contractile membrane perforated by the pupil, and forming the colored portion of the eye. See Eye.
A genus of plants having showy flowers and bulbous or
Ishwara is supracosmic as well as intracosmic; He is that which exceeds and inhabits and supports all individuality; He is the supreme and universal Brahman, the Absolute, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha.8 But, very clearly, this is not the personal God of popular religions, a being limited by his qualities, individual and separate from all others; for all such personal gods are only limited representations or names and divine personalities of the one Ishwara. Neither is this the Saguna Brahman active and possessed of qualities, for that is only one side of the being of the Ishwara; the Nirguna immobile and without qualities is another aspect of His existence. Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, revealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 366-367
Isvara(Sanskrit) ::: Isvara means "lord," and is a term which is frequently applied in Hindu mythology not only tokosmic divinities, but to the expression of the cosmic spirit in the human being. Consequently, whenreference is had to the individual human being, Isvara is the divine individualized spirit in man -- man'sown personal god. It may be otherwise described as the divine ego, the child of the divine monad in aman, and in view of this fact also could be used with reference to the dhyani-buddha or to the immanentChrist in a man. In India it is a title frequently given to Siva and other gods of the Hindu pantheon.
isvari (ishwari; iswari) ::: the all-ruling Goddess (devi), "the Worldisvari Mother, creatrix of the universe, putting forth the Gods and the worlds and all things and existences out of her spirit-substance".
Jainism: An Indian religion claiming great antiquity, the last of the great teachers (tirthankara) being Mahavira (6th cent. B.C.), embracing many philosophical elements of a pluralistic type of realism. It rejects Vedic (q.v.) authority and an absolute being, gods as well as men partaking of mortality, and holds the mythologically conceived world to be eternal and subject only to the fixed sequence of six ages, good and bad, but not periodic creation and destruction. There is an infinitude of indestructible individual souls or spiritual entities, each possessing by nature many properties inclusive of omniscience, unlimited energy and bliss which come to the fore upon attaining full independence. The non-spiritual substances are space and time, rest and motion, and matter composed of atoms and capable of being apprehended by the senses and combining to form the world of infinite variety. Matter also penetrates spiritual substance like a physician's pill, changing to karma and producing physical attachments. The good life consists in the acquisition of the three gems (triratna) of right faith (samyag-darsana), right knowledge (samyag-jnana), right conduct (samyag-caritra). Salvation, i.e., becoming a kevalin (cf. kevala), is an arduous task achieved in 14 stages of perfection, the last being bodiless existence in bliss and complete oblivion to the world and its ways. -- K.F.L.
Jainism: An Indian religion claiming great antiquity, the last of the great teachers (tirthankara) being Mahavira (6th century B.C.), embracing many philosophical elements of a pluralistic type of realism. It rejects Vedic (q.v.) authority and an absolute being, gods as well as men partaking of mortality, and holds the mythologically conceived world to be eternal and subject only to the fixed sequence of six ages, good and bad, but not periodic creation and destruction. There is an infinitude of indestructible individual souls or spiritual entities, each possessing by nature many properties inclusive of omniscience, unlimited energy and bliss which come to the fore upon attaining full independence. The non-spiritual substances are space and time, rest and motion, and matter composed of atoms and capable of being apprehended by the senses and combining to form the world of infinite variety. Matter also penetrates spiritual substances like a physician’s pill, changing to karma and producing physical attachments.
jainism ::: n. --> The heterodox Hindoo religion, of which the most striking features are the exaltation of saints or holy mortals, called jins, above the ordinary Hindoo gods, and the denial of the divine origin and infallibility of the Vedas. It is intermediate between Brahmanism and Buddhism, having some things in common with each.
japa. ::: incantation; a spiritual discipline involving the meditative repetition of the Lord's name or a mantra as a means to a continual recollection of His presence; uttering the names of the gods or sacred mantras, like OM, either mentally or spoken softly as a method of spiritual practice
Jhumur: “All the planes of the different Gods, the Forces.”
Jhumur: “The gods. From his (Death’s) point of view they are unreal. Because he wants to prove that he is the final arbiter and that all is bound by him, nothing else really matters. At this point in the argument this is what he wants to emphasize, that Savitri must accept her limitations.”
Juno: In Roman mythology, wife of Jupiter, queen of the gods, mistress of heaven and earth, patroness of marriage and female virtue.
Jupiter: Chief deity, lord of heaven and earth, king of the gods of the Romans. Identified with Zeus of the Greeks.
jupiter ::: n. --> The supreme deity, king of gods and men, and reputed to be the son of Saturn and Rhea; Jove. He corresponds to the Greek Zeus.
One of the planets, being the brightest except Venus, and the largest of them all, its mean diameter being about 85,000 miles. It revolves about the sun in 4,332.6 days, at a mean distance of 5.2028 from the sun, the earth&
Kailasa (Kailas) ::: the mountain on whose summit Śiva is said to dwell, according to a popular tradition which translated inner truths "into terms familiar to our physical and objective experience, . . . turned the rarer heights of subtle substance into material heights and placed the abodes of the gods on the summits of physical mountains". kaivaly kaivalyananda
kami ::: n. pl. --> A title given to the celestial gods of the first mythical dynasty of Japan and extended to the demigods of the second dynasty, and then to the long line of spiritual princes still represented by the mikado.
Karma(Karman, Sanskrit) ::: This is a noun-form coming from the root kri meaning "to do," "to make." Literallykarma means "doing," "making," action. But when used in a philosophical sense, it has a technicalmeaning, and this technical meaning can best be translated into English by the word consequence. Theidea is this: When an entity acts, he acts from within; he acts through an expenditure in greater or lessdegree of his own native energy. This expenditure of energy, this outflowing of energy, as it impactsupon the surrounding milieu, the nature around us, brings forth from the latter perhaps an instantaneousor perhaps a delayed reaction or rebound. Nature, in other words, reacts against the impact; and thecombination of these two -- of energy acting upon nature and nature reacting against the impact of thatenergy -- is what is called karma, being a combination of the two factors. Karma is, in other words,essentially a chain of causation, stretching back into the infinity of the past and therefore necessarilydestined to stretch into the infinity of the future. It is unescapable, because it is in universal nature, whichis infinite and therefore everywhere and timeless; and sooner or later the reaction will inevitably be feltby the entity which aroused it.It is a very old doctrine, known to all religions and philosophies, and since the renascence of scientificstudy in the Occident has become one of the fundamental postulates of modern coordinated knowledge.If you toss a pebble into a pool, it causes ripples in the water, and these ripples spread and finally impactupon the bank surrounding the pool; and, so modern science tells us, the ripples are translated intovibrations, which are carried outward into infinity. But at every step of this natural process there is acorresponding reaction from every one and from all of the myriads of atomic particles affected by thespreading energy.Karma is in no sense of the word fatalism on the one hand, nor what is popularly known as chance, onthe other hand. It is essentially a doctrine of free will, for naturally the entity which initiates a movementor action -- spiritual, mental, psychological, physical, or other -- is responsible thereafter in the shape ofconsequences and effects that flow therefrom, and sooner or later recoil upon the actor or prime mover.Since everything is interlocked and interlinked and interblended with everything else, and no thing andno being can live unto itself alone, other entities are of necessity, in smaller or larger degree, affected bythe causes or motions initiated by any individual entity; but such effects or consequences on entities,other than the prime mover, are only indirectly a morally compelling power, in the true sense of the wordmoral.An example of this is seen in what the theosophist means when he speaks of family karma as contrastedwith one's own individual karma; or national karma, the series of consequences pertaining to the nationof which he is an individual; or again, the racial karma pertaining to the race of which the individual is anintegral member. Karma cannot be said either to punish or to reward in the ordinary meaning of theseterms. Its action is unerringly just, for being a part of nature's own operations, all karmic actionultimately can be traced back to the kosmic heart of harmony which is the same thing as saying pureconsciousness-spirit. The doctrine is extremely comforting to human minds, inasmuch as man may carvehis own destiny and indeed must do so. He can form it or deform it, shape it or misshape it, as he wills;and by acting with nature's own great and underlying energies, he puts himself in unison or harmonytherewith and therefore becomes a co-worker with nature as the gods are.
*Karmic gods, Karmic norm.**
Kathenotheism: A term invented by Max Müller which literally denotes one at a time -- theism. It symbolizes the Vedic monotheistic practice according to which the position of the gods is so arranged that each God is supreme in turn, in which the titular god is always changing without entailing a denial that the other gods exist. -- H.H.
LAMENTING AND COMPLAINING. ::: This is a icrapcra- ment which the gods will not help because they know that help is useless, for it will either not be received or will be spilled and wasted ; and all that is rdjasic and asiiric in the world despises and tramples upon this kind of nature.
lar ::: n. --> A tutelary deity; a deceased ancestor regarded as a protector of the family. The domestic Lares were the tutelar deities of a house; household gods. Hence, Eng.: Hearth or dwelling house.
A species of gibbon (Hylobates lar), found in Burmah. Called also white-handed gibbon.
Les Dieux [French] ::: "The Gods", title of a book by Paul Richard.
Life-Atom ::: A learning, evolving entity, each one a unit in one or other of the numberless hosts or hierarchies of themwhich exist. A life-atom is a vital individualized vehicle or body of a spiritual monad, which latter is theconsciousness-center, the ultimate, noblest, highest, finest part of us. The heart of every life-atom is aspiritual monad. Life-atoms are young gods, embryo gods, and are, therefore, in a continuous process ofself-expressing themselves on the planes of matter.A life-atom may be briefly said to be the ensouling power in every primary or ultimate particle. An atomof physical matter is ensouled by such a life-atom, which is its pranic-astral-vital primary, the life-atomof it. The life-atom is not the physical atom, which latter is but its garment or vehicle and is compoundedof physical matter only, which breaks up when its term of life has run, and which will return again inorder to reimbody itself anew through the instrumentality and by the innate force or energy latent in itsensouling primary, the life-atom.In other words, the life-atom has a house of life, and this house of life is its body or physical atom; andthe life-atom itself is the lowest expression of the monadic light within that atomic house.
Ling chos: Tibetan legends and tales of gods, demons and giants; parts of an ancient pre-Buddhist religion, carried on in the folklore of the peoples of Tibet.
Macrocosm ::: The anglicized form of a Greek compound meaning "great arrangement," or more simply the greatordered system of the celestial bodies of all kinds and their various inhabitants, including theall-important idea that this arrangement is the result of interior orderly processes, the effects ofindwelling consciousnesses. In other and more modern phrasing the macrocosm is the vast universe,without definable limits, which surrounds us, and with particular emphasis laid on the interior, invisible,and ethereal planes. In the visioning or view of the ancients the macrocosm was an animate kosmicentity, an "animal" in the Latin sense of this word, as an organism possessing a directing and guidingsoul. But this was only the outward or exoteric view. In the Mystery schools of the archaic ages, themacrocosm was considered to be not only what is hereinbefore just stated, but also to consist moredefinitely and specifically of seven, ten, and even twelve planes or degrees of consciousness-substanceranging from the superdivine through all the intermediate stages to the physical, and even to degreesbelow the physical, these comprised in one kosmic organic unit, or what moderns would call a universe.In this sense of the word macrocosm is but another name for kosmic hierarchy, and it must beremembered in this connection that these hierarchies are simply countless in number and not only fill butactually compose and are indeed the spaces of frontierless SPACE.The macrocosm was considered to be filled full not only with gods, but with innumerable multitudes orarmies of evolving entities, from the fully self-conscious to the quasi-self-conscious downwards throughthe merely conscious to the "unconscious." Note well that in strict usage the term macrocosm was neverapplied to the Boundless, to boundless, frontierless infinitude, what the Qabbalists called Eyn-soph. Inthe archaic wisdom, the macrocosm, belonging in the astral world, considered in its causal aspect, wasvirtually interchangeable with what modern theosophists call the Absolute.
Madhav: “A Demiurge is a secondary creator. If God is the creator, then he has many assistants, the various gods; they are the Demiurges.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “Here is the Mother of all the Gods and all the Powers; she is the mediatrix, standing between the Supreme above and the earth below and firmly linking the earth to the Supreme.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “The allusion is to the Vedic legend which narrates how the dark powers of the nether regions, i.e. the subconscient—and the still below—steal and hide the riches of the Gods in their subterranean chambers. They are called the Panis, thieves.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “The guardians of eternity, the gods, the higher gods, …” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “This creation is an ordered manifestation of the Divine. There is a central Will, expressing the originating Truth-vision, impelling the whole movement. But also there are special emanations from the Divine charged with specific tasks in the organisation and maintenance of the emerging creation. These are the gods and goddesses, deities, Powers and Personalities that are in charge of their respective domains, on different levels of existence. Each world has its own guardians entrusted by the Supreme Creative Spirit with the work of building and furthering the manifestation of the particular Truth-principle that pushes for expression in that world-formula.” Readings in Savitri Vol. I.
Male principle; masculine force: In esoteric philosophy, the active and positive aspect of cosmic order or force or of the deity. The male principles are represented by male gods in the pantheons of polytheistic religions.
Manasaputra(s)(Sanskrit) ::: This is a compound word: manas, "mind," putra, "son" -- "sons of mind." The teaching is thatthere exists a Hierarchy of Compassion, which H. P. Blavatsky sometimes called the Hierarchy of Mercyor of Pity. This is the light side of nature as contrasted with its matter side or shadow side, its night side.It is from this Hierarchy of Compassion that came those semi-divine entities at about the middle periodof the third root-race of this round, who incarnated in the semi-conscious, quasi-senseless men of thatperiod. These advanced entities are otherwise known as the solar lhas as the Tibetans call them, the solarspirits, who were the men of a former kalpa, and who during the third root-race thus sacrificedthemselves in order to give us intellectual light -- incarnating in those senseless psychophysical shells inorder to awaken the divine flame of egoity and self-consciousness in the sleeping egos which we thenwere. They are ourselves because belonging to the same spiritray that we do; yet we, more strictlyspeaking, were those halfunconscious, half-awakened egos whom they touched with the divine fire oftheir own being. This, our "awakening," was called by H. P. Blavatsky, the incarnation of themanasaputras, or the sons of mind or light. Had that incarnation not taken place, we indeed should havecontinued our evolution by merely "natural" causes, but it would have been slow almost beyondcomprehension, almost interminable; but that act of self-sacrifice, through their immense pity, theirimmense love, though, indeed, acting under karmic impulse, awakened the divine fire in our own selves,gave us light and comprehension and understanding. From that time we ourselves became "sons of thegods," the faculty of self-consciousness in us was awakened, our eyes were opened, responsibilitybecame ours; and our feet were set then definitely upon the path, that inner path, quiet, wonderful,leading us inwards back to our spiritual home.The manasaputras are our higher natures and, paradoxical as it is, are more largely evolved beings thanwe are. They were the spiritual entities who "quickened" our personal egos, which were thus evolved intoself-consciousness, relatively small though that yet be. One, and yet many! As you can light an infinitenumber of candles from one lighted candle, so from a spark of consciousness can you quicken andenliven innumerable other consciousnesses, lying, so to speak, in sleep or latent in the life-atoms.These manasaputras, children of mahat, are said to have quickened and enlightened in us themanas-manas of our manas septenary, because they themselves are typically manasic in their essentialcharacteristic or svabhava. Their own essential or manasic vibrations, so to say, could cause that essenceof manas in ourselves to vibrate in sympathy, much as the sounding of a musical note will causesympathetic response in something like it, a similar note in other things. (See also Agnishvattas)
Man ::: Man is in his essence a spark of the central kosmic spiritual fire. Man being an inseparable part of theuniverse of which he is the child -- the organism of graded consciousness and substance which thehuman constitution contains or rather is -- is a copy of the graded organism of consciousnesses andsubstances of the universe in its various planes of being, inner and outer, especially inner as being by farthe more important and larger, because causal.Human beings are one class of "young gods" incarnated in bodies of flesh at the present stage of theirown particular evolutionary journey. The human stage of evolution is about halfway between theundeveloped life-atom and the fully developed kosmic spirit or god.From another point of view, man is a sheaf or bundle of forces or energies. Force and matter, or spiritand substance being fundamentally one, hence, man is de facto a sheaf or bundle of matters of variousand differing grades of ethereality, or of substantiality; and so are all other entities and thingseverywhere.Man's nature, and the nature of the universe likewise, of which man is a reflection or microcosm or "littleworld," is composite of seven stages or grades or degrees of ethereality or of substantiality; or,kosmically speaking, of three generally inclusive degrees: gods, monads, and atoms. And so far as man isconcerned, we may take the New Testament division of the Christians, which gives the same triformconception of man, that he is composed of spirit, soul, body -- remembering, however, that all these threewords are generalizing terms.Man stands at the midway point of the evolutionary ladder of life: below him are the hosts of beings lessthan he is; above him are other hosts greater than he is only because older in experience, riper in wisdom,stronger in spiritual and in intellectual fiber and power. And these beings are such as they are because ofthe evolutionary unfoldment of the inherent faculties and powers immanent in the individuality of theinner god -- the ever-living, inner, individualized spirit.Man, then, like everything else -- entity or what is called "thing" -- is, to use the modern terminology ofphilosophical scientists, an "event," that is to say, the expression of a central consciousness-center ormonad passing through one or another particular phase of its long, long pilgrimage over and throughinfinity, and through eternity. This, therefore, is the reason why the theosophist often speaks of themonadic consciousness-center as the pilgrim of eternity.Man can be considered as a being composed of three essential upadhis or bases: first, the monadic ordivine-spiritual; second, that which is supplied by the Lords of Light, the so-called manasa-dhyanis,meaning the intellectual and intuitive side of man, the element-principle that makes man Man; and thethird upadhi we may call the vital-astral-physical.These three bases spring from three different lines of evolution, from three different and separatehierarchies of being. This is the reason why man is composite. He is not one sole and unmixed entity; heis a composite entity, a "thing" built up of various elements, and hence his principles are to a certainextent separable. Any one of these three bases can be temporarily separated from the two others withoutbringing about the death of the man physically. But the elements that go to form any one of these basescannot be separated without bringing about physical dissolution or inner dissolution.These three lines of evolution, these three aspects or qualities of man, come from three differenthierarchies or states, often spoken of as three different planes of being. The lowest comes from thevital-astral-physical earth, ultimately from the moon, our cosmogonic mother. The middle, the manasicor intellectualintuitional, from the sun. The monadic from the monad of monads, the supreme flower oracme, or rather the supreme seed of the universal hierarchy which forms our kosmical universe oruniversal kosmos.
Marduk: In Babylonian mythology, the king of all the gods, determiner of destiny, god of magicians and magic arts.
.Maruts ::: the Vedic storm-gods, "luminous and violent gods of the storm and the lightning", representing in the esoteric sense of the Veda "the powers of Thought which by the strong and apparently destructive motion of their progress break down that which is established and help to the attainment of new formations".
master of the worlds ::: Sri Aurobindo: " If we suppose a supreme consciousness, master of the world, which really conducts behind the veil all the operations the mental gods attribute to themselves, it will be obvious that that consciousness will be the entire Knower and Lord. *The Upanishads
mata devanam aditer anikam ::: Mother of the gods, force of the Infinite. [RV 1.113.19]
mercury ::: n. --> A Latin god of commerce and gain; -- treated by the poets as identical with the Greek Hermes, messenger of the gods, conductor of souls to the lower world, and god of eloquence.
A metallic element mostly obtained by reduction from cinnabar, one of its ores. It is a heavy, opaque, glistening liquid (commonly called quicksilver), and is used in barometers, thermometers, ect. Specific gravity 13.6. Symbol Hg (Hydrargyrum). Atomic weight 199.8. Mercury has a molecule which consists of only one atom. It was
Meruloka ::: the world of Meru, the mountain of the gods at the centre of the earth.
Midgard serpent: In Norse mythology, a great snake-like monster (Midgardsormr) which lies in the sea, coiled around the earth; one of the offspring of Loki. At the end of the world, the serpent will come out of the sea and join the attack of the other monsters and giants on the gods, and will kill Thor with its poisonous breath.
Mixcoatl: An ancient Mexican god of war, thunder and hunting; according to the Aztec cosmology, one of the gods aiding in the creation of the world.
Mysteries: In occultism or esoteric philosophies, this term is used in general for any occult discipline or body of teachings or practice, the nature and meaning of which cannot be divulged to non-initiates. Specifically, rites of antiquity in which priests, initiates and neophytes enacted allegorical scenes from the lives of gods and goddesses, the secret meaning of which was explained to new adherents upon initiation. (See Dionysian mysteries; Eleusinian mysteries; Isis-Osiris mysteries; Mithraism; mystery cult; Orphic mysteries; Phrygian mysteries.)
Mystery cult; mystery religion: This term is commonly employed to mean any religion or cult to which initiates are admitted by secret rites, the meaning of which cannot be divulged to the public; the possession of this esoteric knowledge is believed to insure special blessings for the devoted initiate both in earthly life and after physical death. The term is frequently used for the mysteries (q.v.) of classical Greece and Egypt although it is not very appropriate in this application, since these cults did not demand exclusive allegiance of the adherents and did not preclude their acceptance and observance of other gods and ritual practices.
myth ::: a traditional or legendary story, without a determinable basis of fact or natural explanation, esp. one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature. myths.
Myth: (Gr. mythes, legend) The truth, symbolically, or affectively, presented. Originally, the legends of the Gods concerning cosmogonical or cosmological questions. Later, a fiction presented as historically true but lacking factual basis; a popular and traditional falsehood. A presentation of cosmology, employing the affective method of symbolic representation in order to escape from the limitations of literal meaning. -- J.K.F.
mythology ::: n. --> The science which treats of myths; a treatise on myths.
A body of myths; esp., the collective myths which describe the gods of a heathen people; as, the mythology of the Greeks.
na hi te bhagavan vyaktim vidur deva na danavah ::: neither the gods nor the titans, O blessed Lord, know Thy manifestation. [Gita 10.14]
Name ::: “Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of things embodies and which we try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. Nomen in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence.” The Life Divine
name ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of things embodies and which we try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. Nomen in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence.” The Life Divine
Nature ::: The consciousness side of nature is composed of vast hierarchies of gods, developed cosmical spirits,spiritual entities, cosmic graduates in the university of life. The material side of nature is theheterogeneous matter, the material world in its many various planes, in all stages of imperfection -- butall these stages filled with armies of entities evolving and growing. The proper term for nature in moderntheosophical usage is prakriti or still more accurately mulaprakriti -- the ever-living kosmic producer, theeternally fecund mother, of the universe. When a theosophist speaks of nature, unless he limits the termto the physical world, he never means the physical world alone, but the vast reaches of universal kosmosand more particularly the inner realms, the causal factors of the boundless All. Hence, a growingunderstanding of nature in this sense -- which is another way of saying an understanding of reality -obviously provides the only basis of a religion founded on the changeless realities.
Nature worship: The expression of man’s feeling of dependence on the powers of nature, of his gratitude to beneficent phases of his natural environment and of his fear of its dangerous elements. Almost all ancient gods were personified powers of nature.
nectar ::: 1. *Myth. The life-giving drink of the gods. 2. The juice of a fruit. 3. A delicious or invigorating drink. *nectar-cup.
nectar ::: n. --> The drink of the gods (as ambrosia was their food); hence, any delicious or inspiring beverage.
A sweetish secretion of blossoms from which bees make honey.
Nectar: The drink of the gods of Greek mythology.
net.- "convention, networking, messaging" /net dot/ A prefix used to describe people and events related to {Usenet} and the {Internet}. The convention dates from the time before the {Great Renaming}, when most non-local {Usenet} newsgroups had names beginning "net.". Includes {net.gods}, "net.goddesses" (various charismatic net.women with circles of on-line admirers), "net.lurkers" (see {lurker}), "net.person", "net.parties" (a synonym for {boink}), and many similar constructs. See also {net.police}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-03-21)
niobe ::: n. --> The daughter of Tantalus, and wife of Amphion, king of Thebes. Her pride in her children provoked Apollo and Diana, who slew them all. Niobe herself was changed by the gods into stone.
nr̄.h. (nrih) ::: (apparently the plural of nr., whose more regular forms nrh are narah. [nominative] or nr̄.n [accusative]) literally "men", a term used in the Veda for "the gods as the male powers or Purushas presiding over the energies of Nature".
Odin: One of the Norse triad of deities (the other two were Thor and Freyr); the god of war, the lord of the Valhalla (Hall of the Chosen Dead). Later revered also as the creator of the world and king of all gods.
"Of course, the gods exist — that is to say, there are Powers that stand above the world and transmit the divine workings. It is the physical mind which believes only what is physical that denies them. There are also beings of other worlds — gods and Asuras, etc.” Letters on Yoga
“Of course, the gods exist—that is to say, there are Powers that stand above the world and transmit the divine workings. It is the physical mind which believes only what is physical that denies them. There are also beings of other worlds—gods and Asuras, etc.” Letters on Yoga
olympic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Olympus, a mountain of Thessaly, fabled as the seat of the gods, or to Olympia, a small plain in Elis.
Olympus: A mountain in southern Thessaly; its perpetually cloud-capped peak (9,794 feet high) was believed to be the abode of the gods of the Greek-Roman pantheon.
On the next level Odin is again instrumental in creation. Here his brother creators are named Honir and Lodur. The gods of this second trinity correspond to the Hindu tattvas: Odin stands for air (breath, spirit), Honir for water (fluidity, intelligence), and Lodur for fire (energy, will and vital heat). They found on the earth “Ask (ash) and Embla (alder), indeterminate,” and gave to these vegetative life forms out of their own nature the properties needed to complete the human constitution.
Overmind ::: Above the mind there are several levels of conscious of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believing that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. It is not the authentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs , all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind.being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.
Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally ; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators. Only each creates in his own way ; he sees all but sees all from his own tnewpoint. There is not the abso- lute supramental harmony and quietude.
overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga
"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine
"The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.” The Life Divine
"The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri
"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga
*Overmind"s.
paganism ::: n. --> The state of being pagan; pagan characteristics; esp., the worship of idols or false gods, or the system of religious opinions and worship maintained by pagans; heathenism.
pagan ::: n. --> One who worships false gods; an idolater; a heathen; one who is neither a Christian, a Mohammedan, nor a Jew.
Of or pertaining to pagans; relating to the worship or the worshipers of false goods; heathen; idolatrous, as, pagan tribes or superstitions.
pandora ::: n. --> A beautiful woman (all-gifted), whom Jupiter caused Vulcan to make out of clay in order to punish the human race, because Prometheus had stolen the fire from heaven. Jupiter gave Pandora a box containing all human ills, which, when the box was opened, escaped and spread over the earth. Hope alone remained in the box. Another version makes the box contain all the blessings of the gods, which were lost to men when Pandora opened it.
A genus of marine bivalves, in which one valve is flat,
Pan: The Arcadian god of shepherds, hunters and rural residents, chief of the minor deities of the Greek pantheon. Represented as a horned, long-eared man with the lower half of the body and legs resembling those of a goat; he plays a pipe on which he can produce music of magic power which “can charm the very gods.”
pantheon ::: n. --> A temple dedicated to all the gods; especially, the building so called at Rome.
The collective gods of a people, or a work treating of them; as, a divinity of the Greek pantheon.
Pantheon: The collective name of all the gods of a tribe, race or nation. Also, a temple dedicated to all the gods.
Para handatar; para handandatar: A Hittite term for a special force through which the gods govern, individual to each god.
penates ::: n. pl. --> The household gods of the ancient Romans. They presided over the home and the family hearth. See Lar.
PISaCA. ::: Demon ; beings of Ihc lower vital planes, who arc in opposition to the Gods.
Planetary gods: See: Planetary spirits.
Planetary spirits: In theosophical terminology, the seven rulers of the planets (“planetary gods”); they are regarded as emanations and agents of the Absolute.
Plotinism is a theocentric form of thought. As reality becomes more intelligible, it becomes more spiritual and Divine. The Ideas in the sphere of Nous are Divine and in later Neo-Platonism become gods; hence the system is polytheistic.
Polytheism: Belief in many gods.
Polytheism: (Gr. polus, many; and theos, god) A theory that Divine reality is numerically multiple, that there are many gods, opposed to monotheism. See Plotinism. -- V.J.B.
polytheism ::: n. --> The doctrine of, or belief in, a plurality of gods.
polytheist ::: n. --> One who believes in, or maintains the doctrine of, a plurality of gods.
Powers of darkness, the Veilcrs in Night; beings of. the middle vital plane who are in opposition to the gods. ' • ^
powers ::: Sri Aurobindo: "These are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pishachas (beings respectively of the mentalised vital, middle vital and lower vital planes) who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, purve devah , as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos.” Letters on Yoga
powers ::: “These are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pishachas (beings respectively of the mentalised vital, middle vital and lower vital planes) who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, purve devah , as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos.” Letters on Yoga
Prajapati(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning "governor" or "lord" or "master" of "progeny." The word is applied to severalof the Vedic gods, but in particular to Brahma -- that is to say the second step from parabrahman -- theevolver-creator, the first and most recondite figure of the Hindu triad, consisting of Brahma, Vishnu, andSiva. Brahma is the emanator or evolver, Vishnu the sustainer or preserver, and Siva, a name which maybe translated euphemistically perhaps as "beneficent," the regenerator. Prajapati is a name which is oftenused in the plural, and refers to seven and also to ten different beings. They are the producers and giversof life of all on earth and, indeed, on the earth's planetary chain.
Prajapati: Sanskrit for lord of creatures. A term originally applied to various Vedic gods; it assumed, as early as the Rig Veda, the importance of a first philosophical principle of creation, and later of time as suggestive of gestation and productive periodicity.
Prajapati: (Skr.) "Lord of creatures", originally applied to various Vedic (q.v.) gods, it assumed as early as the Rig Veda the importance of a first philosophical principle of creation, and later of time as suggestive of gestation and productive periodicity. -- K.F.L.
Predestination: The doctrine that all events of man's life, even one's eternal destiny, are determined beforehand by Deity. Sometimes this destiny is thought of in terms of an encompassing Fate or Luck (Roman and Greek), sometimes as the cyclic routine of the wheel of Fortune (Indian), sometimes as due to special gods or goddesses (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos in Hesiod), sometimes as the Kismet or mysterious Fate (Mohammedanism), as due to rational Necessity (Stoicism) and more often in terms of the sheer will of a sovereign Deity (Hebrew, Jewish and Christian). In historic Christianity utterances of Paul are given as the authority for the doctrine (Eph. 1:11, Rom. 8:30, Rom. 9:18). St. Augustine believed that man's own sinfulness made his salvation utterly dependent upon the sheer grace and election of God. Extreme expressions of Calvinism and Lutheranism held that man does absolutely nothing toward his salvation apart from the grace and good will of the Divine. Classical examples of theological determinism are the views of Bucer (1491-1551), Calvin (see Calvinism), and the American theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). The two classic theories concerning the place of the alleged Fall of man are supralapsarianism, the view that the Fall itself was predetermined; infralapsarianism, the view that man's predestination was set up subsequent to the Fall, the Fall itself only being permitted. -- V.F.
proceed on its way as an independent divine being with its own play in the world. All the Gods can put forth such emanations from their being, identified with them in essence of conscious- ness and power though not commensurate.
purana ::: n. --> One of a class of sacred Hindoo poetical works in the Sanskrit language which treat of the creation, destruction, and renovation of worlds, the genealogy and achievements of gods and heroes, the reigns of the Manus, and the transactions of their descendants. The principal Puranas are eighteen in number, and there are the same number of supplementary books called Upa Puranas.
Purana: One of eighteen or more sacred treatises of India, legendary and allegorical in character, discussing five principal topics, viz., the creation of the universe, its destruction and renovation, the genealogy of gods and patriarchs, the reigns of the Manus, and the history of the solar and lunar races; interspersed are ethical, philosophical, and scientific observations; they are supposed to have been compiled by the poet Vyasa.
Puranas(Sanskrit) ::: A word which literally means "ancient," "belonging to olden times." In India the word isespecially used as a term comprehending certain well-known sacred scriptures, which popular and evenscholarly authorities ascribe to the poet Vyasa. The Puranas contain the entire body of ancient Indianmythology. They are usually considered to be eighteen in number, and each Purana, to be complete, issupposed to consist of five topics or themes. These five topics or themes are commonly enumerated asfollows: (1) the beginnings or "creation" of the universe; (2) its renewals and destructions, ormanvantaras and pralayas; (3) the genealogies of the gods, other divine beings, heroes, and patriarchs; (4)the reigns of the various manus; and (5) a resume of the history of the solar and lunar races. Practicallynone of the Puranas as they stand in modern versions contains all these five topics, except perhaps theVishnu-Purana, probably the most complete in this sense of the word; and even the Vishnu-Puranacontains a great deal of matter not directly to be classed under these five topics. All the Puranas alsocontain a great deal of symbolical and allegorical writing.
purve devah ::: the former gods.
Ragnarok: In Norse and Teutonic cosmogony, the end of the present state of the world, when a new age of righteousness on a new earth will be accomplished by a battle between the gods and the evil giants, in which evil will be overthrown.
Rahu: In Hindu mythology Rahu is a daitya (demon) who possessed an appendage like a dragon’s tail, and made himself immortal by stealing from the gods some amrita—elixir of divine life—which they obtained by churning an ocean of milk. Unable to deprive him of his immortality, Vishnu exiled him from Earth and made of him the constellation Draco: his head is called Rahu, and his tail Ketu. Using his appendage as a weapon, he has ever since waged a destructive war on the denouncers of his robbery, the Sun and the Moon, which he swallows during the eclipse. The fable is presumed to have a mystic or occult meaning.
Ray: In ancient Akkadian literature, the source or symbol of the divine power of the gods; the loss of the rays to another god meant loss of supernatural powers and functions.
R.bhus (Ribhus) ::: the name of three Vedic gods or demigods, the "arRbhus tisans of Immortality"; they "are represented as human beings who have attained to the condition of godhead by power of knowledge and perfection in their works" and act as "energies of formation and upward progress who assist the gods in the divinising of man".
religion ::: n. --> The outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god or of gods having power over their destiny, to whom obedience, service, and honor are due; the feeling or expression of human love, fear, or awe of some superhuman and overruling power, whether by profession of belief, by observance of rites and ceremonies, or by the conduct of life; a system of faith and worship; a manifestation of piety; as, ethical religions; monotheistic religions; natural religion; revealed religion; the religion of the
Rig Veda: The oldest part of the Vedas (q.v.), consisting of hymns to the gods.
roup ::: v. i. & t. --> To cry or shout; hence, to sell by auction. ::: n. --> An outcry; hence, a sale of gods by auction.
A disease in poultry. See Pip.
Rudra2 ::: "the terrible", a Vedic deity who is "the Violent and Merciful, the Mighty One, . . . the armed, wrathful and beneficent Power of God who lifts forcibly the creation upward, smites all that opposes, scourges all that errs and resists, heals all that is wounded and suffers"; (in the plural) gods with the qualities of this deity, "the fierce, impetuous ones", such as the Maruts; in later Hinduism, a name of Śiva as the Destroyer, one of the "three Powers and Personalities of the One Cosmic Godhead", of which the other two are Brahma, the Creator, and Vis.n.u, the Preserver; in the Record of Yoga, sometimes identified with the Balarama personality of the fourfold isvara. rudra ananda
Rudras ::: the fierce, impetuous ones; [a group of Gods, in the Veda sometimes identified with the Maruts, later eleven (or thirty-three) minor deities led by Rudra (Siva)].
Rupa(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning "form," "image," "similitude," but this word is employed technically, andonly rarely in the popular sense in which it is commonly used in English. It signifies rather an atomic ormonadic aggregation about the central and indwelling consciousness, forming a vehicle or body thereof.Thus the rupa-lokas are lokas or worlds where the body-form or vehicle is very definitely outlined inmatter; whereas the arupa-lokas are worlds where the body-forms or "images" are outlined in a mannerwhich to us humans is much less definite. It should be noted that the word rupa applies with equal forceto the bodies or vehicles even of the gods, although these latter to us are purely subjective or arupa. (Seealso Loka)
rustic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the country; rural; as, the rustic gods of antiquity.
Rude; awkward; rough; unpolished; as, rustic manners.
Coarse; plain; simple; as, a rustic entertainment; rustic dress.
Simple; artless; unadorned; unaffected. ::: n.
sadhyas. ::: deities who guard rites and prayers to the more important Gods
Sakti(Sanskrit) ::: A term which may be briefly defined to mean one of what in modern Occultism are called theseven forces of nature, of which six are manifest and the seventh unmanifest, or only partly manifest.Sakti in general may be described as universal energy, and is, as it were, the feminine aspect of fohat. Inpopular Hinduism the various saktis are the wives or consorts of the gods, in other words, the energies oractive powers of the deities represented as feminine influences or energies.These anthropomorphic definitions are unfortunate, because misleading. The saktis of nature are reallythe veils, or sheaths, or vehicular carriers, through which work the inner and ever-active energies. Assubstance and energy, or force and matter, are fundamentally one, as modern science in its researches hasbegun to discover, it becomes apparent that even these saktis or sheaths or veils are themselves energic tolower spheres or realms through which they themselves work.The crown of the astral light, as H. P. Blavatsky puts it, is the generalized sakti of universal nature in so far as our solar system is concerned.
Satya loka: In Hinduism and occult terminology, the world or plane of absolute purity and wisdom, the abode of the gods.
siva ::: n. --> One of the triad of Hindoo gods. He is the avenger or destroyer, and in modern worship symbolizes the reproductive power of nature.
&
Soma: A plant, the juice of which was the favorite drink of the Vedic gods and was used in Hindu temples to induce trance and give supernatural powers. Soma is also the name of a Vedic god.
"Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda; gandharva itthâ padam asya rakshati. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, adbhuta, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pâti devânâm janimâni adbhutah. The ‘births of the gods" is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being.” The Secret of the Veda
“Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda; gandharva itthâ padam asya rakshati. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, adbhuta, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pâti devânâm janimâni adbhutah. The ‘births of the gods’ is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being.” The Secret of the Veda
“Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda; gandharvaitthâpadamasyarakshati. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, adbhuta, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pâtidevânâmjanimâniadbhutah. The ‘births of the gods’ is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being.” The Secret of the Veda
Soma: One of the three important gods of the Vedic religion, about whom the ninth book of the Rig-Veda centers. This god is associated with the plant growing in northern India which was made into an intoxicating liquor. The effects of this drink became associated with supernatural powers. -- V.F.
Spiral Dynamics ::: A theoretical model focusing on the development of value memes, or “vMemes,” from First Tier (Survival Sense, Kin Spirits, Power Gods, Truth Force, Strive Drive, and Human Bond) to Second Tier (Flex Flow and Global View). Conceived by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, and based on research by Clare Graves.
Sri Aurobindo: "As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man; — this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon, Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other, — invisible Personalities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood and Evil.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Life Heavens are the heavens of the vital gods and there is there a perfect harmony but a harmony of the sublimated satisfied senses and vital desires only.” Letters on Yoga
stubh ::: the rhythm that affirms the gods; the Word considered as a power which affirms and confirms in the settled rhythm of things. [Ved.]
sudha ::: nectar or amrta; the food or drink of the gods.
Supramental Creation ::: Characteristically the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age of religions. As I said, the flower of human effort towards what is above it gave rise to innumerable religious forms, to a religious relationship between the noble souls and the invisible world.And now, all these old things seem so old, so out-of-date, so arbitrary — such a travesty of the real truth. In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions.The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world.
Ref: CWM Vol.09, Page: 151
sūri ::: illumined, luminous; an illumined thinker, a seer; any of the suri solar gods or powers of Sūrya2.
taliscd vita], middle vital and lower vital planes) who arc in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too arc
Tantra(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word literally meaning a "loom" or the warp or threads in a loom, and, by extension ofmeaning, signifying a rule or ritual for ceremonial rites. The Hindu Tantras are numerous works orreligious treatises teaching mystical and magical formulae or formularies for the attainment of magical orquasi-magical powers, and for the worship of the gods. They are mostly composed in the form of dialogsbetween Siva and his divine consort Durga, these two divinities being the peculiar objects of theadoration of the Tantrins.In many parts of India the authority of the Tantras seems almost to have superseded the clean andpoetical hymns of the Vedas.Most tantric works are supposed to contain five different subjects: (1) the manifestation or evolution ofthe universe; (2) its destruction; (3) the worship or adoration of the divinities; (4) the achievement orattainment of desired objects and especially of six superhuman faculties; (5) modes or methods of union,usually enumerated as four, with the supreme divinity of the kosmos by means of contemplativemeditation.Unfortunately, while there is much of interest in the tantric works, their tendency for long ages has beendistinctly towards what in occultism is known as sorcery or black magic. Some of the rites or ceremoniespracticed have to do with revolting details connected with sex.Durga, the consort of Siva, his sakti or energy, is worshiped by the Tantrins as a distinct personifiedfemale power.The origin of the Tantras unquestionably goes back to a very remote antiquity, and there seems to belittle doubt that these works, or their originals, were heirlooms handed down from originally debased ordegenerate Atlantean racial offshoots. There is, of course, a certain amount of profoundly philosophicaland mystical thought running through the more important tantric works, but the tantric worship in manycases is highly licentious and immoral.
Tantra: That body of Hindu religious literature which is stated to have been revealed by Shiva as the specific scripture of the Kali Yuga (the present age). The Tantras were the encyclopedias of esoteric knowledge of their time; the topics of a Tantra are: the creation of the universe, worship of the gods, spiritual exercise, rituals, the six magical powers, and meditation.
Tehmi: “The hour just before dawn. The Gods awake with the dawn in the Veda. The Gods are called ‘Ushabuddha, ‘those who awake with the dawn’. All the gods are sons of light except Agni who burns also in the light and the darkness.”
The aesir are not the highest gods, even though cosmic Odin in his capacity of Allfather is the father of gods and men by virtue of being descended from a previous era of evolution. “All the creative gods, or personal Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic evolution” (SD 1:427). The aesir were ousted from Asgard by the vaner, superior gods who remain in their high realms while the aesir dwell in living spheres. Nevertheless even the aesir receive a “hostage” (in one interpretation an avatara) from the vaner and in exchange furnish the mind and matter which enable these exalted beings to evolve.
"The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.” The Life Divine
“The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.” The Life Divine
The Apsaras then are the divine Hetairae of Paradise, beautiful singers and actresses whose beauty and art relieve the arduous and world-long struggle of the Gods against the forces that tend towards disruption by the Titans who would restore Matter to its original atomic condition or of dissolution by the sages and hermits who would make phenomena dissolve prematurely into the One who is above phenomena. They rose from the Ocean, says Valmiki, seeking who should choose them as brides, but neither the Gods nor the Titans accepted them, therefore are they said to be common or universal. The Harmony of Virtue
::: "The Gods are Personalities and Powers of the dynamic Divine.” *Letters on Yoga
“The Gods are Personalities and Powers of the dynamic Divine.” Letters on Yoga
The Gods are Personalities and Powers of the dynamic
"The Gods are the great undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute, preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos.” Essays on the Gita
“The Gods are the great undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute, preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos.” Essays on the Gita
::: "The Gods, as has already been said, are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother, the Adya Shakti; in their cosmic action they are Powers and Personalities of the Divine each with his independent cosmic standing, function and work in the universe. They are not impersonal entities but cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces.” Letters on Yoga
“The Gods, as has already been said, are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother, the Adya Shakti; in their cosmic action they are Powers and Personalities of the Divine each with his independent cosmic standing, function and work in the universe. They are not impersonal entities but cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces.” Letters on Yoga
The Gods cannot be transformed, for they are typal and not evolutionary beings, they can come for conversion, that is to say, to ^ve up their own ideas and outlook on things and con- form themselves to the higher Will and Supramcntal Truth of the Divine.
"The Gods, who in their highest secret entity are powers of this Supermind, born of it, seated in it as in their proper home, are in their knowledge truth-conscious'' and in their action possessed of theseer-will"".” The Life Divine
“The Gods, who in their highest secret entity are powers of this Supermind, born of it, seated in it as in their proper home, are in their knowledge truth-conscious’’ and in their action possessed of theseer-will’’.” The Life Divine
The Brahmanas and Puranas generally reckon twelve adityas. In a preceding manvantara they were called tushitas, but when the end of the cycle was near they entered the “womb of Aditi, that we may be born in the next Manwantara; for, thereby, we shall again enjoy the rank of gods.” Hence in the present seventh manvantara, they are known as adityas (VP 1:15). When the pralaya (dissolution) of the world comes, twelve suns will appear (MB 3:3, 26; Dict Hind 3). The twelve adityas are the twelve great gods of the Hindu pantheon; also, the twelve signs of the zodiac or twelve months of the year.
The deceased, entering the domain as a khu, performs the same activities that he did on earth: plowing, reaping, sailing his boat, and making love. On entering Amenti, Anubis conducts the soul to the hall of Osiris where it is judged by the 42 judges and its heart is weighed against the feather of truth. If the soul passes the test, it goes to the fields of Aalu. If the names of the 15 Aats, the 7 Arrets (circles), the 21 Pylons, as well as the gods and guardians of these domains are all known, the deceased is enabled to pass from one mansion to the other, and finally to enter the Night Boat of the Sun, which passes through the Tuat on its way to arise in the heavens. The shades who miss this boat, the unprogressed egos, must remain in the afterworld or kama-loka, while those who enter the boat are carried to the heaven world or devachan where they wander about until they return to earth for rebirth. This refers to the passing from world to world by the ego proficient in knowledge of the “names,” and thereafter entering the secret or invisible pathways to the sun. The knowledge of the names indicates spiritual, intellectual, and psychic development, by which the ego of the defunct is no longer attracted to the lower spheres, but having knowledge of them correctly answers the challenges and thereafter follows the attraction upwards and onwards.
The gods are the great undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute, preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 346
"The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.” The Secret of the Veda
“The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.” The Secret of the Veda
The gods in (he ovcrmcntal plane have not many heads and arms ; this is a vital symbolism, it is not necessary in other planes.
“The Life Heavens are the heavens of the vital gods and there is there a perfect harmony but a harmony of the sublimated satisfied senses and vital desires only.” Letters on Yoga
“The Life Heavens are the heavens of the vital gods
The mysteries of Osiris and Isis were revived in Rome, and Apuleius (2nd century) in The Golden Ass tells of the Procession of Isis, in which the dual aspect of Anubis was portrayed: “that messenger between heaven and hell displaying alternately a face black as night, and golden as the day; in his left the caduceus, in his right waving aloft the green palm branch” (Gods of the Egyptians, Budge 2:264-5). In most of his attributes, Anubis is a lunar power, Plutarch connecting him with the Grecian Hecate, one of the names for the moon; and this is further emphasized by his being a guide of the dead. Also identified with Hermes as psychopomp. See also Hermanubis
The necessity of assuming such a supreme form appears also from the side of physics. Since every movement or change implies a mover, and since the chain of causes cannot be infinite if the world is to be intelligible, there must be an unmoved first mover. Furthermore, since motion is eternal (for time is eternal, and time is but the measure of motion), the first mover must be eternal. This eternal unmoved first mover, whose existence is demanded by physical theory, is described in the Metaphysics as the philosophical equivalent of the god or gods of popular religion. Being one, he is the source of the unity of the world process. In himself he is pure actuality, the only form without matter, the only being without extension. His activity consists in pure thought, that is, thought which has thought for its object; and he influences the world not by mechanical impulse, but by virtue of the perfection of his being, which makes him not only the supreme object of all knowledge, but also the ultimate object of all desire.
Theocrasy: (Gr. theos god, krasis a mixture) a) A mixture of the worship of different gods.
theocrasy ::: n. --> A mixture of the worship of different gods, as of Jehovah and idols.
An intimate union of the soul with God in contemplation, -- an ideal of the Neoplatonists and of some Oriental mystics.
theogony ::: n. --> The generation or genealogy of the gods; that branch of heathen theology which deals with the origin and descent of the deities; also, a poem treating of such genealogies; as, the Theogony of Hesiod.
"The old writings call the Titans the elder gods. So they still are; nor is any god entirely divine unless there is hidden in him also a Titan.” Essays Divine and Human
“The old writings call the Titans the elder gods. So they still are; nor is any god entirely divine unless there is hidden in him also a Titan.” Essays Divine and Human
theomachist ::: n. --> One who fights against the gods; one who resists God of the divine will.
Theomachy: Battle against the gods; opposition to the divine will.
Theomachy: (Gr. theoi, machein, battle against the gods), a term implying opposition to the divine will. -- K.F.L.
theomachy ::: n. --> A fighting against the gods, as the battle of the gaints with the gods.
A battle or strife among the gods.
Opposition to God or the divine will.
The overmind is the region of the gods, the beings of divine origin who have been charged with supervising, directing and organising the evolution of the universe; and more specifically, since the formation of the earth they have served as messengers and intermediaries to bring to the earth the aid of the higher regions and to preside over the formation of the mind and its progressive ascension. It is usually to the gods of the overmind that the prayers of the various religions are addressed. These religions most often choose, for various reasons, one of these gods and transform him for their personal use into the supreme God.
The overmind is the world of the gods.
“The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way—it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” Letters on Yoga
There is only one psychic being for each human being, but the beings of the higher planes, eg. the Gods of the Overmind can manifest in more than one human body at a time by send- ing different emanations into different bodies.
There is the danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation ; for these inter* mediate planes arc full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhaka and make him (heir instrument for the purpose.
theurgy ::: n. --> A divine work; a miracle; hence, magic; sorcery.
A kind of magical science or art developed in Alexandria among the Neoplatonists, and supposed to enable man to influence the will of the gods by means of purification and other sacramental rites.
In later or modern magic, that species of magic in which effects are claimed to be produced by supernatural agency, in distinction from natural magic.
Theurgy: The literal meaning of this Greek term is divine work, and it is generally applied to denote the work of a divine or other supernatural agency in the affairs of man, generally by direct intervention. In occult terminology, it means communication with supernatural beings and the practice of magic rites aimed at bringing Gods and spirits down to the Earth.
The world of the Asuras is prior to the evolution, so are the worlds of the mental, vital or subtle-physical Devas — but these beings are different from each other. The great Gods belong to the Overmind plane ::: in the Supennind they are unified as aspects of the Divine, in the Overmind they appear as separate personali- ties. Any godhead can descend by emanation to the physical plane and associate himself with the evolution of a human being with whose line of manlfestion he is in affinity.
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her—the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
thunderbolt ::: an imaginary bolt or dart conceived as the material destructive agent cast to earth in a flash of lightening. Myth & Legend / Norse Myth & Legend) (in mythology) the destructive weapon wielded by several gods, esp. the Greek god Zeus and the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
Thunderer ::: An epithet for Jupiter or the Deity. Jupiter (Latin: Iuppiter; /ˈjʊpɪtɛr/; genitive case: Iovis; /ˈjɔːvɪs/) or Jove is the king of the gods and the god of sky and thunder in myth. Jupiter was the chief deity of Roman state religion throughout the Republican and Imperial eras, until Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire. In Roman mythology, he negotiates with Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, to establish principles of Roman religion such as sacrifice.
thunderer ::: n. --> One who thunders; -- used especially as a translation of L. tonans, an epithet applied by the Romans to several of their gods, esp. to Jupiter.
Tiamat: In Babylonian and Chaldean cosmogony, the undifferentiated matter out of which gods and men, heaven and earth sprang.
Titan ::: “In Greek mythology, one of a family of gigantic beings, the twelve primordial children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth); also certain of the offspring of these Titans. The names of the twelve Titans, the ancestors of the Olympian gods, were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronos. Cronos, the youngest of them, ruled the world after overthrowing and castrating Uranus. He swallowed each of his own children at birth but Zeus escaped. Cronos was made to vomit up the others (including Hera, Demeter, Poseidon, and Hades) and, after a protracted struggle, he and the other Titans were vanquished, all of them but Atlas imprisoned in Tartarus, and the reign of Zeus was established. More broadly, the word Titan may be applied to any being of a colossal force or grandiose and lawless self-assertion, or even to whatever is huge or mighty.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works.
titan ::: "In Greek mythology, one of a family of gigantic beings, the twelve primordial children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth); also certain of the offspring of these Titans. The names of the twelve Titans, the ancestors of the Olympian gods, were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronos. Cronos, the youngest of them, ruled the world after overthrowing and castrating Uranus. He swallowed each of his own children at birth but Zeus escaped. Cronos was made to vomit up the others (including Hera, Demeter, Poseidon, and Hades) and, after a protracted struggle, he and the other Titans were vanquished, all of them but Atlas imprisoned in Tartarus, and the reign of Zeus was established. More broadly, the word Titan may be applied to any being of a colossal force or grandiose and lawless self-assertion, or even to whatever is huge or mighty.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
Titans: The giants of Greek mythology who made war on the gods.
::: "To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
“To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
To Xenophanes is due the saying: "The gods of the Ethiopians are dark-skinned and snub-nosed, the gods of the Thracians are fair and blue-eyed; if oxen could paint, their gods would be oxen."
transcendent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence — and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal — of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth — a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"We see then that there are three terms of the one existence, transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always contains secretly or overtly the two others. The Transcendent possesses itself always and controls the other two as the basis of its own temporal possibilities; that is the Divine, the eternal all-possessing God-consciousness, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs all existences. The human being is here on earth the highest power of the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at its critical turning-point that movement of self-manifestation which appears to us as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge.” The Life Divine
The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her — the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
**Transcendent"s.**
Triad: A divine trinity or group or union of three gods, e.g., Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. (See also higher triad.)
Trilemma: See Proof by cases. Trimurti: (Skr. having three shapes) The Hindu trinity, religiously interpreted as the three gods Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, or metaphysically as the three principles of creation-maintenance-destruction operative in cosmo-psychology. -- K.F.L.
trimurti ::: n. --> The triad, or trinity, of Hindu gods, consisting of Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Siva, the Destroyer.
Trimurti: The Hindu triad of gods: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.
Tritheism: Name given to the opinions of John Philoponus, the noted commentator on Aristotle, Conon, Bishop of Tarsus, and Eugeius, Bishop of Seleucia in Isauria, leaders of a group of Monophysites of the sixth century, which were understood in the sense that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three partial substances and distinct individuals, consequently three Gods. Any similar doctrine is usually called Tritheism. -- J.J.R.
tritheism ::: n. --> The opinion or doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct Gods.
Tuatha de Danaan: In ancient Irish mythology, gods living underground. (The name literally means the folk of the goddess Danu.)
Twilight of the gods: In Norse mythology, the final battle between the gods and their enemies, the evil giants.
Two-factor religion: A term coined by F. L. Parrish, to designate any religion in which all religious ideas and practices of faith are based on the assumption that the religious factor (q.v.) native to man and that native to non-human nature powers are different and mutually exclusive factors; the religions which assume that there are two impinging worlds—the human world of the here and hereafter, and the world of the immortals (gods, demons and spirits).
Universe ::: The theosophical philosophy divides the universe into two general functional portions -- one theconsciousness side, the abode or dwelling place, and at the same time the aggregate, of all theself-conscious, thinking entities that the boundless universe contains; and the other, the material side ofnature, which is their schoolhouse, their home, and their playground too. This so-called material side is apractically infinite aggregate of monads or consciousness-centers passing through that particular phase oftheir evolutionary journey.This universe, therefore, is a vast aggregate of consciousnesscenters in both the two functional portionsof it; and these consciousness-centers theosophists call monads. They are entities conscious in differingdegrees, stretching along the boundless scale of the universal life; but in that particular phase whichpasses through what we humans call matter, those monads belonging to and forming that side of theuniverse, in the course of their long, long, evolutionary journey have not yet attained self-consciouspowers or faculties. And furthermore, what we call matter, in its last analysis is actually an aggregate ofthese monads manifesting in their physical expressions as life-atoms.The consciousness side of universal nature, which also consists of countless hosts of self-consciousentities, works in and through this other or material side; for these hosts of consciousnesses self-expressthemselves through this other or material function or side, through these other countless hosts of youngerand inferior and embryo entities, which are the life-atoms -- embryo gods. The universe is thereforeactually and literally imbodied consciousnesses.
usik ::: an aspirant (applied like nr to men and gods, but, like nr also, sometimes especially indicating the Angirasas). [Ved.] ::: usigbhih [instrumental plural], by those who desire. ::: usijah [plural], desirers (of the godheads) .
Vanir: In Norse mythology, a group of gods who dwell in Vanaheim; deities of wealth, commerce, fruitfulness, antagonists of Odin and his group of gods.
vasus. :::eight elemental gods representing aspects of nature, representing cosmic natural phenomenon &
Vasus ::: the shining Ones, the Lords of the riches; [a group of (usually eight) gods].
Veda an image of the Gods, the male power in Nature. Again, the bull is vihana • of Siva.
Veda, plural Vedas: (Skr. knowledge) Collectively the ancient voluminous, sacred literature of India (in bulk prior to 1000 B.C.), composed of Rigveda (hymns to gods), Samaveda (priests' chants), Yajurveda (sacrificial formulae), and Atharvaveda (magical chants), which among theosophic speculations contain the first philosophic insights. Generally recognized as an authority even in philosophy, extended and supplemented later by sutras (q.v.) and various accessory textbooks on grammar, astronomy, medicine, etc., called Vedangas ("members of the Veda") and the philosophical treatises, such as the Upanishads (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Vedas, dating from 2000 BC or earlier, consisting of several mythological and poetical accounts of the origin of the world, hymns praising the gods, and ancient prayers for life and prosperity; "praise verse"
Vedas, she is the Mother of the gods from whose cosmic matrix the heavenly bodies were born
Veda: The generic name for the most ancient sacred literature of the Hindus, consisting of the four collections called (1) Rig Veda, hymns to gods, (2) Sama Veda, priests’ chants, (3) Yajur Veda, sacrificial formulae in prose, and (4) Atharva Veda, magical chants; each Veda is divided into two broad divisions, viz. (1) Mantra, hymns, and (2) Brahmana, precepts, which include (a) Aranyakas, theology, and (b) Upanishads, philosophy; the Vedas are classified as revealed literature; they contain the first philosophical insights and are regarded as the final authority; tradition makes Vyasa the compiler and arranger of the Vedas in their present form; the Vedic period is conservatively estimated to have begun about 1500 to 1000 B.C.
Vedic Religion: Or the Religion of the Vedas (q.v.). It is thoroughly cosmological, inspirational and ritualistic, priest and sacrifice playing an important role. It started with belief in different gods, such as Indra, Agni, Surya, Vishnu, Ushas, the Maruts, usually interpreted as symbolizing the forces of nature, but with the development of Hinduism it deteriorated into a worship of thousands of gods corresponding to the diversification of function and status in the complex social organism. Accompanying there was a pronounced tendency toward magic even in Vedic times, while the more elevated thoughts which have found expression in magnificent praises of the one or the other deity finally became crystallized in the philosophic thought of the Upanishads (q.v.). There is a distinct break, however, between Vedic culture with its free and autochthonous religious consciousness and the rigidly caste and custom controlled religion as we know it in India today, as also the religion of bhakti (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Vishnu: One of the three gods of the Hindu Trinity (Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer), and as such he is one of the three aspects of Ishwara, the Personal God. To the adherents of Vaishnavism, Vishnu is the supreme deity.
visvadevaloka ::: the world of the all-gods or karmadevatas. visvadevaloka
visve devah (Vishwadevas) ::: the All-gods or all the Gods; the universal collectivity of the divine powers.
visvedevas. ::: the various vedic gods taken together as a whole
vital gods
vital gods ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Life Heavens are the heavens of the vital gods and there is there a perfect harmony but a harmony of the sublimated satisfied senses and vital desires only.” Letters on Yoga
waybill ::: n. --> A list of passengers in a public vehicle, or of the baggage or gods transported by a common carrier on a land route. When the goods are transported by water, the list is called a bill of lading.
way, the upward ::: Sri Aurobindo: "For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India
Wheel of life: (1) Samsara (q.v.)—(2) A wheel often depicted in Tibetan paintings, setting forth the basic beliefs in reincarnation found in Lamaism. The endless circumference of the wheel is symbolic of immortality; the three prominences of the hub symbolize the three great vices, ignorance, lust and anger, a lapse into which will make the wrongdoer reincarnate as an insect or other low life-form in his next life; the six spokes symbolize the six principle divisions of life and religion: the gods, the demigods, hell, the tortured souls, human beings, and animals.
When androgynous or hermaphrodite is used in philosophy, it does not mean physically or ethereally double-sexed — except when physical dual-sexed beings are distinctly referred to — but means the dual characteristic of nature in manifestation. Very often this duality is separated into “masculine” and “feminine,” using the words familiar to human life, although this duality is perhaps more accurately described by the words positive and negative, or by spirit and matter, or again by consciousness and vehicle. Here we have the reason for the separation of the deities in ancient pantheons into gods and goddesses, although occasionally in the mythological tales deities are represented as dual sexed. This androgynous or dual character of all the manifested worlds commenced with cosmic buddhi, or mahabuddhi, although the first more defined manifestations of individualized duality began on the plane of cosmic kama where fohat especially works. Above that the two rays from the One ascend again to reunite.
When there is something in the nature that has to be got over, it is always drawing on itself incidents that put it to the test till the sadhaka has overcome and is free. At least it is a thing that often happens especially if the person is making a sincere effort to overcome. One docs not always know whether it is the hostiles who are trying to break the resolution or putting it to the test (for they claim the right to do it) or whether it is, let us say, the gods who are doing it so as to press and hasten the progress or insisting on the surety and thoroughness of the change aspired after. Perhaps it helps most when' one can take it from the latter standpoint.
whore ::: n. --> A woman who practices unlawful sexual commerce with men, especially one who prostitutes her body for hire; a prostitute; a harlot.
To have unlawful sexual intercourse; to practice lewdness.
To worship false and impure gods. ::: v. t.
yajna ::: sacrifice; action consecrated to the gods, works; the Master of Works.
yajna &
Yasna: Zoroastrian liturgies in the Avesta, including invocations to Ahura-Mazda and other gods.
Yet on the upward arc of an evolutionary cycle, partaking of this sacred ambrosial food signifies initiation, the partaking by the initiant in the Mysteries of the “drink” of spiritual immortality. This drink is symbolized by the cup and its contained liquid, but actually is the receiving into the consciousness from the inner nature of the life-giving streams, the draught of everlasting life, or the elixir of life. After partaking of this ambrosial elixir, brought about by lives of selflessness and by final initiation, the adept learns to live in the minor and intermediate spheres of the solar system as a fully self-conscious co-laborer with the gods in their cosmic work. Such are the higher nirmanakayas, true buddhas, etc.
Yggdrasil: The world-tree of Norse mythology, whose leaves are always green. Fire will destroy it in the twilight of the gods.
Zaotar: Ancient Persian for caller. Priest-magician who invokes the gods by reciting ritual formulas and improvised chants.
zoomorphism ::: n. --> The transformation of men into beasts.
The quality of representing or using animal forms; as, zoomorphism in ornament.
The representation of God, or of gods, in the form, or with the attributes, of the lower animals.
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1:Attribute all to the Gods. ~ Archilochus, #KEYS
2:Everything is overflowing with Gods. ~ Proclus, #KEYS
3:Gods mill grinds slow, but sure.
~ George Herbert,#KEYS
4:To little men, gods send little things. ~ Callimachus, #KEYS
5:What are men? Mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
6:The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.
~ Henri Bergson,#KEYS
7:If it pleases the gods, so be it. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
8:Let us be silent, -- so we may hear the whisper of the gods. ~ Emerson, #KEYS
9:Ye are Gods. ~ Psalms, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
10:All is full of gods ~ Thales, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
11:When the gods want to punish us, they grant our desires." ~ Ancient Greek saying., #KEYS
12:The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods. ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle #KEYS
13:Death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die. ~ Sappho, #KEYS
14:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." ~ Alan Watts, #KEYS
15:sunrise
is where
the Gods live ~ Kobayashi Issa,#KEYS
16:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
~ Alan Watts,#KEYS
17:The gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
18:Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
~ Plotinus,#KEYS
19:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
~ Diogenes,#KEYS
20:absent of the Gods
it all goes to ruin
fallen leaves ~ Matsuo Basho,#KEYS
21:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, #KEYS
22:on a journey
traveling with the gods
numbering the days ~ Matsuo Basho,#KEYS
23:All the gods and goddesses are only varied aspects of the One. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
24:Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much." ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton, #KEYS
25:Know thyself, and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and the universe.
~ the Temple of Apollo at Delphi,#KEYS
26:Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand. ~ Hippocrates, Regimen, IV, 87, #KEYS
27:The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free... You know it and they do not. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies, #KEYS
28:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
29:Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 4:1, #KEYS
30:The Ancestors fashioned the gods as a workman fashions iron. ~ Rig Veda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
31:They have all withdrawn, deserting shrine and altar, the gods by who this realm once stood firm. ~ Virgil, Aeneid II.351-52, #KEYS
32:Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:5, #KEYS
33:God is love and we are in our weakness imperfect gods. ~ Antoine the Healer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
34:Surmount the desires of which gods and men are the subjects. ~ Uttana Sutta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
35:All the gods and goddesses are only varied aspects of the One. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
36:Love is the hoop of the gods
Hearts to combine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
37:The gods love what is mysterious and dislike what is evident." ~ "The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, (about 700 BC) a treatise on Ātma, #KEYS
38:That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice ~ Sappho,#KEYS
39:If you knew what the Gods have in store for you, you would run naked and dance on the beach.
~ Vikings, The Seer to Rollo, Vikings,#KEYS
40:The gods make use of our forgotten deeds. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate, #KEYS
41:That is worlds, gods, beings, the All,-the supreme Soul. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
42:The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - I, Bhawani Mandir, #KEYS
43:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
44:The gods have been created by Him, but of Him who knows the manner of His being? ~ Rig Veda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
45:The gods use instruments,
Not ask their consent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Short Stories - I, Act Five,#KEYS
46:Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #KEYS
47:True nature of the gods is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind's thought and influenced by the mind
~ Dion Fortune,#KEYS
48:And you sit in the lap of the Gods." ~ Arjuna Ardagh, (b. 1957), author & founder of the "Living Essence Foundation." See "How About Now?", (1999), #KEYS
49:If a man thinks of the images of gods and goddesses as symbols of the Divine, he reaches Divinity. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
50:Know thyself and thou shalt know the universe and the gods. ~ Inscription of the Temple of Delphi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
51:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
52:Of what use are the gods
If they crown not our just desires on earth? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
53:Where the
great gods live
sunrise
~ Kobayashi Issa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
54:From light lips and casual thoughts
The gods speak best as if by chance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
55:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
56:Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
57:And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone. ~ Plotinus, #KEYS
58:That Intelligence is God within us; by that men are gods and their humanity neighbours divinity. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
59:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
60:this tree born
in the time of the gods
now in autumn
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
61:trusting in the Gods
a little butterfly
in autumn
~ Kobayashi Issa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
62:on a journey
traveling with the gods
numbering the days
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
63:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning, #KEYS
64:The realms of the gods and demons ~ heaven, purgatory, hell ~ are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light, #KEYS
65:The favours of the Gods are too awful to be coveted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest, To His Sister, #KEYS
66:Man is the creator of the gods whom he worships in his temples. Therefore humanity has made its gods in its own image. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
67:The Gods prodigiously sometimes reverse
The common rule of Nature and compel
Matter with soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
68:There is always a reason to live. The Gods will set you on the proper path. There is a deeper purpose to the path you have been set upon, one that has yet to reveal itself.
~ Sura,#KEYS
69:Who knows this ruler within, he knows the worlds and the gods and creatures and the Self, he knows all. ~ Mundaka Upanishad I.210., the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
70:This world is a people of friends, and these friends are first the gods and next men whom Nature has made for each other. ~ Epictetus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
71:He who thus knows, "I am the Eternal", the gods themselves cannot make him other, for he is their own self. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
72:In Christian theology, kenosis (Greek: κένωσις, kénōsis, lit. emptiness) is the self-emptying of ones own will and becoming entirely receptive to Gods divine will.
~ Wikipedia,#KEYS
73:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
74:Eternity drew close disguised as Love
And laid its hand upon the body of Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
75: And needed not the splendour of a robe.
All objects were like bodies of the Gods,
A spirit symbol environing a soul, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02:14, The World-Soul,#KEYS
76:Fear of the gods arose from man's ignorance of God and his ignorance of the laws that govern the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Godward Emotions, #KEYS
77:The high gods look on man and watch and choose
Today's impossibles for the future's base. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
78:The reason meant for nearness to the gods
And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,#KEYS
79:But like a shining answer from the gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Call to the Quest, [T5],#KEYS
80:Below him lay like gleaming jewelled thoughts
Rapt dreaming cities of Gandharva kings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
81:Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves
And turned his strength into undying power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
82:Thoughts too great and deep to find a voice,
Thoughts whose desire new-makes the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
83:Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortals heart,
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
84:Out of the ineffable hush it hears them come
Trembling with the beauty of a wordless speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
85:The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,
The rapture that the gods sustain he bore. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
86:Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
87:Love is a honey and poison in the breast
Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
88:Worshippers of the gods go to the gods,
worshippers of the ancestors go to the ancestors,
worshippers of the goblins go to the goblins,
worshippers of me also go to me.
~ Bhagavad Gita, 9, 25,#KEYS
89:Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
~ Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love (1973).,#KEYS
90:The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 4:2,#KEYS
91:Always ascends the zigzag of the gods
And upward points the spirit's climbing Fire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind,#KEYS
92:He tore desire up from its bleeding roots
And offered to the gods the vacant place. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The House of the Spirit and the New Creation,#KEYS
93:You are facing God and God is facing you. Your divinity will make you feel that two Gods are facing each other and conversing. But eventually you will merge into the God that you are now facing. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #KEYS
94:Gods who know not grief
And look impassive on a suffering world,
Calm they gaze down on the little human scene ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
95:The high gods watch in their silence,
Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
96:Whether on earth or in the abodes of the gods, all beings are upon three evil paths; they are in thepower of existence, desire and ignorance. ~ Latita Vistara, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
97:By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;
Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
98:All alters in a world that is the same.
Man most must change who is a soul of Time;
His gods too change and live in larger light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act V,#KEYS
99:Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
100:Across the threshold's sleep she entered in
And found herself amid great figures of gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Book of Yoga, The Finding of the Soul, 524,#KEYS
101:A screened Necessity drives even the gods.
Over human lives it strides to unseen ends;
Our tragic failures are its stepping-stones. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act IV,#KEYS
102:A sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
103:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
104:Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
105:He whose senses have become calm like horses perfectly tamed by a driver, who has rid himself of pride and concupiscence, the gods themselves envy his lot. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
106:He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,#KEYS
107:Speak the truth, do not abandon yourself to wrath, give of the little you have to those who seek your aid. By these three steps you shall approach the Gods. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
108:The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - II, #KEYS
109:Incessant in the arms of ecstasy
Repeating its sweet involuntary note
A sob of rapture flowed along the hours. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
110:They say the anarchy of love disturbs
Gods even: shaken are the marble natures,
The deathless hearts are melted to the pang
And rapture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
111:This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods'; with these things be not thou troubled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
112:The swoon of glad identity
Where spirit and flesh in inner ecstasy join
Annulling the quarrel between self and shape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
113:We should not make comparisons between the gods. When a man has really seen a divinity, he knows that all divinities are manifestations of one and the same Brahman. ~ Ramakishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
114:Felt its honey of felicity
Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,
Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
115:Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
116:The gods wrest our careful policies
To their own ends until we stand appalled
Remembering what we meant to do and seeing
What has been done. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act IV,#KEYS
117:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
118:God's Desire
Lo, how all shakes when the gods tread too near!
All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
119:Reason and taste, two powers of the intelligence, are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist, while to the poet they are only minor deities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Essence of Poetry, #KEYS
120:These sages breathed for God's delight in things.
Assisting the slow entries of the gods,
Sowing in young minds immortal thoughts they lived, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Quest,#KEYS
121:To those who accuse us of a doctrine of three gods, let it be stated that we confess one God, not in number but in nature. For what is said to be one numerically is not one absolutely, nor is it simple in nature. ~ Evagrius of Pontus, #KEYS
122:For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many and lords many,) but to us there is but one God, of whom are all things. ~ Corinthians, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
123:Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods.
~ Aeschylus, Agamemnon,#KEYS
124:A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,
But measureless to life its gain of joy;
All the untold Beyond is mirrored there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
125:Her pragmatism of the transcendent Truth
Fills silence with the voices of the gods, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.06,#KEYS
126:Time's works
The giant's and the Titan's furious march
Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the gods
Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
127:Too hard the gods are with man's fragile race;
In their large heavens they dwell exempt from Fate
And they forget the wounded feet of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
128:For such a man, one who neglects no effort to set himself from now in the ranks of the best, is a priest, a minister of the gods, a friend of Him who dwells within him. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
129:Mind's voices mimicked inspiration's stress,
Its ictus of infallibility,
Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#KEYS
130:None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,
All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
131:Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,
His slow inertia as of living stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
132:Free from the happiness desired by slaves, delivered from the gods and their adoration, fearless and terrible, grand and solitary is the will of the man of truth. ~ Nietzsche, Zarathoustra, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
133:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
134:A touch supreme surprised his hurrying heart,
The clasp was remembered of the Wonderful,
And hints leaped down of white beatitudes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
135:A gift of priceless value from Time's gods
Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,
Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
136:The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
137:Walled from ours are other hearts:
For if life's barriers twixt our souls were broken,
Men would be free and one, earth paradise
And the gods live neglected. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
138:The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,#KEYS
139:The beasts are mortal, but they do not know or fully understand that fact; the gods are immortal, and they know it - but poor man, up from beasts and not yet a god, was that unhappy mixture: he was mortal, and he knew it. ~ Ken Wilber, Up From Eden, p. x., #KEYS
140:fools! whose pride
Absurd the gods permit a little space
To please their souls with laughter, then replace
In the loud limbo of futilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#KEYS
141:Great figures of gods
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
Executive figures of the cosmic self ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
142:In a veiled Nature's hallowed secrecies
It burns for ever on the altar Mind,
Its priests the souls of dedicated gods,
Humanity its house of sacrifice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal,#KEYS
143:Busy the gods are always, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,
Weaving Fate on their looms, and yesterday, now and tomorrow
Are but the stands they have made with Space and Time for their timber, ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Ilion,#KEYS
144:To music that can immortalise the mind
And make the heart wide as infinity
Listened, and captured the inaudible
Cadences that awake the occult ear. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
145:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature's abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
146:The phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness ~ the world of things and animals and men and even gods ~ is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent., #KEYS
147:A man has certain debts to pay: his debts to the gods and rishis, and his debts to mother, father, and wife. He cannot achieve anything without paying the debt he owes to his parents. A man is indebted to his wife as well. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
148:Beatrice is to be loved because she is beautiful; but she is beautiful because there is behind her a many-sided mystery of beauty, to be seen also in the grass and the sea, and even in the dead gods. There is a promise in and yet beyond all such pictures. ~ GK Chesterton, #KEYS
149:If men were not and all were brilliant gods,
The mediating stair would then be lost
By which the spirit awake in Matter winds ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
150:Wise are the gods in their silence,
Wise when they speak; but their speech is other than ours and their wisdom
Hard for a mortal mind to hold and not madden or wander. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
151:Some persons, however, find a difficulty in this faith; when they hear that the Father is God, and the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God, and yet that this Trinity is not three Gods, but one God. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, #KEYS
152:Heed these Words, You who Wish to Probe the Depths of Nature: If You Do Not Find Within Yourself that Which You Seek, Neither will You Find it Outside. In You is Hidden the Treasure of Treasures. Know Thyself and You Will Know the Universe and the Gods. ~ The Oracle of Delphi, #KEYS
153:I am not of the mild and later gods,
But of that elder world; Lemuria
And old Atlantis raised me crimson altars,
And my huge nostrils keep that scent of blood
For which they quiver. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Prologue,#KEYS
154:In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
155:It is very good to dream of the Guru, the Chosen Ideal and of Gods and Goddesses. It encourages and delights the mind greatly. If you experience them, do not go about talking about them to anybody and everybody, you can tell them to your Guru, if you like. ~ SWAMI VIRAJANANDA, #KEYS
156:The great Gods use the pain of human hearts
As a sharp axe to hew their cosmic road:
They squander lavishly men's blood and tears
For a moment's purpose in their fateful work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
157:Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
158:In the narrow nether centre's petty parts
Its childish game of daily dwarf desires
Was changed into a sweet and boisterous play,
A romp of little gods with life in Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
159:When man has seen that he is one with the infinite being of the universe, all separation is at an end, all men, women, angels, gods, animals, plants, the whole world lost in this oneness, then all fear disappears. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
160:Given that 'we' are the product of all previous human culture, we have at some level already experienced those gods... If we are truly to understand ancient [religion], it will be part of our task to 'remember' what we have forgotten, but which in some sense we already know. ~ RB, #KEYS
161:None is greater than he. The gods themselves will have to descend upon earth and it is in a human form that they will get their salvation. Man alone reaches the perfection of which the gods themselves are ignorant. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
162:Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Ilion,#KEYS
163:Obstructing the gods' open ways he makes
His own estate of the earth's air and light;
A monopolist of the world-energy,
He dominates the life of common men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
164:Without Art we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science we should always worship false gods." ~ W. H. Auden, (1907 - 1973) English-American poet; poetry noted for its stylistic and technical achievement; its engagement with politics, morals, love, & religion, Wikipedia, #KEYS
165:A border sovereign is the occult Force.
A threshold guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond,
She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness,#KEYS
166:It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence marge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 01.01,#KEYS
167:Just as the fly settles now on an unclean sore and now on the sweetmeats offered to the gods, so a worldly man's thoughts stop for a moment on religious subjects and the next stray into the pleasures of luxury and lust. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
168:Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,
Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,
Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
169:His earth, dowered with celestial competence,
Harboured a power that needed now no more
To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh
And smuggle godhead into humanity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
170:One on another we prey and one by another are mighty.
This is the world and we have not made it; if it is evil,
Blame first the gods; but for us, we must live by its laws or we perish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
171:9. Gods three thousand and three hundred and thirty and nine waited upon the Fire. They anointed him with streams of the clarity, they spread for him the seat of sacrifice, and seated him within as priest of the call.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire,#KEYS
172:In that fair subtle realm behind our own
The form is all, and physical gods are kings.
The inspiring Light plays in fine boundaries;
A faultless beauty comes by Nature's grace; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter,#KEYS
173:It drew from sight and sound spiritual power,
Made sense a road to reach the intangible:
It thrilled with the supernal influences
That build the substance of life's deeper soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods#KEYS
174:Feet (Mother's)
A giant drop of the Bliss unknowable
Overwhelmed his limbs and round his soul became
A fiery ocean of felicity;
He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
175:The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,
The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.
Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves
And turned his strength into undying power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
176:Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest." ~ Plato, (428/427 or 424/423 - 348/347) Greek philosopher, Wikipedia., #KEYS
177:Heaven-fire laughed in the corners of her eyes;
Her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength,
She menaced the triumph of the nether gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
178:Though a man should have lived a hundred years consecrating his whole life to the performance of numerous sacrifices to the gods, all this is far from having the same worth as a single act of love which consists in succouring a life. ~ Fa-khen-pi-, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
179:In its vast ambit of ideal Space
Where beauty and mightiness walk hand in hand,
The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#KEYS
180:Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. ~ Plato, Phaedrus, sec. 279, #KEYS
181:Not only is there hope for godheads pure;
The violent and darkened deities
Leaped down from the one breast in rage to find
What the white gods had missed: they too are safe; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
182:Armies of revolution crossed the time-field,
The clouds' unending march besieged the world,
Tempests' pronunciamentos claimed the sky
And thunder drums announced the embattled gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Birth and Childhood of the Flame,#KEYS
183:Just as a fly settles now on an unclean sore in the body, now on the offerings consecrated to the gods, so the mind of a worldly man stops for a moment upon religious ideas, but the next it strays away to the pleasures of luxury and lust. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
184:How shall they prosper who haste after auguries, oracles, whispers,
Dreams that walk in the night and voices obscure of the silence?
Touches are these from the gods that bewilder the brain to its ruin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
185:Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men. They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods. Krishna himself was known by most as a man-only a few worshipped him as the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
186:Dead is the past; the void has possessed it; its drama is ended,
Finished its music. The future is dim and remote from our knowledge;
Silent it lies on the knees of the gods in their luminous stillness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
187:Man's house of life holds not the gods alone:
There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,
Inhabitants of life's ominous nether rooms,
A shadowy world's stupendous denizens. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
188:Pride is not for our clay; the earth, not heaven was our mother
And we are even as the ant in our toil and the beast in our dying;
Only who cling to the hands of the gods can rise up from the earth-mire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
189:Leave to the gods their godhead and, mortal, turn to thy labour;
Take what thou canst from the hour that is thine and be fearless in spirit;
This is the greatness of man and the joy of his stay in the sunlight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
190:A lustre of some rapturous Infinite,
It held in the splendour of its golden laugh
Regions of the heart's happiness set free,
Intoxicated with the wine of God,
Immersed in light, perpetually divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
191:The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
192:None of the heavenly gods quits his sphere to come upon the earth, while man mounts up to heaven and measures it. He knows what is on high and what is below. He knows all correctly and, what is more, has no need to leave the earth in order to exalt himself. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
193:Our will labours permitted by thy will
And without thee an empty roar of storm,
A senseless whirlwind is the Titan's force
And without thee a snare the strength of gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
194:I fear not for the angry frown of Heaven,
I flinch not from the red assault of Hell;
I crush the opposition of the gods,
Tread down a million goblin obstacles. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
195:He is not sized by the eye, nor by the speech, nor by the other gods, nor by the austerity of force, nor by action; when a man's being has been purified by a calm clarity of knowledge, he meditating beholds that which has not parts nor members. ~ Mundaka Upanishad III.1-8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
196:How many are the Krishnas and Shivas,
How many are the Brahmas fashioning the worlds,
Of many kinds and shapes and colours...
How many adepts, Buddhas and Yogis are there,
How many goddesses and how many images of goddesses,
How many gods and demons and how many sages.
~ Hymns of Guru Nanak, Dharam khand,#KEYS
197:Transient, we made not ourselves, but at birth from the first we were fashioned
Valiant or fearful and as was our birth by the gods and their thinkings
Formed, so already enacted and fixed by their wills are our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
198:Traveller on plateau and on musing ridge,
As one who sees in the World-Magician's glass
A miracled imagery of soul-scapes flee
He traversed scenes of an immortal joy
And gazed into abysms of beauty and bliss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
199:She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme:
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
200:2. O knower of all things born, high-kindled, iron-tusked, touch with thy ray the demon-sorcerers; do violence to them with thy tongue of flame, the gods who kill,28 the eaters of flesh, putting them off from us shut them into thy mouth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire, 2 - Other Hymns, #KEYS
201:The shining Edens of the vital gods
Received him in their deathless harmonies.
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
Beauty was there creation's native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
202:Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,
It flamed unquenched upon the central hearth
Where burns for the high houselord and his mate
The homestead's sentinel and witness fire
From which the altars of the gods are lit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
203:Who can point out the way of the gods and the path of their travel,
Who shall impose on them bounds and an orbit? The winds have their treading,-
They can be followed and seized, not the gods when they move towards their purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
204:Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say "no." I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
205:Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them
Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour.
Chained is their gaze to the span in front, to the gulfs they are blinded
Meant for their steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
206:All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. ~ Neil Gaiman in American Gods, #KEYS
207:In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamor. Enlil heard the clamor and he said to the gods in council, "The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel." So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind. ~ Anonymous, #KEYS
208:There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous. ~ Mr. Wednesday in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, #KEYS
209:Greater it seems to my mind to be king over men than their slayer,
Nobler to build and to govern than what the ages have laboured
Putting their godhead forth to create or the high gods have fashioned,
That to destroy in our wrath of a moment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
210:Such were a dream of some sage at night when he muses in fancy,
Imaging freely a flawless world where none were afflicted,
No man inferior, all could sublimely equal and brothers
Live in a peace divine like the gods in their luminous regions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
211:Worthy persons deserve to be called so because they are not carried away by the eight winds: prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure,suffering, and pleasure. They are neither elated by prosperity nor grieved by decline. The heavenly gods will surely protect one who is unbending before the eight winds. ~ Nichiren, #KEYS
212:This was the play of the bright gods of Thought.
Attracting into time the timeless Light,
Imprisoning eternity in the hours,
This they have planned, to snare the feet of Truth
In an aureate net of concept and of phrase ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#KEYS
213:8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and mortals sit with obeisance before the all-pervading Master of the peoples, the ever-wakeful Fire.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire,#KEYS
214:The knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
215:All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
216:So many Siddhas and Buddhas, so many Yogic masters. So many goddesses of various kinds. So many demi-gods and demons, so many silent sages. So many oceans of jewels. So many ways of life, so many languages. So many dynasties of rulers. So many intuitive people, so many selfless servants. O Nanak, His limit has no limit!
~ Guru Nanak, Guru Granth Sahib,#KEYS
217:Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
218:This is the burden of man that he acts from his heart and his passions,
Stung by the goads of the gods he hews at the ties that are dearest.
Lust was the guide they sent us, wrath was a whip for his coursers,
Madness they made the heart's comrade, r ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
219:This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure,
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they hav ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
220:Children of Immortality, gods who are joyous for ever,
Rapture is ours and eternity measures our lives by his aeons.
For we desireless toil who have joy in the fall as the triumph,
Knowledge eternal possessing we work for an end that is destined
L ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
221:Stolen by the robbers of the Deep,
The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,
Hoarded from touch and view and thought's desire,
Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood,
Lest men should find them and be even as Gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,#KEYS
222:Surely the gods protect, yet is Death too always mighty.
Most in his shadowy envy he strikes at the brave and the lovely,
Grudging works to abridge their days and to widow the sunlight.
Most, disappointed, he rages against the beloved of Heaven;
S ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
223:Though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nation's will we are ruled in the home and the battle
An ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
224:Evil is worked, not justice, when into the mould of our thinkings
God we would force and enchain to the throb of our hearts the immortals,—
Justice and Virtue, her sister,—for where is justice mid creatures
Perfectly? Even the gods are betrayed by o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
225:How soon is spent
This treasure wasted by the gods on man,
This happy closeness as of soul to soul,
This honey of the body's companionship,
This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,
This strange illumination of the sense! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
226:The occult priest should be capable of instructing anyone in the procedures of emotional engineering. The main methods are the gnostic ones of casting oneself into a frenzied ecstacy, stilling the mind to a point of absolute quiescence, and evoking the laughter of the gods by combining laughter with the contemplation of paradox.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
227:These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap,—
The Master and the Mother of all lives
Watching the worlds their twin reg ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
228:With writing as an ability to catch and manipulate names, the scribe was able to imprison the object and manipulate its very nature. The catching of names was considered a magical act in ancient societies so the ability to write was reserved for the clergy under the direct influence of gods of wisdom and magic such as Thoth. ~ Mage the Ascension, Order of Hermes, #KEYS
229:The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes
And guide its giant stumblings through the void,
Have given to man the burden of his mind;
In his unwilling heart they have lit their fires
And sown in it incurable unrest. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,#KEYS
230:God's Tread
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
231:Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Works, #KEYS
232:Time in its cycles waited for man. Though his kingdom is ended,
Here in a speck mid the suns and his life is a throb in the aeons,
Yet, O you Titans and Gods, O Rudras, O strong Aditeians,
Man is the centre and knot; he is first, though the last in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
233:Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.
We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.
Our hearts are heroic and hard; we wear the belt of Orion:
Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Children of Wotan,#KEYS
234:All was gold and gold and gold, a torrent of golden light pouring down in an uninterrupted flow and bringing with it the consciousness that the path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality.
Such is the path open before us if we choose to take it.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Path of Yoga, The Path, [T5],#KEYS
235:To share the suffering of the world I came,
I draw my children's pangs into my breast.
I am the nurse of the dolour beneath the stars;
I am the soul of all who wailing writhe
Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
236:But not the utter vision and delight.
A veil is kept, something is still held back,
Lest, captives of the beauty and the joy,
Our souls forget to the Highest to aspire.
In that fair subtle realm behind our own
The form is all, and physical gods are kings.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter,#KEYS
237:'O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
One shall descend and break the iron Law,
Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power.
A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
238:The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her - the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga,#KEYS
239:In the natal mist
Across the dangerous haze, the pregnant stir,
He through the astral chaos shore a way
Mid the grey faces of its demon gods,
Questioned by whispers of its flickering ghosts,
Besieged by sorceries of its fluent force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.05,#KEYS
240:Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
241:The sorrow by which Nature's hunger is fed,
The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,
The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,
The tragedy that destroys long happiness,
The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,
Ceased in a truth which l ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,#KEYS
242:I know how Gods begin, Roger. We start as Dreams. Then we walk out of Dreams into the Land. We are worshiped and loved, and take power to ourselves.
And then, one day, there's no one left to worship us.
And in the end, each little God and Goddess takes its last journey back into Dreams... and what comes after, not even WE know.
I'm going to dance now, I'm afraid.
~ Neil Gaiman,#KEYS
243:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called? ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
244:There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators of the earth - until now. There are the gods of the Vedas who are mentioned in everything that has come down from the Rishis. And there are the gods of the Supermind, those who are going to manifest on earth, although of course they exist from all eternity on their own plane. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #KEYS
245:He who knows that He is the supreme Lord, becomes that, and the gods themselves cannot prevent him...He who adores any other divinity, has not the knowledge. He is as cattle for the gods. Even as numerous cattle serve to nourish men, so each man serves to nourish the gods...That is why the gods love not that a man should know That. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
246:The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a man will worship something have no doubt about that, either. He may think that his tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of his heart, but it will out. That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
247:But Indra does not turn back from the quest like Agni and Vayu; he pursues his way through the highest ether of the pure mentality and there he approaches the Woman, the manyshining, Uma Haimavati; from her he learns that this Daemon is the Brahman by whom alone the gods of mind and life and body conquer and affirm themselves, and in whom alone they are great. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena And Other Upanishads, 83, #KEYS
248:[Contemporary man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by 'powers' that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses.
~ Carl Jung,#KEYS
249:The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
250:...the conception of a Truth-consciousness supramental and divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truth to raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the attainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfect good and felicity and the inner sacrifice and offering of what one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda, [68],#KEYS
251:Heaven's Gates
Heaven mocks us with the brilliance of its gifts,
For Death is a cupbearer of the wine
Of too brief joy held up to mortal lips
For a passionate moment by the careless gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate
Heaven's Gifts
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
252:For all the series of the ruling Gods (θεοὶ ἄρχοντες), are collected into the intellectual fabrication as into a summit, and subsist about it. And as all the fountains are the progeny of the intelligible father, and are filled from him with intelligible union, thus likewise, all the orders of the principles or rulers, are suspended according to nature from the demiurgus, and participate from thence of an intellectual life. ~ Proclus, The Theology of Plato, #KEYS
253:Bjorn: I'm sorry to hear of Helga's death. We knew each other a long time. Since I was a boy.
Floki: I too am dead, Bjorn. A part of me died with my daughter, Angrboda, a second part with Ragnar, and the last part of what was Floki died with my sweet, sad Helga. What I am now is nothing. And all this nothing I give to the gods to do with as they please. And I shall be an empty ship with no rudder set upon their endless sea. And where they take me, I shall go.
~ Vikings,#KEYS
254:There, where millions of Krishnas stand with hands folded, Where millions of Vishnus bow their heads, Where millions of Brahmâs are reading the Vedas, Where millions of Shivas are lost in contemplation, Where millions of Indras dwell in the sky, Where the demi-gods and the munis are unnumbered, Where millions of Saraswatis, Goddess of Music, play on the vina— There is my Lord self-revealed: and the scent of sandal and flowers dwells in those deeps. ~ Kabir, #KEYS
255:Humans are great experimenters, constantly exploring, searching, and struggling to gain power over themselves, over nature, even over the gods. Through this entire struggle and self-torture, we have also made ourselves "sick," and it is no wonder that we find the ascetic ideal springing up everywhere. Though it may seem to deny life, the ascetic ideal is supremely life affirming, as it says "yes" to life in the face of hardship and sickness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, #KEYS
256:I pray to the unknown gods that some man-even a single man, tens of centuries ago-has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, #KEYS
257:In Bahaí belief, the Holy Spirit is the conduit through which the wisdom of God becomes directly associated with his messenger, and it has been described variously in different religions such as the burning bush to Moses, the sacred fire to Zoroaster, the dove to Jesus, the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, and the Maid of Heaven to Bahaullah.[14] The Bahaí view rejects the idea that the Holy Spirit is a partner to God in the Godhead, but rather is the pure essence of Gods attributes
~ ?,#KEYS
258:To those who ask you, Where have you seen the gods, or how do you who are so devout know for sure that the gods exist? I answer, first of all, that even to the very eye, they are in some manner visible and apparent. Secondly, neither have I seen my own soul, and yet I respect and honour it. So then for the gods, by the daily experience that I have of their power and providence towards myself and others, I know certainly that they exist and therefore I worship them. ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12, 21, #KEYS
259:In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God
Dropped carelessly in creation's spendthrift work,
Left in the chantiers of the bottomless world
And stolen by the robbers of the Deep,
The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,
Hoarded from touch and view and thought's desire,
Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood,
Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release,#KEYS
260:He tore desire up from its bleeding roots
And offered to the gods the vacant place.
Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.
A last and mightiest transformation came.
His soul was all in front like a great sea
Flooding the mind and body with its waves;
His being, spread to embrace the universe,
United the within and the without To make of life a cosmic harmony,
An empire of the immanent Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The House of the Spirit and the New Creation,#KEYS
261:The Japanese have a proverb: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #KEYS
262:As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue,#KEYS
263:In Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a 'great daemon' (202d). She goes on to explain that 'everything daemonic is between divine and mortal' (202d-e), and she describes daemons as 'interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above...' (202e). In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a 'divine something')[16] that frequently warned him-in the form of a 'voice'-against mistakes but never told him what to do.
~ Wikipedia, Daemon,#KEYS
264:Magic never in its wildest dreams thought that it would be trumped by mythic. And the mythic gods and goddesses never imagined that reason could and would destroy them. And here we sit, in our rational worldview, all smug and confident that nothing higher will sweep out of the heavens and completely explode our solid perceptions, undoing our very foundations. And yet surely, the transrational lies in wait. It is just around the corner, this new dawn. Every stage transcends and includes, and thus inescapably, unavoidably it seems, the sun will rise on a world tomorrow that in many ways transcends reason. ~ Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, #KEYS
265:13. The Magic Flight:If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
266:Vainly the sands of Time have been strewn with the ruins of empires,
Signs that the gods had left, but in vain. For they look for a nation,
One that can conquer itself having conquered the world, but they find none. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Self-conquest
When one conquers a difficulty or goes forward, it creates a right current in the atmosphere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV: The Right Attitude towards Difficulties
Self-Conquest
Self-denial is a necessary discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly attached. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation,#KEYS
267:If the magician wishes to put himself into or out of any emotional state, then he should be provided with the techniques to accomplish this. The process requires no justification
- that he wills it is sufficient. One cannot escape emotional experience in a human incarnation, and it is preferable to adopt a master rather than a slave relationship to it. The occult priest should be capable of instructing anyone in the procedures of emotional engineering. The main methods are the gnostic ones of casting oneself into a frenzied ecstacy, stilling the mind to a point of absolute quiescence, and evoking the laughter of the gods by combining laughter with the contemplation of paradox. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
268:Where spring, the lord of seasons reigneth, there the unstruck music sounds of itself,
There the streams of light flow in all directions, few are the men who can cross to that shore!
There, where millions of Krishnas stand with hands folded,
Where millions of Vishnus bow their heads, where millions of Brahmas are reading the Vedas,
Where millions of Shivas are lost in contemplation, where millions of Indras dwell in the sky,
Where the demi-gods and the munis are unnumbered, where millions of Saraswatis, goddess of music play the vina,
There is my Lord self-revealed, and the scent of sandal and flowers dwells in those deeps. ~ Kabir, II.57, Translated by Rabindranath Tagore[26],#KEYS
269:The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in-and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Crossing of the Return Threshold, #KEYS
270:Lila is by no means the last word. Passing through all these states, I said to the Divine Mother: 'Mother, in these states there is separation. Give me a state where there is no separation.' Then I remained for some time absorbed in the Indivisible Satchidananda. I removed the pictures of the gods and goddesses from my room. I began to perceive God in all beings. Formal worship dropped away. You see that bel-tree. I used to go there to pluck its leaves. One day, as I plucked a leaf, a bit of the bark came off. I round the tree full of Consciousness. I felt grieved because I had hurt the tree. One day I tried to pluck some durva grass, but I found I couldn't do it very well. Then I forced myself to pluck it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
271:The Pentagram
[Dedicated to George Raffalovich]
In the Years of the Primal Course, in the dawn of terrestrial birth,
Man mastered the mammoth and horse, and Man was the Lord of the Earth.
He made him an hollow skin from the heart of an holy tree,
He compassed the earth therien, and Man was the Lord of the Sea.
He controlled the vigour of steam, he harnessed the lightning for hire;
He drove the celestial team, and man was the Lord of the Fire.
Deep-mouthed from their thrones deep-seated, the choirs of the æeons declare
The last of the demons defeated, for Man is the Lord of the Air.
Arise, O Man, in thy strength! the kingdom is thine to inherit,
Till the high gods witness at lenght that Man is the Lord of his spirit.
~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
272:Thus slowly I lift man's soul nearer the Light.
But human mind clings to its ignorance
And to its littleness the human heart
And to its right to grief the earthly life.
Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand,
Only when infinity weds the finite's thought,
Can man be free from himself and live with God.
I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;
I bring back hope to the despairing heart;
I give peace to the humble and the great,
And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise.
I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved.
Then Love shall at last unwounded tread earth's soil;
Man's mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth
And body bear the immense descent of God."
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
273:11. The Ultimate Boon:The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
274:The Gods, who in their highest secret entity are powers of this Supermind, born of it, seated in it as in their proper home, are in their knowledge 'truth-conscious' and in their action possessed of the 'seer-will'. Their conscious-force turned towards works and creation is possessed and guided by a perfect and direct knowledge of the thing to be done and its essence and its law, - a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind as Creator 132,#KEYS
275: There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distri bute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, 1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #KEYS
276:Savitri is neither fantasy nor yet mere philosophical thought, but vision and revelation of the actual structure of the inner Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere — the Stairway of the Worlds reveals itself to our gaze — worlds of Light above, worlds of Darkness beneath, and we see also ever-encircling life ('kindled in measure and quenched in measure') ascending that stair under the calm unwinking gaze of the Cosmic Gods who shine forth now as of old. Poetry is indeed the full manifestation of the Logos and, when as here, it is no mere iridescence dependent on some special standpoint, but the wondrous structure of the mighty Cosmos, the 'Adored One', that is revealed, then in truth does it manifest its full, its highest grandeur.
It is an omen of the utmost significance and hope that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri should have appeared. ~ Krishnaprem,#KEYS
277:Above her little finite steps she feels,
Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out
A strange perfection beyond law and rule,
A universe of self-found felicity,
An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,
The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,
Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,
Order of the freedom of the infinite,
The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.
There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.
But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,
Hers are but careless visits of the gods.
They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day,#KEYS
278:At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavement of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced). 'This palace is a fabrication of the gods,' I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: ' The gods who built it have died.' I noted its peculiarities and said: 'The gods who built it were mad.' I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear...
...'This City' (I thought) 'is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings,#KEYS
279:Now, on the other hand, there is an entirely different type of angel; and here we must be especially careful to remember that we include gods and devils, for there are such beings who are not by any means dependent on one particular element for their existence. They are microcosms in exactly the same sense as men and women are. They are individuals who have picked up the elements of their composition as possibility and convenience dictates, exactly as we do ourselves... I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order. He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #KEYS
280:''He is a great spirit,151 Socrates. All spirits are intermediate between god and mortal''.
''What is the function of a spirit?'' I asked.
''Interpreting and conveying all that passes between gods and humans: from humans, petitions and sacrificial offerings, and from gods, instructions and the favours they return. Spirits, being intermediary, fill the space between the other two, so that all are bound together into one entity. It is by means of spirits that all divination can take place, the whole craft of seers and priests, with their sacrifices, rites and spells, and all prophecy and magic. Deity and humanity are completely separate, but through the mediation of spirits all converse and communication from gods to humans, waking and sleeping, is made possible. The man who is wise in these matters is a man of the spirit,152 whereas the man who is wise in a skill153 or a manual craft,154 which is a different sort of expertise, is materialistic.155 These spirits are many and of many kinds, and one of them is Love''. ~ Plato, Symposium, 202e,#KEYS
281:The earth too, one with the surrounding mass of darkness and inconscience is asleep and insentient. She has to wake up and start on her journey moving forward, unveiling her secret mysteries towards the supreme revelation, the Divine incarnation in matter. The Gods are awake, in order to awaken the earth. A first ray is sent down and it touches as it were the sleeping Mother. The Divine Ray is just like a finger of a child touching her mother trying, as it were, to persuade her to open her eyes and look at her child. The first ray, however, comes not as a caress to the inert being of darkness, it is a sharp prick, even a hard blow. Such is the first impact of light upon dead matter; and the light is thrown back, as an unwelcome intruder, into what it came from; and the darkness grovels in its old groove. The second stage comes when the impact is not felt as a pain or something totally foreign and strange; its touch is felt as something soothing, something that heals an eternal sore. But this too was not suffered long and the light has to go back again. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, On Savitri, #KEYS
282:O King, thy fate is a transaction done
At every hour between Nature and thy soul
With God for its foreseeing arbiter.
Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny's book.
Man can accept his fate, he can refuse.
Even if the One maintains the unseen decree
He writes thy refusal in thy credit page:
For doom is not a close, a mystic seal.
Arisen from the tragic crash of life,
Arisen from the body's torture and death,
The spirit rises mightier by defeat;
Its godlike wings grow wider with each fall.
Its splendid failures sum to victory.
O man, the events that meet thee on thy road,
Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief,
Are not thy fate, - they touch thee awhile and pass;
Even death can cut not short thy spirit's walk:
Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.
On the altar throwing thy thoughts, thy heart, thy works,
Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the gods
Till they have opened to thee thy secret self
And made thee one with the indwelling God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 06:02 The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
283:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others.
There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya,#KEYS
284:Yes, from thenceforward, is there any suffering for one who sees this unity of the universe, this unity of life, this unity of the All? The separation between man and man, man and woman, man and child; nation and nation, that is the real cause of all the misery of the world. Now this separation is not at all real ; it is only apparent, it is only on the surface. In the very heart of things is the unity which is for ever. Go into yourself and you will find this unity between man and man, women and children, race and race, the great and the little, the rich and the poor, gods and men : all of us are one, even the animals, if you go down to a sufficient depth. And to the man who goes so far nothing can cause any illusion. ..where can there exist for him any illusion ? What can deceive him ? He knows the reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where can there exist any misery for him ? What can he desire ? He has discovered the reality of everything in the Lord who is the centre, the unity of all and who is the eternal felicity, the eternal knowledge, the eternal existence. ~ Virekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
285:If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call God; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. We may also enter the world of music, which in fact is not different from the others but a special extension of this same, great inexpressible Vibration. If once, only once, even for a few moments in a lifetime, we can hear that Music, that Joy singing above, we will know what Beethoven and Bach heard; we will know what God is because we will have heard God. We will probably not say anything grandiose; we will just know that That exists, whereupon all the suffering in the world will seem redeemed.
At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate - sometimes much later - into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light...
~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,#KEYS
286:To see life steadily and see it whole is only permitted to a Perfect and Infinite Consciousness standing outside Time, Space and Conditions. To such a divine Vision the working out of preordainment may present itself as a perfect, immediate and unhindered consummation. God said, 'Let there be Light' and, straightway,there was Light; and when the Light came into being, God saw that it was good. But to the imperfect finite consciousness, Light seems in its inception to have come into being by a slow material evolution completed by a fortuitous shock of forces; in its operation to be lavished with a prodigal wastefulness since only a small part is used for the purposes of life; in its presentation to be conveyed to a blinking and limited vision, hampered by obstacles and chequered with darkness. Limitation, imperfection, progression and retrogression are inseparable from phenomenal work, phenomenal intelligence, phenomenal pleasure and satisfaction. To Brahman the Will who measures all Time in a moment, covers all Space with one stride, embraces the whole chain of causation in one glance, there is no limitation, imperfection, progression or retrogression. He looks upon his work as a whole and sees that it is good. But the Gods cannot reach to His completeness, even though they toil after it; for ever He outruns their pursuit, moving far in front. Brahman, standing still, overtakes and passes the others as they run.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad,#KEYS
287:On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and ever more war and inequality shall divide them: thus does my great love make me speak.
In their hostilities they shall become inventors of images and ghosts, and with their images and ghosts they shall yet fight the highest fight against one another. Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all the names of values-arms shall they be and clattering signs that life must overcome itself again and again.
Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers.
Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing.
And behold, my friends: here where the tarantula has its hole, the ruins of an ancient temple rise; behold it with enlightened eyes Verily, the man who once piled his thoughts to the sky in these stones-he, like the wisest, knew the secret of all life. That struggle and inequality are present even in beauty, and also war for power and more power: that is what he teaches us here in the plainest parable. How divinely vault and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers-with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends Let us strive against one another like gods. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Fred Kaufmann,#KEYS
288:The Nirmanakaya manifestation of Amitabha, I,
the Indian Scholar, the Lotus Born,
From the self-blossoming center of a lotus,
Came to this realm of existence through miraculous powers
To be the prince of the king of Oddiyana.
Then, I sustained the kingdom in accordance with Dharma.
Wandering throughout all directions of India,
I severed all spiritual doubts without exception.
Engaging in fearless activity in the eight burial grounds,
I achieved all supreme and common siddhis.
Then, according to the wishes of King Trisong Detsen
And by the power of previous prayers, I journeyed to Tibet.
By subduing the cruel gods, nagas, yakshas, rakshas,
and all spirits who harm beings,
The light of the teachings of secret mantra has been illuminated.
Then, when the time came to depart for the continent of Lanka,
I did so to provide refuge from the fear of rakshas
For all the inhabitants of this world, including Tibet.
I blessed Nirmanakaya emanations to be representatives of my body.
I made sacred treasures as representatives of my holy speech.
I poured enlightened wisdom into the hearts of those with fortunate karma.
Until samsara is emptied, for the benefit of sentient beings,
I will manifest unceasingly in whatever ways are necessary.
Through profound kindness, I have brought great benefit for all.
If you who are fortunate have the mind of aspiration,
May you pray so that blessings will be received.
All followers, believe in me with determination.
Samaya. ~ The Wrathful Compassion of Guru Dorje Drollo, Vajra Master Dudjom Yeshe Dorje, translated by Dungse Thinley Norbu Rinpoche,#KEYS
289:37 - Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the Bhagavat (6) could not have been written. - Sri Aurobindo
Does Brindavan exist anywhere else than on earth?
The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for the manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested.
In the world of the gods there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature.
Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible (to the ordinary man) and receive their inspiration from them.
So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed.
Whether Krishna existed or not in a human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance (except perhaps from an exclusively historical point of view), for Krishna is a real, living and active being; and his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.
8 June 1960
(6 The story of Krishna, as related in the Bhagavat Purana.) ~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms, volume-10, page no.60-61),#KEYS
290:Musa Spiritus :::
O Word concealed in the upper fire,
Thou who hast lingered through centuries,
Descend from thy rapt white desire,
Plunging through gold eternities.
Into the gulfs of our nature leap,
Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!
Break the seals of Matter's sleep,
Break the trance of the unseen height.
In the uncertain glow of human mind,
Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,
Carve thy epic mountain-lined
Crowded with deep prophetic grots.
Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds
Over the swirl of the heart's sea.
Touch into sight with thy fire-words
The blind indwelling deity.
O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make
In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice,
In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake
Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.
Out, out with the mind and its candles flares,
Light, light the suns that never die.
For my ear the cry of the seraph stars
And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!
Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;
All make tranquil, all make free.
Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God
As He comes from His timeless infinity
To build in their rapture His burning abode.
Weave from my life His poem of days,
His calm pure dawns and His noons of force.
My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,
My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
291:Received him in their deathless harmonies.
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
Beauty was there creation's native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
Dream walked along the highways of the stars;
Sweet common things turned into miracles:
Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,
Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,
Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.
All life's high visions are embodied there,
Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs
Caught by the honey-eater's darting tongue,
Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,
Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm
And liberated her immense desires.
In that paradise of perfect heart and sense
No lower note could break the endless charm
Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;
Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.
After the anguish of the soul's long strife
At length were found calm and celestial rest
And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,
Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs
In the encircling arms of Energies
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense
Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues
He met the forms that divinise the sight,
To music that can immortalise the mind
And make the heart wide as infinity
Listened, and captured the inaudible
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
292:The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 2.15, #KEYS
293:It is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached to its past and present associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically changed in what are now our fixed circumstances.We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop into that animal. Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own instinctive aspiration,-Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Ego and the Dualities, #KEYS
294:Now I have taught you about Immortal Man and have loosed the bonds of the robbers from him. I have broken the gates of the pitiless ones in their presence. I have humiliated their malicious intent, and they all have been shamed and have risen from their ignorance. Because of this, then, I came here, that they might be joined with that Spirit and Breath, [III continues:] and might from two become one, just as from the first, that you might yield much fruit and go up to Him Who Is from the Beginning, in ineffable joy and glory and honor and grace of the Father of the Universe.
"Whoever, then, knows the Father in pure knowledge will depart to the Father and repose in Unbegotten Father. But whoever knows him defectively will depart to the defect and the rest of the Eighth. Now whoever knows Immortal Spirit of Light in silence, through reflecting and consent in the truth, let him bring me signs of the Invisible One, and he will become a light in the Spirit of Silence. Whoever knows Son of Man in knowledge and love, let him bring me a sign of Son of Man, that he might depart to the dwelling-places with those in the Eighth.
"Behold, I have revealed to you the name of the Perfect One, the whole will of the Mother of the Holy Angels, that the masculine multitude may be completed here, that there might appear in the aeons, the infinities and those that came to be in the untraceable wealth of the Great Invisible Spirit, that they all might take from his goodness, even the wealth of their rest that has no kingdom over it. I came from First Who Was Sent, that I might reveal to you Him Who Is from the Beginning, because of the arrogance of Arch-Begetter and his angels, since they say about themselves that they are gods. And I came to remove them from their blindness, that I might tell everyone about the God who is above the universe. Therefore, tread upon their graves, humiliate their malicious intent, and break their yoke and arouse my own. I have given you authority over all things as Sons of Light, that you might tread upon their power with your feet."
These are the things the blessed Savior said, and he disappeared from them. Then all the disciples were in great, ineffable joy in the spirit from that day on. And his disciples began to preach the Gospel of God, the eternal, imperishable spirit. Amen.
~ The Sophia of Jesus, (excerpt), The Nag Hamadi Library,#KEYS
295:Daemons
A daemon is a process that runs in the background, not connecting to any controlling terminal. Daemons are normally started at boot time, are run as root or some
other special user (such as apache or postfix), and handle system-level tasks. As a
convention, the name of a daemon often ends in d (as in crond and sshd), but this is
not required, or even universal.
The name derives from Maxwell's demon, an 1867 thought experiment by the physicist James Maxwell. Daemons are also supernatural beings in Greek mythology,
existing somewhere between humans and the gods and gifted with powers and divine
knowledge. Unlike the demons of Judeo-Christian lore, the Greek daemon need not
be evil. Indeed, the daemons of mythology tended to be aides to the gods, performing
tasks that the denizens of Mount Olympus found themselves unwilling to do-much
as Unix daemons perform tasks that foreground users would rather avoid.
A daemon has two general requirements: it must run as a child of init, and it must
not be connected to a terminal.
In general, a program performs the following steps to become a daemon:
1. Call fork( ). This creates a new process, which will become the daemon.
2. In the parent, call exit( ). This ensures that the original parent (the daemon's
grandparent) is satisfied that its child terminated, that the daemon's parent is no
longer running, and that the daemon is not a process group leader. This last
point is a requirement for the successful completion of the next step.
3. Call setsid( ), giving the daemon a new process group and session, both of
which have it as leader. This also ensures that the process has no associated controlling terminal (as the process just created a new session, and will not assign
one).
4. Change the working directory to the root directory via chdir( ). This is done
because the inherited working directory can be anywhere on the filesystem. Daemons tend to run for the duration of the system's uptime, and you don't want to
keep some random directory open, and thus prevent an administrator from
unmounting the filesystem containing that directory.
5. Close all file descriptors. You do not want to inherit open file descriptors, and,
unaware, hold them open.
6. Open file descriptors 0, 1, and 2 (standard in, standard out, and standard error)
and redirect them to /dev/null.
Following these rules, here is a program that daemonizes itself:
~ OReilly Linux System Programming,#KEYS
296:As far as heaven, as near as thought and hope,
Glimmered the kingdom of a griefless life.
Above him in a new celestial vault
Other than the heavens beheld by mortal eyes,
As on a fretted ceiling of the gods,
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
Swam stars apart in a rippled sea of sky.
Towered spirals, magic rings of vivid hue
And gleaming spheres of strange felicity
Floated through distance like a symbol world.
On the trouble and the toil they could not share,
On the unhappiness they could not aid,
Impervious to life's suffering, struggle, grief,
Untarnished by its anger, gloom and hate,
Unmoved, untouched, looked down great visioned planes
Blissful for ever in their timeless right.
Absorbed in their own beauty and content,
Of their immortal gladness they live sure.
Apart in their self-glory plunged, remote
Burning they swam in a vague lucent haze,
An everlasting refuge of dream-light,
A nebula of the splendours of the gods
Made from the musings of eternity.
Almost unbelievable by human faith,
Hardly they seemed the stuff of things that are.
As through a magic television's glass
Outlined to some magnifying inner eye
They shone like images thrown from a far scene
Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize.
But near and real to the longing heart
And to the body's passionate thought and sense
Are the hidden kingdoms of beatitude.
In some close unattained realm which yet we feel,
Immune from the harsh clutch of Death and Time,
Escaping the search of sorrow and desire,
In bright enchanted safe peripheries
For ever wallowing in bliss they lie.
In dream and trance and muse before our eyes,
Across a subtle vision's inner field,
Wide rapturous landscapes fleeting from the sight,
The figures of the perfect kingdom pass
And behind them leave a shining memory's trail.
Imagined scenes or great eternal worlds,
Dream-caught or sensed, they touch our hearts with their depths;
Unreal-seeming, yet more real than life,
Happier than happiness, truer than things true,
If dreams these were or captured images,
Dream's truth made false earth's vain realities.
In a swift eternal moment fixed there live
Or ever recalled come back to longing eyes
Calm heavens of imperishable Light,
Illumined continents of violet peace,
Oceans and rivers of the mirth of God
And griefless countries under purple suns.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and the Fall of Life,#KEYS
297:INVOCATION
The ultimate invocation, that of Kia, cannot be performed. The paradox is that as Kia has no dualized qualities, there are no attributes by which to invoke it. To give it one quality is merely to deny it another. As an observant dualistic being once said:
I am that I am not.
Nevertheless, the magician may need to make some rearrangements or additions to what he is. Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which one is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation. Alternatively, the process of invocation may be seen as adding to the magician's psyche any elements which are missing. It is true that the mind must be finally surrendered as one enters fully into Chaos, but a complete and balanced psychocosm is more easily surrendered.
The magical process of shuffling beliefs and desires attendant upon the process of invocation also demonstrates that one's dominant obsessions or personality are quite arbitrary, and hence more easily banished.
There are many maps of the mind (psychocosms), most of which are inconsistent, contradictory, and based on highly fanciful theories. Many use the symbology of god forms, for all mythology embodies a psychology. A complete mythic pantheon resumes all of man's mental characteristics. Magicians will often use a pagan pantheon of gods as the basis for invoking some particular insight or ability, as these myths provide the most explicit and developed formulation of the particular idea's extant. However it is possible to use almost anything from the archetypes of the collective unconscious to the elemental qualities of alchemy.
If the magician taps a deep enough level of power, these forms may manifest with sufficient force to convince the mind of the objective existence of the god. Yet the aim of invocation is temporary possession by the god, communication from the god, and manifestation of the god's magical powers, rather than the formation of religious cults.
The actual method of invocation may be described as a total immersion in the qualities pertaining to the desired form. One invokes in every conceivable way. The magician first programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature. In the most elaborate form of ritual he may surround himself with the sounds, smells, colors, instruments, memories, numbers, symbols, music, and poetry suggestive of the god or quality. Secondly he unites his life force to the god image with which he has united his mind. This is accomplished with techniques from the gnosis. Figure 5 shows some examples of maps of the mind. Following are some suggestions for practical ritual invocation.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
298:Mother of Dreams :::
Goddess supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto men in thy visions that troop, group upon group, down the path of the shadows slanting?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the heart they beat and ravish the soul as it listens.
What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming with sails whose strands are not made by hands, an unearthly wind advances?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in strange and stately dances?
Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded with fire, attracting desire, thy tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see thy witchcraft and feel thy caresses.
Open the gate where thy children wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food has been given for my tasting from heaven and fruit of immortal sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the kingdoms divine and have healed the change of music strange from a lyre which our hands cannot master,
Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.
For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal;
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine endeavour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
299:- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expression, - all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in ideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin's distinction from other men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from there: it must not be made in the mind, - for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man's that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 142 [T4],#KEYS
300:The madman.-
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place. and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward. forward. in all directions? be there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too. decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then: "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves... It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his reqttiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann,#KEYS
301:Apotheosis ::: One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.
Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings are without self."
The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them-and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.
The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." - Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Apotheosis,#KEYS
302:On that spring day in the park I saw a young woman who attracted me. She was tall and slender, elegantly dressed, and had an intelligent and boyish face. I liked her at once. She was my type and began to fill my imagination. She probably was not much older than I but seemed far more mature, well-defined, a full-grown woman, but with a touch of exuberance and boyishness in her face, and this was what I liked above all .
I had never managed to approach a girl with whom I had fallen in love, nor did I manage in this case. But the impression she made on me was deeper than any previous one had been and the infatuation had a profound influence on my life.
Suddenly a new image had risen up before me, a lofty and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as fervent within me as the craving to worship and admire. I gave her the name Beatrice, for, even though I had not read Dante, I knew about Beatrice from an English painting of which I owned a reproduction. It showed a young pre-Raphaelite woman, long-limbed and slender, with long head and etherealized hands and features. My beautiful young woman did not quite resemble her, even though she, too, revealed that slender and boyish figure which I loved, and something of the ethereal, soulful quality of her face.
Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She raised her image before me, she gave me access to a holy shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple.
From one day to the next I stayed clear of all bars and nocturnal exploits. I could be alone with myself again and enjoyed reading and going for long walks.
My sudden conversion drew a good deal of mockery in its wake. But now I had something I loved and venerated, I had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery and a feeling of dawn that made me immune to all taunts. I had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and servant of a cherished image.
I find it difficult to think back to that time without a certain fondness. Once more I was trying most strenuously to construct an intimate "world of light" for myself out of the shambles of a period of devastation; once more I sacrificed everything within me to the aim of banishing darkness and evil from myself. And, furthermore, this present "world of light" was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer an escape, no crawling back to -nether and the safety of irresponsibility; it was a new duty, one I had invented and desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control. My sexuality, a torment from which I was in constant flight, was to be transfigured nto spirituality and devotion by this holy fire. Everything :brk and hateful was to be banished, there were to be no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious picures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors, no lust. In place of all this I raised my altar to the image of Beatrice, :.. and by consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods, sacrificing that part of life which I withdrew from the forces of darkness to those of light. My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and spirituality.
This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life.
~ Hermann Hesse, Demian,#KEYS
303:The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. "I see" he cries "all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and the Siddhas crying "May there be peace and weal" praise it with many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, "Declare to me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of thy workings." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita, 2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer,#KEYS
304::::
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
305:Of course we do." Dresden's voice was cutting. "But you're thinking too small. Building humanity's greatest empire is like building the world's largest anthill. Insignificant. There is a civilization out there that built the protomolecule and hurled it at us over two billion years ago. They were already gods at that point. What have they become since then? With another two billion years to advance?"
With a growing dread, Holden listened to Dresden speak. This speech had the air of something spoken before. Perhaps many times. And it had worked. It had convinced powerful people. It was why Protogen had stealth ships from the Earth shipyards and seemingly limitless behind-the-scenes support.
"We have a terrifying amount of catching up to do, gentlemen," Dresden was saying. "But fortunately we have the tool of our enemy to use in doing it."
"Catching up?" a soldier to Holden's left said. Dresden nodded at the man and smiled.
"The protomolecule can alter the host organism at the molecular level; it can create genetic change on the fly. Not just DNA, but any stable replicatoR But it is only a machine. It doesn't think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change."
Holden interrupted. "If it was supposed to wipe out life on Earth and replace it with whatever the protomolecule's creators wanted, why turn it loose?"
"Excellent question," Dresden said, holding up one finger like a college professor about to deliver a lecture. "The protomolecule doesn't come with a user's manual. In fact, we've never before been able to actually watch it carry out its program. The molecule requires significant mass before it develops enough processing power to fulfill its directives. Whatever they are."
Dresden pointed at the screens covered with data around them.
"We are going to watch it at work. See what it intends to do. How it goes about doing it. And, hopefully, learn how to change that program in the process."
"You could do that with a vat of bacteria," Holden said.
"I'm not interested in remaking bacteria," Dresden said.
"You're fucking insane," Amos said, and took another step toward Dresden. Holden put a hand on the big mechanic's shoulder.
"So," Holden said. "You figure out how the bug works, and then what?"
"Then everything. Belters who can work outside a ship without wearing a suit. Humans capable of sleeping for hundreds of years at a time flying colony ships to the stars. No longer being bound to the millions of years of evolution inside one atmosphere of pressure at one g, slaves to oxygen and water. We decide what we want to be, and we reprogram ourselves to be that. That's what the protomolecule gives us."
Dresden had stood back up as he'd delivered this speech, his face shining with the zeal of a prophet.
"What we are doing is the best and only hope of humanity's survival. When we go out there, we will be facing gods."
"And if we don't go out?" Fred asked. He sounded thoughtful.
"They've already fired a doomsday weapon at us once," Dresden said.
The room was silent for a moment. Holden felt his certainty slip. He hated everything about Dresden's argument, but he couldn't quite see his way past it. He knew in his bones that something about it was dead wrong, but he couldn't find the words. Naomi's voice startled him.
"Did it convince them?" she asked.
"Excuse me?" Dresden said.
"The scientists. The technicians. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this. They had to watch the video of people dying all over Eros. They had to design those radioactive murder chambers. So unless you managed to round up every serial killer in the solar system and send them through a postgraduate program, how did you do this?"
"We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints."
Half a dozen clues clicked into place in Holden's head. ~ James S A Corey, Leviathan Wakes,#KEYS
306:The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
Only was missing the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index to the Absolute.
There walled apart by its own innerness
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.
So it towered up to heights intangible
And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;
Its spire touches the apex of the world;
Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses
It marries the earth to screened eternities.
Amid the many systems of the One
Made by an interpreting creative joy
Alone it points us to our journey back
Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
This was the single stair to being's goal.
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret air of self
A subtle pattern of the universe.
It is within, below, without, above.
Acting upon this visible Nature's scheme
It wakens our earth-matter's heavy doze
To think and feel and to react to joy;
It models in us our diviner parts,
Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,
Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,
Links the body's death with immortality's call:
Out of the swoon of the Inconscience
It labours towards a superconscient Light.
If earth were all and this were not in her,
Thought could not be nor life-delight's response:
Only material forms could then be her guests
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;
This higher scheme of being is our cause
And holds the key to our ascending fate;
It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
Its unthought logic of Reality's acts
Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,
Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.
Its steps are paces of the soul's return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;
They are partners of her greater growing fate
And her return to immortality;
They consent to share her doom of birth and death;
They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive
Her blind laborious spirit to compose
A meagre image of the mighty Whole.
The calm and luminous Intimacy within
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,#KEYS
307:The ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that. For example-very briefly-there was a deity known as Marduk. Marduk was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened. As an empire grew out of the post-ice age-15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago-all these tribes came together. These tribes each had their own deity-their own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory. One tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B, and one could wipe the other one out, and then it would just be God A, who wins. That's not so good, because maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war. So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority-which ideal is going to take priority.
What seems to happen is represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in celestial space. From a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialog. You believe this; I believe this. You believe that; I believe this. How are we going to meld that together? You take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them, and you say, 'God C now has the attributes of A and B.' And then some other tribes come in, and C takes them over, too. Take Marduk, for example. He has 50 different names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods-that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think, 'this is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive, and so we'll take the best of both, if we can manage it, and extract out something, that's even more abstract, that covers both of us.'
I'll give you a couple of Marduk's interesting features. He has eyes all the way around his head. He's elected by all the other gods to be king God. That's the first thing. That's quite cool. They elect him because they're facing a terrible threat-sort of like a flood and a monster combined. Marduk basically says that, if they elect him top God, he'll go out and stop the flood monster, and they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat. It's chaos itself making its comeback. All the gods agree, and Marduk is the new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. When he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat. We need to know that, because the word 'Tiamat' is associated with the word 'tehom.' Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis, so it's linked very tightly to this story. Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out and confronts Tiamat, who's like this watery sea dragon. It's a classic Saint George story: go out and wreak havoc on the dragon. He cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces. That's the world that human beings live in.
The Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor insofar as he was a good Marduk. That meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic; he could speak properly. We are starting to understand, at that point, the essence of leadership. Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face, and maybe in every direction, and maybe the capacity to use your language properly to transform chaos into order. God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out. The best they could do was dramatize it, but it's staggeringly brilliant. It's by no means obvious, and this chaos is a very strange thing. This is a chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time.
Chaos is half psychological and half real. There's no other way to really describe it. Chaos is what you encounter when you're blown into pieces and thrown into deep confusion-when your world falls apart, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed. It's the chaos that emerges, and the chaos is everything it wants, and it's too much for you. That's for sure. It pulls you down into the underworld, and that's where the dragons are. All you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open, and to speak as carefully and as clearly as you can. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side. It's taken people a very long time to figure that out, and it looks, to me, that the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we used to represent serpentile, or other, carnivorous predators. ~ Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series, 1,#KEYS
308:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jewelled dreams of you.
I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.
But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
A home for the deathless fire.
I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began.
For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
Enamoured of sorrow and sin.
The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
His drama can endure.
All around is darkness and strife;
For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
Cast by the Undying Ones.
Man lights his little torches of hope
That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
An inn his pilgrimage.
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose.
All that was found must again be sought,
Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
"Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.
"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life's iron doom?
"This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god's desires?
"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace."
But the god is there in my mortal breast
Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
For the nameless Immaculate.
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
I left the surface gauds of mind
And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.
I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.
Above me the dragon murmurs moan
And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
I have walked in the bottomless pit.
On a desperate stair my feet have trod
Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
Into the human abyss.
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness' end.
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,#KEYS
309:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
310:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.
Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.
Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.
Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,#KEYS
311:[The Gods and Their Worlds]
[...] According to traditions and occult schools, all these zones of realities, these planes of realities have got different names; they have been classified in a different way, but there is an essential analogy, and if you go back far enough into the traditions, you see only the words changing according to the country and the language. Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists offer great similarities. All who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw, give a very similar description, whether they be from here or there; they use different words, but the experience is very similar and the handling of forces is the same.
This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies. They are what the psychological method calls "states of consciousness", but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure consists then in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in becoming sufficiently a master of them so as to be able to go out of them successively, one after another. There is indeed a whole scale of subtleties, increasing or decreasing according to the direction in which you go, and the occult procedure consists in going out of a denser body into a subtler body and so on again, up to the most ethereal regions. You go, by successive exteriorisations, into bodies or worlds more and more subtle. It is somewhat as if every time you passed into another dimension. The fourth dimension of the physicists is nothing but the scientific transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another image, one can say that the physical body is at the centre - it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest - and the inner bodies, more subtle, overflow more and more the central physical body; they pass through it, extending themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming a kind of steam all around. And the greater the subtlety, the more the extension tends to unite with that of the universe: one ends by universalising oneself. And it is altogether a concrete process which gives an objective experience of invisible worlds and even enables one to act in these worlds.
There are, then, only a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary - more or less wildly imaginary - but that they correspond to a universal truth.
All these regions, all these domains are filled with beings who exist, each in its own domain, and if you are awake and conscious on a particular plane - for instance, if on going out of a more material body you awake on some higher plane, you have the same relation with the things and people of that plane as you had with the things and people of the material world. That is to say, there exists an entirely objective relation that has nothing to do with the idea you may have of these things. Naturally, the resemblance is greater and greater as you approach the physical world, the material world, and there even comes a time when the one region has a direct action upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the overmental worlds, you will find a concrete reality absolutely independent of your personal experience; you go back there and again find the same things, with the differences that have occurred during your absence. And you have relations with those beings that are identical with the relations you have with physical beings, with this difference that the relation is more plastic, supple and direct - for example, there is the capacity to change the external form, the visible form, according to the inner state you are in. But you can make an appointment with someone and be at the appointed place and find the same being again, with certain differences that have come about during your absence; it is entirely concrete with results entirely concrete.
One must have at least a little of this experience in order to understand these things. Otherwise, those who are convinced that all this is mere human imagination and mental formation, who believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have thought them to be like that, and that they have certain defects and certain qualities because men have thought them to be like that - all those who say that God is made in the image of man and that he exists only in human thought, all these will not understand; to them this will appear absolutely ridiculous, madness. One must have lived a little, touched the subject a little, to know how very concrete the thing is.
Naturally, children know a good deal if they have not been spoilt. There are so many children who return every night to the same place and continue to live the life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoilt with age, you can keep them with you. At a time when I was especially interested in dreams, I could return exactly to a place and continue a work that I had begun: supervise something, for example, set something in order, a work of organisation or of discovery, of exploration. You go until you reach a certain spot, as you would go in life, then you take a rest, then you return and begin again - you begin the work at the place where you left off and you continue it. And you perceive that there are things which are quite independent of you, in the sense that changes of which you are not at all the author, have taken place automatically during your absence.
But for this, you must live these experiences yourself, you must see them yourself, live them with sufficient sincerity and spontaneity in order to see that they are independent of any mental formation. For you can do the opposite also, and deepen the study of the action of mental formation upon events. This is very interesting, but it is another domain. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you become aware of how far you can delude yourself. So you must study both, the dream and the occult reality, in order to see what is the essential difference between the two. The one depends upon us; the other exists in itself; entirely independent of the thought that we have of it.
When you have worked in that domain, you recognise in fact that once a subject has been studied and something has been learnt mentally, it gives a special colour to the experience; the experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality. Whereas if you had learnt nothing about the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be completely spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it would be more or less adequate, but it would not be the outcome of a previous mental formation.
Naturally, this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because in those who do not have a developed inner life, there are veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the first time, they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being!
I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it would be worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him "go out" - but it was a frightful thing! When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active, and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being; then he remembered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon. And to go out of one's body means to pass gradually through all the states of being, if one does the thing systematically. Well, already in the subtle physical, one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised.
Thus, when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, to enter into themselves, they are in agony - naturally! They have the impression that they are vanishing. And with reason: there is nothing, no consciousness!
These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are, for people who know nothing, wild imagination. If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to the West, well, unless you have been frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with open eyes. And when you have turned your back, they hasten to say, "These people are cranks!" Now to come back to the gods and conclude. It must be said that all those beings who have never had an earthly existence - gods or demons, invisible beings and powers - do not possess what the Divine has put into man: the psychic being. And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.
In the gods there is no fault because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint: as gods, it is their manner of being. But if you take a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see that they lack certain qualities that are exclusively human. By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his egoism.
If he fulfils the required condition, man is nearer to the Supreme than the gods are. He can be nearer. He is not so automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality.
If human love manifested itself without mixture, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love there is as much love of oneself as of the one loved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself. - 4 November 1958
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III, 355
,#KEYS
312:The Supreme Discovery
IF WE want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life.
Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the intellectual representation symbolising That which is at the centre of our being, That which is our life and our light.
This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages.
The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning?
The ancient traditions rightly said:
"Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one."
And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity.
Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to reascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that what he wants to attain, what he believes to be so far from him, is within him.
For how could he know anything of the origin until he becomes conscious of this origin in himself?
It is by understanding himself, by learning to know himself, that he can make the supreme discovery and cry out in wonder like the patriarch in the Bible, "The house of God is here and I knew it not."
That is why we must express that sublime thought, creatrix of the material worlds, and make known to all the word that fills the heavens and the earth, "I am in all things and all beings."When all shall know this, the promised day of great transfigurations will be at hand. When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."
This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought which should be ever present to our remembrance as the sun that illumines all life.
That is why I remind you of it today. For if we follow our path bearing this thought in our hearts like the rarest jewel, the most precious treasure, if we allow it to do its work of illumination and transfiguration within us, we shall know that it lives in the centre of all beings and all things, and in it we shall feel the marvellous oneness of the universe.
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real apprenticeship in order to achieve this: their egoistic being is too all-absorbing, too rigid, too conservative, and their struggles against it are long and painful. Others, on the contrary, who are more impersonal, more plastic, more spiritualised, come easily into contact with the inexhaustible divine source of their being.But let us not forget that they too should devote themselves daily, constantly, to a methodical effort of adaptation and transformation, so that nothing within them may ever again obscure the radiance of that pure light.
But how greatly the standpoint changes once we attain this deeper consciousness! How understanding widens, how compassion grows!
On this a sage has said:
"I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'"
Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed as if by miracle.
This is the attitude of true, conscious and discerning love, the love which knows how to see behind appearances, understand in spite of words, and which, amid all obstacles, is in constant communion with the depths.
What value have our impulses and our desires, our anguish and our violence, our sufferings and our struggles, all these inner vicissitudes unduly dramatised by our unruly imagination - what value do they have before this great, this sublime and divine love bending over us from the innermost depths of our being, bearing with our weaknesses, rectifying our errors, healing our wounds, bathing our whole being with its regenerating streams?
For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself, conceals and forgets herself in the heart of all beings and things; she never accuses, she neither judges nor curses nor condemns, but works unceasingly to perfect without constraint, to mend without reproach, to encourage without impatience, to enrich each one with all the wealth he can receive; she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything, excuse and pardon everything, hope and prepare for everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things....
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
To achieve this total self-consecration, all means are good, all methods have their value. The one thing needful is to persevere in our will to attain this goal. For then everything we study, every action we perform, every human being we meet, all come to bring us an indication, a help, a light to guide us on the path.
Before I close, I shall add a few pages for those who have already made apparently fruitless efforts, for those who have encountered the pitfalls on the way and seen the measure of their weakness, for those who are in danger of losing their self-confidence and courage. These pages, intended to rekindle hope in the hearts of those who suffer, were written by a spiritual worker at a time when ordeals of every kind were sweeping down on him like purifying flames.
You who are weary, downcast and bruised, you who fall, who think perhaps that you are defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment, and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart. Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults, the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace.
You who weep, who suffer and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild, no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child, you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this, that the most sublime forces of the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only makes him greater.
Hear the story of the worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates a richer and deeper unity, and by multiplying the surfaces of the material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity, but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place and sanctuary.
That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, The Supreme Discovery,#KEYS
313:It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.
But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
*He has crammed the whole universe in a single book.* It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with a new consciousness which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a *super-epic,* it is super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value - spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come into contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.
My child, every day you are going to read Savitri; read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever, wanting to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide, for all that he needs he will find Savitri. If he remains very quiet when before a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if lead by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble. - 5 November 1967
~ The Mother, Sweet Mother, The Mother to Mona Sarkar, [T0],#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:The gods favor the bold. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 2:Even the gods love jokes. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 3:Leave the rest to the gods. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 4:The gods have their own laws. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 5:The gods have their own rules. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 6:What are men? Mortal gods. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 7:What are gods? Immortal men. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 8:Ask the gods nothing excessive. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 9:The gods behold all righteous actions. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 10:We are gods in the chrysalis. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 11:The deeds of men never escape the gods. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 12:The gods have become our diseases. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 13:We are gods in the chrysalis. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 14:Fear first created the gods. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 15:Land of lost gods and godlike men. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 16:The gods help them who help themselves. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 17:The gods see the deeds of the righteous. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 18:The gods love those of ordered soul. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 19:Man is greater than the gods. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 20:Those whom the gods love grow young. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 21:Beauty- it was a favor bestowed by the gods. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 22:Take the goods the gods provide thee. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 23:Pray the gods do not envy your happiness! ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 24:Mankind led on by gods err all too easily. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 25:Presents, believe me, seduce both men and gods. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 26:Slow but sure moves the might of the gods. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 27:The worshiper is the father of the gods. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 28:If the gods do evil then they are not gods. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 29:Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 30:Beware of absolutes. There are many gods. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 31:Even the gods are moved by the voice of entreaty. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 32:Gods should not resemble men in their anger! ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 33:It is said that gifts persuade even the gods. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 34:Coincidence is Gods way of staying anonymous. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 35:The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 36:To live without evil belongs only to the gods. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 37:Let my heart be wise. It is the gods' best gift. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 38:Of all the gods only death does not desire gifts. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 39:We have complicated every simple gift of the gods. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 40:The gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 41:Serve God and live; serve these other gods and died. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 42:A Letter is a Joy of Earth - It is denied the Gods ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 43:Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 44:What are men? Mortal gods. What are gods? Immortal men. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 45:I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 46:The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 47:If there are none [gods], All our toil is without meaning. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 48:Know we how many tomorrows the gods intend for our todays. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 49:The Gods cannot help those who do not seize opportunities. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 50:The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 51:I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 52:Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 53:Respect the gods and the devils but keep them at a distance ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 54:ye gods! what thick encircling darkness blinds the minds of men! ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 55:It's useful that there should be Gods, so let's believe there are. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 56:We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 57:The friendship of a great man is a favor of the gods. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 58:Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour? ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 59:There is as much confusion in the world of the gods as in ours. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 60:The saying goes that the gods leave a town once it is captured. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 61:They tell me there are many gods, for god is in each of us. ~ brian-l-weiss, @wisdomtrove 62:Whom the Gods love die young no matter how long they live. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 63:Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 64:The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 65:Respect the gods, but have as little to do with them as possible. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 66:The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 67:When a man takes the road to destruction, the gods help him along. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 68:All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 69:For by the will of the gods Fate hath held sway since ancient days. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 70:Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 71:To be famous when you are young is the fortune of the gods. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 72:When you come to Christ, you have to give up all the other gods. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 73:No man looks with love on deeds that to the high Gods hateful prove. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 74:The Cosmos was not made by gods but always was and is eternal fire. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 75:The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 76:If you don't know how to serve men, why worry about serving the gods? ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 77:Kindness is an essential part of Gods work and ours here on earth. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 78:Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain? ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 79:I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 80:Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 81:Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 82:Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 83:Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most we can hope for is excellence. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 84:Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 85:Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient? ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 86:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 87:Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length? ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 88:Heaven rewards the pious; those who cherish the gods Themselves are cherished. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 89:Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 90:It is vain to ask of the gods what man is capable of supplying for himself. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 91:“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 92:Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 93:Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 94:The ways of the gods are long, but in the end they are not without strength. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 95:Friendship is the gift of the gods, and the most precious boon to man. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 96:We must believe in the gods no longer if injustice is to prevail over justice. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 97:Only gods can safely risk perfection ... it's a dangerous thing for a man. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 98:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 99:Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 100:Are the gods not just?' & 101:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 102:Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 103:I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 104:It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 105:Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 106:It is not safe to despise what Love commands. He reigns supreme, and rules the mighty gods. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 107:Christ demands first place. There's no room on the throne of your heart for two gods. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 108:Know yourself and fit yourself to new fashions. For there is a new ruler among the gods. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 109:Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods! ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 110:Real are the dreams of gods, and soothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 111:Believe me, the gods spare the afflicted, and do not always oppress those who are unfortunate. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 112:If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 113:Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 114:Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass / Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 115:Quos vilt perdere dementat' Whome the gods wish to destroy, they first drive made (Latin). ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 116:What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the climate's sultry. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 117:For the gods, though slow to see, see well, whenever a man casting aside worship turns folly. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 118:There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 119:Gifts, believe me, captivate both men and Gods, Jupiter himself was won over and appeased by gifts. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 120:It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 121:When the anger of the gods is incurred, wealth or power only bring more devastating punishment. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 122:Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 123:If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 124:It is expedient that there should be gods, and, since it is expedient, let us believe that gods exist. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 125:Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 126:War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 127:Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 128:Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 129:It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 130:You have to decide to servant the gods of materialism all around us or the true and the living God. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 131:As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for. ~ josh-billings, @wisdomtrove 132:Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god? ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 133:There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 134:Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm and yet he will be making gods by dozens. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 135:All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 136:I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 137:The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 138:There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 139:Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 140:Indulgent gods, grant me to sin once with impunity. That is sufficient. Let a second offence bear its punishment. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 141:They are not wise, then, who stand forth to buffet against Love; for Love rules the gods as he will, and me. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 142:Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 143:Why should we censure Othello when the Criterion Lover says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me"? ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 144:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 145:The Gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies; they are the trees and the plants and the seeds. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 146:That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 147:What is to be taught I learn; what is to be discovered I seek; what is to be prayed for I sought from the gods. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 148:Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want? ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 149:There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 150:Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 151:The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 152:History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 153:When I say that you are Gods and Goddesses I mean that your possibility is infinite, your potentiality is infinite. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 154:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 155:The most interesting emerging religion is Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man – it worships data. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 156:In order that a people may be free, it is necessary that the governed be sages, and those who govern, gods. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 157:The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 158:The gods at will can shape a gladder strain, and from the lamentations at the graveside, a song of triumph may arise. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 159:Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 160:Though Gods attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 161:What is Death, so it be but glorious? & 162:Grateful for his mistakes, man should be the gods, because by overcoming the faults the stronger force is developed. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 163:The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 164:A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 165:And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 166:If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 167:Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 168:Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 169:India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 170:Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 171:Venus is kind to creatures as young as we;We know not what we do, and while we're youngWe have the right to live and love like gods. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 172:When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him& 173:If these town gods can't detect the thieves who steal from their own temples, it's hardly likely they'll tell me who stole my spade. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 174:Not all of life's roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 175:Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 176:Oh, if only you knew yourselves! You are souls; you are Gods. If ever I feel like blaspheming, it is when I call you man. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 177:The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict among us, gods or people. Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 178:Only one accomplishment is beyond both the power and the mercy of the Gods. They cannot make the past as though it had never been. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 179:Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 180:In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 181:There is nothing new about humanism. It is the yielding to Satan's first temptation of Adam and Eve: "Ye shall be as gods." (Gen. 3:5) ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 182:She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 183:The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in His divinity, assumed our nature, so that He, made man, might make men gods. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 184:If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 185:It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 186:The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in His divinity, assumed our nature, so that He, made man, might make men gods. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 187:When an oath is taken ... the mind is more attentive; for it guards against two things, the reproach of friends and offence against the gods. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 188:I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 189:They are enlightened who join in this play knowing it as play, for people suffer only because they take as serious what the gods made for fun. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 190:Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 191:The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 192:If all the world be worth thy winning. / Think, oh think it worth enjoying: / Lovely Thaïs sits beside thee, / Take the good the gods provide thee. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 193:What do you gain in heaven? You become gods, drink nectar, and get rheumatism. There is less misery there than on earth, but also less truth. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 194:There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 195:If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 196:Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 197:The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 198:Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ... but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 199:What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 200:Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 201:Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 202:It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 203:Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 204:There is no happiness where there is no wisdom; No wisdom but in submission to the gods. Big words are always punished, And proud men in old age learn to be wise. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 205:Always remember that renunciation is the root idea. Unless one is initiated into this idea, not even Brahma and the World - gods have the power to attain Mukti ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 206:The Gods occupy the loftiest regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region... They have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common with men. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 207:My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 208:To give oneself ernestly to securing righteousness and justice among the people, and while respecting the gods and demons, to keep aloof from them, that may be called wisdom. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 209:Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 210:Gods are called many by the error of some who worshipped many deities, thinking as they did the planets and other stars were gods, and also the separate parts of the world. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 211:Gods are called many by the error of some who worshipped many deities, thinking as they did the planets and other stars were gods, and also the separate parts of the world. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 212:The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 213:Best of children, sisters arm-in-arm, we must bear what the gods give us to bear& 214:Live and let live, believe and let believe. & 215:A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken... ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 216:Every evildoer began by despising the Gods; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not wholly bad, becomes an evildoer by the very fact. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 217:A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture? ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 218:The gods, (if gods to goodness are inclined If acts of mercy touch their heavenly mind), And, more than all the gods, your generous heart, Conscious of worth, requite its own desert! ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 219:The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 220:The world, an entity out of everything, was created by none of the gods or men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and reg- ularly becoming extinguished. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 221:Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.) ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 222:The attempt is to kill the false "I", so that the real "I", the Lord, will reign. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me," say the Hebrew scriptures. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 223:We were romantics. We didn't just read poetry. We let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared. Women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh? ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 224:No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 225:Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 226:[Hermes addresses Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day& 227:We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 228:But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and inclines now to the one order, now to the other; some men grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 229:For every nation that lives peaceably, there will be many others to grow hard and push their arrogance to extremes; the gods attend to these things slowly. But they attend to those who put off God and turn to madness. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 230:Self is not liberated. It was never bound. What gets liberated are the demons as well as gods of your mind. Set them free. You are sick of playing with the game. Be willing to not play the game. This takes huge resolve. ~ gangaji, @wisdomtrove 231:Of all the gods, Death only craves not gifts: Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed By hymns of praise. From him alone of all The powers of heaven Persuasion holds aloof. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 232:Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it. Let the rest of your days be spent as one who has whole-heartedly committed his all to the gods and is thenceforth no man's master or slave. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 233:Unfortunately, blind faith in these stories meant that human efforts frequently focused on increasing the glory of fictional entities such as gods and nations, instead of bettering the lives of real sentient beings. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 234:As those that pull down private houses adjoining to the temples of the gods, prop up such parts as are contiguous to them; so, in undermining bashfulness, due regard is to be had to adjacent modesty, good-nature and humanity. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 235:Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 236:& 237:The gods should certainly be revered, but kept at a distance... . The way is not beyond man; he who creates a way outside of man cannot make it a true way. A good man is content with changing man, and that is enough for him. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 238:She saw the myriad gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our present life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendors of the spirit. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 239:Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 240:If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself: & 241:Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 242:But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 243:thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, "here or nowhere," couldst thou only see. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 244:If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 245:No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 246:John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 247:Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 248:If the gods have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not all-powerful. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither all-powerful or benevolent. If they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist? ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 249:The animal has its happiness in the senses, the human beings in their intellect, and the gods in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 250:For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 251:Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 252:none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 253:Watchful are the Gods of all Hands with slaughter stained. The black Furies wait, and when a man Has grown by luck, not justice, great, With sudden overturn of chance They wear him to a shade, and, cast Down to perdition, who shall save him? ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 254:To the Greeks, the supreme function of music was to "praise the gods and educate the youth". In Egypt... Initiatory music was heard only in Temple rites because it carried the vibratory rhythms of other worlds and of a life beyond the mortal. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 255:It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 256:The truth Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives By suffering. Nothing speaks the truth, Nothing tells us how things really are, Nothing forces us to know What we do not want to know Except pain. And this is how the gods declare their love. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 257:First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods. "Be and make." Let this be our motto. Say not man is a sinner. Tell him that he is a God. Even if there were a devil, it would be our duty to remember God always, and not the devil. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 258:Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 259:As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 260:But & 261:It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 262:It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 263:Man's highest blessedness, In wisdom chiefly stands; And in the things that touch upon the Gods, & 264:Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 265:Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain& 266:The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 267:Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 268:We should not speak of one that prospers well As happy, till his life have run its course, And reached its goal. An evil spirit's gift In shortest time has oft laid low the state Of one full rich in great prosperity, When the change comes, and so the Gods appoint. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 269:Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 270:If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 271:There are two Gods, there is the God that people generally believe in - a God who has to serve them. This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget - the God whom we all have to serve - exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 272:Aegistheus, the kings have another secret... . Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 273:It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 274:I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 275:Infinite power of the spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality, and made to act upon itself makes of man a God. First, let us be Gods, and then help other to be GOds. Be and Make. Let this be our motto. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 276:Holiness consists in doing Gods will joyfully. Faithfulness makes saints. The spiritual life is a union with Jesus: the divine and the human giving themselves to each other. The only thing Jesus asks of us is to give ourselves to him, in total poverty and total self-forgetfulness. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 277:The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 278:Something you want badly enough can always be gained. No matter how fierce the enemy, how remote the beautiful lady, or how carefully guarded the treasure, there is always a means to the goal for the earnest seeker. The unseen help of the guardian gods of heaven and earth assure fulfillment. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 279:Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 280:I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 281:The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 282:One may come armoured, Invinsible. His will immobile meets the mobile hour. The world blows cannot bend this Victor Head. Calm and sure are his steps in the growing night. The goal recedes, he hurries not his pace. He asks from no help from the inferior Gods. His eyes are fixed on the immutable aim. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 283:You'll see all other mortal sinners, the ones who flout the honor owed to gods or guests, or loving parents& 284:Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 285:Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 286:religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimises human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 287:Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 288:I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 289:It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 290:The command "Be ye prfect" is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He said (in the Bible) that we were "gods" and he is going to make good his words. He will make us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature... a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 291:They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 292:We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 293:I'm not going to get involved in a debate with you. Just remember this: the gods give, and the gods take away. Even if you are not aware of having been granted what you posses, the gods remember what they gave you. They don't forget a thing. You should use the abilities you have been granted with the utmost care. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 294:It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 295:I pray the gods some respite from the weary task of this long year's watch that lying on the Atreidae's roof on bended arm, dog- like, I have kept, marking the conclave of all night's stars, those potentates blazing in the heavens that bring winter and summer to mortal men, the constellations, when they wane, when they rise. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 296:I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 297:And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 298:We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 299:Faith, faith, faith in ourselves, faith, faith in God, this is the secret of greatness.If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty millions of your mythological Gods, and in all the Gods which foreigners have now and again introduced into your midst, and still have no faith in yourselves, there is no salvation for you. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 300:An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 301:Truth alone triumphs, not untruth. Through truth alone lies the way to Devayana (the way to the gods). Those who think that a little sugar - coating of untruth helps the spread of truth are mistaken and will find in the long run that a single drop of poison poisons the whole mass ... The man who is pure, and who dares, does all things. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 302:Softly sweet, in Lydian measures, Soon he sooth'd his soul to pleasures. War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble; Never ending, still beginning, Fighting still, and still destroying. If all the world be worth the winning, Think, oh think it worth enjoying: Lovely Thais sits beside thee, Take the good the gods provide thee. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 303:We want Shraddh√¢, we want faith in our own selves. Strength is life, weakness is death. & 304:I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 305:I pray the gods will give me some relief and end this weary job. One long full year I've been lying here, on this rooftop, the palace of the sons of Atreus, resting on my arms, just like a dog. I've come to know the night sky, every star, the powers we see glittering in the sky, bringing winter and summer to us all, as the constellations rise and sink. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 306:I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 307:You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may learn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk in water and live in fire; But control of the mind is better and more difficult. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 308:Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, meaningful coincidence. ... Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 309:You are therefore able to run on this path, on which God is found above all vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, speech, sense, rationality, and intellect. It is found as none of these, but rather above everything as God of gods and King of all kings. Indeed, the King of the world of the intellect is the King of kings and Lord of lords in the universe. ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 310:Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 311:Now, brethren, this is one of our greatest faults in our Christian lives. We are allowing too many rivals of God. We actually have too many gods. We have too many irons in the fire. We have too much theology that we don't understand. We have too much churchly institutionalism. We have too much religion. Actually, I guess we just have too much of too much. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 312:The Greeks adored their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony declined with paganism,but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 313:Life is a creative process, not a journey of discovery or a school of learning. You're not discovering yourself, but recreating yourself. So don't try and figure out who you are, but establish who you want to be. You create your reality every minute, probably without realizing it. You can be, do, and have whatever you can imagine. Didn't I say you were gods? ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove 314:The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 315:Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 316:Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 317:I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 318:Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me - the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love - He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 319:People have various visions of gods and goddesses (in me) according to their own predilections. What I was before, I am now, and shall be hereafter. I am also whatever you or anybody may think I am……… why don't you look at it this way: the yearnings (of seekers after Truth) have brought about this body. All of you have wanted it and so you have found it. That is all you need to know. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 320:To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 321:I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 322:O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee ,has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty .how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring) ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 323:Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 324:The gods were bored and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; them Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 325:Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition." "And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages on the depths of the seven seas, and through the salt they reel with drunken delight and in the tropics tremble they with love and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 326:It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another. They have invented gods and challenged each other: "Discard your gods and worship mine or I will destroy both your gods and you!" ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 327:Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words, No undue credence: for I say that kings kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, And doing thus are happier than those, Who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity is built-up from our good and evil luck. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 328:The Christian gospel is a message of freedom through grace and we must stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. But what shall we do with our freedom? The Apostle Paul grieved that some of the believers of his day took advantage of their freedom and indulged the flesh in the name of Christian liberty. They threw off discipline, scorned obedience and made gods of their own bellies. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 329:Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 330:The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge, grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of tenderness. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 331:It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 332:The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 333:The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 334:When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 335:Muhammad was a prince; he rallied his compatriots around him. In a few years, the Muslims conquered half of the world. They plucked more souls from false gods, knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Jesus did in fifteen centuries. Muhammad was a great man. He would indeed have been a god, if the revolution that he had performed had not been prepared by the circumstances. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 336:Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 337:The ancient man approached God (or even the gods)as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God is in the dock. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 338:Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 339:Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we're made. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 340:Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 341:Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself I’ll do it tomorrow, and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed yourself. It is time to realise that you are a member of the Universe, that you are born of Nature itself, and to know that a limit has been set to your time. Use every moment wisely, to perceive your inner refulgence, or ’twill be gone and nevermore within your reach. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 342:[Not parroting.] My old Master used to say, "It is all very good to teach the parrot to say, & 343:When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 344:We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 345:This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 346:You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 347:The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 348:This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 349:Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine. A man who uses reminders of these things correctly is always at the highest, most perfect level of initiation, and he is the only one who is perfect as perfect can be. He stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine; ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 350:My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the Ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr... She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 351:There cannot be two almighty beings in this world. [Imagine having] two or three Gods; one will create the world, another says, "I will destroy the world." It [can] never happen. There must be one God. The soul attains to perfection; [it becomes] almost omnipotent [and] omniscient. This is the worshipper. Who is the worshipped? He, the Lord God Himself, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient, and so on. And above all, He is Love. How is [the soul] to attain this perfection? By worship. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 352:Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound gods. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 353:There is no God separate from you, no God higher than you, the real "you." All the gods are little beings to you, all the ideas of God and Father in heaven are but your own reflection. God Himself is your image. ‚ÄúGod created man after His own image." That is wrong. Man creates God after his own image. That is right. Throughout the universe we are creating gods after our own image. We create the god and fall down at his feet and worship him; and when this dream comes, we love it ! ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 354:For the next fifty years this alone shall be our keynote - this, our great Mother India. Let all other vain gods disappear for the time from our minds. This is the only god that is awake, our own race - "everywhere his hands, everywhere his feet, everywhere his ears, he covers everything." All other gods are sleeping. What vain gods shall we go after and yet cannot worship the god that we see all round us, the Vir√¢t? When we have worshiped this, we shall be able to worship all other gods. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 355:The Laughing Heart your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 356:Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 357:. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and - from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 358:I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to & 359:Who can break the law? If I break this glass, it will fall down. If anyone succeeds in throwing one atom out of place, every other atom will go out of balance. . . . The law can never be broken. Each atom is kept in its place. Each is weighed and measured and fulfils its [purpose] and place. Through His command the winds blow, the sun shines. Through His rule the worlds are kept in place. Through His orders death is sporting upon the earth. Just think of two or three Gods having a wrestling match in this world! It cannot be. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 360:At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 361:I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 362:It is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods-you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 363:... it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods& 364:Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like& 365:God is true. The universe is a dream. Blessed am I that I know this moment that I have been and shall be free all eternity; ... that I know that I am worshiping only myself; that no nature, no delusion, had any hold on me. Vanish nature from me, vanish these gods; vanish worship; ... vanish superstitions, for I know myself. I am the Infinite. All these - Mrs. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, responsibility, happiness, misery - have vanished. I am the Infinite. How can there be death for me, or birth? Whom shall I fear? I am the One. Shall I be afraid of myself? Who is to be afraid of whom? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 366:How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 367:When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 368:It is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don't want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions, because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 369:Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 370:The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 371:Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 372:Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose. For if anyone shall become acquainted with this source of beauty he will then know what I say, and after what manner he is beautiful. Indeed, whatever is desirable is a kind of good, since to this desire tends. But they alone pursue true good, who rise to intelligible beauty, and so far only tend to good itself; as far as they lay aside the deformed vestments of matter, with which they become connected in their descent. Just as those who penetrate into the holy retreats of sacred mysteries, are first purified and then divest themselves of their garments, until someone by such a process, having dismissed everything foreign from the God, by himself alone, beholds the solitary principle of the universe, sincere, simple and pure, from which all things depend, and to whose transcendent perfections the eyes of all intelligent natures are directed, as the proper cause of being, life and intelligence. With what ardent love, with what strong desire will he who enjoys this transporting vision be inflamed while vehemently affecting to become one with this supreme beauty! For this it is ordained, that he who does not yet perceive him, yet desires him as good, but he who enjoys the vision is enraptured with his beauty, and is equally filled with admiration and delight. Hence, such a one is agitated with a salutary astonishment; is affected with the highest and truest love; derides vehement affections and inferior loves, and despises the beauty which he once approved. Such, too, is the condition of those who, on perceiving the forms of gods or daemons, no longer esteem the fairest of corporeal forms. What, then, must be the condition of that being, who beholds the beautiful itself? ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Even the Gods love jokes. ~ Plato, #NFDB
2:Even the gods love jokes. ~ Plato, #NFDB
3:The gods are leaving. ~ Jos Rizal, #NFDB
4:Gods have many faces. ~ Subhash Kak, #NFDB
5:The Gods have meant ~ Ruth St Denis, #NFDB
6:Good gods, this ~ Elisabeth Naughton, #NFDB
7:Leave the rest to the gods. ~ Horace, #NFDB
8:The gods have their own laws. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
9:...the Gods too love a joke. ~ Plato, #NFDB
10:We are our own gods. ~ Zeena Schreck, #NFDB
11:Only the Gods are real. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
12:The gods have their own rules. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
13:Your gods made no sound ~ David Tibet, #NFDB
14:All men have need of the gods. ~ Homer, #NFDB
15:But what if there are no gods? ~ Plato, #NFDB
16:Gods have bloody hands. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
17:No gods, no masters. ~ Margaret Sanger, #NFDB
18:Oh gods, stairs. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
19:All the sea-gods are dead. ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
20:gray hair is gods graffiti ~ Bill Cosby, #NFDB
21:heights th' immortal Gods, Jove ~ Homer, #NFDB
22:may the gods be with you ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
23:Old gods do new jobs. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
24:What gods do you pray to? ~ Gerry Lopez, #NFDB
25:When half-gods go ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
26:All things are full of gods. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
27:People make crummy gods. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
28:We are gods with anuses. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
29:What are men? Mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
30:There are no gods, only men. ~ David Vann, #NFDB
31:There must be real gods ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
32:What are men? Mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
33:Whom the gods love dies young. ~ Menander, #NFDB
34:The Gods rank work above virtues. ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
35:Ask the gods nothing excessive. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
36:Don’t make gods into demons. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
37:Fear is the mother of all gods. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
38:Gift of the Real Estate Gods. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
39:God Gives Birth To gods! ~ Chris Oyakhilome, #NFDB
40:He whom the Gods love dies young. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
41:What the Gods want happens soon ~ Petronius, #NFDB
42:Ye gods and little fishes. ~ Grace Burrowes, #NFDB
43:Fear first made gods in the world. ~ Statius, #NFDB
44:He whom the gods love dies young. ~ Menander, #NFDB
45:Keep challenging the gods ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
46:Let the gods speak softly of us ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
47:the gods are created by poets" --Ovid ~ Ovid, #NFDB
48:The gods don’t make mistakes. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
49:The gods too are fond of a joke. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
50:All gods are one god. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
51:All Gods were immortal. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
52:Days are gods to years, my ~ Anton DiSclafani, #NFDB
53:gods, i hope i terrify you. ~ Amanda Lovelace, #NFDB
54:If it pleases the gods, so be it. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
55:The gods behold all righteous actions. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
56:The gods love to fuck with us. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
57:We are gods in the chrysalis. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
58:Everything is overflowing with Gods. ~ Proclus, #NFDB
59:Gods have no one to pray to. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
60:If it pleases the gods, so be it. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
61:Mathematics is the Life of the Gods. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
62:The deeds of men never escape the gods. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
63:The gods have become our diseases. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
64:Theres a wideness in Gods mercy ~ Rich Mullins, #NFDB
65:Uneven numbers are the gods' delight. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
66:We are gods in the chrysalis. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
67:with two statues of twin gods, ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
68:Complacency serves the old gods. ~ Dion Fortune, #NFDB
69:Everything is overflowing with Gods. ~ Proclus, #NFDB
70:Fear first created the gods. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
71:Land of lost gods and godlike men. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
72:Speak of the Gods as they are. ~ Bias of Priene, #NFDB
73:The gods help them who help themselves. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
74:The gods see the deeds of the righteous. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
75:Improv is... gods creating worlds. ~ Scott Adsit, #NFDB
76:Lord, I fashion dark gods, too, ~ Countee Cullen, #NFDB
77:Quaint, outlandish heathen gods ~ Countee Cullen, #NFDB
78:"The gods have become our diseases." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
79:The gods help them that help themselves. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
80:The gods love those of ordered soul. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
81:The gods play games with men as balls. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
82:We are not self-caused little gods. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
83:We are the playthings of the gods. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
84:Wi-Fi is a blessing from the gods. ~ Darren Shan, #NFDB
85:And Englishmen like posing as gods. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
86:Astrology reveals the will of the gods. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
87:Human beings make terrible gods. ~ Nnedi Okorafor, #NFDB
88:Jacob was a gift from the gods. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
89:Man is greater than the gods. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
90:the gods play no
favorites. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
91:How the gods must have laughed ~ Christian Cameron, #NFDB
92:Take the good the gods provide thee. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
93:Those whom the gods love grow young. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
94:What Were the Gods Thinking?” list. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
95:Whom the gods notice they destroy. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
96:Beauty- it was a favor bestowed by the gods. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
97:But, hey, none of the Greek gods is. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
98:Do the gods of different nations ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
99:Fear in the world first created the gods. ~ Statius, #NFDB
100:Gods given us all strengths and gifts. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
101:It's up to poets to revive the gods. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
102:Lha Gyal Lo! (Victory to the gods) ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
103:Pray, for all men need the aid of the gods. ~ Homer, #NFDB
104:The gods are on the side of the stronger. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
105:Europe has resurrected its pagan gods. ~ Subhash Kak, #NFDB
106:Gods mill grinds slow, but sure.
~ George Herbert,#NFDB
107:I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky, ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
108:Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men, ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
109:Thank the gods and pass the hot sause ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
110:We need to mock false gods publicly. ~ Robert Barron, #NFDB
111:Who hearkens to the gods, the gods give ear. ~ Homer, #NFDB
112:Gods you avoid won't hurt you. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston, #NFDB
113:No mercy goes unpunished by the angry gods. ~ Critias, #NFDB
114:Perfection belongs to the Gods; the most ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
115:Poets are thus liberating gods. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
116:Pray the gods do not envy your happiness! ~ Euripides, #NFDB
117:Pulque - lightning nectar for the Gods. ~ Steve Olson, #NFDB
118:The sacrifice of Diogenes to all the gods. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
119:To little men, gods send little things. ~ Callimachus, #NFDB
120:When gods are contrary they stand by no one. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
121:Even gods do not endure forever. ~ Christopher Paolini, #NFDB
122:Mankind led on by gods err all too easily. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
123:Men always makes gods in their own image. ~ Xenophanes, #NFDB
124:Not even the gods fight against necessity. ~ Simonides, #NFDB
125:Power makes gods. Virtue makes martyrs. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
126:Presents, believe me, seduce both men and gods. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
127:Slow but sure moves the might of the gods. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
128:Sometimes the gods give you a break. ~ Richard Bachman, #NFDB
129:Take the goods the gods provide you. ~ H Rider Haggard, #NFDB
130:The gods need heroes. They always have. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
131:The worshiper is the father of the gods. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
132:To hate excellence is to hate the gods. ~ Mary Renault, #NFDB
133:Wealth--the most excellent of all gods. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
134:We are not gods Pontius, we are monsters! ~ K L Coones, #NFDB
135:you are the hero of heroes the god of gods ~ Rupi Kaur, #NFDB
136:Ah yes, the gods use us mortals as footballs! ~ Plautus, #NFDB
137:All gods are better than their reputation. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
138:Dancers are the messengers of the gods. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
139:For false gods, they cast long shadows. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
140:I don't believe in gods, only in religion. ~ K J Parker, #NFDB
141:If the gods do evil then they are not gods. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
142:I trust men even less than I trust gods. ~ Heidi Heilig, #NFDB
143:I will storm the gods, and shake the universe. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
144:Men create the gods after their own images. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
145:Nearer the gods no mortal may approach. ~ Edmond Halley, #NFDB
146:No Gods Or Kings. Only Man. -Andrew Ryan ~ John Shirley, #NFDB
147:Now, gods, stand up for bastards! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
148:Now, gods, stand up for bastards. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
149:The comedy gods are smiling on me tonight. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
150:We gods are capable of infinite marvels. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
151:Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
152:Beware of absolutes. There are many gods. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
153:Consciousness is Gods' gift to mankind. ~ Albert Hofmann, #NFDB
154:Even the gods are moved by the voice of entreaty. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
155:Gods should not resemble men in their anger! ~ Euripides, #NFDB
156:I grew up in the arms of the gods. ~ Friedrich H lderlin, #NFDB
157:In that cage we’re both Gods and monsters. ~ Tillie Cole, #NFDB
158:It was man who first made men believe in gods. ~ Critias, #NFDB
159:I will storm the Gods and shake the Universe ~ Euripides, #NFDB
160:Mercury ~ Messenger of the Gods shar.es/cL6M8 #astrology, #NFDB
161:Nothing is impossible to gods and authors. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
162:The gods are watching, but idly, yawning. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
163:Ye gods, annihilate but space and time, ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
164:Gods, I love it when you talk mathy to me. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
165:I am old, but the Gods still love me. ~ Erich von Daniken, #NFDB
166:It is said that gifts persuade even the gods. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
167:Politicians. Little Tin Gods on Wheels. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
168:The gods are what has failed to become of us ~ W S Merwin, #NFDB
169:The gods thought otherwise.
Dis aliter visum. ~ Virgil,#NFDB
170:THEY THINK THAT BECAUSE THEY ARE GODS 10100 ~ Jeff Somers, #NFDB
171:A man takes what the gods thrust upon him. ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB
172:And this stuff about the gods.” She grabbed my ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
173:Do not make gods in your own images. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
174:God became man, that we might be gods. ~ Irenaeus of Lyons, #NFDB
175:I'm Irish, for gods sake. I'm a romantic. ~ Pierce Brosnan, #NFDB
176:Nay, we must think men are not gods, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
177:No one suspects the days to be gods. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
178:Scars and a thrill seeker. Gods help her... ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
179:The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable. ~ Plato, #NFDB
180:To live without evil belongs only to the gods. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
181:We are our own gods and our own demons ~ Sergei Lukyanenko, #NFDB
182:A culture finds the gods it needs. ~ Kevin Crossley Holland, #NFDB
183:As nations improve, so do their gods. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
184:Charleston, West “by gods” Virginia ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
185:Heaven rewards the pious; those who cherish the gods ~ Ovid, #NFDB
186:...humanity generally gets the Gods it deserves. ~ Tom Holt, #NFDB
187:If any man obeys the gods, they listen to him also. ~ Homer, #NFDB
188:In wondrous ways do the gods make sport with men. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
189:Men would be angels, angels would be gods. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
190:Never, dear gods. Never mess with mortals. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
191:O thou, the drink of gods and angels! Wine ~ Robert Herrick, #NFDB
192:The planet is littered with irresponsible gods. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
193:The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
194:We are our own gods and our own demons. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko, #NFDB
195:Where men can't live gods fare no better. ~ Cormac McCarthy, #NFDB
196:Calling to the gods, she's every inch a goddess. ~ E L James, #NFDB
197:Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
198:It's easier to believe in aliens than in gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
199:It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods, ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
200:Let my heart be wise. It is the gods' best gift. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
201:Let us be protectors of all of Gods Creatures ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
202:Majestic mighty Wealth is the holiest of our gods. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
203:Men mock the gods until they need them, Kaz. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
204:The gods do not fight against necessity. ~ Simonides of Ceos, #NFDB
205:The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
206:They were firemakers! They were gods! [humans] ~ Jack London, #NFDB
207:As long as there is poverty there will be gods. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
208:As long as there is poverty, there will be gods ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
209:Cheeseburgers,’ Percy said. ‘Food of the gods. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
210:Fear was the first thing on Earth to create gods. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
211:Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
212:If horses had Gods, they would look like horses. ~ Xenophanes, #NFDB
213:It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods; ~ Anne Spencer, #NFDB
214:Makes you wonder if the gods are always right. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
215:Of all the gods only death does not desire gifts. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
216:People invent gods to explain their suffering. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
217:Power came from the rituals, not from the gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
218:Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter. ~ Buster Keaton, #NFDB
219:Thank the Gods! My misery exceeds all my hopes! ~ Jean Racine, #NFDB
220:the demons of to day are the gods od yesterday. ~ Jon Skovron, #NFDB
221:The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
222:The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ~ Roberto Calasso, #NFDB
223:The gods sustain and guide all their works. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
224:Uncontrollable laughter arose among the blessed gods. ~ Homer, #NFDB
225:We have complicated every simple gift of the gods. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
226:God gives not kings the stile of Gods in vaine, ~ King James I, #NFDB
227:How can there be such anger in the minds of the gods? ~ Virgil, #NFDB
228:It is fear that first brought gods into the world. ~ Petronius, #NFDB
229:Man wasn't made to share the universe with gods. ~ Darren Shan, #NFDB
230:May the gods always send me stupid enemies. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
231:Not even the gods fight against necessity. ~ Simonides of Ceos, #NFDB
232:The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ~ Roberto Calasso, #NFDB
233:The violet sea longs for the birth of gods, ~ Jose Lezama Lima, #NFDB
234:We served two Gods, our lusts and our shame. ~ Darnell L Moore, #NFDB
235:Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked? ~ Carol Goodman, #NFDB
236:Whoever truly worships the gods loves their priests. ~ Statius, #NFDB
237:Addicts turn their pleasures into vengeful Gods. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
238:All the gods are dead except the god of war. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, #NFDB
239:American law needs to reflect gods law. ~ Gordon Klingenschmitt, #NFDB
240:Humor, motivations, moral,gods,energy,secrecy ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
241:If the gods do a shameful thing, they are not gods. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
242:If you can't please the gods, trick them. ~ Lesley Nneka Arimah, #NFDB
243:I mean that gods do not limit men. Men limit men. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
244:The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
245:There are many roads to happiness, if the gods assent. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
246:You believe dragons are better than gods? ~ Christopher Paolini, #NFDB
247:Agression is a trait common to men and new gods. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
248:A grief-stricken man is driven to defy the gods. ~ Clive Cussler, #NFDB
249:Ah! why, ye Gods, should two and two make four? ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
250:At least all Gods except one are man-made. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
251:Even Gods have sought out gurus for themselves. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
252:Even the gods couldn't devise a fates so twisted. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
253:I want to Gods thoughts, the rest are details. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
254:I was born for killing—the gods made me to ruin. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
255:Perhaps he'd been using Just for Gods hair cream. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
256:The glorious gifts of the gods are not to be cast aside. ~ Homer, #NFDB
257:The gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
258:Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
259:There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
260:Thou oughtest to know, since thou livest near the gods. ~ Horace, #NFDB
261:We are as gods and might as well get good at it. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
262:Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen. ~ Homer, #NFDB
263:Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
264:Ah coffee, the elixir of gods and humans. ~ Jacqueline M Battisti, #NFDB
265:gods are nothing without fools to believe in them. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
266:The gods alone know, what kind of wife a man will have. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
267:The gods are immortal men, and men are mortal gods. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
268:The gods give to mortals not everything at the same time. ~ Homer, #NFDB
269:The gods love to laugh at a happy man, however. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
270:The universe is a machine for the making of Gods. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
271:We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals. ~ John Green, #NFDB
272:Whom the mad would destroy, first they make gods. ~ Bernard Levin, #NFDB
273:All gods are tricksters, and war gods worst of any. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
274:All that is from the gods is full of Providence. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
275:another insect wandering past the feet of gods. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
276:Beware, ye Gods, for the sun is up and I am awake. ~ Peter Clenott, #NFDB
277:Even the blind and meek and voiceless have gods. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
278:Gods and men honor those who have fought in battle. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
279:However, monarchs are literal Gods in your fantasy ~ Krista D Ball, #NFDB
280:Ideas are the invisible Gods of our universe! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
281:I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion. ~ Themistocles, #NFDB
282:more 27 and 53,'i said. 'Food of the gods,' he said ~ David Almond, #NFDB
283:nor freedom, nor gods, nor work, nor anything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
284:Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
285:The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
286:There is no part of me that is not of the Gods. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
287:Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
288:Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
289:Even in the darkest times the gods are always there. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
290:Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez. ~ Valeria Luiselli, #NFDB
291:In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
292:Serve God and live; serve these other gods and died. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
293:The minds of the everlasting gods are not changed suddenly. ~ Homer, #NFDB
294:Why don’t you speak to me, O Gods! she cried out ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
295:Why would Roman gods want to date Chinese Canadians? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
296:With no gods to pray to, Susan prayed to her father. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
297:A Letter is a Joy of Earth - It is denied the Gods ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
298:For you can always tell the gods by their appetite. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
299:Gods are what people worship. Men are what die. ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson, #NFDB
300:If it shakes you in the right places, it's Gods gift. ~ Steven Tyler, #NFDB
301:Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. ~ Plotinus, #NFDB
302:Only so much can be borne from men, so much from gods ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
303:On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
304:The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
305:The universe... is a machine for the making of gods. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
306:The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.
~ Henri Bergson,#NFDB
307:Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
308:When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows. ~ Cathy Ostlere, #NFDB
309:Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
310:Fury from the heavens; fury at the gods - inseparable. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
311:Gods are so last year,” Hiro said, and Aya smiled. ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
312:I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself. ~ Conor McGregor, #NFDB
313:It was too much... the gods would not permit such joy. ~ Eva Ibbotson, #NFDB
314:I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
315:Mathematics is the language in which the gods talk to people. ~ Plato, #NFDB
316:The gods give no gifts without hooks embedded. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
317:The gods have given you wealth and the means of enjoying it. ~ Horace, #NFDB
318:The gods - if they existed - detested happiness. ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
319:the gods seldom
give
but so quickly
take. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
320:The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
321:The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
322:They did not know her-gods are hard for mortals to recognize. ~ Homer, #NFDB
323:Three gods, two Druids, and a selkie walk into a bar … ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
324:When dealing with the gods, one deals with danger. ~ Yasmine Galenorn, #NFDB
325:Your gods don't know you exist.
And that's okay. ~ Brenna Yovanoff,#NFDB
326:Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
327:All the best gods are made of stone and say nothing. ~ Christina Stead, #NFDB
328:As for our gods, we have a few too many to be true. ~ Pierre Corneille, #NFDB
329:Dear Gods Nick what have you done while I was gone? ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
330:Disciple : Then it is dangerous to worship these gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
331:Gods always behave like the people who make them. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
332:Gods, this woman was hotter than Death Valley in July. ~ Thea Harrison, #NFDB
333:He is nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent. ~ Cato the Elder, #NFDB
334:If a man obeys the gods they’re quick to hear his prayers. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
335:I feel like the gods have certainly patted me on the head. ~ Dane Cook, #NFDB
336:If there are none [gods], All our toil is without meaning. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
337:It's the priests who have demands, not the gods. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
338:Know we how many tomorrows the gods intend for our todays. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
339:Love is powerful. It can bring the gods to their knees. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
340:of every night you must be open to the Gods, and if ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
341:Pray to the devils; the gods have given us over. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
342:The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, ~ Xenophanes, #NFDB
343:The Gods cannot help those who do not seize opportunities. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
344:The grudges of gods are as deathless as their flesh. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
345:The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB
346:tiny mortals tampering with chariots of the gods. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
347:We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
348:What are gods, after all, if not the perfect victims? ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
349:When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
350:Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
351:With Free minds all are to worship their Gods. ~ Constantine the Great, #NFDB
352:Xander and Ethan are sex gods ALL THE WAY. —Nonna8359 ~ Scarlett Avery, #NFDB
353:Bloody Egyptian gods in their bloody revealing swimwear. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
354:Everyone has gods. You just don't think they're gods. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
355:From my example learn to be just, and not to despise the gods. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
356:He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
357:I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
358:I'm a polyatheist - there are many gods I don't believe in. ~ Dan Fouts, #NFDB
359:In dreams, the gods watch over us. Awake, we're on our own. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
360:Madness ends sometimes. The Gods decree it, not man. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
361:Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
~ Plotinus,#NFDB
362:Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men. ~ Horace, #NFDB
363:Respect the gods and the devils but keep them at a distance ~ Confucius, #NFDB
364:The Ancestors fashioned the gods as a workman fashions iron. ~ Rig Veda, #NFDB
365:The designer always has to leave room for the gods. ~ Robert Bringhurst, #NFDB
366:The gods loves to punish whatever is greater than the rest. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
367:The next century's task will be to rediscover its gods. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
368:We are not servants of some God; we are 'our own gods?' ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
369:We are simultaneously gods and worms.”—Abraham Maslow ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
370:When the gods come among men, they are not known. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
371:Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
372:...because really, sometimes the irony gods just get drunk. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
373:Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments. ~ Dick Cavett, #NFDB
374:Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
375:If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
376:I like the night and the sky better than the gods of men. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
377:Prayer is “Gods breath in man returning to his birth. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
378:Remember, this is war. The gods are at war for your soul. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
379:Respect the gods and buddhas, but never rely on them. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
380:So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners. ~ Hal Duncan, #NFDB
381:The games of gods play out upon the backbones of mortals. ~ Ella Summers, #NFDB
382:The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
383:The Gods give with one hand and take with the other. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
384:The more we deny ourselves, the more the gods supply our wants. ~ Horace, #NFDB
385:They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
386:What are men? Mortal gods.
What are gods? Immortal men. ~ Heraclitus,#NFDB
387:Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
388:Every people have gods to suit their circumstances. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
389:Gods always behave like the people who created them. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
390:Here, far from our homes, we will be forgotten by our gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
391:I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
392:If I am unable to make the gods above relent, I shall move hell. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
393:If you are wise, be wise; keep what goods the gods provide you. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
394:It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing. ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
395:It is not the rituals of worship that please the gods. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
396:It's useful that there should be Gods, so let's believe there are. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
397:Oh, dear gods, this was turning into a boy fight. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
398:O ye gods! what thick encircling darkness blinds the minds of men! ~ Ovid, #NFDB
399:The gods give that man some profit to whom they are propitious. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
400:The mills of the gods grind slowly....but they grind to dust. ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
401:Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
402:Ultimately the gods of pleasure can’t satisfy our desires. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
403:We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
404:When gods die, they always die many sorts of death. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
405:Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. ~ Cyril Connolly, #NFDB
406:"All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
407:He had a face that would make angels weep and gods go to war. ~ Geneva Lee, #NFDB
408:I am the hole on the flute that Gods breath flows through. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
409:If you could disagree with kings, were gods so far above? ~ Elizabeth Bear, #NFDB
410:Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
411:Many high gods dwelt in one beautiful home; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 4:1, #NFDB
412:May the gods show their mercy... The Alexion would not. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
413:only to find out the Viking gods had invented Google-boats. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
414:People are killing for gods again. Money is killing us all. ~ Kate Tempest, #NFDB
415:the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
416:The friendship of a great man is a favor of the gods. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
417:The gods never let us love and be wise at the same time. ~ Publilius Syrus, #NFDB
418:The gods wanted war?
They were about to get it. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
419:The populace drags down the gods to their own level. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
420:There are no gods, only one, and he's too sublime to help. ~ Robert Walser, #NFDB
421:They tell me there are many gods, for god is in each of us ~ Brian L Weiss, #NFDB
422:We Ask the Gods for Answers and They Give Us Questions ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
423:Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour? ~ Horace, #NFDB
424:Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
425:As much as we think we’re gods, we’re still just animals. ~ Iain Rob Wright, #NFDB
426:Deos fortioribus adesse. The gods support those who are stronger. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
427:Exceeds man's might: that dwells with the gods above. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
428:God is love and we are in our weakness imperfect gods. ~ Antoine the Healer, #NFDB
429:If the enemy were gods, he had to become a godslayer. This ~ Vaughn Heppner, #NFDB
430:If the gods sent you to fight here, then the gods are fools. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
431:If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods. ~ Sydney Pollack, #NFDB
432:In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite. ~ Greg Bear, #NFDB
433:In the time of gods and monsters, what is the worth of a man? ~ Joss Whedon, #NFDB
434:Its shadows gleaming with the birth of gods, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:5, #NFDB
435:Man's first and greatest victory must be won against the gods. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
436:Most men do nothing to deserve what the gods throw their way, ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
437:No matter how much I crave peace, the gods have other plans. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
438:Oh, my gods.
There were furies in the Covenant. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
439:Respect the gods and Buddhas, but do not depend on them. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
440:Santeria gods and goddesses. It’s a quiet act of defiance, ~ Chanel Cleeton, #NFDB
441:Surmount the desires of which gods and men are the subjects. ~ Uttana Sutta, #NFDB
442:There are no unbeatable odds, there are no believable gods. ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB
443:There is as much confusion in the world of the gods as in ours. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
444:The saying goes that the gods leave a town once it is captured. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
445:To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands. ~ Elizabeth Moon, #NFDB
446:When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
447:Whom the Gods love die young no matter how long they live. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
448:Creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
449:Do the gods sleep well at night? I think maybe they do. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
450:Govern your tongue before all other things, following the gods. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
451:Hazel blinked. “Two gods had a horse for a kid?” “Long story. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
452:How could Quing-jao know what the gods meant by anything? ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
453:Introite, nam et heic Dii sunt! (Enter, for here too are gods.) ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
454:It was possible that there were two gods in this church. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
455:…it will be possible, in the time of the wolf, to kill the gods. ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
456:Man must look after man, for we have no gods to watch over us. ~ Hilari Bell, #NFDB
457:Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
458:Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
459:Piety and holiness of life will propitiate the gods. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
460:The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
461:The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
462:there is no gods saes grimcell but in thy deorc heorte man ~ Paul Kingsnorth, #NFDB
463:Through is a favorite word of Gods... [follow with] (Isa. 43.2) ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
464:was no dearth of gods in my country. It only lacked men. ~ Anand Neelakantan, #NFDB
465:We’re using the gifts of God as if they themselves are gods. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
466:when the gods created mankind, death they dispensed to mankind, ~ David Rose, #NFDB
467:When the gods were more manlike, Men were more godlike. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
468:Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
469:You are making Socrates's mistake of assuming the gods are good. ~ Jo Walton, #NFDB
470:Zeus, the Lord of the Gods, wore a dark blue pinstriped suit. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
471:Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
472:Disciple : The gods do not care whether man is killed or not. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
473:Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
474:I don’t live by other people’s time tables; I live by Gods. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
475:IF there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
476:Man was big enough to kill himself, thanks. No gods need apply. ~ Scott Morse, #NFDB
477:Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
478:Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
479:Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
480:Respect the gods, but have as little to do with them as possible. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
481:Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods thyself a Goddess. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
482:The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
483:The gods changed their war cry to: “RUN!” “HELP!” And: “MOMMY! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
484:The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
485:The Gods give of their best, not their worst, to men! ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
486:The gods use their chosen hard, but reveal little to them. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
487:There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation. ~ Iain Banks, #NFDB
488:When Gods dabble in the affairs of men, anything can happen. ~ Amanda Bouchet, #NFDB
489:Wise men and gods are on the strongest side. ~ Sir Charles Sedley 5th Baronet, #NFDB
490:A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
491:Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
492:I was not going to be killed by a gods-bedamned caterpillar ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
493:Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. PLOTINUS ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
494:that the gods made a bridge from earth, to heaven, called Bifröst? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
495:The dead were legion and the gods had their own secret agenda. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
496:The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
497:The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
498:The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
499:The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
500:The Universe that the quantum gods made is cruel and random. ~ Hannu Rajaniemi, #NFDB
501:Truly, when the gods set their faces against you, you are fucked. ~ Robert Low, #NFDB
502:When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
503:When a man takes the road to destruction, the gods help him along. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
504:You fear everything as mortals but desire to have everything as gods. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
505:All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
506:All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
507:But as Nietzsche said, ‘The gods furl their flags at boredom. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
508:But you gods will give us
Some faults to make us men. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
509:Cease to think that the decrees of the gods can be changed by prayers. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
510:For by the will of the gods Fate hath held sway since ancient days. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
511:Gods, this is so fucked up. You and me. It makes no sense. ~ Elisabeth Naughton, #NFDB
512:Hazel blinked. “Two gods had a horse for a kid?”
“Long story. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
513:I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. ~ Jesus, #NFDB
514:I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. ~ William Ernest Henley, #NFDB
515:Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
516:Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.
pg86 ~ Madeline Miller,#NFDB
517:The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
518:To be famous when you are young is the fortune of the gods. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
519:To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
520:Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
521:We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
522:When you come to Christ, you have to give up all the other gods. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
523:Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
524:All the gods and goddesses are only varied aspects of the One. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
525:But the boy already had a god of his own. And the gods were selfish. ~ R F Kuang, #NFDB
526:Funny thing, watching gods realize they’ve been mortal all along. ~ Pierce Brown, #NFDB
527:gods are children's blankets that get carried over into adulthood. ~ James Randi, #NFDB
528:Let us be silent — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
529:Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods. ~ Peter Shaffer, #NFDB
530:No man looks with love on deeds that to the high Gods hateful prove. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
531:Not they who reject the gods are profane, but those who accept them. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
532:Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
533:The Cosmos was not made by gods but always was and is eternal fire. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
534:The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven. ~ Rae Armantrout, #NFDB
535:The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
536:The only thing you can count on is that the gods make other plans. ~ Janie Chang, #NFDB
537:We’re not gods; we can’t be the answer to everyone’s problems. ~ Lindsay Buroker, #NFDB
538:We would have to think the gods had no minds, to pray for murderers. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
539:When the gods give you another look at the world, best enjoy it. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
540:Who knows if the gods above will add tomorrow's span to this day's sum? ~ Horace, #NFDB
541:You judge the gods by who bows down at their altars?" Ai Ling asked. ~ Cindy Pon, #NFDB
542:all gods fear death, even when we are not encased in mortal forms. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
543:All the gods and goddesses are only varied aspects of the One. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
544:A woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
545:Gods and wonders always appear, to attend the birth of kings. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
546:If you don't know how to serve men, why worry about serving the gods? ~ Confucius, #NFDB
547:It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance. ~ Sulari Gentill, #NFDB
548:Kindness is an essential part of Gods work and ours here on earth. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
549:The gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
550:There. Let the gods of friendship and common sense strike him dead. ~ Kelly Moran, #NFDB
551:They feared the LORD, but also served their own gods. (2 Kings 17:33 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
552:When mortals go to war with gods, the outcome doesn’t favor us. ~ Victoria Danann, #NFDB
553:Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain? ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
554:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
555:For business, our internet love affair was a gift from the gods. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk, #NFDB
556:He lived far from the gods, but in his mind he was at home with them. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
557:I don't want to be any closer to the gods than death will bring me. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
558:I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
559:Love is powerful, Piper. It can bring even the gods to their knees. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
560:Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
561:My job, one of them, in science, was to find the gods inside of us. ~ Howard Bloom, #NFDB
562:One should only question gods where none but gods can reply. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
563:Sententious sage! so it is: but I swear by my household gods not ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
564:Sometimes, the gods are kind. And hubris is the worst of sins. ~ Christian Cameron, #NFDB
565:The gods attend to great matters, they neglect small ones. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
566:The gods envy me because they cannot die. ~ Giannina Braschi in "Empire of Dreams", #NFDB
567:The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best. ~ Barbara Kingsolver, #NFDB
568:There was no dearth of gods in my country. It only lacked men. ~ Anand Neelakantan, #NFDB
569:Though the favourites of the Gods die young, they also live ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
570:Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods. ~ Peter A Levine, #NFDB
571:While the gods remained more human, the men were more divine. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
572:Why do I hate spiders? Gods, who doesn't? What a stupid question. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
573:With our mortal minds we should seek from the gods that which becomes us. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
574:You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
575:Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
576:Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
577:A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
578:Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
579:Gods, when did we discover how easy it is to be cruel to one another? ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
580:How I envy you creative people - creativity is a gift from the gods ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
581:I frowned. “You mean Set’s got, like, other evil gods on speed dial? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
582:It is the gods' custom to bring low all things of surpassing greatness. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
583:Let’s fight, ye gods and little fishes! I’ve had enough of despotism. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
584:Men and women who seek to become gods must first lose their humanity. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
585:Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
586:That is worlds, gods, beings, the All,—the supreme Soul. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, #NFDB
587:The flesh is the clay of the gods. Only the chosen can be sculptors. ~ Michael West, #NFDB
588:The gods are fair, and they use our little vices to punish us ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
589:The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life ~ Lucan, #NFDB
590:The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn't love? ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
591:The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love? ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
592:Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man. ~ Plato, #NFDB
593:Two gods in one day…” “Un-Roman fighting…” “Water cannon up my nose… ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
594:Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient? ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
595:Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes. ~ Mark Leyner, #NFDB
596:Come, then! Face Ravelle! The gods have sent your doom, motherfuckers! ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
597:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
598:From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us. ~ David Antin, #NFDB
599:God is one; there are not many Gods, one for each tribe among men. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
600:Gods live past our meager death.
We die past their ceaseless living. ~ Heraclitus,#NFDB
601:I owe them gods
a bottle of whiskey
and a bullet each ~ Elancharan Gunasekaran,#NFDB
602:It sounds to me like the gods of sneaking out have smiled upon Lucy. ~ Suzanne Young, #NFDB
603:Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It’s best we stay separate. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
604:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
605:Never honor the gods in one breath and take the gods for fools the next. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
606:Of all the gods nailed to the cross, Discord was the most beautiful. ~ Norah Labiner, #NFDB
607:Oh God, I just kissed a vampire!" Oh Gods, I just kissed a human! ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
608:So why not care for that side of you, where you and the gods are equals? ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
609:The Olympian gods cannot have grand passions because they cannot die. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
610:There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
611:What are gods?" asked the buffalo man.
"I don't know," said Shadow. ~ Neil Gaiman,#NFDB
612:Who apart from the gods is without pain for his whole lifetime's length? ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
613:"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
614:A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
615:A good commander can beat the odds. A great commander can beat the gods. ~ Jack Kirby, #NFDB
616:All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. ~ William James, #NFDB
617:Cats must always be cats, even when they are gods, or constellations. ~ Tamora Pierce, #NFDB
618:Damn me to hell or take me to heaven, but for Gods sake, do it now.... ~ Nora Roberts, #NFDB
619:Death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die. ~ Sappho, #NFDB
620:Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness? ~ Homer, #NFDB
621:Nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
622:Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. ~ Bodhidharma, #NFDB
623:Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers. ~ Horace, #NFDB
624:Recently, the scientific gods have grown kinder to psychologists. ~ Daniel L Schacter, #NFDB
625:thank the yoga gods for making my legs strong and my stamina steady. ~ Sawyer Bennett, #NFDB
626:The Gods did not count time spent fishing in the hours of a man's life. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
627:The gods make use of our forgotten deeds. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate, #NFDB
628:The worship of false gods is always an outgrowth of spiritual deception. ~ Max Anders, #NFDB
629:Those who deck themselves out in stolen gods are not viable. ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness, #NFDB
630:Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
631:We can't arrange gods by coolness. That would lead to too many fights. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
632:You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't. ~ Sam Mendes, #NFDB
633:Youre supposed to be the leading lady in your own life, for Gods sake! ~ Kate Winslet, #NFDB
634:Death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die. ~ Sappho, #NFDB
635:...for when the gods have made up their minds they do not change them lightly. ~ Homer, #NFDB
636:I do like men who come out frankly and own that they are not gods. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
637:I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
638:If we neglect our privileges, the gods take them from us. ~ Constance Fenimore Woolson, #NFDB
639:If you worship false gods, the ripples bring a little of hell to earth. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
640:It is vain to ask of the gods what man is capable of supplying for himself. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
641:...let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent. ~ Glen Cook, #NFDB
642:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
643:Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
644:On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
645:Open this fucking cage, you glowing bluidy freak!” Gods, he was fierce. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
646:Our gods are much too busy in our lives for us to ignore them. (Myles) ~ Tamora Pierce, #NFDB
647:The Gods are unkind and deny us knowledge of what the future holds ~ Peter L Bernstein, #NFDB
648:The most natural path in the world is to adopt the gods of our parents. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
649:they created huge empires of faithful slaves “by the will of the supreme gods”… ~ Rius, #NFDB
650:They wanted them to look like the Gods.
God doesn't look like this. ~ James Rollins,#NFDB
651:We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl. ~ John Green, #NFDB
652:Worry less about what the gods might do and more about what you can, ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
653:You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa. ~ Stanis aw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
654:You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
655:Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool, ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
656:Calum patted her shoulder and prayed to the Gods of Balanced Equations ~ Anne McCaffrey, #NFDB
657:Clovis,’ Nico growled, ‘for the gods’ sake, stop dreaming so powerfully! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
658:God is one, greatest of gods and men, not like mortals in body or thought. ~ Xenophanes, #NFDB
659:Heaven hears and pities hapless men like me, For sacred ev'n to gods is misery. ~ Homer, #NFDB
660:it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, ~ Claire Messud, #NFDB
661:Lester (Apollo) Still human; thanks for asking Gods, I hate my life WHEN ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
662:Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods. ~ Plato, #NFDB
663:Man invented the gods. Then the gods went off on their own, but not far. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
664:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
~ Alan Watts,#NFDB
665:Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
666:The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
667:The gods are hard to handle — when they come blazing forth in their true power. ~ Homer, #NFDB
668:The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools. ~ Larry Niven, #NFDB
669:The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools. ~ Larry Niven, #NFDB
670:They were the gods of this strange little heaven, and I was their guest. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
671:This only is denied the Gods: the power to remake the past. —ARISTOTLE ~ Jeffery Deaver, #NFDB
672:When there are no gods to judge, who can say what is right or wrong? There ~ Luke Scull, #NFDB
673:A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods. ~ Plato, #NFDB
674:Actually it’s two cups. And yes. Coffee is the elixir of the gods. ~ Denise Grover Swank, #NFDB
675:Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become us us if they were? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
676:Each and every being has an innate ability to heal as a gift from the gods. ~ Mikao Usui, #NFDB
677:For a "monotheistic" religion it should be sufficient with three gods. ~ Arnulf Øverland, #NFDB
678:Free will is the liberty to choose what is right according to Gods law. ~ Malachi Martin, #NFDB
679:Good gods, can we stop arguing and just, I don’t know, make out? ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
680:It is not a god that makes us more human, it is we human that make Gods. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
681:Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist. ~ Horace, #NFDB
682:None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man, it has always been. ~ Empedocles, #NFDB
683:One cannot come closer to the gods than by bringing health to his Fellow Man. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
684:The best way to be thankful is to use the goods the gods provide you. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
685:The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost. ~ Akwaeke Emezi, #NFDB
686:The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
687:The ways of the gods are long, but in the end they are not without strength. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
688:We don’t need any more Atreides gods! We need a space for some humanity! ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
689:We're all bit of relaxation away from being Gods and Goddesses. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div, #NFDB
690:When a man cannot fight he would curse. The gods like to feel needed. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
691:But even so, we're not devils, let alone gods. We're human. We're human! ~ Hiromu Arakawa, #NFDB
692:Death must be an evil and the gods agree; for why else would they live for ever? ~ Sappho, #NFDB
693:Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
694:I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
695:If, as Niko asks, you show them mercy, then the gods will be well pleased. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
696:In the Land of Gods and Monsters I was an angel looking to get fucked hard ~ Lana Del Rey, #NFDB
697:It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
698:Old gods die hard. They hold on, they creep in, they quietly clutch at us. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
699:Prometheus stole fire from the gods so that humans could become like gods. ~ Alan Russell, #NFDB
700:The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
701:The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men. ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson, #NFDB
702:Truly divine faculties of intellect and imagination can make gods of us all ~ Michael Cox, #NFDB
703:When a man cannot fight he should curse. The gods like to feel needed. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
704:Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
705:Yes, she was still breathing—and by the gods, he would keep her that way! ~ T L Shreffler, #NFDB
706:As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport ~ James Shapiro, #NFDB
707:As someone has said "gods" is not really the plural of God; God has no plural. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
708:Friendship is the gift of the gods, and the most precious boon to man. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
709:Heaven is a home without the machines or gods. Hell is a home without love. ~ C J Anderson, #NFDB
710:Know thyself and thou shall know all the mysteries of the gods and the universe. ~ Various, #NFDB
711:Life is one of Gods greatest Journeys, But Death is the next great Adventure. ~ Chris Cole, #NFDB
712:Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
713:Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was every granted by the gods to man. ~ Plato, #NFDB
714:Only gods can safely risk perfection ... it's a dangerous thing for a man. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
715:Soldiers do not believe in gods until they do something to offend them. ~ Anna Smith Spark, #NFDB
716:The gods don’t care about men, no more than kings care about peasants. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
717:The path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality. ~ The Mother, #NFDB
718:Visiem zināms, ka ģimenes gods ir atkarīgs no tās sieviešu uzvedības. ~ Louis de Berni res, #NFDB
719:We are given up to those gods, those monsters, those giants, — our thoughts. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
720:We must believe in the gods no longer if injustice is to prevail over justice. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
721:We’re human beings. We create gods and fight with them, and they bless us. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
722:Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings. ~ James Purdy, #NFDB
723:Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. I’m not even a god. ~ Jack Campbell, #NFDB
724:and God. There was no dearth of gods in my country. It only lacked men. ~ Anand Neelakantan, #NFDB
725:As a Polynesian, our gods are tied to water, so this means something special. ~ Jason Momoa, #NFDB
726:Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over." "Not to me. Not to them. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
727:Do not turn to idols or make metal gods for yourselves. I am the LORD your God. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
728:Gods, it was a messed up day when I was the voice of reason. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
729:Gods of Rome. If this was only a portion of Nico’s pain … how could he bear it? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
730:God withholds his blessing in the very areas in which we lift up false gods. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
731:Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover, #NFDB
732:Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
733:It was just a hug, but gods, it meant so much. It meant everything. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
734:Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
735:Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate. ~ Horace, #NFDB
736:Sometimes I feel like I'm writing pornography in the notebook of the gods. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
737:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
738:The gods are blind. And men see only what they wish" - Tyrion Lannister ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
739:The gods have been created by Him, but of Him who knows the manner of His being? ~ Rig Veda, #NFDB
740:Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
741:You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you. ~ Lisa See, #NFDB
742:You walk between gods and men. Your choices are only between despair and hope! ~ Greg Keyes, #NFDB
743:Disbelieve nothing wonderful concerning the gods, nor concerning divine dogmas. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
744:Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. We have killed him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
745:If the gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
746:It was built against the will of the immortal gods, and so it did not last for long. ~ Homer, #NFDB
747:my curse is that i fall in love with
men who believe in gods but not in me. ~ Salma Deera,#NFDB
748:Naked before my eyes,
I thank whatever Gods created your
ancestors. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo,#NFDB
749:Oh God, I just kissed a vampire!"
Oh Gods, I just kissed a human! ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
750:One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
751:The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
752:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
753:The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
754:We are human beings. We make gods and do battle with them and they bless us. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
755:We are in the hands of those gods, those monsters, those giants: our thoughts. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
756:When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
757:Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked.
With your own voice,' he said. ~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
758:You only get to be my age by assuming the worst." Mr. Wednesday, American Gods ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
759:Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
760:Half Gods are worshipped with wine and Flowers. Real Gods require Blood. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
761:He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
762:He too,I think,should pray to the deathless ones himself.
All men need the gods... ~ Homer,#NFDB
763:I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
764:In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
765:...in het aangezicht Gods zijn we allemaal even grote klootzakken,' zei hij,... ~ Herman Koch, #NFDB
766:It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts. ~ Walker Percy, #NFDB
767:Love, the fairest among the undying gods, who loosens the limbs of all gods and men, ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
768:Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers. ~ Horace, #NFDB
769:Men in no way approach so nearly to the gods as in doing good to men. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
770:One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
771:The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools. She'd ~ Larry Niven, #NFDB
772:The gods give, like twin flowers,
power and ruin, memory and oblivion. ~ Gabriela Mistral,#NFDB
773:The gods help those who help themselves, and my word, didn't I help myself. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
774:Time has nothing to do with the gifts that the gods give you; it's what you do. ~ Anita Baker, #NFDB
775:Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
776:Use him wisely. Few have been given such a weapon by the gods or Fates before. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
777:We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
778:You keep your gods in your backyard and I'll keep my lack of God in mine. ~ Michael Ian Black, #NFDB
779:Chose me because I was good at it. At suffering. That is whom the gods choose. ~ Douglas Clegg, #NFDB
780:Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over."
"Not to me. Not to them. ~ Steven Pressfield,#NFDB
781:Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
782:Gods, if they're neglected, tend to fall asleep, but they never really go away. ~ Nancy Farmer, #NFDB
783:Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
784:If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
785:In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
786:In a thousand ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal. ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
787:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
788:It was said that the gods favored fools because they were entertaining to watch. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
789:Oberon
Atticus "Gods below, I think you're right. Quick, to the Geekmobile! ~ Kevin Hearne,#NFDB
790:Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
791:Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
792:The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time... ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
793:The world the gods made is too big for us, so we make ourselves a smaller one. ~ Sarah Micklem, #NFDB
794:Those whom the gods chose as their property must not consort with mortals. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
795:Valkyrie, if there was ever a cradle to be robbed . . . Gods, just look at him. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
796:Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods. ~ Naomi Wolf, #NFDB
797:A culture that must express its gods in visual images cannot know God accurately. ~ Tony Reinke, #NFDB
798:Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? ~ C S Lewis,#NFDB
799:As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. ~ Protagoras, #NFDB
800:Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
801:But I like not these great successes of yours; for I know how jealous are the gods. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
802:Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
803:I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
804:If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
805:It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
806:It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
807:Men mock the gods until they need them, Kaz.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows ~ Leigh Bardugo,#NFDB
808:Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
809:My people do, I do not. Gods are a myth, a comforting story for children.” “Such ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB
810:Of course we all would like to foretell the future and make contact with the gods. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
811:Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break a dead resistance in the mortal's heart ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
812:People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
813:Surely you do not believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof? ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
814:The cross is Gods way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
815:Then the gods become no gods; death becomes no death; life becomes no life. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
816:...the path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality. ~ ~ The Mother, #NFDB
817:The souls of heroes are forged by the gods and tempered with the pain of life. ~ Brian Rathbone, #NFDB
818:This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith ~ Paul Ricoeur, #NFDB
819:Why would the gods care what happens to a child who doesn’t care about himself? ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
820:And join with thee calm Peace and Quiet, Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
821:As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
822:Consciousness is Gods' gift to mankind. ~ Dr. Albert Hofmann discoverer of LSD (15 January 2006), #NFDB
823:Don’t spit into heaven... Don’t tell the gods your plans; they’ll only laugh. ~ Joseph Monninger, #NFDB
824:Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man's mad desire become his god? ~ Virgil, #NFDB
825:His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
826:If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
827:If we don't have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like the gods. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
828:Kira: L, do you know
Gods of death
love apples?
L: Damn you, Kira... ~ Tsugumi Ohba,#NFDB
829:Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
830:Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #NFDB
831:People are Gods masterpieces, created for the purposes that God has already mapped out. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
832:Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
833:The battlefield of the gods is your heart. Your heart is shaped by your thoughts. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
834:The gods gave you a brain, boy,' he'd say. 'If you want to honor them, use it. ~ Mercedes Lackey, #NFDB
835:Then arose Manwë Súlimo, Lord of Gods and Elves, and Varda Tinwetári was beside him, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
836:Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
837:We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods. ~ Maurice Samuel, #NFDB
838:We can only fix our own life. We cannot play the role of Gods in someone else's. ~ Jessica Brody, #NFDB
839:Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
840:Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
841:He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
842:Immortality is only for the gods," he whispered. "I wonder how they can stand it. ~ Barry Hughart, #NFDB
843:Immortality is only for the gods,” he whispered. “I wonder how they can stand it. ~ Barry Hughart, #NFDB
844:I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
845:It is always easier to blame gods or legends than it is to face our own mistakes. ~ Susan Dennard, #NFDB
846:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
~ Diogenes,#NFDB
847:It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide. ~ Ry nosuke Akutagawa, #NFDB
848:It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa, #NFDB
849:I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile. ~ Lily King, #NFDB
850:Know thyself and thou shalt know the universe and the gods. ~ Inscription of the Temple of Delphi, #NFDB
851:Let the gods into your life and you rapidly lose faith in the natural laws. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
852:There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
853:There was room for more gods, there always was. But I didn’t believe in any of them. ~ Ann Leckie, #NFDB
854:The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world. ~ Helen Gardner, #NFDB
855:Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know! ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
856:We can only fix our own lives. We cannot play the role of gods in someone else's. ~ Jessica Brody, #NFDB
857:What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people? ~ Nalo Hopkinson, #NFDB
858:Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
859:(‘With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.’) Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) ~ William Blum, #NFDB
860:Your Gods and my Gods—do you or I know which are the stronger? —Native Proverb. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
861:As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
862:Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
863:He whom the gods love dies young, whilst he is full of health, perception, and judgment. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
864:Human sacrifice empowered the gods with the spiritual life source of their victims. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
865:I don’t understand gods. Seems like we’re always getting the worst of their messes. ~ Erin M Evans, #NFDB
866:If extravagance were a fault, it would not have a place in the festivals of the gods. ~ Aristippus, #NFDB
867:If I and my two children cannot move the gods, the gods must have their reasons. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
868:If the gods weren’t long dead, I might accuse them of lining up to take a shit on me. ~ Luke Scull, #NFDB
869:It is not safe to despise what Love commands. He reigns supreme, and rules the mighty gods. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
870:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
871:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
872:Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
873:See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly. ~ Homer, #NFDB
874:Sometimes the best of gods gift's arrive by the shattering of all the window panes. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
875:The gods, if they exist, are just the people who happen to live on the other side. ~ Brendan Myers, #NFDB
876:The gods of Djelibeybi In the river kingdom of Djelibeybi, the national religion ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
877:The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter at the portal. Some do not! ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
878:We drink to the gods,” Amiit said, raising his bowl. “May they never drink to us. ~ Daniel Abraham, #NFDB
879:We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones upon occasion. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
880:When the gods amused themselves at a man’s expense, they had a tendency to overdue. ~ Josie Litton, #NFDB
881:When you love someone it catches the attention of the Gods, who punish you. ~ Cinda Williams Chima, #NFDB
882:Who can gauge all the ways in which the Gods who've created you craft your life? ~ Bill Willingham, #NFDB
883:You will be on of those gods without magic powers. What are they called? King. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
884:All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator. ~ Dion Fortune, #NFDB
885:Gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
886:have already in the fourth act killed all the Gods- for the sake of morality! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
887:Never ask the Gods for life set free from grief, but ask for courage that endureth long. ~ Menander, #NFDB
888:Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.” “Is ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
889:People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus. ~ Edna Ferber, #NFDB
890:Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods. ~ A Bartlett Giamatti, #NFDB
891:The False Gods We Worship,” Ensign, June 1976, 3. ~ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, #NFDB
892:The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
893:The gods throw the dice and they don't ask whether we want to be in the game or not. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
894:They become gods, and the gods become tyrants, and the tyrants become slave masters. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
895:When we touch...our gods lay down their weapons and I can forgive every trespass... ~ Katie Waitman, #NFDB
896:But I'd rather not add to my regrets. The gods know I got a queue of the bastards. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
897:Christ demands first place. There's no room on the throne of your heart for two gods. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
898:Coming in Fall 2015 Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book One The Sword of Summer ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
899:Death is an ill; 'tis thus the Gods decide: / For had death been a boon, the Gods had died. ~ Sappho, #NFDB
900:Gods blast it, I was asking ye where you shite in the city, not where I should do it! ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
901:guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
902:Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
903:If we are the toys of the gods are not perhaps the gods themselves mere children? ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
904:In nothing do humans approach so nearly to the gods as doing good to others. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
905:In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
906:I was in Rent, for Gods sake. The closest we came to stunts was dancing on a table. ~ Jesse L Martin, #NFDB
907:Know yourself and fit yourself to new fashions. For there is a new ruler among the gods. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
908:Life is a gift of the immortal Gods, but living well is the gift of philosophy. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
909:Lord, she really hoped that was his penis and that Greek gods didn’t pad their briefs. ~ Rosanna Leo, #NFDB
910:Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
911:No god would do this to him, he said. Not even the all the gods in the underworld. ~ Nicole R Taylor, #NFDB
912:Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
913:Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods! ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
914:Real are the dreams of gods, and soothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
915:The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity. ~ Richard Carlile, #NFDB
916:The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
917:The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
918:Therefore men are deceived in false gods, that they may depend on the true God only. ~ Matthew Henry, #NFDB
919:There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
920:Trust to yourself; let our own eyes determine;
Be they our tripods, oracles, and gods. ~ Voltaire,#NFDB
921:We are their gods, their angels, their devils, and their dreams. We could rule them. ~ Pippa DaCosta, #NFDB
922:We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
923:all gods is one when it comes to thanks, so I’ve heard, and ’tis a good enough saying. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
924:And may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love get it. ~ Daniel Abraham, #NFDB
925:Batman was human. He had no powers. He stood next to Gods and said, "I handle my city. ~ Scott Snyder, #NFDB
926:Believe me, the gods spare the afflicted, and do not always oppress those who are unfortunate. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
927:Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
928:God gives us tears so other know when we need help." from the book Gods in Alabama ~ Joshilyn Jackson, #NFDB
929:Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make any effort to catch them. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
930:House gods,” Percy said. “Like…smaller than real gods, but larger than apartment gods? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
931:Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
932:I don't believe there is a God. If I were to believe in a god, l would believe in gods. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
933:If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. ~ P D James, #NFDB
934:If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
935:I kill gods and guard them, and raise them from the dead when they die. I don’t pray. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
936:In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
937:I suppose gods see most things differently. Who’s going to tell them they’re wrong? ~ Michael McClung, #NFDB
938:Men and women will forever make gods of others rather than see the god in themselves. ~ Ki Longfellow, #NFDB
939:Mother of Aeneas, pleasure of men and gods. -Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
940:Nasty things, you know, gods, they don’t much care for anyone other than themselves. ~ Charlie Higson, #NFDB
941:Oh God,” she breathed. “I just kissed a vampire!” “Oh gods, I just kissed a human! ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
942:Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
943:Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience. “Yet ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
944:O, why should nature build so foul a den, Unless the gods delight in tragedies? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
945:Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
946:The gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
947:The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage. I ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
948:The skirts of the gods Drag in our mud. We feel the touch And take it to be a kiss. ~ Christopher Fry, #NFDB
949:UGLINESS, n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
950:Ye Gods! Annihilate but space and time, And make two lovers happy. —Alexander Pope (1728) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
951:Always, he whispered. The gods do not always answer, but they are always listening. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
952:But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice! ~ Bill Watterson, #NFDB
953:Even Zeus, the grandest of the gods, is no match for the goddesses of vengeance. ~ Ry nosuke Akutagawa, #NFDB
954:Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
955:If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. ~ P D James, #NFDB
956:If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
957:*I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. ~ Jesus quoted in Psalms 82:6, #NFDB
958:... Life can be savored only if you look to the future and leave vengeance to the gods ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB
959:Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them. ~ Plato, #NFDB
960:So . . . gods are real?” Aric nodded. “That’s how the game came about. They grew bored. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
961:the children were no longer fast gods, but pigeons in the head of a very quiet, dark bomb, ~ Greg Bear, #NFDB
962:The girl had hoped for fog, but the gods ignored her prayers as gods so often did. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
963:Their gods were back. Tiger Lily had Called them. And the Englanders were doomed. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson, #NFDB
964:Then again, could bed-hopping gods be any worse than the violent cartoons on TV today? ~ Janet Chapman, #NFDB
965:The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
966:Ugliness, n.: A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
967:You are given the gifts of the gods; you create your reality according to your beliefs. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
968:and has found that the world, and the gods, and heaven are ... within his own Self. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
969:Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
970:Every thing has been achieved except for the gods to rule; for no one is free save Jupiter. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
971:For the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
972:He was Loki, a being who only half belonged to the Gods; his father was the Wind Giant. ~ Padraic Colum, #NFDB
973:I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply. ~ Robert E Howard, #NFDB
974:In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods. They certainly had ’em outnumbered. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
975:In front of excellence, the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it. ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
976:It is unwise for them to be so very happy, for the gods will feel the need to humble us. ~ R L LaFevers, #NFDB
977:Love is the hoop of the gods
Hearts to combine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#NFDB
978:Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
979:Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
980:Oh my gods. The alpha of Clan Cat just got smacked with a rolled-up newspaper.
"Mom! ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
981:Our souls are but leaves in a storm, and only the gods know where we will come to rest. ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB
982:Quos vilt perdere dementat' Whome the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad (Latin). ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
983:The gods do make playthings of us. But it is we mortals who provide them with tools. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
984:The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
985:The natural gods of men are other men, mythic or real, who embody manhood in men's eyes. ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
986:You are not alone. You are part of the Olympian family. The gods have not abandoned you. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
987:All these folks I've never met became gods over my life. Now I gotta take the power back. ~ Angie Thomas, #NFDB
988:Amanda - "Oh God, I just kissed a vampire!" Kyrian - "Oh Gods, I just kissed a human! ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
989:Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes: the glorious fault of angels and of gods. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
990:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, #NFDB
991:It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. ~ Diogenes of Sinope, #NFDB
992:I wondered why the gods no longer came to earth. It would make belief so much easier. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
993:Many humans prefer tiny gods,” said the Gardener. “Tiny gods of limited preoccupations… ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
994:May your dreams be gifts from the gods and may you open them with excitement and pleasure. ~ Harley King, #NFDB
995:Men have enslaved each other since they invented gods to forgive them for doing it. ~ Seth Grahame Smith, #NFDB
996:Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth ~ Homer, #NFDB
997:On any occasion when one can discover the cause of events, one should not resort to the gods. ~ Polybius, #NFDB
998:Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
999:Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1000:People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1001:Quos vilt perdere dementat' Whome the gods wish to destroy, they first drive made (Latin). ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1002:Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. ~ Alfred Tennyson,#NFDB
1003:The gods were not, in fact, smiling upon me. I at least hoped they weren't laughing at me. ~ Jeff Strand, #NFDB
1004:there were gods who needed to be worshipped and placated, and the currency for that was blood. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
1005:Thor—the Batman or James Bond of the gods—has once again conquered the forces of evil. ~ Jostein Gaarder, #NFDB
1006:What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the climate's sultry. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1007:Without the interns to do their nefarious bidding, the gods turn to other tricks. ~ Carmen Maria Machado, #NFDB
1008:Worry less about what the gods might do and more about what you can, that’s my advice. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1009:And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn. ~ Alexander Chee, #NFDB
1010:Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
1011:Both were gods of the same line, a single father, but Zeus was the elder-born and Zeus knew more. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1012:Do you want me to say that men create gods to enforce their definitions of good and evil? ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1013:Even the seemingly immortal gods survive only as long as they are required by mortal men. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1014:For the gods, though slow to see, see well, whenever a man casting aside worship turns folly. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1015:Gods can screw anything and anybody. For reference, see history.
Atticus O'Sullivan ~ Kevin Hearne,#NFDB
1016:Gods, how I’ve missed you. (Stryker) I hate you with every beat of my heart. (Zephyra) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1017:Gods of Asgard!” I waved a hand in front of my face. “What crawled up inside him and died? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1018:Great shoulders. Always has a handkerchief. Gods above, if he would just make a damn move… ~ T Kingfisher, #NFDB
1019:Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1020:I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned. ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB
1021:If within the power of another, whom do you blame—atoms or gods? To do either is folly. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1022:Lay ye down the golden chain From Heaven, and pull at its inferior links Both Goddesses and Gods. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1023:Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1024:Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1025:That Intelligence is God within us; by that men are gods and their humanity neighbours divinity. ~ Hermes, #NFDB
1026:The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1027:The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be. The weariness of all hypotheses … ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1028:The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quotation and Originality, #NFDB
1029:There are Universes begging for Gods, yet he hangs around this one looking for work. ~ Philip Jose Farmer, #NFDB
1030:There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1031:There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
1032:You can do anything you think you can. This knowledge is literally the gift of the gods. ~ Robert Collier, #NFDB
1033:Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing. Bravely face whatever the gods offer ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
1034:Farden, I swear to the gods, I will carry you through this door myself if you don’t hurry up! ~ Ben Galley, #NFDB
1035:Gifts, believe me, captivate both men and Gods, Jupiter himself was won over and appeased by gifts. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1036:Gods are nothing without their worshipers; they act on the affairs and the passions of men. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
1037:Gods damn it, there they go again,” someone says loudly. “Keffing human. Go to sleep already. ~ Ruby Dixon, #NFDB
1038:He whom the gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
1039:hit a man in the face long enough and he turns for help to his racial memory and tribal gods. ~ Paul Scott, #NFDB
1040:If the gods cannot recognize your names,” she warned, “they will never hear your prayers. ~ Michelle Moran, #NFDB
1041:If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1042:If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1043:It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
1044:It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the gods. ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
1045:"Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
1046:I wish sometimes that the gods would either choose better, or make their wishes clearer ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
1047:Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. ~ Stanislaw Lem, #NFDB
1048:Nothing's promised us by the gods. Isn't that all the more reason to love while we can? ~ Livia Blackburne, #NFDB
1049:Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book. ~ Mark Z Danielewski, #NFDB
1050:Things perish. Gods have passed.
But song sublimely cast
Shall citadels outlast. ~ Th ophile Gautier,#NFDB
1051:We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
1052:We’re gods, not saints. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone scores off everyone else. ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
1053:Will you walk the road to your destiny, or must the Gods drag you to it unwilling? ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
1054:And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1055:Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
1056:Blood, though it sleep a time, yet never dies. The gods on murtherers fix revengeful eyes. ~ George Chapman, #NFDB
1057:Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing. Bravely face whatever the gods offer. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
1058:Gods of math and physics," she intoned, "I accept your gift of this clever, fair-haired boy. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1059:Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? ~ Plato, #NFDB
1060:Man hunts and fights. Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods. ~ Jules Michelet, #NFDB
1061:May the gods defend me from heroes with duct tape. And heroes always seem to have duct tape. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1062:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
1063:One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods. ~ Fay Weldon, #NFDB
1064:Religion would have us believe that immortality is reserved for the gods. We remain skeptical. ~ Fiona Paul, #NFDB
1065:So you can go down there and see the gods, sell Girl Scout cookies door-to-door or whatever? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1066:The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
1067:Undisturbed by fears and unspoiled by pleasures, we shall be afraid neither of death nor the gods. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1068:When the anger of the gods is incurred, wealth or power only bring more devastating punishment. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
1069:Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1070:You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1071:You've injured me, Farshooter, most deadly of the gods;
And I'd punish you, if I had the power. ~ Homer,#NFDB
1072:Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
1073:Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1074:every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1075:ghosts, unicorns, and gods. That seemed much less of a fantasy than the twenty-first century. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1076:Given the diverse raiment life sports, one never knows what the guises of the gods may be. ~ Stephanie Mills, #NFDB
1077:Gods, how I’ve missed you. (Stryker)
I hate you with every beat of my heart. (Zephyra) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1078:Gods? There is but one God now, child, and I am no more than a wind through bare branches. ~ Katherine Arden, #NFDB
1079:I hold in my hands the very soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? ~ William John Locke, #NFDB
1080:Instead of preparing to die, prepare to live in the midst of all the exaltations of the Gods ~ Brigham Young, #NFDB
1081:Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
1082:Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
1083:Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1084:Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1085:The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - I, Bhawani Mandir, #NFDB
1086:They say he was fearless. And we’ve all got a bit of our fathers in us. The gods know I do. ~ Nicholas Eames, #NFDB
1087:What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination? ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1088:Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt. "You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1089:Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1090:And, furthermore, how could they kill him who was the chosen of gods and doomed to greatness? ~ Stephen Crane, #NFDB
1091:Dear Ones, Beware of the tiny gods frightened men Create To bring anesthetic relief to their sad days ~ Hafez, #NFDB
1092:I awake. I don’t mean to but clearly I have not appeased the Sleep Gods with enough offerings. ~ Marian Keyes, #NFDB
1093:I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1094:If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1095:Is something good because the gods approve of it? Or do the gods approve of it because it is good? ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1096:It is expedient that there should be gods, and, since it is expedient, let us believe that gods exist. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1097:It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them. ~ Martial, #NFDB
1098:Let no more gods or exploiters be served Let us learn rather to love one another. ~ Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, #NFDB
1099:Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1100:Occasionally it can be a little disappointing to see rock gods in their 60s or 70s up on stage. ~ Charlie Day, #NFDB
1101:Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1102:The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1103:Time renders all people and all things silent. And gods, it seems, are no exception. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett, #NFDB
1104:We do not turn from our false gods to become God's children. We turn from them because we are. ~ Kelly Minter, #NFDB
1105:What in Gods name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine? ~ John Brunner, #NFDB
1106:Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1107:1CH16.25 For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised: he also is to be feared above all gods. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1108:A good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and his affairs are not neglected by the gods. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1109:Animals are neither gods nor fiends, but men in their way without the lust and greed of man. ~ Robert E Howard, #NFDB
1110:Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead. ~ Robert Silverberg, #NFDB
1111:I'd challenge gods and queens to make you mine, Ballard. Conquer a kingdom or two if necessary. ~ Grace Draven, #NFDB
1112:Men are mad and gods are madder, she told the grass, and the grass murmured its agreement. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1113:No man who is not willing to help himself has any right to apply to his friends, or to the gods. ~ Demosthenes, #NFDB
1114:Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
1115:The gods are capricious, and I was about to amuse them. And Alfred was right. I was a fool. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1116:The gods do make playthings of us ... but it is we mortals who provide them with the tools. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
1117:The gods," he said. "Imprisoned in a thought. And perhaps they were never more than a dream. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1118:And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love! ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
1119:Do not try to find out - we're forbidden to know - what end the gods have in store for me, or for you. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1120:Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
1121:Gods. So this is what a command is. Staring consequences in the eye and pretending not to flinch. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
1122:I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. ~ Julian Jaynes, #NFDB
1123:Maybe if gods weren’t all crazy, their language wouldn’t be such an exercise in futility for him. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1124:Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1125:Of all the things which a man has, next to the gods his soul is the most divine and most truly his own. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1126:The gods listen, Rain. Put a thought out there often enough, and they'll think it's what you want. ~ C L Wilson, #NFDB
1127:The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it... ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1128:The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to? ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1129:War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1130:Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt.
"You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1131:A half-blood of the eldest dogs..."
"Er, Percy?" Annabeth interrupted. "That's gods. Not dogs. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1132:And to kill time while awaiting death, I smoke slender cigarettes thumbing my nose to the gods. ~ Jules Laforgue, #NFDB
1133:...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1134:[...]every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1135:I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart ~ Matthew Woodring Stover, #NFDB
1136:It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
1137:It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity. ~ David Attenborough, #NFDB
1138:Men imitate the gods whom they adore, and to such miserable beings their crimes become their religion. ~ Cyprian, #NFDB
1139:Shouldn’t we be magnanimous with the locals? It’s their gods that have abandoned them, not ours. ~ Peter Tieryas, #NFDB
1140:Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof? ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
1141:Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening. ~ Jeanne Moreau, #NFDB
1142:The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
1143:The orthodox Hindu [the Mimâmsaka] does not believe in gods, the unorthodox believe in them. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1144:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
1145:We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1146:We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. ~ Ben Okri, #NFDB
1147:Whether the gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1148:Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1149:Building a temple didn’t mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1150:Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men ~ Dennis Lehane, #NFDB
1151:Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible. ~ Janet E Morris, #NFDB
1152:How sad that we can now go up in aeroplanes and see that there are no gods upon the clouds. ~ Gavin Pretor Pinney, #NFDB
1153:How wealthy the gods would be if we remembered the promises we made when we were in danger. ~ Jean de La Fontaine, #NFDB
1154:If oxen and horses and lions could draw and paint, they would delineate the gods in their own image. ~ Xenophanes, #NFDB
1155:If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?' 'Because of men like you. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1156:I've been grateful enough, smart enough to take the work with Ian McKellen in Gods And Monsters. ~ Brendan Fraser, #NFDB
1157:Most of us retain enough of the theological attitude to think that we are little gods. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
1158:The Gods know what it is to be eternal, and they love to toy with mortals who use absolutes. ~ Josephine Angelini, #NFDB
1159:The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous. ~ Diodorus Siculus, #NFDB
1160:We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1161:Well. This has been erotic. Enlightening. Gods, this is enlightening. Like eye-opening. Nothing else! ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
1162:And when gods touched something, the normal became the supernatural, the simple became the wondrous. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
1163:Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1164:Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1165:Do you think it’s right for Christians to use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week? ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
1166:Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians gods with gray eyes and red hair, ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB
1167:Even the most malignant gods would not continue to inflict life upon humanity, time without end. ~ Taylor Caldwell, #NFDB
1168:Gods looked for such hubris when deciding where to step, and so far good fortune had been scarce. ~ Shawn Speakman, #NFDB
1169:If they are gods, why do you lament them? If you lament them, you must no longer regard them as gods. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1170:It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1171:Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1172:men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1173:The gods’ most savage curses come to us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1174:Tyson, thank the gods. Annabeth is hurt!” “You thank the gods she is hurt?” he asked, puzzled. “No! ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1175:Tyson! Thank the gods, Annabeth is hurt!" "You thank the gods that she is hurt?" he asked, puzzled. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1176:Why do gods do anything?” Nova asks. “You can have your existential crisis when we return.” “Get ~ Zoraida C rdova, #NFDB
1177:Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves? ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1178:You have to decide to servant the gods of materialism all around us or the true and the living God. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
1179:Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1180:But there exists not one man who never errs. We would be gods." And gods didn't apologize. Men did. ~ Meljean Brook, #NFDB
1181:If mortals wait until the gods remake the world to their liking to be happy, they are already in hell. ~ Bette Lord, #NFDB
1182:Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god? ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1183:She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?” “None.” “And why not?” “I help myself,” he said. ~ Octavia E Butler, #NFDB
1184:Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth. ~ Sarah Caldwell, #NFDB
1185:Then why do the gods even let me live? It would be safer to kill me.” “You’re right.” “Thanks a lot. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1186:The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1187:There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1188:They seem to think the females belong to the males here rather than the way the gods truly intended it. ~ G A Aiken, #NFDB
1189:whether in peace or in war, man generally speaking is the best thing that ever happened to the gods. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
1190:A rarer spirit never Did steer humanity; but you gods will give us Some faults to make us men. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1191:Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1192:For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1193:In the end, we are what our pasts have made us and we live the lives the gods have chosen for us. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1194:Madness has a purpose! It’s a gift from the Gods, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1195:One soul is enough, I know, to pay the debt for thousands, if one will go to the gods in all good faith. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1196:Sometimes the gods smile,” he grunted. “Yes, sir.” And sometimes they kick you over and stomp you flat. ~ Tanya Huff, #NFDB
1197:The confounding of all right and wrong, in wild fury, has averted from us the gracious favor of the gods. ~ Catullus, #NFDB
1198:The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1199:The veneration in which some people hold the gods says more about those people than about the gods ~ James Lovegrove, #NFDB
1200:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
1201:We pulled slow and steady through the darkness and we hammered the ears of the gods with prayers. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1202:you put too much faith in the power of the gods, if you think they can give and take away the shape of things ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1203:All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1204:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning, #NFDB
1205:Gods fuck me,” said Roderick, managing the impressive feat of swearing and praying at the same time. ~ Nicholas Eames, #NFDB
1206:Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool. ~ James A Garfield, #NFDB
1207:How gracious are the gods in bestowing high positions; and how reluctant are they to insure them when given. ~ Lucian, #NFDB
1208:Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else... Even the gods. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1209:I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1210:If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1211:I swear, the reason for full moons is so the gods can more clearly see the mischief they create. ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
1212:Know thyself, and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and the universe.
~ the Temple of Apollo at Delphi,#NFDB
1213:Man is quite insane. He wouldn?t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1214:My mother used to say that men would fight and kill for money, but they would only die for their gods. ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB
1215:The gods are nothing more than the creations of humans needing something to blame for their problems. ~ Andy Peloquin, #NFDB
1216:The Gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered. ~ Luc Ferry, #NFDB
1217:The gods use instruments,
Not ask their consent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Short Stories - I, Act Five,#NFDB
1218:The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1219:Tyson! Thank the gods, Annabeth is hurt!"
"You thank the gods that she is hurt?" he asked, puzzled. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1220:We are all gods, all forces of nature. We can destroy, we can build. We are like oceans and like fires. ~ Barry White, #NFDB
1221:Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1222:Wow! First vampires. Then gods. Now…vampire—gods? What’s next? Werewolves? Smurfs? Were-Smurfs? ~ Mimi Jean Pamfiloff, #NFDB
1223:Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1224:Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1225:Never did like the idea of meeting a god. Somehow, I get the feeling gods just don't like me very much. ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
1226:Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand. ~ Hippocrates, Regimen, IV, 87, #NFDB
1227:So it is that the gods do not give all men gifts of grace - neither good looks nor intelligence nor eloquence. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1228:That such baseness could occur alongside events of staggering significance was like a joke from the gods. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
1229:The gods grow jealous of too much contentment anywhere, and they show their displeasure all of a sudden. ~ R K Narayan, #NFDB
1230:The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1231:There's millions of gods, beta, but all represent aspects of three, and all three are really one"... ~ Sarah Macdonald, #NFDB
1232:Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
1233:What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods and vermin is ideology. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
1234:Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1235:Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1236:yet it was vain and stupid to create our own vision of these gods and fight over whose vision was right. ~ Mainak Dhar, #NFDB
1237:Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1238:For God is himself the Being of all Beings, and we are as gods in him, through whom he revealeth himself. ~ Jakob Bohme, #NFDB
1239:From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails ~ Steve Aylett, #NFDB
1240:Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1241:He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1242:If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. ~ Baron d Holbach, #NFDB
1243:Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1244:Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods. Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving. ~ Richard Wiseman, #NFDB
1245:Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest. I would give my life again to make it so ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
1246:Nothing that is really good and admirable is granted by the gods to men without some effort and application. ~ Xenophon, #NFDB
1247:Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1248:Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs. ~ Thornton Wilder, #NFDB
1249:Thank the Gods Below for paranoia. I classified it as a survival skill rather than a neurotic condition. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
1250:The Gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect. ~ Porphyry, #NFDB
1251:The world will fall, the gods will die, and I will never achieve a perfect score on this stupid machine. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1252:This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, #NFDB
1253:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
~ Aleister Crowley,#NFDB
1254:We are all, as ever, the playthings of the Gods, and none of us can say what our tomorrows may bring; ~ Dennis Wheatley, #NFDB
1255:We shall give up the things of childhood --
gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets. ~ Norman Spinrad,#NFDB
1256:What good were bright gods who only watched from afar while dark gods strove every moment to devour you? ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1257:Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me,’50 he says, and: ‘If it pleases the gods, so be it. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
1258:Even if you don't believe in God, exploring fully the idea of a God or Gods should pose no threat to you. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
1259:he cursed the malevolent Gods for the black day when idly, for their amusement, they had spawned men. ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
1260:He’s not my god.”
“Mine either. Who are you to judge me?”
“Gods should always be judged. ~ Michael LaRocca,#NFDB
1261:He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or ‘fear of the gods’, in controlling Roman behaviour, ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
1262:Ignorance and fear create the gods, enthusiasm and deceit adorn them, and human weakness worships them. ~ Graham McNeill, #NFDB
1263:Indulgent gods, grant me to sin once with impunity. That is sufficient. Let a second offence bear its punishment. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1264:It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here. ~ Vikram Seth, #NFDB
1265:Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them. ~ Nicholas Eames, #NFDB
1266:Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen! ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1267:Oh these foolish men! They could not create so much as a worm, but they create gods by the dozens. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1268:Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" -- ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1269:She is not so secure on her throne that she can risk offending her people's gods. No woman can be. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
1270:Somewhere in the world, there were marble statues of gods that didn’t compare to Ryker’s perfection. ~ Charity Parkerson, #NFDB
1271:So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1272:The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett, #NFDB
1273:The Lord God has often lost out when competing with the gods of entertainment for our time and attention. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
1274:The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free... You know it and they do not. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies, #NFDB
1275:The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1276:There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. ~ Joshilyn Jackson, #NFDB
1277:These athletes can be considered the gods in certain ways and the fans can be considered parishioners. ~ Michael Strahan, #NFDB
1278:They are not wise, then, who stand forth to buffet against Love; for Love rules the gods as he will, and me. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1279:Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it--the only satisfactory theodicy! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1280:War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1281:We are gods in our dreams. Disaster strikes when we come to believe the same is true in our real lives. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
1282:We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted. ~ Robinson Jeffers,#NFDB
1283:When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
1284:Where there is no symbolic understanding, the impulses of the soul are misinterpreted. ~ David Tacey "Gods and Diseases", #NFDB
1285:...a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1286:Death is the origin of all religions, and perhaps if there had been no death there would have been no gods. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1287:In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1288:Jason noticed that the other gods stayed well away from the Fates and their gleaming brass clubs. “Please, ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1289:JOH! Thank God I found you.”
“I have 9022 gods listed in my database. Must I thank all of them? ~ Maureen A Miller,#NFDB
1290:Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1291:The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
1292:The gods where like the weather; sometimes good, sometimes bad, and either way, always beyond her. ~ Michelle Sagara West, #NFDB
1293:Tyson, thank the gods. Annabeth is hurt!'
'You thank the gods she is hurt?' He asked, puzzled.
'No! ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1294:What a strange circumstance she found herself in: baking brownies for a handful of gods from the Underworld. ~ Eva Pohler, #NFDB
1295:When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
1296:Why should we censure Othello when the Criterion Lover says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me"? ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
1297:You do not swing in a shield wall, you stab. May the gods ever send me enemies who swing their blades. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1298:Collaboration, it turns out, is not a gift from the gods but a skill that requires effort and practice. ~ Douglas B Reeves, #NFDB
1299:Ever since the gods created the world, mortals have been forgetting from where their blessings come. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
1300:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1301:How I miss the Hetawa baths! The gods put hot water and fragrant oil in this world for a reason, I tell you. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1302:I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1303:If I am interested, amazed, stimulated to work, that is sufficient reason to thank the gods, and go ahead! ~ Edward Weston, #NFDB
1304:Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast." XXXIII. ~ Suetonius, #NFDB
1305:must not trouble the gods with our affairs; they take no heed of our angers and disputes."Plutarch.] ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1306:Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven. ~ Cory Doctorow, #NFDB
1307:Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it. Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1308:Sober, for Gods’ sake? Fight sober? Jotnar think that’s unmanly. That’s worse cheating than using far-sight! ~ Dave Duncan, #NFDB
1309:Some men want whores on the eve of battle, and some want gods. Jon wondered who felt better afterward. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1310:So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods. ~ Howard Jacobson, #NFDB
1311:The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1312:Then he had felt in his heart: “A path lies before you which you are called to follow. The gods await you. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1313:The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods. ~ Rachel Hartman, #NFDB
1314:Three things are required of man—to worship the gods, to do no evil, and to maintain manly behavior. ~ Donna Fletcher Crow, #NFDB
1315:Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods. ~ David Sylvester, #NFDB
1316:We are like he who the gods have condemned to push the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1317:All words have power, of course, but names are the most potent of all, which is why the gods had so many. ~ Joanne M Harris, #NFDB
1318:Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?” “No, sir.” “Gods don’t think they can become men. ~ Dennis Lehane, #NFDB
1319:For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1320:For Wounds
O bear me, gods, to some enchanted isle
Where woman's tears can antidote her smile.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
1321:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1322:History is littered with examples of men who would become gods, but only one example of God becoming Man. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1323:I am Odem`s nephew. Uthirk´ s son." (Yarvi)
"Oh, dear gods", he heards Samuel whistling, " We are dead ~ Joe Abercrombie,#NFDB
1324:If you did not know at age five that the gods are made up beings and the myths made up stories, you are a fool. ~ Suetonius, #NFDB
1325:Such lack of understanding was frightening. He’s right, the gunslinger thought. We are broken. Gods help us. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1326:That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
1327:The only prayer which a well-meaning man can pray is, O ye gods, give me whatever is fitting unto me! ~ Apollonius of Tyana, #NFDB
1328:Think not to match yourself against the gods, for men that walk the earth cannot hold their own with the immortals. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1329:We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
1330:What does one do when one needs to pray to the gods for patience but a god is causing the need for patience? ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
1331:What is to be taught I learn; what is to be discovered I seek; what is to be prayed for I sought from the gods. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1332:Where’s the creativity, gods? I didn’t see why Death couldn’t have pink. Or purple. What if he liked sparkles? ~ Jaymin Eve, #NFDB
1333:Whether in peace or in war, man, generally speaking, is the best thing that could have happened to the gods. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
1334:with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy. ~ John Kennedy Toole, #NFDB
1335:Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1336:Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1337:Gods, gods! 'tis strange that from their cold'st neglect
My love should kindle to inflamed respect. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
1338:Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them. —Fragment of Turfa’n M7 ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1339:He had done as his dreams had told him, but dreams know more than they reveal, even to the wisest of the gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1340:Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
1341:I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1342:I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1343:Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want? ~ Yuval Noah Harari, #NFDB
1344:Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1345:Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1346:Praise be to the Weaver and all the gods!' said Shalhassan of Cathal. 'Finally she's done something adult! ~ Guy Gavriel Kay, #NFDB
1347:The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies... they are the trees and the plants and the seeds. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1348:The gods offer no reward for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.” -Mark Twain ~ Angela Roquet, #NFDB
1349:There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
1350:There was a moment of silence and then Sutherland breathed, “But, darling! Gossip is the food of the gods. ~ Andrew Holleran, #NFDB
1351:Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1352:We say we worship. A word. A man-god. A fiery mountain. But we worship only ourselves. And we are jealous gods. ~ Eowyn Ivey, #NFDB
1353:Ah, gods, hope. Our savior and our tormentor, the price and ferry pass for the dreams that carry us to the future. ~ Amy Lane, #NFDB
1354:Faith in one’s own destiny was among the most valuable of the gifts which the gods could bestow upon a man, ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1355:He strove to integrate us,” said Eve, “but he, or we, failed. We are ineluctably children of the Beta Gods. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1356:Hope is that tiny light that the gods have given us so that we can find our way through our darkest hours. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1357:I am an ant in the battlefield of the gods. There's no room for pride or ego, and barely enough room for survival. ~ Susan Ee, #NFDB
1358:I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1359:I don't believe in about 2700 Gods. Christians don't believe in 2699 Gods. They're nearly as atheistic as me. ~ Ricky Gervais, #NFDB
1360:I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them, ~ Sherwood Anderson, #NFDB
1361:It is said by some that the gods show us their bitter humor by molding us into what we hate most in others. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
1362:Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them.” The ~ Nicholas Eames, #NFDB
1363:Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1364:No. The old gods ain't big on 'sorry,'" said Granny, pacing up and down again. "They know it's just a word. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1365:Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. ~ Thucydides, #NFDB
1366:Of what use are the gods
If they crown not our just desires on earth? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#NFDB
1367:Pearls were accidents, and the finding of one was luck, a little pat on the back by God or the gods or both. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1368:Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.
Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed. ~ Orson Scott Card,#NFDB
1369:Ruling the world is child’s play. To truly rule your soul is like ruling creation. It is above even the gods. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1370:Some Gods are wicked, Derfel. And besides, they have no duty to us, only we to them. Maybe it amused them? ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1371:The gods and myths of Babylon and Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumerian theology; ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1372:The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
1373:The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston, #NFDB
1374:What is Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset; And mortals may be happy to resemble The Gods but in decay. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1375:When people ask me how they can know Gods plan for their lives, I tell them the best first step is to know God. ~ Pete Wilson, #NFDB
1376:When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
1377:All gold and silver rather turn to dirt, An 'tis no better reckoned but of these Who worship dirty gods. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1378:Everything is permitted, everything is allowed, and all our Gods we have outwitted, we are running with the crowd. ~ Meat Loaf, #NFDB
1379:For what we are about to receive . . . ,” murmured someone over the command net. “May the gods make us thankful. ~ David Drake, #NFDB
1380:God' is a title, not a name - so be clearly mindful which (spirit) 'gods' you invite into your soulful experience. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
1381:History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1382:If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1383:I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
1384:Oh, Gods."
His eyes shone with want and predatory satisfaction. "The name's William. It's a common mistake. ~ Ilona Andrews,#NFDB
1385:Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1386:The gods we ourselves have created ruled us for centuries! What a great comedy! And what a great tragedy! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1387:The world is ashes and the gods are a horror. Tell me, Learned, what other place is there for me to go? ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
1388:They’re not gods,” Brüks reminded him softly. “Not yet.” “Not ever.” “That’s denial.” “Better than genuflection. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
1389:Ungit tells me things. I hear of terrible doings in this land, mortals aping the gods and stealing the worship due ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1390:We are our own wicked gods with little 'g's' and big dicks, sadistic and constantly inflicting a slow demise. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
1391:We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
1392:When I say that you are gods and goddesses I mean that your possibility is infinite, your potentiality is infinite. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1393:Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
1394:Deos placatos pictas efficiet et sanctitas. - Piety and holiness of life will propitiate the gods. ~ Cicero, De Officiis. II. 3, #NFDB
1395:„Do not kneel,” said Claire Jurat in a voice like thunder, like earths breaking and stars forming. „No more gods. ~ Kij Johnson, #NFDB
1396:Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
1397:Gods of Olympus, Hazel thought. I love this horse. Arion snorted as if to say, Of course you do. You’re not stupid. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1398:Humans are so good at imagining things, they invent gods who feel so real, they then betray us by not existing. ~ Samantha Hunt, #NFDB
1399:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1400:I was the youngest of nine siblings... I lost my father when I was just 13. For me, the elders have been my gods. ~ Tina Ambani, #NFDB
1401:less the work of nature than they were denizens of demented dreams, as if imagined into existence by insane gods. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1402:Man is the creator of the gods whom he worships in his temples. Therefore humanity has made its gods in its own image. ~ Hermes, #NFDB
1403:Men show no mercy and expect no mercy, when honor calls, or when they fight for their idols or their gods. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1404:No matter what the world said, my magic was beautiful. Even without powers, the gods had blessed me with a gift. ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
1405:Oh gods, Jane, the answer to all those questions is you. You turn me on; you’re what I want; you make me growl. ~ Nicole Peeler, #NFDB
1406:Oh my gods, when do you not sport wood? There are bathrooms in the back, so go burp the worm or whatever.--Regin ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
1407:Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
1408:Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1409:She told herself she should concentrate on those things in her control, not what was in the lap of the gods. ~ Elisabeth Storrs, #NFDB
1410:That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1411:The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
1412:We are all gripped in madness. I have never seen the like nor heard of such a thing—gods, what we have become… ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
1413:We worship Him not because He is the best of our gods, but because He is, or was, the greatest killer among them. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1414:An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out. ~ Peter Porter, #NFDB
1415:Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them? ~ Charles Kingsley, #NFDB
1416:Flirting with random women in a tavern? That sounds like Helios. Well, it sounds like most of the gods, actually. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1417:From light lips and casual thoughts
The gods speak best as if by chance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#NFDB
1418:Hey, if you poop on my blankets..."
"Please. War gods do not poop on blankets..Well except for that one time.. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1419:I do not know much about gods;but I think that the river is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable . . . ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1420:If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me. ~ Megan Whalen Turner, #NFDB
1421:If I'd been listening closely, I'd have caught the sound of the gods having a great big old tee-hee at my expense. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
1422:I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
1423:I’m not a bunny, Rydstrom. And is that bark?” With a laugh, she said, “Good gods, you brought me bark to gnaw on! ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
1424:In a way, it’s nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1425:In order that a people may be free, it is necessary that the governed be sages, and those who govern, gods. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
1426:Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
1427:People don’t just appear on the beach unless they’re demigods or gods or really, really lost pizza delivery guys. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1428:The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
1429:“The only freedom the gods grant usIs this: to submitOf our own free will to their sovereignty.” ~ Ricardo Reis/ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1430:We’ve exalted our womenfolk into little tin gods, and at the same time left them out of the real business of life. ~ John Buchan, #NFDB
1431:Whatever gods there be, there is something
godlike in man, as there is also something of the devil in him. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru,#NFDB
1432:But Ubba? Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1433:Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
1434:Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn't matter so you don't have to worry about it. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
1435:I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom. ~ Lillian Russell, #NFDB
1436:If some animals are good at hunting and others are suitable for hunting, then the Gods must clearly smile on hunting. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1437:If you call upon the Gods and they answer, who is there to oppose or to challenge the integrity of your Path? ~ Andrew D Chumbley, #NFDB
1438:Let the warriors clamor after gods of blood and thunder; love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
1439:My father, an occasionally wise man, once said that we were blessed only when the gods remained ignorant of us. ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
1440:On the day the gods chose for his destruction, Peter Hale ate his breakfast on the terrace of his condominium. ~ Phillip Margolin, #NFDB
1441:Respect gods before demigods, heroes before men, and first among men your parents; but respect yourself most of all. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
1442:The gods at will can shape a gladder strain, and from the lamentations at the graveside, a song of triumph may arise. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
1443:The world will fall, the gods will die, and I will never achieve a perfect score on this stupid machine. -Dionysus ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1444:We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe. ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
1445:What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster. ~ Margaret Drabble, #NFDB
1446:Who knows this ruler within, he knows the worlds and the gods and creatures and the Self, he knows all. ~ Mundaka Upanishad I.210, #NFDB
1447:Yesterday you were gods. Today you are mortal. Your death is my gift to you. Accept it with grace and humility. ~ Neal Shusterman, #NFDB
1448:all the gods are the same unknowable mystery, just as each face of a jewel strikes light in a different direction ~ Kate Constable, #NFDB
1449:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
1450:And how can man die better than by facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
1451:Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
1452:Fear is the mother of all gods ... Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
1453: From the eternal principles and essences the androgynous creator-gods manifested forth the positive and negative aspects of Being, #NFDB
1454:In Bengal, Hindus are known to crack jokes at the expense of their gods and goddesses and that's what I did. ~ Sunil Gangopadhyaya, #NFDB
1455:Indeed, Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves. ~ Hubert L Dreyfus, #NFDB
1456:Like most Chinese, I am basically a fatalist - too sophisticated for religion and too superstitious to deny the gods. ~ Bette Lord, #NFDB
1457:Our magic,’ said Tozi’s mother, ‘comes not from the gods, or from men, but from the source of all created things. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1458:Rock salt and bread by the doorstep to placate any resident gods. Sandalwood on our pillow, to sweeten our dreams. ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
1459:Usually he didn’t bother the gods, and he hoped the gods wouldn’t bother him. Life was quite complicated enough. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1460:You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
1461:And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods? ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
1462:And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we're closer to gods than we know. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
1463:Despise all those things which when liberated from the body you will not want; invoke the Gods to become your helpers. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
1464:Give people the power of the gods, and they'll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on. ~ Karl Schroeder, #NFDB
1465:He's like a God. You worship the gods, but you don't go out with them. You only like guys like that from a distance. ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
1466:How persistent it is, this demand that our gods be perfect. The Greeks were much more reasonable about such things. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1467:I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them? ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1468:If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1469:Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1470:Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1471:My advice," he added in a whisper, "would be to make your peace with the gods, for I fear you will face them shortly. ~ Darren Shan, #NFDB
1472:Something in my chest curled up and died—possibly my hope that there was any kind of justice in the universe. “Gods. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1473:That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, an all to make a song for those to come. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1474:The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible ….” So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind. ~ Ronald Wright, #NFDB
1475:this body has carried herself into days so bitter all gods wept. Yet, I am still here and I will always be here. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo, #NFDB
1476:Though Gods attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
1477:Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1478:Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men. ~ Jean Baptiste Rousseau, #NFDB
1479:We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
1480:We who are gods forever have to endure the most horrible hurts, by each other’s hatred, as we try to give favor to mortals. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1481:Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shpwrecked by the laughter of the gods. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1482:You walked the path the gods ordained for you, Xena, Athena mind-whispered. You are not here to change it. No, ~ Martin H Greenberg, #NFDB
1483:You want to wake the Old Gods, don't you?” “Yes.” “Well then, go where the Old Gods are accustomed to be worshipped. ~ Dion Fortune, #NFDB
1484:Alia waggled her fingers. "Google knows all and sees all."
"Google," Diana repeated. "Is Google one of your gods? ~ Leigh Bardugo,#NFDB
1485:Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
1486:As big as an elephant is, a whale is still larger. Everything's relative. Even gods have their spot on the food chain. ~ Jim Starlin, #NFDB
1487:Beginning to doubt the gods, there is only Atman...and where is Atman found but in the self? But where is this self? ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1488:Bless us, divine number, who generated gods and men. Number contains the root and source of eternally flowing creation. ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
1489:Church was never meant to be a place for gods to gather, but for devils wanting to shed their horns for halos. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
1490:Even when the gods stood on the side of righteousness, they were concerned with the act more than with the intent. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1491: From the eternal principles and essences the androgynous creator-gods manifested forth the positive and negative aspects of Being, #NFDB
1492:I do not plan to tell her. Telegonus, these are gods. You must keep your tricks close or you will lose everything. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
1493:Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?” “A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
1494:Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1495:May the gods damn you all! (Talon)
The gods don’t damn us, we damn ourselves by our words and deeds. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1496:Oh gods, Jean. Take a false name wherever we end up. Tavrin Callas is good. Let the bastard pop up all over the place. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
1497:Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents' undergarments. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1498:Our gods did not come to us in any specific form, but we held them in our hearts and understood them in our own way. ~ Natsuo Kirino, #NFDB
1499:ROSE FELT LIKE she had a neon sign flashing over her head—looking for a one night stand, only sex gods need apply. ~ Mary J Williams, #NFDB
1500:That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice ~ Sappho,#NFDB
502 Integral Yoga
257 Poetry
136 Occultism
85 Philosophy
63 Fiction
58 Psychology
53 Yoga
39 Christianity
26 Hinduism
19 Philsophy
17 Mythology
16 Mysticism
16 Islam
4 Buddhism
2 Baha i Faith
1 Thelema
1 Science
1 Kabbalah
1 Education
1 Alchemy
292 Sri Aurobindo
195 The Mother
169 Nolini Kanta Gupta
117 Satprem
55 Carl Jung
50 Aleister Crowley
48 H P Lovecraft
43 James George Frazer
32 Sri Ramakrishna
25 Friedrich Schiller
24 Saint Augustine of Hippo
20 Vyasa
20 Percy Bysshe Shelley
19 Ralph Waldo Emerson
19 Friedrich Nietzsche
18 Lucretius
17 Aldous Huxley
16 Swami Vivekananda
16 Muhammad
16 Jorge Luis Borges
16 A B Purani
15 John Keats
13 Ovid
13 Anonymous
12 Plato
12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11 William Butler Yeats
11 Walt Whitman
10 Saint John of Climacus
10 Robert Browning
10 George Van Vrekhem
9 William Wordsworth
7 Jordan Peterson
6 Plotinus
6 Nirodbaran
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Rabindranath Tagore
4 Swami Krishnananda
4 Joseph Campbell
4 Henry David Thoreau
4 Bokar Rinpoche
3 Patanjali
3 Franz Bardon
3 Aristotle
2 Thubten Chodron
2 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
2 Saint Teresa of Avila
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Ken Wilber
2 Baha u llah
48 Lovecraft - Poems
43 The Golden Bough
43 Savitri
42 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
32 The Synthesis Of Yoga
32 Record of Yoga
31 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
31 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
26 Mysterium Coniunctionis
26 Magick Without Tears
25 Schiller - Poems
25 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
25 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
25 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
22 Collected Poems
22 City of God
20 Vishnu Purana
20 Shelley - Poems
20 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
19 Liber ABA
19 Emerson - Poems
19 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
18 Of The Nature Of Things
18 Essays On The Gita
18 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
18 Agenda Vol 03
17 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
17 The Perennial Philosophy
16 The Life Divine
16 Quran
16 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
16 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
15 Keats - Poems
14 The Secret Of The Veda
13 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
13 Metamorphoses
13 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
12 Agenda Vol 02
11 Yeats - Poems
11 Whitman - Poems
11 Agenda Vol 11
11 Agenda Vol 08
10 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
10 Preparing for the Miraculous
10 Kena and Other Upanishads
10 Essays Divine And Human
10 Browning - Poems
10 Anonymous - Poems
10 Agenda Vol 01
9 Wordsworth - Poems
9 Talks
9 Labyrinths
9 Goethe - Poems
9 Agenda Vol 04
9 5.1.01 - Ilion
8 The Practice of Psycho therapy
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
8 Questions And Answers 1956
8 Isha Upanishad
8 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
8 Aion
8 Agenda Vol 05
7 Words Of Long Ago
7 The Bible
7 Questions And Answers 1953
7 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
7 On the Way to Supermanhood
7 Maps of Meaning
7 Letters On Yoga IV
7 Letters On Yoga I
7 Crowley - Poems
7 Bhakti-Yoga
7 Agenda Vol 06
6 Vedic and Philological Studies
6 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 Raja-Yoga
6 Agenda Vol 07
6 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
5 The Human Cycle
5 Tagore - Poems
5 Questions And Answers 1954
5 Borges - Poems
4 Walden
4 The Study and Practice of Yoga
4 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 Tara - The Feminine Divine
4 Some Answers From The Mother
4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
4 Agenda Vol 10
3 The Divine Comedy
3 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
3 Poetics
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
3 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
3 Initiation Into Hermetics
3 Faust
3 Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
3 Agenda Vol 09
2 Words Of The Mother II
2 Twilight of the Idols
2 The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
2 Symposium
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Questions And Answers 1955
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
2 Agenda Vol 13
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
She was uprooting a new Matter, free, free from the habit of inexorably being a man who repeats himself ad infinitum with a few improvements in the way of organ transplants or monetary exchanges. In fact, She was there to discover what would happen after materialism and after spiritualism, these prodigal twin brothers. Because Materialism is dying in the West for the same reason that Spiritualism is dying in the East: it is the hour of the new species. Man needs to awaken, not only from his demons but also from his Gods. A new Matter, yes, like a new Spirit, yes, because we still know neither one nor the other. It is the hour when Science, like Spirituality, at the end of their roads, must discover what Matter TRULY is, for it is really there that a Spirit as yet unknown to us is to be found. It is a time when all the 'isms' of the old species are dying: 'The age of
Capitalism and business is drawing to its close. But the age of Communism too will pass ... 'It is the hour of a pure little cell THAT WILL HAVE TERRESTRIAL REPERCUSSIONS, infinitely more radical than all our political and scientific or spiritualistic panaceas.
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Zen
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the Gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There was an aspirant, a student who was seeking after knowledge. One day there appeared to him a white dog. Soon, other dogs followed and addressed their predecessor: "O Lord, sing to our Food, for we desire to eat." The white dog answered, "Come to me at dawn here in this very place." The aspirant waited. The dogs, like singer-priests, circled round in a ring. Then they sat and cried aloud; they cried out," Om We eat and Om we drink, may the Gods bring here our food."
Now, before any explanation is attempted it is important to bear in mind that the Upanishads speak of things experiencednot merely thought, reasoned or argued and that these experiences belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered a methodeven a very well-defined and strict methodin the madness of that domain. It is an ordered, organised, significant world; but its terminology has to be understood, its code deciphered. It is not a jargon, but a foreign language that must be learnt and mastered.
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The Word has four breasts. The Gods feed on two, SWAHAKAR and VASHATKAR, men upon the third, HANTAKAR,and the Ancestor upon the fourth, SWADHA 2
Ritualistically these four terms are the formulae for oblation to four Deities, Powers or Presences, whom the sacrificer wishes to please and propitiate in order to have their help and blessing and in order thereby to discharge his dharma or duty of life. Svh is the offering especially dedicated to Agni, the foremost of the Gods, for he is the divine messenger who carries men's offering to the Gods and brings their blessing to men. Vaatkr is the offering to the Gods generally. Hantakr is the offering to mankind, to our kin, an especial form of it being the worship of the guests,sarvadevamayo' tithi. Svadh is the offering to the departed Fathers (Pitris).
The duty of life consists, it is said, in the repaying of three debts which every man contracts as soon as he takes birth upon earth the debt to the Gods, to Men and to the Ancestors. This threefold debt or duty has, in other terms, reference to the three fields or domains wherein an embodied being lives and moves and to which he must adjust and react rightly -if he is to secure for his life an integral fulfilment. These are the family, society and the world and beyond-world. The Gods are the Powers that rule the world and beyond, they are the forms and forces of the One Spirit underlying the universe, the varied expressions of divine Truth and Reality: To worship the Gods, to do one's duty by them, means to come into contact and to be unitedin being, consciousness and activitywith the universal and spiritual existence, which is the supreme end and purpose of human life. The seconda more circumscribed fieldis the society to which one belongs, the particular group of humanity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of humanity, of Man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma, the ethic of an ideal life.
From the psychological standpoint, the four oblations are movements or reactions of consciousness in its urge towards the utterance and expression of Divine Truth. Like some other elements in the cosmic play, these also form a quartetcaturvyha and work together for a common purpose in view of a perfect and all-round result.
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The Gods feed upon Svdh and Vaa, as these represent the ascending movement of human consciousness: it is man's self-giving and aspiration and the upward urge of his heart and soul that reach to the Gods, and it is that which the immortals take into themselves and are, as it were, nourished by, since it is something that appertains to their own nature.
And in response they descend and approach and enter into the aspiring human soulthis descent and revelation and near and concrete presence of Divinity, this Hanta is man's food, for by it his consciousness is nourished.
This interchange, or mutual giving, the High Covenant between the Gods and Men, to which the Gita too refers
With this sacrifice nourish the Gods, that the Gods may nourish you; thus mutually nourishing ye shall obtain the highest felicity3 is the very secret of the cosmic play, the basis of the spiritual evolution in the universal existence.
The Gods are the formations or particularisations of the Truth-consciousness, the multiple individualisations of the One spirit. The Pitris are the Divine Fathers, that is to say, souls that once laboured and realised here below, and now have passed beyond. They dwell in another world, not too far removed from the earth, and from there, with the force of their Realisation, lend a more concrete help and guidance to the destiny that is being worked out upon earth. They are forces and formations of consciousness in an intermediate region between Here and There (antarika), and serve to bring men and Gods nearer to each other, inasmuch as they belong to both the categories, being a divinised humanity or a humanised divinity. Each fixation of the Truth-consciousness in an earthly mould is a thing of joy to the Pitris; it is the Svadh or food by which they live and grow, for it is the consolidation and also the resultant of their own realisation. The achievements of the sons are more easily and securely reared and grounded upon those of the forefa thers, whose formative powers we have to invoke, so that we may pass on to the realisation, the firm embodiment of higher and greater destinies.
III. The Path of the Fathers and the Path of the Gods
One is an ideal in and of the world, the other is an ideal transcending the world. The Path of the Fathers (Pityna) enjoins the right accomplishing of the dharma of Lifeit is the path of works, of Karma; it is the line of progressive evolution that, man follows through the experience of life after life on earth. The Path of the Gods (Devayna) runs above life's evolutionary course; it lifts man out of the terrestrial cycle and places him in a superior consciousness it is the path of knowledge, of Vidya.4 The Path of the Fathers is the soul's southern or inferior orbit (dakiyana, aparrdha); the Path of the Gods is the northern or superior orbit (uttaryaa, parrdha)The former is also called the Lunar Path and the latter the Solar Path.5 For the moon represents the mind,6 and is therefore, an emblem that befits man so long as he is a mental being and pursues a dharma that is limited by the mind; the sun, on the other hand, is the knowledge and consciousness that is beyond the mindit is the eye of the Gods.7
Man has two aspects or natures; he dwells in two worlds. The first is the manifest world the world of the body, the life and the mind. The body has flowered into the mind through the life. The body gives the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune realitySat, Chit and Ananda.
The one, however, is not completely divorced from the other. The apparent, the inferior nature is only a preparation for the real, the superior nature. The Path of the Fathers concerns itself with man as a mental being and seeks so to ordain and accomplish its duties and ideals as to lead him on to the Path of the Gods; the mind, the life, and the body consciousness should be so disciplined, educated, purified, they should develop along such a line and gradually rise to such a stage as to make them fit to receive the light which belongs to the higher level, so allowing the human soul imbedded in them to extricate itself and pass on to the Immortal Life.
And they who are thus lifted up into the Higher Orbit are freed from the bondage to the cycle of rebirth. They enjoy the supreme Liberation that is of the Spirit; and even when they descend into the Inferior Path, it is to work out as free agents, as vehicles of the Divine, a special purpose, to bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher.
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The central secret of the transfigured consciousness lies, as we have already indicated, in the mystic rite or law of Sacrifice. It is the one basic, fundamental, universal Law that upholds and explains the cosmic movement, conformity to which brings to the thrice-bound human being release and freedom. Sacrifice consists essentially of two elements or processes: (i) The offering or self giving of the lower reality to the higher, and, as a consequence, an answering movement of (ii) the descent of the higher into the lower. The lower offered to the higher means the lower sublimated and integrated into the higher; and the descent of the higher into the lower means the incarnation of the former and the fulfilment of the latter. The Gita elaborates the same idea when it says that by Sacrifice men increase the Gods and the Gods increase men and by so increasing each other they attain the supreme Good. Nothing is, nothing is done, for its own sake, for an egocentric satisfaction; all, even movements relating to food and to sex should be dedicated to the Cosmic BeingVisva Purusha and that alone received which comes from Him.
VII. The Cosmic and the Transcendental
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It would be interesting to know what the five ranges or levels or movements of consciousness exactly are that make up the Universal Brahman described in this passage. It is the mystic knowledge, the Upanishad says, of the secret delight in thingsmadhuvidy. The five ranges are the five fundamental principles of delightimmortalities, the Veda would say that form the inner core of the pyramid of creation. They form a rising tier and are ruled respectively by the GodsAgni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and Brahmawith their emanations and instrumental personalities the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts and the Sadhyas. We suggest that these refer to the five well-known levels of being, the modes or nodi of consciousness or something very much like them. The Upanishad speaks elsewhere of the five sheaths. The six Chakras of Tantric system lie in the same line. The first and the basic mode is the physical and the ascent from the physical: Agni and the Vasus are always intimately connected with the earth and -the earth-principles (it can be compared with the Muladhara of the Tantras). Next, second in the line of ascent is the Vital, the centre of power and dynamism of which the Rudras are the deities and Indra the presiding God (cf. Swadhishthana of the Tantras the navel centre). Indra, in the Vedas, has two aspects, one of knowledge and vision and the other of dynamic force and drive. In the first aspect he is more often considered as the Lord of the Mind, of the Luminous Mind. In the present passage, Indra is taken in his second aspect and instead of the Maruts with whom he is usually invoked has the Rudras as his agents and associates.
The third in the line of ascension is the region of Varuna and the Adityas, that is to say, of the large Mind and its lightsperhaps it can be connected with Tantric Ajnachakra. The fourth is the domain of Soma and the Marutsthis seems to be the inner heart, the fount of delight and keen and sweeping aspirations the Anahata of the Tantras. The fifth is the region of the crown of the head, the domain of Brahma and the Sadhyas: it is the Overmind status from where comes the descending inflatus, the creative Maya of Brahma. And when you go beyond, you pass into the ultimate status of the Sun, the reality absolute, the Transcendent which is indescribable, unseizable, indeterminate, indeterminable, incommensurable; and once there, one never returns, neverna ca punarvartate na ca punarvartate.
VIII. How Many Gods?
"How many Gods are there?" Yajnavalkya was once asked.13 The Rishi answered, they say there are three thousand and three of them, or three hundred and three, or again, thirty-three; it may be said too there are six or three or two or one and a half or one finally. Indeed as the Upanishad says elsewhere, it is the One Unique who wished to be many: and all the Gods are the various glories (mahim) or emanations of the One Divine. The ancient of ancient Rishis had declared long long ago, in the earliest Veda, that there is one indivisible Reality, the seers name it in various ways.
In Yajnavalkya's enumeration, however, it is to be noted, first of all, that he stresses on the number three. The principle of triplicity is of very wide application: it permeates all fields of consciousness and is evidently based upon a fundamental fact of reality. It seems to embody a truth of synthesis and comprehension, points to the order and harmony that reigns in the cosmos, the spheric music. The metaphysical, that is to say, the original principles that constitute existence are the well-known triplets: (i) the superior: Sat, Chit, Ananda; and (ii) the inferior: Body, Life and Mindthis being a reflection or translation or concretisation of the former. We can see also here how the dual principle comes in, the twin godhead or the two Gods to which Yajnavalkya refers. The same principle is found in the conception of Ardhanarishwara, Male and Female, Purusha-Prakriti. The Upanishad says 14 yet again that the One original Purusha was not pleased at being alone, so for a companion he created out of himself the original Female. The dual principle signifies creation, the manifesting activity of the Reality. But what is this one and a half to which Yajnavalkya refers? It simply means that the other created out of the one is not a wholly separate, independent entity: it is not an integer by itself, as in the Manichean system, but that it is a portion, a fraction of the One. And in the end, in the ultimate analysis, or rather synthesis, there is but one single undivided and indivisible unity. The thousands and hundreds, very often mentioned also in the Rig Veda, are not simply multiplications of the One, a graphic description of its many-sidedness; it indicates also the absolute fullness, the complete completeness (prasya pram) of the Reality. It includes and comprehends all and is a rounded totality, a full circle. The hundred-gated and the thousand-pillared cities of which the ancient Rishis chanted are formations and embodiments of consciousness human and divine, are realities whole and entire englobing all the layers and grades of consciousness.
Besides this metaphysics there is also an occult aspect in numerology of which Pythagoras was a well-known adept and in which the Vedic Rishis too seem to take special delight. The multiplication of numbers represents in a general way the principle of emanation. The One has divided and subdivided itself, but not in a haphazard way: it is not like the chaotic pulverisation of a piece of stone by hammer-blows. The process of division and subdivision follows a pattern almost as neat and methodical as a genealogical tree. That is to say, the emanations form a hierarchy. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, stands the one supreme Godhead. That Godhead is biune in respect of manifestation the Divine and his creative Power. This two-in-one reality may be considered, according to one view of creation, as dividing into three forms or aspects the well-known Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra of Hindu mythology. These may be termed the first or primary emanations.
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The number of Gods depends on the level of consciousness on which we stand. On this material plane there are as many Gods as there are bodies or individual forms (adhar). And on the supreme height there is only one God without a second. In between there are gradations of types and sub-types whose number and function vary according to the aspect of consciousness that reveals itself.
IX. Nachiketas' Three Boons
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Only, to some perhaps the beauty may not appear as evident and apparent. The Spirit of beauty that resides in the Upanishadic consciousness is more retiring and reticent. It dwells in its own privacy, in its own home, as it were, and therefore chooses to be bare and austere, simple and sheer. Beauty means usually the beauty of form, even if it be not always the decorative, ornamental and sumptuous form. The early Vedas aimed at the perfect form (surpaktnum), the faultless expression, the integral and complete embodiment; the Gods they envisaged and invoked were gleaming powers carved out of harmony and beauty and figured close to our modes of apprehension (spyan). But the Upanishads came to lay stress upon what is beyond the form, what the eye cannot see nor the vision reflect:
na sandi tihati rpamasya
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the Gods. The Vedas mean by this attribute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the Gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heavenkavi kavitv divi rpam sajat.1Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the Poet discovers and embodies? HeavenDyaushas a very definite connotation in the Veda. It means the luminous or divine Mind 2the mind purified of its obscurity and limitations, due to subjection to the external senses, thus opening to the higher Light, receiving and recording faithfully the deeper and vaster movements and vibrations of the Truth, giving them a form, a perfect body of the right thought and the right word. Indra is the lord of this world and he can be approached only with an enkindled intelligence, ddhay man,3a faultless understanding, sumedh. He is the supreme Artisan of the poetic power,Tash, the maker of perfect forms, surpa ktnum.4 All the Gods turn towards Indra and become Gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty.5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving;6 the poet is the priest who calls down and works out the right thinking in the sacrificial labour of creation.7 But that creation is made in and through the inner mind and the inner senses that are alive to the subtle formation of a vaster knowledge.8 The poet envisages the golden forms fashioned out of the very profundity of the consciousness.9 For the substance, the material on which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names.10 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth.11The form of beauty is the body of the Truth.
The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara. He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.12 A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his,nigam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun,srya caku.13 He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.14 In the second place, the Poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, ncak;15 he is the Seer-Will,kavikratu.16 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.17 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the Poet gives birth to the Truth, srya satyasava, satyya satyaprasavya. But the Poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator,savit, he is also the builder or fashioner,ta, and he is the organiser,vedh is personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara, of the Truth.18 As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,19 the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The Poet pursues the Path of the Right;20 it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.21 He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;22 he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond 23into the world of felicity.
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The Poet creates forms of beauty in Heaven; but these forms are not made out of the void. It is the Earth that is raised to Heaven and transmuted into divine truth forms. The union of Earth and Heaven is the source of the Joy, the Ananda, that the Poet unseals and distributes. Heaven and Earth join and meet in the world of Delight; between them they press out Soma, the drink of the Gods.
The Mind and the Body are held together by means of the Life, the mid-world. The Divine Mind by raising the body-consciousness into itself gathers up too, by that act, the delight of life and releases the fountain of immortal Bliss. That is the work and achievement of the Gods as poets.
Where then is the birth of the Poets? Ask it of the Masters. The Poets have seized and mastered the Mind, they have the perfect working and they fashion the Heaven.
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All the Gods are poetstheir forms are perfect, surpa, suda, their Names full of beauty,cru devasya nma.31 This means also that the Gods embody the different powers that constitute the poetic consciousness. Agni is the Seer-Will, the creative vision of the Poet the luminous energy born of an experience by identity with the Truth. Indra is the Idea-Form, the architectonic conception of the work or achievement. Mitra and Varuna are the large harmony, the vast cadence and sweep of movement. The Aswins, the Divine Riders, represent the intense zest of well-yoked Life-Energy. Soma is Rasa, Ananda, the Supreme Bliss and Delight.
The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art tooat least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.32
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
A simple example is the concept of the Trinity in the Christian religion. The student is frequently amazed to learn through a study of the Qabalah that Egyptian mythology followed a similar concept with its trinity of Gods, Osiris the father, Isis the virgin-mother, and Horus the son. The Qabalah indicates similar correspondences in the pantheon of Roman and Greek deities, proving the father-mother (Holy Spirit) - son principles of deity are primordial archetypes of man's psyche, rather than being, as is frequently and erroneously supposed a development peculiar to the Christian era.
At this juncture let me call attention to one set of attri butions by Rittangelius usually found as an appendix attached to the Sepher Yetzirah. It lists a series of "Intelligences" for each one of the ten Sephiros and the twenty-two Paths of the Tree of Life. It seems to me, after prolonged meditation, that the common attri butions of these Intelligences is altogether arbitrary and lacking in serious meaning.
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A good many attri butions in other symbolic areas, I feel are subject to the same criticism. The Egyptian Gods have been used with a good deal of carelessness, and without sufficient explanation of motives in assigning them as I did. In a recent edition of Crowley's masterpiece Liber 777 (which au fond is less a reflection of Crowley's mind as a recent critic claimed than a tabulation of some of the material given piecemeal in the Golden Dawn knowledge lectures), he gives for the first time brief explanations of the motives for his attri butions. I too should have been far more explicit in the explanations I used in the case of some of the Gods whose names were used many times, most inadequately, where several paths were concerned. While it is true that the religious coloring of the Egyptian Gods differed from time to time during Egypt's turbulent history, nonetheless a word or two about just that one single point could have served a useful purpose.
Some of the passages in the book force me today to emphasize that so far as the Qabalah is concerned, it could and should be employed without binding to it the partisan qualities of any one particular religious faith. This goes as much for Judaism as it does for Christianity. Neither has much intrinsic usefulness where this scientific scheme is concerned. If some students feel hurt by this statement, that cannot be helped. The day of most contemporary faiths is over; they have been more of a curse than a boon to mankind. Nothing that I say here, however, should reflect on the peoples concerned, those who accept these religions. They are merely unfortunate. The religion itself is worn out and indeed is dying.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Gadadhar grew up into a healthy and restless boy, full of fun and sweet mischief. He was intelligent and precocious and endowed with a prodigious memory. On his father's lap he learnt by heart the names of his ancestors and the hymns to the Gods and goddesses, and at the village school he was taught to read and write. But his greatest delight was to listen to recitations of stories from Hindu mythology and the epics. These he would afterwards recount from memory, to the great joy of the villagers. Painting he enjoyed; the art of moulding images of the Gods and goddesses he learnt from the potters. But arithmetic was his great aversion.
At the age of six or seven Gadadhar had his first experience of spiritual ecstasy. One day in June or July, when he was walking along a narrow path between paddy-fields, eating the puffed rice that he carried in a basket, he looked up at the sky and saw a beautiful, dark thunder-cloud. As it spread, rapidly enveloping the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes passed in front of it. The beauty of the contrast overwhelmed the boy. He fell to the ground, unconscious, and the puffed rice went in all directions. Some villagers found him and carried him home in their arms. Gadadhar said later that in that state he had experienced an indescribable joy.
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Born in an orthodox brahmin family, Sri Ramakrishna knew the formalities of worship, its rites and rituals. The innumerable Gods and goddesses of the Hindu religion are the human aspects of the indescribable and incomprehensible Spirit, as conceived by the finite human mind. They understand and appreciate human love and emotion, help men to realize their secular and spiritual ideals, and ultimately enable men to attain liberation from the miseries of phenomenal life. The Source of light, intelligence, wisdom, and strength is the One alone from whom comes the fulfilment of desire. Yet, as long as a man is bound by his human limitations, he cannot but worship God through human forms. He must use human symbols. Therefore Hinduism asks the devotees to look on God as the ideal father, the ideal mother, the ideal husband, the ideal son, or the ideal friend. But the name ultimately leads to the Nameless, the form to the Formless, the word to the Silence, the emotion to the serene realization of Peace in Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. The Gods gradually merge in the one God. But until that realization is achieved, the devotee cannot dissociate human factors from his worship. Therefore the Deity is bathed and clothed and decked with ornaments. He is fed and put to sleep. He is propitiated with hymns, songs, and prayers. And there are appropriate rites connected with all these functions. For instance, to secure for himself external purity, the priest bathes himself in holy water and puts on a holy cloth. He purifies the mind and the sense-organs by appropriate meditations. He fortifies the place of worship against evil forces by drawing around it circles of fire and water. He awakens the different spiritual centres of the body and invokes the Supreme Spirit in his heart. Then he transfers the Supreme Spirit to the image before him and worships the image, regarding it no longer as clay or stone, but as the embodiment of Spirit, throbbing with Life and Consciousness. After the worship the Supreme Spirit is recalled from the image to Its true sanctuary, the heart of the priest. The real devotee knows the absurdity of worshipping the Transcendental Reality with material articles — clothing That which pervades the whole universe and the beyond, putting on a pedestal That which cannot be limited by space, feeding That which is disembodied and incorporeal, singing before That whose glory the music of the spheres tries vainly to proclaim. But through these rites the devotee aspires to go ultimately beyond rites and rituals, forms and names, words and praise, and to realize God as the All-pervading Consciousness.
Hindu priests are thoroughly acquainted with the rites of worship, but few of them are aware of their underlying significance. They move their hands and limbs mechanically, in obedience to the letter of the scriptures, and repeat the holy mantras like parrots. But from the very beginning the inner meaning of these rites was revealed to Sri Ramakrishna. As he sat facing the image, a strange transformation came over his mind. While going through the prescribed ceremonies, he would actually find himself encircled by a wall of fire protecting him and the place of worship from unspiritual vibrations, or he would feel the rising of the mystic Kundalini through the different centres of the body. The glow on his face, his deep absorption, and the intense atmosphere of the temple impressed everyone who saw him worship the Deity.
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Totapuri arrived at the Dakshineswar temple garden toward the end of 1864. Perhaps born in the Punjab, he was the head of a monastery in that province of India and claimed leadership of seven hundred sannyasis. Trained from early youth in the disciplines of the Advaita Vedanta, he looked upon the world as an illusion. The Gods and goddesses of the dualistic worship were to him mere fantasies of the deluded mind. Prayers, ceremonies, rites, and rituals had nothing to do with true religion, and about these he was utterly indifferent. Exercising self-exertion and unshakable will-power, he had liberated himself from attachment to the sense-objects of the relative universe. For forty years he had practised austere discipline on the bank of the sacred Narmada and had finally realized his identity with the Absolute. Thenceforward he roamed in the world as an unfettered soul, a lion free from the cage. Clad in a loin-cloth, he spent his days under the canopy of the sky alike in storm and sunshine, feeding his body on the slender pittance of alms. He had been visiting the estuary of the Ganges. On his return journey along the bank of the sacred river, led by the inscrutable Divine Will, he stopped at Dakshineswar.
Totapuri, discovering at once that Sri Ramakrishna was prepared to be a student of Vedanta, asked to initiate him into its mysteries. With the permission of the Divine Mother, Sri Ramakrishna agreed to the proposal. But Totapuri explained that only a sannyasi could receive the teaching of Vedanta. Sri Ramakrishna agreed to renounce the world, but with the stipulation that the ceremony of his initiation into the monastic order be performed in secret, to spare the feelings of his old mother, who had been living with him at Dakshineswar.
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Totapuri asked the disciple to withdraw his mind from all objects of the relative world, including the Gods and goddesses, and to concentrate on the Absolute. But the task was not easy even for Sri Ramakrishna. He found it impossible to take his mind beyond Kali, the Divine Mother of the Universe. "After the initiation", Sri Ramakrishna once said, describing the event, "Nangta began to teach me the various conclusions of the Advaita Vedanta and asked me to withdraw the mind completely from all objects and dive deep into the Atman. But in spite of all my attempts I could not altogether cross the realm of name and form and bring my mind to the unconditioned state. I had no difficulty in taking the mind from all the objects of the world. But the radiant and too familiar figure of the Blissful Mother, the Embodiment of the essence of Pure Consciousness, appeared before me as a living reality. Her bewitching smile prevented me from passing into the Great Beyond. Again and again I tried, but She stood in my way every time. In despair I said to Nangta: 'It is hopeless. I cannot raise my mind to the unconditioned state and come face to face with Atman.' He grew excited and sharply said: 'What? You can't do it? But you have to.' He cast his eyes around. Finding a piece of glass he took it up and stuck it between my eyebrows. 'Concentrate the mind on this point!' he thundered. Then with stern determination I again sat to meditate. As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane and I lost myself in samadhi."
Sri Ramakrishna remained completely absorbed in samadhi for three days. "Is it really true?" Totapuri cried out in astonishment. "Is it possible that he has attained in a single day what it took me forty years of strenuous practice to achieve? Great God! It is nothing short of a miracle!" With the help of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna's mind finally came down to the relative plane.
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The Knowledge of Brahman in nirvikalpa samadhi had convinced Sri Ramakrishna that the Gods of the different religions are but so many readings of the Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed by human tongue. He understood that all religions lead their devotees by differing paths to one and the same goal. Now he became eager to explore some of the alien religions; for with him understanding meant actual experience.
--- ISLAM
Toward the end of 1866 he began to practise the disciplines of Islam. Under the direction of his Mussalman guru he abandoned himself to his new sadhana. He dressed as a Mussalman and repeated the name of Allah. His prayers took the form of the Islamic devotions. He forgot the Hindu Gods and goddesses — even Kali — and gave up visiting the temples. He took up his residence outside the temple precincts. After three days he saw the vision of a radiant figure, perhaps Mohammed. This figure gently approached him and finally lost himself in Sri Ramakrishna. Thus he realized the Mussalman God. Thence he passed into communion with Brahman. The mighty river of Islam also led him back to the Ocean of the Absolute.
--- CHRISTIANITY
--
Keshab possessed a complex nature. When passing through a great moral crisis, he spent much of his time in solitude and felt that he heard the voice of God, When a devotional form of worship was introduced into the Brahmo Samaj, he spent hours in singing kirtan with his followers. He visited England land in 1870 and impressed the English people with his musical voice, his simple English, and his spiritual fervour. He was entertained by Queen Victoria. Returning to India, he founded centres of the Brahmo Samaj in various parts of the country. Not unlike a professor of comparative religion in a European university, he began to discover, about the time of his first contact with Sri Ramakrishna, the harmony of religions. He became sympathetic toward the Hindu Gods and goddesses, explaining them in a liberal fashion. Further, he believed that he was called by God to dictate to the world God's newly revealed law, the New Dispensation, the Navavidhan.
In 1878 a schism divided Keshab's Samaj. Some of his influential followers accused him of infringing the Brahmo principles by marrying his daughter to a wealthy man before she had attained the marriageable age approved by the Samaj. This group seceded and established the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Keshab remaining the leader of the Navavidhan. Keshab now began to be drawn more and more toward the Christ ideal, though under the influence of Sri Ramakrishna his devotion to the Divine Mother also deepened. His mental oscillation between Christ and the Divine Mother of Hinduism found no position of rest. In Bengal and some other parts of India the Brahmo movement took the form of unitarian Christianity, scoffed at Hindu rituals, and preached a crusade against image worship. Influenced by Western culture, it declared the supremacy of reason, advocated the ideals of the French Revolution, abolished the caste-system among its own members, stood for the emancipation of women, agitated for the abolition of early marriage, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, and encouraged various educational and social-reform movements. The immediate effect of the Brahmo movement in Bengal was the checking of the proselytizing activities of the Christian missionaries. It also raised Indian culture in the estimation of its English masters. But it was an intellectual and eclectic religious ferment born of the necessity of the time. Unlike Hinduism, it was not founded on the deep inner experiences of sages and prophets. Its influence was confined to a comparatively few educated men and women of the country, and the vast masses of the Hindus remained outside it. It sounded monotonously only one of the notes in the rich gamut of the Eternal Religion of the Hindus.
--
Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, the right-hand man of Keshab and an accomplished Brahmo preacher in Europe and America, bitterly criticized Sri Ramakrishna's use of uncultured language and also his austere attitude toward his wife. But he could not escape the spell of the Master's personality. In the course of an article about Sri Ramakrishna, Pratap wrote in the "Theistic Quarterly Review": "What is there in common between him and me? I, a Europeanized, civilized, self-centred, semi-sceptical, so-called educated reasoner, and he, a poor, illiterate, unpolished, half-idolatrous, friendless Hindu devotee? Why should I sit long hours to attend to him, I, who have listened to Disraeli and Fawcett, Stanley and Max Muller, and a whole host of European scholars and divines? . . . And it is not I only, but dozens like me, who do the same. . . . He worships Siva, he worships Kali, he worships Rama, he worships Krishna, and is a confirmed advocate of Vedantic doctrines. . . . He is an idolater, yet is a faithful and most devoted meditator on the perfections of the One Formless, Absolute, Infinite Deity. . . . His religion is ecstasy, his worship means transcendental insight, his whole nature burns day and night with a permanent fire and fever of a strange faith and feeling. . . . So long as he is spared to us, gladly shall we sit at his feet to learn from him the sublime precepts of purity, unworldliness, spirituality, and inebriation in the love of God. . . . He, by his childlike bhakti, by his strong conceptions of an ever-ready Motherhood, helped to unfold it [God as our Mother] in our minds wonderfully. . . . By associating with him we learnt to realize better the divine attributes as scattered over the three hundred and thirty millions of deities of mythological India, the Gods of the Puranas."
The Brahmo leaders received much inspiration from their contact with Sri Ramakrishna. It broadened their religious views and kindled in their hearts the yearning for God-realization; it made them understand and appreciate the rituals and symbols of Hindu religion, convinced them of the manifestation of God in diverse forms, and deepened their thoughts about the harmony of religions. The Master, too, was impressed by the sincerity of many of the Brahmo devotees. He told them about his own realizations and explained to them the essence of his teachings, such as the necessity of renunciation, sincerity in the pursuit of one's own course of discipline, faith in God, the performance of one's duties without thought of results, and discrimination between the Real and the unreal.
--
Even before Rakhal's coming to Dakshineswar, the Master had had visions of him as his spiritual son and as a playmate of Krishna at Vrindavan. Rakhal was born of wealthy parents. During his childhood he developed wonderful spiritual traits and used to play at worshipping Gods and goddesses. In his teens he was married to a sister of Manomohan Mitra, from whom he first heard of the Master. His father objected to his association with Sri Ramakrishna but afterwards was reassured to find that many celebrated people were visitors at Dakshineswar. The relationship between the Master and this beloved disciple was that of mother and child. Sri Ramakrishna allowed Rakhal many liberties denied to others. But he would not hesitate to chastise the boy for improper actions. At one time Rakhal felt a childlike jealousy because he found that other boys were receiving the Master's affection. He soon got over it and realized his guru as the Guru of the whole universe. The Master was worried to hear of his marriage, but was relieved to find that his wife was a spiritual soul who would not be a hindrance to his progress.
--- THE ELDER GOPAL
--
Kaliprasad visited the Master toward the end of 1883. Given to the practice of meditation and the study of the scriptures. Kali was particularly interested in yoga. Feeling the need of a guru in spiritual life, he came to the Master and was accepted as a disciple. The young boy possessed a rational mind and often felt sceptical about the Personal God. The Master said to him: "Your doubts will soon disappear. Others, too, have passed through such a state of mind. Look at Naren. He now weeps at the names of Radha and Krishna." Kali began to see visions of Gods and goddesses. Very soon these disappeared and in meditation he experienced vastness, infinity, and the other attributes of the Impersonal Brahman.
--- SUBODH
--
The more the body was devastated by illness, the more it became the habitation of the Divine Spirit. Through its transparency the Gods and goddesses began to shine with ever increasing luminosity. On the day of the Kali Puja the devotees clearly saw in him the manifestation of the Divine Mother.
It was noticed at this time that some of the devotees were making an unbridled display of their emotions. A number of them, particularly among the householders, began to cultivate, though at first unconsciously, the art of shedding tears, shaking the body, contorting the face, and going into trances, attempting thereby to imitate the Master. They began openly to declare Sri Ramakrishna a Divine Incarnation and to regard themselves as his chosen people, who could neglect religious disciplines with impunity. Narendra's penetrating eye soon sized up the situation. He found out that some of these external manifestations were being carefully practised at home, while some were the outcome of malnutrition, mental weakness, or nervous debility. He mercilessly exposed the devotees who were pretending to have visions, and asked all to develop a healthy religious spirit. Narendra sang inspiring songs for the younger devotees, read with them the Imitation of Christ and the Gita, and held before them the positive ideals of spirituality.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
the Gods.
This Reason and Law is the Bond of the Great Lie.
--
"Household Gods" is an attempt to write pure comedy.
"The Bacchae" of Euripides is another.
--
are Gods.
This is that which is written: "A feast for Life, and
--
In the World's Tragedy, Household Gods, The
Scorpion, and also The God-Eater, the reader may
--
been the most acceptable offerings to all the Gods, but
especially the Christian God.
--
circumstances of the Equinox of the Gods.
The word "Phoenix" may be taken as including the
--
Gods die, for SORROW.
Wilt thou endure unto THe End, O FRATER
--
Infernal Gods!
The Englishman lives upon the excrement of his
--
crapulence. The priests of the Gods were carefully
chosen, and carefully trained to fulfill the sacrament of
--
sonally, at the Equinox of the Gods. (It is the flame
desending upon the altar, and licking up the burnt
--
Household Gods. Pallanza, 1912.
Liber LXI vel Causae. The Eqx., III, i.
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Though his children received proper attention from him, his real family, both during the Master's lifetime and after, consisted of saints, devotees, Sannysins and spiritual aspirants. His life exemplifies the Master's teaching that an ideal householder must be like a good maidservant of a family, loving and caring properly for the children of the house, but knowing always that her real home and children are elsewhere. During the Master's lifetime he spent all his Sundays and other holidays with him and his devotees, and besides listening to the holy talks and devotional music, practised meditation both on the Personal and the Impersonal aspects of God under the direct guidance of the Master. In the pages of the Gospel the reader gets a picture of M.'s spiritual relationship with the Master how from a hazy belief in the Impersonal God of the Brahmos, he was step by step brought to accept both Personality and Impersonality as the two aspects of the same Non-dual Being, how he was convinced of the manifestation of that Being as Gods, Goddesses and as Incarnations, and how he was established in a life that was both of a Jnni and of a Bhakta. This Jnni-Bhakta outlook and way of living became so dominant a feature of his life that Swami Raghavananda, who was very closely associated with him during his last six years, remarks: "Among those who lived with M. in latter days, some felt that he always lived in this constant and conscious union with God even with open eyes (i.e., even in waking consciousness)." (Swami Raghavananda's article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXXVII. P. 442.)
Besides undergoing spiritual disciplines at the feet of the Master, M. used to go to holy places during the Master's lifetime itself and afterwards too as a part of his Sdhan.
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the Gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some element or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefa thers fashioning the Gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The overmind is the region of the Gods, the beings of divine
origin who have been charged with supervising, directing and
--
progressive ascension. It is usually to the Gods of the overmind
that the prayers of the various religions are addressed. These religions most often choose, for various reasons, one of these Gods
and transform him for their personal use into the supreme God.
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
drink from the cup of the Gods who are immortal.
To receive the divine grace, not only must one have a great
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here also one must guard against certain misconceptions that are likely to occur. The transformation of human life does not necessarily mean that the entire humanity will be changed into a race of Gods or divine beings; it means the evolution or appearance on earth of a superior type of humanity, even as man evolved out of animality as a superior type of animality, not that the entire animal kingdom was changed into humanity.
As regards the possibility of such a consummation,Sri Aurobindo says it is not a possibility but an inevitabilityone must remember that the force that will bring about the result and is already at work is not any individual human power, however great it may be, but the Divine himself, it is the Divine's own Shakti that is labouring for the destined end.
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The New Humanity will be something in the mould that we give to the Gods. It will supply the link that we see missing between Gods and men; it will be the race of embodied Gods. Man will attain that thing which has been his first desire and earliest dream, for which he coveted the Gods Immortality, amritatwam. The mortalities that cut and divide, limit and bind man make him the sorrowful being he is. These are due to his ignorance and weakness and egoism. These are due to his soul itself. It is the soul that requires change, a new birth, as Christ demanded. Ours is a little soul that has severed itself from the larger and mightier self that it is. And therefore does it die every moment and even while living is afraid to live and so lives poorly and miserably. But the age is now upon us when the god-like soul anointed with its immortal royalties is ready to emerge and claim our salutation.
The breath and the surge of the new creation cannot be mistaken. The question that confronts us today is no longer whether the New Man, the Super-humanity, will come or if at all, when; but the question we have to answer is who among us are ready to be its receptacle, its instrument and embodiment.
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
1.2
--
In her there was the anguish of the Gods
Imprisoned in our transient human mould,
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To humanise the Divine, that is what we all wish to do; for the Divine is too lofty for us and we cannot look full into his face. We cry and supplicate to Rudra, "O dire Lord, show us that other form of thine that is benign and humane". All earthly imageries we lavish upon the Divine so that he may appear to us not as something far and distant and foreign, but, quite near, among us, as one of us. We take recourse to human symbolism often, because we wish to palliate or hide the rigours of a supreme experience, not because we have no adequate terms for it. The same human or earthly terms could be used differently if we had a different consciousness. Thus the Vedic Rishis sought not to humanise the Divine, their purpose was rather to divinise the human. And their allegorical language, although rich in terrestrial figures, does not carry the impress and atmosphere of mere humanity and earthliness. For in reality the symbol is not merely the symbol. It is mere symbol in regard to the truth so long as we take our stand on the lower plane when we have to look at the truth through the symbol; but if we view it from the higher plane, from truth itself, it is no longer mere symbol but the very truth bodied forth. Whatever there is of symbolism on earth and its beauties, in sense and its enjoyments, is then transfigured into the expression of the truth, of the divinity itself. We then no longer speak in human language but in the language of the Gods.
We have been speaking of philosophy and the philosophic manner. But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean nothing more and nothing lessthan the force of thought and the mass of thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference between the past and the present human consciousness in so far at least as it has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet
--
And if there is something in the creative spirit of Sri Aurobindo which tends more towards the strenuous than the genial, the arduous than the mellifluous, and which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than the easy felicity of Valmiki, however it might have affected the ultimate value of his creation, according to certain standards,14 it has illustrated once more that poetry is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative visionit is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the Gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.
James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet."
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A colloquy of the original Gods
Meeting upon the borders of the unknown,
--
And the heavy servitudes of the Karmic Gods,
The slow revenge of unforgiving Law
--
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife.
--
Moves in some prophet cavern of the Gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
--
The strength, the silence of the Gods were hers.
3.41
--
Her walk kept still the measures of the Gods.
4.4
--
Years like gold raiment of the Gods that pass;
Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.
--
Admitting without appeal the nether Gods.
4.28
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is spiritual matter and spiritual manner that can never be improved upon. This is spiritual poetry in its quintessence. I am referring naturally here to the original and not to the translation which can never do full justice, even at its very best, to the poetic value in question. For apart from the individual genius of the poet, the greatness of the language, the instrument used by the poet, is also involved. It may well be what is comparatively easy and natural in the language of the Gods (devabhasha) would mean a tour de force, if not altogether an impossibility, in a human language. The Sanskrit language was moulded and fashioned in the hands of the Rishis, that is to say, those who lived and moved and had their being in the spiritual consciousness. The Hebrew or even the Zend does not seem to have reached that peak, that absoluteness of the spiritual tone which seems inherent in the Indian tongue, although those too breathed and grew in a spiritual atmosphere. The later languages, however, Greek or Latin or their modern descendants, have gone still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears.
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the supra-sensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reactionit is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
--
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of Gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and mannerswabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo's sadhana starts from the perception of a Power that is beyond the ordinary nature yet is its inevitable master, a fulcrum, as we have said, outside the earth. For what is required first is the discovery and manifestation of a new soul-consciousness in man which will bring about by the very pressure and working out of its self-rule an absolute reversal of man's nature. It is the Asuras who are now holding sway over humanity, for man has allowed himself so long to be built in the image of the Asura; to dislodge the Asuras, the Gods in their sovereign might have to be forged in the human being and brought into play. It is a stupendous task, some would say impossible; but it is very far removed from quietism or passivism. Sri Aurobindo is in retirement, but it is a retirement only from the outward field of present physical activities and their apparent actualities, not from the true forces and action of life. It is the retreat necessary to one who has to go back into himself to conquer a new plane of creative power,an entrance right into the world of basic forces, of fundamental realities, into the flaming heart of things where all actualities are born and take their first shape. It is the discovery of a power-house of tremendous energism and of the means of putting it at the service of earthly life.
And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere school of thought, that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Gods of light and titans of the dark
Battled for his soul as for a costly prize.
--
The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,
Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.
--
Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,
Strange riches sailed to him from the Unseen;
--
Covered by the forged signatures of the Gods,
Detect the magic bride in her disguise
--
A recorder of the inquiry of the Gods,
Spokesman of the silent seeings of the Supreme,
--
Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.
A vision lightened on the viewless heights,
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were draison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
--
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
--
Carrying clay images of unborn Gods,
Executrix of the inevitable Idea
01.05 - The Nietzschean Antichrist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The real secret of Nietzsche's philosophy is not an adoration of brute force, of blind irrational joy in fighting and killing. Far from it, Nietzsche has no kinship with Treitschke or Bernhard. What Nietzsche wanted was a world purged of littleness and ugliness, a humanity, not of saints, perhaps, but of heroes, lofty in their ideal, great in their achievement, majestic in their empirea race of titanic Gods breathing the glory of heaven itself.
***
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.
There in a hidden chamber closed and mute
--
Its law of the opposition of the Gods,
Its list of inseparable contraries.
--
A mediatrix with veiled and nameless Gods
Whose alien will touches our human life,
--
She has canalised the outbreaks of the Gods
And cut through vistas of intuitive sight
--
Its shadows gleaming with the birth of Gods,
Its bodies signalling the Bodiless,
--
Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods
From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A personal reminiscence. A young man in prison, accused of conspiracy and waging war against the British Empire. If convicted he might have to suffer the extreme penalty, at least, transportation to the Andamans. The case is dragging on for long months. And the young man is in a solitary cell. He cannot always keep up his spirits high. Moments of sadness and gloom and despair come and almost overwhelm him. Who was there to console and cheer him up? Vivekananda. Vivekananda's speeches, From Colombo to Almora, came, as a Godsend, into the hands of the young man. Invariably, when the period of despondency came he used to open the book, read a few pages, read them over again, and the cloud was there no longer. Instead there was hope and courage and faith and future and light and air.
Such is Vivekananda, the embodiment of Fearlessnessabh, the Upanishadic word, the mantra, he was so fond of. The life and vision of Vivekananda can be indeed summed up in the mighty phrase of the Upanishads, nyam tm balahnena labhya. 'This soul no weakling can attain.' Strength! More strength! Strength evermore! One remembers the motto of Danton, the famous leader in the French Revolution:De l'audance, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!
--
"Man is higher than all animals, than all angels: none is greater than man. Even the Devas will have to come down again and attain to salvation though a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas." Indeed, men are Gods upon earth, come down here below to perfect themselves and perfect the worldonly, they have to be conscious of themselves. They do not know what they are, they have to be actually and sovereignly what they are really and potentially. This then is the life-work of everyone:
"First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods.
'Be and make', let this be our motto."
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed it is a divine creature that should be envisaged on the next level of evolution. The mental and the moral, the psychical and the physical transfigurations which must follow the change in the basic substratum do imply such a mutation, the birth of a new species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of the Gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be but a prophecy of the future actuality.
This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially human being, she has brought out the fundamental possibilities of humanity and perfected it, so far as perfection may be attained within the cadre by which she chose to limit herself; she is now looking forward to another kind of experiment the evolving of another life, another being out of her entrails, that will be greater than the humanity we know today, that will be superior even to the supreme that has yet been actualised.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Aphorism 133, Sri Aurobindo says that "the Gods
were able to accept only the pleasant burden of His love
and kindlier rapture."4 So the Gods are cowards! Where
then is their greatness and their splendour? Why do we
--
"The Titans are stronger than the Gods because they have agreed with God to front
and bear the burden of His wrath and enmity; the Gods were able to accept only the
pleasant burden of His love and kindlier rapture."
--
not, I see no need for us to worship the Gods, great or small. Our
adoration ought to go only to the Supreme Lord, who is one in
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel oneself, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's dutythere is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by Sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the Gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely and integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outerspontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or haltna me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
They are the Gods.
Naturally, this is a way of speaking which corresponds to a
--
What the white Gods had missed: they too are safe;
Savitri, Book X, Canto 1.
--
What had the white Gods missed?
The conversion of the Asuras.
--
of the Gods?
The vibrations of evil are in truth less powerful than the vibrations of good.
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In effect, according to tradition, the first divine forces that emanated for the creation were the Asuras, who turned into demons. The Gods were created later to repair the disorder engendered by the demons.
So'ham, the traditional mantra of the Vedantic path, which declares that the world is an illusion.
0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
We are the distorting intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the Gods.
***
0 1958-08-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Evidently the Gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than human beings, as we saw in that film the other day1 (and that story was absolutely true). The Gods of the Overmind are infinitely more egocentric the only thing that counts for them is their power, the extent of their power. Man has in addition a psychic being, so consequently he has true love and compassionwherein lies his superiority over the Gods. It was very, very clearly expressed in this film, and its very true.
The Gods are faultless, for they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint; it is their godly way. But if one looks at it from a higher point of view, if one has a higher vision, a vision of the whole, they have fewer qualities than man. In this film, it was proved that through their capacity for love and self-giving, men can have as much power as the Gods, and even morewhen they are not egoists, when they can overcome their egoism.
Certainly man is nearer the Supreme than the Gods. Provided he fulfills the necessary conditions, he can be nearerhe isnt so automatically, but he can be, he has the power, the potentiality to be.
Anusuya: wife of the rishi Atri and endowed with a great inner force. In her husband's absence, three Gods came (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) disguised as brahmins and asked her for something to eat. Then they refused to eat unless she served them naked. Since they were brahmins, she could not send them away without feeding them, so by her inner power, she changed them into babies and served them naked. This film was shown at the Ashram Playground on August 5, 1958.
***
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
For example, this question of PowerTHE Powerover Matter. Those who perceive me as the eternal, universal Mother and Sri Aurobindo as the Avatar are surprised that our power is not absolute. They are surprised that we have not merely to say, Let it be thus for it to be thus. This is because, in the integral realization, the union of the two is essential: a union of the power that proceeds from the eternal position and the power that proceeds from the sadhana through evolutionary growth. Similarly, how is it that those who have reached even the summits of yogic knowledge (I was thinking of Swami) need to resort to beings like Gods or demi Gods to be able to realize things?Because they have indeed united with certain higher forces and entities, but it was not decreed since the beginning of time that they were this particular being. They were not born as this or that, but through evolution they united with a latent possibility in themselves. Each one carries the Eternal within himself, but one can join Him only when one has realized the complete union of the latent Eternal with the eternal Eternal.
And this explains everything, absolutely everything: how it works, how it functions in the world.3 I was saying to myself, But I have no powers, I have no powers! Several days ago, I said, But after all, I KNOW WHO is there, I know, yet how is it that ? There, up to there (the level of the head), it is all-powerful, nothing can resist but here it is ineffective. So those who have faith, even an ignorant but real faith (it can be ignorant but nevertheless it is real), say, What! How can you have no powers? Because the sadhana is not yet over.
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
object:0_1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams
author class:The Mother
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(Concerning; the Agenda of August 9, 1958, on the Gods of the Puranas)
The Gods of the Puranas are merciless Gods who respect only power and have nothing of the true love, charity or profound goodness that the Divine has put into the human consciousness and which compensate psychically for all the outer defects. They themselves have nothing of this, they have no psychic.1 The Puranic Gods have no psychic, so they act according to their power. They are restrained only when their power is not all-powerful, thats all.
But what does Anusuya represent?2
She is a portrait of the ideal woman according to the Hindu conception, the woman who worships her husb and as a god, which means that she sees the Supreme in her husband. And so this woman was much more powerful than all the Gods of the Puranas precisely because she had this psychic capacity for total self-giving; and her faith in the Supremes presence in her husb and gave her a much greater power than that of all the Gods.
The story narrated in the film went like this: Narada, as usual, was having fun. (Narada is a demigod with a divine position that is, he can communicate with man and with the Gods as he pleases, and he serves as an intermediary, but then he likes to have fun!) So he was quarrelling with one of the goddesses, I no longer recall which one, and he told her (Ah, yes! The quarrel was with Saraswati.) Saraswati was telling him that knowledge is much greater than love (much greater in that it is much more powerful than love), and he replied to her, You dont know what youre talking about! (Mother laughs) Love is much more powerful than knowledge. So she challenged him, saying, Well then, prove it to me.I shall prove it to you, he replied. And the whole story starts there. He began creating a whole imbroglio on earth just to prove his point.
It was only a film story, but anyway, the goddesses, the three wives of the Trimurti that is, the consort of Brahma, the consort of Vishnu and the consort of Shivajoined forces (!) and tried all kinds of things to foil Narada. I no longer recall the details of the story Oh yes, the story begins like this: one of the three I believe it was Shivas consort, Parvati (she was the worst one, by the way!)was doing her puja. Shiva was in meditation, and she began doing her puja in front of him; she was using an oil lamp for the puja, and the lamp fell down and burned her foot. She cried out because she had burned her foot. So Shiva at once came out of his meditation and said to her, What is it, Devi? (laughter) She answered, I burned my foot! Then Narada said, Arent you ashamed of what you have done?to make Shiva come out of his meditation simply because you have a little burn on your foot, which cannot even hurt you since you are immortal! She became furious and snapped at him, Show me that it can be otherwise! Narada replied, I am going to show you what it is to really love ones husbandyou dont know anything about it!
Then comes the story of Anusuya and her husb and (who is truly a husb and a very good man, but well, not a god, after all!), who was sleeping with his head resting upon Anusuyas knees. They had finished their puja (both of them were worshippers of Shiva), and after their puja he was resting, sleeping, with his head on Anusuyas knees. Meanwhile, the Gods had descended upon earth, particularly this Parvati, and they saw Anusuya like that. Then Parvati exclaimed, This is a good occasion! Not very far away a cooking fire was burning. With her power, she sent the fire rolling down onto Anusuyas feetwhich startled her because it hurt. It began to burn; not one cry, not one movement, nothing because she didnt want to awaken her husband. But she began invoking Shiva (Shiva was there). And because she invoked Shiva (it is lovely in the story), because she invoked Shiva, Shivas foot began burning! (Mother laughs) Then Narada showed Shiva to Parvati: Look what you are doing; you are burning your husbands foot! So Parvati made the opposite gesture and the fire was put out.
Thats how it went.
--
Oh, the story was very lovely all along. There was one thing after another, one thing after another, and always the power of Anusuya was greater than the power of the Gods. I liked that story very much.
It ended in a (Oh, the story was very long; it lasted three hours!) But really, it was lovely throughout. Lovely in the way it showed that the sincerity of love is much more powerful than anything else.
--
(Shortly afterwards, the disciple again brings up the topic of August 9, where Mother had said that the Gods are a good deal worse than human beings)
It should be said that we are speaking of the Puranic Gods, because the Christians, for example, do not understand what this can mean. They have an entirely different conception of the Gods.
It could apply to the old Greek mythology, though.
--
There is something similar between the Puranic Gods and the Gods of Greek or Egyptian mythology. The Gods of Egyptian mythology are terrible beings They cut off peoples heads, tear their enemies to pieces!
The Greeks were not always tender either!
In Europe and in the modern Western world, it is thought that all these Gods the Greek Gods and the pagan Gods, as they are calledare human fancies, that they are not real beings. To understand, one must know that they are real beings. That is the difference. For Westerners, they are only a figment of the human imagination and dont correspond to anything real in the universe. But that is a gross mistake.
To understand the workings of universal life, and even those of terrestrial life, one must know that in their own realms these are all living beings, each with his own independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist! Most of these Gods existed before man.
They are beings who belong to the progressive creation of the universe and who have themselves presided over its formation from the most etheric or subtle regions to the most material regions. They are a descent of the divine creative Spirit that came to repair the mischief in short, to repair what the Asuras had done. The first makers created disorder and darkness, an unconsciousness, and then it is said that there was a second lineage of makers to repair that evil, and the Gods gradually descended through realities that were ever moreone cant say dense because it isnt really dense, nor can one even say material, since matter as we know it does not exist on these planesthrough more and more concrete substances.
All these zones, these planes of reality, received different names and were classified in different ways according to the occult schools, according to the different traditions, but there is an essential similarity, and if we go back far enough into the various traditions, hardly anything but words differ, depending upon the country and the language. The descriptions are quite similar. Moreover, those who climb back up the ladderor in other words, a human being who, through his occult knowledge, goes out of one of his bodies (they are called sheaths in English) and enters into a more subtle bodyin order to ACT in a more subtle body and so forth, twelve times (you make each body come out from a more material body, leaving the more material body in its corresponding zone, and then go off through successive exteriorizations), what they have seen, what they have discovered and seen through their ascensionwhe ther they are occultists from the Occident or occultists from the Orientis for the most part analogous in description. They have put different words on it, but the experience is very analogous.
--
However, you must have at least a little experience of these things to understand them. Otherwise, if you are convinced that all this is just human fancy or mental formations, if you believe that these Gods have such and such a form because men have imagined them to be like that, or that they have such and such defects or qualities because men have envisioned it that wayas with all those who say God is created in the image of man and exists only in human thoughtall such people wont understand, it will seem absolutely ridiculous to them, a kind of madness. You must live a little, touch the subject a little to know how concrete it is.
Naturally, children know a great dealif they have not been spoiled. There are many children who return to the same place night after night and continue living a life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoiled with age, they can be preserved within one. There was a time when I was especially interested in dreams, and I could return exactly to the same place and continue some work I had begun there, visit something, for example, or see to something, some work of organization or some discovery or exploration; you go to a certain place, just as you go somewhere in life, then you rest a while, then you go back and begin againyou take up your work just where you left it, and you continue. You also notice that there are things entirely independent of you, certain variations which were not at all created by you and which occurred automatically during your absence.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It is something similar to what Sri Aurobindo has written in A Gods Labour.
Was it the Supreme at the very bottom of the Inconscient who cast you up directly to the Supreme?
0 1959-05-19 - Ascending and Descending paths, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
When you follow the ascending path, the work is relatively easy. I had already covered this path by the beginning of the century and had established a constant relationship with the SupremeThat which is beyond the Personal and the Gods and all the outward expressions of the Divine, but also beyond the Absolute Impersonal. Its something you cannot describe; you must experience it. And this is what must be brought down into Matter. Such is the descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo; and there, the work is immense.
The thing can still be brought down as far as the mental and vital planes (although Sri Aurobindo said that thousands of lifetimes would be needed merely to bring it down to the mental plane, unless one practiced a perfect surrender1). With Sri Aurobindo, we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even into the Inconscient. But after the descent comes the transformation, and when you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forwardoh, not even a real step, just a little step!everything starts grating; its like stepping on an anthill And yet the presence, the help of the supreme Mother, is there constantly; thus you realize that for ordinary men such a task is impossible, or else millions of lives would be needed but in truth, unless the work is done for them and the sadhana of the body done for the entire earth consciousness, they will never achieve the physical transformation, or else it will be so remote that it is better not even to speak of it. But if they open themselves, if they give themselves over in an integral surrender, the work can be done for themthey have only to let it be done.
0 1959-06-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The earthquake he mentioned promises to be a kind of pralaya (as X put it), for not only Bombay will be touched. This is what he said: America supports Pakistan, but the Gods do not support Pakistan, and Pakistan will be punished by the Gods. HALF of western Pakistan, including Karachi, will go into the sea. The sea will enter into Rajasthan and touch India also
X then said that India would side with America against the Communist bloc (in spite of Americas support to Pakistan), and furthermore, that the day India sides with America, America will cease supporting Pakistan. In any case, it will be the end of Pakistan.
0 1959-06-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, I have prayed with so much truth in my heart that I am sure the Gods will come to help me, and that you will help me, too. I think not only of Sujata, but of all these destinies that are being stifled within me.
Your child,
0 1960-10-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Yesterday, I suddenly saw a huge living head of blue lightthis blue light which is the force, the powerful force in material Nature (this is the light the tantrics use). The head was made entirely of this light, and it wore a sort of tiaraa big head, so big (Mother indicates the length of her forearm); its eyes werent closed, but rather lowered, like this. The immobility of eternity, absolutely the repose, the immobility of eternity. A magnificent head, quite similar to the way the Gods here are represented, but even better; something between certain heads of the Buddha and (these heads most probably come to the artists). Everything else was lost in a kind of cloud.
I felt that this kind of yes, immobility came from there: everything stops, absolutely everything stops. Silence, immobility truly, you enter into eternity.I told him it wasnt time!
0 1961-01-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the Vedas, the panis and dasyus represent beings or forces hidden in subterranean caves who have stolen the 'Riches' or the 'Lights', symbolized by herds of cows. With the help of the Gods, the Aryan warrior must recover these lost riches, the 'sun in the darkness,' by igniting the flame of sacrifice. It is the path of subterranean descent.
Indra represents the king of the Gods, the master of mental power freed from the limitations and obscurities of the physical consciousness.
The body-consciousness.
0 1961-02-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now, according to Theon, Jehovah was the chief of the Asuras,6 the supreme Asura, the egoistic God who wanted to dominate everything and keep everything under his control. And of course this act made him furious, for it enabled mankind to become Gods through the power of an evolution of consciousness. And thats why he banished them from Paradise.
Although told in a childish manner, theres a great deal of truth in this story, a great deal.
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
55Be wide in me, O Varuna; be mighty in me, O Indra; O Sun, be very bright and luminous; O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness. Be fierce and terrible, O Rudra; be impetuous and swift, O Maruts; be strong and bold, O Aryama; be voluptuous and pleasurable, O Bhaga; be tender and kind and loving and passionate, O Mitra. Be bright and revealing, O Dawn; O Night, be solemn and pregnant. O Life, be full, ready and buoyant; O Death, lead my steps from mansion to mansion. Harmonise all these, O Brahmanaspati. Let me not be subject to these Gods, O Kali.1
He invokes all these Vedic Gods and tells each one to take possession of him; and THEN he tells Kali to free him from their influence! It is very amusing!
Its written in black and white, but the people here read and dont understand what theyre reading, and thats a pity. They have to be told, This means that!
T. asks, Why dont the Gods help us? Why do they keep us in bondage?
Thats not what Sri Aurobindo means! He means he doesnt WANT to be limited by the Gods, not even by their powers. He wants to be vaster than they are: vaster, more total, more complete. Its not a question of getting rid of their influence but of becoming more than that.
(silence)
For Sri Aurobindo, the important thing was always the Mother. As he explained it, the Mother has several aspects, and certain aspects are still unmanifest. So if he has represented the Mother by Kali in particular, I believe its in relation to all those Gods. Because, as he wrote in The Mother, the aspects to be manifested depend upon the time, the need, the thing to be done. And he always said that unless one understands and profoundly feels the aspect of Kali, one can never really participate in the Work in the worldhe felt that a sort of timid weakness makes people recoil before this terrible aspect.
***
0 1961-03-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Things are going very badly: a pack of enemies assailing me, friends deserting usits going very, very badly. Then yesterday evening, while I was walking for japa and all these good tidings were arriving, I said to the Lord, Listen, Lord, you have Indra to help the good people I beseech you, send him to me; he has some work to do!(Mother laughs) Then my walk became so amusing! I was watching them come in as I walked Indra and all the other Godsand they were hard at work. Delightful!
Hibiscus, double flower, light pink.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yet for a time I was in contact with all these Gods and all these things, and they had an entirely concrete reality for me; but now I read and I understand, but I cannot live it. And I dont know why. It still hasnt triggered the experience. You see, experience for me the constant, total and permanent Experienceis that there is nothing other than the Supremeonly the Supreme that the Supreme alone exists. So when they speak of Agni or Varuna or Indra it doesnt strike a chord. However, what the Vedas succeed in doing very well is to give you the perception of your infirmity and ineptitude, of the dismal state we are in now; it succeeds wonderfully in doing that!
Yesterday, this ardor of the Flame was thereburning all to offer all. It was absolutely concrete, an intensity of vibrations; I could see the vibrationsall the movements of obscurity and ignorance were cast into that. And I recall a time when I was translating these hymns to Agni with Sri Aurobindo, and Agni was real for me. Well, yesterday it wasnt that, it wasnt the god Agni, it was a STATE OF BEING. It was a state of the Supreme, and as such, it was intimate, clear, intense, vibrant and living.
0 1961-04-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But what can be translated is this kind of sensation that the sequence of cause and effect, of purpose, of goal, all seems to be very far below, very, very DISTANT, very humanperhaps divine, too (from the viewpoint of the Gods it may be like this also, I dont know), because in the consciousness of the universal Mother it is still there, there is still this ardent love to serve: To do Your Will. That is still there, so its there with the Gods also.
(silence)
0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
59One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their Gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.
Poor T.! She asked me, What does it mean (laughing) to give God a satisfactory beating? How is this possible? I still havent answered. And then she added another question: Many people say that Sri Aurobindos teachings are a new religion. Would you call it a religion? You understand, I began to fume!
--
Europeans dont have the inner sense at all. To them, everything is like this (gesture), a surfacenot even that, a film on the surface. And they cant feel anything behind. But its an absolutely real fact that the Presence is there I guarantee it. People have given me statuettes of various Gods, little things in metal, wood or ivory; and as soon as I take one in my hand, the god is there. I have a Ganesh2 (I have been given several) and if I take it in my hand and look at it for a moment, hes there. I have a little one by my bedside where I work, eat, and meditate. And then there is a Narayana3 which comes from the Himalayas, from Badrinath. I use them both as paperweights for my handkerchiefs! (My handkerchiefs are kept on a little table next to my bed, and I keep Ganapati and Narayana on top of them.) And no one touches them but me I pick them up, take a fresh handkerchief, and put them back again. Once I blended some nail polish myself, and before applying it, I put some on Ganapatis forehead and stomach and fingertips! We are on the best of terms, very friendly. So to me, you see, all this is very true.
Only.
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Narayana: another name of Vishnu, one of the Gods of the Hindu trinity. He watches over the creation, whereas Brahma is the creator and Shiva the destroyer.
Rakshasa: demon of the vital plane, as opposed to an asura, a demon of the mental world.
0 1961-07-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
68The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was Gods corrective for egoism. But mans egoism meets Gods device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.
(Mother laughs) Marvelous!
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Once this had occurred, the divine Consciousness turned towards the Supreme and said (Mother laughs): Well, heres what has happened. Whats to be done? Then from the Divine came an emanation of Love (in the first emanation it wasnt Love, it was Ananda, Bliss, the Delight of being which became Suffering), and from the Supreme came Love; and Love descended into this domain of Inconscience, the result of the creation of the first emanation, Consciousness Consciousness and Light had become Inconscience and Darkness. Love descended straight from the Supreme into this Inconscience; the Supreme, that is, created a new emanation, which didnt pass through the intermediate worlds (because, according to the story, the universal Mother first created all the Gods who, when they descended, remained in contact with the Supreme and created all the intermediate worlds to counterbalance this fallits the old story of the Fall, this fall into the Inconscient. But that wasnt enough). Simultaneously with the creation of the Gods, then, came this direct Descent of Love into Matter, without passing through all the intermediate worlds. Thats the story of the first Descent. But youre speaking of the descent heralded by Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental Descent, arent you?
Not only that. For example, Sri Aurobindo says that when Life appeared there was a pressure from below, from evolution, to make Life emerge from Matter, and simultaneously a descent of Life from its own plane. Then, when Mind emerged out of Life, the same thing from above happened again. Why this intervention from above each time? Why dont things emerge normally, one after another, without needing a descent?
--
Take the experience of Mind, for example: Mind, in the evolution of Nature, gradually emerging from its involution; well and this is a very concrete experience these initial mentalized forms, if we can call them that, were necessarily incomplete and imperfect, because Natures evolution is slow and hesitant and complicated. Thus these forms inevitably had an aspiration towards a sort of perfection and a truly perfect mental state, and this aspiration brought the descent of already fully conscious beings from the mental world who united with terrestrial formsthis is a very, very concrete experience. What emerges from the Inconscient in this way is an almost impersonal possibility (yes, an impersonal possibility, and perhaps not altogether universal, since its connected with the history of the earth); but anyway its a general possibility, not personal. And the Response from above is what makes it concrete, so to speak, bringing in a sort of perfection of the state and an individual mastery of the new creation. These beings in corresponding worlds (like the Gods of the overmind,4 or the beings of higher regions) came upon earth as soon as the corresponding element began to evolve out of its involution. This accelerates the action, first of all, but also makes it more perfectmore perfect, more powerful, more conscious. It gives a sort of sanction to the realization. Sri Aurobindo writes of this in SavitriSavitri lives always on earth, with the soul of the earth, to make the whole earth progress as quickly as possible. Well, when the time comes and things on earth are ready, then the divine Mother incarnates with her full powerwhen things are ready. Then will come the perfection of the realization. A splendor of creation exceeding all logic! It brings in a fullness and a power completely beyond the petty shallow logic of human mentality.
People cant understand! To put oneself at the level of the general public may be all very well5 (personally I have never found it so, although its probably inevitable), but to hope that they will ever understand the splendor of the Thing. They have to live it first!
--
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the 'Overmind' represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the Gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now. in his gradations of the worlds, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two hemispheres, the upper hemisphere and the lower. The Overmind is the line between these two hemispheres, 'This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, but in receiving it divides, distributes, breaks up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds.' In the words of the Upanishad, 'The face of the Truth is covered by a golden lid.'
Mother is referring to the book Satprem will write on Sri Aurobindo, which prompted the questions posed in this conversation.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this respect, you say somewhere that the Gods too must incarnate to become fully conscious.
Yes, because.
How is this possible? Arent the Gods already fully conscious?!
No, they have no psychic being, so that whole side of life does not exist for them.
In all the traditions here in India (and in other countries and other religions as well), most of the time these Gods behave impossibly! This is simply because they have no psychic being. The psychic being is the one thing belonging specifically to terrestrial life; it has been given as a grace to repair, to undo what had been done.
Yes, but arent the Gods conscious of the Divine?
Listen, mon petit, they are conscious of their own divinity, and of that above all!
--
I knew how it was with her because I remember the days when Sri Aurobindo was here and I used to go downstairs to give meditations to the people assembled in the hall. Theres a ledge above the pillars there, where all the Gods used to sitShiva, Krishna, Lakshmi, the Trimurti, all of them the little ones, the big ones, they all used to come regularly, every day, to attend these meditations. It was a lovely sight. But they didnt have this kind of adoration for the Supreme. They had no use for that concepteach one, in his own mode of being, was fully aware of his own eternal divinity; and each one knew as well that he could represent all the others (such was the basis of popular worship,7 and they knew it). They felt they were a kind of community, but they had none of those qualities that the psychic life gives: no deep love, no deep sympathy, no sense of union. They had only the sense of their OWN divinity. They had certain very particular movements, but not this adoration for the Supreme nor the feeling of being instruments: they felt they were representing the Supreme, and so each one was perfectly satisfied with his particular representation.
Except for Krishna. In 1926, I had begun a sort of overmental creation, that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). I asked all these Gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body (some of them absolutely refused). Well, with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on November 24th, and it was the beginning of Mother.8
Yes, in fact I wanted to ask you what this realization of 1926 was.
It was this: Krishna consented to descend into Sri Aurobindos bodyto be FIXED there; there is a great difference, you understand, between incarnating, being fixed in a body, and simply acting as an influence that comes and goes and moves about. The Gods are always moving about, and its plain that we ourselves, in our inner beings, come and go and act in a hundred or a thousand places at once. There is a difference between just coming occasionally and accepting to be permanently tied to a bodybetween a permanent influence and a permanent presence.
These things have to be experienced.
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The secret lies in matter. Because Agni is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. It is said that Agni is without head or feet, that it conceals its two extremities: above, it disappears into the great heaven of the supraconscient (which the Rishis also called the great ocean), and below, it sinks into the formless ocean of the inconscient (which they also called the rock). We are truncated. But the Rishis were men of a solid realism, a true realism resting upon the Spirit; and since the summits of mind opened out upon a lacuna of lightecstatic, to be sure, but with no hold over the worldthey set upon the downward way.6 Thus begins the quest for the lost sun, the long pilgrimage of descent into the inconscient and the merciless fight against the dark forces, the thieves of the sun, the panis and vritras, pythons and giants, hidden in the dark lair with the whole cohort of usurpers: the dualizers, the confiners, the tearers, the COVERERS. But the divine worker, Agni, is helped by the Gods, and in his quest he is led by the intuitive ray, Sarama, the heavenly hound with the subtle sense of smell who sets Agni on the track of the stolen herds (strange, shining herds). Now and again there comes the sudden glimmer of a fugitive dawn then all grows dim. One must advance step by step, digging, digging, fighting every inch of the way against the wolves whose savage fury increases the nearer one draws to their denAgni is a warrior. Agni grows through his difficulties, his flame burns more brilliantly with each blow from the Adversary; for, as the Rishis said, Night and Day both suckled the divine Child; they even said that Night and Day are the two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover [the sun] common they, though different their forms (I.113.2,3). These alternations of night and brightness accelerate until Day breaks at last and the herds of Dawn7 surge upward awakening someone who was dead (I.113.8). The infinite rock of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers the Sun dwelling in the darkness (III.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter. In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call the Great Passage. Without abandoning the earth they found the vast dwelling place, that dwelling place of the Gods, Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: Human beings [the Rishis emphasize that they are indeed men] slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place (I.36.8). They have entered the True, the Right, the Vast, Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the unbroken light, the fearless light, where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amritam.
***
All is reconciled. The Rishi is the son of two mothers: son of Aditi, the luminous cow, Mother of infinite Light, creatrix of the worlds; and son as well of Diti, the black cow, Mother of the tenebrous infinite and divided existence for when Diti at last reaches the end of her apparent Night, she gives us divine birth and the milk of heaven. All is fulfilled, The Rishi sets flowing in one movement human strengths and things divine (IX.70.3), he has realized the universal in the individual, become the Infinite in the finite: Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of these Gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee (V.66.2). Far from spurning the earth, he prays: O Godhead, guard for us the Infinite and lavish the finite(IV.2.11).
The voyage draws to its close. Agni has recovered its solar totality, its two concealed extremities. The inviolable work is fulfilled. For Agni is the place where high meets lowand in truth, there is no longer high nor low, but a single Sun everywhere: O Flame, thou goest to the ocean of Heaven, towards the Gods; thou makest to meet together the godheads of the planes, the waters that are in the realm of light above the sun and the waters that abide below (III.22.3). O Fire O universal Godhead, thou art the navel-knot of the earths and their inhabitants; all men born thou controllest and supportest like a pillar (I.59.1). O Flame, thou foundest the mortal in a supreme immortality thou createst divine bliss and human joy (I.31.7). For the worlds heart is Joy, Joy dwells in the depths of all things, the well of honey covered by the rock (II.24.4).
The day before, Mother had listened to the passage of the manuscript concerning 'The Secret of the Veda.' Several extracts from it are included in the Addendum to this conversation.
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As a matter of fact, the books he wrote (especially the first one, The Living Ether) were based on my knowledge; he put my knowledge into French and beautiful French, I must say! I would tell him my experiences and he would write them down. Later he wrote The Gods (it was incomplete, one-sided). Then he became a lawyer and entered politics (he was a first-class orator and fired his audiences with enthusiasm) and was sent to Pondicherry to help a certain candidate who couldnt manage his election campaign single-handed. And since Richard was interested in occultism and spirituality, he took this opportunity to seek a Master, a yogi. When he arrived, instead of involving himself in politics, the first thing he did was announce, I am seeking a yogi. Someone said to him, Youre incredibly lucky! The yogi has just arrived. It was Sri Aurobindo, who was told, Theres a Frenchman asking to see you. Sri Aurobindo wasnt particularly pleased but he found the coincidence rather interesting and received him. This was in 1910.
When Richard had finished his work, he returned to France with a poor photograph of Sri Aurobindo and a completely superficial impression of him, yet with the feeling that Sri Aurobindo KNEW (he hadnt at all understood the man that Sri Aurobindo was, he hadnt felt the presence of an Avatar, but he had sensed that he had knowledge). Moreover, I think he always held this opinion, because he used to say that Sri Aurobindo was a unique intellectual giant without many spiritual realizations! (The same type of stupidity as Romain Rollands.) Well, my relationship with Richard was on an occult plane, you see, and its difficult to touch upon. What happened was far more exciting than any novel imaginable.
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
68The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was Gods corrective for egoism. But mans egoism meets Gods device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.
69Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection. The sense of virtue helps us to cherish our sins in secret.
0 1962-01-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What the white Gods had missed: they too are safe;
A Mothers eyes are on them and her arms
--
What the white Gods had missed.
I didnt remember it. But thats it exactly.
0 1962-01-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Id like to ask you a question about those lines from Savitri I showed you the other day. I dont know if you remember the passage about the white Gods.
What did you want to ask? What was it that the white Gods had missed? But Sri Aurobindo has written it all down in full, right here in the Aphorisms. He has mentioned everything, taken up one thing after another: Without this, there would not have been that; without this, there would not have been that and so on.1
But I also remember reading The Tradition, before I met Sri Aurobindo (it was like a novel, a serialized romance of the worlds creation, but it was very evocative; Theon called it The Tradition). That was where I first learned of the universal Mothers first four emanations, when the Lord delegated his creative power to the Mother. And it was identical to the ancient Indian tradition, but told like a nursery story; anyone could understandit was an image, like a movie, and very vivid.
--
And as She plunged into the earth, a second series of emanations was sent forth the Godsto inhabit the intermediary zones between Sachchidananda and the earth. And these Gods (laughing) well, great care was taken to make them perfect, so they wouldnt give any trouble! But they are a bit a bit too perfect, arent they? Yes, a bit too perfect: they never make mistakes, they always do exactly as theyre told. In short, rather lacking in initiative. They do have some, but.
In fact, they were not surrendered in the way a psychic being can be, because they had no psychic in them. The psychic being is the result of that descent. Only human beings have it. And thats what makes humanity so superior to the Gods. Theon insisted greatly on this: throughout his story, humans are far superior to Gods and should not obey themthey should only be in contact with the Supreme in his aspect of perfect Love.
I dont know how to put it. To me, those Gods always seemed (not those described in the Puranas, theyre different well, not so very different!) but the way Theon presented them, they seemed just like a bunch of marshmallows! Its not that they had no powerthey had a lot of power, but they lacked that psychic flame.
And to Theon, the God of the Jews and Christians was an Asura. This Asura wanted to be unique; and so he became the most terrible despot imaginable. Anatole France said the same thing (I now know that Anatole France had never read Theons story, but I cant imagine where he picked this up). Its in The Revolt of the Angels. He says that Satan is the true God and that Jehovah, the only God, is the monster. And when the angels wanted Satan to become the one and only God, Satan realized he was immediately taking on all Jehovahs failings! So he refused: Oh, nothank you very much! Its a wonderful story, and in exactly the same spirit as what Theon used to say. The very first thing I asked Anatole France (I told you I met him oncemutual friends introduced us), the first thing I asked him was, Have you ever read The Tradition? He said no. I explained why I had asked, and he was interested. He said his source was his own imagination. He had caught that idea intuitively.
0 1962-02-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Sri Aurobindo's play, Andromeda, daughter of the King of Syria, is condemned by her own people to be devoured by Poseidon, the Sea-god, for some impiety she had committed against him. The story is actually about the passage of a half-primitive tribe, living in terror of the old dark and cruel Gods, to a more evolved and sunlit stage. Perseus, son of Diana and Zeus, and protected by Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and intelligence, comes to deliver Andromeda from the rock she is chained to (the rock symbolizes the Inconscient for the Rishis), and founds the religion of Athene, "... the Omnipotent / Made from His being to lead and discipline / The immortal spirit of man, till it attain / To order and magnificent mastery / Of all his outward world" (in the words of Sri Aurobindo). It is the force of progress pitted against the old priests of the old religions, symbolized by the cruel and ambitious Polydaon. Here Mother is scrutinizing an old problem"Always the same problem"that she must have encountered in many existences (Egypt included) and would encounter again eleven years later: the acceptance of the death she is forced into as the Supreme's Will, and then this "love of Life" she twice mentions here.
***
0 1962-02-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Meanwhile, there are all sorts of ways to receive indications. That exact, precise and (whats the word?) habitual vision certain people have may stem from various sources. It may be a vision through identity with circumstances and things when you have learned to expand your consciousness. It may be an indication from some chatterbox of the invisible world, who has got it into his head to let you know whats going to happenthis is often the case. Then everything depends on your harbingers morals: if he is having fun at your expense, he spins stories for youthis almost always happens to those who receive their information from entities. To bait you, they may repeatedly tell you how things are going to turn out (for they have a universal vision in some vital or mental realm); then, when they are sure you trust them, they may start telling you fibs and, as they say in English, you make a fool of yourself. This happens frequently! You have to be in a higher consciousness than these fellows, these entities (or these minor Gods, as some call them) and able to check from above the value of their statements.
With a universal mental vision, you can see (and this is very interesting) how the mental world operates to get realized on the physical plane. You see the various mental formations, how they converge, conflict, combine and relate to one another, which ones get the upper hand, exert a stronger influence and achieve a more total realization. Now, if you really want a higher vision, you must get out of the mental world and see the original wills as they descend to take expression. In this case, you may not have all the details, but the central FACT, the fact in its central truth, is indisputable, undeniable, absolutely correct.
0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, but what about the minor Gods? You often speak of a little Kali or a little Durga; are these beings beneficent?
Ah, they arent from the vital at all! Not at all! They are manifestations of Overmind2 beings, projected into the vital world for a specific action. But they arent vital beings: they have an Origin, they are still linked to a being from another world. Oh, no, not at all!
--
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the Overmind represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the Gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now.
***
0 1962-06-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yantram: Tantric symbol used to invoke or evoke Gods, goddesses, or beings from worlds beyond.
Siddhi: realization (sometimes also occult powers).
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Besides, all the Greek Gods are various aspects of a single thing: you see it this way, that way, that way, this way (turning her hand, Mother seems to show several facets of a single prism). But its simply one and the same thing.4
Sri Aurobindos description fits this Being exactly. And a few days ago, this same Being came, without my calling it or thinking about it or wishing it to come. And it seemed to be saying it was time for it to intervene.
--
Did I ever tell you? Last time I went down for the pujas (was it last year or the year before? I remember nothing any more, you know: it all gets swept away, brrt!). Yes, it was the year before last, in 60, after that anniversary.6 (Durga used to come every year, two or three days before the Durga puja.) I was walking as usual and she came; that was when she made her surrender to the Supreme. Those divinities dont have the sense of surrender. Divinities such as Durga and the Greek Gods (although the Greek Gods are a bit dated now; but the Gods of India are still very much alive!). Well, they are embodimentswhat you might almost call localizationsof something eternal, but they lack the sense of surrender to the Supreme. And while I was walking, Durga was therereally, it was beautiful! Durga, with that awesome power of hers, forever bringing the adverse forces to heel and she surrendered to the Supreme, to the point of no longer even recognizing the adverse forces: ALL is the Supreme. It was like a widening of her consciousness.
Some interesting things have been happening in that world [since the supramental descent]. How can I explain? Those beings have an independence, an absolute freedom of movement (although at the same time, they are all a single Being), but they had the true sense of perfect Unity only with the supreme Consciousness. And now with this present intervention [Mothers], with this incarnation and the establishment of the Consciousness here, like this (Mother makes a fist in a gesture of immutable solidity), in such an absolute way (I mean there are no fluctuations) HERE, on earth, in the terrestrial atmosphere, this incarnation has a radiating action throughout all those worlds, all those universes, all those Entities. And it results in small events,7 incidents scaled to the size of the earthwhich in themselves are quite interesting.
0 1962-06-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(A little later, Mother refers to a passage from the preceding conversation in which she said that her present incarnation on earth didnt have a merely terrestrial effect but an effect on all the other worlds as well and particularly on the Gods.)
None of those beings, those Gods and deities of various pantheons, have the same rapport with the Supreme that man has; for man has a psychic being, in other words, the Supremes presence within him. These Gods are emanationsindependent emanationscreated for a special purpose and a particular action which they fulfill SPONTANEOUSLY; they do it not with a sense of constant surrender to the Divine but simply because thats what they are, and why they are, and all they know is what they are. They dont have the conscious link with the Supreme that man hasman carries the Supreme within himself.
That makes a considerable difference.
But with this present incarnation of the Mahashakti. She is the Supremes first manifestation, creations first stride, and it was She who first gave form to all those beings. Now, since her incarnation in the physical world, and through the position She has taken here in relation to the Supreme by incarnating in a human body, all the other worlds have been influenced, and influenced in an extremely interesting way.8 I have been in contact with all those Gods, all those great beings, and for the most part their attitude has changed. And even with those who didnt want to change, it has nonetheless influenced their way of being.
Human experience, with this direct incarnation of the Supreme,9 is ultimately a UNIQUE experience, which has given a new orientation to universal history. Sri Aurobindo speaks of thishe speaks of the difference between the Vedic era, the Vedic way of relating to the Supreme, and the advent of Vedanta (I think its Vedanta): devotion, adoration, bhakti, the God within.10 Well, this aspect of rapport with the Supreme could exist ONLY WITH MAN, because man is a special being in universal History the divine Presence is in him. And several of those great Gods have taken human bodies JUST TO HAVE THAT.11 But not many of themthey were so fully aware of their own perfect independence and their almightiness that they didnt NEED anything (unlike man, you see, struggling to escape his slavery): they were absolutely free.
And thats why. How many times Durga came! She would always come, and I had my eye on her (!), because in her presence I could clearly sense that there wasnt that rapport with the Supreme (she just didnt need it, she didnt need anything). And it wasnt that something acted on her consciously, deliberately, to obtain that result: it has been a contagion. I remember how she used to come, and my aspiration would be so intense, my inner attitude so concentrated and one day there was such a sense of power, of immensity, of ineffable bliss in the contact with the Supreme (it was a day when Durga was there), and she seemed to be taken and absorbed in it. And through that bliss she made her surrender.
--
Vedism is in contact with the Gods and, THROUGH THE Gods, with the Supreme; but it is not in direct contact with the Supreme there is no inner, psychic contact. That's what Sri Aurobindo says (I myself know nothing about it!). But with the Vedanta and the devotees of Krishna, it is the god within: they had a direct contact with the god within (as in the Gita).
Shortly afterwards, Satprem asked:
--
But supposing one of those Gods were to incarnate in the present world ... well, it wouldn't be much funhe would suffocate.
Fun?... No, you see, they extend sufficiently beyond the limits of their bodies so as not to be suffocated.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is no easy change to make. After these fifteen years I am only now rising into the lowest of the three levels of the Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities. But when this siddhi will be complete, then I am absolutely certain that through me God will give to others the siddhi of the Supermind with less effort. Then my real work will begin. I am not impatient for success in the work. What is to happen will happen in Gods appointed time. I have no hasty or disorderly impulse to rush into the field of work in the strength of the little ego. Even if I did not succeed in my work I would not be shaken. This work is not mine but Gods. I will listen to no other call; when God moves me then I will move.
I know very well that Bengal is not really ready. The spiritual flood which has come is for the most part a new form of the old. It is not the real transformation. However this too was needed. Bengal has been awakening in itself the old yogas and exhausting their samskaras [old habitual tendencies], extracting their essence and with it fertilizing the soil. At first it was the time of VedantaAdwaita, Sannyasa, Shankaras Maya and the rest. It is now the turn of Vaishnava DharmaLila, love, the intoxication of emotional experience. All this is very old, unfitted for the new age and will not endure for such excitement has no capacity to last. But the merit of the Vaishnava Bhava [emotional enthusiasm] is that it keeps a connexion between God and the world and gives a meaning to life; but since it is a partial bhava the whole connexion, the full meaning is not there. The tendency to create sects which you have noticed was inevitable. The nature of the mind is to take a part and call it the whole and exclude all other parts. The Siddha [illuminated being] who brings the bhava, although he leans on its partial aspect, yet keeps some knowledge of the integral whole, even though he may not be able to give it form. But his disciples do not get that knowledge precisely because it is not in a form. They are tying up their little bundles, let them. The bundles will open of themselves when God manifests himself fully. These things are the signs of incompleteness and immaturity. I am not disturbed by them. Let the force of spirituality play in the country in whatever way and in as many sects as may be. Afterwards we shall see. This is the infancy or the embryonic condition of the new age. It is a first hint, not even the beginning.
--
We can mix with all, but in order to draw all into the true path, keeping intact the spirit and form of our ideal. If we do not do that we shall lose our direction and the real work will not be done. If we remain individually everywhere, something will be done indeed; but if we remain everywhere as parts of a Samgha, a hundred times more will be done. As yet that time has not come. If we try to give a form hastily, it may not be the exact thing we want. The Samgha will at first be in unconcentrated form. Those who have the ideal will be united but work in different places. Afterwards, they will form something like a spiritual commune and make a compact Samgha. They will then give all their work a shape according to the demand of the spirit and the need of the agenot a bound and rigid form, not an achalayatana3, but a free form which will spread out like the sea, mould itself into many waves and surround a thing here, overflood a thing there and finally take all into itself. As we go on doing this there will be established a spiritual community. This is my present idea. As yet it has not been fully developed. All is in Gods hands; whatever He makes us do, that we shall do.
Now let me discuss some particular points of your letter. I do not want to say much in this letter about what you have written as regards your yoga. We shall have better occasion when we meet. To look upon the body as a corpse is a sign of Sannyasa, of the path of Nirvana. You cannot be of the world with this idea. You must have delight in all thingsin the Spirit as well as in the body. The body has consciousness, it is Gods form. When you see God in everything that is in the world, when you have this vision that all this is Brahman, Sarvamidam Brahma, that Vasudeva is all thisVasudevah sarvamiti then you have the universal delight. The flow of that delight precipitates and courses even through the body. When you are in such a state, full of the spiritual consciousness, you can lead a married life, a life in the world. In all your works you find the expression of Gods delight. So far I have been transforming all the objects and perceptions of the mind and the senses into delight on the mental level. Now they are taking the form of the supramental delight. In this condition is the perfect vision and perception of Sachchidananda.
You write about the Deva Samgha and say, I am not a god, I am only a piece of much hammered and tempered iron. No one is a God but in each man there is a God and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do. I recognize that there are great and small adharas [vessels]. I do not accept, however, your description of yourself as accurate. Still whatever the nature of the vessel, once the touch of God is upon it, once the spirit is awake, great and small and all that does not make much difference. There may be more difficulties, more time may be taken, there may be a difference in the manifestation, but even about that there is no certainty. The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my failings a small one? Were there less obstacles in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something. That is sufficient, since God wanted to build it. It is the same as regards everyone. Not our strength but the Shakti of God is the sadhaka [worker] of this yoga.
Let me tell you in brief one or two things about what I have long seen. My idea is that the chief cause of the weakness of India is not subjection nor poverty, nor the lack of spirituality or dharma [ethics] but the decline of thought-power, the growth of ignorance in the motherl and of Knowledge. Everywhere I see inability or unwillingness to thinkthought-incapacity or thought-phobia. Whatever may have been in the middle ages, this state of things is now the sign of a terrible degeneration. The middle age was the night, the time of the victory of ignorance. The modern world is the age of the victory of Knowledge. Whoever thinks most, seeks most, labors most, can fathom and learn the truth of the world, and gets so much more Shakti. If you look at Europe, you will see two things: a vast sea of thought and the play of a huge and fast-moving and yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe is in that. And in the strength of that Shakti it has been swallowing up the world, like the tapaswins [ascetics] of our ancient times, by whose power even the Gods of the world were terrified, held in suspense and subjection. People say Europe is running into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions and upsettings are the preconditions of a new creation.
Then look at India. Except for some solitary giants, everywhere there is your simple man, that is, the average man who does not want to think and cannot think, who has not the least Shakti but only a temporary excitement. In India, you want the simple thought, the easy word. In Europe they want the deep thought, the deep word; there even an ordinary laborer or artisan thinks, wants to know, is not satisfied with surface things but wants to go behind. But there is still this difference: there is a fatal limitation in the strength and thought of Europe. When it comes into the spiritual field, its thought-power can no longer move ahead. There Europe sees everything as riddlenebulous metaphysics, yogic hallucination. They rub their eyes as in smoke and can see nothing clear. Still, some effort is being made in Europe to surmount even this limitation. We already have the spiritual sensewe owe it to our forefa thersand whoever has that sense has at his disposal such Knowledge and Shakti as with one breath might blow away all the huge power of Europe like a blade of grass. But to get that Shakti one must be a worshiper of Shakti. We are not worshipers of Shakti. We are worshipers of the easy way. But Shakti is not to be had by the easy way. Our forefa thers dived into a sea of vast thought and gained a vast Knowledge and established a mighty civilization. As they went on in their way, fatigue and weariness came upon them. The force of thought diminished and with it also the strong current of Shakti. Our civilization has become an achalayatana [prison], our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of religious intoxication. And so long as this sort of thing continues, any permanent resurgence of India is improbable
0 1962-09-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the middle of the First World War, Sri Aurobindo noted with prophetic force: The defeat of Germany could not of itself kill the spirit then incarnate in Germany; it may well lead merely to a new incarnation of it, perhaps in some other race or empire, and the whole battle would then have to be fought over again. So long as the old Gods are alive, the breaking or depression of the body which they animate is a small matter, for they know well how to transmigrate. Germany overthrew the Napoleonic spirit in France in 1813 and broke the remnants of her European leadership in 1870; the same Germany became the incarnation of that which it had overthrown. The phenomenon is easily capable of renewal on a more formidable scale.2 Today we are finding that the old Gods know how to transmigrate. Gandhi himself, seeing all those years of nonviolence culminate in the terrible violence that marked Indias partition in 1947, ruefully observed shortly before his death: The attitude of violence which we have secretly harboured now recoils on us, and makes us fly at each others throats when the question of distribution of power arises. Now that the burden of subjection is lifted, all the forces of evil have come to the surface. For neither nonviolence nor violence touch upon the root of Evil.
Ahimsa: nonviolence.
0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The overmind isnt part of the intellect. Its the domain of the Gods.
It is the domain of the Gods, and thats what has been ruling the earth. All the Gods men have known, worshipped and had contact with are there.
Yes, a domain of Gods, with godlike lives and godlike waysits not the Supermind.
Yes, precisely but what exactly makes the difference?
I dont believe the Gods have access to the Supermind.
Yes, the Gods stop at the overmind.
I am unfamiliar with the purely Hindu traditions, but the Gods are the beings the Vedas and people of Vedic times were in touch wi that least I think so. I learned what I know about the Gods before coming here, through the other tradition, the Chaldean. But Thon used to say that this tradition and the Vedic (which he knew well) were outgrowths of a more ancient tradition common to both. The story goes, according to him, that the first Emanations, who were perfectly independent, separated themselves from the Supreme in their action, creating all the disorder thats what caused the creations disorder. Afterwards the Gods were emanated, to repair the evil that had been wrought and to organize the world according to the supreme Will. Of course, this is a childlike way of putting it, but its comprehensible. So all these Gods work in harmony and order. Thats what the ancient tradition says.
As far as Ive understood, the Indian tradition has embraced everything that came from the first Emanations, since all the Gods of destruction, of unconsciousness and of suffering are included in its pantheon.
In the end, I think its up to each one to name what he wants the way he wants. Thats how I have always felt. Even in Hindu tradition it is written: Man is chattel for the Gods; beware of the Gods.
All this is merely a question of language to mewords to suit each one according to his nature.
Ive had conscious contacts with all the beings of the tradition Theon made known to me, and with all the beings described in Indian tradition; in fact, as far as I know Ive had contacts with all the deities of all the religions. Theres a gradation (gesture of levels). These beings are found all the way from there are even some in the vital; in the mental realm, man has deified many things: he has readily made Gods out of whatever didnt seem exactly like him. If you are eclectic, you can have contacts with them all. And they all have their own reality and existence.
This region just overlooks the earth and the mind (including the very highest mind). But evolution I mean TERRESTRIAL evolution, with its particular rhythm which is more condensed, more concentrated and, you could say, more focused than universal evolution as a wholethis terrestrial evolution has, with the human species, created a kind of higher intellectuality capable of passing through the overmental region, the region of the Gods, and reaching a higher Principle directly.
But this overmental region, this region of the Gods with the power to govern the universe and, PARTIALLY, the earth, does have its own reality. You can come into contact with it and use it; the Vedic forefa thers used it, occultists use it, even Tantrics use it. But theres another path which, distrusting the Gods, bypasses them through a kind of intellectual asceticism, as it were, wary of forms, of images, and differing expressions, which rises straight as an arrow, proud and pure, towards the supramental Light. That is a living experience.
Sri Aurobindo preached the integral yoga which includes everything, so one can have all the experiences. Indeed, the universe was clearly created as a field of experience. Some people prefer the short, straight and narrow paths thats their business. Others like to dawdle along the wayand thats their business! And some are drawn to have all the experiences, and thus they often wander for a long time through the overmental world. And of course, the vast majority of those who have RELIGIOUS aspirations are thus put in touch with various deities, where they stopits enough for them.
--
Actually, this domain of the Gods belongs to our side, although on a godlike scale: with the Gods power, their possibilities, their consciousness, their freedom; and their immortality, too. In other words, a godlike life I think most human beings would be more than satisfied with it!
And as all the stories tell us, sometimes the Gods come to earth to have some fun. I know that some come and take on a human body to have a psychic being but not all. Most of them simply enjoy having human contact. In any case, they have bodies in their own domain theres no sense of being bodiless. They have bodiesimmortal ones.
Yes, but in the Supermind as well?
But the Gods dont go to the Supermind!
No, what I mainly want to know is the difference when you cross to the other side, into the Supermind the difference in vision between the Supermind and the overmind.
--
This is just what I am observing these days. To me, the overmental consciousness is a magnified consciousness: far lovelier, far loftier, far more powerful, far happier, far with lots of far mores to it. But. I can tell you one thing: the Gods dont have the sense of Oneness. For instance, in their own way they quarrel among themselves, which shows they have no sense of Oneness, no sense of all being one, of all being various expressions of the Divine the unique Divine. So they are still on this side, but with magnified forms, and powers beyond our comprehension: the power to change form at will, for example, or to be in many places at the same timeall sorts of things that poor human beings can only dream of having. The Gods have it all. They live a divine life! But its not supramental.
The Supermind is knowledgePure Knowledge. Yes, it is knowingknowing what is to be known.
There is no longer a play BETWEEN oneself and things, its. Truly, the sign of the Supermind is Oneness. Not a sum of a lot of different things, but, on the contrary, a Oneness at play with Itself. Theres nothing of the way Gods relate to each other and the world, for they are still part of the realm of diversity, though FREE from Ignorance. They dont have Ignorance, they dont have what we human beings have here. They have no Ignorance, they have no Unconsciousness, but they have the sense of diversity and of separation.
What about Sri Aurobindos experience at Alipore, then? You know, that well-known experience when he saw Narayana in the prisoners, Narayana in the guards, Narayana everywhere?
--
The experience of the Gods has never been more than a distraction for mean amusement, a pleasant diversion; none of it seems essential or indispensable. You can treat yourself to the luxury of all these experiences, and they increase your knowledge and your power, your this and your that, but its not particularly important. THE thing is altogether different.
We can do without the Gods. We can have access to the Supermind without any of these experiences, theyre not indispensable. But if you want to know and experience the universe, if you want to be identified with the Supreme in His expression, well, all this is part of His expression, in varying degrees and with varying powers. Its all part of His experience. So why not treat yourself to that luxury? Its very interesting, very interesting but not indispensable.
I think that once you are identified with the Supreme and He has chosen you to do a work on earth, then He quite naturally grants you all these things, because it increases your power of action, thats all. Thats all.
--
Sri Aurobindo didnt put too much emphasis on the Overmind. The one significant point is that the Overmind has ruled the world through the different religions. And it is the dwelling place of all the Gods, all the beings humans have made into Gods in their religions. Those beings exist in their own world, and some humans, coming in touch with them, have been overwhelmed by their powers and their superiority, and have made Gods and religions out of them.
But its better not to emphasize this [in your book]. As I have said, we can bypass that plane, or even pass through without knowing it. It interested me to read in the Vedas that if you dont ascend the way youre supposed to, if you try to bypass the Gods, then unpleasant things happen to you and your way is blockeddo you remember that?1 That gives you an idea of what it is. Its like an intermediary zone, far superior to the earth, but still intermediary. Some have tried to cross it without stopping; and there, they say, you run into trouble. Personally, I am not sure, I can only speak of my own experience: there was always a sense of fraternityas you can imagine! I knew them, I was on friendly terms with them, so there was no question of bypassing them or not!
But I have a strong impression that that world is still a magnified version of our own, and part of the old path; it has nothing to do with the Supramental Creation, which will bring to earth the sense of the Supreme and the Unique.
--
But the Gods belong to the present curve. The overmind belongs to this curve.
Those Gods are all very nice! For some people theyre unbearable at times (Mother laughs), but theyre really very nice! They have their faults, they have their good points, but with me they have always been very nice!
No more (Mother makes an X across her mouth).
--
Oh, yes! He used the word Narayana because he hadnt yet developed his own terminology; but he isnt referring to the Gods: its the supramental experience.
***
0 1962-10-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A little later, Satprem returns to the previous conversation on the Gods:
But do those Gods exist independently of human consciousness? Theyre not human creations?
No, not at all!
--
No, no! I mean all the things and forms in the overmind itself (the raiment of the Gods, for instance, their jewels and crowns there are all kinds of things in the overmind). In those worlds there are all kinds of forms, which we translate into images from terrestrial life but its only a translation.
Take the Gods raiment, for example. Their raiment, which they change at will in the same way they change their forms, is made not of physical but of overmental substance, and that substance contains its own light. Its like that with everything, its all. Theres no sun casting light and shadows: the substance is self-luminous.
And beyond, in the Supramental?
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All those zones of artistic creation are very high up in human consciousness, which is why art can be a wonderful tool for spiritual progress. For this world of creation is also the world of the Gods; but the Gods, I am sorry to say, have absolutely no taste for artistic creation.1 They feel absolutely no need for permanence in formsthey couldnt care less! When they want something, there it isall they have to do is want it. When they wish a particular surrounding or atmosphere, it takes form all by itself at their wish. They get everything the way they want it, so they feel no need for fixed forms. Man, on the other hand, who doesnt get what he wants the way he wants it, must make an effort to create forms, and thats why he progressesart is a great means of spiritual progress.
But about those great waves of music that interest me I had the impression they must be located well above the world of thought.
0 1962-11-10, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother listens to Satprem read a chapter from his manuscript entitled "Under the Sign of the Gods," in which he speaks of the overmind's inadequacy for attaining the plenitude of evolution, Afterwards, Mother tells what she saw while he was reading.)
Theres a kind of cadence.
--
But the Gods may not be so pleased; after all, I say the overmind is inadequate!
Of course they will!
0 1962-12-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But to me this seems to come from his Jewish background. Because Thon was Jewish, even though he never mentioned the fact (the Tlemcen officials made it known: when he arrived he had to tell them who he was). He never spoke of it and he had changed his name. They said he was of Jewish origin, but they could never say whether he was Polish or Russian. At least the person who told me never knew. But for the Jews its the Unthinkable, whose name must not be uttered (it is uttered only once a year, on the Day of Atonement; I think thats what its called). Its the word Yahveh, and it must not be uttered. But the prayers speak of the Elohim, and the Hebrew word Elohim is plural, meaning the invisible lords. So there was no one and only God for Thon, only the unthinkable Formless; and all the invisible beings who claimed to be one and only Gods were Asuras.
He used to call Christ That young man! (Laughter) It was very funny.
0 1962-12-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem reads a passage from his manuscript dealing with the Ashrams bright period in 1926, when Mother had made an overmental creation and the Gods were beginning to manifest.)
In the end, Sri Aurobindo told me it was an overmental creation, not the Truth. These were his very words: Yes, its an overmental creation, but thats not the truth were seeking; its not the truth, the highest truth, he said.
I made no reply, not a word: in half an hour I had undone everything I undid it all, really everything, cut the connection between the Gods and the people here, demolished absolutely everything. Because you see, I knew it was so attractive for people (they were constantly seeing the most astonishing things) that the obvious temptation was to hang on to it and say, Well improve on itwhich was impossible. So I sat down quietly for half an hour, and I undid it all.
We had to start over again with something else.
0 1962-12-28, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This cleansing of the middle ground is the whole story of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I had been dredging, dredging, dredging the mire of the subconscious. The supramental light was coming down before November,2 but afterwards all the mud arose and it stopped.3 Once again Sri Aurobindo verified, not individually this time but collectively, that if one pulls down too strong a light, the violated darkness below is made to moan. It is noteworthy that each time Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had some new experience marking a progress in the transformation, this progress automatically materialized in the consciousness of the disciples, without their even knowing anything about it, as a period of increased difficulties, sometimes even revolts or illnesses, as though everything were grating and grinding. But then, one begins to understand the mechanism. If a pygmy were abruptly subjected to the simple mental light of a cultivated man, we would probably see the poor fellow traumatized and driven mad by the subterranean revolutions within him. There is still too much jungle beneath the surface. The world is still full of jungle, thats the crux of the matter in a word; our mental colonization is a minuscule crust plastered over a barely dry quaternary. And the battle seems endless; one digs and digs, said the Rishis, and the deeper one digs, the more the bottom seems to recede: I have been digging, digging. Many autumns have I been toiling night and day, the dawns aging me. Age is diminishing the glory of our bodies. Thus, thousands of years ago, lamented Lopamudra, wife of Rishi Agastya, who was also seeking transformation. But Agastya doesnt lose heart, and his reply is magnificently characteristic of the conquerors the Rishis were: Not in vain is the labor which the Gods protect. Let us relish all the contesting forces, let us conquer indeed even here, let us run this battle race of a hundred leadings.
(Rig-Veda I.179)
0 1963-01-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But especially all the prohibitions. For instance, let me quote you a statement from X which I heard from a third person: I will do a special puja to help money come. I will prepare a special yantram1 to bring money. But FOR Gods SAKE dont say anything [to Mother], dont do anything or give anything before January 14, because until January 14, a certain planet is in opposition to a certain other planet (Mother laughs), so things follow a downward trend and wont be successful. But afterwards, that particular planet will be ascending and everything will be successful! (Mother laughs) Something in me said spontaneously (something, well, someone), spontaneously and immediately, But why? I can always hear! And I laughed. So they thought I was making fun of him I dont make fun: I laugh, its not the same!
So, mon petit, thats all.
0 1963-03-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Interceding twixt Gods day and the mortal night,
Accepting worship as its single law,
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The deeper significance of figures There are countless traditions, countless scriptures which I took great care not to follow. But the deeper significance of figures came to me in Tlemcen, when I was in the Overmind. I dont remember the names Thon used to give to those various worlds, but it was a world that corresponded to the highest and most luminous regions of Sri Aurobindos Overmind. It was above, just above the Gods region. And it was something in accord with the Overmind creation the earth under the Gods influence. That was where figures took on a living meaning for menot a mental speculation: a living meaning. That was where Madame Thon recognized me, because of the formation of twelve pearls she saw above my head; and she told me, You are that because you have this. Only that can have this! (Mother laughs) It hadnt even remotely occurred to me, thank God!
But figures are alive for me. They have a concrete reality.
0 1963-07-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Upon earths new-born soil Gods tread was heard.
(II.I.101)
0 1963-09-25, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other day, the process was less complete, but it was something similar, a first hint: K. had sent me an article he wanted to publish somewhere with quotations from Sri Aurobindo and myself, and he wanted to make sure it was correct and he hadnt muddled it (!) In one place, I saw a comment by him (you know how people delight in wordplays when they are fully in the mind: the mind loves to play with words and contrast one sentence with another), it was in English, I am not quoting word for word, but he said that the age of religions was the age of the Gods; and, naturally, as our Mr. Mind loves to play with words, it made him say that, now, the age of the Gods is over and it is the age of Godwhich means he was deplorably falling back into the Christian religion without noticing it! And just as I saw his written sentence, I saw that tendency of the mind which loves it and finds it very oh, charming, such a nice turn of phrase (!) I didnt say anything, I went on to the end of his article. Then where that sentence was I saw a little light shining: it was like a little spark (I saw that with my eyes open). I looked at my spark, and in the place of God, there was The One. So I took my pen and made the correction.
But my first translation was The All-Containing One, because it was an experience, not a thought. What I saw was The One containing all. And innocently, I wrote it down on a paper (Mother shows a little scrap of paper): The All-Containing One. But just then, I saw what looked like someone giving me a slap and telling me, Not that: you should put The One, thats all. So I wrote The One.
0 1963-09-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In other words, that Power assumed the appearance of Gods Will.
And Deaths deep falsity has mastered Life.
0 1963-10-05, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was what corresponds to the owners they were the owners, in the sense that they had built everything and everything belonged to thembuilt and organized everything. Maybe they are Gods?
I had no consideration for them (I dont know how to explain this), not only no respect, but no consideration: they were just owners. Only, I lived at the very top of the house. And in that house, everyone obeyed me (obeyed, well, in appearance). They were the owners or the management. But they werent responsible to me, they didnt take orders from me; they didnt need to ask me before doing somethingnor was I responsible to them. But I didnt have the feeling of being any more at home there than anywhere else; yet I had undeniably my room there, at the very top of the house.
Maybe they were Gods?
The worlds construction as they built it?
0 1963-10-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every time a new truth has attempted to manifest upon earth, it has been immediately attacked, corrupted and diverted by pseudo-spiritual forceswhich did represent a certain spirituality at a given time, but precisely the one that the new truth wants to go beyond. To give but one example of those sad spiritual diversions which clutter History, Buddhism was largely corrupted in a sizable part of Asia by a whole Tantric and magic Buddhism. The falsity lies not in the old spirituality which the new truth seeks to go beyond, but in the eternal fact that the Past clings to its powers, its means and its rule. As Mother said in her simple language, Whats wrong is to remain stuck there. And Sri Aurobindo with his ever-present humor: The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past. We could expect the phenomenon to recur today. In India, Tantrism represents a powerful discipline from the Past and it was inevitable that Mother should experience the better and the worse of that system in her attempt to transform all the means and elements of the old earththis Agenda has made abundant mention of a certain X, symbol of Tantrism. Now, as it happens, we are witnessing the same phenomenon of diversion, and today this same Tantrism is seeking to divert the new truth by convincing as many adepts as possible not to say Mothers Mantra, which is too advanced for ordinary mortals, and to say Tantric mantras in its stead. This is purely and simply an attempt to take Mothers place. One has to be quite ignorant of the mechanism of forces not to understand that saying a mantra of the old Gods puts you under the influence and into the orbit of precisely that which resists the new truth. Mother had foreseen the phenomenon and forewarned me in the following conversation. Unfortunately, until recently, I always wanted to believe that Tantrism would be converted. Nothing of the sort. It is attempting to take Mothers place and lead astray those who are not sincere enough to want ONE SINGLE THING: the new world.
***
--
Very, very long ago, when I was still downstairs (not last year, the year before), one day I dont remember the details, but I know he made a sort of cinema show during the meditation: he showed himself as this god, that god, this or thatthere was a whole swarm of Gods and beings who came and threw themselves onto him like this (Mother lays one hand flat on the other), and Sri Aurobindo was there too, among the crowd! I took it as a demonstration of his powers I didnt attach any importance to it. Naturally, I saw what it was; none of those beings was actually there, it was only their image. But I didnt attach any importance to it because to me it was (laughing) like someone giving me a show!
But this time
0 1963-12-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All can be done if Gods touch is there2
There: All can be done. All.
--
Tomorrow, I see here (Mother looks at her notebook) four, five, six, seven, eight people, and two over there, which makes tentomorrow morning between 10 and 11 A.M. (Laughing) All can be done if Gods touch is there!
So Ill see you next year.
--
Put a sardonic rictus on Gods face.
(II.VII.206)
0 1964-01-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had X told about a rather interesting encounter of mine with Ganapati1 (quite a few years ago), and how he had promised to give me whatever I needed and actually gave it for quite a long time, certainly more than ten years, and generously so. Then everything changed in the Ashram. It was after the war, the children came and we spilled over; we became much more complex, much larger, and began to be in touch with foreign countries, particularly America. And I continued to be in contact with Ganapati; I cant say I used to do a puja to him (!), but every morning I would put a flower in front of his image. Then one morning I asked him, Why have you stopped doing what you had been doing for such a long time? I listened, and he clearly replied, Your need has grown too large. I didnt quite understand, because he has at his disposal fortunes larger than what I needed. But then, some time afterwards, I had this told to X, who answered me from the height of his punditism, Let her not be concerned with the Gods, I will look after that! It was needlessly insolent. Then I turned to Ganapati and asked him, What does all that mean? And I clearly saw (it wasnt he who answered, it was Sri Aurobindo), I clearly saw that Ganapati has power only over those who have faith in him, which means its limited to India, while I needed money from America, France, England, Africa and that he has no power there, so he couldnt help. It became very clear, I was at peace, I understood: Very well, he did his best, thats all. And its true that I keep receiving from India, though not sufficiently; especially as since Independence half of India has been ruined, and all those who used to give me a lot of money no longer do, because they no longer canit isnt that they no longer want to, but that they no longer can.
For instance, M. was greatly interested in my story about Ganapati, and I saw that there was a connection between him and Ganapati, so I told him, But turn to him and he will give you the right inspiration. And since then M. has been perfect, really; all that he can do he does to the utmost of his ability. So all this is very good.
But there is a considerable difference between the real fact, that is, what this body [Mothers body] represents, and Xs conception. He has always remained all the way down. This is what, in fact, had ruined his health for a time. And the odd thing is that every time he was ill and CONSENTED to inform me, he was instantly curedhe KNOWS this, but still his first instinct is always to turn to the Gods with his ordinary puja.
It was the same thing with you I saw that. He regards you like this (gesture of looking down on Satprem), and then, youre not a pundit (!), you havent had the religious education of the countryhe regards you as a beginner, he isnt at all conscious of where your mind is, of where your mind can reach. I told him, but even that he doesnt quite understand. But once, I saw (it was at the time when I was giving him meditations downstairs), he had made a remark that was quite preposterous on the fact that people here meditated with eyes closed and that I, too, had my eyes closed when I meditated. It was reported to me. That was long ago, years ago. He was going to come and see me the next morning, so I said, Wait, my friend, Ill show you! And the next day, I meditated with my eyes open (Mother laughs)the poor man! When he went downstairs, he said, Mother meditated with her eyes open, she was like a lion!
--
No, I am not imagining things: I know! He said that thing (had Sri Aurobindo been here, he would have had a good laugh!), Oh, the Gods, she should let me look after them, I know better than she does! You understand, when I was giving meditations in the hall downstairs, they were all thereadd: Shiva, Krishna, all the Gods of the Indian pantheon were there, seated like this (gesture in a circle) to follow the meditation.
Krishna sometimes I walked with him for hours in conversation. At night, when I was very tired from my work, he would come and sit on the edge of my bed, I would put my head on his shoulder and fall asleep. And it lasted for years and years and years, you knownot just once by chance.
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I presume this is in reply to the biblical belief in Gods Commandments received by Moses, which the Lord is supposed to have uttered Himself and Moses is supposed to have heardits a roundabout way (Mother laughs) to say its not possible!
The supreme authority because the soul saw it, but it can be a supreme authority ONLY for the soul that saw it, not for all souls. For the soul that had that experience and saw it, its a supreme authority but not for other souls.
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
101In Gods sight there is no near or distant, no present, past or future. These things are only a convenient perspective for His world-picture.
102To the senses it is always true that the sun moves round the earth; this is false to the reason. To the reason it is always true that the earth moves round the sun; this is false to the supreme vision. Neither earth moves nor sun; there is only a change in the relation of sun-consciousness and earth-consciousness.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame of life; for by this inwardness we shall best be able both to see the truth of the high things which we now only speak with our lips and form into outward intellectual constructions, and to apply their truth sincerely to all our outward living. If we are to found the kingdom of God in humanity, we must first know God and see and live the diviner truth of our being in ourselves; otherwise how shall a new manipulation of the constructions of the reason and scientific systems of efficiency which have failed us in the past, avail to establish it? It is because there are plenty of signs that the old error continues and only a minority, leaders perhaps in light, but not yet in action, are striving to see more clearly, inwardly and truly, that we must expect as yet rather the last twilight which divides the dying from the unborn age than the real dawning. For a time, since the mind of man is not yet ready, the old spirit and method may yet be strong and seem for a short while to prosper; but the future lies with the men and nations who first see beyond both the glare and the dusk the Gods of the morning and prepare themselves to be fit instruments of the Power that is pressing towards the light of a greater ideal.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All those stories those so-called saints and sages told about Gods Love coming and going, oh, its unspeakably stupid!Its THERE, eternally; It has always been there, eternally; It will always be there, eternally, always the same and at the highest of its possibility.
It hasnt left, and now it wont be able to leave.
--
And the physical world is made to express Beauty; if it became harmonious instead of being the ignoble thing it is, if it became harmonious, it would have an exceptional vibratory quality! Its rather curious: the vital world is magnificent, the mental world has its splendors, the overmental world with all its Gods (who are existing beings, I know them well) is truly very beautiful; but I tell you, since I had that Contact, I have found all that hollowhollow and lacking the essential.
And that essential thing, in its principle, is here, on earth.
0 1964-08-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Narada was a demigod, immortal like the Gods, who had the power to appear on earth whenever he wished. Janaka, Mithila's king at the time of the Upanishads was famed for his spiritual knowledge and divine realization, even though he led a worldly life. This is how Sri Aurobindo refers to him: 106"Sannyasa [renunciation of worldly life] has a formal garb and outer tokens; therefore men think they can easily recognise it; but the freedom of a Janaka does not proclaim itself and it wears the garb of the world; to its presence even Narada was blinded."
***
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As Sri Aurobindo said, if you cant have Gods love (I am translating), well then, find a way to fight with God and have a wrestlers relationship with Him.1
(meditation)
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its an amused way of looking at religions and all the Gods the way you would look at they are like theater performances. Theyre pastimes; but thats not what can teach you to know yourself, not at all, not at all! You must go right down to the bottom.
And it is this, this descent to the very bottom, in search of but it isnt an unknown, it isnt an unknowna bursting (it really is like a bursting), that marvelous bursting of the Vibration of Love; that is it is the memory. And the effort is to turn it into an active reality.
0 1965-01-12, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To me, its very simple. Narada was a demigod, as we know, and he belonged to the overmental world and was able to materializethose beings dont have a psychic being. The Gods dont have in themselves the divine spark which is the heart of the psychic being, since only ON THE EARTH (I am not even referring to the material universe), only on the earth was there the Descent of divine Love that was the origin of the divine Presence in the heart of Matter. And naturally, as they dont have a psychic being, they dont know, they have no knowledge of the psychic being. Some of those beings even decided to take on a physical body in order to experience the psychic beingnot many.
They generally did it only partially, through an emanation, not through a complete descent. It is said, for instance, that Vivekananda was an incarnation (a vibhuti) of Shivas; but Shiva himself I have had a very close relationship with him and he clearly expressed the will to come down on earth only with the supramental world. When the earth is ready for supramental life, he will come. And almost all those beings will manifest they are waiting for that moment, they do not want the present struggle and darkness.
--
All those Gods are without a psychic being, its only by coming down, by uniting with the psychic being of a man that they can have one, but they themselves dont have one.
***
--
Narada: a wandering sage who goes about playing the vina. Immortal like the Gods, he appears on earth whenever he wishes. He is mentioned as far back as the Upanishads.
It was in fact an attack of tuberculosis.
0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Buddha said that the world, this terrestrial world (maybe the universe, I dont know, the point isnt very clear), in any case the terrestrial world is the result of Desire (but I know someone who used to say [laughing], Yes, its Gods desire to manifest!), and that when Desire disappears, the world will disappear and there will be Nirvana. In other words, once the desire to manifest has disappeared, there is no Manifestation anymore.
I dont think Buddha was ignorant; I think he knew very well the existence of invisible beings, of immortal beings (what men call Gods) and probably the existence of a supreme God, toohe very likely knew it. But he didnt want people to think about it because it appeared to contradict his opinion that the world was the result of Desire and that, once Desire was withdrawn, the world withdrewif there is an immortal world, things cannot happen that way.
Basically, the further one goes, the more one realizes that all human teachings are opportunistic: they are told with an aim in view; one thing is told, and the other (not that its not known) is deliberately ignored. It seems hard to me to find a different explanation, because as soon as you have passed beyond the Mind (and those people appear to have done so), all knowledge is (whats the word?) available, obtainable.
--
I told him, thats why people who very much tried to find, but in vain, spoke of Gods Will; but that (Mother shakes her head) that seems to be irreconcilable with, as I said, the knowledge you have when you have passed beyond the Mind. The Mind can say that to itself in order to give itself peace, but its thoroughly, thoroughly unsatisfying, because it postulates an unacceptable arbitrariness, which is felt as contrary to the Truth. But then, how do you explain those kinds of reversals? Naturally, others, like Buddha, spoke about Ignorance; they said, You are ignorant; you think you know, but you are ignorant. But the key he gave isnt satisfying, either. Because when you have taken care to establish down to the cells of the body an apparently unshakable equanimity, how can you accept the ignorance factor?
Which means that the further you go, the nearer you draw to the Goal, the more inexplicable it appears to be.
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw the other dayit was very interesting, the very day he was on his way here (I wasnt thinking of him I never think of people), suddenly I saw all that the knowledge of the pundits and those who profess to follow a spiritual life (the whole class of sannyasins, pundits, purohits,1 etc.), all that that represents. (I am not referring to religions in other countries: its specific to India.) And they are people who have a knowledge, a mental knowledge, of course, but very precise and very exact, of the movements in relation to the Overmind: all the Gods and godheads and their ways of being and the relationships between men and Gods; and they have tried to organize and formulate the relationships men have with Gods so that, as was said in the past, men would not be the cattle of the Godsthey have tried to change the human position with regard to deities. Its interesting, its a whole interesting field which to me does not represent the true thing. They on their part think that is spiritual lifeits not spiritual life, but it is a higher mental region which borders on the Overmind, which even enters into the Overmind, and which is completely organized; its a sort of legislation of the relationships between men and Gods. From that point of view, its interesting.
I saw that very clearly: the place it has in the universal organization. And if its in its place, then its quite all rightwhen a thing is in its place it becomes very good.
0 1965-07-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In other words, all the intermediate states of being, also the Gods, the entities and all those things. And it spoke with a power and a sort of dignityyes, it was dignity, almost pride, but not an arrogant pride, nothing of the sort. It was the sense of a nobility.
The supreme Lord alone can satisfy me.
0 1965-11-27, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Those who have touched the higher regions of intelligence but havent mastered in themselves the mental faculties have an ingenuous need for everyone to think as they do and to be able to understand as they understand, and when they realize that others cannot, dont understand, their first reflex is to be horribly shocked; they say, What a fool! But fool isnt the point at allthey are different, they live in another region. You dont go and tell an animal, Youre a fool, you say, Its an animal. Well, you say, Its a man. Its a man. Only, there are those who arent men anymore and arent Gods yet, and those are in a very in English they say, a very awkward position.
But it was so soothing, so sweet, so marvelous, that visioneach thing expressing its own kind, quite naturally.
0 1965-12-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So then, all the dramaall the tragedy, all the horror, all the dread, all of itis vital fabrication. Well, those who are Gods warriors dont allow themselves to be affected by that. One smiles, Yes, yes, you may put on a big show, we dont care; go ahead with the big show if you enjoy it. As for us, we know its only a showan ugly show, if you like, its not pretty, but its just a show.
***
0 1965-12-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
113Hatred is the sign of a secret attraction that is eager to flee from itself and furious to deny its own existence. That too is Gods play in His creature.
It corresponds to a sort of vibration the vibration received from people who hate. Its a vibration which is, so to say, fundamentally the same as the vibration of love. At its very bottom, there is the same sensation. Although on the surface its the opposite, it is supported by the same vibration. And we could say that we are just as much the slaves of what we hate as of what we lovemaybe even more. Its something that keeps hold of you, that obsesses you and which you cherish; a sensation you cherish, because beneath its violence there is a warmth of attraction as great as that which you feel for what you love. And it seems its only in the activity of the manifestation, that is to say, quite on the surface, that there is this distorted appearance.
0 1966-02-11, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As if lost remnants of forgotten light, Before her mind there fled with trailing wings Dimmed revelations and delivering words, Emptied of their mission and their strength to save, The messages of the evangelist Gods, Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.
(X.IV.642)
0 1966-02-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thons idea (which also fits with the teaching here in India in which they say it was the sense of separation that created the whole DisorderDeath, Falsehood and all the rest), Thons idea was that those first four Emanations, that is, Consciousness, Love, Life, and Truth (Love was the last, I think, but I no longer remember what he said), those four individual emanated Beings, according to him, in full consciousness of their power and existence, cut themselves off from their Origin. In other words, they wanted to depend only on themselves, they didnt even feel the need to keep the connection with their Origin (I am putting it very materially). So then, that cut is what instantly caused Consciousness to become Unconsciousness, Love to become Suffering (it wasnt Loveit was actually Ananda which became Suffering), Life to become Death and Truth to become Falsehood. And they hurled themselves into the creation like that. Then, there was a second creation, which was the creation of the Gods, to mend the mischief caused by those four (the story is told in almost a childlike way in order not to be abstract, in order to become concrete). The Gods are the second emanation and they came to mend. In India and everywhere, they were given various names and functions, and they are found in the Overmind region, that is to say, above the physical quaternary, the material quaternary. And the function of those Gods is to mend the damage wrought by the others. And the region in which the others (the first Emanations) concentrated is the vital region.
All this can be translated philosophically, intellectually and so on. It is told as a story so that the most physical intellectuality may understand. But in principle, its the separation from the Origin that created the whole Disorder. And, as far as I know, in India too the Upanishads say the same thing; Sri Aurobindo, at any rate, says that Disorder came with the sense of Separation. So those are different ways of saying the same thing. In one case, seen in a certain way, its a willed separation; in the other case, its an inevitable consequenceinevitable consequence of of what? I dont know.
Because, according to theogonies, the Gods have remained in contact with their Origin and they feel themselves to be the representation of the Origin, as in the Indian theogony in which they say that Shiva is the representative of the SupremeBrahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, Shiva, the transformer and all three are conscious representatives of the Supreme, but partial ones.
Its perfectly obvious that those are only manners of speaking. There are indeed entities, they do exist, but its only a way of telling the story; in one way or another, its the same thing. Metaphysics is also one way of telling the story. And one isnt truer than the other.
0 1966-04-20, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am asking this because V. told me she would be going there, she said Anousuya wasnt feeling well. So I looked, and (V. wanted me to send a line to Anousuya), I took a paper and wrote I dont remember the exact words, but it was: The unshakable faith that Gods Will alone is realized. I dont exactly remember, I wrote what was dictated. And at the time of writing it, I knew it was over.
I didnt say anything, but I knew.
0 1966-04-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void
(X.IV.644)
--
I saw that, it was so amusing! I saw it all. Oh, it was an extraordinary experience. All of a sudden I was outside and, I cant say above (but it was above), but outside the whole human creation, outside everything, everything man has created in all the worlds, even in the most ethereal worlds. And seen from there, it was I saw that play of all the possible conceptions men have had of God and of the way to approach God (what they call God), and also of the invisible worlds and the Gods, all that: one thing came upon another, one upon another, it all went by (as its written in Savitri), one thing upon another went by (gesture as if on a screen), one upon another with its artificiality, its inadequacy to express the Truth. And with such precision! A precision so accurate that you felt in anguish, because the impression was of being in a world of nothing but imagination, of imaginative creation, but in nothing real, there wasnt a feeling of of touching the Thing. To such a point that it became yes, a terrible anguish: But then, what? What? Whats truly TRUE and outside all that we can conceive?
And it came. It was like this: (gesture of self-abandon) the total, complete self-annulment, annulment of that which can know, of that which tries to knoweven surrender isnt an adequate word: a sort of annulment. And suddenly it ended with a slight movement as a child could have who doesnt know anything, doesnt try to know anything, doesnt understand anything, doesnt try to understand but who abandons himself. A slight movement of such simplicity, such ingenuousness, such extraordinary sweetness (words cant express it): nothing, just this (gesture of self-abandon), and instantaneously, THE Certitude (not expressed, lived), the lived Certitude.
0 1966-05-18, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its the same with the Gods, mon petit, the same thing! The relationship with all those beings of the Overmind, with all those Gods, the form those relationships take depends on the human consciousness. You can be The scriptures say, Man is cattle for the Gods but thats if man ACCEPTS the role of cattle. There is in the essence of human nature a sovereignty over all those things which is spontaneous and natural, when its not warped by a certain number of ideas and a certain amount of so-called knowledge.
We could say that man is the all-powerful master of all the states of being of his nature, but that he has forgotten to be so.
--
Its the same thing with Gods: they can rule your life and torment you quite a lot (they can also help you a lot), but their power IN RELATION TO YOU, in relation to the human being, is the power you give them.
Thats something I have learned little by little for several years. But now, I am sure of it.
--
This relationship with the Gods is extremely interesting. As long as man is dazzled, in admiration before the power, beauty, realizations of those divine beings, he is their slave. But when they are, to him, ways of being of the Supreme and nothing more, and when he himself is another way of being of the Supreme, which he must become, then the relationship is different and he is no longer their slavehe is NOT their slave.
Ultimately, the only objectivity is the Supreme.
0 1966-09-14, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
122If thou wouldst not be the fool of Opinion, first see wherein thy thought is true, then study wherein its opposite and contradiction is true; last, discover the cause of these differences and the key of Gods harmony.
123An opinion is neither true nor false, but only serviceable for life or unserviceable
0 1967-02-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it might be amusing if we put together one specimen of every religion from every country and every epoch. A city of religions, can you see that? The totem pole next to the cathedral! Oh, that would be very amusing! All the ancient religions the Egyptian, the Tyrian, the Scandinavian Gods and then the new religions.
They would all quarrel with each other!
--
Its a subject I found very interesting, in the beginning I even wanted to give a class1 on it, when the School had only thirty children or so: a class on religions showing the whole course, from the Gods with the heads of birds or jackals to cathedrals. Oh, when I was just five, I was revolted by that God who really was a wicked character and caused bloodshed.
So we could have a city of religions. But we would have to re-create the atmosphere.
0 1967-04-03, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When Nolini read me sentences from that brochure, at first when I felt that malaise, I wondered Because, as I have said several times, for the transformation to take place freely in this body, those very Entities and Powers and Beings were all keeping at a distance, they were no longer manifesting so as not to cause any mixture and so this (body) could be transformed. At first I thought, Thats what it is: I have lost (the body, I mean), has lost the habit of manifesting that (the Gods, the aspects of the Mother), and so, when it comes into contact with that, there is a malaise. I thought it was that. And for a day (a whole day), it came back again and again, like a problem to be resolved. Then, suddenly, looking at it attentively, I saw it was the very opposite! I saw it was the sense of a constriction, of a limitation. Instead of it being an unbearable weight (those Gods or aspects of the Mother), it was something preventing the free manifestation! It seems so limitedall those Entities, all those Powers, all those qualities, all those differences, all those attributes, all oh! (Mother makes a cramped gesture)
There, thats what I wanted to tell you today.
0 1967-04-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Also, the contact with all those beings of the Overmind, all those Gods, all those Entities, all those divinities. There is here, in the cells, a sort of (what can I call it?) rectitude, and, yes, sincerity and honesty that says, Oh, what fuss they make! How all this is (Mother puffs up her cheeks) puff! puff! swollen up. Its very interesting, really very interesting. The vision of the world is quite different. Its far more honestfar more honest, far more sincere, far more upright. Its strange.
The consciousness expressed in transformed cells is a marvel. It justifies all those ages of misery. To reach that was really worth the trouble. Really worth it.
0 1967-05-10, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, you say, I wondered how they restored the names of the pharaohs and Gods. Then you ask, Is the Egyptians language contemporary with the most ancient Sanskrit, or still more ancient? Or is there another human language older than the oldest Sanskrit? You also ask, Is this Egyptian hieroglyphic language akin to the Chaldean tradition or the Aryan tradition?
Yes, all that is very interesting, but I cant get an answer. Theres a complete lacuna.
0 1967-08-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Actually, there are, inside oneself naturally (and consequently around oneself), forces that oppose ones realization, and the system of those [Tantric] mantras is to look for the support of those Overmind beings against those forces, which are much more powerful than they (the Gods)the proof is that despite all their goodwill, they (the Overmind Gods) have never been able to make the earth a harmonious place. We cant help noting the fact. So I told him it was a direct fight, all those mantras are a direct fight against the difficulty, whereas (and thats what gave him the terrible headache he complains about: its dangerous, of course, it can unsettle the whole functioning). I told him to stop and use that (Mothers Mantra). I explained it all to him yesterday. I told him he shouldnt wage a direct fight: one must try to find the support in the force one has inside oneself, which is everywhere and can overcome the difficulty: Instead of fighting, live in the other consciousness. But I saw he was closedlocked inwith a hard look. He didnt want to understand. So
For half an hour he kept me here. It was half past twelve!
0 1967-08-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have often wondered if the memory of physical forms is what makes me see that world in that way, or IF IT IS really like that. Sometimes there is no doubt because it has its own specific character, but at other times I have a doubt and wonder if its not in the active memory. Because at that moment I am very conscious, everything is extremely natural, you understand; and its permanent: I find the same things in the same places again, sometimes with slight differences, but differences made necessary by action. That is to say, its a coherent world, not wild imaginings. But to what extent are those forms the reflection of material forms? To what extent ARE they really like that, or do we SEE them that way? I am not very sure yet. I had the same problem in the past when I used to go into the Overmind and see the Gods: I always had a kind of hesitation as to whether they really are like that, or whether we perceive them like that because of our physical habits. There, after a time I reached a conclusion, but here, physically?
Strangely, there are no doors, no windows, no ceiling or floor, all that is self-existent and does not appear to be subject to the law of gravity, that is, there isnt the earths magnetic attraction, yet what you write with (laughing) looks like a fountain pen! What you write on looks like paper; the documents are placed in what look like filing cabinets. You do feel that the substance isnt the same, but the appearance is very close. And I am still wondering about that appearance: is it because of our ordinary cerebral function that we put the appearance upon things, or is it really like that?
0 1967-09-16, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These people (laughing), we could say that their ego has taken the attitude of being the Divines instrument but its the ego. So naturally, they dont see clearly: they see what they want to see, do what they want to do. And for them, I am Gods instrument.
Well see.
0 1967-09-23, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told her I wasnt a guru, that if she wanted to follow this path, she had to have a guru and I wasnt here to spread the Good Word. I told her, If you walk alone on this path, you run the risk of taking your thoughts and desires for Gods commandments, so it helps to have a guru who protects and leads you. But I am not a guru at all. And I told her once more, If you wish, Mother is there and you can turn to her. Then there was a little something that made me angry: she said, Sri Aurobindo, yes, I understand Sri Aurobindo; Sri Aurobindo is an Avatar, but the Mother she is a highly developed personality, but not an Avatar. I replied, But what kind of perception do you have to say things of that sort! Then I added, It doesnt matter in the least
Yes.
0 1967-10-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And this man (I saw his photo, he has a magnificent head) says, I live in Gods presence. Thats what he says, and I dont think he makes any fussbesides he doesnt have the time because he goes to bed after midnight and gets up at five every day, starts work at five-thirty and spends the whole day working, that is, seeing people and people and more people (when that was read out to me, I thought, And I complain!). Its admirable. He did some studies, but he isnt a philosopher, he doesnt have any theories: he seems to have been born like that, with healing hands. He probably gets rid of infections by dehydrating them, so he cures all the diseases of that nature. And they did (poor man, they must have made his life impossible!), they did encephalograms, cardiograms and so on, and they noticed that just when he lays his hands (for a few seconds, two or three minutes at the most), at that moment his heartbeats suddenly go up from sixty to eighty, then fall back to normal. And he doesnt seem to be making any fuss, unlike that German I told you aboutnothing at all, very simple, very nice.
I liked that story.
0 1967-10-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the Gods have a divine ego. Thats what was really interesting this morning. They feel they exist in themselves, by themselves, for themselves (Mother clenches her fist). Only, of course, theres no comparison with the sordidness of the human ego.
But thats what was so interesting this morning. Once these divine egos have abdicated, and depending on the extent of that abdication, it will mean an EXTRAORDINARY transformation in the creation. It was like a vision being worked out slowly (Mother closes her eyes), almost with images, as if you saw the entire earth (gesture like a hall) and the image of Durga (gesture enveloping the earth), and the two together, it was quite lovely.
--
How He has used the Gods, how He uses everything, how He has used the Adversaries everything. Its all ways of being, and everything leads where we must go.
***
0 1967-11-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But anything higher than him man has been used to thinking of as divine beings; that is to say, bodiless beings, appearing in the light, anyway all the Gods in human conception but its not that at all!
(long silence)
0 1968-02-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now stupidity, imbecility, ignorance, all those things are looked at with a patience which waits for them to grow. But bad will and crueltyespecially viciousness, cruelty, what LOVES to cause suffering thats still difficult, one still has to keep a hold on oneself. In figurative language (not language, but a way of being), its Kali that wants to strike, and I have to tell her, Keep still, keep still. But thats a human transcription. All those Gods, all those beings are real, they exist, but its a transcription. True truth is beyond all that.
So there.
0 1968-09-07, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have told you many times, and couldnt repeat it too often, that we are not made of a piece. Within ourselves we have lots of states of being, and each state of being has its own life. All that is gathered together in a single body, as long as you have one, and acts through a single body; thats what gives you the sense of a single person, a single being. But there are many of them, and there are in particular concentrations on different planes: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, a mental being, a psychic being, and many others with all possible intermediaries. So when you leave your body, all those beings will scatter. Its only if you are a very advanced yogi and have been capable of unifying your being around the divine center that those beings remain linked together. If you havent been able to unify yourself, then at the time of death, all that will scatter: every being will go back to its own region. With the vital being, for example, your various desires will separate and each of them will go and chase its realization quite independently, because there will no longer be a physical being to hold them together. While if you have united your consciousness to the psychic consciousness, when you die you will remain conscious of your psychic being, and the psychic being will return to the psychic world which is a world of bliss, joy, peace, tranquillity, and growing knowledge. But if you have lived in your vital and all its impulses, each impulse will try to realize itself here and there. For instance, for the miser who was concentrated on his money, when he dies the part of his vital that was concerned with his money will hook on there and will keep watching over the money so no one takes it. People wont see him, but he is there nonetheless, and very unhappy if something happens to his dear money. Now, if you live exclusively in your physical consciousness (which is difficult, because, after all, you have thoughts and feelings), if you live exclusively in your physical, when the physical being disappears, you disappear along with it, its over. There is a spirit of the form: your form has a spirit that lives on for seven days after your death. The doctors have declared you dead, but the spirit of your form is alive, and not only alive but conscious in most cases. It lasts for seven to eight days, and after that, it too dissolves I am not talking about yogis, I am talking about ordinary people. Yogis have no laws, its quite different; for them the world is different. I am talking about ordinary people living an ordinary life; for them its like that. So the conclusion is that if you want to preserve your consciousness, it would be better to center it on a part of your being which is immortal; otherwise it will evaporate like a flame into thin air. And happily so, because if it were otherwise, there might be Gods or kinds of superior men who would create hells and heavens as they do in their material imagination, inside which they would shut you up. (Question:) It is said that there is a god of death. Is it true? Yes. As for me, I call him a genius of death. I know him very well. And its an extraordinary organization. You cant imagine how organized it is! I think there are many of those genii of death, hundreds of them. I met at least two of them. One I met in France, the other in Japan, and they were very different. Which leads me to believe that depending on the mental culture, the education, the countries and beliefs, there must be different genii. But there are genii for all manifestations of Nature: there are genii of fire, genii of air, water, rain, wind; and there are genii of death. Any one genius of death is entitled to a certain number of dead every day. Its truly a fantastic organization. Its a sort of alliance between the vital forces and the forces of Nature. If, for example, he decided, Here is the number of people I am entitled to, say four or five, or six, or one or two (it varies from day to day), if he decided so many people would die, hell go straight and set himself up near the person whos going to die. But if you (not the person) happen to be conscious, if you see the genius going to the person but do not want him or her to die, then, if you have a certain occult power, you can tell him, No, I forbid you to take this person. Thats something which happened, not once but several times, in Japan and here. It wasnt the same genius. Which makes me say there must be many of them. If you can tell him, I forbid you to take this person and have the power to send him away, theres nothing he can do but go away; but he wont give up his due and will go elsewhere there will be a death elsewhere. (Question:) Some people, when they are about to die, are aware of it. Why dont they tell the genius to go away? Two things are needed. First, nothing in your being, no part of your being, should wish to die. That doesnt often happen. You always have, somewhere in you, a defeatist: something tired or disgusted, which has had enough, something lazy or which doesnt want to fight and says, Ah, well, let it be over, so much the better. Thats enoughyoure dead. But its a fact: if nothing, absolutely nothing in you consents to die, you will not die. For someone to die, there is always a second, if a hundredth part of a second, when he consents. If there isnt that second of consent, he will not die. But who is certain he doesnt have within himself, somewhere, a tiny bit of a defeatist which just yields and says, Oh well? Hence the need to unify oneself. Whatever the path we may follow, the subject we may study, we always reach the same result. The most important thing for an individual is to unify himself around his divine center; that way he becomes a real individual, master of himself and of his destiny. Otherwise, he is a plaything of the forces, which toss him about like a cork in a stream. He goes where he doesnt want to, is made to do what he doesnt want to, and finally he gets lost in a hole without any way to stop himself doing so. But if you are consciously organized, unified around the divine center, governed and led by it, you are the master of your destiny. Its worth trying. At any rate, I find its better to be the master rather than the slave. The feeling of being pulled by strings and being made to do things you may or may not want to do is a rather unpleasant sensation. Its quite irksome. Well, I dont know, I, for one, found it quite irksome even when I was a small child. When I was five, I began finding it wholly intolerable, and I sought a way for it to be otherwisewithout anyone being able to tell me anything. Because I knew no one capable of helping me, and I didnt have the luck you havesomeone who can tell you, Here is what you must do. There was no one to tell me. I had to find it all by myself. I found it. I began at the age of five. And you, its a long time since you were five?
Well cut out the end.
0 1968-12-11, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body is something very, very simple and very childlike, and it has that experience so imperatively, you understand, it doesnt need to seek: it just has to stop its activity for a minute and its there. So then, it wonders why people havent been aware of that since the beginning? It wonders, Why, why have they sought all kinds of thingsreligions, Gods all kinds of thingswhen its so simple! So simple, for the body its so simple, so self-evident.
All those constructionsreligions, philosophies all those constructionsare a need of the mind to play the game. It wants to play the game well. While the body is so simple, so simple, so obvious! So obvious, so simple: Why, it wonders, Why, why have they been seeking all kinds of complications when its so simple? The very fact of saying, The Divine is deep within you (it remembers its own experience, you understand) is so complicated, while its so simple!
0 1969-01-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its odd, he is receptive enough: every time I do something, there is a result but the result he attributes to his Gods! So it makes a muddle in his consciousness.
(silence)
0 1969-08-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother actually said "the overmental being." This confusion will often take place, probably because Mother found this vocabulary quite cumbersome. But this next being clearly has nothing to do with the overmind or the world of the Gods.
In May 1968, the student uprising in France.
0 1969-10-25, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it seems Christ himself said he would come back with Gods swordwhich means its no longer the same thing at all.
As for me, I never believed: I had a lot of difficulty, its Sri Aurobindo who made me believe in the physical reality of Christ; I always thought it was some story people toldthey took hold of just anybody and built a story around him. But Sri Aurobindo believed in it. He said it was an Avatara partial Avatar.
0 1969-12-13, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
222"The old writings call the Titans the elder Gods. So they still are; nor is any god entirely divine unless there is hidden in him also a Titan."
223"If I cannot be Rama, then I would be Ravana; for he is the dark side of Vishnu." (Rama is a divine incarnation, whereas Ravana is the incarnation of a demon.)
0 1970-01-10, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I found the Cosmic Review [of Thon] again, its quite amusing! Ive kept it to show you. They made some rules and regulations for the members of the Society, its very funny! People must be very nice to each other! And among the rules there is one saying that one must not recognize personal Gods.
(Mother holds out the file to Satprem)
0 1970-03-04, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
135All disease is a means towards some new joy of health, all evil and pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss and good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is Gods secret which only the soul purified of egoism can penetrate.
Yes, yes (Mother nods approvingly), thats what I am doing right now. And one has be really persevering.
0 1970-03-25, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
She asks, What does Sri Aurobindo mean by the joy of being Gods enemy?2 So you reply:
Here too, I am obliged to say that I do not exactly know because he never told me.
0 1970-05-20, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
516O fool of thy weakness, cover not Gods face from thyself by a veil of awe, approach Him not with a suppliant weakness. Look! thou wilt see on His face not the solemnity of the King and Judge, but the smile of the Lover.
I dont remember. There was something after, wasnt there?
0 1970-05-23, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
520Our parents fell, in the deep Semitic apologue, because they tasted the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Had they taken at once of the tree of eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but Gods purpose in humanity would have been defeated. His wrath is our eternal advantage.
And you say:
0 1970-06-06, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For thou must die to thyself to reach Gods height:
I, Death, am
0 1970-06-13, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the past, when a man was like that, he was called Gods instrument. Thats exactly the impression he gives me: Gods instrument. A power that connects the Force, concentrates it, then it becomes tremendous.
I am happy, very happy, tell him!
0 1970-07-01, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, Death told her one must leave ones body in order to find Gods height.
(Mother translates the sequel)
0 1970-09-09, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"A voice cried, 'Go where none have gone! Dig deeper, deeper yet Till thou reach the grim foundation stone And knock at the keyless gate.'... I left the surface Gods of mind And life's unsatisfied seas And plunged through the body's alleys blind To the nether mysteries."
A God's Labour
0 1970-10-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
0 1970-11-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,
Invests with grace the demon and the snake.
0 1971-05-01, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We (human beings) are not living for the satisfaction of our ego; we live to fulfill Gods will. But to be able to perceive and to know the will of God, we must be without desires and preferences. Otherwise we mistake for Gods will our own limited ideas and principles.
It is in the wide peace of an absolute and devoted sincerity free from fixed ideas and preferences that we can realize the conditions required to know Gods Will and it is with a fearless discipline that we must execute it.
April 30, 1971
0 1972-03-29a, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(In an interview in a Swedish magazine, Malraux had said, For the last fifty years, psychology has been reinstating the demons in man. Such is the real result of psychoanalysis. Faced as we are with the most frightening threat humanity has ever known, I believe that the task of the next century will be to reinstate the Gods in man.)
August 2, 1955
--
I seem to find in Sri Aurobindos work an answer that meets yours and develops it for the question is indeed to reinstate the Gods IN man after having reinstated the demons, as you rightly stated in the Swedish article but I also find there an answer to the agonizing question constantly raised by your characters from The Royal Way to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Indeed, all of them seek a deeper notion in man that will deliver them from death and solitudethis is THE question of the West, to which Sri Aurobindo brings a solution at once dynamic and illuminating. Hence, I am taking the liberty of sending by surface mail one of Sri Aurobindos books in the original English entitled The Human Cycle. I hope it will interest you.
I call on you rather than any other contemporary writer because I think your works embody the very anguish of the West, an anguish I have bitterly experienced all the way to the German concentration camps at the age of twenty, and then in a long and uneasy wandering around the world. Insofar as I have always turned to you, daring and searching with each of your characters what surpasses man, I am again turning to you because I have a feeling that, more than anyone else, you can understand Sri Aurobindos message and perhaps draw a new impetus from it. I am also thinking of a whole generation of young people who expect much from you: more than an ideal of pure heroism, which only opens the doors (as does all self-offering) on another realm of man we have yet to explore, and more than a fascination with death, which also is only a means and not an end, although its brutal nakedness can sometimes open a luminous breach in the bodily prisonwhere we seem to have been immured alive and we emerge into a new dimension of our being. For we tend too often to forget that it is for living that your heroes think so constantly of death; also I think that the young people I mentioned want the truth of Tchen and Katow, the truth of Hernandez, Perken and Moreno [characters in Malrauxs novels] beyond their death.
--
In your reply to the Swedish magazine, you emphasize, The major obstacle to tolerance is not agnosticism but Manichaeism. That is also why religions will never be able to unite humanity, because they have remained Manichaean in their principle, because they are founded on morality, on a sense of good and evil, necessarily varying from one country to the next. Religions will not reconcile men with one another any more than they have reconciled men with themselves, or reconciled their aspiration to be with their need for action and for the same reasons, for in both cases they have dug an abyss between an ideal good, a being they have relegated to heaven, and an evil, a becoming, which reigns supreme in a world where all is vanity. I would like to quote here a passage from Sri Aurobindos Essays on the Gita which throws a clear light on the problem: To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the worlds are Gods discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony.2 I believe that the characters of your books would not be seeking sacrifice and death so intensely if they did not feel the side of light and joy behind the mask of darkness in which they so passionately lose themselves.
Sri Aurobindo has constantly stressed that, through progressive evolutionary cycles, humanity must go beyond the purely ethical and religious stage, just as it must go beyond the infrarational and rational stage, in order to reach a new spiritual and suprarational ageotherwise we will simply remain doomed to the upheavals, conflicts and bloody sacrifices that shake our times, for living according to a code of morality is always a tragedy, as one of the characters in Hope notes.
0 1972-04-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What Sri Aurobindo called overmind is the realm of the Gods.
So it isnt necessary to pass through that.
Oh, no, the realm of the Gods stands apart. I dont think it has much to do with the earths problems. Only sometimes those Gods enjoy meddling in earthly affairs. But they dont have much in common with the great Movement of transformation.
Yes, quite so.
02.01 - A Vedic Story, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Gods are in a great fix. Where is Agni? How is it that the comrade has disappeared all on a sudden? The Sacrifice the great work has to be undertaken. And he is to be the leader, for he alone can take up the burden. There is no time to be lost, everything is ready for the ceremony to start and just at the moment the one needed most is nowhere. So the Gods organise a search party to find out the whereabouts of the runaway god.
The search party consists of Varuna, Mitra and Yama. We shall presently understand the sense of the selection. They look about here and therein ten directions, it is mentioned and at last spot the defaulting god hiding within a huge thick strong cloak or caul. They hail him and ask him to come out and take up his charge. Agni refuses: he says he is not competent to undertake the burden; indeed that is why he ran away and they must not force him. The Gods explain, entreat, encourage Agni. They say and assure him that no harm will come to him, rather he will flourish and prosper and become immortal. He is mighty and he will become almighty as he takes up his work and proceeds with it. Agni accepts in the end and marches out with the Gods.
What does this parable mean? First of all then we must know what Sacrificea Vedic sacrificeis. Sacrifice symbolises the cosmic labour, the march of the universe towards its goal, the conquest of Light over Darkness, the ascent of manhood to godhead, the flaming rise and progress of consciousness to its supreme expression and embodiment. It is the release out of Inconscience and Unconsciousness to consciousness and finally into the super-consciousness.
Sacrifice consists essentially in lighting the fire and pouring fuelofferingsinto it so that it may burn always and brighter and brighter. It calls the Gods, also, it is said, ascends to them, brings them down here to live among men, in men. It lifts men from the ordinary life and consciousness, takes them to the abode of the Gods. In other words its function is to bring down and infuse into the human vessel the godly consciousness and delight and power. Its purpose is to divinise human life. Through the sacrifice man offers his present possessions, his body and life and mind to the Deity and deities and by this surrender and submission constant and unfailing (namas) he awakens the Divine in him the Agni that is to lead him to the divine consummation.
Fire then is the energy of consciousness secreted in the heart of things. It is that which moves the creation upward, produces the unfolding evolution that is history, both individual and collective. It is kindled, it increases in volume and strength and purity and effectiveness, as and when a lower element is offered and submitted to a higher reality and this higher reality impinges upon the lower one (which is what the rubbing of the arai or the pressing of the soma symbolises); the limitation is broken, the small enters into and becomes the vast, the crooked is straightened and leng thened out, what was hidden becomes manifest. This is described as the progression of the sacrifice (adhvaraadvanceon the path). That is also the victorious battle waged against the dark forces of Ignorance. The goal, the purpose is the descent and manifestation of the Gods here upon earth in human vehicles.
But this Fire is not normally available. It is lost, imbedded in the thick petrified folds of unconsciousness and inconscience. Man's soul is not an apparent reality. It has to be found out, called forth, brought to the front. Even so, in the normal consciousness, the soul, the divine fire is a flickering, twinkling, hesitating spark; it is not sure of itself, not certain of its destiny. Yet when the time is ripe and the call comes, the Gods, the luminous forces from above descend with all their insistence and meet the hidden godhead: Agni is reminded of his work and destiny which nothing can frustrate or cancel. He has to consent and undertake his sacrificial labour.
Agni feared and tried to escape from the burden of his responsibility. He wrapped himself in a thick and vast cloak and hid in the depths of far waters. That is the parable way of describing the difficulty, the apparent impossibility of the undertaking Agni has to shoulder. Curiously however he has taken shelter just in the spot which seemed safest to him, from where begins his work, whose nature and substance he has to transform, that is to say, the nether regions of inconscience which is to be raised and transfigured into the solar region of the supra-consciousness.
One interesting point in the story is the choice of the Gods who formed the search party. They were Mitra, Varuna and Yama. Varuna is the god of the vast consciousness (Brihat), the wide universal, the Infinite. His eye naturally penetrates everywhere and nothing can escape his notice. Mitra is harmony and rhythm of the infinity. Every individual element he embraces and he holds them all together in loving unionhis is the friendly tie of comradeship with all. Finally Yama is the master of the lower regions, the underworld of physical and material consciousness, where precisely Agni has taken refuge. Agni is within the jurisdiction of this trinity and it devolves upon them to tackle the truant god.
There is another point which requires clarification. As a reason for his nervousness and flight he alleges that greater people who preceded him had attempted the work, but evidently failed in the attempt; so how can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one play explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anteriorin the evolutionary movementand inferior Gods that Agni's service is being requisitioned. Mythologically also a parallelism is found in the Greek legends where it is said that the Olympian GodsZeus and his companywere a younger generation that replaced, after of course a bloody warfare, their ancestors, the more ancient race of Kronos, the Titans. Titans were the Asuras and Rakshasas who reigned upon earth before the advent of the mentalsattwichuman being, Manu, as referred here.
Now, here I give you the original text in translation:
The Colloquy of Agni and the Gods
(RigvedaX. 51.)
The Gods
I) Huge and firm was that covering with which you shrouded yourself and entered into the waters.
--
II) Who saw me? Which of the Gods saw my multiple body all around? O Mitra! O Varuna! Tell me, where do they dwellall the blazing fuel that move to the Gods?
The Gods
III) O Agni! god self-conscient, we seek you, you who have entered variably into the waters and into the growths of the earth. You shine richly. Yam a has seen you as you flame out of your ten seats.
--
IV) O Varuna! I fled because I was afraid of the work of the priest. The Gods must not yoke me to that work.
That was why I imbedded my body variably so that I as Agni may not know of that pathway.
The Gods
V) Come, O Agni! Man, the mental being, desires to do the sacrifice, he has made everything ready, and you dwell in obscurity!
Make easy-going the path that leads to the Gods, with a happy mind carry the offering.
Agni
--
The Gods
VII) We shall make your life undecaying, O Agni! so that no harm comes to you when engaged in the work.
So, carry to the Gods their share of the offering; a happy birth you have, a happy mind you must carry.
Agni
--
O Gods! Long life to the being shining in the waters, to Agni himself lying in the growths of the earth.
The Gods
IX) The offerings that precede, the offerings that follow, offerings pure and simpleall forceful, may you enjoy. May this sacrifice be yours entirely. The four quarters bow down to you, O Agni!
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
--
A cube and union-crystal of the Gods;
A Mind shall think behind Nature's mindless mask,
02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Asura triumphs everywhere for a while because his power is well-built, perfectly organised. Human power is constituted differently and acts differently; it is full of faults and flaws to start with and for a long time. There is no gap anywhere in the power of the Asura, no tear or stitchit is streamlined, solid, of one piece; it is perfection itself in its own kind once for all. Man's being is made up of conflicts and contradictions; he moves step by step, slowly and laboriously, through gradual purification; he grows through endeavour and struggle. Man triumphs over the Asura only in so far as he moulds himself in the ways of the divine power. But in the world, the Divine and his powers remain behind, because the field of actuality in front is still the domain of the Asura. The outer field, the gross vehiclebody and life and mindall this is constituted by Ignorance and Falsehood; so the Asura can always establish there his influence and hold sway and has actually done so. Man becomes easily an instrument of the Asura, though often unwittingly; the earth is naturally in the firm grasp of the Asura. For the Gods to conquer the earth, to establish their rule in the earth consciousness requires labour and endeavour and time.
No doubt, the violences indulged by men in older times, especially when they acted in groups and packs, were often inflamed and inspired by an Asuric influence. But today it must be clearly seen and recognised that it is the Asura himself with the whole band of his army that has descended upon the earth; they have possessed a powerfully organised human collectivity, shaped it in their mould, using it to complete their conquest of mankind and consolidate their definitive reign upon earth.
--
We believe that the war of today is a war between the Asura and men, human instruments of the Gods. Man certainly is a weaker vessel in comparison with the Asuraon this material plane of ours; but in man dwells the Divine and against the divine force and might, no asuric power can ultimately prevail. The human being who has stood against the Asura has by that very act sided with the Gods and received the support and benediction of the Divine. The more we become conscious about the nature of this war and consciously take the side of the progressive force, of the divine force supporting it, the more will the Asura be driven to retire, his power diminished, his hold relaxed. But if through ignorance and blind passion, through narrow vision and obscurant prejudice we fail to distinguish the right from the wrong side, the dexter from the sinister, surely we shall invite upon mankind utter misery and desolation. It will be nothing less than a betrayal of the Divine Cause.
The fate of India too is being decided in this world-crisison the plains of Flanders, on the steppes of Ukraine, on the farthest expanses of the Pacific. The freedom of India will become inevitable and even imminent in proportion as she becomes cognizant of the underlying character and significance of the present struggle, deliberately takes the side of the evolutionary force, works for the Gods, in proportion as she grows to be an instrument of the Divine Power. The instrument that the Divine chooses is often, to all appearances, faulty and defective, but since it has this higher and mightier support, it will surely outgrow all its drawbacks and lapses, it will surmount all dangers and obstacles and become unconquerable. Thisis what the spiritual seeker means by saying that the Divine Grace can make the lame leap across the mountain. India's destiny today hangs in the balance; it lies in the choice of her path.
A great opportunity is offered to India's soul, a mighty auspicious moment is come, if she can choose. If she chooses rightly, then can she arrive at the perfect fulfilment of her agelong endeavour, her life mission. India has preserved and fostered through the immemorial spiritual living of her saints and seers and sages the invaluable treasure, the vitalising, the immortalising power of spirituality, so that it can be placed at the service of terrestrial life for the deliverance of mankind, for the transfiguration of the human type. It is this for which India lives; by losing this India loses all her reason of existenceraison d'tre the earth and humanity too lose all significance. Today we are in the midst of an incomparable ordeal. If we know how to take the final and crucial step, we come out of it triumphant, a new soul and a new body, and we make the path straight for the Lord. We have to recognise clearly and unequivocally that victory on' one side will mean that the path of the Divineof progress and evolution and fulfilmentwill remain open, become wider and smoother and safer; but if the victory is on the other side, the path will be closed perhaps for ever, at least for many ages and even then the travail will have to be undergone again under the most difficult conditions and circumstances. Not with a political shortsightedness, not out of -the considerations of convenience or diplomacy, of narrow parochial interests, but with the steady vision of the soul that encompasses the supreme welfare of humanity, we have to make our choice, we have to go over to the right side and oppose the wrong one with all the integrity of our life and being. The Allies, as they have been justly called, are really our allies, our friends and comrades, in spite of their thousand faults and defects; they have stood on the side of the Truth whose manifestation and triumph is our goal. Even though they did not know perhaps in, the beginning what they stood for, even though perhaps as yet they do not comprehend the full sense and solemnity of the issues, still they have chosen a side which is ours, and we have to stand by them whole-heartedly in an all-round comradeship if we want to be saved from a great perdition.
This war is a great menace; it is also a great opportunity. It can land humanity into a catastrophe; it can also raise it to levels which would not have been within its reach but for the occasion. The Forces of Darkness have precipitated themselves with all their might upon the world, but by their very downrush have called upon the higher Forces of Light also to descend. The true' use of the opportunity offered to man would be to bring about a change, better still, a reversal, in his consciousness, that is to say, it will be of highest utility if it forces upon him by the pressure of inexorable circumstancessince normally he is so unwilling and incapable to do it through a spontaneous inner awakening the inescapable decision that he must change and shall change; and the change is to be for or towards the birth of a spiritual consciousness in earthly life. Indeed the war might be viewed" as the birth-pangs of such a spiritual consciousness. Whether the labour would be sublimely fruitful here and how or end in barrenness is the question the Fates and the Gods are asking of man the mortal beingtoday.
***
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Next is the domain of the Supermind with which the manifestation of the Divine starts. We have said it is the world of typal realities, of the first seed-realities, where the One and the Many are united and fused in each other, where the absolute unity of the Supreme maintains itself in undiminished magnitude and expresses and formulates itself perfectly in and through the original multiplicity. Here take birth the first personalities, absolute truth-forms of the Divine. Here are the highest Gods, the direct formations of the Divine himself. Here are the Four Powers and Personalities of swara whom Sri Aurobindo has named after the Vaishnava terminology: (i) Mahavira, embodying the Brahmin quality of Knowledge and Light and wide Consciousness, (ii) Balarama, embodying the Kshatriya quality of Force and intense dynamism, (iii) Pradyumna, embodying the quality of love and beauty the Vaishya virtue of mutuality and harmony and solidarity, and (iv) Aniruddha, embodying the Sudra quality of competent service, of organisation and execution in detail. Corresponding with these Four there are the other Four Powers and Personalities of the Divine Mother war (i) Maheshwari, (ii) Mahakali, (iii) Mahalakshmi and (iv) Mahasaraswati. Next in the downward gradient comes the Overmind where the individualised powers and personalities of the Divine tend to become self-sufficient and self-regarding; their absolute unity is loosened and the lines of multiplicity begin to be more independent of each other, each aiming at a special fulfilment of its own. Still the veil that is being drawn over the unity is yet transparent which continues to be sufficiently dynamic. This is the abode of the Gods, the true and high Gods: it is these that the Vedic Rishis appear to have envisaged and sought after. The all Gods (vive dev) were indeed acknowledged to be but different names and forms of one supreme godhead (dev) it is the one god, says Rishi Dirghatamas, who is called multifariously whether as Agni or Yam a or Matariswan; it is the one god, again, who is described as having a thousand heads and a thousand feet. And yet they are separate entities, each has his own distinct and distinctive character and attribute, each demands a characteristic way of approach and worship. The tendency towards an exclusive stress is already at work on this level and it is the perception of this truth that lies behind the term henotheism used by European scholars to describe the Vedic Religion.
The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the Gods have become all quite separate, self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and horizon. The overmind Gods the true Godsare creators in a world of balanced or harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam bhvayantah). Between the Overmind and the Mind there is a class of lesser Godsthey have been called formateurs; they do not create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior Gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement, fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhynamrtis. But in the Mind the Gods become still more fixed and rigid, stereotyped; the mental Gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly understand or tolerate each other.
Mind is the birth-place of absolute division and exclusivismit is the own home of egoism. Egoism is that ignorant modea twist or knot of consciousness which cuts up the universal unity into disparate and antagonistic units: it creates isolated, mutually exclusive whorls in the harmonious rhythm and vast commonalty of the one consciousness or conscious existence. The Sankhya speaks of the principle of ego coming or appearing after the principle of vastness (mahat). The Vast is the region above the Mind, where the unitary consciousness is still intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asuraAsura, the mentalised vital being.
--
All the ancient legends about a principle and a personalityof Denial and Ignorance, of an Everlasting Nayrefer to this fact of a descending consciousness, a Fall. The Vedantic my, spoken of sometimes as the Dark Mother, seems to be the personification of the lower Overmind, Jehovah and Satan of the Hebrews, Olympians and Titans of the Greeks, Ahriman and Ahura Mazda of old Iran, the sons of Diti and Aditi the Indian Puranas speak of, are powers and personalities of consciousness when it has descended entirely into the mind and the vital where the division is complete. These lower reaches have completely lost the unitary consciousness; still there are beings even here that have succeeded in maintaining it as a memory or an aspiration, although in a general way the living reality of the oneness is absent. It is significant that the term asura which came to mean in classical and mythological ages a + sura, not-god, the Titan, had originally a different connotation and etymology, asu + ra, one having force or strength, and was used as a general attri bute of all the Gods. The degradation in the sense of the word is a pointer to the spiritual Fall: Satan was once Lucifer, the bringer or bearer of light. We may mention in this connection that these beings of which we are speaking, dwelling in unseen worlds, are of two broad categories(1) beings that are native to each plane and immutably confined and bound to that plane, and (2) those that extend their existence through many or all planes and assume on each plane the norm and form appropriate to that plane. But this is a problem of individual destiny with which we are not concerned at present.
We were speaking of the descent into the Vital, the domain of dynamism, desire and hunger. The Vital is also the field of some strong creative Powers who follow, or are in secret contact with the line of unitary consciousness, who are open to influences from a deeper or higher or subtler consciousness. Along with the demons there is also a line of daimona, guardian angels, in the hierarchy of vital beings. Much of what is known as aesthetic or artistic creation derives its spirit from this sphere. Many of the Gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspectin their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the own home of the Gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the most part can be located in this region.
All this is comprised within what we term the Higher or the Middle Vital. In the lower vital, we have said, consciousness has become still more circumscribed, dark, ignorantly obstinate, disparately disintegrated. It is the seed-bed of lust and cruelty, of all that is small and petty and low and mean, all that is dirt and filth. It is here that we place the picas, djinns, ghouls and ghosts, and vampires, beings who possess the possessed.
02.02 - Rishi Dirghatama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A word is perhaps necessary to complete the sense of the commentary. Agni has been called old and ancient (Palita), but why? Agni is the first among the Gods. He has come down upon earth, entered into matter with the very creation of the material existence. He is the secret energy hidden in the atom which is attracting, invoking all the other Gods to manifest themselves. It is he who drives the material consciousness in its evolutionary re-course upward towards the radiant fullness in the solar Supra-Consciousness at the summit. He is however not only energy, he is also delight (vma). For he is the Soma, the nectarous flow, occult in the Earth's body. For Earth is the storehouse of the sap of Life, the source of the delightful growths of Life here below.
Sri Aurobindo says: "In the deep and mystic style of the Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vashishtha's even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates."
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,
Invests with grace the demon and the snake.
--
A labour to the Gods impossible.
A life living hardly in a field of death
--
The form is all, and physical Gods are kings.
The inspiring Light plays in fine boundaries;
02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As on a fretted ceiling of the Gods,
An archipelago of laughter and fire,
--
A nebula of the splendours of the Gods
Made from the musings of eternity.
--
Assemblies, crowded senates of the Gods,
Life's puissances reigned on seats of marble will,
--
Her young Gods yearned for the release of souls
Asleep in objects, vague, inanimate.
02.03 - The Shakespearean Word, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Glo.[Kneeling]O you mighty Gods!
This world I do renounce. . .
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To dim dwarf Gods she offers secret rites.
37.22
--
A foundling of the Gods she wanders here
Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell
--
Admiring themselves as titans and as Gods
Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds
02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like the poet his idol also is of a lower rank or of a plebeian status. He keeps away from such high Gods as Indra and Agni and Varuna and Mitra: great poets will sing their praises. He will take care of the lesser ones, those who are moving in the shadow of the great ones and are hardly noticed. Even in these modern days, goddess Shitala, the healing goddess of epidemics, lives side by side with Durga.
But really it does not matter if the deity is small. For, if the worship is sincere and the offering pure, they ultimately reach the Divine. Did not Sri Krishna say in the Gita that whom-soever you may worship and in whatever way, that in the end' reaches him? The importance and significance of worship do not depend upon their size and scale: a little water, a leaf, a flower may more than do.
The small Gods are small, but do not slight themthey are powerful. They are powerful because they are deities of the earth. In fact, like Gods and goddesses in heaven, there are Gods and goddesses on earth also. The Gods in heaven are high and far away, but these unobtrusive deities are near to our hearth and home. The Greeks referred to the Olympian Gods, of high caste and rank as it were,like Jupiter and Apollo and to those others who dwelt on the lowly earth and embraced its water and land, its rivers and trees and fields the nymph, the satyr, and Pan and dryad and naiad. What are the powers and functions of these unearthly beings? They on their part are guarding the gate to heaven, questioning the pilgrim of their divine destination. Well, the sentinels have to be appeased first, satisfied and convinced. Surely the sands burn hotter than the sun!
We may ask in this connection which deity does our poet invoke here, to whom does he raise his offerings, to whomkasmai devya? One need not be startled at the answer: it is the toadstool. But the mushroom growth assumes a respectable figure in the guise of its Sanskrit name,chatraka. Kalidasa did one better. His magic touch gave the insignificant flora a luminousrobeilndhra, a charming name. The great poet tells us that the earth is not barren or sterilekartum yat camahmucchilndhrmabandhym. The next pertinent question is: why does the poet worship a toadstool? What is his purpose? Does a toadstool possess any special power? This leads us to a hidden world, to the 'mysteries' spoken of by the poet himself.
--
Our poet too is saying something in the same line. He is appealing to the toadstool god to give him the right vision, to take him to the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the Gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, evenwhile in the physical body, existence in heaven,ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said.
That he may pass me through when my star falls
--
He begins by speaking of the birth of the Gods. Well, a small truth needs to be revealed at this point. We have spoken of he lesser and smaller Gods. These small Gods are shielded and supported, in fact, by the big Gods. This Shilindhra or toadstool has behind him Dionysus, the delight and loveliness and enjoyment and youtha veritable symbol of ecstasy, of earthly ecstasy. That which is nectar in heaven is presented on earth in drugs and herbal juices. Shilindhra and ambrosia pertain to the same class.
The birth of Shilindhra resembles the birth of Dionysus. When King Zeus took the form of thunder and lightning and entered the womb of Semele, Dionysus was born. Similar is the story of the appearance of the toadstool, in the midst of rain and thunder and lightning and on the lap of mother earth. We have already said that there are two categories of Gods or two types of themone belongs to heaven and the other to earth. The Vedic Rishis announced that heaven was our father and earth themotherdaurme pit mt pthvimahyam. The Vedantins usually and mainly worship the father, and Tantriks, the mother. Svarga, Dyaus, is the world of light, and earth or bhu is that of delight and enjoyment. We have already said that high above, up there, dwell Apollo and Zeus and Juno, and below here on earth, Dionysus and Bacchus and Semele and Aphrodite.
However the poet says that as the toadstool is born in the midst of thunder and lightning, his strength and capacity are of the nature of thunderenduring and hard and powerful. Born thus it spreads everywhere and lasts through all time. From the beginning of creation this god has sprouted up everywhere, as giver of pleasure and ecstasy and intoxication. To worship him is to worship earth, to worship Dionysus himself. But one needs to worship this god in the right way, to give oneself away wholly to him. Once upon a time the demons for some selfish interest wanted to capture and imprison him. The result was disastroushe thought of depriving them of their power of movement and drowning them into the ocean. On the contrary, to the devoted which world does he reveal, which delight bring? Let us listen to the poet:
--
Calm faces of the Gods on background vast
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes,
--
Of course, in Sri Aurobindo we reach the inner and higher world through a luminous path, through worlds of light, ranging one upon another. It is a journey through pure air and clear light. Conversely the poet of the toadstool leads one by the passage of an acid drunkenness and a half-conscious drowse. If the goal here is a delight and a freedom they are arrived at after traversing a purgatory or undergoing a troubled purification. But this too leads verily to a world of the Gods.
This "little slender lad, whose flesh is bitter, lightning engendered, born from dungs of mares" is perhaps a symbol of our human receptacle. We have to carry this mortal frame with its clay feet and make the effort towards self-transcendence: the alchemy's other name is self-purification and self-perfection. This tender shoot is a mysterious chemical storehouse, its fermentation and purification and use awaken in us the sleeping divine will, give a clear vision, guide us through the secret worlds and ultimately to the home of Immortality. The Vedic Rishis sang to the Soma creeper or god Soma,Tatra mm. amtam kdhi, O Somadeva, carry us where thou flowest down and there make us immortal. For there abound all delight, all ecstasy, all enjoyment, all lure and the supreme Desire ofdesirenanda, moda, mud, pramud, kma4are these not the five fruits of heaven the poet of the West mentions?
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He dreams sometimes of the revels of the Gods
And sees the Dionysian gesture pass, -
--
A magnificent imbroglio of the Gods,
A game, a work ambiguously divine.
--
Mid the grey faces of its demon Gods,
Questioned by whispers of its flickering ghosts,
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Fills silence with the voices of the Gods,
But in the cry the single Voice is lost.
--
A life of Gods in heaven she sees above,
A demigod emerging from an ape
--
An error of the Gods has made the world.
Or indifferent the Eternal watches Time.
02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It captured the oracles of the occult Gods,
Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage,
--
Turned from the brilliant nature of the Gods
To fallen angels and misleading suns,
--
Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the Gods
And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.
--
And no news of him reach the waiting Gods,
Marked "missing" in the register of souls,
--
The reason meant for nearness to the Gods
And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The forms of Gods sustained a demon cult;
Heaven's face became a mask and snare of Hell.
--
The Gods see not and man is impotent;
Oppressing the God-spark within the soul
--
Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.
A yoke is laid upon the world's dim heart;
--
In scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods
They claim creation as their conquered fief
--
For even the radiant children of the Gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
02.09 - The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A favourite and intimate of the Gods
Obeying the divine comm and to joy,
--
The shining Edens of the vital Gods
Received him in their deathless harmonies.
--
And Pleasure had the stature of the Gods;
Dream walked along the highways of the stars;
--
The rapture that the Gods sustain he bore.
Immortal pleasure cleansed him in its waves
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
69 - VOICES OF THE Gods (2)
Section 66
--
Always ascends the zigzag of the Gods
And upward points the spirit's climbing Fire.
--
And heard afar the voices of the Gods.
69.3
02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Spirit's truths take form as living Gods
And each can build a world in its own right.
--
The natural privilege of unfallen Gods,
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.
--
This quick uncertain leader of blind Gods,
This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
--
And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
And Life, a splendour stream of musing Force,
--
But, nearer, Gods and living Presences.
A march of friezes marked the lowest steps;
--
Stood there, a race of young keen-visioned Gods,
King-children born on Wisdom's early plane,
--
This was the play of the bright Gods of Thought.
Attracting into time the timeless Light,
02.12 - The Heavens of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All the high Gods who hid their visages
From the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,
--
Its priests the souls of dedicated Gods,
Humanity its house of sacrifice.
02.14 - Appendix, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul2
02.14 - The World-Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All objects were like bodies of the Gods,
A spirit symbol environing a soul,
--
Resume their place in the process of the Gods
Until their work in cosmic Time is done.
--
Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,
His soul passed on, a single conscious power,
02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Gods conversed with him behind Life's veil.
Neighbour his being grew to Nature's crests.
--
His actions framed the movements of the Gods,
His will took up the reins of cosmic Force.
03.01 - The New Year Initiation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The scope of this New Year Prayer does not limit itself only to our individual sadhanait embraces also the collective consciousness which is specially the field of its application. It is the muffled voice of entire humanity in its secret aspiration that is given expression here. It is by the power of this mantra, protected by this invulnerable armour,if we choose to accept it as such,that the collective life of man will attain its fulfilment. We have often stated that the outstanding feature of the modern world is that it has become a Kurukshetra of Gods and Titans. It is no doubt an eternal truth of creation, this conflict between the divine and the anti-divine, and it has been going on in the heart of humanity since its advent upon earth. In the inner life of the world this is a fact of the utmost importance, its most significant principle and mystery. Still it must be said that never in the annals of the physical world has this truth taken such momentous proportions as in the grim present. It is pregnant with all good and evil that may make or mar human destiny in the near future. Whether man will transcend his half-animal state and rise to the full height of his manhood, nay even to the godhead in him, or descend back to the level of his gross brute naturethis is the problem of problems which is being dealt with and solved in the course of the mighty holocaust of the present World War.
In her last year's message1 the Mother gave a clear warning that we must have no more hesitation, that we must renounce one side, free ourselves from all its influence and embrace the other side without hesitation, without reservation. At the decisive moment in the life of the world and of mankind, one must definitely, irrevocably choose one's loyalty. It will not do to say, like the over-wise and the over-liberal, that both sides the Allies and the Axis Powersare equalequally right or equally wrong and that we can afford to be outside or above the prejudices or interests of either. There is no room today for a neutral. He who pretends to be a neutral is an enemy to the cause of truth. Whoever is Dot with us is against us.
03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In a general way we may perhaps say, without gross error, that every man has the right to become a poet, a scientist or a politician. But when the question rises in respect of a particular person, then it has to be seen whether that person has a natural ability, an inherent tendency or aptitude for the special training so necessary for the end in view. One cannot, at will, develop into a poet by sheer effort or culture. He alone can be a poet who is to the manner born. The same is true also of the spiritual life. But in this case, there is something more to take into account. If you enter the spiritual path, often, whether you will or not, you come in touch with hidden powers, supra-sensible forces, beings of other worlds and you do not know how to deal with them. You raise ghosts and spirits, demons and GodsFrankenstein monsters that are easily called up but not so easily laid. You break down under their impact, unless your adhr has already been prepared, purified and streng thened. Now, in secular matters, when, for example, you have the ambition to be a poet, you can try and fail, fail with impunity. But if you undertake the spiritual life and fail, then you lose both here and hereafter. That is why the Vedic Rishis used to say that the ear then vessel meant to hold the Soma must be properly baked and made perfectly sound. It was for this reason again that among the ancients, in all climes and in all disciplines, definite rules and regulations were laid down to test the aptitude or fitness of an aspirant. These tests were of different kinds, varying according to the age, the country and the Path followedfrom the capacity for gross physical labour to that for subtle perception. A familiar instance of such a test is found in the story of the aspirant who was asked again and again, for years together, by his Teacher to go and graze cows. A modern mind stares at the irrelevancy of the procedure; for what on earth, he would question, has spiritual sadhana to do with cow-grazing? In defence we need not go into any esoteric significance, but simply suggest that this was perhaps a test for obedience and endurance. These two are fundamental and indispensable conditions in sadhana; without them there is no spiritual practice, one cannot advance a step. It is absolutely necessary that one should carry out the directions of the Guru without question or complaint, with full happiness and alacrity: even if there comes no immediate gain one must continue with the same zeal, not giving way to impatience or depression. In ancient Egypt among certain religious orders there was another kind of test. The aspirant was kept confined in a solitary room, sitting in front of a design or diagram, a mystic symbol (cakra) drawn on the wall. He had to concentrate and meditate on that figure hour after hour, day after day till he could discover its meaning. If he failed he was declared unfit.
Needless to say that these tests and ordeals are mere externals; at any rate, they have no place in our sadhana. Such or similar virtues many people possess or may possess, but that is no indication that they have an opening to the true spiritual life, to the life divine that we seek. Just as accomplishments on the mental plane,keen intellect, wide studies, profound scholarship even in the scriptures do not entitle a man to the possession of the spirit, even so capacities on the vital plane,mere self-control, patience and forbearance or endurance and perseverance do not create a claim to spiritual realisation, let alone physical austerities. In conformity with the Upanishadic standard, one may not be an unworthy son or an unworthy disciple, one may be strong, courageous, patient, calm, self-possessed, one may even be a consummate master of the senses and be endowed with other great virtues. Yet all this is no assurance of one's success in spiritual sadhana. Even one may be, after Shankara, a mumuksu, that is to say, have an ardent yearning for liberation. Still it is doubtful if that alone can give him liberation into the divine life.
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And offered to the Gods the vacant place.
Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.
--
As stake in a wager of indifferent Gods
And the shifting lights and shadows of the idea
--
Immortal hushbefore the Gods are born;
A universal Force awaited, mute,
--
A seeking and a finding as of Gods.
There Matter is the Spirit's firm density,
03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The story runs (Aitareya Upanishad) that once the Gods wished to come down and inhabit an earthly frame. Several animal forms (the cow, the horse) were presented to them one after another, but they were not satisfied, none was considered adequate for their habitation. At last the human frame (with its conscious personality) was offered to them and immediately they declared that that was indeed the perfect form they neededsuktam bateti and they entered into it.
The human frame is the abode of the Gods; it is a temple of God, as we all know. But the most significant thing about it is that the Gods alone do not dwell there: all being, all creatures crowd there, even the ungodly and the undivine. The Pashu (the animal), the Pishacha (the demon), the Asura (the Titan), and the Deva (the god), all find comfortable lodging in itthere are many chambers indeed in this mansion of the Lord. Man was made after the image of God and yet Lucifer had access into that tabernacle and all his entire host with him. This duality of the divine and the undivine, the characteristic mark of human nature as it is, presents a field and a labour through which man's progress has to be worked out. The soul, the divine flame, has, been placed in Ignorance, that is to say, what is apparent Ignorance, the frame of Matter, just because this Matter in Ignorance is to be smelted, purified, given its original and intrinsic substance, shape and character. The human person in its actual form is not obviously something absolutely perfect and divine. The type, the norm it represents is divine, but it has been overlaid with all obscure and base elementsit has to be washed and cleaned thoroughly, smelted and reconditioned. The dark ungodly elements mar and vitiate; they must be removed on the one hand, but on the other, they point out and test the salvaging work that has to be done and is being done. Man is always at the crossroads. This is his especial difficulty and this is also his unique opportunity. His consciousness has a double valency, in contradistinction to the animal's which is, it can be said, monovalent, in that it is amoral, has not the sense of divided loyalty and hence the merit of choice. The movements of the animal follow a fixed stereotyped pattern; it has not got to deviate from the beaten track of its instincts. But man with his sense of the moral, of the good, of the progressive is at every step of his life faced with a dilemma, has to pause at a parting of the ways, always looks before and after and is puzzled at a cas de conscience. That, we have said, has been made for him the condition of growth, of a conscious and willed change with an ever-increasing tempo towards perfect perfection. That furnishes the occasion and circumstance by which he rises to divinity itself, becomes the Divine. He becomes the Divine thus not merely in the own home of the Divine, but on all the levels of the manifestation: all the planes of consciousness with all the hierarchy of beingspowers and personalitiesfind a new play of harmony, a supreme and global fulfilment in the transfigured human vehicle. The frame itself that encases the human consciousness acts as a living condenser: the very contour in its definiteness seems to exert a pressure towards an ever larger and higher synthesis, it may be compared to a kind of field office (Einsteinian, for example) that controls, regulates, moves and configurates all elements within its range. The human frame even as a frame possesses a magic virtue.
Vaishnavism sees the Divine as a human person, the human person par excellence. Krishna's body is a radiant form of consciousness (cinmaya), no doubt, but it is as definite, determinate, and concrete as the physical body, it is the physical itself but in its true substance. And its exquisiteness consists in its being human in form. The Vedantin's Maya does not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For they say Goloka stands above Brahmaloka.
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The high Gods look on man and watch and choose
Today's impossibles for the future's base.
--
Measured for man by the initiate Gods.
My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.
--
Only we hear the feet of passing Gods.
341
--
The labourers in the quarries of the Gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
--
He shall take on him the burden of the Gods;
All heavenly light shall visit the earth's thoughts,
--
Moved by the passions of the Gods shall come.
All mights and greatnesses shall join in her;
--
Broad-based to bear the Gods on fiery wheels,
Flaming he swept through the spiritual gates.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There was no department of life or culture in which it could be said of India that she was not great, or even, in a way, supreme. From hard practical politics touching our earth, to the nebulous regions of abstract metaphysics, everywhere India expressed the power of her genius equally well. And yet none of these, neither severally nor collectively, constituted her specific genius; none showed the full height to which she could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not names of warriors or statesmen, nor of poets who were only poets, nor of mere intellectual philosophers, however great they might be, but of Rishis, who saw and lived the Truth and communed with the Gods, of Avataras who brought down and incarnated here below something of the supreme realities beyond.
The most significant fact in the history of India is the unbroken continuity of the line of her spiritual masters who never ceased to appear even in the midst of her most dark and distressing ages. Even in a decadent and fast disintegrating India, when the whole of her external life was a mass of ruins, when her political and economical and even her cultural life was brought to stagnation and very near to decomposition, this undying Fire in her secret heart was ever alight and called in the inevitable rebirth and rejuvenation. Ramakrishna, with Vivekananda as his emanation in life dynamic and material, symbolises this great secret of India's evolution. The promise that the Divine held out in the Gita to Bharata's descendant finds a ready fulfilment in India, in Bharata's land, more perhaps than anywhere else in the world; for in India has the. Divine taken birth over and over again to save the pure in heart, to destroy the evil-doer and to establish the Right Law of life.
03.07 - The Sunlit Path, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like the individual, nations too have their sunlit path and the path of the doldrum as well. So long as a nation keeps to the truth of its inner being, follows its natural line of development, remains faithful to its secret godhead, it will have chosen that good part which will bring it divine blessings and fulfilment. But sometimes a nation has the stupidity to deny its self, to run after an ignis fatuus, a mymrga, then grief and sorrow and frustration lie ahead. We are afraid India did take such a wrong step when she refused to see the great purpose behind the present war and tried to avoid contri buting her mite to the evolutionary Force at work. On the other hand Britain in a moment of supreme crisis, that meant literally life or death, not only to herself or to other nations, but to humanity itself, had the good fortune to be led by the right Inspiration, the whole nation rose as one man and swore allegiance to the cause of humanity and the Gods. That was how she was saved and that was how she acquired a new merit and a fresh lease of life. Unlike Britain, France bowed down and accepted what should not have been accepted and cut herself adrift from her inner life and truth, the result was five years of hell. Fortunately, the hell in the end proved to be a purgatory, but what a purgatory! For there were souls who were willing to pay the price and did pay it to the full cash and nett. So France has been given the chance again to turn round and take up the thread of her life where it snapped.
Once more another crisis seems to be looming before the nations, once more the choice has to be made and acted upon. In our weakness it is natural and easy to invoke God, to feel the presence of a higher Guidance, to trust in a heavenly light; but it is in our strength that we must know whose strength it is, and in whose strength it is that we conquer.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is this characteristic that struck the European mind in its first contact with the Indian artistic world and called forth the criticism that Indian culture lacks in humanism. It is true, a very sublimated humanism finds remarkable expression in Ajanta, and perhaps it is here that the Western eye began to learn and appreciate the Indian style of beauty; even in Ajanta, however, in the pieces where the art reaches its very height, mere humanism seems to be at its minimum. And if we go beyond these productions that reflect the mellowness and humaneness of the Buddhist Compassion, if we go into the sanctuary of the Brahmanic art, we find that the experiences embodied there and the method of expression become more and more "anonymous"; they have not, that is to say, the local colour of humanity, which alone makes the European mind feel entirely at home. Europe's revulsion of feeling against Indian art came chiefly from her first meeting with the multiple-headed, multiple-armed, expressionless, strangely poised Hindu Gods and goddesses, so different in every way from ordinary human types.
Indian art had to be non-human, because its aim was to be supra-human, unnatural, because its very atmosphere was the supra-natural.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Life is an expression of the Divine Presence, earth is the field of labour for the Godssuch was the original old-world Vedic view. It was the Buddhist dispensation that made life an inferior truth, a complex of unreality and decreed that the highest aim of man is to disappear from life after life's fitful fever to sleep well that seems to have been the motto given.
Buddhism saw and accepted a world of misery; therefore it knew how to touch the human heart, open up the doors in human consciousness to sympathy and compassion and love. Life it envisaged as an unreal persistence and therefore awakened and installed there the fiery urge towards withdrawal, ascension and transcendence. It was Buddhism that canonised the way of asceticism, laid out the path of the Everlasting Nayalthough called (somewhat euphemistically perhaps) the Middle Path being tempered by an attitude of sweet reasonableness in the inner heart.
03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Buddhism cried halt because of two omissions: it turned man's mind to two new directions. In our eagerness to reach the spiritual and the supra-sensual, we gave scant recognition to the mental and the rational; and yet mind and reason should be the very basis of the life spiritual. And in the pursuit of God and the Gods and the things divine, we became blind to human problems, things concerning man in the human way. The earlier vision gives us a happy picture of humanity. The world moves, it was said, from delight to delight, it was born in delight and it consummates in delight. One sang of immortality, of the solar light, of men being children of Heaven and Beatitude. That this material structure on which man leads his precarious existence is a texture of age and disease and death, that misery and undelight is of the very substance of human life was a hard fact that did not get due recognition. Perhaps it was an earlier, that is to say, a younger humanity
A simple Child,
03.12 - Communism: What does it Mean?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Be that as it may, if one demands a fair share of the riches of the commonwealth, one must lend one's hand honestly and whole-heartedly to its production. That is the line of true communism. Above all, one must cultivate the civic sense, the very primary thing one must have for a harmoniously prosperous collective life, we have to learn again the first lesson of civilised living in these days when the brute and the vampire are seated in human hearts. We must not always clamour for selfish gains, gains for oneself, for one's class or community, or even for one's country. We must have a global view of the human society which is a complex and multifoliate organism. Many interests have to be served, many lines of growth have to be encouraged, liberty for contraries all in the framework of a wider harmony. The ancient Rishis invoked the aid of the Gods Mitra and Varuna for the establishment of that wide harmony, the builders of the new age too can do no better.
***
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the raceits soul of lyric fervour and grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner heart that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagores art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world of Gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.
I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tagore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.
--
The modernist does not ask: is it good? is it beautiful? He asks: is it effective? is it expressive? And by effectivity and expressiveness he means something nervous and physical. Expressiveness to him would mean the capacity to tear off the veil over what once was considered not worth the while or decent to uncover. A strange recklessness and shamelessness, an unhealthy and perverse curiosity, characteristic of the Asura and the Pisacha, of the beings of the underworld, mark the movement of the modernist. But I forget. The Modernist is not always an anarchist, for he too seeks to establish a New Order; indeed he arrogates to himself that mission and declares it to be his and his alone. Obviously it is not the order of the higher Gods of Olympus: these have been ousted and dethroned. We are being led back to the mysteries of an earlier race, reverting to an infra-evolutionary status, into the arcana of Thor and Odin, godlings of an elemental Nature.
In such a world Tagore is a voice and a beacon from over the heights of the old world declaring and revealing the verities that are eternal and never die. They who seek to kill them do so at their peril. Tagore is a great poet: as such he is close to the heart of Bengal. He is a great Seer: as such humanity will claim him as its own.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And thunder drums announced the embattled Gods.
A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas,
--
In this high signal moment of the Gods
Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss,
--
Thoughts natural and native to the Gods.
As needing nothing but its own rapt flight
--
Her spirit kept the stature of the Gods;
It stooped but was not lost in Matter's reign.
--
Many high Gods dwelt in one beautiful home;
Yet was her nature's orb a perfect whole,
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This episode links up with the inner story of mankind, its spiritual history. The growing or evolving consciousness of man was not only an outgoing and widening movement: it was also a heightening, an ascent into ranges that are not normally perceived, towards summits of our true reality. We have spoken of the Grco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret vein of life that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant influence along channels and achievements that are meant to serve the final goal and purpose. The Mysteries prevalent and practised in Greece itself and Crete and the occult rites of Egyptian priests, the tradition of a secret knowledge and discipline found in the Kabbalah, the legendary worship of Gods and goddesses sometimes confused, sometimes identified with Nature forcesall point to the existence of a line of culture which is known in India as Yoga. If all other culture means knowledge, Yoga is the knowledge of knowledge. As the Upanishad says, there are two categories of knowledge, the superior and-the inferior. The development of the mind and life and body belongs to the domain of Inferior Knowledge: the development of the soul, the discovery of the Spirit means the Superior Knowledge.
This knowledge remained at the outset scattered, hidden, confined to a few, a company of adepts: it had almost no direct contact with the main current of life. Its religious aspect too was so altered and popularised as to represent and serve the secular life. The systematisation and propagation of that knowledgeat least the aspiration for that knowledgewas attempted on an effective scale in the Hebrew Old Testament. But then a good amount of externalities, of the Inferior Knowledge was mixed up with the inner urge and the soul perception. The Christ with his New Testament came precisely with the mission of cleaning the Augean stables, in place of the dross and coverings, the false and deformed godheads, to instal something of the purest ray of the inner consciousness, the unalloyed urge of the soul, the demand of our spiritual personality. The Church sought to build up society on that basis, attempting a fusion of the spiritual and the temporal power, so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or worldly world, there maybe established God's own world, the City of God.
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The appearance of the Greeks on the stage of human civilisation is a mystery to historians. They are so different from all that preceded them. There does not seem to exist any logical link between them and the races from whom they are supposed to have descended or whose successors they were. The Minoan or Cretan civilisation is said to be cradle of the Greek, but where is the parallel or proportion between the two, judging from whatever relics have been left over from the older, the more ancient one. Indeed that is the term which best describes the situation. Whatever has gone before the Hellenic culture is ancient; they belong to the Old Regime. Egypt is old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding Gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida.
Human evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic culture and civilisation. All crises in evolution are a sudden revelation, an unexpected outburst, a saltum, a leap into the unknown. Now, what the Greeks brought in was the Mind, the luminous Reason, the logical faculty that is married to the senses, no doubt, but still suffused with an inner glow of consciousness. It is the faculty mediating between a more direct and immediate perception of things, Intuition and Instinct, on the one hand, and on the other, the perception given by the senses and a power of control over material things. Take Egypt or Israel or Chaldea, what one finds prominent there is the instinctive-intuitive man, spontaneousprime-sautierimaginative, mythopoeic, clairvoyant, clairaudient (although not very clear, in the modern and Greek sense), bringing into this world things of the other world and pushing this world as much as possible into the other, maintaining a kind of direct connection and communion between the two. The Greeks are of another mould. They are a rational people; they do not move and act simply or mainly by instinctive reactions, but even these are filtered in them through a light of the Mind of Intelligence, a logical pattern, a rational disposition of things; through Mind they seek to know Matter and to control it. It is the modern methodology, that of observation and experiment, in other words, the scientific procedure. The Greeks have had their Gods, their mythology; but these are modelled somewhat differently: the Gods are made more human, too human, as has often been observed. Zeus and Juno (Hera) are infinitely more human than Isis and Osiris or Moloch and Baal or even the Jewish Jehovah. These vital Gods have a sombre air about them, solemn and serious, grim and powerful, but they have not the sunshine, the radiance and smile of Apollo (Apollo Belvedere) or Hermes. The Greeks might have, they must have taken up their Gods from a more ancient Pantheon, but they have, after the manner of their sculptor Phidias, remoulded them, shaped and polished them, made them more luminous and nearer and closer to earth and men. 1 Was it not said of Socrates that he brought down the Gods from heaven upon earth?
The intermediary faculty the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
--
The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the Gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought- Gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clo the our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the Gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.
The Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous, the physical, the material. Since the arrival of the Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need not speak any more of God and the Gods and the divine principles indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something of what lies beyond intellect and reason.
In India we have an echo of the transition, rather perhaps, she held up the type of the transition required. For here the evolution seems to have been more gradual and the steps are more clearly visible leading one to the other. India maintained an unbroken continuity in the cyclic change of the human consciousness. She was coeval with Egypt and Chaldea, Sumeria and Babylon: she communed with them perhaps in similar and parallel terms. And yet she changed or evolved and knew to express herself in other terms in other times. She had talked in mystic terms with the mystics and later on she talked in rational terms with rationalists. And today we see signs of her parleying with the Scientists in scientific terms. That is how India still lives, while Egypt and Chaldea have gone the way of Atlantis and Gondwanaland. For something is enshrined there which is eternal, something living and dynamic which is pressing forward to manifest and embody itself, some supreme truth and reality of the future which she is fostering within her to deliver to nature and humanitya new humanity with a new nature.
The Olympians as opposed to the Chthonian Gods. The Olympians were white in colour, the Chthonians black or blood-red: the Olympian temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on.
***
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mounting from mind's last peaks to mate with Gods,
Making earth's brilliant thoughts a springing-board
--
Into communion with its comrade Gods.
Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms
--
Nor yet the art and wisdom of the Gods.
--
Puissant, apart her soul as the Gods live.
--
Content in her little garden of the Gods
As blooms a flower in an unvisited place.
04.02 - To the Heights II, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A solar world made of the glories of the Gods!
October 1, 1932
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Your life a changeful mould for growing Gods.
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
--
The Gods are still too few in mortal forms."
The Voice withdrew into its hidden skies.
But like a shining answer from the Gods
Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
--
Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty Gods,
This breathing Scripture of the Eternal's joy,
--
Stanzaed to glimmering curves by artist Gods,
Depart where love and destiny call your charm.
--
Face the high Gods, crowned with felicity,
Then meet a greater god, thy self beyond Time."
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Viewed as a progressive growth of consciousness and transformation of nature, man's advance has been marked out in a few very definite stages. The first was the purely animal manPasuwhen man lived merely as a physical being, concerned solely about his body. Then came the Pisacha, the man of vital urges in their crudest form, the man of ignorant passions and dark instincts who has been imaged in the popular mind as the ghoul. At the next stage, with a further release of the consciousness, when the larger vital impulses come into play man becomes the Rakshasa, the demon. Egoistic hunger for possession, enjoyment, enlarged and increased appetite are his characteristics. Next came the Asura, the Titan, the egoistic mental man in his earlier avatar seeking to emerge out of the purely vital nature. Ambition and pride are his guiding spirit. Prometheus is his prototype. There are still two higher types which have been established in the human consciousness and in the world atmosphere as dynamic ideals, if not as common concrete facts of the material world. The first is the ethical man, who seeks to govern his life according to some principles of light and purity, such, for example, as unselfishness, altruism, chivalry, self-abnegation, rectitude, truthfulness etc. He is the Sattwic man, as known in India. There is also a still higher category, where consciousness endeavours to go beyond mind, enters into the consciousness of the Spirit; then we have the spiritual man, the saint and the sage. Beyond lie the supra-mental domains formed of the consciousness of the Gods.
Man, individually and collectively, has passed and is passing through these steps of evolution. The last one is his goal at the present stage. To be a saint, seer or sage is not enough for man. He must be a god. Indeed when he has succeeded to be a god then only would it be possible for him to become what a saint or a seer or sage has to be in order to fulfil himself totally and integrally. The human race as a whole is progressing along the same line towards the same consummation. That is the secret purpose and end of Nature, to evolve a growing developing material form housing, embodying higher and wider ranges of consciousness, integrating all elements into a more and more intimate and inviolable unity and harmony.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And temples hewn as if by exiled Gods
To imitate their lost eternity.
--
Assisting the slow entries of the Gods,
Sowing in young minds immortal thoughts they lived,
--
Like a desire that questions silent Gods
Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.
04.04 - To the Heights IV, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Gods descend along a path of luminous silence spread in
the farthest spaces of our inmost being.
04.05 - The Immortal Nation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The truth then is this: the stronger the inner life a nation builds up and organises, the longer it lives and the greater the power it acquires to revive when it falls for a time into decline. Naturally, a good deal depends upon the nature and quality of this inner life. There are certain types of inner life which mean the very source of life, there are others that are only secondary sources. Ancient Greece or even modern France has had a well-developed inner life, but this inner life was very strongly wedded to and welded into the outer life, it lay at least at one remove farther from the true source of life. Ancient Egypt less intellectual, less mentally cultivated, was in contact with the occult, the subliminal base of life, more potent and dynamic springs of consciousness. This was the cause of Egypt's greater longevity and some capacity of renewal. The older people generally lived in, or at least, were in living contact with principles of existence more fundamental and therefore more enduring. The Gods of the mind and of the inner vital enjoy a longer immortality than the deities that rule man's outer life and body.
Viewed from this standpoint India stands as a case sui generis. She did not stop short satisfied with the lesser Gods. She aspired for the highest One, the supreme spiritual reality and it was her mission, her destiny, to foster it and keep guard over it for the sake of humanity. Whatever the outer vicissitudes, she maintained throughout the inner continuity of her spiritual life and realisation. That is where she drank of the nectar of immortality and that is how she could always revive and renew herself after a period of decline and almost disintegration, because she possessed the mystery of the self. Other peoples were busy about many other things important or unimportant in some measure, but here was a race that never forgot the one thing needful. India of today, we repeat, is fundamentally and essentially the India of the Vedas, even in a more literal sense than that China of Mao-tse- Tung (or Sun-yat-Sen) is the China of Lao-tse.
A race dies out altogether or continues to lead a superficial mechanical existence, that is to say, vegetates as an inchoate mass, when it knows to live only in its body, confined only to the demands of the barest physical necessities. The life of a race gains a meaning and a new vitality when a higher light and aspiration inspire and move its spirit; when a deeper and finer sensibility, a nobler ambition stir its affections, when a superior intelligence and understanding illumine its mental horizon, its lease of life is increased by that and also its power of recuperation and renewal. And the further it enters into these basic constants of existence the greater that power of rejuvenation. 1
04.06 - To Be or Not to Be, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Yes, there is one thing intrinsically evil and undivine and that has to be rejected and cast aside ruthlessly that is nothing else than the egoistic consciousness. It is this that has passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, formations of its own, other deities installed in place of the Divine Truth and Reality. The ego goes, indeed, and with it also those rhythms and stresses, lines and shades germane to it that bar the free flow of the Supreme Breath. But the instrument remains and the arms and the weapons they are cleansed and sanctified: instead of the Asura wielding them, it is now the Gods, the Divine Himself who possess and use them.
Canto I 5
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An Evolutionary Problem Man and the Gods
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of CivilisationValues Higher and Lower
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An Evolutionary Problem Man and the Gods
04.37 - To the Heights-XXXVII, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I t is the pure energy of the Gods,
The clear knowledge that fashions bodies of delight.
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:05.01 - Man and the Gods
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Values Higher and Lower Gods Labour
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalMan and the Gods
Man and the Gods
The Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It is the body and substance, the very personification, of unconsciousness Ignorance carried to the last limit and concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality at the summit. The supreme and original Reality is the quaternary:(1) Light, (2) Truth, (3) Love and (4) Life. They are the first and primal godheads with whom creation starts and who preside over the whole play of the manifestation. These Gods that emanated out of the supreme consciousness of the Divine Mother as her fundamental aspects and personalities had automatically an absolute freedom of action and movement, otherwise they would not be divine personalities. And this freedom could be exercised and was in fact exercised in cutting the tie with the mother consciousness, in order to follow a line of independent and separate development instead of a merger life of solidarity with the Supreme. The result was immediate and drastic the precipitation of a physical life and an earthly existence which negated the very principles of the original nature of the godheads and brought forth exactly their contraries: instead of Light there brooded Darkness and Inconscience, Truth turned to Falsehood, Love and Delight gave place to Hatred and Suffering and finally, instead of Life and Immortality there appeared Death. That was how separation, "the disobedience" of the Bible, caused the distortion that turned the Gods into Asuras, that was how Lucifer became Satan.
And that was how Paradise was lost. But the story of Paradise Regained is yet more marvellous. When the Divine Mother, the creative infinite Consciousness found herself parcelled out and scattered (even like the body of Sati borne about by Shiva, in the well-known Indian legend) and lost in unconsciousness, something shot down from the Highest into the lowest, something in response to an appeal, a cry, as it were, from the depth of the utter hopelessness in the heart of Matter and the Inconscient. A dumb last-minute S O S from belowa De profundis clamaviwent forth and the Grace descended: the Supreme himself came down and entered into the scuttled dead particles of earth's dust as a secret core of light and flame, just a spark out of his own conscious substance. The Earth received the Grace and held it in her bosom. Thus she had her soul born in her the psychic being that is to grow and evolve and bring about her redemption, her transmutation into the divine substance.
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The Gods are especial powers and executive agents of the one Divine. They move and act in a special way with a special end in view. They are, we may say, highbrow entities: they carry things with a high hand. That is to say, what they have got to do, they seek to do without any consideration or computation of the means, without regard to the pauses and hindrances that naturally attend all terrestrial and human achievements. God said, let there be light, and there was light. That is also the way of the Gods. There is here an imperial majesty and grandeur, a sweeping mastery and sovereign indifference,
Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain, ||12.11||
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The Gods possess this high quality of crystal purity, of a concentrated seeing will in which vision and execution form one single simultaneous movement, of the taut yet perfectly serene rhythm of a hero-consciousness. Something of that grandiose sweep of godly march the Virgilian gradus diviis echoed in these Vedic lines hymned to Varuna:
Adabdhni varunasya vratni vicakaaccandram naktameti
--
Such are the Gods, such is their nature:
The Spirit's free and absolute potencies
--
Human nature, human movement, is, however, different. Man, the terrestrial creature, has developed as the result of a slow growth, through struggle and suffering, the sturm und drangof an arduous ascent. He knows of things which the Gods do not. He has an experience which even they, strange to say, covet. First of all, it must be borne in mind that the Gods represent only one mode of consciousness, a fixed and definite typea god is bound by his godhood; but man embodies all the modes of consciousness, he is an ever growing and changing type. Man is an epitome of creation, he is coterminous with Nature. If he is that within which is wholly divineconsciousness and bliss, truth and immortalityphenomenally he is also quite the oppositeearthly, unconsciousness, pain and suffering, ignorance and falsehood, incapacity and death. If heaven is his father, the earth is his motherdyaur me pit mt pthivriyam. And all the gradations in between he has in him and can become any.
Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of earth-natureearth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortalitychildren of Mahasaraswatiwere originally men, men who have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The Gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downshis path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the Gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The Gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workingsna me thate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later Gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the Gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saintit is sttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rjasicpride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every stepfrom outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The Gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.
Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the Gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.
III
We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The Gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forceslines (or vectors, if we wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery: the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We would say that the human body holds a marvellous juste milieu. By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.
IV
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The Gods are glorious beings; they are aspects and personalities of the Divine, presiding and ruling over the cosmic laws, each with his own truth and norm and dominion, although, in the higher status, all work together and harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic core of being. They are forms and powers of consciousness organised round a divine truth, a typal Idea; but they do not have this exquisite presence secretly seated in the heart, which is the privilege of the terrestrial creature.
And the exquisiteness, the special quality of this inner Heart is mostly if not wholly derived from a particular factor of terrestrial evolution. For the journey here is a sacrifice, a passage through pain and suffering, even through frustration and death. The tears that accompany the mortal being in his calvary of an earthly life serve precisely as a holy unction of purification, give a sweet intensity to all his urges in the progressive march to Resurrection. This is the Immanent Divine who has to be worshipped and realised as much as the Transcendent Divine, if man is to fulfil himself wholly and earth justify its existence.
--
As the human aspiration is to reach out towards divinity, the Gods too at times are not satisfied with their closed divine status. They lean down to help humanity, to bring it up into their consciousness; but also they seek this contact and unification for their own sake, for a change and transformation in themselves; they may seek to rise further in a higher status of consciousness or they may wish to participate in the earthly travail, in the human endeavour. In either case the channel lies through the human consciousness. In the Vedas the Gods always look to men, almost depend upon them for their own fulfilment and enrichment. Men ask the Gods for wealth and plentymaterial as well as spiritual the Gods too ask from men the sacrifice, the sacrifice that pours out the substance of the human reality upon which they feed and grow. The Gita speaks of the same covenant the interchange of gifts between the two, each increasing the other and both attaining the highest good.
Our dark destinies move under vast laws that nothing diverts, nothing softens. Thou canst not have sudden clemencies that disturb the world, O God, Spirit tranquil!Victor Hugo, A Villequier.
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Values Higher and Lower Gods Labour
05.01 - Of Love and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sacrifice all-but into the radiant fire of Aspiration that flames up to the Gods.
The Heart is the blazing hearth of Aspiration, the divine door that opens into Immortality.
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:05.02 - Gods Labour
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Man and the Gods Bypaths of Souls Journey
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the Goal Gods Labour
Gods Labour
Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, it has been said, begins where other yogas end. Other yogas end by the attainment of the Brahman or some form or mode of it or something akin to it, which means the transcendent Reality, the supreme status of the Spirit beyond name and form, beyond all particular manifestation. It is the final realisation of the soul in its upward ascent, the nee plus ultra. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga takes that poise for granted and upon it bases its own development and structure. In other words, it works for the descent of the Spirit upon the level from which the Spirit worked up. The Mystery of the descent is the whole characteristic secret of this Yoga.
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Man and the Gods Bypaths of Souls Journey
05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
His look was a wide daybreak of the Gods,
His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,
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Invaded by a swarm of golden Gods:
Arising to a hymn of wonder's priests
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Gods Labour The Immortal Person
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalBypaths of Souls Journey
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Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as Gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.
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Gods Labour The Immortal Person
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I know that mighty Gods are friends of earth.
Amid the pageantries of day and dusk,
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Risen in a wide morning of the Gods
Thou drov'st thy horses from the Thunderer's worlds.
--
High forest Gods have taken in their arms
The human hour, a guest of their centuried pomps.
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Heaven's brilliant Gods recalled their careless gifts,
Took from blank eyes their glad and helping ray
--
In one great hour of the unveiling Gods.
Even a brief nearness has reshaped my life.
--
Of flaming Gods. I draw a wealthier breath
And in a fierier march of moments move.
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The conception of the Purusha at the origin of things, as the very source of things, so familiar to the Indian tradition, gives this high primacy to the human figure. We know also of the cosmic godhead cast in man's mouldalthough with multiple heads and feetvisioned and hymned by sages and seers. The Gods themselves seem to possess a human frame. The Upanishads say that once upon a time the Gods looked about for a proper body to dwell in, they were disappointed with all others; it is only when the human form was presented that they exclaimed, This is indeed a perfect form, a perfect form indeed. All that indicates the feeling and perception that there is something eternal and transcendent in the human body-frame.
***
05.05 - Of Some Supreme Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Gods are the glories of the Supreme Divine; they are the agents that effect this transmutation and the types that embody the transmuted reality.
The Gods are the individualised Name-Forms of the Supreme.
You are always an instrument, a mere tool, so long as you are in the unconsciousness.
--
When you become conscious, you are an agent who can act for, and act with, and act as, the Gods.
To be conscious means to become aware of the truth of one's nature and to live with the light and the force of that truth.
--
Religion is a worship of lesser Gods; often, even, it is the worship of beings that are not Gods at all but pose as Gods, simulating their truth, usurping their status, acting arbitrarily in their divine name and aping their authority.
The pseudo- Gods are not always evil, nor do they lead men only to perdition: their worship may often be useful, even salutary. But what these beings will not allow is to let man pass beyond a given frontier; they will not suffer him to rise in the scale of consciousness higher than a certain limit. Any attempt or turn towards a transcending of that limit they watch with jealous vigilance and suppress it with vehemence, even with violence. Within their domain, subject to their dharma, they accord to their worshippers prosperity and power, some-times perhaps even a certain elevation of consciousness.
The lesser Gods and the pseudo- Gods are none other than the various forces that reign in the world of the mental, the vital or the physical consciousness. These are the three planes that, in the cosmic as well as in the human scale, form the fundamental notes of the Inferior Hemisphere of Nature.
The true Gods belong to higher reaches, they are powers of the Superior Hemisphere; living beyond the triple mundane consciousness, in the Fourth-turya-they are native to the domain of the Spirit. They embody the mighty universal laws of that vaster Truth-Consciousness (tam).
To go beyond all the dharmas of this threefold Lower Nature, attain to the Truth-Consciousness of the Fourth Status, incarnate in all that we are, know, will, feel and do the Law or Dharma of the Spirit and of the Spirit alone, is what we mean by Spirituality.
05.09 - Varieties of Religious Experience, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There have been religions, approaches to the Divine, which did not believe in the divinity of man, the Chaldean line, the Semitic, for example. According to these, the Creator and the created are separate in nature and being; to call anything created as God himself is blasphemy. The ancient Egyptian, the Hebrew or the Muslim place God high in Paradise, and, in their view, man can be only his servant or slave, his worker or warrior. Man is too small and too earthly to be ever identified with God: he can only be a worshipper. Man can love God, at the most, as his Beloved. But this devotion is for something afar, like the desire of the moth for the star. And to equate the two is to confuse realities. Man as worshipper and devotee can attain certain divine qualities, but limited and modified and always humanized to a large extent. And God can never become man. He sends down his representative, his vicar, prophet or apostle who acts for him and in and through whom He acts, but He himself does not come down and put on the form or flesh. The universe is Gods handiwork and testifies to his miracle and glory; but the universe is not God. Between the watch and the watchmaker there is always a hiatus and an incommensurability.
But can we say, I am born of God, and yet I am not God? So the Indian boldly declares, all this is the supreme Divine, there is nothing else than the Divinesarvam khalvidam brahma I am He, Thou are That, or again, that which is in me and the conscious being which is there in the Sun are one and the same thing. God has created man and the world, He is in man and in the world, He has become and is man and the world. Not only so. Not only does God become the clod of earth by reducing his potentialto zero, so to say; but He descends often enough in his own being and consciousness here below, assuming a human form for a special work and a special purpose. This is the Indian conception of Avatarhood.
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The special gift of the Chaldean line of discipline lay in another direction. It cultivated not so much the higher lines of spiritual realisation but was occupied with what may be called the mid regions, the occult world. This material universe is not moved by the physical, vital or mental forces that are apparent and demonstrable, but by other secret and subtle forces; in fact, these are the motive forces, the real agents that work out and initiate movements in Nature, while the apparent ones are only the external forms and even masks. This occultism was also practised very largely in ancient Egypt from where the Greeks took up a few threads. The MysteriesOrphic and Eleusiniancultivated the tradition within a restricted circle and in a very esoteric manner. The tradition continued into the Christian Church also and an inner group formed in its heart that practised and kept alive something of this ancient science. The external tenets and dogmas of the Church did not admit or tolerate this which was considered as black magic, the Devil's Science. The evident reason was that if one pursued this line of occultism and tasted of the power it gave, one might very likely deviate from the straight and narrow path leading to the Spirit and spiritual salvation. In India too the siddhis or occult powers were always shunned by the truly spiritual, although sought by the many who take to the spiritual lifeoften with disastrous results. In Christianity, side by side with the major saints, there was always a group or a line of practicants that followed the occult system, although outwardly observing the official creed. It is curious to note that often where the original text of the Bible speaks of Gods, in the plural, referring to the deities or occult powers, the official version translates it as God, to give the necessary theistic value and atmosphere.
But if occultism is to be feared because of its wrong use and potential danger, spirituality too should then be placed on the same footing. All good things in the world have their deformation and danger, but that is no reason why one should avoid them altogether. What is required is right attitude and discrimination, training and discipline. Viewed in the true light, occultism is dynamic spirituality; in other words, it seeks to express and execute, bring down to the material life the powers and principles of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of mind and life and the subtle physical.
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The higher Gods, like those, for example, envisaged in the Veda, may be considered each as an emanation of one or other of these Divine Aspects. They are dwellers of Swar or the Overmind. Varuna seems to be an emanation of Mahavira, a son of Maheshwari: for he is pre-eminently the god of the pure and vast consciousness who releases us from the triple bonds and shows us the winding way into the embrace of the infinite Mother. His associate, Mitra, is the lord of love and harmony, evidently an emanation of Pradyumna (or Mahalakshmi). Other Gods of the same category are Bhaga and Soma. The Balarama or Mahakali aspect is manifested in Aryaman: Rudra being another form of the same. And Mahasaraswati (or Aniruddha) must have given birth to and inspired the Ribhus, who are artisans of divinity. The Puranic trinityBrahma, Vishnu and Shivawith lndra as the fourth member forms a parallel system embodying a similar conception.
Another tradition gives the Four Supernals as (1) Light or Consciousness, (2) Truth or Knowledge, (3) Life and (4) Love. The tradition also says that the beings representing these four fundamental principles of creation were the first and earliest Gods that emanated from the Supreme Divine, and that as they separated themselves from their source and from each other, each followed his own independent line of fulfilment, they lost their divinity and turned into their oppositesLight became obscurity, Consciousness unconsciousness or the inconscient, Truth became falsehood and Knowledge ignorance, Life became death and finally Love and Delight became suffering and hatred. These are the fallen angels, the Asuras that deny their divine essence and now rule the world. They have possessed mankind and are controlling earthly existence. They too have their emanations, forces and beings that are born out of them and serve them in their various degrees of power. Men talk and act inspired and impelled by these beings and when they do so, they lose their humanity and become worse than animals.
But still the Pure Reality descends undeviated in its own line and man enshrines that within him, the undying fire that will clean him and bear him to the source from where he came. And there are luminous godheads that help him and wish themselves to participate in the terrestrial transformation. There is a pressure from above and there is an urge from below, between these two infinities all is ground and moulded and changed. Even the Lords of Denial will in the end change and learn to affirm, become again what they truly were and are.
First then there are the supreme divinities, aspects or own personalities of the Divine in his supreme status, the Super-mind; next come the first emanations, the true or pure Gods in the Overmind. Thence or simultaneously there is the line of deformation, that of the false Gods and godheads, the Asuras and Titans. These too extend in a series of emanations down to the subtle physical; except when they themselves incarnate on the earth in an earthly body.
Man, the soul, we said, comes direct from the Divine and is thrown and almost stuck into the earth as a spark, as a point of luminous consciousness-force. This soul, as it develops, we find, belongs to one or other of the fundamental type of divine personality, it is a lineal descendant, as it were, of one of the quaternary and its growth means growing into the nature of that particular godhead and its fulfilment means identification with that.
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For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic Gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
***
05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that it is consciousness-energy. And it is this consciousness-energy that is at the source of all cosmic activities. Man's action too springs from this original source, although apparently it seems to be caused by other secondary and derivative energies. As a matter of fact what these energies that seem to be actually in play do is not the origination but rather the deviation and diversion, a diminution and adulteration of the supreme energy, a lowering of the quality, the tone and temper of the dynamism. In other words, as we have already said, a thought force, a vital force, a nervous or physical force, all these are only lower, even minima values, more or less distant and deformed echoes of a true and absolute Power behind and above them all. These forces become powerful in proportion as they are instruments and functions of that one mother energy. The truth is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Brahma a and the Gods in the Kena Upanishad. The Gods conquered and were proud of their conquest; each thought that it was due to his own personal prowess that he conquered. But they were utterly discomfited and shamed when the Divine Power appeared and proved to them that but for this Power they would not be able even to tackle a blade of grassFire would not burn it, Water would not drench it, Wind would not move it.
The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo
06.01 - The End of a Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Perhaps it was necessary that it should be so. A pralaya, a Deluge has to be there to end an epoch and begin a new one. Indeed the civilisation that man has built up over the millenniums, that has reached its culmination in modern scientism, whatever gifts it might have brought to him, however great and powerful and beautiful it might have been at its best in its own sphere, still it had and was a limitation, acted as a deterrent to a further leap and progress of the consciousness. It is the humanistic cycle that has reigned, from ancient Greece down to modern America. Is it not time that another consciousness should intervene, other Gods make their appearance?
And yet if the civilisation really goes, it will not be a small thing, even when measured on the cosmic scale. A civilisation is to be judged and valued not at its nadir, but at its zenith, in its total effect and not by a temporary phase in its course. Civilisation really means preparation of the instrument: the human instrument that is to express the Divine. The purpose of creation, we have often said, is the establishment of the highest spiritual consciousness in the embodied life on earth. The embodied life means man's body and life and mind; individually and socially these constitute the instrument through which the higher light is to manifest itself. The instrument has to be prepared, made ready for the purpose; Actually it is obscure, ignorant, narrow, weak; at the outset and for a long time it expresses only or mainly the inferior animal nature. Civilisation is an attempt to raise this inferior nature, to refine, enlarge and heighten it, to cultivate and increase its potentialities and capacities. The present civilisation, we have said, is a growth of thousands of years-at least five thousand years according to the most modest archaeological computation. In this period man has developed his brain, his rational intelligence, has unravelled some of the great mysteries of nature; he has controlled and organised life to an extent that has opened new possibilities of growth and achievement; even with respect to the body he has learnt to treat it with greater skill and endowed it with finer and more potent efficiencies. There have been aberrations and misuses, no doubt; but the essence of things achieved still remains and is always an invaluable asset: that must not be allowed to go.
06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Tilted upon a table of the Gods,
Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand
--
He saw the eternal labour of the Gods,
And looked upon the life of beasts and men.
--
Spoke of the toils of men and what the Gods
Strive for on earth, and joy that throbs behind
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One carrying the sanction of the Gods
To her love and its luminous eternity,
--
What feet of Gods, what ravishing flutes of heaven
Have thrilled high melodies round, from near and far
--
For such is thy spirit, a sister of the Gods,
Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes
--
Proud deeds step forth, a rank and march of Gods.
Although in pauses of our human lives
--
A stanza of the ardour of the Gods
Perfectly rhymed, a pillared ripple of gold!
--
Along the dreadful causeway of the Gods,
Armoured with love and faith and sacred joy,
--
Too hard the Gods are with man's fragile race;
In their large heavens they dwell exempt from Fate
--
And trembles at the laughter of the Gods.
Or if crouches unseen a panther doom,
--
Aspiring to the nature of the Gods,
A mind proof-armoured mailed in mighty thoughts,
--
The Gods make use of our forgotten deeds.
Yet all in vain the bitter law was made.
--
Love darkens to the spirit of nether Gods.
The dreadful angel, angry with his joys
--
We are not as the Gods who know not grief
And look impassive on a suffering world,
--
The great Gods use the pain of human hearts
As a sharp axe to hew their cosmic road:
--
A treasure thus unique loaned by the Gods,
A being so rare, of so divine a make!
--
For a passionate moment by the careless Gods.
But I reject the grace and the mockery.
--
In an eternal moment of the Gods.
My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan:
--
Only the Gods can speak what now thou speakst.
Thou who art human, think not like a god.
--
Climbs to usurp the kingdom of the Gods
Or skirts the demon magnitudes of Hell;
--
I shall walk with him like Gods in Paradise.
If for a year, that year is all my life.
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It turned the straight path hewn by the body's Gods,
Followed the zigzag of the uncertain course
--
A gift of priceless value from Time's Gods
Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,
--
By his own hand in the furrows of the Gods,
The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped
--
Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the Gods.
Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works
--
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,
--
This earth is full of the anguish of the Gods;
Ever they travail driven by Time's goad,
--
He asks no aid from the inferior Gods;
His eyes are fixed on his immutable aim.
--
Obstructing the Gods' open ways he makes
His own estate of the earth's air and light;
--
And the itinerary of the Gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
--
In casual hours or moments of the Gods,
Yet your least stumblings are foreseen above.
--
Thy fate is a long sacrifice to the Gods
Till they have opened to thee thy secret self
06.05 - The Story of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the graded descent, in the hierarchy of planes and levels, there appeared forces and beings also proper to each domain. The earliest, the first among them are the Asuras, rather the original Asuras the first quaternary (some memory of them seemed to linger in the Greek legend of Chronos and his brood). For they embody the powers of division, of Inconscience: they are the Affirmations of the Negation. Against the Asuras there came and ranged-at the first line of division, on the one side of the descent of the Light the first godheads, the major powers and personalities of the Divine Consciousness. The battle of the Gods and Titans for the possession of the earth has been going on ever since. The end will come one day: it will mean the dissolution of the forces of Negation, at least within the earthly sphere, and the establishment there of the reign of ,Light.
***
06.11 - The Steps of the Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The complexity arises not only in extension, but also in depth. Man does not live on a single plane but on many planes at the same time. There is a scale of gradation in human consciousness: the higher one rises in the scale the greater the number of elements or personalities that one possesses. Whether one lives mostly or mainly on the physical or vital or mental plane or on any particular section of these planes or on planes above and beyond, there will be accordingly differences in the constitution or psycho-physical make-up of the individual personality. The higher one stands the richer the personality, because it lives not only on its own normal level, but also on all that are below and which it has transcended. The complete or integral man, some occultists say, possesses 365 personalities; indeed it may be much more. (The Vedas speak of the three and thirty-three and thirty-three hundred and thirty-three thousand Gods that may be housed in the human vehicle the basic three being evidently the triple status or world of Body, Life and Mind).
What is the meaning of this self-contradiction, this division in man? To understand that we must know and remember that each person represents a certain quality or capacity, a particular achievement to be embodied. How best can it be done? What is the way by which one can acquire a quality at its purest, and highest and most perfect? It is by setting an opposition to it. That is how a power is increased and streng thenedby fighting against and overcoming all that weakens and contradicts it. The deficiencies in respect of a particular quality show you where you are to mend and reinforce and in what way to improve in order to make it perfectly perfect. It is the hammer that beats the weak and soft iron to transform it into hard steel. The preliminary discord is useful and necessary to be utilised for a higher harmony. This is the secret of self-conflict in man. You are weakest precisely in that element which is destined to be your greatest asset.
06.13 - Body, the Occult Agent, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A body, in this way, becomes the instrument, a lever for producing mighty changes and creations upon earth. This conception of the occult potency of the body is at the basis of the rite or institution of sacrifice that was a characteristic feature of the old-world society. Iphigenia was offered as a victim to avert the wrath of the Gods and bring victory to the Greeks. Sometimes an animal replaced the human victim and served the same purpose and in the same way. And in a higher senseindeed in the highest sensea body can sacrifice itself in such a waywholly and integrallyas to bring about a corresponding integral reversal or revaluation in the physical world. A human being that makes of himself a holocaustburns himself out at the altar of the Divinekeeping nothing for his own sake, living for the Divine alone, by calling down the divine will in himself, brings into the earthly life too a divine presence and transformation. A total physical sacrifice results inevitably into a total expression and embodiment of the Divine in the Physical world.
***
06.16 - A Page of Occult History, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Into the heart of this Darkness and Falsehood and Pain and Death, a seed was sown, a grain that is to be the epitome and symbol of material creation and in and through which the Divine will claim back all the elements gone astray, the prodigal ones who will return to recognise and fulfil the Divine. That was Earth. And the earth, in her turn, in her labour towards the Divine Fulfilment, out of her bosom, threw up a being who would again symbolise and epitomise the earth and material creation. That is Man. For, man came with the soul in him, the Psychic Being, the Divine Flame, the spark of consciousness in the midst of universal unconsciousness, a miniature of the original Divine Light-Truth-Love-Life. In the meantime, to help the evolution, to join hands with the aspiring soul in the human being, there was created, on the defection of the First Lords the Asuric Quaternitya second hierarchy of luminous beingsDevas, Gods. (Some-thing of this inner history of the world is reflected in the Greek legend of struggle between the Titans and the Olympians.) These Gods, however, being a latter creation, perhaps because they were young and inexperienced, could not cope immediately with their strong Elders. It is why we see in the mythological legends the Gods very often worsted at the hands of the Asuras: Indra hiding under the sea, Zeus threatened often with defeat and disaster. It is only an intervention from the Supreme (the Greeks called it Fate) that saved them in the end and restored the balance.
However, the Asuras came to think better of the game and consented to use their freedom on the side of the Divine, for the fulfilment of the Divine; that is to say, they agreed to conversion. Thus they took birth as or in human beings, so that they may be in contact with the human soulPsychewhich is the only door or passage to the Divine in this material world. But the matter was not easy; the process was not straight. For, even agreeing to be converted, even basking in the sunshine of the human psyche, these incorrigible Elders could not forget or wholly give up their old habit and nature. They now wanted to work for the Divine Fulfilment in order to magnify themselves thereby; they consented to serve the Divine in order to make the Divine serve them, utilise the Divine End for their own purposes. They wished to see the new creation after their own heart's desire.
06.21 - The Personal and the Impersonal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As you go up in your consciousness towards the origin of things you come finally at the end of things: you are beyond the names and forms that make up the universe, beyond even the subtle names and forms at the topmost. You arrive at something formless, impersonal,' unthinkable, unique, infinite and eternal. It is at best a vast force or a state of consciousness. When you come in contact with it, you lose your personal form, your separate individuality and become the featureless absolute. Many religions and philosophies consider this status to be the supreme, the highest and the origin of things. In reality, however, it is not the end of things nor the supreme status. You can rise further beyond. Your consciousness enters into the formless and impersonal and merges its separate existence there and then emerges again; it envisages a reality which is not formless but has a form, it is not impersonality but a Person, with which or with whom you can have a personal relation unlike the relation or lack of relation with the Impersonal. But this form beyond the formless is not like the forms of the inferior consciousness: it is the Form of forms. And it is not a person like a human being or even a divine being or god, but an essential Personality, the Person of persons. It has not the limitation or exclusiveness of ego-bounded individuality (even the Gods are ego-bounded); it has a kind of fluid boundedness or outline which is recognizable as that of a definite Person, but it has not the fixity or rigidity of lower forms.
And yet to arrive at this supreme Person, to come in contact with Him, it is necessary to pass through and have the experience of the formless impersonal infinity. For that breaks the inferior moulds, the narrow egoistic formations which are only aberrations or obscure images of the true Person.
06.24 - When Imperfection is Greater Than Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Gods are perfect; but it is said, they have to become men, come down upon earth and assume human proportions that is, imperfections,if they wish to progress further, attain still higher levels of consciousness. For, the Gods are perfect each in his own limited and well-defined and therefore unchangeable type; but man means an aspiring soul, that is to say, infinityhis very imperfection is a sign and symbol of ever greater possibility; the fluidity of his nature means an opportunity.
***
07.01 - Realisation, Past and Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The whole material and physical world, the whole earth I mention earth, because we are concerned directly and much more with it than other regionshas been till now governed by forces of consciousness that come from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. Even the thing man has named God is a force, a power in the Overmind. The entire universe has been, so to say, under the domination of this status of consciousness. Even then, you have to pass through many intermediary grades, or levels to arrive at the Overmind and when you reach there the first impression is that of a dazzling light that almost blinds you. But one can and has to press on and go beyond. Sri Aurobindo says, the rule of the Overmind is precisely coming to its end and the rule of the Supermind will replace it. All the past spiritual experiences were concerned with the Overmind: so it is a thing known to all who have found the Divine and are identified with Him. What Sri Aurobindo says is this that there is something more than the Overmind, something that lies a step higher and that it is now the turn of this higher status to come down and reign. We need not talk much of Overmind, because all the saints and seers, all religions and spiritual disciplines, scriptures and philosophies have spoken about it at length. All the Gods known and familiar to men are there in its Pantheon. What we want, what is needed at present is a new revelation, a manifestation in a new manner of which very few were conscious in the past. We are not here merely to repeat the past.
But it is so difficult. It is difficult for people to come out of experiences they have had, of what they have heard and read about always and everywhere. It is difficult for them not to think of the Supermind in terms of the Overmind, not to confuse the Supermind with the Overmind. They are unable to conceive of anything beyond or different. Sri Aurobindo used to say always that his Yoga Began where all the past Yogas ended: in order to realise his Yoga one must have already arrived at the extreme limit of what the ancients realised. In other words, one must have had already the perception of the Divine, the union and identification with the Divine. This divinity, Sri Aurobindo says, is the Divine of the Overmind which is itself something quite unthinkable for the human consciousness, and even to reach there one has to rise through many planes of consciousness and, as I said, one gets dazzled and dazed even at this level.
07.01 - The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A tranquillity and a violence of the Gods
Indomitable and immutable.
--
A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the Gods
And all its scenes a smile on rapture's lips
--
She dwelt like a dumb priest with hidden Gods
Unappeased by the wordless offering of her days,
--
Immortal it walked unslayable as the Gods:
Her spirit stretched measureless in strength divine,
07.02 - The Parable of the Search for the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A follower of the footprints of the Gods,
To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws?
--
Visits the Gods on Life's miraculous peaks,
Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell.
--
Man's house of life holds not the Gods alone:
There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,
--
The unborn Gods hide in his house of Life.
The daemons of the unknown overshadow his mind
--
Lines of the secret purpose of the Gods.
In strange directions runs the intricate plan;
--
We feel an aid from deep indwelling Gods;
One speaks within, Light comes to us from above.
--
Amid the cosmic workings of the Gods
It marked her the centre of a wide-drawn scheme,
07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But dreamed a vintage of glory of life's Gods,
And felt as celestial rapture's golden sting.
--
Its speed and lightning heaven-leap of the Gods.
A trenchant blade that shore the nets of doubt,
--
To conquer the secret treasures of the Gods
Or win for a masked king some glorious world,
--
Strong wind-haired Gods carrying the harps of hope,
Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air,
--
"O happy company of luminous Gods,
Reveal, who know, the road that I must tread, -
--
We are the messengers, the occult Gods
Who help men's drab and heavy ignorant lives
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Under the ruthless harrow of the Gods.
I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten beast;
--
She menaced the triumph of the nether Gods.
A halo of lightnings flamed around her head
--
I crush the opposition of the Gods,
Tread down a million goblin obstacles.
--
And put on him the breastplate of the Gods.
I break the ignorant pride of human mind
--
The Gods shall be my aides or menial folk,
No wish I harbour unfulfilled shall die:
--
And walk like Gods in the presence of the Supreme.
But without wisdom power is like a wind,
--
I show to her the figures of bright Gods
And bring strength and solace to her struggling life;
--
I bring meanwhile the Gods upon the earth;
I bring back hope to the despairing heart;
--
This wizard Gods may dream, not thinking men."
And Savitri heard the voice, the warped answer heard
07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And found herself amid great figures of Gods
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
--
And the high meaning of the life of Gods,
The power and necessity of these numberless worlds,
--
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she:
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
--
A romp of little Gods with life in Time.
In the deep place where once the Serpent slept,
--
Allied to Gods and cosmic beings and powers
It built the harmony of its human state;
--
A temple is shaped where the high Gods could live.
Even if the struggling world is left outside
07.08 - The Divine Truth Its Name and Form, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You expect to see a divine form in each and all things? It may happen so. But I am not sure; I have the impression that there is a large part of imagination in such experiences. You may, for example, see the form of Krishna or Christ or Buddha in every being or thing. But I say that much of human conception enters into this perception. Otherwise what I was telling you just now would not be true. I said all who have the consciousness of the Divine, all who get the contact with the Divine, wherever one may be, to whatever age or country he may belong, all have the same essential experience. If it were not so, the Hindus would always see one of their Gods, the Europeans one of theirs, the Japanese a third variety and so on. This may be an addition of each one's own mental formation, but it would not be the Reality in its essence or purity which is beyond all form. One can have a perception of the Divine Presence, a very concrete perception, one can have even a personal contact with the Divine, but it need not happen in and through the kind of form you imagine; it is something inexpressible, beyond all explanation or definition, it is evident only to one who has the experience. It may be as you are suddenly lifted up into a peculiar condition, you find yourself in the presence of the Divine which takes a form familiar to you, a form you have been accustomed to associate with the Divine, because of your education, your up-bringing and tradition. But, as I say, it is not the supreme essence of the experience: the form gives after all a limitation to the experience, takes away from it its universality and a large measure of its power.
***
07.30 - Sincerity is Victory, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine Images of Gods and Goddesses
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part SevenSincerity is Victory
--
How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine Images of Gods and Goddesses
07.31 - Images of Gods and Goddesses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:07.31 - Images of Gods and Goddesses
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part Seven Images of Gods and Goddesses
Images of Gods and Goddesses
Are the usual images of Gods and goddesses true to reality?
Well when a little child draws a picture of an object, is there any likeness? It is about the same or even worse here. For the child is simple and sincere, while the image-maker is full of prejudices and preconceived ideas, stuffed with things he has heard or read. And he is tied to his constructions. But at times, here and there, very rarely indeed, artists appear with an inner vision, with a great aspiration and a great purity of soul; they do things that are acceptable. But they are exceptions, the contrary is the rule.
I have seen some of these forms in the vital world and also in the mental world; they are truly creations of man. There is a Power from beyond that manifests, but in this triple world of Ignorance man creates God Himself in his own image and beings that appear there are more or less the outcome of the creative human thought. So at times we do have things that are truly frightful. I have seen formations that are so obscure, so un-understandable, so inexpressive! There are some divine beings that are treated worse than the others. Take, for example, this poor Mahakali. What has man made of her, wildly terrible, a nightmare beyond imagination! Such creations however live in a very inferior world, in the lowest vital world; and if there is anything there of the original being, it is such a far off reflection that it is hardly recognisable. And yet it is that which is pulled by the human consciousness. When, for example, an image is made and installed and the priest calls down into it a form, an emanation of a god, through an inner invocation there is usually a whole ceremony in this connectionif the priest is someone having the power of evocation, then the thing succeeds (what Ramakrishna did in the Kali temple). But generally priests are people with the commonest ideas and the most traditional training and education; when they think of the Gods they give them attributes and appearances which are popular, which belong normally to entities of the vital world, at best to mental formations but which do not represent in any way the truth of the beings behind. All the idols in temples or the household Gods worshipped by the many are inhabited by beings who know only how to lead you to unhappiness and disaster. They are so far away from the divinity that one means to worship. There are certain family Kalis that are real monsters. I have even advised some to throw such an image into the Ganges to get rid of the evil influence emanating from it. But of course it is always the fault of man and not of the divinity. For man wishes so much to make his Gods in his own image.
***
07.32 - The Yogic Centres, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Images of Gods and Goddesses The Inner and the Outer
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part SevenThe Yogic Centres
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Images of Gods and Goddesses The Inner and the Outer
07.36 - The Body and the Psychic, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The matter is not so simple. I have told you often that the psychic being is the result of an evolution, that is to say, it is the expression of the divine consciousness that has entered and spread itself into Matter and slowly raises Matter and develops it so that it may return to the Divine. The psychic being is formed progressively by the divine centre through many lives or incarnations. There comes a time when it attains a kind of perfection, the perfection of its growth and formation. It has then often an aspiration towards greater realisation, a further progress to manifest better or further the Divine. As the result of this pull, it generally draws towards itself a being of a higher order, from a higher plane, from the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, a being of involution who incarnates in the psychic being. These overmental entities are termed Gods and divinities by men. Now when the fusion takes place, of a god into a psychic being, the latter naturally increases in stature and partakes of the nature of the god and acquires also the capacity to produce emanations; that is to say it throws out of itself a part which possesses an independent existence and can incarnate in others. In this way there may be not only two but several emanations or projections of the same original being. In other words, there may be a single psycho-divine origin but many personalities coming out of it. That is how it happens sometimes that different people feel a sort of affinity and even identity, and with reason, because they carry within them the same deity, out of which they, that is, their psychic being came. It is not the same thing as the doubling of the personality where in throwing oneself out of oneself one loses a portion, as when you cut a body into two: there are only two halves. Here the projection is a whole and independent personality. If you emanate a being out of you, you remain whole and entire without losing anything of yourself and the emanation too is a being whole and entire living its independent life.
II
--
The Psychic is like the wire between the generator and the lamp. What is the generator and what is the lamp, or rather, who is the generator and who the lamp? The Divine is the generator and the body, the visible being, is the lamp. The function then of the Psychic is to connect the two. In other words, if there were no Psychic in Matter, Matter could not come in direct contact with the Divine. All human beings, including yourself, all carry the Divine within you, you have only to enter within you to find Him. It is a unique speciality of the human being, rather of all embodied beings living upon earth. In the human being, the psychic becomes more conscious and formed; more conscious and therefore also more free, it is individualised. You should note that it is a speciality of the earth alone. It is the direct infusion of a purifying and redeeming agent into the most obscure and unconscious Matter to awaken it by degrees towards the divine consciousness, the divine presence, to the Divine Himself. It is the psychic presence that makes of man an exceptional being. Perhaps it is not good to tell it to him too often, for as it is he is already puffed up and thinks very highly of himself and there is no need to encourage him in that direction. Still it is a fact: so much so that beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi Gods or even Gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it. These beings have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional thing belonging to the earth alone. All the inhabitants of the higher worlds the Higher Mind, the Overmind and other domainsdo not have the psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital worlds have not got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have it. There are, however, a few exceptional beings on this level who wish to be converted and therefore desire a physical body; but the rest do not want, they are bound to the law of their being and cannot repudiate it.
So I say and we are bound to admit that it is an exceptional virtue in the human being to bear the psychic in him. But to tell the truth, he does not seem to have profited much by it. He does not look like considering his virtue as something very desirable, from the manner he has been treating this presence. He prefers to it his mental ideals, he prefers to it his vital demands and he prefers to it his physical habits. I do not know how many of you have read the Bible. But there is a story that I used to like always. There were two brothers, Esau and Jacob. Esau had gone out hunting and felt tired and hungry. He came back home and found his brother preparing a dish. He asked Jacob to feed him. Jacob said he would give him food if he, Esau, sold his birthright to him. Esau said, of what use is the birthright to me now, and sold it to his brother. You understand the significance? You can of course take it quite in the superficial way. But I took it differently. The birthright is the right to be the son of God. And Esau was quite ready to give up his divine right for a mess of pottage. It is an old story, but it is eternally true.
07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In ancient times, in the great ages, in Greece, for example or even during the Italian Renaissance, particularly, however, in Greece and in Egypt, they erected buildings, constructed monuments for the sake of public utility. Their buildings were meant for the most part to be temples, sanctuaries to lodge their Gods and deities. What they had in view was something total, whole and entire, beautiful and complete in itself. That was the purpose of architecture embodying the harmony of sweeping and majestic lines: sculpture was a part of architecture supplying details of expression and even painting came up to complete the expression: but the whole held together in a coordinated unity which was the monument itself. The sculpture was for the monument, the painting was for the monument; it was not that each was separate from the other and existed for itself and one did not know why it was there. In India, when a temple was being built, for example, what was aimed at was a total creation, all the parts combined to give effect to one end, to make a beautiful vesture for God, the one object of their adoration. All the great epochs of art were of this kind. But in modern times, in the latter part of the last century, Art' became a matter of business. A painting was done in order to be sold. You do your paintings, put each one in a frame and place them side by side or group them, that is, lump them together without much reason. The same with regard to sculpture. You make a statue and set it up anywhere without any connection whatsoever with the surroundings. It is always something foreign, extraneous in its setting, like a mushroom or a parasite. The thing in itself may not be quite ugly, but it is out of place, it is not part of an organic whole. We exhibit art today. Indeed, it is exhibitionism, it is the showing off of cleverness, talent, skill, virtuosity. A piece of architecture does not incarnate a living force as it used to do once upon a time. It is no longer the expression of an aspiration, of something that uplifts the spirit nor the expression of the magnificence of the Divine whose dwelling it is meant to be. You build houses here and there pell-mell or somehow juxtaposed without any coordinating idea governing them, without any relation to the environment where they are situated. When you enter a house, it is the same thing. A bit of painting here, a bit of sculpture there, some objects of art in one corner, a few others in another. Yes, it is an exhibition, a museum, a kaleidoscopic collection. It gives a shock to the truly sensitive artistic taste.
I do not say that a museum is not necessary or useful. It is a good means of education, that is to say, getting information about what other people or other epochs did. It is an aid to the historic knowledge of things. But it is far from being artistic. A museum is not the place where art can find its highest or its true expression. There is an art which seeks to coordinate, integrate distinct, discrete, contrary objects. It is called decorative art. And in so far as this art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true art.
08.03 - Death in the Forest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Griefless and strong she waited like the Gods.
But now his sweet familiar hue was changed
08.12 - Thought the Creator, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Buddhists, I mean those who are in the more orthodox tradition, do not believe in God or an eternal Reality; they do not believe in Gods either, that is to say, in beings who are truly divine. They, however, know admirably how to use the mind and the mind's power. The Buddhist discipline makes you master of the mental instrument. A person following the Buddhist discipline came to me once and said that he had made an experiment: he had formed a being with his thought, he had created something like a Mahatma. He knew and it is a proved fact that these mental formations after a time begin to have a personal life, independently of the author,although they may be connected with him, yet they are quite independent, in the sense that they have a will of their own. But now he was facing a formidable difficulty. He said: "Do you know I have formed my Mahatma so well that he has become a personality quite independent of me and comes all the while to trouble me? He comes, scolds me for this and that, advises me in this matter and that and wants to control my life altogether. I am unable to get rid of him. I find it extremely difficult and do not know how to go about it. As I say, my Mahatma has become extremely troublesome. He does not leave me to be at rest. He interferes in all my activities, prevents me from doing my work and yet I know it is my own creation and I am unable to do away with it." He explained to me how he had tried to get rid of the thing. I then told him it was because he did not know the trick. I showed him the process and the next morning he came happy and beaming, saying "it has left." He could not cut the connection; even then cutting the connection is not sufficient, for the being would continue to live apart and independent. What is needed is to re-absorb what one has created, to swallow what has been put out.
***
08.15 - Divine Living, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I am perfectly sure that if we went back into the past a few thousands of years, we would find that when one spoke of the Divine it was of a being somewhat like one of the "overmental" Gods. But now, the way of living proper to these overmental divinities who governed the earth and created many things upon earth for a very long time, seems to us very inferior to what we conceive as the Supramental. This Supramental again which we now call the Divine and which we seek to bring down upon earth will have the same effect upon us a few thousand years hence as the Overmental has upon us now.
In other words, in the manifestation, in his Self-expression the Divine is progressive. Outside and beyond manifestation, He is something we cannot conceive of. But when He manifests Himself in this status of constant becoming, He manifests more and more of Himself, as if He had reserved for the final end the most beautiful things of His being.
08.27 - Value of Religious Exercises, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I have been to holy places. I have seen monuments considered as very highly religious, in France, in Japan and elsewhere; they were not always the same kind of temples or churches nor were they the same Gods but the impression they left on me, my experiences of them were everywhere almost the same, with but slight differences. There is usually a force concentrated at the place, but its character depends entirely upon the faith of the faithful; also there is a difference between the force as it really exists and the form in which it appears to the faithful. For instance, in a most famous and most beautiful place of worship which was, from the standpoint of art, the most magnificent creation one could imagine, I saw within its holy of holies a huge black Spider that had spread its net all around, caught within it and absorbed all the energies emanating from the devotion of the people, their prayers and all that. It was not a very pleasant spectacle. But the people who were there and prayed felt the divine contact, they received all kinds of benefit from their prayers. And yet the truth of the matter was what I saw. The people had the faith and their faith changed what was bad into something that was good to them. Now if I had gone and told them: 'you think it is God you are praying to! it is only a formidable vital Spider that is sucking your force,' surely it would not have been very charitable on my part. But everywhere it is almost the same thing. There is a vital Force presiding. And vital beings feed upon the vibrations of human emotion. Very few are they, a microscopic number, who go to the temples and churches and holy places with the true religious feeling, that is to say, not to pray or beg something of God, but to offer themselves, to express gratitude, to aspire, to surrender. One in a million would be too many. These when they are there, get some touch of the Divine just for the moment. But all others go only out of superstition, egoism, self-interest and create the atmosphere as it is found and it is that that you usually brea the in when you go to a holy place; only as you go there with a good feeling, you say to yourself "what a peace-giving spot!"
I am sorry to say it. But it is like that. I tell you I have purposely made the experiment to some extent everywhere. Perhaps I came across at times in far-away small cornerslike a small village church, for exampleplaces where there was real peace and quiet and some true aspiration. Barring that, everywhere it is but a web of adverse vital forces that use everything for their food. The bigger the congregation, the more portentous the vital deity. Besides, in the invisible world it is only the vital beings that like to be worshipped. For, as I have said, that pleases them, gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and are happy; when they can have a troop of people adoring them, they reach the very height of satisfaction.
09.01 - Towards the Black Void, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A body of the music of the Gods.
Immortal yearnings without name leap down,
--
Bore the deep pity of destroying Gods;
A sorrowful irony curved the dreadful lips
--
Your transient loves bind not the eternal Gods."
The dread voice ebbed in the consenting hush
09.02 - The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes
And guide its giant stumblings through the void,
--
He is the cattle of the shepherd Gods.
His body the tether with which he is tied,
--
Bound to the chariot of the dreadful Gods.
But if thou still canst hope and still wouldst love,
--
Now in the wrestling of the splendid Gods
My spirit shall be obstinate and strong
--
Mine is the labour of the battling Gods:
Imposing on the slow reluctant years
--
The Gods to whom man prays can help not man;
They are my imaginations and my moods
09.03 - The Psychic Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a thing characteristic of earthly creatures. It is a speciality of the earth. But only in the human being does the psychic become more conscious, more formed and also more independent; it is there individualised. It is the presence of the psychic that makes of man an exceptional being, so much so that beings of other domains in the universe, those, for example, belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, the demi- Gods and even the Gods are very eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they can have the experience of the psychic. These beings possess certainly many qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional, which is a fact of the earth and is found nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, of Higher Mind and Overmind and other regions do not possess a psychic being.
Naturally, the beings of the vital world do not have it either. They do not regret it, they do not want it. In their origin, of course, they descended directly from the Divine, but that was only in their origin and it is so long ago. Now they have no direct contact with the Divine within them, they do not have the psychic being. If they had converted themselves under these conditions nothing would have remained of them, because they are made wholly of the opposite movement. They are entirely made of self-assertion, despotic power, alienation from the origin and the utmost disdain for all that is pure and beautiful and noble. Those only, very rare, among them who wish to be converted do one thing immediately: take a physical body. But others do not want it; that ties them, restricts them to a rule which they defy.
10.01 - A Dream, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A poor man was sitting in a dark hut thinking of his miseries and of the injustice and wrongs that could be found in this world of Gods making. Out of abhimna he began to mutter to himself, As men do not want to cast a slur on Gods name, they put the blame on Karma. If my misfortunes are really due to the sins committed in my previous birth and if I was so great a sinner, then currents of evil thoughts should still be passing through my mind. Can the mind of such a wicked person get cleansed so soon? And what about that Tinkari Sheel who has such colossal wealth and commands so many people! If there is anything like the fruits of Karma, then surely he must have been a famous saint and sadhu in his previous life; but I see no trace of that at all in his present birth. I dont think a bigger rogue existsone so cruel and crooked. All these tales about Karma are just clever inventions of God to console mans mind. Shyamsundar1 is very tricky; luckily he does not reveal himself to me, otherwise I would teach him such a lesson that he would stop playing these tricks.
As soon as he finished muttering, the man saw that his dark room was flooded with a dazzling light. After a while the luminous waves faded and he found in front of him a charming boy of a dusky complexion standing with a lamp in his hand, and smiling sweetly without saying a word. Noticing the musical anklets round his feet and the peacock plume, the man understood that Shyamsundar had revealed himself. At first he was at a loss what to do; for a moment he thought of bowing at his feet, but looking at the boys smiling face no longer felt like making his obeisance. At last he burst out with the words, Hullo, Keshta,2 what makes you come here? The boy replied with a smile, Well, didnt you call me? Just now you had the desire to whip me! That is why I am surrendering myself to you. Come along, whip me. The man was now even more confounded than before, but not with any repentance for the desire to whip the Divine: the idea of punishing instead of patting such a sweet youngster did not appeal to him. The boy spoke again, You see, Harimohon, those who, instead of fearing me, treat me as a friend, scold me out of affection and want to play with me, I love very much. I have created this world for my play only; I am always on the lookout for a suitable playmate. But, brother, I find no one. All are angry with me, make demands on me, want boons from me; they want honour, liberation, devotionnobody wants me. I give whatever they ask for. What am I to do? I have to please them; otherwise they will tear me to pieces. You too, I find, want something from me. You are vexed and want to whip some one. In order to satisfy that desire you have called me. Here I am, ready to be whipped. ye yath m prapadyante3, I accept whatever people offer me. But before you beat me, if you wish to know my ways, I shall explain them to you. Are you willing? Harimohon replied, Are you capable of that? I see that you can talk a good deal, but how am I to believe that a mere child like you can teach me something? The boy smiled again and said, Come, see whether I can or not.
10.01 - The Dream Twilight of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is a morning twilight of the Gods;
Miraculous from sleep their forms arise
--
Led by a low far chanting of the Gods.
A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Aerial raiment of unbodied Gods;
A rapture of things that never can be born,
--
Or colonise a world of death with Gods.
O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,
--
This treasure wasted by the Gods on man,
This happy closeness as of soul to soul,
--
Put off the dire disguises of the Gods,
Unveil from terror and disrobe from sin.
--
What the white Gods had missed: they too are safe;
A mother's eyes are on them and her arms
--
Close not thy lids to dream the forms of Gods.
At last to open thy eyes consent and see
--
Drunk by it as the nectar of the Gods.
Earth's human wisdom is no great-browed power,
10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A worshipper of false dogmas and false Gods,
Or fanatic of a fierce intolerant creed
--
Cast on some neutral background of the Gods:
The Artist's skill he admires who planned it all.
--
"So prove thy absolute force to the wise Gods,
By choosing earthly joy! For self demand
--
To whom the secrets of the Gods are plain?
For now at last I know beyond all doubt,
--
From which the altars of the Gods are lit.
All still compelled went gliding on unchanged,
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The messages of the evangelist Gods,
Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.
--
Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;
Then disappointed to the Void he turns
--
The laughter of men, the irony of the Gods?
Where leads the march, whither the pilgrimage?
--
Arise delivered by the seeing Gods.
If free thou hadst kept thy mind from life's fierce stress,
--
Lo, how all shakes when the Gods tread too near!
All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved.
--
By divine words and human Gods revealed?
Impose not upon sentient minds and hearts
--
And spend the labour that might earn the Gods
And battle and bear agony of wounds
--
Child, hast thou trodden the Gods beneath thy feet
Only to win poor shreds of earthly life
--
There it is greatness to create the Gods.
Is not the spirit immortal and absolved
--
Uttered in hidden conclaves of the Gods,
Thy heart's ephemeral passion cannot break
--
With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.
Whoever thou art behind thy human mask,
--
And watches his will done by the forms of Gods
And the desire that goads half-conscious man
--
He meets the Gods in great and sudden hours,
He feels the universe as his larger self,
--
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
Fencing eternity from the toil of Time.
--
By Power, not Light, the great Gods rule the world;
Power is the arm of God, the seal of Fate.
--
Where hides his light from the pursuing Gods,
It glided into the lotus of her heart
--
Of its own nature binding even on Gods.
The Two opposed each other face to face.
10.04 - Transfiguration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As of the Brahman, even so of the Brahman's qualities. They are various aspects, living aspects or personalities of the One Divine. The Vedas therefore consider them as Gods and Goddesses and give each one a name and a form. They are adored and worshipped as such so that they may enter into the worshipper and transmute him into something of His image. The Gods bring riches to man. But these riches are they themselves. Vasu is the richness of their substance, Ratna is the wealth of their delight.
Agni is the energy of consciousness, Varuna is the vastness of consciousness, Mitra is the harmony. Ila is the revelation, Saraswati inspiration, Bharati is the Goddess of the Divine Word.
In the mental world we meet abstractions, lifeless ideas, forms without a soul. In reality, however, all movements in man, all forces in nature are more than mere movements and forces, they are personalities, embodiments of conscious beings. Indeed the Puranic tradition has elaborated this conception almost to its extreme limit. Those people crowded the world with an infinite number of Gods and Goddesses. They speak of 33 crores of Gods. The earth is the playfield of all godlings.
In this way we come very far from the Supreme Brahman, the Mayavadin's inane Unity. The Puranic multiplicity is perhaps a corrective of the Vedantin's empty Absolute.
1.005 - The Table, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
116. And God will say, “O Jesus son of Mary, did you say to the people, `Take me and my mother as Gods rather than God?'“ He will say, “Glory be to You! It is not for me to say what I have no right to. Had I said it, You would have known it. You know what is in my soul, and I do not know what is in Your soul. You are the Knower of the hidden.
117. I only told them what You commanded me: that you shall worship God, my Lord and your Lord. And I was a witness over them while I was among them; but when You took me to Yourself, You became the Watcher over them—You are Witness over everything.
1.006 - Livestock, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
19. Say, “What thing is more solemn in testimony?” Say, “God is Witness between you and me. This Quran was revealed to me, that I may warn you with it, and whomever it may reach. Do you indeed testify that there are other Gods with God?” Say, “I myself do not testify.” Say, “He is but One God, and I am innocent of your idolatry.”
20. Those to whom We have given the Book recognize it as they recognize their own children; but those who have lost their souls do not believe.
--
74. Abraham said to his father Azar, “Do you take idols for Gods? I see that you and your people are in evident error.”
75. Thus We showed Abraham the empire of the heavens and the earth, that he might be one of those with certainty.
1.007 - The Elevations, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
127. The chiefs of Pharaoh's people said, “Will you let Moses and his people cause trouble in the land, and forsake you and your Gods?” He said, “We will kill their sons, and spare their women. We have absolute power over them.”
128. Moses said to his people, “Seek help in God, and be patient. The earth belongs to God. He gives it in inheritance to whomever He wills of His servants, and the future belongs to the righteous.”
--
138. And We delivered the Children of Israel across the sea. And when they came upon a people who were devoted to some statues of theirs, they said, “O Moses, make for us a god, as they have Gods.” He said, “You are truly an ignorant people.”
139. “What these people are concerned with is perdition, and their deeds are based on falsehoods.”
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The climax of my life was what is known as the Cairo Working, described in the minutest detail in The Equinox of the Gods. At that time most of The Book of the Law was completely unintelligible to me, and a good deal of it especially the third chapter extremely antipa thetic. I fought against this book for years; but it proved irresistible.
I do not think I am boasting unfairly when I say that my personal researches have been of the greatest value and importance to the study of the subject of Magick and Mysticism in general, especially my integration of the various thought-systems of the world, notably the identification of the system of the Yi King with that of the Qabalah. But I do assure you that the whole of my life's work, were it multiplied a thousand fold, would not be worth one ti the of the value of a single verse of The Book of the Law.
I think you should have a copy of The Equinox of the Gods and make The Book of the Law your constant study. Such value as my own work may possess for you should amount to no more than an aid to the interpretation of this book.
2) It may be that later on you will want a copy of Eight Lectures on Yoga so I am putting a copy aside for you in case you should want it.
--
It would be better for you to get a copy of The Equinox of the Gods and study it. The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting of the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego or what not.
By "love under will" one refers to the fact that the method in every case is love, by which is meant the uniting of opposites as above stated, such as hydrogen and chlorine, sodium and oxygen, and so on. Any reaction what- ever, any phenomenon, is a phenomenon of "love", as you will understand when I come to explain to you the meaning of the word "point-event". But love has to be "under will," if it is to be properly directed. You must find your True Will, and make all your actions subservient to the one great purpose.
--
I think I am fair if I say that the first step on the Qabalah which may be called success, is when you make an actual discovery which throws light on some problem which has been troubling you. A quarter of a century ago I was in New Orleans, and was very puzzled about my immediate course of action; in fact I may say I was very much distressed. There seemed literally nothing that I could do, so I bethought myself that I had better invoke Mercury. As soon as I got into the appropriate frame of mind, it naturally occurred to me, with a sort of joy, "But I am Mercury." I put it into Latin Mercurius sum, and suddenly something struck me, a sort of nameless reaction which said: "That's not quite right." Like a flash it came to me to put it into Greek, which gave me "' " and adding that up rapidly, I got the number 418, with all the marvellous correspondences which had been so abundantly useful to me in the past (See Equinox of the Gods, p. 138). My troubles disappeared like a flash of lightning.
Now to answer your questions seriatum; it is quite all right to put questions to me about The Book of the Law; a very extended commentary has been written, but it is not yet published. I shall probably be able to answer any of your questions from the manuscript, but you cannot go on after that when it would become a discussion; as they say in the law-courts, "You must take the witness' answer."
--
3. Now then to your old Pons Asinorum about the names of the Gods! Stand in the corner for half an hour with your face to the wall! Stay in after school and write Malka be-Tharshishim v-Ruachoth b-Schehalim 999 times!
My dear, dear, dear sister, a name is a formula of power. How can you talk of "anachronism" when the Being is eternal? For the type of energy is eternal.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
astrolabe of Gods mysteries. If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing
one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and
1.00d - Introduction, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
It has come, it is bursting out all over the earth, even if the unseen flower still looks like a festering boil: students behead Gandhi's statue in Calcutta, the old Gods crumble, minds fed on intellect and philosophy cry for destruction and invite the outl and Barbarians to help them break their own prison, just as the ancient Romans did; others call for chemical paradises any way is better than this one! And the earth gasps and groans through all its cracks, its countless cracks, through all the cells of its great body in transformation. The so-called evil of our time is a new birth in disguise, which we do not know how to handle. We are before a new evolutionary crisis as radical as must have been the first human aberration among the great apes.
But since the terrestrial body is one, the remedy is one, like Truth, and a single point transmuted will transmute all the others. That point, however, is not to be found in the improvement of our laws, our systems or sciences, our religions, schools of thought or many-hued isms all those are part of the old Machinery; not a single nut needs to be tightened, added or improved anywhere: we are suffocating in the extreme. Moreover, that point has nothing to do with our intelligence that is what has contrived the whole Machine in the first place or even with improving Man, which would amount only to glorifying his weaknesses and past greatness. The imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, said Sri Aurobindo, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit. Indeed, this point lies in a future beyond the grasp of our intelligence, but it is growing in the depths of the being like the flowers of the flame tree when all its leaves have fallen.
1.00g - Foreword, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"One genius, inspired of the Gods, suggested recently that the riddle might be solved somewhat on the old and well-tried lines of 'Dr. Brewer's Guide to Science'; i.e., by having aspirants write to the Master asking questions, the kind of problem that naturally comes into the mind of any sensible enquirer, and getting his answer in the form of a letter. 'What is it?' 'Why should I bother my head about it?' 'What are its principles?' 'What use is it?' 'How do I begin?', and the like.
"This plan has been put into action; the idea has been to cover the subjects from every possible angle. The style has been colloquial and fluent; technical terms have either been carefully avoided or most carefully explained; and the letter has not been admitted to the series until the querent has expressed satisfaction. Some seventy letters, up to the present have been written, but still there seem to be certain gaps in the demonstration, like those white patches on the map of the World, which looked so tempting fifty years ago.
1.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
This Indian tale, which comes from Bengal, where Sri Aurobindo was born, was not unknown to him who said that all is He Gods,
devils, men, the earth, not just heaven and whose entire experience leads to a divine rehabilitation of matter. For the last half century,
psychology has done nothing but reinstate the demons in man; it is possible, as Andr Malraux believed, that the task of the next half century will be "to reinstate the Gods in man," or, rather, as Sri Aurobindo put it, to reinstate the Spirit in man and in matter, and to create "the life divine on earth": The heavens beyond are great and 1
Thoughts and Glimpses, 16:378
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
totalitarian assumption of omniscience is adoption of Gods place by reason is something that
inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops
1.00 - PRELUDE AT THE THEATRE, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
Who makes Olympus sure, the Gods uniting?
The might of Man, as in the Bard revealed.
1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew.
The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadow?
--
Believe me. 23 It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path therefore I fol. i(v)/ii(r) cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, 24 nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.
Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself?
1.011 - Hud, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
53. They said, “O Hud, you did not bring us any evidence, and we are not about to abandon our Gods at your word, and we are not believers in you.”
54. “We only say that some of our Gods have possessed you with evil.” He said, “I call God to witness, and you to witness, that I am innocent of what you associate.
55. Besides Him. So scheme against me, all of you, and do not hesitate.
--
101. We did not wrong them, but they wronged themselves. Their Gods, whom they invoked besides God, availed them nothing when the command of your Lord arrived. In fact, they added only to their ruin.
102. Such is the grip of your Lord when He seizes the towns in the midst of their sins. His grip is most painful, most severe.
1.016 - The Bee, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
51. God has said: “Do not take two Gods; He is only One God; so fear only Me.”
52. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and the earth; and to Him obedience is due always. Do you, then, fear anyone other than God?
1.017 - The Night Journey, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
42. Say, “If there were other Gods with Him, as they say, they would have sought a way to the Lord of the Throne.”
43. Be He glorified. He is exalted, far above what they say.
1.018 - The Cave, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
15. “These people, our people, have taken to themselves Gods other than Him. Why do they not bring a clear proof concerning them? Who, then, does greater wrong than he who invents lies and attributes them to God?”
16. “Now that you have withdrawn from them, and from what they worship besides God, take shelter in the cave. And your Lord will unfold His mercy for you, and will set your affair towards ease.”
1.019 - Mary, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
46. He said, “Are you renouncing my Gods, O Abraham? If you do not desist, I will stone you. So leave me alone for a while.”
47. He said, “Peace be upon you. I will ask my Lord to forgive you; He has been Kind to me.
--
81. And they took, besides God, other Gods, to be for them a source of strength.
82. By no means! They will reject their worship of them, and become opponents to them.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
things, the periphery of the Gods. ... We are reminded of the
Vedic thunderbolt, that electric Fire, of the Sun who is the
--
the Gods below and the Gods above, and worshipped them
4 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 103.
--
and the animal masks of the Gods has surfaced around the
beginning of the Common Era in writings which are called
--
of primitive Greece, together with the statues of their Gods,
when they founded the mysteries at Dodona, those of the
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
they really do mean. That the Gods die from time to time is due
to man's sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that
--
26 The Gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same dis-
ease as did our Christian symbols: people discovered then, as
--
the other hand, the Gods of the strangers still had unexhausted
mana. Their names were weird and incomprehensible and their
--
they were not banal like the conventional Gods. The fact that
people accepted the new as unthinkingly as they had rejected
--
kind, and the Gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we
call the Gods "factors," which comes from facere, 'to make.' The
makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in
--
ment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the Gods as
psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. No
1.01 - BOOK THE FIRST, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
--
With forms of Gods he fills the vacant sky:
New herds of beasts he sends, the plains to share:
--
Which next to Hell, the prudent Gods had laid;
And that alluring ill, to sight display'd.
--
Nor were the Gods themselves more safe above;
Against beleaguer'd Heav'n the giants move.
--
Against the Gods immortal hatred nurst,
An impious, arrogant, and cruel brood;
--
Which when the king of Gods beheld from high
(Withal revolving in his memory,
--
Then call'd a general council of the Gods;
Who summon'd, issue from their blest abodes,
--
The Gods of greater nations dwell around,
And, on the right and left, the palace bound;
--
The Gods to silence were compos'd, and sate
With reverence, due to his superior state.
--
Thus ended he; the greater Gods assent;
By clamours urging his severe intent;
--
To whom the Father of the Gods reply'd,
Lay that unnecessary fear aside:
--
Their houses fell upon their houshold Gods.
The solid piles, too strongly built to fall,
--
And then invoke the Gods, with pious prayers.
Thus, in devotion having eas'd their grief,
--
And doubts the Gods; yet both resolve to try.
Descending from the mount, they first unbind
--
The King of Gods begot me: what shall be,
Or is, or ever was, in Fate, I see.
--
If water Gods are deities indeed:
Gape Earth, and this unhappy wretch intomb;
--
The king of Gods (nor is thy lover less)
Invites thee to yon cooler shades; to shun
--
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
The rural, and the woodl and Pow'rs disdain'd;
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the Gods of Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There can be no doubt that in the beginning there was a worship of the Powers of the physical world, the Sun, Moon, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Rain and Storm etc., the Sacred Rivers and a number of Gods who presided over the workings of Nature.
That was the general aspect of the ancient worship in Greece, Rome, India and among other ancient peoples. But in all these countries these Gods began to assume a higher, a psychological function; Pallas Athene who may have been originally a Dawn-Goddess springing in flames from the head of Zeus, the Sky-God, Dyaus of the Veda, has in classical Greece a higher function and was identified by the Romans with their Minerva, the Goddess of learning and wisdom; similarly, Saraswati, a river Goddess, becomes in India the goddess of wisdom, learning and the arts and crafts: all the Greek deities have undergone a change in this direction - Apollo, the Sun-God, has become a god of poetry and prophecy, Hephaestus the Fire-God a divine smith, god of labour. In India the process was arrested half-way, and the Vedic Gods developed their psychological functions but retained more fixedly their external character and for higher purposes gave place to a new pantheon. They had to give precedence to Puranic deities who developed out of the early company but assumed larger cosmic functions, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahma - developing from the Vedic Brihaspati, or Brahmanaspati, - Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga. Thus in India the change in the Gods was less complete, the earlier deities became the inferior divinities of the Puranic pantheon and this was largely due to the survival of the Rig Veda in which their psychological and their external functions co-existed and are both given a powerful emphasis; there was no such early literary record to maintain the original features of the Gods of Greece and Rome.
This change was evidently due to a cultural development in these early peoples who became progressively more mentalised and less engrossed in the physical life as they advanced in civilisation and needed to read into their religion and their deities finer and subtler aspects which would support their more highly mentalised concepts and interests and find for them a true spiritual being or some celestial figure as their support and sanction.
--
For it is a fact that the tradition of a secret meaning and a mystic wisdom couched in the Riks of the ancient Veda was as old as the Veda itself. The Vedic Rishis believed that their Mantras were inspired from higher hidden planes of consciousness and contained this secret knowledge. The words of the Veda could only be known in their true meaning by one who was himself a seer or mystic; from others the verses withheld their hidden knowledge. In one of Vamadeva's hymns in the fourth Mandala (IV.3.16) the Rishi describes himself as one illumined expressing through his thought and speech words of guidance, "secret words" - nin.ya vacamsi - "seer-wisdoms that utter their inner meaning to the seer" - kavyani kavaye nivacana. The Rishi Dirghatamas speaks of the Riks, the Mantras of the Veda, as existing "in a supreme ether, imperishable and immutable in which all the Gods are seated", and he adds "one who knows not That what shall he do with the Rik?" (I.164.39) He further alludes to four planes from which the speech issues, three of them hidden in the secrecy while the fourth is human, and from there comes the ordinary word; but the word and thought of the Veda belongs to the higher planes (I.164.45).
Elsewhere in the Riks the Vedic Word is described (X.71) as that which is supreme and the topmost height of speech, the best and the most faultless. It is something that is hidden in secrecy and from there comes out and is manifested. It has entered into the truth-seers, the Rishis, and it is found by following the track of their speech. But all cannot enter into its secret meaning. Those who do not know the inner sense are as men who seeing see not, hearing hear not, only to one here and there the Word desiring him like a beautifully robed wife to a husb and lays open her body. Others unable to drink steadily of the milk of the Word, the Vedic cow, move with it as with one that gives no milk, to him the Word is a tree without flowers or fruits. This is quite clear and precise; it results from it beyond doubt that even then while the Rig Veda was being written the Riks were regarded as having a secret sense which was not open to all. There was an occult and spiritual knowledge in the sacred hymns and by this knowledge alone, it is said, one can know the truth and rise to a higher existence. This belief was not a later tradition but held, probably, by all and evidently by some of the greatest Rishis such as Dirghatamas and Vamadeva.
--
But where is this body of esoteric meaning in the Veda? It is only discoverable if we give a constant and straightforward meaning to the words and formulas employed by the Rishis, especially to the key-words which bear as keystones the whole structure of their doctrine. One such word is the great word, Ritam, Truth; Truth was the central object of the seeking of the mystics, a spiritual or inner Truth, a truth of ourselves, a truth of things, a truth of the world and of the Gods, a truth behind all we are and all that things are. In the ritualistic interpretation this master word of the Vedic knowledge has been interpreted in all kinds of senses according to the convenience or fancy of the interpreter, "truth", "sacrifice", "water", "one who has gone", even "food", not to speak of a number of other meanings; if we do that, there can be no certitude in our dealings with the Veda. But let us consistently give it the same master sense and a strange but clear result emerges. If we apply the same treatment to other standing terms of the Veda, if we give them their ordinary, natural and straightforward meaning and give it constantly and consistently, not monkeying about with their sense or turning them into purely ritualistic expressions, if we allow to certain important words, such as sravas, kratu, the psychological meaning of which they are capable and which they undoubtedly bear in certain passages as when the Veda describes Agni as kratur hr.di, then this result becomes all the more clear, extended, pervasive. If in addition we follow the indications which abound, sometimes the explicit statement of the Rishis about the inner sense of their symbols, interpret in the same sense the significant legends and figures on which they constantly return, the conquest over Vritra and the battle with the Vritras, his powers, the recovery of the Sun, the Waters, the Cows, from the Panis or other Dasyus, the whole Rig Veda reveals itself as a body of doctrine and practice, esoteric, occult, spiritual, such as might have been given by the mystics in any ancient country but which actually survives for us only in theVeda. It is there deliberately hidden by a veil, but the veil is not so thick as we first imagine; we have only to use our eyes and the veil vanishes; the body of the Word, the Truth stands out before us.
Many of the lines, many whole hymns even of the Veda bear on their face a mystic meaning; they are evidently an occult form of speech, have an inner meaning. When the seer speaks of Agni as "the luminous guardian of the Truth shining out in his own home", or of Mitra and Varuna or other Gods as "in touch with the Truth and making the Truth grow" or as "born in the Truth", these are words of a mystic poet, who is thinking of that inner Truth behind things of which the early sages were the seekers.
He is not thinking of the Nature-Power presiding over the outer element of fire or of the fire of the ceremonial sacrifice. Or he speaks of Saraswati as one who impels the words of Truth and awakes to right thinkings or as one opulent with the thought: Saraswati awakes to consciousness or makes us conscious of the "Great Ocean and illumines all our thoughts." It is surely not the River Goddess whom he is thus hymning but the Power, theRiver if you will, of inspiration, the word of the Truth, bringing its light into our thoughts, building up in us that Truth, an inner knowledge. The Gods constantly stand out in their psychological functions; the sacrifice is the outer symbol of an inner work, an inner interchange between the Gods and men, - man givingwhat he has, the Gods giving in return the horses of power, the herds of light, the heroes of Strength to be his retinue, winning for him victory in his battle with the hosts of Darkness, Vritras, Dasyus, Panis. When the Rishi says, "Let us become conscious whether by the War-Horse or by the Word of a Strength beyond men", his words have either a mystic significance or they have no coherent meaning at all. In the portions translated in this book we have many mystic verses and whole hymns which, however mystic, tear the veil off the outer sacrificial images covering the real sense of the Veda. "Thought", says the Rishi, "has nourished for us human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens; it is the milch-cow which milks of itself the wealth of many forms" - the many kinds of wealth, cows, horses and the rest for which the sacrificer prays; evidently this is no material wealth, it is something which Thought, the Thought embodied in the Mantra, can give and it is the result of the same Thought that nourishes our human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens. A process of divinisation, and of a bringing down of great and luminous riches, treasures won from the Gods by the inner work of sacrifice, is hinted at in terms necessarily covert but still for one who knows how to read these secret words, nin.ya vacamsi, sufficiently expressive, kavaye nivacana. Again, Night and Dawn the eternal sisters are like "joyful weaving women weaving the weft of our perfected works into the form of a sacrifice."
Again, words with a mystic form and meaning, but there
--
and manifest the Gods.2 But what is a ghee-pouring mind, and
how by pouring ghee can a priest manifest the Gods and the
triple heavens? But admit the mystical and esoteric meaning
--
certainly manifest by this process the Gods and the worlds and
all planes of the being. The Rishis, it must be remembered, were
--
- as an element of the wealth for which they pray to the Gods,
but here too an esoteric sense can be seen, for in certain passages
--
or the Sun-world - svar - by the Gods and the Angiras Rishis.
The symbol of the Sun is constantly associated with the higher
--
5 Or it means, "I saw the greatest (best) of the bodies of the Gods."
6 Or, for the law of the Truth, for vision.
--
the way of the Gods. This is the second mystic doctrine. The
third is that our life is a battle between the powers of Light
and Truth, the Gods who are the Immortals and the powers of
Darkness. These are spoken of under various names as Vritra
--
have to call in the aid of the Gods to destroy the opposition
of these powers of Darkness who conceal the Light from us or
--
way the soul's ascent. We have to invoke the Gods by the inner
sacrifice, and by the Word call them into us, - that is the specific
--
journey, a pilgrimage and a battle, - a travel towards the Gods
and we also make that journey with Agni, the inner Flame, as
--
The Gods, the powers of Light and Truth are powers and names
of the One, each God is himself all the Gods or carries them in
him: there is the one Truth, tat satyam,17 and one bliss to which
1.01 - Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
4. One unmoving that is swifter than Mind, That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run. In That the Master of Life5 establishes the Waters.6
5. That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this.
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Maitreya said, Master! I have been instructed by you in the whole of the Vedas, and in the institutes of law and of sacred science: through your favour, other men, even though they be my foes, cannot accuse me of having been remiss in the acquirement of knowledge. I am now desirous, oh thou who art profound in piety! to hear from thee, how this world was, and how in future it will be? what is its substance, oh Brahman, and whence proceeded animate and inanimate things? into what has it been resolved, and into what will its dissolution again occur? how were the elements manifested? whence proceeded the Gods and other beings? what are the situation and extent of the oceans and the mountains, the earth, the sun, and the planets? what are the families of the Gods and others, the Menus, the periods called Manvantaras, those termed Kalpas, and their subdivisions, and the four ages: the events that happen at the close of a Kalpa, and the terminations of the several ages[11]: the histories, oh great Muni, of the Gods, the sages, and kings; and how the Vedas were divided into branches (or schools), after they had been arranged by Vyāsa: the duties of the Brahmans, and the other tribes, as well as of those who pass through the different orders of life? All these things I wish to hear from you, grandson of Vaśiṣṭha. Incline thy thoughts benevolently towards me, that I may, through thy favour, be informed of all I desire to know. Parāśara replied, Well inquired, pious Maitreya. You recall to my recollection that which was of old narrated by my father's father, Vaśiṣṭha. I had heard that my father had been devoured by a Rākṣas employed by Visvāmitra: violent anger seized me, and I commenced a sacrifice for the destruction of the Rākṣasas: hundreds of them were reduced to ashes by the rite, when, as they were about to be entirely extirpated, my grandfather Vaśiṣṭha thus spake to me: Enough, my child; let thy wrath be appeased: the Rākṣasas are not culpable: thy father's death was the work of destiny. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains by arduous exertions, of fame, and of devout austerities; and prevents the attainment of heaven or of emancipation. The chief sages always shun wrath: he not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of these unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed. Mercy is the might of the righteous[12].
Being thus admonished by my venerable grandsire, I immediately desisted from the rite, in obedience to his injunctions, and Vaśiṣṭha, the most excellent of sages, was content with me. Then arrived Pulastya, the son of Brahmā[13], who was received by my grandfather with the customary marks of respect. The illustrious brother of Pulaha said to me; Since, in the violence of animosity, you have listened to the words of your progenitor, and have exercised clemency, therefore you shall become learned in every science: since you have forborne, even though incensed, to destroy my posterity, I will bestow upon you another boon, and, you shall become the author of a summary of the Purāṇas[14]; you shall know the true nature of the deities, as it really is; and, whether engaged in religious rites, or abstaining from their performance[15], your understanding, through my favour, shall be perfect, and exempt from). doubts. Then my grandsire Vaśiṣṭha added; Whatever has been said to thee by Pulastya, shall assuredly come to pass.
--
[1]: An address of this kind, to one or other Hindu divinity, usually introduces Sanscrit compositions, especially those considered sacred. The first term of this mantra or brief prayer, Om or Omkāra, is well known as a combination of letters invested by Hindu mysticism with peculiar sanctity. In the Vedas it is said to comprehend all the Gods; and in the Purāṇas it is directed to be prefixed to all such formulæ as that of the text. Thus in the Uttara Khaṇḍa of the Pādma Purāṇa: 'The syllable Om, the mysterious name, or Brahma, is the leader of all prayers: let it therefore, O lovely-faced, (Śiva addresses Durgā,) be employed in the beginning of all prayers:' According to the same authority, one of the mystical imports of the term is the collective enunciation of Viṣṇu expressed by A, of Srī his bride intimated by U, and of their joint worshipper designated by M. A whole chapter of the Vāyu Purāṇa is devoted to this term. A text of the Vedas is there cited: 'Om, the monosyllable Brahma;' the latter meaning either the Supreme Being or the Vedas collectively, of which this monosyllable is the type. It is also said to typify the three spheres of the world, the three holy fires, the three steps of Viṣṇu, &c.-Frequent meditation upon it, and repetition of it, ensure release from worldly existence. See also Manu, II. 76. Vāsudeva, a name of Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa, is, according to its grammatical etymology, a patronymic derivative implying son of Vasudeva. The Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, however, devise other explanations: see the next chapter, and again, b. VI. c. 5.
[2]: In this stanza occurs a series of the appellations of Viṣṇu: 1. Puṇḍarīkākṣa, having eyes like a lotus, or heart-pervading; or Puṇḍarīka is explained supreme glory, and Akṣa imperishable: the first is the most usual etymon. 2. Vīswabhāvana, the creator of the universe, or the cause of the existence of all things. 3. Hṛṣīkeśa, lord of the senses. 4. Mahā puruṣa, great or supreme spirit; puruṣa meaning that which abides or is quiescent in body (puri sété), 5. Pūrvaja, produced or appearing before creation; the Orphic πρωτογόνος. In the fifth book, c. 18, Viṣṇu is described by five appellations, which are considered analogous to these; or, 1. Bhūtātmā, one with created things, or Puṇḍarīkākṣa; 2. Pradhānātmā, one with crude nature, or Viśvabhāvana; 3. Indriyātmā, one with the senses, or Hṛṣikeśa; 4. Paramātmā, supreme spirit, or Mahāpuruṣa; and Ātmā, soul; living soul, animating nature and existing before it, or Pūrvaja.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of Gods decomposition? Gods too
decompose.
--
of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become Gods simply to seem worthy of it?
We find ourselves in an absurd and unfortunate situation when our thoughts turn, involuntarily, to
--
who gave birth to the Sky and the Earth and the ancestress who brought forth all the Gods. The theme
of the primordial waters, imagined as a totality at once cosmic and divine, is quite frequent in archaic
1.01 - On Love, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for Gods sacred feast.
*****
1.01 - On renunciation of the world, #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
20. If an earthly king were to call us and request us to serve in his presence, we should not delay for other orders, we should not make excuses, but we should leave everything and eagerly go to him. Let us then be on the alert, lest when the King of kings and Lord of lords and God of Gods calls us to this heavenly office, we cry off out of sloth and cowardice and find ourselves without excuse at the Last Judgment. It is possible to walk, even when tied with the fetters of worldly affairs and iron cares, but only with difficulty. For even those who have iron chains on their feet can often walk; but they are continually stumbling and getting hurt. An unmarried man, who is only tied to the world by business affairs, is like one who has fetters on his hands; and therefore when he wishes to enter the monastic life he has nothing to hinder him. But the married man is like one who is bound hand and foot. (So when he wants to run he cannot.)2
Some people living carelessly in the world have asked me: We have wives and are beset with social cares, and how can we lead the solitary life? I replied to them: Do all the good you can; do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not lie to anyone; do not be arrogant towards anyone; do not hate any one; be sure you go to church; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another mans domestic happiness;3 and be content with what your own wives can give you. If you behave in this way you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.
1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian system and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between Gods and men, - a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human mind; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative and symbolic given to the word "sacrifice" and the conception of the Gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equally the idea of action according to the Shastra, the fourfold order of society, the allusion to the relative position of the four orders or the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and women seem at first sight local and temporal, and, if they are too much pressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of the teaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth and limit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behind to the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporal institution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true and the spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal. By Shastra we perceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by humanity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the natural unregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in the satisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. We see too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concrete form of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form; it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
--
There have been other syntheses in the long history of Indian thought. We start with the Vedic synthesis of the psychological being of man in its highest flights and widest rangings of divine knowledge, power, joy, life and glory with the cosmic existence of the Gods, pursued behind the symbols of the material universe into those superior planes which are hidden from the physical sense and the material mentality. The crown of this synthesis was in the experience of the Vedic Rishis something divine, transcendent and blissful in whose unity the increasing soul of man and the eternal divine fullness of the cosmic godheads meet perfectly and fulfil themselves. The Upanishads take up this crowning experience of the earlier seers and make it their starting-point for a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge; they draw together into a great harmony all that had been seen and experienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternal throughout a great and fruitful period of spiritual seeking. The
Gita starts from this Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means and powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.
1.01 - Proem, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars
--
Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke
Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
--
I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,
And the primordial germs of things unfold,
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
become such Gods, and, according to the Sankhyas, the God
spoken of in the Vedas really means one of these free souls.
--
re-manifestation of the Gods and of those that become
merged in nature.
The Gods in the Indian systems represent certain high offices
which are being filled successively by various souls. But
--
These are they who do not want the position of Gods, or even
that of rulers of cycles. They attain to liberation.
--
these teachers, however great they may have been Gods or
angels were all bound and limited by time, and God is not
1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
become" Gods" or "goddesses."
Tara may be seen as belonging-at least from the
1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
palace of the Gods, and proceeded toward the park.
" ' T h e time for the enlightenment of the prince Siddhartha
draweth nigh,' thought the Gods; 'we must show him a sign':
and they changed one of their number into a decrepit old man,
--
the park, he saw a diseased man whom the Gods had fashioned;
and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart,
--
to the park, he saw a dead man whom the Gods had fashioned;
and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart,
--
the Gods had fashioned; and he asked his charioteer, 'Pray, who
is this man?' 'Sire, this is one who has retired from the world';
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Undoubtedly, wherever we can seize human society in what to us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages,no matter whether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically advanced or backward,we do find a strongly symbolic mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and institutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together. When man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age of symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are losing their virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities,the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the least intervene in its movements.
If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature- Gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig Veda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Sury, daughter of the Sun, with different Gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that figure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things. This symbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.
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.
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
1.01 - The Dark Forest. The Hill of Difficulty. The Panther, the Lion, and the Wolf. Virgil., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
During the time of false and lying Gods.
A poet was I, and I sang that just
1.01 - The First Steps, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
This world has a good many of these demoniac natures, but there are some Gods too. If one proposes to teach any science to increase the power of sense-enjoyment, one finds multitudes ready for it. If one undertakes to show the supreme goal, one finds few to listen to him. Very few have the power to grasp the higher, fewer still the patience to attain to it. But there are a few also who know that even if the body can be made to live for a thousand years, the result in the end will be the same. When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall. No man was ever born who could stop his body one moment from changing. Body is the name of a series of changes. "As in a river the masses of water are changing before you every moment, and new masses are coming, yet taking similar form, so is it with this body." Yet the body must be kept strong and healthy. It is the best instrument we have.
This human body is the greatest body in the universe, and a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all animals, than all angels; none is greater than man. Even the Devas ( Gods) will have to come down again and attain to salvation through a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas. According to the Jews and Mohammedans, God created man after creating the angels and everything else, and after creating man He asked the angels to come and salute him, and all did so except Iblis; so God cursed him and he became Satan. Behind this allegory is the great truth that this human birth is the greatest birth we can have. The lower creation, the animal, is dull, and manufactured mostly out of Tamas. Animals cannot have any high thoughts; nor can the angels, or Devas, attain to direct freedom without human birth. In human society, in the same way, too much wealth or too much poverty is a great impediment to the higher development of the soul. It is from the middle classes that the great ones of the world come. Here the forces are very equally adjusted and balanced.
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Attis is associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius
with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus." What the nature of that
--
of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in
general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her
1.01 - The Mental Fortress, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
This impossible endeavour (for us) is not impossible for the Great Executrix who had led the evolutionary play to this crucial turning point. It is She who can. We just have to seize her secret springs, or rather, let Her seize hold of us and collaborate in our own evolution by having an intimate understanding of the Great Process. None of the spiritual virtues and athletics of the old closed system will be of any use. What is needed is a sort of radical leap, fully conscious and with eyes wide open, a very childlike surrender to the Gods of the future, an iron resolve to track the momentous Illusion down to the smallest recesses, a supreme opening to the supreme Possibility which will lift us up in Her arms and carry us upon Her sunlit road even before we are satisfied of having taken a quarter of a step toward Her. For indeed there are moments when the Spirit moves among men..., there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weaknesses of their own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny.3
We are just at that moment.
1.01 - The Unexpected, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
It was the hour before the Gods awake
The calendar stood at November 1938, the month of the Darshan. A few weeks more and we would meet the Master after a long wait of three months. After every Darshan we start counting the days for the next one, for each occasion brings the Eternal and his Shakti closer to us and is therefore a significant landmark in our lives. As the date comes nearer, our days too take on a brighter hue and the day before the Darshan, all faces glow with sweet smiles. Friends meeting on the road greet each other with one word, "Tomorrow!" or with a silent look of happy expectation. The Dining Room hums with the same theme. Wherever you go, whomsoever you meet, no other talk except the Guru's Darshan for one or two minutes, an eternal moment.
--
As we had no work now except to keep a watch, I could not but contemplate upon what had happened. I remembered Sri Aurobindo writing to me that though he had acquired sufficient control over disease and death, accidents were possible. Still, living in entire seclusion, secure from all outward contingencies, and inwardly master of cosmic forces, and yet to meet with such an accident in so unexpected a way, was inconceivable. {Sri Aurobindo explained to us later on in the "Talks" the why and wherefore of the catastrophe.) The forces must have been very sly clever indeed to have chosen the time when the Mother had retired, the Gods were asleep. But the Powers of the Inconscience were awake to strike their infernal blow. It was really the hour of the unexpected!
In the clear morning light I could have a good view of Sri Aurobindo as he was lying on his bed, almost motionless and straight. I asked myself; "Is he enjoying a bit of sweet sleep since he had none the whole night? Or is he simply keeping quiet and bearing the severe pain with equanimity?" It was the latter, as he told us afterwards. Only the Mother's visit, to make some enquiries or to offer some drink, showed flickers of life in his otherwise trance-like mood. I could now observe him from close at hand and the room he had been living in for the last twelve years! Since then, it has undergone such a tremendous change that just a faint memory of its original state is all that remains today. The wooden bed (on which Sri Aurobindo was lying) was rather large, the upper part being slightly raised, and he filled almost the entire breadth the broad chest and the head large and round, the fine silken hair parted in the middle. As for the rest of the room, it was very plain, almost austerely furnished, except for the carpet, one small box-wood table at either end of the room, a semicircular table in the middle; notebooks, and odds and ends of papers lying scattered on one of the tables; a big almirah containing a small number of books: on the top shelf, the bound volumes of the Arya. On the next one, the Collected Works of Shakespeare and Shelley and books presented by writers such as Radhakrishnan, James Cousins, etc. There were two paintings, one Chinese and the other of Amitabha Buddha with the lotus in his hand; a few wood carvings; a couch for the Mother opposite Sri Aurobindo's bed. The only furniture of luxury was a long cane chair in the adjacent room, in which he could recline and have some repose.
1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
As I said in my previous letter, I was disturbed to learn you have recently been indulging in your reprehensible habit of using strong and unfilial language to your elderly parents. This has caused them much pain. It is altogether abominable. Never forget that there is indeed such a thing as heavenly retri bution. The wrath of the Gods is very real.
Until this spring I was staying at a place called Shinoda in Izumi Province. In a village nearby named Tsukumi, there lived the son of a very wealthy man named Shinkichir. He was talented, handsome, had a clever mind, and was dearly loved by all the members of his family, who coddled and protected him as he grew up. Shinkichir turned eighteen last year, his father having passed away three or four years earlier. Arrangements for his marriage were begun this past winter. An agreement was reached with the bride's family, and the bride was being fitted out with a trousseau and so forth.
--
After I left the temple, word reached me that the Gods and Buddhas had protected him and that his life was no longer in danger. But his eyes had been destroyed, his hearing was gone, and he seemed to have lost his desire to live.
In ancient China, there was a gentleman named Shu-liang who lived at a place called Han-yin with his mother, wife, and son. He was extremely quick-tempered, and would often fly off the handle, venting his spleen on his wife and mother, causing them great distress. No matter how ferocious a tiger is, it does not devour its cubs; it cares for them lovingly, as though they were precious jewels.
--
The people in the half-dozen stories I related, having turned away from reasonable courses of action, convinced themselves that their transgressions were minor and that any retri bution would be minor as well, and because of that they ended up receiving the severe judgment of heaven, dying very unfortunate deaths, leaving behind them names blackened forever as unfilial sons or daughters, and falling into the interminable suffering and torment of the Burning Hells. That this happened because they did not fear the wrath of the Gods and were ignorant of heavenly retri bution is a matter each and every person should give the greatest care and consideration.
Last winter when I heard that story of Shinkichir of Tsukumi village, I immediately thought of you.
--
Obsession with these seductions is a serious disease, and it is one that neither the wise nor the foolish can escape. A wise person blinded by delusion is like a tiger that falls into a well and yet has sufficient strength to claw its way out without losing its skin. When a foolish man is similarly blinded, he is like a tired, skinny old fox that falls in but perishes miserably at the bottom of the well because he lacks the strength to clamber out. Even a person who is just tolerably clever will, once he has fallen victim to these seductions and begins behaving in an unfilial manner, heed the warnings of his elders and the advice of the good and virtuous, immediately change his ways and become a kind and considerate son to his parents. Receiving heaven's favor and the Gods' hidden assistance, he will be blessed with great happiness and long life. When he dies, he will leave a sterling reputation for wisdom and goodness behind him.
Not so a foolish man, for once he engages in unfilial behavior he neither fears the warnings of his elders nor heeds the advice of good, upright people. He defies the sun, he opposes the moon, and in the end he receives the punishment of heaven and the dire verdict of the Gods. In this state, self-redemption is no longer possible.
The difference between the two men does not exist from the start. It arises only because the former heeds to the warnings, and the latter does not.
1.021 - The Prophets, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
21. Or have they taken to themselves Gods from the earth who resurrect?
22. If there were in them Gods other than God, they would have gone to ruin. So glory be to God, Lord of the Throne, beyond what they allege.
23. He will not be questioned about what He does, but they will be questioned.
24. Or have they taken, besides Him, other Gods? Say, “Bring your proof. This is a message for those with me, and a message of those before me.” But most of them do not know the truth, so they turn away.
25. We never sent a messenger before you without inspiring him that: “There is no god but I, so worship Me.”
--
36. When those who disbelieve see you, they treat you only with ridicule: “Is this the one who mentions your Gods?” And they reject the mention of the Merciful.
37. The human being was created of haste. I will show you My signs, so do not seek to rush Me.
--
43. Or do they have Gods who can defend them against Us? They cannot help themselves, nor will they be protected from Us.
44. We have given these enjoyments, and their ancestors, until time grew long upon them. Do they not see how We gradually reduce the land from its extremities? Are they then the victors?
--
59. They said, “Who did this to our Gods? He is certainly one of the wrongdoers.”
60. They said, “We heard a youth mentioning them. He is called Abraham.”
--
62. They said, “Are you the one who did this to our Gods, O Abraham?”
63. He said, “But it was this biggest of them that did it. Ask them, if they can speak.”
--
68. They said, “Burn him and support your Gods, if you are going to act.”
69. We said, “O fire, be coolness and safety upon Abraham.”
--
99. Had these been Gods, they would not have descended into it. All will abide in it.
100. In it they will wail. In it they will not hear.
1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
* 4. One unmoving that is swifter than Mind; That the Gods reach not, for It progresses
ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run. In That the Master of
--
The laws of the relativity, upheld by the Gods, are Its temporary
creations. Their apparent eternity is only the duration, immeasurable to us, of the world which they govern. They are laws
--
the movement. The Gods, therefore, are described as continually
running in their course. But the Lord is free and unaffected by
--
THE RUNNING OF THE Gods
Brahman representing Itself in the universe as the Stable, by Its
--
The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal
action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.
--
Everything in the universe, even the Gods, seems to itself to
be moving in the general movement towards a goal outside itself
--
illusory. For Brahman is Absolute and Infinite. The Gods, labouring to reach him, find, at every goal that they realise, Brahman
still moving forward in front to a farther realisation. Nothing
1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
Titans or of the Gods, of Indra, of Prajapati. This is gained
in the path of self-enlargement by an ample acceptance of the
1.02.4.2 - Action and the Divine Will, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
the Gods and all the worlds, upholds all the universal workings
and finally fulfils the godhead, the Immortality. He is the worker
--
into the Immortality, the good, the beatitude. The Vedic Gods
are a parable of human life emerging, mounting, lifting itself
1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
One hundred times the happiness of the emperor of this world is the happiness of the pitris, another level which is superior to the physical world. One hundred times the happiness of the pitris is the happiness of the gandharvas, who are celestial musicians in a world which is still higher than that of the pitris. One hundred times the happiness of the gandharvas is the happiness of the celestials in heaven the devas, as we call them. One hundred times the happiness of these celestials is the happiness of Indra, the king of the Gods. One hundred times the happiness of the king of the Gods is the happiness of the preceptor, the Guru of the Gods Brihaspati. One hundred times the happiness of Brihaspati is the happiness of Prajapati, the Creator Brahma. One hundred times the happiness of Brahma the Creator is the happiness of Virat, the Supreme. Beyond that is Hiranyagarbha, and beyond that, Ishvara, and beyond Ishvara is the Absolute.
So where are we in this scheme? What is our happiness? It is the happiness of a cup of coffee, cup of tea, or a sweet which has no meaning compared to these calculations of astounding existences which are transcendent to human comprehension. When I say a hundred times, it is not merely a mathematical increase of the quantity of happiness; it is also a corresponding increase of the quality of happiness. As mentioned earlier, the quality of happiness in waking life is superior to the happiness in dream; it is not merely quantitative increase, but is also a qualitative increase. The joy of waking life is greater and more intense than the quality of joy in dream. So these calculations given in the Upanishad mean an increase of happiness one hundred times, both in quantity and in quality, so that when we go to the top, we are in an uncontrollable ecstasy of unbounded bliss.
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ashwapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the Gods themselves dwell. Even these Ashwapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One Reality beyond. Thus he leaves all behind and reaches into the single sole Reality, the transcendental Truth of things, the status vast and infinite and eternal, immutable existence and consciousness and bliss.
A Vastness brooded free from sense of Space,
--
What is this banquet that she prepared for man and which man refused? It is nothing else than the Life Divine here below the life of the Gods enjoying immortality, full of the supreme light and power, love and delight. Man refused because for him it is something too high, too great. Being a creature earthbound and of small dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him, for in his half wakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if ever he came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens to cross his threshold, he is not at peace, does not want to recognise but denies and even curses it.
The Divine Mother brings solace and salvation. For the Grace it is such a small and easy thing, it is a wonder how even such a simple, natural, inconspicuous thing could be refused by anybody.
1.025 - The Criterion, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
3. And yet, instead of Him, they produce for themselves Gods that create nothing, but are themselves created; that have no power to harm or benefit themselves; and no power over life, death, or resurrection.
4. Those who disbelieve say, “This is nothing but a lie that he made up, and others have helped him at it.” They have committed an injustice and a perjury.
--
42. “He nearly led us away from our Gods, had we not patiently adhered to them.” But they will know, when they witness the torment, who is further away from the way.
43. Have you seen him who chose his desire as his god? Would you be an agent for him?
10.28 - Love and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness Gods Debt
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenLove and Love
--
Consciousness Gods Debt
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
itself may be conceived as a Movement too rapid for the Gods,
that is to say, for our various functions of consciousness to follow
10.29 - Gods Debt, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:10.29 - Gods Debt
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Gods Debt
Here is a line from Savitri:
--
First let us understand the mystery of God's debt to man. We know, in ordinary life a subordinate has a duty towards his superior, the lesser owes a debt to the greater. That is easily understood. Likewise the superior also has a duty to his subordinate, the greater has his duty to the smaller. The child owes a debt to his parents; no less is the debt that the parents owe to the child. The parents not only bring forth the child, but they have to bring him up, nourish, foster, educate and settle him in life. We know also, as the scriptures tell us, that there is a debt man owes to the Gods. The paying of the debt is described in the institution of the sacrifice (yajna). It is through his sacrifice that man achieves what he has to achieve upon earth. It is the givingof what one is and what one hasto the Gods the sacrifice mounts carrying the offering to the Gods. But the sacrifice is not a mere one-sided movement, the sacrifice brings from the Gods gifts for the manmaterial prosperity and spiritual fulfilment. Man increases himself in this way, but thereby increases the Gods also. The offering that man brings in his sacrificeall his possessionshis earthly possessions, but chiefly his possessions of the inner world, the wealth of his spirit, the virtues of his consciousness all go to the Gods and increase them, that is to say, they become more manifest and more powerful upon earth and in earthly existence and in the service of man.
The sacrifice going up to the Gods as offered by man means the sadhana, the inner discipline that he follows by which he lifts up his being with its mental and vital and physical formulations to their higher and higher potencies upon earth. The dedication of the normal powers and faculties to the Gods means purification and release from the bondages of ignorance and egoism. This serves to make the Gods living to us, bring them near to our terrestrial life, to our normal consciousness. This is what is meant by increasing the Godsman's duty or debt to the Gods. In answer there is a corresponding gesture from the Gods, with their immortalising reality they dwell in us and fill our being with their godlike qualities, their light, their energy, their delight, their very immortality. Man increases the Gods and the Gods increase man and by their mutual increasing they attain the supreme increment, the Divine status, so says the Gita.
Now, we go beyond the Gods, to the very origin, God himself, the Supreme. What is the debt that God, the Supreme, the Divine, owes to us human beings? We owe to God everything, our life, our very existence, our soul and substance given to us by him, then how is he indebted to us? What kind of debt he has incurred which he has to pay to his creature, the human being? Primarily because he is the Divine Father, he has to take charge of his own creation, see to its growth and fruition and fulfilment. Indeed that is the role of the Divine in us (and above us and around us): that is his work, the Divine Work. Since he has put us out of his consciousness (for a special experience of growth and development), it is also his work (and duty) to bring us back to him: after a process of self-separation a process of self-integration. Man, so long as he is a separate consciousness has to dedicate, lift up and unify this separative conscious being to the whole being and consciousness. This is how he discharges his debt to the Divine, and the answering grace of the Divine is the clearing of the debt which He owes to His creatures.
What has been said of man is equally applicable to earth. The destiny of man is the destiny of earth as also the destiny of earth is the destiny of man. For man is an earthly creature, is born out of earth and he grows with the growth of the earth; equally the earth grows with the growth of man.
--
Earth moves forward through man who is its flowering and man moves forward through his representative, the higher man, who reveals and embodies still greater potentialities of God's creation, having the privilege of being so conscious as to contact the Gods and God Himselfhe is master of life-force (awapati); he climbs to the summits and brings down upon earth the heavenly riches and the Divine Grace, which fulfils, transmuting all debits into credits.
***
1.02 - BOOK THE SECOND, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And Gods and Goddesses the waters grac'd.
Aegeon here a mighty whale bestrode;
--
There is not one of all the Gods that dares
(However skill'd in other great affairs)
--
And stately dooms, and cities fill'd with Gods;
While through a thousand snares your progress lies,
--
Seeks his last refuge in the Gods and pray'r.
What cou'd he do? his eyes, if backward cast,
--
"If you, great king of Gods, my death approve,
And I deserve it, let me die by Jove;
--
Destruction seizes on the Heav'ns and Gods;
Atlas becomes unequal to his freight,
--
The Gods stand round him, as he mourns, and pray
He would resume the conduct of the day,
--
And Tethys, both rever'd among the Gods.
They ask what brings her there: "Ne'er ask," says she,
--
To Gods and men; nor God nor man was there:
A virgin Goddess heard a virgin's pray'r.
--
The Gods, in pity, shall contract thy date,
And give thee over to the pow'r of Fate."
--
And, as he mix'd among the crowd of Gods,
Beckon'd him out, and drew him from the rest,
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
It is true that man was created in order to serve the Gods, who, first of all, needed to be fed and
clothed.50
--
motivation (to please the Gods, so to speak). If the unexpected occurs say, the elevator is not operating
the mismatch temporarily stops me. I replace my current plan with an alternative behavioral strategy,
--
appease the angry Gods, and restore order to the cosmos). I will become a medical technician; or maybe
even a nurse. I can still be a good person, even if Im not a doctor and, perhaps, that is the most
--
constitute the life of Brahma. But even this duration of the Gods life does not exhaust time, for the Gods
are not eternal and the cosmic creations and destructions succeed one another forever.195
--
conflated, as is frequently the case, in this myth); Apsu, Tiamats husb and and consort; the elder Gods,
children of Tiamat and Apsu; and Marduk, sun-deity and mythic hero. Tiamat symbolizes the great
--
elder Gods symbolize the common psychological attri butes of humanity (the fragments or constituent
elements of consciousness), and constitute a more thorough representation of the constituent elements of
--
The original union of Tiamat and Apsu brings the elder Gods into being. These Gods carelessly kill
Apsu, upon who they unconsciously depend. Tiamat re-appears, with a vengeance, and decides to
--
All fail. Finally, Marduk offers to do battle. He is elected as king as the greatest of Gods, as the
determiner of destinies and voluntarily confronts Tiamat. He cuts her apart, and creates the cosmos
--
who gave birth to the Sky and the Earth and the ancestress who brought forth all the Gods. The theme
of the primordial waters, imagined as a totality at once cosmic and divine, is quite frequent in archaic
--
was killed and his widow Tiamat, goddess of the bitter or salt waters, threatened the Gods with
destruction. Marduk, the champion of the Gods, killed her and split her in two, creating heaven out of
one half and earth out of the other. Similarly, the creation in Genesis begins with a firmament
--
to be seen; when none of the other Gods had been brought into being, when they had not yet been called by
their name, and their destinies had not yet been fixed....225 Their uroboric union served as the source from
--
were the Gods created with them.226 The precosmogonic egg inhabited by Tiamat and Apsu gave rise
to the initial world of Gods. This process is portrayed schematically in Figure 19: The Birth of the World
of Gods.
th rth"
--
"World" of Gods
APSU:
--
Figure 19: The Birth of the World of Gods.
The Mesopotamian Gods like deities everywhere present somewhat of a mystery to the modern mind.
Archaic cultures are rife with deities. We seem unable to locate them now. They do not seem part of the
--
The original children of Tiamat and Apsu the elder Gods should therefore be regarded as
embodiments of the archaic transpersonal intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to human motivation, as
--
considered themselves destined to clo the and feed such Gods, because they viewed themselves as the
servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, elicited by the environment. Such
--
the Gods during such times are not so fortunate.
Back to the Enuma elish: The secondary/patriarchal deities of the Mesopotamian celestial pantheon
--
grandfa ther, Anshar,229 without rival among the Gods his brothers.230
The elder Gods, in totality, serve to reproduce and to noisily act. Their incessant racket and movement
upsets the divine parents; disturbs the inner parts of Tiamat.231 So Tiamat and her husb and Apsu conspire
--
Yahweh, Noah and the Flood. The Gods give birth to the cosmos, but ceaselessly attempt to destroy it.
Ea catches wind of his parents plot, however, however, and slays Apsu adding insult to injury by
--
the wise, the wisest of the Gods,232 filled with awe-inspiring majesty.233 When Ea saw his son:
He rejoiced, he beamed, his heart was filled with joy.
He distinguished him and conferred upon him double equality with the Gods,
So that he was highly exalted and surpassed them in everything.
--
He was exalted among the Gods, surpassing was his form;
His members were gigantic, he was surpassing in height.
--
Son of the sun-god, the sun-god of the Gods!234
Marduk is characterized by the metaphoric associates of consciousness. He has exaggerated sensory
--
(secondary/patriarchal) elder Gods, once and for all, and begins to produce horrible soldiers, to aid her in
battle:
--
She crowned them with fear-inspiring glory and made them like Gods,
So that he who would look upon them should perish from terror.235
--
She made ready to join battle with the Gods her offspring.
To avenge Apsu, Tiamat did this evil.
--
"World" of Gods
rea
--
Lord of the Gods, destiny of the great Gods,
If I am indeed to be your avenger,
--
Tiamat. When therefore the Gods, at the New Years festival [see discussion below], convened in the
Court of Assembly, they reverently waited on Marduk, the king of the Gods of heaven and earth, and
in that spirit they decided the destinies. The Gods, indeed, continue to determine destinies long after
Marduk has received the powers he here desires240; but the final decision rested with Marduk, so that in
--
This is an example of the hierarchical organization of the Gods, a concept frequently encapsulated in
mythology, and one we shall return to later. All the original children of Tiamat are potent and impersonal
elder Gods, psychological forces the deities that eternally rule or constitute human motivation and
affect. The question of the proper ordering of those forces (who, or what, should rule?) comprises the
--
chaos to the position of king (and the subjugation of the other Gods to that king):
Anshar opened his mouth
--
Cause the Gods my fathers to be brought before me.
Let them bring all the Gods to me!
Let them converse and sit down to banquet.
--
All the Gods went over to her;
Even those who ye have created march at her side.
--
She crowned them with fear-inspiring glory and made them like Gods.
So that they might cause him who would look upon them to perish from terror,
--
Of those among the Gods, her first-born, who formed her assembly,
She exalted Kingu; in their midst she made him great.
--
I have cast the spell for thee, I have made thee great in the assembly of the Gods.
The dominion over all the Gods I have given into thy hand.
Mayest thou be highly exalted, thou my unique spouse!
--
They decreed the destinies of the Gods, her sons, saying:
May the opening of our mouths quiet the fire-god!
--
Then Marduk, the wisest of the Gods, your son, came forward.
His heart prompted him to face Tiamat.
--
The hierarchical organization of the Gods is represented schematically in Figure 21: World of
Gods: Hierarchical Organization, which portrays Marduk as the superordinate personality or pattern
--
Figure 21: World of Gods: Hierarchical Organization
The vizier Kaka goes on his way, as commanded, and spreads the word among the (secondary/
--
Thou art the most important among the great Gods,
Thy destiny is unequaled, thy comm and is like that of Anu.
Marduk, thou art the most important among the great Gods.
Thy destiny is unequaled, thy comm and is like that of Anu.
--
None among the Gods shall infringe upon thy prerogative.243
The Gods place the starry garment of the night sky244 in their midst. At the comm and of Marduks
mouth on his word it appears; at his command, it disappears, as the night sky on the passage of the
--
When the Gods his fathers beheld the power of his word,
They were glad and did homage, saying: Marduk is king!
--
After the Gods his fathers had determined the destiny of [Marduk],
They set him on the road the way to success and attainment.246
--
As for the Gods of battle, they sharpen their weapons.
Tiamat and Marduk, the wisest of the Gods, advanced against one another;
They pressed on to single combat, they approached for battle.247
--
Kingu, the greatest and most guilty of Tiamats allies), so that upon him shall the services of the Gods be
imposed that they may be at rest250; then, he returns the Gods allied with him to their appropriate celestial
abodes. Grateful, they deliver him a present:
--
(unknowable) source of all things, the Gods who rule human life, and the subject or process who
constructs determinate experience, through voluntary encounter with the unknown. The full story
--
mother of all the Gods); as the thing that destroys all things; as the consort of a patriarchal spiritual
principle, upon who creation also depends (Apsu); and, finally, as the thing that is cut into pieces by the
--
World of Gods
"Birth" o
--
Finally, he was delivered, and the Gods assembled (that is, their statues were brought together) to
determine the destinies. (This episode corresponds, in the Enuma elish, to Marduks advancement to the
--
[outside the domain of civilization, or order]. The procession represented the army of the Gods
advancing against Tiamat. According to an inscription of Sennacherib, we may suppose that the
--
descent made him supremely the intermediary between Gods and men. The sovereign represented the
people before the Gods, and it was he who expiated the sins of his subjects. Sometimes he had to suffer
death for his peoples crimes; this is why the Assyrians had a substitute for the king. The texts
proclaim that the king had lived in fellowship with the Gods in the fabulous garden that contains the Tree
of Life and the Water of Life.... The king is the envoy of the Gods, the shepherd of the people,
named by god to establish justice and peace on earth....
--
whom he personified. In any case, as mediator between the world of men and the world of the Gods, the
Mesopotamian king effected, in his own person, a ritual union between the two modalities of existence,
--
ruined Gods, as though they were his own creation; The lord who by holy incantation restore[s] the dead
Gods to life.255 This idea echoes through ancient Egyptian theology, as described below. Marduk is
--
valuable attri bute or property (likely at one time separate Gods), now regarded as clearly dependent for its
existence upon him, and what his pattern of action signified. It seems evident that the attri bution of these
--
(with all the Gods organizing themselves voluntarily under Marduks dominion) and occurring in
Mesopotamian society, at the human and historical level. It might be said that the Mesopotamians came to
--
is Ptah who made the Gods exist....
107
--
monotheistic, integrated pattern, its external nature, as an attri bute of the Gods, recedes. It becomes more
clearly an attri bute of the human being, per se rather than a characteristic of the extra-individual world
and more like what we would conceive of as a psychological trait. The Gods subjective aspect his or her
intrapsychic quality becomes more evident, at least to the most sophisticated of intuitions, and the
--
the unknown, eternally promising and threatening) to generate the world of experience; the Egyptian Gods
Horus-Osiris represent the extended version of that capacity, which means not only generation of the world
--
(Marduk-Tiamat, for example) the Gods victory constitutes the preliminary condition for the
cosmogony. In other cases the stake is the inauguration of a new era or the establishment of a new
--
darkness. Now, Sky and Earth are the parents of the Gods (1.185.6); Indra is the youngest (3.38.1) and
also the last god to be born, because he put an end to the hierogamy [mystical union] of Sky and Earth:
--
already existed. For Sky and Earth were formed and had engendered the Gods. Indra only separated the
cosmic parents, and, by hurling the vajra at Vrtra, he put an end to the immobility, or even the
--
fashioner of the Gods, Tvastr, whose role is not clear in the Rig Veda, had built himself a house and
created Vrtra as a sort of roof, but also as walls, for his habitation. Inside this dwelling, encircled by
--
ubiquitous and potent of primordial Gods:
This is the ancient Egyptian symbol of which it is said, Draco interfecit se ipsum, maritat se ipsum,
--
is broken up until the most primordial of Gods is murdered that existence itself springs into being. The
emergence of things, however, brings with it the problem of opposites a problem that must be solved,
--
of the Gods or is in communication with the world of the Gods. The world (that is, our world) is a
universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the breakthrough from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the
--
and communication with the world of the Gods is ensured; the space of the altar becomes a sacred space.
But the meaning of the ritual is far more complex, and if we consider all of its ramifications, we shall
--
of the universe by the Gods. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland (land-nama)
and cleared it, they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane
--
of the Gods who had organized chaos by giving it a structure, forms, and norms.
Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory
--
serious dynamic representations of this type are deities, Gods, borne of human experience, possessed of
quasi-objective transpersonal status like the Word manifestations of the unfamiliar, the other, the
--
appease the Gods is the embodiment in procedure of the idea that the benevolent aspect of the unknown
will return if the present schema of adaptation (the ruling king) is sufficiently altered (that is, destroyed
--
the lamb. Such peace emerges as a consequence of the hierarchical organization of the Gods of tradition
under the dominion of the hero. This means that the creative exploratory hero is also peace-maker, in his
--
The Mesopotamian emperor and the Pharaohs of Egypt were solar Gods, representatives of the
incarnated sun-deity, eternal victor of the unending battle between order and chaos, light and darkness,
--
the interpersonal sphere (arise as a result of an interpersonal war of implicit Gods). Such clashes may be
resolved in a variety of manners. One partner may, through judicious application of physical or
--
myths, in ancient Phoenicia and elsewhere. In the Hittite theogony, the relative sovereignty of the Gods was
determined by war conducted between them:
The initial episode, Kingship in Heaven, explains the succession of the first Gods. In the beginning,
Alalu was king, and Anu, the most important of the Gods, bowed before him and served him. But after
nine years Anu attacked and vanquished him. Then Alalu took refuge in the subterranean world, and
--
entered his body, and he became big with three Gods. The rest of the text is badly mutilated, but it is
presumed that Anus children, with Teshub, the storm god leading them, make war on Kumarbi and
--
battle of the young Gods against the old Gods, and (3) the victory of Marduk, who thus assumes the
sovereignty....
To sum up: all the myths that recount the conflicts between successive generations of Gods for the
conquest of universal sovereignty justify, on the one hand, the exalted position of the last conquering
--
The Gods are transpersonal forces instinctive and socially-modified comprising universal elements
of human experience. The organization of these Gods, as a consequence of combat, is an abstracted and
poetic description of the manner in which emergent behavioral patterns and interpretive schemas moral
--
consequence of the battle of the Gods constitutes the tradition that structures the intrapsychic hierarchy of
values, regulates interpersonal interaction, and keeps individual emotion in check (as the consequences of
--
personification as Gods (or, for their existence as Gods, from a more liberal interpretive perspective). It is
the constant clash of these Gods that allows for their mutual co-existence, and their social organization. A
number of Gods might operate simultaneously in the domain of a disputed toy, for example (in the
unknown territory brought about by the fact of something desirable, but singular, in a social
--
The social structure that emerges, over time, as a consequence of the battle of the Gods, might be most
accurately likened to a personality (to the personality adopted by all who share the same culture). It is in
--
constantly resisting incremental change. It is in this manner that the Gods become displeased with their
creation, man and his willful stupidity and wash away the world. The necessity for interchange of
1.02 - Outline of Practice, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
no wrong, I'm punished by my past. Neither Gods nor men can
foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit. I accept it with an open
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This opens to us the door to almost unlimited power. Suppose, for instance, a man understood the Prana perfectly, and could control it, what power on earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and stars out of their places, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the biggest suns, because he would control the Prana. This is the end and aim of Pranayama. When the Yogi becomes perfect, there will be nothing in nature not under his control. If he orders the Gods or the souls of the departed to come, they will come at his bidding. All the forces of nature will obey him as slaves. When the ignorant see these powers of the Yogi, they call them the miracles. One peculiarity of the Hindu mind is that it always inquires for the last possible generalisation, leaving the details to be worked out afterwards. The question is raised in the Vedas, "What is that, knowing which, we shall know everything?" Thus, all books, and all philosophies that have been written, have been only to prove that by knowing which everything is known. If a man wants to know this universe bit by bit he must know every individual grain of sand, which means infinite time; he cannot know all of them. Then how can knowledge be? How is it possible for a man to be all-knowing through particulars? The Yogis say that behind this particular manifestation there is a generalisation. Behind all particular ideas stands a generalised, an abstract principle; grasp it, and you have grasped everything. Just as this whole universe has been generalised in the Vedas into that One Absolute Existence, and he who has grasped that Existence has grasped the whole universe, so all forces have been generalised into this Prana, and he who has grasped the Prana has grasped all the forces of the universe, mental or physical. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his own mind, and all the minds that exist. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his body, and all the bodies that exist, because the Prana is the generalised manifestation of force.
How to control the Prana is the one idea of Pranayama. All the trainings and exercises in this regard are for that one end. Each man must begin where he stands, must learn how to control the things that are nearest to him. This body is very near to us, nearer than anything in the external universe, and this mind is the nearest of all. The Prana which is working this mind and body is the nearest to us of all the Prana in this universe. This little wave of the Prana which represents our own energies, mental and physical, is the nearest to us of all the waves of the infinite ocean of Prana. If we can succeed in controlling that little wave, then alone we can hope to control the whole of Prana. The Yogi who has done this gains perfection; no longer is he under any power. He becomes almost almighty, almost all-knowing. We see sects in every country who have attempted this control of Prana. In this country there are Mind-healers, Faith-healers, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, etc., and if we examine these different bodies, we shall find at the back of each this control of the Prana, whether they know it or not. If you boil all their theories down, the residuum will be that. It is the one and the same force they are manipulating, only unknowingly. They have stumbled on the discovery of a force and are using it unconsciously without knowing its nature, but it is the same as the Yogi uses, and which comes from Prana.
1.02 - Pranayama, Mantrayoga, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Who makest the Gods and Death
To tremble before Thee: --
1.02 - Prayer of Parashara to Vishnu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Then, ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable according to their qualities, as soothing, terrific, or stupifying; but possessing various energies, and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. Having combined, therefore, with one another, they assumed, through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and from the direction of spirit, with the acquiescence of the indiscrete Principle[29], Intellect and the rest, to the gross elements inclusive, formed an egg[30], which gradually expanded like a bubble of water. This vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements, and resting on the waters, was the excellent natural abode of Viṣṇu in the form of Brahmā; and there Viṣṇu, the lord of the universe, whose essence is inscrutable, assumed a perceptible form, and even he himself abided in it in the character of Brahmā[31]. Its womb, vast as the mountain Meru, was composed of the mountains; and the mighty oceans were the waters that filled its cavity. In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the Gods, the demons, and mankind. And this egg was externally invested by seven natural envelopes, or by water, air, fire, ether, and Aha
kāra the origin of the elements, each tenfold the extent of that which it invested; next came the principle of Intelligence; and, finally, the whole was surrounded by the indiscrete Principle: resembling thus the cocoa-nut, filled interiorly with pulp, and exteriorly covered by husk and rind.
--
kara Siva. The Viṣṇu who is the subject of our text is the supreme being in all these three divinities or hypostases, in his different characters of creator, preserver and destroyer. Thus in the Mārkaṇḍeya: 'Accordingly, as the primal all-pervading spirit is distinguished by attributes in creation and the rest, so he obtains the denomination of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. In the capacity of Brahmā he creates the worlds; in that of Rudra he destroys them; in that of Viṣṇu he is quiescent. These are the three Avasthās (ht. hypostases) of the self-born. Brahmā is the quality of activity; Rudra that of darkness; Viṣṇu, the lord of the world, is goodness: so, therefore, the three Gods are the three qualities. They are ever combined with, and dependent upon one another; and they are never for an instant separate; they never quit each other.' The notion is one common to all antiquity, although less philosophically conceived, or perhaps less distinctly expressed, in the passages which have come down to us. The τρεῖς ἀρχικὰς ὑποστάσεις of Plato are said by Cudworth (I. 111), upon the authority of Plotinus, to be an ancient doctrine, παλαιὰ δόξα: and he also observes, "Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato have all of them asserted a trinity of divine hypostases; and as they unquestionably derived much of their doctrine from the Egyptians, it may reasonably be suspected that the Egyptians did the like before them." As however the Grecian accounts, and those of the Egyptians, are much more perplexed and unsatisfactory than those of the Hindus, it is most probable that we find amongst them the doctrine in its most original as well as most methodical and significant form.
[2]: This address to Viṣṇu pursues the notion that he, as the supreme being, is one, whilst he is all: he is Avikāra, not subject to change; Sadaikarūpa, one invariable nature: he is the liberator (tāra), or he who bears mortals across the ocean of existence: he is both single and manifold (ekānekarūpa): and he is the indiscrete (avyakta) cause of the world, as well as the discrete (vyakta) effect; or the invisible cause, and visible creation.
1.02 - Priestly Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
intercessors between man and god, but as themselves Gods, able to
bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are
--
weather and an abundant crop from the Gods; and if a god should
happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
story that the king of the Gods, Indra, once became a pig,
wallowing in mire; he had a she pig, and a lot of baby pigs,
--
and came to him, and told him, You are the king of the Gods,
you have all the Gods command. Why are you here? But
Indra said, Let me be; I am all right here; I do not care for the
--
had; he, the king of the Gods, to have become a pig, and to
think that the pig-life was the only life! Not only so, but to
1.02 - Substance Is Eternal, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.
Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind
1.02 - Taras Tantra, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
Body and addresses human beings less than Gods,
celestial bodhisattvas and a host of beings with whom
--
bodhi sattva s, Gods, nagas , and other beings. Most
often, it was not in huma n places but in other
1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
. . . The path of the visible Gods will appear through the disc of the
sun, who is God my father. Likewise the so-called tube, the origin
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
eral times to the evening circle of disciples about the Gods,
7 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 23.
--
spoke about the world of the Gods because not to speak of
it would [now] be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind
--
tal world of the Gods into the physical? In the reminiscences
of disciples present around Sri Aurobindo in those days, we
--
the Gods], that is, I had brought the overmind down into
matter, here on earth. Miracles and all kinds of things were
beginning to happen. I asked all those Gods to incarnate, to
identify themselves with a body [on earth]. Some of them
--
the humans and the incarnated Gods, leading up to a world
perhaps resembling Sri Krishnas goloka, in other words a
--
direct participation of the Gods, some of them incarnated in
terrestrial bodies, a new religion would have been found-
--
In the 1930s he had already written in A Gods Labour:
A voice cried, Go where none have gone.
--
Where the grey Sphinx guards Gods riddle sleep
On the Dragons outspread wings.
I left the surface Gods of mind
And lifes unsatisfied seas
1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And this is no easy or peaceful march; it is for long seasons a fierce and relentless battle. Constantly the Aryan man has to labour and to fight and conquer; he must be a tireless toiler and traveller and a stern warrior, he must force open and storm and sack city after city, win kingdom after kingdom, overthrow and tread down ruthlessly enemy after enemy. His whole progress is a warring of Gods and Titans, Gods and Giants, Indra and the Python, Aryan and Dasyu. Aryan adversaries even he has to face in the open field; for old friends and helpers turn into enemies; the kings of Aryan states whom he would conquer and overpass join themselves to the Dasyus and are leagued against him in supreme battle to prevent his free and utter passing on.
But the Dasyu is the natural enemy. These dividers, plunderers, harmful powers, these Danavas, sons of the Mother of division, are spoken of by the Rishis under many general appellations. There are Rakshasas; there are Eaters and Devourers, Wolves and Tearers; there are hurters and haters; there are dualisers; there are confiners or censurers. But we are given also many specific names. Vritra, the Serpent, is the grand Adversary; for he obstructs with his coils of darkness all possibility of divine existence and divine action. And even when Vritra is slain by the light, fiercer enemies arise out of him. Shushna afflicts us with his impure and ineffective force, Namuchi fights man by his weaknesses, and others too assail, each with his proper evil. Then there are Vala and the Panis, miser traffickers in the sense-life, stealers and concealers of the higher Light and its illuminations which they can only darken and misuse, - an impious host who are jealous of their store and will not offer sacrifice to the Gods. These and other personalities - they are much more than personifications - of our ignorance, evil, weakness and many limitations make constant war upon man; they encircle him from near or they shoot their arrows at him from afar or even dwell in his gated house in the place of the Gods and with their shapeless stammering mouths and their insufficient breath of force mar his self-expression. They must be expelled, overpowered, slain, thrust down into their nether darkness by the aid of the mighty and helpful deities.
1 This excerpt is reproduced from the 1946 edition of Hymns to the Mystic Fire. The complete essay which appeared in the Arya is published in The Secret of the Veda with Selected Hymns, Part Three. - Ed.
The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swiftnesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses, - milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the GodMind's radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymns and the wine and forms perfectly - as a smith forges iron, says the Veda - their great and luminous godheads.
All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.
To what Gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
--
Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the Gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya.
--
Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the Gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being.
Three great Gods, origin of the Puranic Trinity, largest puissances of the supreme Godhead, make possible this development and upward evolution; they support in its grand lines and fundamental energies all these complexities of the cosmos.
Brahmanaspati is the Creator; by the word, by his cry he creates - that is to say he expresses, he brings out all existence and conscious knowledge and movement of life and eventual forms from the darkness of the Inconscient. Rudra, the Violent and Merciful, the Mighty One, presides over the struggle of life to affirm itself; he is the armed, wrathful and beneficent Power of God who lifts forcibly the creation upward, smites all that opposes, scourges all that errs and resists, heals all that is wounded and suffers and complains and submits. Vishnu of the vast pervading motion holds in his triple stride all these worlds; it is he that makes a wide room for the action of Indra in our limited mortality; it is by him and with him that we rise into his highest seats where we find waiting for us the Friend, the Beloved, the Beatific Godhead.
--
We create for ourselves by the sacrifice and by the word shining seers, heroes to fight for us, children of our works. The Rishis and the Gods find for us our luminous herds; the Ribhus fashion by the mind the chariots of the Gods and their horses and their shining weapons. Our life is a horse that neighing and galloping bears us onward and upward; its forces are swift-hoofed steeds, the liberated powers of the mind are wide-winging birds; this mental being or this soul is the upsoaring Swan or the Falcon that breaks out from a hundred iron walls and wrests from the jealous guardians of felicity the wine of the Soma. Every shining godward Thought that arises from the secret abysses of the heart is a priest and a creator and chants a divine hymn of luminous realisation and puissant fulfilment. We seek for the shining gold of the Truth; we lust after a heavenly treasure.
The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the Gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial session.
Such are some of the principal images of the Veda and a very brief and insufficient outline of the teaching of the Forefa thers. So understood the Rig Veda ceases to be an obscure, confused and barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.
1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
seems unnatural to the average Indian, who will bow respectfully before Christ (with as much spontaneous reverence as before his own image of God), but who will see also the face of God in the laughter of Krishna, the terror of Kali, the sweetness of Saraswati, and in the thousands upon thousands of other Gods who dance, multicolored and mustachioed, mirthful or terrifying, illuminated or compassionate, on the deliriously carved towers of Indian temples. A God who cannot smile could not have created this humorous universe,13 said Sri Aurobindo. All is His face, all is His play, terrible or beautiful, as many-faceted as our world itself. For this country so teeming with 13
Thoughts and Aphorisms, 17:138
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Some idea of the inexhaustible richness of the divine nature can be obtained by analysing, word by word, the invocation with which the Lords Prayer beginsOur Father who art in heaven. God is oursours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours. But as well as immanently ours, God is also transcendently the personal Father, who loves his creatures and to whom love and allegiance are owed by them in return. Our Father who art: when we come to consider the verb in isolation, we perceive that the immanent-transcendent personal God is also the immanent-transcendent One, the essence and principle of all existence. And finally Gods being is in heaven; the divine nature is other than, and incommensurable with, the nature of the creatures in whom God is immanent. That is why we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure Godlike, only when we permit Gods kingdom to come by making our own creaturely kingdom go.
God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril. Thus, if we approach God with the preconceived idea that He is exclusively the personal, transcendental, all-powerful ruler of the world, we run the risk of becoming entangled in a religion of rites, propitiatory sacrifices (sometimes of the most horrible nature) and legalistic observances. Inevitably so; for if God is an unapproachable potentate out there, giving mysterious orders, this kind of religion is entirely appropriate to the cosmic situation. The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Who is Ishvara? Janmdyasya yatah "From whom is the birth, continuation, and dissolution of the universe," He is Ishvara "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the AllKnowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers"; and above all, Sa Ishvarah anirvachaniyapremasvarupah "He the Lord is, of His own nature, inexpressible Love." These certainly are the definitions of a Personal God. Are there then two Gods the "Not this, not this," the Sat-chit-nanda, the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss of the philosopher, and this God of Love of the Bhakta? No, it is the same Sat-chit-ananda who is also the God of Love, the impersonal and personal in one. It has always to be understood that the Personal God worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect of Brahman, that is, Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. To use a simile: Brahman is as the clay or substance out of which an infinite variety of articles are fashioned. As clay, they are all one; but form or manifestation differentiates them. Before every one of them was made, they all existed potentially in the clay, and, of course, they are identical substantially; but when formed, and so long as the form remains, they are separate and different; the clay-mouse can never become a clay-elephant, because, as manifestations, form alone makes them what they are, though as unformed clay they are all one.
Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara.
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This is proved from the scriptural text, "From whom all these things are born, by which all that are born live, unto whom they, departing, return ask about it. That is Brahman.' If this quality of ruling the universe be a quality common even to the liberated then this text would not apply as a definition of Brahman defining Him through His rulership of the universe. The uncommon attributes alone define a thing; therefore in texts like 'My beloved boy, alone, in the beginning there existed the One without a second. That saw and felt, "I will give birth to the many." That projected heat.' 'Brahman indeed alone existed in the beginning. That One evolved. That projected a blessed form, the Kshatra. All these Gods are Kshatras: Varuna, Soma, Rudra, Parjanya, Yama, Mrityu, Ishna.' 'Atman indeed existed alone in the beginning; nothing else vibrated; He thought of projecting the world; He projected the world after.' 'Alone Nryana existed; neither Brahm, nor Ishana, nor the Dyv-Prithivi, nor the stars, nor water, nor fire, nor Soma, nor the sun. He did not take pleasure alone. He after His meditation had one daughter, the ten organs, etc.' and in others as, 'Who living in the earth is separate from the earth, who living in the Atman, etc.' the Shrutis speak of the Supreme One as the subject of the work of ruling the universe. . . . Nor in these descriptions of the ruling of the universe is there any position for the liberated soul, by which such a soul may have the ruling of the universe ascribed to it."
In explaining the next Sutra, Ramanuja says, "If you say it is not so, because there are direct texts in the Vedas in evidence to the contrary, these texts refer to the glory of the liberated in the spheres of the subordinate deities." This also is an easy solution of the difficulty. Although the system of Ramanuja admits the unity of the total, within that totality of existence there are, according to him, eternal differences. Therefore, for all practical purposes, this system also being dualistic, it was easy for Ramanuja to keep the distinction between the personal soul and the Personal God very clear.
--
Now to go back to our Acharya Shankara: "Those", he says, "who by worshipping the qualified Brahman attain conjunction with the Supreme Ruler, preserving their own mind is their glory limited or unlimited? This doubt arising, we get as an argument: Their glory should be unlimited because of the scriptural texts, 'They attain their own kingdom', 'To him all the Gods offer worship',
'Their desires are fulfilled in all the worlds'. As an answer to this, Vyasa writes, 'Without the power of ruling the universe.' Barring the power of creation etc. of the universe, the other powers such as Anim etc. are acquired by the liberated. As to ruling the universe, that belongs to the eternally perfect Ishvara.
1.02 - The Virtues, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One day a festival was held there, not for men but for very different beings, Gods and goddesses great and small, who on earth are honoured by the name of Virtues.
The vestibule of the palace was a great hall, where the walls, the floor, the ceiling, luminous in themselves, were resplendent with a myriad glittering fires.
10.30 - India, the World and the Ashram, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Gods Debt The Mystery of The Five Senses
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part Ten India, the World and the Ashram
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Gods Debt The Mystery of The Five Senses
10.31 - The Mystery of The Five Senses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed we say habitually, when speaking of spiritual realisation, that one sees the truth, one has to see the truth: to know the truth, to know the reality is taken to mean to see the truth, to see the reality, and what does this signify? It signifies what one sees is the light, the light that emanates from truth, the form that the Truth takes, the radiant substance that is the Truth. This then is the special character or gift of this organ, the organ of sight, the eye. One sees the physical light, of course, but one sees also the supraphysical light. It is, as the Upanishad says, the eye of the eye, the third eye in the language of the occultists. What we say about the eye may be equally said in respect of the other sense-organs. Take hearing, for example. By the ear we hear the noises of the world, its deafening cries and no doubt at times also some earthly music. But when the ear is turned inward, we listen to unearthly things Indeed we know how stone-deaf Beethoven heard some of those harmonies of supreme beauty that are now the cherished possessions of humanity. This inner ear is able to take you by a process of regression to the very source of all sound and utterance, from where springs the anhata vk, the undictated voice, the nda-brahman, the original sound-seed, the primary vibration. So the ear gives that hearing which reveals to you a special aspect of the Divine: the vibratory rhythm of the being, that matrix of all utterance, of all speech that mark the material expression of consciousness. Next we come to the third sense, that of smell, Well, the nose is not a despicable organ, in any way; it is as important as any other more aristocratic sense-organ, as the eye or the ear. It is the gate to the perfumed atmosphere of the reality. Even like a flower, as a lotus for example, the truth is colourful, beautiful, shapely, radiant to the eye; to the nostrils it is exhilarating perfume, it distils all around a divine scent that sanctifies, elevates the whole being. After the third sense we come to the fourth, the tongue. The mouth gives you the taste of the truth and you find that the Truth is sweetness, the delicious nectar of the Gods: for the truth is also soma, the surpreme rasa, amta, immortality itself. Here is Aswapathy's experience of the thing in Savitri:
In the nostrils quivered celestial fragrances,
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Continuing farther, if we go beyond the five senses, we have still another sense, it is mind, the sixth sense; it is in and through the mind that the other five senses distil their perceptions allowing a coordinated picture of the sense-experiences. Now, to attain, to realise, to possess the Truth means, first of all, to know the Truth: for, knowing as we know, is the function of the mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is declared, the mind is to be expunged altogether or silenced at least. One must get away, one must withdraw from that play of activity and be far from it. True knowledge comes through revelations. It descends from above, it does not enter by a level side-door and it comes only when the mind is not there. But this also, as in the other cases, as in respect of the other senses, is an extreme view. Like the other senses the mind too can be turned inward or upward, made a receptive organ or instrument. When turned round, when it is the Mind of the mind, then there begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contri bution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surpa (beautiful and perfect form) chanted by the Vedic Rishis that the purified mind models for the Gods to inhabitit is what the poets and prophets always aspire for in their creative consciousness.
But these separate senses with their separate qualities are not really separate. In the final account of things, the account held in the Supreme Consciousness, at the highest height, these diverse elements or movements are diverse but not exclusive of one another. When they find themselves in the supreme consciousness, they do not, like the rivers of which the Upanishads speak, move and merge into the sea giving up their separate individual name and function. These senses do maintain their identity, each its own, even when they together are all of them part and parcel of the Supreme Universal Consciousness. Only, they become supple and malleable, they intertwine, mix together, even one doing another's work. Also, as things exist at present, modern knowledge has found out that a blind man can see, literally see, through some part of his body; the sense of hearing is capable of bringing to you the vision of colours. And the olfactory organ can reveal to you the taste of things. Indeed it has been found that not only at the sight of good food, but in contemplating an extraordinarily beautiful scenery or while listening to an exquisite piece of music, the mouth waters. It is curious to note that Indra, the Lord of the Gods, the Vedic lord of the mind and the senses, is said to have transformed the pores of his skin into so many eyes, so that he could see all things around at once, globally: it is why he was called Sahasralochana or Sahasraksha, one with a thousand eyes. The truth is that all the different senses are only extensions of one unitary sensibility and the variation depends on a particular mode or stress on the generalised sensibility.
This is what the Rishis meant when they named and represented even the senses as Gods. The Gods are many, each has his own attribute and function, but they form one indivisible unity.
The senses therefore are not merely externalisers but they are also internalisers. They are modes and movements that work separately and conjointly and present aspects of the Supreme Reality. These aspects are there in the very essence and the constitution of the One Truth, also they are projected outwards to manifest and embody those very elements in the material manifestation and incarnation of the Supreme Divine:
10.35 - The Moral and the Spiritual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The states of being or consciousness from the animal, or down from Matter itself up to the Supremebrahmastambaconstitute what is called a hierarchy. Hierarchy means a structure rising upward tier upon tier, step by step: it is a scale, as it were, of increasing values, only the values are not moral, they indicate only a measure, a neutral measure respecting position or a kind of mass content. As in a building where brick is laid upon brick, or stone upon stone, the one laid above is not superior to the one laid below; the terms inferior and superior indicate only the simple position of the objects. Even the system of the four social orders in ancient" India was originally such a hierarchy. The higher and lower orders did not carry any moral appreciation or depreciation. The four orders placed one above the other schematically denote only the respective social functions classified according to the nature of each, even as the human body represents such a hierarchy, rising from the feet at the bottom towards the head at the top. This is to say all objects and movements in nature are right when they are confined each to its own domain, following its own dharma of that domain. Thus one can be perfectly calm and at ease witnessing the catastrophes and cataclysms in nature, for one knows it is the dharma of material nature. Man terms them disasters for he judges them according to his own convenience. Even so, one should not be perturbed at the wild behaviourman calls it wildof wild animals. Likewise the Gods in their sovereign tranquillity smile at the crudeness and stupidities of human beings. One has to lift oneself up, withdraw and stand high above all that one wishes to surpass and look at it, with a benign godly smile.
The world is a gradation of developing consciousness, of growing states or status of being. There is a higher and lower level in point of the measure of consciousness but that involves no moral judgement: the moral judgement is man's; it is man's, one might almost say, idiosyncrasy, that is to say, a notion that is a prop to help him mount the ladder. Though it might be necessary at a certain stage, in certain circumstances, it is not a universal or ineluctable law, not even in his personal domain. The growing consciousness is like the growing tree rising upward first into a trunk, then spreading out into branches, into twigs and tendrils, then in flowers and finally, in fruits. These are mounting grades of growth, but the growth above is not superior to the growth below. It is a one unified whole and each portion has its own absolute value, beauty and utility.
1.036 - Ya-Seen, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
23. Shall I take other Gods instead of Him? If the Merciful desires harm for me, their intercession will not avail me at all, nor will they save me.
24. In that case, I would be completely lost.
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74. Yet they have taken to themselves Gods other than God, that perhaps they may be helped.
75. They cannot help them, although they are arrayed as troops for them.
1.037 - Preventing the Fall in Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The reason is simple. In the practice of yoga the whole being is active and, therefore, it starts waking up every blessed thing in this world whatever may be sleeping anywhere. Even invisible forces, even distant elements may feel that some strange activity is going on in some part of the universe. We must have heard in the Epics and Puranas that even the Gods are distressed by the tapas of yogis. It means that the meditative activity of a sincere seeker can tell upon even very far and distant regions like the heavens, and not merely the corners of the earth. But our ordinary little work that is going on in a shop, a factory or an office may not be felt at all in such regions. The reason is that these ordinary activities are shallow; they are not deep enough. They do not touch the bottom of things, and therefore the reactions set up are also mild.
But in yoga, what actually moves is the very root of our being. Our soul itself is yearning in the aspiration for the Ultimate Reality. It is not a function of a part of the psychological organs like mentation, intellection, egoism, etc. It is every blessed thing that is in us that becomes active, and we may say there is a sort of conscription of every part of our personality in this warfare called the practice of yoga. Every individual is harnessed into the army. Everyone is a soldier when this war takes place. There is no civilian at all in the practice of yoga; everyone is active like an army man everyone, and no one is excluded. Every part of the personality becomes roused, and we can imagine what reactions this can set up. You may ask me why they should set up reactions. Can this noble activity called yoga not be carried on without any adverse reactions.
1.037 - The Aligners, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
36. And said, “Are we to abandon our Gods for a mad poet?”
37. In fact, he came with the truth, and he confirmed the messengers.
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86. Is it falsified Gods, instead of God, that you want?
87. So what is your opinion about the Lord of the Worlds?”
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91. Then he turned to their Gods, and said, “will you not eat?
92. What is it with you, that you do not speak?”
1.038 - Saad, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
5. “Did he turn all the Gods into one God? This is something strange.”
6. The notables among them announced: “Go on, and hold fast to your Gods. This is something planned.
7. We never heard of this in the former faith. This is nothing but a fabrication.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing.
Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in
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Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or
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represented by the hero, who, as the ancient Sumerians stated, restores all ruined Gods, as though they
were his own creation.374
1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
they say they're as happy as Gods. All mortals, even those who
think themselves wellborn, are likewise unaware. Because of the
1.03 - BOOK THE THIRD, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And thanks the Gods, and turns about his eye
To see his new dominions round him lye;
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Ally'd by marriage to the deathless Gods;
And, in a fruitful wife's embraces old,
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Did all the thoughts of men and Gods engage;
Some call'd the evils which Diana wrought,
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Has been by these pretended Gods betray'd,
But if he be indeed the thund'ring Jove,
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Thus pray'd the Gods, provok'd by his disdain,
"Oh may he love like me, and love like me in vain!"
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And fix'd in foreign earth your country Gods;
Will you without a stroak your city yield,
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And now by all the Gods in Heav'n that hear
This solemn oath, by Bacchus' self, I swear,
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
pounded by Euhemeros, 18 who maintained that the Gods were
nothing but reflections of human character. It is indeed easy to
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child. They represent the pair of Gods who appear at its birth,
thus illustrating the "dual birth" motif. 27
1.03 - Hymns of Gritsamada, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5. O Fire, thou art Twashtri and fashionest fullness of force for thy worshipper; thine, O friendly Light, are the goddess-Energies and all oneness of natural kind. Thou art the swift galloper and lavishest good power of the Horse; thou art the host of the Gods and great is the multitude of thy riches.
6. O Fire, thou art Rudra, the mighty one of the great Heaven and thou art the army of the Life- Gods and hast power over all that fills desire. Thou journeyest with dawn-red winds to bear thee and thine is the house of bliss; thou art Pushan and thou guardest with thyself thy worshippers.
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13. O Fire, the sons of the indivisible Mother made thee their mouth, the pure Gods made thee their tongue; O Seer, they who are ever close to our giving are constant to thee in the rites of the Path; the Gods eat in thee the offering cast before them.
14. O Fire, all the Gods, the Immortals unhurtful to man, eat in thee and by thy mouth the offering cast before them; by thee mortal men taste of the libation. Pure art thou born, a child of the growths of the earth.
15. O Fire that hast come to perfect birth, thou art with the Gods and thou frontest them in thy might and thou exceedest them too, O God, when here the satisfying fullness of thee becomes all-pervading in its greatness along both the continents, Earth and Heaven.
16. When to those who chant thee, the luminous Wise Ones set free thy gift, O Fire, the wealth in whose front the Ray-Cow walks and its form is the Horse, thou leadest us on and leadest them to a world of greater riches. Strong with the strength of the heroes, may we voice the Vast in the coming of knowledge.
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3. The Gods have sent into the foundation of the middle world this great worker and pilgrim of earth and of heaven, whom we must know, like our chariot of white-flaming light, Fire whom we must voice with our lauds like a friend in the peoples.
4 Or, who dwells in the Light,
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6. O Fire, opulently kindling for our peace, let thy light arise in us and bring its gift of riches. Make Earth and Heaven ways for our happy journeying and the offerings of man a means for the coming of the Gods.
7. O Fire, give us the vast possessions, the thousandfold riches; open to inspiration like gates the plenitude; make Earth and Heaven turned to the Beyond by the Word. The Dawns have broken into splendour as if there shone the brilliant world of the Sun.
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1. The Fire that was set inward in the earth is kindled and has arisen fronting all the worlds. He has arisen, the purifying Flame, the priest of the call, the wise of understanding, the Ancient of Days. Today let the Fire in the fullness of his powers, a god to the Gods do sacrifice.
2. Fire who voices the godhead, shines revealing the planes, each and each; high of ray he reveals, each and each, the triple heavens by his greatness. Let him flood the oblation with a mind that diffuses the light and manifest the Gods on the head of the sacrifice.
3. O Fire, aspired to by our mind, putting forth today thy power do sacrifice to the Gods, O thou who wast of old before aught that is human. Bring to us the unfallen host of the Life- Gods; and you, O Powers, sacrifice to Indra where he sits on the seat of our altar.
4. O Godhead, strewn is the seat on this altar, the hero-guardedseat that ever grows, the seat well-packed for the riches,8 anointed with the Light. O all Gods, sit on this altar-seat, sons of the indivisible Mother princes of the treasure, kings of sacrifice.
5. May the divine Doors swing open, wide to our call, easy of approach with our prostrations of surrender; may they stretch wide opening into vastnesses, the imperishable Doors purifying the glorious and heroic kind.
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7. The two divine Priests of the call, the first, the full in wisdom and stature, offer by the illumining Word the straight things in us; sacrificing to the Gods in season, they reveal them in light in the navel of the Earth and on the three peaks of Heaven.
8. May Saraswati effecting our thought and goddess Ila and Bharati who carries all to their goal, the three goddesses, sit on our altar-seat and guard by the self-law of things our gapless house of refuge.
9. Soon there is born a Hero of golden-red form, an aspirant to the Godheads, a mighty bringer of riches and founder of our growth to wideness. Let the Maker of forms loosen the knot of the navel in us, let him set free the issue of our works; then let him walk on the way of the Gods.9
9 Or, let the way of the Gods come to us.
10. The Plant is with us streaming out the Wine. Fire speeds the oblation by our thoughts. Let the divine Achiever of works, understanding, lead the offering triply revealed10 in his light on its way to the Godheads.
11. I pour on him the running light; for the light is his native lair, he is lodged in the light, the light is his plane. According to thy self-nature, bring the Gods and fill them with rapture. O Male of the herd, carry to them our offering blessed with svaha.11
SUKTA 4
1. I call to you the Fire with his strong delights and his splendours of light, Fire who strips all sin from us, the guest of the peoples. He becomes like a supporting friend, he becomes the God who knows all things born in the man with whom are the Gods.12
2. The Bhrigus worshipping in the session of the Waters set him a twofold Light in the peoples of Man. May he master all planes prevailing vastly, Fire the traveller of the Gods with his rapid horses.
10 Or, triply anointed
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12 Or, in all from men to the Gods.
3. As men who would settle in a home bring into it a beloved friend, the Gods have set the Fire in these human peoples. Let him illumine the desire of the billowing nights, let him be one full of discerning mind in the house for the giver of sacrifice.
4. Delightful is his growth as if one's own increase, rapturous is his vision as he gallops burning on his way. He darts about his tongue mid the growths of the forest and tosses his mane like a chariot courser.
--
6. May we cleave to the safeguardings of the Fire and Soma and Indra and of the Gods, meeting with no hurt overcome those that are embattled against us.
SUKTA 9
--
6. O Fire, shine forth with this force29 of thine in us, one perfect in knowledge, one who worships the Gods and is strong for sacrifice. Be our indomitable guardian and our protector to take us to the other side; flame in us with thy light, flame in us with thy opulence.
29 Or, form
--- Overview of noun god
The noun god has 4 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (90) God, Supreme Being ::: (the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions)
2. (26) deity, divinity, god, immortal ::: (any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force)
3. god ::: (a man of such superior qualities that he seems like a deity to other people; "he was a god among men")
4. idol, graven image, god ::: (a material effigy that is worshipped; "thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"; "money was his god")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun god
4 senses of god
Sense 1
God, Supreme Being
INSTANCE OF=> spiritual being, supernatural being
=> belief
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
deity, divinity, god, immortal
=> spiritual being, supernatural being
=> belief
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
god
=> superior, higher-up, superordinate
=> leader
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 4
idol, graven image, god
=> effigy, image, simulacrum
=> representation
=> creation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun god
3 of 4 senses of god
Sense 1
God, Supreme Being
HAS INSTANCE=> Godhead, Lord, Creator, Maker, Divine, God Almighty, Almighty, Jehovah
HAS INSTANCE=> Yahweh, YHWH, Yahwe, Yahveh, YHVH, Yahve, Wahvey, Jahvey, Jahweh, Jehovah, JHVH
HAS INSTANCE=> Allah
Sense 2
deity, divinity, god, immortal
HAS INSTANCE=> Demogorgon
HAS INSTANCE=> Hypnos
HAS INSTANCE=> Morpheus
=> daemon, demigod
=> sea god
=> sun god
=> Celtic deity
=> Egyptian deity
=> Semitic deity
=> Hindu deity
=> Persian deity
HAS INSTANCE=> Bodhisattva, Boddhisatva
HAS INSTANCE=> Arhat, Arhant, lohan
=> Chinese deity
=> Japanese deity
=> goddess
=> earth-god, earth god
=> demiurge
=> Greco-Roman deity, Graeco-Roman deity
=> Greek deity
=> Roman deity
=> Norse deity
=> Teutonic deity
=> Anglo-Saxon deity
=> Phrygian deity
HAS INSTANCE=> Quetzalcoatl
=> saint
=> war god, god of war
=> zombi, zombie, snake god
Sense 4
idol, graven image, god
=> golden calf
=> joss
=> Juggernaut
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun god
4 senses of god
Sense 1
God, Supreme Being
INSTANCE OF=> spiritual being, supernatural being
Sense 2
deity, divinity, god, immortal
=> spiritual being, supernatural being
Sense 3
god
=> superior, higher-up, superordinate
Sense 4
idol, graven image, god
=> effigy, image, simulacrum
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun god
4 senses of god
Sense 1
God, Supreme Being
-> spiritual being, supernatural being
=> deity, divinity, god, immortal
HAS INSTANCE=> God, Supreme Being
=> eon, aeon
=> angel
=> fairy, faery, faerie, fay, sprite
HAS INSTANCE=> Satan, Old Nick, Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Tempter, Prince of Darkness
=> spirit, disembodied spirit
=> trickster
Sense 2
deity, divinity, god, immortal
-> spiritual being, supernatural being
=> deity, divinity, god, immortal
HAS INSTANCE=> God, Supreme Being
=> eon, aeon
=> angel
=> fairy, faery, faerie, fay, sprite
HAS INSTANCE=> Satan, Old Nick, Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Tempter, Prince of Darkness
=> spirit, disembodied spirit
=> trickster
Sense 3
god
-> superior, higher-up, superordinate
=> better
=> god
=> supervisor
Sense 4
idol, graven image, god
-> effigy, image, simulacrum
=> Guy
=> idol, graven image, god
=> scarecrow, straw man, strawman, bird-scarer, scarer
=> waxwork, wax figure
--- Grep of noun gods
godsend
godson
godspeed
lap of the gods
scourge of the gods
tree of the gods
twilight of the gods
Grep of noun god
act of god
assemblies of god
city of god
demigod
earth-god
earth god
father-god
forest god
goat god
god
god's acre
god's will
god's wisdom
god almighty
god of war
god tree
godard
godchild
goddard
goddaughter
goddess
godel
godfather
godhead
godiva
godlessness
godliness
godmother
godown
godparent
godsend
godson
godspeed
godunov
godwin austen
godwit
grace of god
house of god
kingdom of god
olympic god
party of god
scourge of god
sea god
snake god
soldiers of god
sun god
war god
word of god
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