TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
" . . . a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“ . . . a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues.” The Synthesis of Yoga
almighty ::: ”See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy. If thou believest firmly & unweariedly, in the end thou wilt see & experience the All-true, Almighty & All-blissful.” Essays Divine and Human
IDEAS OF THE CAUSAL WORLD
The ideas of the world of ideas are objective forms as well as being subjective, and thus the ideas are faithful representations of enduring objective and subjective realities. Every intuition corresponds to a mental system of reality ideas. Lower worlds exist in the ideas of the world of ideas and thus the knowledge of these lower worlds is contained in the idea systems of the intuitions. &
anarch ::: “The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.” Essays Divine and Human
and habit. The practice of'rcjcction prevails in the end; but with persona! effort only, it may take a long time. If you can feel the Drt-inc Power working in you, then it should become easier.
..a path of integral seeking of the Divine by which all that we are is in the end liberated out of the Ignorance and its undivine formations into a truth beyond the Mind, a truth not only of highest spiritual status but of a dynamic spiritual self-manifestation in the universe. ::: he object of this Yoga is not to liberate the soul from Nature, but to liberate both soul and nature by sublimation into the Divine Consciousness from whom they came.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 366-67
babel ::: “The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other’s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle
babel ::: "The reference is to the mythological story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, which appears to be an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and tower ‘with its top in the heavens". God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The tower was never completed and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works Sri Aurobindo: "The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other"s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle
Bhaddiya-KAligodhAputta. (S. *Bhadrika-KAligodhAputrika; C. Bati; J. Batsudai; K. Palche 跋提). An ARHAT whom the Buddha declared foremost among his disciples of aristocratic birth (P. uccakulika). According to PAli sources, Bhaddiya was the son of lady KAligodhA and belonged to the royal SAkiyan (S. sAKYA) clan of Kapilavatthu (S. KAPILAVASTU) and entered the order together with Anuruddha (S. ANIRUDDHA) and other nobles in the Anupiya mango grove. Bhaddiya and Anuruddha were childhood friends. When Anuruddha decided to renounce the world, his mother agreed, but only on the condition that Bhaddiya accompany him. Her hope was that Bhaddiya would dissuade him, but in the end Anuruddha instead convinced Bhaddiya to join him as a renunciant. Soon after his ordination, Bhaddiya attained arhatship and subsequently dwelled in solitude beneath a tree, exclaiming, "Oh happiness, Oh happiness!," as he reveled in the bliss of NIRVAnA. When the Buddha queried him about his exclamation, he explained that as a prince in his realm he was well guarded but nevertheless always felt anxious of enemies; now, however, having renounced all worldly things, he was finally free from all fear. Bhaddiya was regal in bearing, a consequence of having been born a king five hundred times in previous lives. During the time of Padumuttara Buddha, he was the son of a wealthy family and performed numerous meritorious deeds, which earned him this distinction under the current buddha GAUTAMA.
bunk ::: n. --> A wooden case or box, which serves for a seat in the daytime and for a bed at night.
One of a series of berths or bed places in tiers.
A piece of wood placed on a lumberman&
But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the
but will be overcome in the end by the great
Chiliastic ::: From the Greek for “1000.” Pertaining to the (Christian) belief that Jesus will reign for a thousand years in the end-times; also called millenarian (from the Latin).
Death Death is not a thing in itself, but one of the phases or temporary events in the unending dramas of life, so that the opposite of death is birth rather than life. In other words, the opposite of manifested life is unmanifest life, pralaya and its aeonic rest. Manvantara and pralaya are phases in the endless flow of the alternating current of cosmic motion, which is the immediate result of the life-breath of the spiritual essence at the heart of everything in manifestation. The same eternal motion which brings everything into objective existence has thereby caused the death of the same entity on the previous subjective plane of life. Then, when the lifetime of this manifestation ends, the reverse of this rhythmic motion causes the death of the entity from objective existence, and carries it back to be reborn into its subjective life.
Divine, because in the end that enables the sadhaka to bring ou
DOUBLE MOVEMENT. ::: Our yoga is a double movement of ascent and descent ; one rises to higher and higher levels of consciousness, but at the same time one brings down their power not only into mind and life, but in the end even into the body.
Endangered Species ::: Animals, birds, fish, plants, or other living organisms threatened with extinction by man-made or natural changes in their environment. Requirements for declaring a species endangered are contained in the Endangered Species Act.
Energy, but this is only an appearance, for we find in the end that all the dispositions of the world can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges
FREE MONADS Those who have attained the highest world have freed themselves from all involvation in matter and as free monads (primordial atoms) have come to know themselves as the ultimate selves they have always been. Their auras are like cosmic giant suns and they radiate energy as the fountainhead of all power.
They can, if they so wish, withdraw with a collectivity from out of their cosmos and begin building a new cosmos in the endless chaos of primordial matter. K 1.37.4f
gudgeon ::: n. --> A small European freshwater fish (Gobio fluviatilis), allied to the carp. It is easily caught and often used for food and for bait. In America the killifishes or minnows are often called gudgeons.
What may be got without skill or merit.
A person easily duped or cheated.
The pin of iron fastened in the end of a wooden shaft or axle, on which it turns; formerly, any journal, or pivot, or bearing, as the pintle and eye of a hinge, but esp. the end journal of a html{color:
It very often happens that when there is an exceptional power in the nature, there is found in the exterior being some contrary element which opens it to a quite opposite influence. It is this that makes the endeavour after a spiritual life so often a difficult struggle ; but the existence of this kind of contradiction even in an intense form does not make that life impossible. Doubt, struggle, efforts and failures, lapses, alternations of happy and unhappy or good and bad conditions, states of light and stales of darkness are the common lot of human beings. They are not created by yoga or by the effort after perfection ; only, in yoga one becomes conscious of their movements and their causes instead of feeling them blindly, and in the end one makes one’s way out of them into a clearer and happier consciousness.
It will be seen that the scope we give to the idea of renunciation is different from the meaning currently attached to it. Currently its meaning is self-denial, inhibition of pleasure, rejection of the objects of pleasure. Self-denial is a necessary discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly attached; inhibition of pleasure is necessary because his sense is caught and clogged in the mud-honey of sensuous satisfactions; rejection of the objects of pleasure is imposed because the mind fixes on the object and will not leave it to go beyond it and within itself. If the mind of man were not thus ignorant, attached, bound even in its restless inconstancy, deluded by the forms of things, renunciation would not have been needed; the soul could have travelled on the path of delight, from the lesser to the greater, from joy to diviner joy. At present that is not practicable. It must give up from within everything to which it is attached in order that it may gain that which they are in their reality. The external renunciation is not the essential, but even that is necessary for a time, indispensable in many things and sometimes useful in all; we may even say that a complete external renunciation is a stage through which the soul must pass at some period of its progress,—though always it should be without those self-willed violences and fierce self-torturings which are an offence to the Divine seated within us. But in the end this renunciation or self-denial is always an instrument and the period for its use passes. The rejection of the object ceases to be necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us because what the soul enjoys is no longer the object as an object but the Divine which it expresses; the inhibition of pleasure is no longer needed when the soul no longer seeks pleasure but possesses the delight of the Divine in all things equally without the need of a personal or physical possession of the thing itself; self-denial loses its field when the soul no longer claims anything, but obeys consciously the will of the one Self in all beings.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 333
KEYS OF YOGA. ::: There Is above us, above the conscious- ness in the physical body, a great supporting extension as it were ot peace, light, power, joy — we can become aware of it, and bring It down into the physical consciousness ; and that, at first for a time, afterwards more frequently and for a longer time, in the end for good, can remain and change the whole basis of our daily consciousness. Even before we are aware ' of it above, »‘c can feel it coming down and entering into us.
Lnow'ledce, His love and delight In the end all our thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions will begm to proceed from Him and chance info some divine seed and form of themselves , in our whole mner Iivinc we shall have grown consaous of ourselves as a part of His being till between the existence of the Divine whom we adore and our own hves there is no longer anj divi- sion
lutely necessary. Otherwise* although the body may go on for a very long time, yet in the end there can be a danger of a collapse. The body can be sustained for a long time when there is the full influence and there is a single-minded faith and call in the mind and the vital ; but if the mind or the vital is dis- turbed by other influences or opens itself to forces which are not the Mother’s, then there will be a mixed condition and there will be sometimes strength, sometimes fatigue, exhaustion or illness or a mixture of the two at the same time. Finally, If not only the mind and the vital, but the body also is open and can absorb the Force, it can do extraordinary things in the way of work without breaking down. Still even then rest is necessary.
Mahākāsyapa. (P. Mahākassapa; T. 'Od srung chen po; C. Mohejiashe; J. Makakasho; K. Mahagasop 摩訶迦葉). Sanskrit name of one of the Buddha's leading disciples, regarded as foremost in the observance of ascetic practices (P. DHUTAnGA; S. dhutaguna). According to the Pāli accounts (where he is called Mahākassapa) his personal name was Pipphali and he was born to a brāhmana family in MAGADHA. Even as a child he was inclined toward renunciation and as a youth refused to marry. Finally, to placate his parents, he agreed to marry a woman matching in beauty a statue he had fashioned. His parents found a match in Bhaddā Kapilānī (S. BHADRA-KAPILĀNĪ), a beautiful maiden from Sāgala. But she likewise was inclined toward renunciation. Both sets of parents foiled their attempts to break off the engagement, so in the end they were wed but resolved not to consummate their marriage. Pipphali owned a vast estate with fertile soil, but one day he witnessed worms eaten by birds turned up by his plowman. Filled with pity for the creatures and fearful that he was ultimately to blame, he resolved then and there to renounce the world. At the same time, Bhaddā witnessed insects eaten by crows as they scurried among sesame seeds put out to dry. Feeling pity and fear at the sight, she also resolved to renounce the world. Realizing they were of like mind, Pipphali and Bhaddā put on the yellow robes of mendicants and abandoned their property. Although they left together, they parted ways lest they prove a hindrance to one another. Realizing what had transpired, the Buddha sat along Pipphali's path and showed himself resplendent with yogic power. Upon seeing the Buddha, Pipphali, whose name thenceforth became Kassapa, immediately recognized him as his teacher and was ordained. Traveling to Rājagaha (S. RĀJAGṚHA) with the Buddha, Mahākassapa requested to exchange his fine robe for the rag robe of the Buddha. The Buddha consented, and his conferral of his own rag robe on Mahākassapa was taken as a sign that, after the Buddha's demise, Mahākassapa would preside over the convention of the first Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, FIRST). Upon receiving the Buddha's robe, he took up the observance of thirteen ascetic practices (dhutanga) and in eight days became an arahant (S. ARHAT). Mahākassapa possessed great supranormal powers (P. iddhi; S. ṚDDHI) and was second only to the Buddha in his mastery of meditative absorption (P. JHĀNA; S. DHYĀNA). His body was said to be adorned with seven of the thirty-two marks of a superman (MAHĀPURUsALAKsAnA). So revered by the gods was he, that at the Buddha's funeral, the divinities would not allow the funeral pyre to be lit until Mahākassapa arrived and had one last chance to worship the Buddha's body. Mahākassapa seems to have been the most powerful monk after the death of the Buddha and is considered by some schools to have been the Buddha's successor as the first in a line of teachers (dharmācārya). He is said to have called and presided over the first Buddhist council, which he convened after the Buddha's death to counter the heresy of the wicked monk SUBHADRA (P. Subhadda). Before the council began, he demanded that ĀNANDA become an arhat in order to participate, which Ānanda finally did early in the morning just before the event. At the council, he questioned Ānanda and UPĀLI about what should be included in the SuTRA and VINAYA collections (PItAKA), respectively. He also chastised Ānanda for several deeds of commission and omission, including his entreaty of the Buddha to allow women to enter the order (see MAHĀPRAJĀPATĪ), his allowing the tears of women to fall on the Buddha's corpse, his stepping on the robe of the Buddha while mending it, his failure to recall which minor monastic rules the Buddha said could be ignored after his death, and his failure to ask the Buddha to live for an eon or until the end of the eon (see CĀPĀLACAITYA). Pāli sources make no mention of Mahākassapa after the events of the first council, although the Sanskrit AsOKĀVADĀNA notes that he passed away beneath three hills where his body will remain uncorrupted until the advent of the next buddha, MAITREYA. At that time, his body will reanimate itself and hand over to Maitreya the rag robe of sĀKYAMUNI, thus passing on the dispensation of the buddhas. It is said that the robe will be very small, barely fitting over the finger of the much larger Maitreya. ¶ Like many of the great arhats, Mahākāsyapa appears frequently in the MAHĀYĀNA sutras, sometimes merely listed as a member of the audience, sometimes playing a more significant role. In the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, he is one of the sRĀVAKA disciples who is reluctant to visit Vimalakīrti. In the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, he is one of four arhats who understands the parable of the burning house and rejoices in the teaching of a single vehicle (EKAYĀNA); later in the sutra, the Buddha prophesies his eventual attainment of buddhahood. Mahākāsyapa is a central figure in the CHAN schools of East Asia. In the famous Chan story in which the Buddha conveys his enlightenment by simply holding up a flower before the congregation and smiling subtly (see NIANHUA WEIXIAO), it is only Mahākāsyapa who understands the Buddha's intent, making him the first recipient of the Buddha's "mind-to-mind" transmission (YIXIN CHUANXIN). He is thus considered the first patriarch (ZUSHI) of the Chan school.
Marga: Sanskrit for path; used in the sense of method or approach in the endeavor to attain spiritual enlightenment. (See bhakti-marga, jnana-marga, karma-marga.)
meditation or, without the sense of phj^ical inertness or immo- bility, a little while longer and afterwards is lost ; but as the sadhana follows its normal course, it comes more and more, lasting longer and in the end as an enduring deep peace and inner stillness and release becomes a normal character of the consciousness, the foundation indeed of a new consciousness, calm and liberated.
Myoe Koben. (明慧高弁) (1173-1232). A Japanese SHINGONSHu monk who sought to revitalize the Kegonshu (C. HUAYAN ZONG) in Japan; commonly known as Myoe Shonin. Koben promoted traditional Buddhist values over the newer approaches of so-called Kamakura Buddhism. Against the prevailing tide of belief that the world was in terminal decline (J. mappo; C.MOFA), he took a positive stance on Buddhist practice by arguing that salvation could still be attained through traditional means. Koben was born in Kii province (present-day Wakayama Prefecture) and orphaned at the age of eight when both parents died in separate incidents. He went to live under the care of his maternal uncle Jogaku Gyoji, a Shingon monk at Jingoji on Mt. Takao, northwest of Kyoto. In 1188, at the age of sixteen, he was ordained by Jogaku at ToDAIJI. He took the ordination name Joben and later adopted the name Koben. After ordination, he studied Shingon, Kegon, and esoteric Buddhism (MIKKYo) at one of Todaiji's subtemples, Sonshoin. Koben tried twice to travel on pilgrimage to India, first in the winter of 1202-1203 and second in the spring of 1205, but was unsuccessful. On his first trip, Kasuga, a spirit (KAMI) associated with the Fujiwara family shrine in Nara, is said to have possessed the wife of Koben's uncle, Yuasa Munemitsu, and insisted that Koben not leave Japan. In the second attempt, he fell ill before he set out on his trip. In both instances, Koben believed that the Kasuga deity was warning him not to go, and he consequently abandoned his plans. These portents were supported by Fujiwara opposition to his voyage. In 1206, the retired emperor Gotoba gave Koben a plot of land in Toganoo. Gotoba designated the temple there as Kegon, renamed it Kozanji, and requested that Koben revive the study of Kegon doctrine. A year later, Gotoba appointed him headmaster of Sonshoin with the hope of further expanding Koben's promotion of the Kegon school. Despite this generous attention, Koben focused little of his efforts on this mission. He initially built a hermitage for himself at Toganoo, and it was not until 1219 that he constructed the Golden Hall at Kozanji. Koben dismissed the newer schools of Buddhism in his day, particularly HoNEN's (1122-1212) reinterpretation of pure land practice in the JoDOSHu. In 1212, he denounced Honen's nenbutsu (C. NIANFO) practice in Zaijarin ("Refuting the False Vehicle"), a response to Honen's earlier work, Senchaku hongan nenbutsu shu ("Anthology of Selections on the Nenbutsu and the Original Vow"; see SENCHAKUSHu). In contrast to the Jodoshu's exclusive advocacy of the single practice of reciting the Buddha's name, Koben defended the traditional argument that there were many valid methods for reaching salvation. Koben spent the last several decades of his life experimenting with ways to make Kegon doctrine accessible to a wider audience. In the end, however, his efforts were largely unsuccessful. He was unable to garner popular support, and his disciples never founded institutionally independent schools, as did the disciples of the other teachers of Kamakura Buddhism. Koben was fascinated by his dreams and recorded many of them in a well-known text known as the Yume no ki, or "Dream Diary." Like most Japanese of his day, Koben regarded many of these dreams to be portents coming directly from the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and gods.
northness ::: n. --> A tendency in the end of a magnetic needle to point to the north.
One ought not to settle down into a fixed idea of one’s own incapacity or allow it to become an obsession ; for such an atti- tude has no true justification and unnecessarily renders the way harder. Where there is a soul that has once become awake, there is surely a capacity within that can outweigh all surface defects and can in the end conquer.
"Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and will lead us if we trust in it and it will use our deficiencies and our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn in the end the secret of a more perfect walking.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and will lead us if we trust in it and it will use our deficiencies and our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn in the end the secret of a more perfect walking.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Parsimony, Law of: Name given to various statements of a general regulative principle of economy of thought, or effort, in the use of means to attain a purpose, like that of William of Ockham (died about 1349), called Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. It is interpreted in the sense that the least possible number of assumptions are to be made in the attempt to explain ascertained facts. It has been supposed that the same principle of simplicity prevails in the physical cosmos, since apparently nature employs the fewest possible means effectively to attain the ends which are intended. -- J.J.R.
PRAYER. ::: The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudi- ties there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which ima- gines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flat- tered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little te^td to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essen- tial movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth.
The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that, being omniscient, his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual's desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least, human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes, -and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, -- or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way, again, may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaksemam vahamyaham. ~ TSOY, SYN
Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is (here consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the givinc of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange.
In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily, in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, -- in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, -- or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.
Prayer for others ::: The fact of praying and the attitude it brings, especially unselfish prayer for others, itself opens you to the higher Power, even if there is no corresponding result in the person prayed for. 'Nothing can be positively said about that, for the result must necessarily depend on the persons, whe- ther they arc open or receptive or something in them can res- pond to any Force the prayer brings down.
Prayer must well up from the heart on a crest of emotion or aspiration.
Prayer {Ideal)'. Not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment, but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and heart with the Divine*and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in his own time.
Prayer ::: The life of man is a life of wants and needs and th
refore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which imagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth. The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that being omniscient his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes,—and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used,—or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way again may either look upon thatWill as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded. Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange. In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, —in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there,—or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 566-67-68
quest ::: “The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague questionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and her. Even if, as modern Science insists, religion started from animism, spirit-worship, demon-worship, and the deification of natural forces, these first forms only embody in primitive figures a veiled intuition in the subconscient, an obscure and ignorant feeling of hidden influences and incalculable forces, or a vague sense of being, will, intelligence in what seems to us inconscient, of the invisible behind the visible, of the secretly conscious spirit in things distributing itself in every working of energy. The obscurity and primitive inadequacy of the first perceptions do not detract from the value or the truth of this great quest of the human heart and mind, since all our seekings,—including Science itself,—must start from an obscure and ignorant perception of hidden realities and proceed to the more and more luminous vision of the Truth which at first comes to us masked, draped, veiled by the mists of the Ignorance. Anthropomorphism is an imaged recognition of the truth that man is what he is because God is what He is and that there is one soul and body of things, humanity even in its incompleteness the most complete manifestation yet achieved here and divinity the perfection of what in man is imperfect.” The Life Divine
Realistic Advaita ::: There is possible a realistic as well as an illusionist Adwaita. The philosophy of The Life Divine is such a realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and th
refore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy; but this is only an appearance, for we find in the end that all the dispositions of theworld can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supramental consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the delight of existence emerges from the original insentience first in the contrary forms of pleasure and pain and then has to find itself in the bliss of the Spirit or as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 91-92
Rhea (Greek) Daughter of Ouranos and Gaia, sister and consort of Kronos, mother of Zeus and others of the principal divinities. Identified by the Homeric Greeks with Cybele, the Asiatic Magna Mater; also, as the mother of Zeus, with Demeter. An Orphic fragment reads: “When she bore Zeus she became Demeter.” The six sons and daughters — Vesta, Demeter, Hera, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades — are symbols of the powers and elements of invisible, and the divisions of visible, nature. Rhea in one aspect is also Isis — nature, divine and human, bearing to Kronos (time) the elements and powers that in both invisible and visible form constitute nature, only to see them swallowed by Kronos in the end, drawn back into the inner worlds in due course by all-ingulfing time. See also ORPHISM
"Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Science is a right knowledge, in the end only of processes, but still the knowledge of processes too is part of a total wisdom and essential to a wide and a clear approach towards the deeper Truth behind.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“Science is a right knowledge, in the end only of processes, but still the knowledge of processes too is part of a total wisdom and essential to a wide and a clear approach towards the deeper Truth behind.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Shad-linga: Six lingas or signs of a perfect exposition or a text viz., 1. Upakranza-Upasarnhara-Ekavakyata (unity of thought in the beginning as well as in the end), 2. Ahhyasa (reiteration or repetition), 3. Apurvata (novelty or uncommon nature of the proof), 4. Phala (fruit of the teaching), 5. Arthavada (eulogy, praise or persuasive expression) and 6. Upapatti (illustration). Some consider Yukti (reason) as the sixth sign instead of Upapatti.
southness ::: n. --> A tendency in the end of a magnetic needle to point toward the south pole.
Sri Aurobindo: ” See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy. If thou believest firmly & unweariedly, in the end thou wilt see & experience the All-true, Almighty & All-blissful.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: "The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: “The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other’s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle. Babel-builders’.
Sri Aurobindo: "The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague questionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and her. Even if, as modern Science insists, religion started from animism, spirit-worship, demon-worship, and the deification of natural forces, these first forms only embody in primitive figures a veiled intuition in the subconscient, an obscure and ignorant feeling of hidden influences and incalculable forces, or a vague sense of being, will, intelligence in what seems to us inconscient, of the invisible behind the visible, of the secretly conscious spirit in things distributing itself in every working of energy. The obscurity and primitive inadequacy of the first perceptions do not detract from the value or the truth of this great quest of the human heart and mind, since all our seekings, — including Science itself, — must start from an obscure and ignorant perception of hidden realities and proceed to the more and more luminous vision of the Truth which at first comes to us masked, draped, veiled by the mists of the Ignorance. Anthropomorphism is an imaged recognition of the truth that man is what he is because God is what He is and that there is one soul and body of things, humanity even in its incompleteness the most complete manifestation yet achieved here and divinity the perfection of what in man is imperfect.” The Life Divine
T2 ::: a union of two of the three elements of T3; (in 1914) abbreviation of telepathy-trikaladr.s.t.i, a combination of the knowledge faculties of T3; (usually, from 1917 onwards) abbreviation of trikaladr.s.t.itapassiddhi, representing a united action of the higher faculties of knowledge and will, with telepathy included in or replaced by trikaladr.s.t.i; in the last entries of 1927, this is associated with a "passive-active attitude . . . in which the Ishwara determines and the Powers [of the Overmind] may for a time resist and even modify temporarily what he has determined, but must now or in the end help to carry out his will".
"The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The change that is effected by the transition from mind to supermind is not only a revolution in knowledge or in our power for knowledge. If it is to be complete and stable, it must be a divine transmutation of our will too, our entotions, our sensa- tions, all our power of life and its forces, in the end even of the very substance and functioning of our body. Then only can it be said that the supermind is there ujwn earth, roofed in its very earth-substance and embodied in a new race of divinised crea- tures.
The course taken by the attacks is not indeed the same for all, but still they have strong family resemblance. One can even- tually overcome If one begins to realise the nature and source of these assaults and acquires the faculty of observing them, bearing, without being involved or absorbed into their gulf, finally becoming the witness of their phenomena and understanding them and refusing the mind's sanction even when the vital is still tossed in the whirl and the most outward physical mind still reflects the adverse suggestions. In the end, these attacks lose their power and fall away from the nature ; the recurrence becomes feeble, or has no power to last ; even, if the detach- ment is strong enough, they can be cut out very soon or at once.
There is one way by which it is possible to get rid of the per- verse habit ::: to establish a strong mental control and so get rid of the wrong movement. A resolute and persistent effort of will can enforce in the end the rejection of the desire and finally even of any roechanical habit of the movement upon this part of the nature also.
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 201
The Vishnu-Purana says of the kali yuga that the barbarians will be masters of the banks of the Indus, of Chandrabhaga and Kasmira, that “there will be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth — kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women, children, and cows; they will seize upon the property of their subjects, and be intent upon the wives of others; they will be of unlimited power, their lives will be short, their desires insatiable. . . . People of various countries intermingling with them, will follow their example; and the barbarians being powerful (in India) in the patronage of the princes, while purer tribes are neglected, the people will perish (or, as the Commentator has it, ‘The Mlechchhas will be in the centre and the Aryas in the end.’) Wealth and piety will decrease until the world will be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigations; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification. . . . a man if rich will be reputed pure; dishonesty (anyaya) will be the universal means of subsistence, weakness the cause of dependence, menace and presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; mutual assent, marriage; fine clothes, dignity. He who is the strongest will reign; the people, unable to bear the heavy burthen, Khara bhara (the load of taxes) will take refuge among the valleys. . . . Thus, in the Kali age will decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its annihilation (pralaya). . . . When the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine being which exists, of its own spiritual nature . . . shall descend on Earth . . . (Kalki Avatar) endowed with the eight superhuman faculties. . . . He will re-establish righteousness on earth, and the minds of those who live at the end of Kali Yuga shall be awakened and become as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed . . . shall be the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, the age of purity. As it is said, ‘When the sun and moon and the lunar asterism Tishya and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the Krita (or Satya) age shall return’ ” (SD 1:377-8). See also YUGA.
tions; but here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles, would be the emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted characters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence. Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind and Supermind too must in the end fulfil themselves in this apparently opposite organisation from a dark Infinite. …
ultimately ::: adv. --> As a final consequence; at last; in the end; as, afflictions often tend to correct immoral habits, and ultimately prove blessings.
Upakrama-upasamhara-ekavakyata: The unity of thought in the beginning as well as in the end; the first of the Shad-lingas.
*What is meant here is the Divine in its essential manifestation which reveals itself to us as Light and Consciousness, Power, Love and Beauty. But in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient—the inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this Universe,— or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat. The Ignorance which is the characteristic of our mind and life is the result of this origin in the Inconscience. Moreover, in the evolution out of inconscient existence there rise up naturally powers and beings which are interested in the maintenance of all negations of the Divine, error and unconsciousness, pain, suffering, obscurity, death, weakness, illness, disharmony, evil. Hence the perversion of the manifestation here, its inability to reveal the true essence of the Divine. Yet in the very base of this evolution all that is divine is there involved and pressing to evolve, Light, Consciousness, Power, Perfection, Beauty, Love. For in the Inconscient itself and behind the perversions of the Ignorance Divine Consciousness lies concealed and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the Divine.
White magic or theurgy is knowledge used for impersonal and beneficent purposes, the bringing into human life of the pattern and powers of nature as these exist on the spiritual planes. Black magic or goetia is knowledge used for selfishly personal or evil purposes. Natural magic is the knowledge and employment of the natural powers, forces, and substances of nature — practically what today is called science. If the knowledge gained through the study of natural science is distorted in its use to selfish or ignoble ends, it becomes de facto black magic. While a hard and fast distinction may not be applicable to all cults of magic, where the student or practitioner has not yet made a conscious choice between the two paths, yet in the end he must choose the one or the other. For nature’s forces must be controlled, either by a pure or an impure will, if the practicer is not to fall victim to them. The motive and use that a person makes of his faculties and will are the deciding factors as to whether the magic is beneficent or maleficent. Any selfish, self-seeking, or selfishly restricted use of nature’s laws or powers is against the impersonality and universality of nature: “The smallest attempt to use one’s abnormal powers for the gratification of self makes of these powers sorcery or Black Magic” (Key 346).
WILL TO UNITY The will to unity is no will to uniformity, no standardization into robotism. The will to unity does not fight against other views or against dissidents. It is so rational that it need never fear criticism. It leaves everybody&
You have only to remain quiet and firm in your following of the path and your will to go to the end. If you do that circum- stances will in the end be obliged to shape themselves to your will, because it will be the Dirine Will in you.
KEYS (10k)
33 Sri Aurobindo
6 Sri Ramakrishna
3 Ramakrishna
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Friedrich Nietzsche
2 Carl Jung
2 Bertrand Russell
2 The Mother
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1 Waking Life
1 Thomas A Kempis
1 Stephen King
1 Shing Xiang
1 Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
1 Roy T. Bennett
1 Neil Gaiman
1 Jean Gebser
1 Irenaeus
1 Gita
1 Georg C Lichtenberg
1 C S Lewis
1 Charles Dickens
1 Bhagavad Gita
1 Anselm of Canterbury
1 Albert Camus
1 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
1 Jalaluddin Rumi
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
30 Stephen King
17 Nicholas Sparks
16 Anonymous
12 John Green
12 Heinrich Heine
9 Haruki Murakami
9 Friedrich Nietzsche
9 Ally Condie
8 Leigh Bardugo
8 Lauren Oliver
8 Abraham Lincoln
7 Jack Kornfield
7 C S Lewis
6 Salman Rushdie
6 Paulo Coelho
6 Neil Gaiman
6 Jack Kerouac
6 Dean Koontz
5 R J Palacio
5 Rick Yancey
1:In the end, everything is simple. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
2:But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
~ Albert Camus,#KEYS
3:In the end, everyone must come to Arunachala. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
4:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
5:I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. ~ Charles Dickens, #KEYS
6:He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
7:But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
8:Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me. ~ Gita, #KEYS
9:This pleasure, appears as poison in the beginning but is like nectar in the end, comes by the grace of Self-knowledge." ~ Bhagavad Gita, #KEYS
10:We really are one with Master or Bhagavan. The Master is God; one discovers it in the end. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
11:Your hardest times often lead to the greatest moments of your life. Keep going. Tough situations build strong people in the end." ~ Roy T. Bennett, #KEYS
12:Let things happen as they happen - they will sort themselves out nicely in the end. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
13:It matters not that you have been walking along a wrong path. The Lord knows what he wants and in the end fulfills it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
14:The knowledge of the absolute does away, in the end, with both knowledge and ignorance, since knowledge is free from all duality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
15:If one does not stop in progress after attaining a few powers, he becomes, in the end, really rich in the eternal knowledge of truth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
16:The raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Its Liberation, #KEYS
17:In the end its not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away." ~ Shing Xiang, (no bio. found). From "1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom", (2014) Ed. Kim Lim, #KEYS
18:The knowledge of the Eternal and the love of the Eternal are in the end one and the same thing. There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure love. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
19:Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow in the end, put on it what fetters you please. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Spiritual Aim and Life, #KEYS
20:Do not be discouraged, because, if there is a continuous effort to improve in the soul, in the end the Lord rewards it by making it suddenly blossom in all its virtues as in a flower garden. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina #KEYS
21:The knowledge of the Eternal and the love of the Eternal are in the end one and the same thing. There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure love. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
22:And yet in the end we are obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive experiences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.5, #KEYS
23:You have created me and recreated me and You have given me all the good things I possess, and still I do not know You. In the end, I was made in order to see You, and I have not yet accomplished what I was made for. ~ Anselm of Canterbury, #KEYS
24:Where there is a soul that has once become awake, there is surely a capacity within that can outweigh all surface defects and can in the end conquer. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Call and the Capacity, #KEYS
25:You must learn to part with an intimate and much-needed friend for the love of God. Do not take it to heart when you are deserted by a friend, knowing that in the end we must all be parted from one another. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
26:Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #KEYS
27:Nature moves forward always in the midst of all stumblings and secures her aims in the end more often in spite of man's imperfect mentality than by its means. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Inadequacy of the State Idea, #KEYS
28:But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#KEYS
29:The aspirant to the true knowledge, if he does not halt in his progress after acquiring certain extraordinary and supernatural powers, becomes in the end rich in the eternal knowledge of the truth. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
30:Man is given faith in himself, his ideas and his powers that he may work and create and rise to greater things and in the end bring his strength as a worthy offering to the altar of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti, #KEYS
31:Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #KEYS
32:Things always come in the way when one wants to progress in the sadhana, but in the end if one is sincere in one's aspiration these troubles help to prepare the victory of the soul over all that opposes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Anger and Violence, #KEYS
33:Innumerable are the ways that lead to God. There are the paths of jnāna, of karma, and of bhakti. If you are sincere, you will attain God in the end, whichever path you follow. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of yoga: jnanayoga, karma yoga, and bhaktiyoga ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
34:Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ~ Stephen King, #KEYS
35:It is for this meaningful development of consciousness by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading in the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the mental being, has entered into the material body.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works,#KEYS
36:Sometimes you get frightened as a camel
Sometimes you get stuck in the mud like hunted prey.
O young fool, how long will you keep running from yourself?
In the end, the thing will happen anyway.
Just go in the direction where there is no direction.
Go, search there. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,#KEYS
37: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
38:Stronger than every obstacle and counter-argument is the instinct which tells us that, to be faithful to Life, we must know; we must know more and still more; we must tirelessly and increasingly search for Something, we know not what, which will appear in the end to those who have penetrated to the very heart of reality.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#KEYS
39:In India the healers by faith comm and their sick to repeat with absolute conviction the words, "There is no malady in me, Sickness is not." The sick man repeats and, so mentally denied, his malady disappears. Thus if you believe yourself to be mortally weak, you find yourself actually in that condition. Know and believe that you can have an immense power, and the power will come to you in the end. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
40:You partake of the nature of him on whom you meditate. By worshipping Siva you acquire the nature of Siva. A devotee of Rama meditated on Hanuman day and night. He used to think he had become Hanuman. In the end he was firmly convinced that he had even grown a little tail. Jnana is the characteristic of Siva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of Siva's nature becomes a jnani, and one who partakes of Vishnu's nature becomes a bhakta. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
41:The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man. ~ C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, #KEYS
42:It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course-for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. ~ Carl Jung, Aion, #KEYS
43:The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will in the end exclude nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world and our will's ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5], #KEYS
44:abolishing the ego :::
In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience - a realisation in the very substance of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Ego, 363,#KEYS
45:For it is in God alone, by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind. All the other activities and realisations of our self-experience have their use and power, but in the end these crowded sidetracks or these lonely paths must circle round to converge into the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul transcends all, embraces all and becomes the promise and the power of the fulfilment of all in their manifested being of the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Its Liberation, 444, [T1],#KEYS
46:[Rex and Regina] It is a therapeutic necessity, indeed, the first requisite of any thorough psychological method, for consciousness to confront its shadow. In the end this must lead to some kind of union, even though the union consists at first in an open conflict, and often remains so for a long time. It is a struggle that cannot be abolished by rational means. When it is wilfully repressed it continues in the unconscious and merely expresses itself indirectly and all the more dangerously, so no advantage is gained. The struggle goes on until the opponents run out of breath. What the outcome will be can never be seen in advance. The only certain thing is that both parties will be changed. ~ Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 514., #KEYS
47:The Gita replies with its third great secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness; our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and in the end a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only motive. This transformation of the motive force and very character of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its initiative.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [104-105],#KEYS
48:The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in the relative and attracting it, as one's highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a Divine Person within us and in the world, in one of his-or her-numerous forms and names or as the ideal which the mind conceives. In the end we perceive that he is all and more than all these things together. The mind's door of entry to the conception of him must necessarily vary according to the past evolution and the present nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62,#KEYS
49:The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]-so at least it seems to me-is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
50:In the depths of your consciousness is the psychic being, the temple of the Divine within you. This is the centre round which should come about the unification of all these divergent parts, all these contradictory movements of your being. Once you have got the consciousness of the psychic being and its aspiration, these doubts and difficulties can be destroyed. It takes more or less time, but you will surely succeed in the end. Once you have turned to the Divine, saying, "I want to be yours", and the Divine has said, "Yes", the whole world cannot keep you from it. When the central being has made its surrender, the chief difficulty has disappeared. The outer being is like a crust. In ordinary people the crust is so hard and thick that they are not conscious of the Divine within them. If once, even for a moment only, the inner being has said, "I am here and I am yours", then it is as though a bridge has been built and little by little the crust becomes thinner and thinner until the two parts are wholly joined and the inner and the outer become one. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #KEYS
51:Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of mans life with God, the conscious interchange. In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily, in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, -- in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, -- or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Love,#KEYS
52:It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised nature. The conversion its action will effect is an integral conversion of our ethical being into the Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual into the illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional into the divine love and unity, our dynamic and volitional into a working of the divine power, our aesthetic into a plenary reception and a creative enjoyment of divine beauty, not excluding even in the end a divine conversion of the vital and physical being. It regards all the previous life as an involuntary and unconscious or half-conscious preparatory growing towards this change and Yoga as the voluntary and conscious
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
53:on cultivating equality :::
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [103-104],#KEYS
54:For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, - of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe. It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 85-86, [T1],#KEYS
55:He is the friend, the adviser, helper, saviour in trouble and distress, the defender from enemies, the hero who fights our battles for us or under whose shield we fight, the charioteer, the pilot of our ways. And here we come at once to a closer intimacy; he is the comrade and eternal companion, the playmate of the game of living. But still there is so far a certain division, however pleasant, and friendship is too much limited by the appearance of beneficence. The lover can wound, abandon, be wroth with us, seem to betray, yet our love endures and even grows by these oppositions; they increase the joy of reunion and the joy of possession; through them the lover remains the friend, and all that he does, we find in the end, has been done by the lover and helper of our being for our souls perfection as well as for his joy in us. These contradictions lead to a greater intimacy. He is the father and mother too of our being, its source and protector and its indulgent cherisher and giver of our desires. He is the child born to our desire whom we cherish and rear. All these things the lover takes up; his love in its intimacy and oneness keeps in it the paternal and maternal care and lends itself to our demands upon it. All is unified in that deepest many-sided relation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Love,#KEYS
56:A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento. It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, A TEACHER OF SLOW READING:- in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste - a malicious taste, perhaps? - no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is 'in a hurry'. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow - it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the WORD which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But precisely for this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book:- this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read WELL, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers...My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: LEARN to read me well! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
57:9. Atonement with the Father/Abyss:Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis-only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same. The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands-and the two are atoned. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
58:But even when the desire to know exists in the requisite strength, the mental vision by which abstract truth is recognised is hard to distinguish from vivid imaginability and consonance with mental habits. It is necessary to practise methodological doubt, like Descartes, in order to loosen the hold of mental habits; and it is necessary to cultivate logical imagination, in order to have a number of hypotheses at command, and not to be the slave of the one which common sense has rendered easy to imagine. These two processes, of doubting the familiar and imagining the unfamiliar, are correlative, and form the chief part of the mental training required for a philosopher.
The naïve beliefs which we find in ourselves when we first begin the process of philosophic reflection may turn out, in the end, to be almost all capable of a true interpretation; but they ought all, before being admitted into philosophy, to undergo the ordeal of sceptical criticism. Until they have gone through this ordeal, they are mere blind habits, ways of behaving rather than intellectual convictions. And although it may be that a majority will pass the test, we may be pretty sure that some will not, and that a serious readjustment of our outlook ought to result. In order to break the dominion of habit, we must do our best to doubt the senses, reason, morals, everything in short. In some directions, doubt will be found possible; in others, it will be checked by that direct vision of abstract truth upon which the possibility of philosophical knowledge depends. ~ Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World,#KEYS
59:What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana, the visvamanava as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine?
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
60:But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujya, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga. In the end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he merges them in the divineWill and its transcendent and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth's spiritual progression or its transformation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T2],#KEYS
61:But usually the representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received written Shastra, - some Word from the past which embodies the experience of former Yogins, - it may be practised either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal.
For the sadhaka of the integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, - if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written Truth, - sabdabrahmativartate - beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, - srotavyasya srutasya ca. For he is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#KEYS
62:One thing is needful. -- To "give style" to one's character-- a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed -- both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.
Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits -- and they may be of the first rank -- are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, mod trans. Walter Kaufmann,#KEYS
63:And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 144, #KEYS
64:the three stages of the ascent :::
There are three stages of the ascent, -at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, the higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, ideas, and at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance.In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process.In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will,#KEYS
65:Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail in the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient, unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their Force and truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads them according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet she has more than any other the heart of the universal Mother. For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [39],#KEYS
66: There is also the consecration of the thoughts to the Divine. In its inception this is the attempt to fix the mind on the object of adoration, -for naturally the restless human mind is occupied with other objects and, even when it is directed upwards, constantly drawn away by the world, -- so that in the end it habitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and thought of only in relation to him. This is done often with the aid of a physical image or, more intimately and characteristically, of a Mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise, to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling and fixing of the mind on the object; and by this comes the full realisation. And by these, too, there comes when the accompanying feeling or the concentration is very intense, the Samadhi, the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from outer objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing essential is the intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the object of adoration. Although it seems akin to the contemplation of the way of knowledge, it differs from that in its spirit. It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration, which ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all ones inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love which possesses the spirit and its members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion [T2],#KEYS
67:Concentration is a gathering together of the consciousness and either centralising at one point or turning on a single object, e.g., the Divine; there can be also be a gathered condition throughout the whole being, not at a point. In meditation it is not indispensable to gather like this, one can simply remain with a quiet mind thinking of one subject or observing what comes in the consciousness and dealing with it. ... Of this true consciousness other than the superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other ways.
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Infinite. There it begins to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head in only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise, one may get shut up in one's own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reflection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there. For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternatively - but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the most desirable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
68:An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But mans present nature is limited, divided, unequal, -- it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the minds one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Supermind and the Yoga of Works [279-280],#KEYS
69:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, anı̄sa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216, #KEYS
70:I have never been able to share your constantly recurring doubts about your capacity or the despair that arises in you so violently when there are these attacks, nor is their persistent recurrence a valid ground for believing that they can never be overcome. Such a persistent recurrence has been a feature in the sadhana of many who have finally emerged and reached the goal; even the sadhana of very great Yogis has not been exempt from such violent and constant recurrences; they have sometimes been special objects of such persistent assaults, as I have indeed indicated in Savitri in more places than one - and that was indeed founded on my own experience. In the nature of these recurrences there is usually a constant return of the same adverse experiences, the same adverse resistance, thoughts destructive of all belief and faith and confidence in the future of the sadhana, frustrating doubts of what one has known as the truth, voices of despondency and despair, urgings to abandonment of the Yoga or to suicide or else other disastrous counsels of déchéance. The course taken by the attacks is not indeed the same for all, but still they have strong family resemblance. One can eventually overcome if one begins to realise the nature and source of these assaults and acquires the faculty of observing them, bearing, without being involved or absorbed into their gulf, finally becoming the witness of their phenomena and understanding them and refusing the mind's sanction even when the vital is still tossed in the whirl or the most outward physical mind still reflects the adverse suggestions. In the end these attacks lose their power and fall away from the nature; the recurrence becomes feeble or has no power to last: even, if the detachment is strong enough, they can be cut out very soon or at once. The strongest attitude to take is to regard these things as what they really are, incursions of dark forces from outside taking advantage of certain openings in the physical mind or the vital part, but not a real part of oneself or spontaneous creation in one's own nature. To create a confusion and darkness in the physical mind and throw into it or awake in it mistaken ideas, dark thoughts, false impressions is a favourite method of these assailants, and if they can get the support of this mind from over-confidence in its own correctness or the natural rightness of its impressions and inferences, then they can have a field day until the true mind reasserts itself and blows the clouds away. Another device of theirs is to awake some hurt or rankling sense of grievance in the lower vital parts and keep them hurt or rankling as long as possible. In that case one has to discover these openings in one's nature and learn to close them permanently to such attacks or else to throw out intruders at once or as soon as possible. The recurrence is no proof of a fundamental incapacity; if one takes the right inner attitude, it can and will be overcome. The idea of suicide ought never to be accepted; there is no real ground for it and in any case it cannot be a remedy or a real escape: at most it can only be postponement of difficulties and the necessity for their solution under no better circumstances in another life. One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time he conceals himself, and then in his own right time he will reveal his Presence.
I have tried to dispel all the misconceptions, explain things as they are and meet all the points at issue. It is not that you really cannot make progress or have not made any progress; on the contrary, you yourself have admitted that you have made a good advance in many directions and there is no reason why, if you persevere, the rest should not come. You have always believed in the Guruvada: I would ask you then to put your faith in the Guru and the guidance and rely on the Ishwara for the fulfilment, to have faith in my abiding love and affection, in the affection and divine goodwill and loving kindness of the Mother, stand firm against all attacks and go forward perseveringly towards the spiritual goal and the all-fulfilling and all-satisfying touch of the All-Blissful, the Ishwara.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
71: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
72:The Two Paths Of Yoga :::
14 April 1929 - What are the dangers of Yoga? Is it especially dangerous to the people of the West? Someone has said that Yoga may be suitable for the East, but it has the effect of unbalancing the Western mind.
Yoga is not more dangerous to the people of the West than to those of the East. Everything depends upon the spirit with which you approach it. Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. It is not dangerous, on the contrary, it is safety and security itself, if you go to it with a sense of its sacredness, always remembering that the aim is to find the Divine.
Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. if you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.
There are two paths of Yoga, one of tapasya (discipline), and the other of surrender. The path of tapasya is arduous. Here you rely solely upon yourself, you proceed by your own strength. You ascend and achieve according to the measure of your force. There is always the danger of falling down. And once you fall, you lie broken in the abyss and there is hardly a remedy. The other path, the path of surrender, is safe and sure. It is here, however, that the Western people find their difficulty. They have been taught to fear and avoid all that threatens their personal independence. They have imbibed with their mothers' milk the sense of individuality. And surrender means giving up all that. In other words, you may follow, as Ramakrishna says, either the path of the baby monkey or that of the baby cat. The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it and cry ma ma.
If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more danger or serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere. If you are not sincere, do not begin Yoga. If you were dealing in human affairs, then you could resort to deception; but in dealing with the Divine there is no possibility of deception anywhere. You can go on the Path safely when you are candid and open to the core and when your only end is to realise and attain the Divine and to be moved by the Divine. There is another danger; it is in connection with the sex impulses. Yoga in its process of purification will lay bare and throw up all hidden impulses and desires in you. And you must learn not to hide things nor leave them aside, you have to face them and conquer and remould them. The first effect of Yoga, however, is to take away the mental control, and the hungers that lie dormant are suddenly set free, they rush up and invade the being. So long as this mental control has not been replaced by the Divine control, there is a period of transition when your sincerity and surrender will be put to the test. The strength of such impulses as those of sex lies usually in the fact that people take too much notice of them; they protest too vehemently and endeavour to control them by coercion, hold them within and sit upon them. But the more you think of a thing and say, "I don't want it, I don't want it", the more you are bound to it. What you should do is to keep the thing away from you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible and, even if you happen to think of it, remain indifferent and unconcerned. The impulses and desires that come up by the pressure of Yoga should be faced in a spirit of detachment and serenity, as something foreign to yourself or belonging to the outside world. They should be offered to the Divine, so that the Divine may take them up and transmute them. If you have once opened yourself to the Divine, if the power of the Divine has once come down into you and yet you try to keep to the old forces, you prepare troubles and difficulties and dangers for yourself. You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires. There are many self-appointed Masters, who do nothing but that. And then when you are off the straight path and when you have a little knowledge and not much power, it happens that you are seized by beings or entities of a certain type, you become blind instruments in their hands and are devoured by them in the end. Wherever there is pretence, there is danger; you cannot deceive God. Do you come to God saying, "I want union with you" and in your heart meaning "I want powers and enjoyments"? Beware! You are heading straight towards the brink of the precipice. And yet it is so easy to avoid all catastrophe. Become like a child, give yourself up to the Mother, let her carry you, and there is no more danger for you.
This does not mean that you have not to face other kinds of difficulties or that you have not to fight and conquer any obstacles at all. Surrender does not ensure a smooth and unruffled and continuous progression. The reason is that your being is not yet one, nor your surrender absolute and complete. Only a part of you surrenders; and today it is one part and the next day it is another. The whole purpose of the Yoga is to gather all the divergent parts together and forge them into an undivided unity. Till then you cannot hope to be without difficulties - difficulties, for example, like doubt or depression or hesitation. The whole world is full of the poison. You take it in with every breath. If you exchange a few words with an undesirable man or even if such a man merely passes by you, you may catch the contagion from him. It is sufficient for you to come near a place where there is plague in order to be infected with its poison; you need not know at all that it is there. You can lose in a few minutes what it has taken you months to gain. So long as you belong to humanity and so long as you lead the ordinary life, it does not matter much if you mix with the people of the world; but if you want the divine life, you will have to be exceedingly careful about your company and your environment.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
73:Chapter 18 - Trapped in a Dream
(A guy is playing a pinball machine, seemingly the same guy who rode with him in the back of the boat car. This part is played by Richard Linklater, aka, the director.)
Hey, man.
Hey.
Weren't you in a boat car? You know, the guy, the guy with the hat? He gave me a ride in his car, or boat thing, and you were in the back seat with me?
I mean, I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, but I don't know what you're talking about.
No, you see, you guys let me off at this really specific spot that you gave him directions to let me off at, I get out, and end up getting hit by a car, but then, I just woke up because I was dreaming, and later than that, I found out that I was still dreaming, dreaming that I'd woken up.
Oh yeah, those are called false awakenings. I used to have those all the time.
Yeah, but I'm still in it now. I, I can't get out of it. It's been going on forever, I keep waking up, but, but I'm just waking up into another dream. I'm starting to get creeped out, too. Like I'm talking to dead people. This woman on TV's telling me about how death is this dreamtime that exists outside of life. I mean, (desperate sigh) I'm starting to think that I'm dead.
I'm gonna tell you about a dream I once had. I know that's, when someone says that, then usually you're in for a very boring next few minutes, and you might be, but it sounds like, you know, what else are you going to do, right? Anyway, I read this essay by Philip K. Dick.
What, you read it in your dream?
No, no. I read it before the dream. It was the preamble to the dream. It was about that book, um Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. You know that one?
Uh, yeah yeah, he won an award for that one.
Right, right. That's the one he wrote really fast. It just like flowed right out of him. He felt he was sort of channeling it, or something. But anyway, about four years after it was published, he was at this party, and he met this woman who had the same name as the woman character in the book. And she had a boyfriend with the same name as the boyfriend character in the book, and she was having an affair with this guy, the chief of police, and he had the same name as the chief of police in his book. So she's telling him all of this stuff from her life, and everything she's saying is right out of his book. So that's totally freaking him out, but, what can he do?
And then shortly after that, he was going to mail a letter, and he saw this kind of, um, you know, dangerous, shady looking guy standing by his car, but instead of avoiding him, which he says he would have usually done, he just walked right up to him and said, "Can I help you?" And the guy said, "Yeah. I, I ran out of gas." So he pulls out his wallet, and he hands him some money, which he says he never would have done, and then he gets home and thinks, wait a second, this guy, you know, he can't get to a gas station, he's out of gas. So he gets back in his car, he goes and finds the guy, takes him to the gas station, and as he's pulling up at the gas station, he realizes, "Hey, this is in my book too. This exact station, this exact guy. Everything."
So this whole episode is kind of creepy, right? And he's telling his priest about it, you know, describing how he wrote this book, and then four years later all these things happened to him. And as he's telling it to him, the priest says, "That's the Book of Acts. You're describing the Book of Acts." And he's like, "I've never read the Book of Acts." So he, you know, goes home and reads the Book of Acts, and it's like uncanny. Even the characters' names are the same as in the Bible. And the Book of Acts takes place in 50 A.D., when it was written, supposedly. So Philip K. Dick had this theory that time was an illusion and that we were all actually in 50 A.D., and the reason he had written this book was that he had somehow momentarily punctured through this illusion, this veil of time, and what he had seen there was what was going on in the Book of Acts.
And he was really into Gnosticism, and this idea that this demiurge, or demon, had created this illusion of time to make us forget that Christ was about to return, and the kingdom of God was about to arrive. And that we're all in 50 A.D., and there's someone trying to make us forget that God is imminent. And that's what time is. That's what all of history is. It's just this kind of continuous, you know, daydream, or distraction.
And so I read that, and I was like, well that's weird. And than that night I had a dream and there was this guy in the dream who was supposed to be a psychic. But I was skeptical. I was like, you know, he's not really a psychic, you know I'm thinking to myself. And then suddenly I start floating, like levitating, up to the ceiling. And as I almost go through the roof, I'm like, "Okay, Mr. Psychic. I believe you. You're a psychic. Put me down please." And I float down, and as my feet touch the ground, the psychic turns into this woman in a green dress. And this woman is Lady Gregory.
Now Lady Gregory was Yeats' patron, this, you know, Irish person. And though I'd never seen her image, I was just sure that this was the face of Lady Gregory. So we're walking along, and Lady Gregory turns to me and says, "Let me explain to you the nature of the universe. Now Philip K. Dick is right about time, but he's wrong that it's 50 A.D. Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in."
And then she tells me that actually this is the narrative of everyone's life. That, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes." All of life is like, "No thank you. No thank you. No thank you." then ultimately it's, "Yes, I give in. Yes, I accept. Yes, I embrace." I mean, that's the journey. I mean, everyone gets to the "yes" in the end, right?
Right.
So we continue walking, and my dog runs over to me. And so I'm petting him, really happy to see him, you know, he's been dead for years. So I'm petting him and I realize there's this kind of gross oozing stuff coming out of his stomach. And I look over at Lady Gregory, and she sort of coughs. She's like [cough] [cough] "Oh, excuse me." And there's vomit, like dribbling down her chin, and it smells really bad. And I think, "Well, wait a second, that's not just the smell of vomit," which is, doesn't smell very good, "that's the smell of like dead person vomit." You know, so it's like doubly foul. And then I realize I'm actually in the land of the dead, and everyone around me is dead. My dog had been dead for over ten years, Lady Gregory had been dead a lot longer than that. When I finally woke up, I was like, whoa, that wasn't a dream, that was a visitation to this real place, the land of the dead.
So what happened? I mean how did you finally get out of it?
Oh man. It was just like one of those like life altering experiences. I mean I could never really look at the world the same way again, after that.
Yeah, but I mean like how did you, how did you finally get out of the dream? See, that's my problem. I'm like trapped. I keep, I keep thinking that I'm waking up, but I'm still in a dream. It seems like it's going on forever. I can't get out of it, and I want to wake up for real. How do you really wake up?
I don't know, I don't know. I'm not very good at that anymore. But, um, if that's what you're thinking, I mean you, you probably should. I mean, you know if you can wake up, you should, because you know someday, you know, you won't be able to. So just, um ... But it's easy. You know. Just, just wake up. ~ Waking Life,#KEYS
74:Mental Education
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and in the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
(3) Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
It is not possible to give here all the details concerning the methods to be employed in the application of these five phases of education to different individuals. Still, a few explanations on points of detail can be given.
Undeniably, what most impedes mental progress in children is the constant dispersion of their thoughts. Their thoughts flutter hither and thither like butterflies and they have to make a great effort to fix them. Yet this capacity is latent in them, for when you succeed in arousing their interest, they are capable of a good deal of attention. By his ingenuity, therefore, the educator will gradually help the child to become capable of a sustained effort of attention and a faculty of more and more complete absorption in the work in hand. All methods that can develop this faculty of attention from games to rewards are good and can all be utilised according to the need and the circumstances. But it is the psychological action that is most important and the sovereign method is to arouse in the child an interest in what you want to teach him, a liking for work, a will to progress. To love to learn is the most precious gift that one can give to a child: to love to learn always and everywhere, so that all circumstances, all happenings in life may be constantly renewed opportunities for learning more and always more.
For that, to attention and concentration should be added observation, precise recording and faithfulness of memory. This faculty of observation can be developed by varied and spontaneous exercises, making use of every opportunity that presents itself to keep the child's thought wakeful, alert and prompt. The growth of the understanding should be stressed much more than that of memory. One knows well only what one has understood. Things learnt by heart, mechanically, fade away little by little and finally disappear; what is understood is never forgotten. Moreover, you must never refuse to explain to a child the how and the why of things. If you cannot do it yourself, you must direct the child to those who are qualified to answer or point out to him some books that deal with the question. In this way you will progressively awaken in the child the taste for true study and the habit of making a persistent effort to know.
This will bring us quite naturally to the second phase of development in which the mind should be widened and enriched.
You will gradually show the child that everything can become an interesting subject for study if it is approached in the right way. The life of every day, of every moment, is the best school of all, varied, complex, full of unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. It is so easy to arouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numerous questions they ask. An interesting reply to one readily brings others in its train and so the attentive child learns without effort much more than he usually does in the classroom. By a choice made with care and insight, you should also teach him to enjoy good reading-matter which is both instructive and attractive. Do not be afraid of anything that awakens and pleases his imagination; imagination develops the creative mental faculty and through it study becomes living and the mind develops in joy.
In order to increase the suppleness and comprehensiveness of his mind, one should see not only that he studies many varied topics, but above all that a single subject is approached in various ways, so that the child understands in a practical manner that there are many ways of facing the same intellectual problem, of considering it and solving it. This will remove all rigidity from his brain and at the same time it will make his thinking richer and more supple and prepare it for a more complex and comprehensive synthesis. In this way also the child will be imbued with the sense of the extreme relativity of mental learning and, little by little, an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge will awaken in him.
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
All that has just been said concerns the speculative mind, the mind that learns. But learning is only one aspect of mental activity; the other, which is at least equally important, is the constructive faculty, the capacity to form and thus prepare action. This very important part of mental activity has rarely been the subject of any special study or discipline. Only those who want, for some reason, to exercise a strict control over their mental activities think of observing and disciplining this faculty of formation; and as soon as they try it, they have to face difficulties so great that they appear almost insurmountable.
And yet control over this formative activity of the mind is one of the most important aspects of self-education; one can say that without it no mental mastery is possible. As far as study is concerned, all ideas are acceptable and should be included in the synthesis, whose very function is to become more and more rich and complex; but where action is concerned, it is just the opposite. The ideas that are accepted for translation into action should be strictly controlled and only those that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have no influence on the action. This work of mental purification should be done very regularly in order to secure a complete control over one's actions.
For this purpose, it is good to set apart some time every day when one can quietly go over one's thoughts and put one's synthesis in order. Once the habit is acquired, you can maintain control over your thoughts even during work and action, allowing only those which are useful for what you are doing to come to the surface. Particularly, if you have continued to cultivate the power of concentration and attention, only the thoughts that are needed will be allowed to enter the active external consciousness and they then become all the more dynamic and effective. And if, in the intensity of concentration, it becomes necessary not to think at all, all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the inspirations that come from there.
But even before reaching this point, silence in itself is supremely useful, because in most people who have a somewhat developed and active mind, the mind is never at rest. During the day, its activity is kept under a certain control, but at night, during the sleep of the body, the control of the waking state is almost completely removed and the mind indulges in activities which are sometimes excessive and often incoherent. This creates a great stress which leads to fatigue and the diminution of the intellectual faculties.
The fact is that like all the other parts of the human being, the mind too needs rest and it will not have this rest unless we know how to provide it. The art of resting one's mind is something to be acquired. Changing one's mental activity is certainly one way of resting; but the greatest possible rest is silence. And as far as the mental faculties are concerned a few minutes passed in the calm of silence are a more effective rest than hours of sleep.
When one has learned to silence the mind at will and to concentrate it in receptive silence, then there will be no problem that cannot be solved, no mental difficulty whose solution cannot be found. When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquillity, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. Bulletin, November 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:In the end is my beginning. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 2:In the end you have only you. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 3:In the end, everything is a gag. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 4:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 5:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 6:In the end, it's all about perseverance. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 7:He that is hard to please, may get nothing in the end. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 8:Still, in the end, we all die just the same. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 9:Man will have to go beyond intellect in the end. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 10:What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 11:I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 12:An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 13:if you put your trust in God, you'll be all right in the end. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 14:Love for yourselves means [in the end] love for everything. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 15:In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 16:In the end you should always do the right thing even if it's hard. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 17:In the end, when it's over, all that matters is what you've done. ~ alexander-the-great, @wisdomtrove 18:Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 19:In the end we must have people to match our principles, not the reverse. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 20:The ways of the gods are long, but in the end they are not without strength. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 21:Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 22:In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 23:With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 24:Wisdom makes a slow defense against trouble, though a sure one in the end. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 25:In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 26:Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 27:If you let women have their way, you will generally get even with them in the end. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 28:What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 29:In the end, dear friend, it is always between us and God, not between us and them. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 30:You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 31:In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 32:If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 33:It will all be better in the end and if it is not better then it must not be the end yet ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 34:Breaking old habits and forming new ones always takes time, but it is worth it in the end. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 35:In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 36:Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 37:Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 38:A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 39:The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 40:In the end, the treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 41:Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 42:One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 43:In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 44:In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 45:In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 46:It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 47:In the end, it is the person you become, not the things you have achieved, that is the most important. ~ les-brown, @wisdomtrove 48:So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 49:I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 50:A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 51:Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 52:For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 53:The parties are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 54:God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair? ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 55:In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 56:We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 57:Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 58:Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, in the end, will attain the state of perfection. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 59:In the end, these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go? ~ buddha, @wisdomtrove 60:In the end, we are not the roles we play. We are the light that animates every soul in the dance we call life. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 61:Please, don't worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this Earth. Life is fleeting. ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 62:Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 63:You're still alive. And that means you'll love and be loved... and in the end, nothing else really matters. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 64:Because in the end, and no matter how hard it is, acceptance helps people move on with the rest of their lives. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 65:And in the end, we were all just humans... Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 66:Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 67:I've a long list of things I don't know how I've done, but I've done them. In the end, it's always about perseverance. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 68:Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 69:For many, religion has to do with what we are allowed to do and not allowed to do. In the end, that doesn't bear fruit. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 70:In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 71:There is a choice you have to make in everything you do. So keep in mind that in the end, the choice you make, makes you. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 72:An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown ~ richard-bach, @wisdomtrove 73:The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 74:The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race. ~ booker-t-washington, @wisdomtrove 75:In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 76:The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 77:We may place blame, give reasons, and even have excuses; but in the end, it is an act of cowardice to not follow your dreams. ~ steve-maraboli, @wisdomtrove 78:The efforts of governments alone will never be enough. In the end, the people must choose and the people must help themselves. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 79:In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 80:I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 81:In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 82:You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 83:For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 84:Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 85:God is out there watching you, even when you're away from home and that if you put your trust in God, you'll be all right in the end. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 86:Two classes of people lose money; those who are too weak to guard what they have; those who win money by trick. They both lose in the end. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 87:We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness. ~ omar-khayyam, @wisdomtrove 88:Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 89:All we really want in the end is to be connected once again with the Truth of our being, to realize what it is that wears this mask of self. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 90:Courage allows the successful woman to fail - and to learn powerful lessons from the failure - so that in the end, she didn't fail at all. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 91:As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 92:In the end, you really want to make the best film that you can, and in the reality of the filmmaking world, you have things like budgets. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 93:But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 94:If people are jumping down people's throats all the time, in the end, they'll just shrivel up like a flower shrivels up that's not watered. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 95:One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 96:I stand for truth. Truth will never ally itself with falsehood. Even if all the world should be against me, Truth must prevail in the end. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 97:Life is painful. Change is painful. Growth is painful. But in the end, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong. ~ marc-and-angel-chernoff, @wisdomtrove 98:they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 99:I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments. ~ dr-seuss, @wisdomtrove 100:The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 101:In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 102:The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end. ~ francis-bacon, @wisdomtrove 103:A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 104:Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 105:Follow the path of serenity. Why lose your temper if by losing it you offend God, trouble your neighbor and in the end have to set things aright anyway? ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 106:Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 107:Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver ... in the end, the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 108:I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 109: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 110:I'm not perfect, either. In the end, it's only God's judgement that matters, and I've learned enough to know that no one can presume to know the will of God. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 111:There comes a moment when we all must realize that life is short, and in the end the only thing that really counts is not how others see us, but how God sees us. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 112:For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 113:I fear not, I see not reason for fear. In the end we will be the victors. For though at times the flame of liberty may cease to shine, the ember will never expire. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 114:In the end, you should always do the right thing, even if it's hard. I know that might not help you and that the right thing isn't always so easy to figure out. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 115:In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends& 116:Like most trends, at the beginning it's driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 117:In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 118:This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 119:I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 120:If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 121:I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 122:We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 123:The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 124:For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 125:It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 126:He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . . ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 127:In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 128:In the end, we shall recognize our song and sing it well. You may feel a little warbly at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you’ll find your way home. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 129:There can be no profit in the making or selling of things to be destroyed in war. Men may think that they have such profit, but in the end the profit will turn out to be a loss. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 130:God doesn't tell you to do hard things so He can stand back and laugh and watch you struggle. He tells you to do things the things that He knows are gonna work out to your good in the end. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 131:If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 132:I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 133:A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 134:I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 135:Then there is the way that was taught two thousand years ago - of overcoming evil with good, which is my way, the way Jesus taught. Never loose faith: God's way is bound to prevail in the end. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 136:Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 137:He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 138:Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 139:Q: What is the value of spiritual books? M: They help in dispelling ignorance. They are useful in the beginning, but become a hindrance in the end. One must know when to discard them. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 140:I know few significant questions of public policy which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 141:He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 142:Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 143:My mother told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 144:One of the wonderful things about science is that when scientists don’t know something, they can try out all kinds of theories and conjunctures, but in the end they can just admit their ignorance. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 145:Emotions come and go and can't be controlled so there's no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 146:What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 147:Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 148:If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 149:You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 150:In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 151:We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 152:In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 153:Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 154:I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 155:Hope - Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us... A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead. ~ barack-obama, @wisdomtrove 156:It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 157:High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 158:In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 159:What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 160:As an adventurer... I try to protect against the downside. I make sure I have covered as many eventualities as I can. In the end, you have to take calculated risks; otherwise you're going to sit in mothballs all day and do nothing. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 161:For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 162:When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it& 163:Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes‚Äîlike the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night ‚Äîlittle flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 164:Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense ‘I am.’ In the end, you reach a state of non-grasping, of joyful non-attachment, of inner ease and freedom indescribable, yet wonderfully real. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 165:When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it& 166:If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 167:The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 168:I looked at the ceiling and wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries. That's what Wire man says. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 169:Pompey had fought brilliantly and in the end routed Caesar's whole force... but either he was unable to or else he feared to push on. Caesar [said] to his friends: & 170:Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 171:Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 172:The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 173:The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 174:You'll make mistakes and struggle like everyone, but when you are with the right person, you'll almost perfect joy, like you are the luckiest person who ever lived. And that means you'll love and be loved... and in the end, nothing else really matters. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 175:The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 176:Don't be afraid to borrow if someone else has said it well. Winston Churchill said, The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. That's so well said. You could stay up all night and not think of that. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 177:Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 178:Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 179:Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 180:When I asked him -Mr.Henry Ford- if he ever worried, he replied: "No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about? ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 181:A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 182:If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 183:I constantly caution our teams: & 184:Credentials are like potential energy, the compliments of a name on paper, in documents, word of mouth, but faith is like kinetic energy, the motion and the force that which is witnessed. Hence in the end it is the faith rather than the credentials that really takes you places. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 185:The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I've chosen to follow. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 186:Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 187:Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 188:If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. You can try and try, and in the end the cat will look up at you and say, “Meow.” Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless. You can spend the rest of your life trying to teach a cat to bark. ~ byron-katie, @wisdomtrove 189:In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 190:An expectation was there, mixed in with so many other emotions - excitement, resignation, hesitation, confusion, fear - that would well up then wither on the vine. You're optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 191:People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It’s really that simple. Once you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 192:Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 193:When life and death are seen as essential to each other, as two aspects of one being, that is immortality. To see the end in the beginning and beginning in the end is the intimation of eternity. Definitely, immortality is not continuity. Only the process of change continues. Nothing lasts. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 194:Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 195:The Church will always be renewed when our attention shifts from ourselves to those who need our care. The blessing of Jesus always comes to us through the poor. The most remarkable experience of those who work with the poor is that, in the end, the poor give more than they receive. They give food to us. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 196:When ice appears out of doors, and boys seize it up while it is solid, at first they experience new pleasures. But in the end their pride will not agree to let it go, but their acquisition is not good for them if it stays in their hands. In the same way an identical desire drives lovers to act and not to act. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 197:Listen up! I've got some really good news! Everything is okay! Being alive is weird and scary and never really makes sense, but that's all right because life is like a dream . . . so there's nothing to be alarmed about . . . it all turns out all right in the end . . . because when you die in a dream, you wake up. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 198: M: Must one suffer only for one's own sins? Are we really separate? In this vast ocean of life, we suffer for the sins of others, and make others suffer for our sins. Of course, the law of balance rules Supreme and accounts are squared in the end. But while life lasts, we affect each other deeply. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 199:Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 200:I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 201:It's like pouring oil from one glass to another down a line - in the end, you don't have any oil left; it is all stuck to the inside of the glasses. This way, 1,000 dollars become 100 dollars by the time it reaches the people. Whereas if we get 10 dollars, we add our effort to it and the money multiplies. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 202:Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 203:The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 204:... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 205:A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 206:Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 207:The persons whom you have idolized can never, in the end, be ungrateful, and, probably, at the time of retreat they still do justice to your heart. But, so long as you must draw persons too near you, a temporary recoil is sure to follow. It is the character striving to defend itself from a heating and suffocating action upon it. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 208:What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 209:Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 210:I remember that throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always... whenever you are in doubt that that is God's way - the way the world is meant to be. Think of that and then try to do His way. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 211:In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 212:In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So, what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 213:Look, I think that when we started Virgin Atlantic 30 years ago, we had one 747 competing with the airlines that had an average of 300 planes each. Every single one of those have gone bankrupt because they didn't have customer service. They had might, but they didn't have customer service, so customer service is everything in the end. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 214:Healing of the physical without the change in the mental and spiritual aspects brings little real help to the individual in the end. How true, because the mind and the body imprint and imitate each other. What we think, we become. What we become, we think. It's an insidious process that can predispose us to illness or it can lead us to health. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 215:In doing your best serving others for free, a lot of eyebrows will raise and sneers will curve many a - faces. But in the end those incredulous to what you put up with to help, no longer matter. It's not between you and those snobs, but with whom you have given your hand to lift, and of course to God who Is watching and noting it in your book. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 216:There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 217:The government in business may waste time and money without rendering service. In the end the public pays in taxes. The corporation cannot waste or it will fall. It cannot make unfair rulings or give high-handed, expensive service, for there are not enough people willing to accept inferior service to make a volume of business that will pay dividends. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 218:In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 219:Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it& 220:Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel every inquietude, indulge every caprice, and perhaps at last be jilted into the bargain. True glory, on the other hand, resembles a woman of sense; her admirers must play no tricks. They feel no great anxiety, for they are sure in the end of being rewarded in proportion to their merit. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 221:The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 222:It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 223:Mankind are in the end always governed by superiority of intellectual faculties, and none are more sensible of this than the military profession. When, on my return from Italy, I assumed the dress of the Institute, and associated with men of science, I knew what I was doing: I was sure of not being misunderstood by the lowest drummer boy in the army. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 224:My biggest faults is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it? ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 225:Recruiting is hard. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it's ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? I ask everybody that: & 226:Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone? ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 227:To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 228:What we need to know about loving is no great mystery. We all know what constitutes loving behavior; we need but act upon it, not continually question it. Over-analysis often confuses the issue and in the end brings us no closer to insight. We sometimes become too busy classifying, separating, and examining, to remember that love is easy. It's we who make it complicated. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 229:It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed - not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 230:A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 231:The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 232:poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate.We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe in the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart's blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 233:I think the Congress will do the right thing. I think that they've - you know, they got into certain arguments and they start worrying about assessing blame, and there is a little demagoguery, but in the end, something this important, they'll do the right thing. So this really is an economic Pearl Harbor. That sounds melodramatic, but I've never used that phrase before. And this really is one. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 234:Stand-up is an art but since it's humor and it's funny - a lot of guys that don't think it's art are probably coming from the angle that they don't want to take it so seriously. I've always looked at it as an art but I don't look at it as a pretentious art. I understand it has to be taken lightly because it is just comedy in the end, but the good stand-up comics are someone with something to say. ~ mitch-hedberg, @wisdomtrove 235:While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 236:Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature... in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 237:What good is talking if neither of you are really committed? If one of you had an affair or got addicted to drugs or was abusive, simply talking about it wouldn;t take the hurt away; or fix the trust that's been lost. In the end, marriage comes down to actions. I think people talk too much about the things that bother them, instead of actually doing the little things that keep a marriage strong. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 238:Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 239:Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 240:There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 241:Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. . . look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 242:Life is kind of like a party. You invite a lot of people, some leave early, some stay all night, some laugh with you, some laugh at you, and some show up really late. But in the end, after the fun, there are a few who stay to help you clean up the mess. And most of the time, they aren’t even the ones who made the mess. These people are your real friends in life. They are the ones who matter most. ~ marc-and-angel-chernoff, @wisdomtrove 243:Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it - a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 244:It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 245:Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. Give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps, to the south and the jungles, to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 246:A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 247:Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, & 248:A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 249:Kids know they can't make it alone, yet at the same time, built into each one of us, is a survival ethic. It says, "Nobody cares and you have to look out for yourself and if you don't, you'll die." These two things work against each other. I think most kids are very frightened of their parents, and that's what all fairy tales reflect: Parents will fail you and you'll be left on your own. But, of course, everything comes out right in the end and the parents take you back. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 250:The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 251:Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky& 252:The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 253:He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 254:In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved... He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 255:That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what‚Äîor who‚Äîis available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, & 256:It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 257:The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents& 258:Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' & 259:But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 260:In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 261:Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 262:Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 263:The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 264:For why, my brothers and sisters, would you rejoice in silver? Either your silver will perish, or you will, and no one knows which will perish first. For neither can you remain here always, nor can silver remain here always; so also with gold, wardrobes, houses, money, real estate-and in the end, even the light by which we enjoy all these things. So do not be willing then to rejoice in such things as these. Rejoice instead in the light that has no setting; rejoice in the dawn which no yesterday precedes, and no tomorrow follows. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 265:No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 266:It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 267:There are few master teachers in life. ... But there are many who can listen to life so well that they can hear the vastness in everything and in you. A teacher is someone who has learned to listen to life. Someone who has found a way to listen well. Any real teacher is only a finger pointing. In the end, we may find out more by not following our teachers but by following what our teachers follow for themselves. From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secrets of life. You will have to listen for yourself. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 268:And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 269:Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 270:No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about anymore and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 271:If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama. This is the part that thinks there’s a reason not to be happy. You have to transcend the personal, and as you do, you will naturally awaken to the higher aspects of your being. In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You’re going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Everyone leaves, in the end. ~ Tara Sim, #NFDB
2:In the end is my beginning. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
3:everyone dies in the end. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
4:In the end only kindness matters ~ Jewel, #NFDB
5:I always win in the end ~ Lisa Scottoline, #NFDB
6:In the end only kindness matters. ~ Jewel, #NFDB
7:In the end, everything matters. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
8:In the end a lie is a lie. ~ Bashar al Assad, #NFDB
9:In the end, there is no end. ~ Robert Lowell, #NFDB
10:In the end, we are our choices. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
11:In the end, we are our choices. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
12:In the end....everything matters. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
13:In the end, oh I know, ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini, #NFDB
14:In the end, We're all the same. ~ Ben Kweller, #NFDB
15:Hard work always wins in the end. ~ Lucas Till, #NFDB
16:Time takes it all in the end... ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
17:We're all stories, in the end. ~ Steven Moffat, #NFDB
18:Everything comes up in the end. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
19:In the end, everything is simple. ~ Jean Gebser, #NFDB
20:In the end we all die anyway. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
21:In the end you have only you. ~ Leo F Buscaglia, #NFDB
22:Death comes for us all in the end. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
23:In the end, everything is simple. ~ Jean Gebser, #NFDB
24:...everyone goes home in the end. ~ Emma Donoghue, #NFDB
25:In the end, it doesn't even matter. ~ Linkin Park, #NFDB
26:In the end there is only Matisse. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
27:I, in the end, make art for myself. ~ Anish Kapoor, #NFDB
28:In the end, everything is a gag. ~ Charlie Chaplin, #NFDB
29:In the end, we both lost. So it goes. ~ John Green, #NFDB
30:Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
31:In the end, there was only Brandenburg. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
32:In the end, we wear out our worries. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
33:In the end words are just wind. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
34:In the end you only answer to yourself! ~ Ryk Brown, #NFDB
35:In the end, you will always kneel. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB
36:What’s inflexible breaks in the end, ~ Carmen Caine, #NFDB
37:In the end, what counts is what you do. ~ Leroy Hood, #NFDB
38:Liars are always found out in the end. ~ Julie Berry, #NFDB
39:The truth will come out in the end. ~ Joseph Estrada, #NFDB
40:his men will betray you in the end—you ~ Scott McEwen, #NFDB
41:I am, in the end, what you made me. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
42:All stories are one story, in the end. ~ Nick Harkaway, #NFDB
43:Injustice in the end produces independence. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
44:In the end, all disguises must drop. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
45:In the end it didn’t matter of course. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
46:In the end, it's all about perseverance. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
47:In the end, the Wheel crushes us all. ~ Margaret Stohl, #NFDB
48:In the end, winning is sleeping better. ~ Jodie Foster, #NFDB
49:In the end, your belly was your emperor. ~ Min Jin Lee, #NFDB
50:So that, in the end, there was no end. ~ Patrick White, #NFDB
51:we're just paper on a shelf, in the end ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
52:Every place is the same place in the end. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
53:In the end, my cock was all I had. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
54:In the end, there is only time for love. ~ Ren e Ahdieh, #NFDB
55:In the end, the work shows if you're good. ~ Scott Caan, #NFDB
56:In the end, we'll all become stories. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
57:In the end, what would Michele’s life be? A ~ Leon Uris, #NFDB
58:In the end, the body betrayed everyone. ~ Gail Tsukiyama, #NFDB
59:It will come all right in the end. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
60:There is, in the end, the letting go. ~ Marya Hornbacher, #NFDB
61:Avoidance always prolongs pain, in the end. ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
62:In the end we always wear out our worries. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
63:In the end, all that's left is an echo. ~ Kimberly Derting, #NFDB
64:In the end, if you stay happy, you win. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
65:In the end, rational policy is always good. ~ Paul Keating, #NFDB
66:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
67:In the end, your integrity is all you've got. ~ Jack Welch, #NFDB
68:Passion, not pedigree, will win in the end. ~ Jon Bon Jovi, #NFDB
69:We're all bitches in the end, aren't we... ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
70:All the hardship, in the end, was worth it. ~ Pittacus Lore, #NFDB
71:Failure usually works for me in the end. ~ David Hasselhoff, #NFDB
72:In the end, all solutions are temporary. ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
73:In the end, everyone loses everyone. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
74:In the end they'll judge me anyway, so whatever. ~ Kid Cudi, #NFDB
75:Zealous in the commencement, careless in the end. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
76:Everything but the truth goes away in the end. ~ Emily Henry, #NFDB
77:In the end, all you have is your reputation. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
78:In the end, everyone can do without fathers ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
79:In the end, life makes victims of us all. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
80:Culture is always about politics in the end. ~ Yasmina Khadra, #NFDB
81:Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
82:In the end all collaborations are love stories. ~ Twyla Tharp, #NFDB
83:In the end, climate change is a math problem. ~ Bill McKibben, #NFDB
84:In the end, it’s all a question of balance. ~ Rohinton Mistry, #NFDB
85:In the end, the sum of my vices is all me. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
86:In the end, what matters is this: I survived. ~ Gail Honeyman, #NFDB
87:In the end you’ll see you won’t stop me. ~ Christina Aguilera, #NFDB
88:He that is hard to please, may get nothing in the end. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
89:In the end one experiences only oneself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
90:In the end one only experiences oneself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
91:Still, in the end, we all die just the same. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
92:The real deal is always going to win in the end. ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
93:We are all strangers to each other in the end. ~ Julie Buxbaum, #NFDB
94:In the end it doesn't matter what you do. ~ Harrison Birtwistle, #NFDB
95:It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition. ~ Bono, #NFDB
96:What counts in the end is what the government does. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
97:Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
98:In the end, it's only the moments that we have. ~ Susan Vreeland, #NFDB
99:...in the end, we all die. But we don't die equal. ~ David Estes, #NFDB
100:It was all about control, in the end, and I had it. ~ Megan Hart, #NFDB
101:Me, myself and I. That's all I got in the end. ~ Beyonce Knowles, #NFDB
102:The weakest are always the cruelest,
in the end. ~ Megan Derr,#NFDB
103:I believe that in the end the truth will conquer. ~ John Wycliffe, #NFDB
104:Just what you want to be, you will be in the end. ~ Justin Hayward, #NFDB
105:but in the end all things work together for good. ~ Louis Zamperini, #NFDB
106:I desire the things that will destroy me in the end. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
107:In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet. ~ Robert Lowell, #NFDB
108:In the end, everyone must come to Arunachala. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
109:Never give up. In the end it'll all be worth it. ~ Leighton Meester, #NFDB
110:People will always show their true selves in the end. ~ Leona Lewis, #NFDB
111:A people that loves freedom will in the end be free. ~ Simon Bolivar, #NFDB
112:If it's bitter at the start, then it's sweeter in the end. ~ Madonna, #NFDB
113:Lovers don't meet in the end, they are in each other forever. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
114:Man will have to go beyond intellect in the end. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
115:Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
116:Youth is no protection; in the end, life scars us all. ~ C W Gortner, #NFDB
117:Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
118:Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
119:In the end it wouldn't be the lucky ones left standing. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
120:In the end it wouldn’t be the lucky ones left standing. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
121:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
122:In the end, we only regret the chances we didn't take. ~ Taylor Swift, #NFDB
123:Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end? ~ Lee Smith, #NFDB
124:Just remind yourself that it will be worth it in the end ~ Kim Chance, #NFDB
125:Leaders lead but in the end it's the people who deliver. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
126:Most people, in the end, really are all on their own. ~ Nova Ren Suma, #NFDB
127:Stirring is OK. It just depends what happens in the end. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
128:There where one burns books, one in the end burns men. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
129:We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
130:You’re slow,” said Loki, “but you get there in the end. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
131:And all we have, in the end, are the choices we make. ~ Naomi Alderman, #NFDB
132:Because all bad little vampires see me in the end ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
133:But fight we must; and conquer we shall; in the end. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
134:In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
135:In the end, only the truth will survive. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
136:In the end, the only thing between us was silence. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick, #NFDB
137:In the end, we’re all just victims of our perceptions. ~ Charlie Human, #NFDB
138:Princess, in the end, life makes victims of us all. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
139:That's all that really matters in the end. Stories. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
140:You're good, boy, but it won't help you, in the end. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
141:animal. In the end it was his passion that did him in. ~ Faye Kellerman, #NFDB
142:Change is often like that—hard, but good in the end. ~ Jessica N Turner, #NFDB
143:History, in the end, becomes a form of irony. ~ Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, #NFDB
144:I am the victor. In the end nothing else matters. ~ Christopher Paolini, #NFDB
145:In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. ~ Cormac McCarthy, #NFDB
146:Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
147:There, where one burns books, on in the end burns men. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
148:Everyone is an actor. In the end, everyone wants applause. ~ V C Andrews, #NFDB
149:In the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is. ~ Robert Wright, #NFDB
150:In the end it’s only ever been one step, and then the next. ~ Ann Leckie, #NFDB
151:In the end, there was you, and that made it all worth it ~ Penelope Ward, #NFDB
152:In the end, winning is sleeping better.” —Jodie Foster ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
153:It was hard graft all the way and a good result in the end. ~ John Tyler, #NFDB
154:Love would triumph in the end. She's make sure of it. ~ Susan Anne Mason, #NFDB
155:Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
156:The race is long but in the end it is only with YOURSELF. ~ Baz Luhrmann, #NFDB
157:There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
158:The same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end. ~ Neil Young, #NFDB
159:We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? ~ Matt Smith, #NFDB
160:What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
161:But in the end he didn't love her enough to fight for her. ~ Nicole Mones, #NFDB
162:Everything does work out in the end, one way or another. ~ Eugene Thacker, #NFDB
163:In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent. ~ Pete Docter, #NFDB
164:In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
165:It is the broken heart that makes us human in the end. ~ Melanie Rae Thon, #NFDB
166:No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg, #NFDB
167:What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
168:In the end, leaders don't decide who leads. Followers do. ~ James M Kouzes, #NFDB
169:In the end you become part of everything you hate, basically. ~ Ray Davies, #NFDB
170:I think all decision making is very instinctive, in the end. ~ Nell Hudson, #NFDB
171:I thought I had friends but in the end n*iggaz dies lonely. ~ Tupac Shakur, #NFDB
172:Life, for all its wonders, is rather flimsy in the end. ~ Samantha Shannon, #NFDB
173:Never give up. Goodness will always outrun evil in the end. ~ Anne Fortier, #NFDB
174:The woman had won. In the end, it seemed they always did. ~ Larry McMurtry, #NFDB
175:Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do. ~ Marina Abramovi, #NFDB
176:But we all still have the ability to choose, in the end. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
177:In the end all books are written for your friends. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, #NFDB
178:In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop. ~ Rem Koolhaas, #NFDB
179:In the end you will be your own undoing. You can't escape you. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
180:I set out to destroy you, but in the end, it destroyed me. ~ Natasha Knight, #NFDB
181:I walked away to get wisdom, but in the end I just walked home. ~ Lisa Loeb, #NFDB
182:There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint. ~ Leon Bloy, #NFDB
183:Treachery, though at first very cautious, in the end betrays itself. ~ Livy, #NFDB
184:we end up stronger architects in the end. Like Spartan warriors. ~ R S Grey, #NFDB
185:We're all monsters. We're all careless and cruel in the end. ~ Mackenzi Lee, #NFDB
186:Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
187:Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
188:After all, what was more important, in the end, than love? ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
189:And in the end, I lost myself in everything I knew I loved. ~ Robert M Drake, #NFDB
190:How do you live again, knowing what waits for you in the end? ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
191:If it's bitter at the start, then it's sweeter in the end. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB
192:In the end, I find my influences or inspirations where I can. ~ Lana Del Rey, #NFDB
193:In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
194:In the end, most women get the type of man they dress for. ~ Tad R Callister, #NFDB
195:In the end, this is your journey, live the life you imagined ~ Ashlyn Harris, #NFDB
196:In the end, you are going to read very few of your books again. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
197:In the end, you have to protect yourself at all times. ~ Floyd Mayweather Jr, #NFDB
198:There, where one burns books... one, in the end, burns men. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
199:Things will be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
200:Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
201:You know, Key, in the end, you just gotta pick your happiness. ~ Ika Natassa, #NFDB
202:You'll be richer in the end than a prince, if you're a friend. ~ Edgar Guest, #NFDB
203:A powerful thing, destiny. You can’t run from it. Not in the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
204:books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. ~ Joel C Rosenberg, #NFDB
205:Interesting, though, that in the end we're all just dogs. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
206:In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden. ~ Jade Chang, #NFDB
207:In the end, leaders are defined by the convictions they hold. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
208:In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. ~ Paul McCartney, #NFDB
209:In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
210:I think that in the end, a talk show is a very different animal. ~ Dan Abrams, #NFDB
211:it’s a long race and you can always outwork talent in the end ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
212:...nobody belonged to anybody but themselves. Not in the end. ~ Jordan Harper, #NFDB
213:She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories. ~ Richard Wagamese, #NFDB
214:Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
215:Xan had helped me in the end. Let him be an uncomplicated hero. ~ Kaje Harper, #NFDB
216:And, in the end, we lie awake And we dream of making our escape. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
217:and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
218:I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
219:In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO. ~ Lee Iacocca, #NFDB
220:In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
221:In the end, it's all just violets trying to come to light. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
222:In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it. ~ Ann Curry, #NFDB
223:Nostalgia an excuse not to live, kills us all in the end. ~ J Andrew Schrecker, #NFDB
224:section is to check the table in the end of the page. Independence ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
225:To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
226:You are the reason. If you want, you are the answer in the end. ~ Jon Anderson, #NFDB
227:All's well in the end, if you've only the patience to wait. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
228:...And In the End, the Love We Take Is Equal To the Love We Make. ~ The Beatles, #NFDB
229:An idea is, in the end, always stronger than circumstances. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
230:ashes or diamonds
foe or friend
we're all equal in the end ~ Roger Waters,#NFDB
231:But a wild creature will always go back to the wild, in the end. ~ Susan Cooper, #NFDB
232:But in the end, you can’t kill what you can’t see coming . . . ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
233:But we’re the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
234:Don’t get too excited. In the end, it’s neither good nor bad. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, #NFDB
235:if you put your trust in God, you’ll be all right in the end. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
236:In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people. ~ Julian Fellowes, #NFDB
237:In the end, forever, you and I will be in Heaven or Hell. Period. ~ John Corapi, #NFDB
238:In the end, I worry that my arrogance shall destroy us all. ~ Brandon Sanderson, #NFDB
239:In the end, the actor's main power is the power to say, 'No.' ~ Viggo Mortensen, #NFDB
240:In the end, the best victory is the one that looks like a defeat. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
241:In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
242:Love for yourselves means [in the end] love for everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
243:Love mistakes, as it’s us that receives blessings from them in the end. ~ Minzy, #NFDB
244:A celebration of insignificance. Is that all we are in the end? ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
245:Always remember: In the end, the surviver gets to tell the story. ~ Nancy Werlin, #NFDB
246:In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates. ~ May Sarton, #NFDB
247:In the end it happens, in some way you couldn't imagine before. ~ Paolo Giordano, #NFDB
248:In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
249:In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit. ~ Steve Jones, #NFDB
250:The perfection of intention. In the end, it is all that matters. ~ Andrew X Pham, #NFDB
251:treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself. ~ Robert Kurson, #NFDB
252:We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
253:We all lose in the end. The fight in between is all that counts. ~ Sean Dietrich, #NFDB
254:Well, it’ll be a long war. There’ll be fun for us all in the end. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB
255:And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make... ~ The Beatles, #NFDB
256:...and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
257:But all bubbles have a way of bursting or being deflated in the end. ~ Barry Gibb, #NFDB
258:But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple. ~ Leo Ornstein, #NFDB
259:Go find your joy. It's what you're going to remember in the end. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
260:In the end, I did whatever I could to stave off her nightmares. ~ Roshani Chokshi, #NFDB
261:In the end, mon cher, all that matters is that you forgive yourself ~ R J Palacio, #NFDB
262:In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone. ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
263:Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
264:The person who is ahead in the end will have the advantage. ~ Jean Claude Juncker, #NFDB
265:Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation? ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
266:What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end. ~ Howard Marks, #NFDB
267:Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
268:But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
269:In the end it seems we're just toys,easy to break and hard to mend ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
270:In the end, life teaches us what is important, and that is family. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
271:life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
272:Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end. ~ Raquel Cepeda, #NFDB
273:We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive. ~ Alexis M Smith, #NFDB
274:We like to think we’re brave, but in the end, we’re only human. ~ Samantha Shannon, #NFDB
275:What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
276:God does not pay at the end of every day, but in the end He pays. ~ Anne of Austria, #NFDB
277:I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure. ~ Jonathan Kozol, #NFDB
278:If you don't change, reality in the end forces that change upon you. ~ Stuart Wilde, #NFDB
279:In the end, it all comes down to how you cope with the unforeseen. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
280:In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
281:In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
282:In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
283:I tried so hard and got so far. But in the end, it doesnt even matter ~ Linkin Park, #NFDB
284:We thought a little longer, and in the end we simply called her Joy. ~ David Almond, #NFDB
285:When I’m patient, things usually work out for the best in the end. ~ Melody Carlson, #NFDB
286:Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too. ~ Joel C Rosenberg, #NFDB
287:A powerful thing, destiny. You can't run from it. Not in the end. ~ Richard C Morais, #NFDB
288:Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material? ~ Ellen Glasgow, #NFDB
289:Every day I did something wrong, and in the end I began to enjoy it. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
290:Everything will be okay in the end. If it is not okay,it is not the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
291:I learned that in the end, only I was responsible for my actions. ~ Juliet Marillier, #NFDB
292:In the end it seems we're just toys, easy to break and hard to mend. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
293:In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen, #NFDB
294:In the end, you should always do the right thing even if it hurts. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
295:In the end you should always do the right thing even if it's hard. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
296:It's not the principles that kill you in the end. It's the books. ~ Michael Swanwick, #NFDB
297:Most of the things we spend our lives chasing will turn to dust in the end. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
298:Sometimes what we see as our purpose hurts us in the end.” Was ~ Denise Grover Swank, #NFDB
299:The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
300:When something's hard, smiling helps us in the end, and it becomes fun. ~ Lee Taemin, #NFDB
301:Where books are burned, in the end, people will eventually burn too ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
302:All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected. ~ Jos Eduardo Agualusa, #NFDB
303:And in the end
the love you take
is equal to
the love you make ~ The Beatles,#NFDB
304:But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
305:Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
306:Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
307:Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
308:Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
309:Fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself. (45) ~ Jonathan Nasaw, #NFDB
310:In the beginning he was my salvation, but in the end I was his redemption. ~ K C Lynn, #NFDB
311:In the end it's about the work, not an award you get for the work. ~ Linda Fiorentino, #NFDB
312:In the end, it's about what you want to be, not what you want to have. ~ Derek Sivers, #NFDB
313:In the end, this armor is my skin. If it is damaged, I am damaged. ~ Aleksandr Voinov, #NFDB
314:In the end, we have nothing to lose by opening our hearts. ~ Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, #NFDB
315:It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
316:That in the end, beauty does not matter. Character is more important. ~ Candice Hern, #NFDB
317:That is why heroes are always so tragic, in the end. They are alone. ~ Stephen Hunter, #NFDB
318:That's all drugs and alcohol do, they cut off your emotions in the end. ~ Ringo Starr, #NFDB
319:The audience swelled to six in the end and we all huddled in a corner. ~ P J Kavanagh, #NFDB
320:To have no loyalty is to have no dignity, and in the end, no manhood. ~ Peter Forsyth, #NFDB
321:Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
322:All you have in the end is to look back and like the choices you've made. ~ Matt Damon, #NFDB
323:And in the end, I think, we're all just trying to survive, aren't we? ~ Janice Y K Lee, #NFDB
324:And, like all the best quests, in the end, I did it all for a girl: me ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
325:Everything will be okay in the end. And if it's not okay,, It's not the end. ~ Orizuka, #NFDB
326:I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
327:In the end, Cole St. Clair had done what he did best. Disappeared. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
328:In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
329:In the end, Spider and I were going to be forever linked. Serendipity. ~ Julie Hockley, #NFDB
330:In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
331:Maybe that's what love is, in the end: a shared illusion of safety. ~ Amanda Eyre Ward, #NFDB
332:Revenge is a good motivator, but it always disappoints in the end. ~ Cecil Castellucci, #NFDB
333:The hardest part about storytelling is knowing what happens in the end. ~ Tye Sheridan, #NFDB
334:The only thing that really matters in the end is how we choose to live. ~ Aimee Carter, #NFDB
335:We all end up dying in the end. It’s just a question of how and when. ~ Michael Monroe, #NFDB
336:And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make. ~ Paul McCartney,#NFDB
337:And, like all the best quests, in the end, I did it all for a girl: me. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
338:As for Heath, he got what he deserved in the end. He paid the price. ~ Michele Campbell, #NFDB
339:Boys never believe I can beat them... But I always win in the end. - Lila ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
340:Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
341:Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end. ~ Julie Johnson, #NFDB
342:Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ Julie Johnson, #NFDB
343:Excitement spread like fire, and in the end someone always got burned. ~ Melissa Wright, #NFDB
344:I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
345:I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs. ~ Glen Cook, #NFDB
346:In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are. ~ Julius Caesar, #NFDB
347:In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
348:In the end, Mothers are always right. No one else tells the truth. ~ Randy Susan Meyers, #NFDB
349:In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures. ~ Frank Gehry, #NFDB
350:In the end, when it's over, all that matters is what you've done. ~ Alexander the Great, #NFDB
351:It’s only the world, Kev,” he said. “It kills us all in the end, anyhow. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
352:It was words that I fell for. In the end, it was words that broke my heart. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
353:It will all be okay in the end, and if its not, then its not the end. ~ Fernando Sabino, #NFDB
354:Recklessness didn't work out for me in the end."
- Sand dan Glokta ~ Joe Abercrombie,#NFDB
355:What we want isn’t always good for us, or what we should have in the end, ~ Ella Fields, #NFDB
356:Wherever it takes me, good to know in the end, it’ll lead back to you. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
357:You were a woman walked on a leash.
And they dropped you in the end. ~ Adrienne Rich,#NFDB
358:Because in the end it is our emotions that make us weak, not our actions. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
359:Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
360:Everything will be okay in the end, if it's not okay, then it's not the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
361:If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end. ~ Kandi Steiner, #NFDB
362:In the end, it was the very fact of my existence that she couldn’t stand. ~ Kanae Minato, #NFDB
363:In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
364:In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
365:In the end, you have to write like you're not afraid of the critics. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
366:Sometimes when you're given hurdles, it makes you more creative in the end. ~ Judy Greer, #NFDB
367:That's what everyone wanted, in the end: to be part of something bigger. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
368:The ways of the gods are long, but in the end they are not without strength. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
369:We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
370:What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
371:Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
372:Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
373:In the end, a man makes his own decisions. You decide, not the machine. ~ Daniel H Wilson, #NFDB
374:In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy. ~ Learned Hand, #NFDB
375:In the end we must have people to match our principles, not the reverse. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
376:My job is to create jobs. In the end I'm going to have jobs to show for it. ~ Nikki Haley, #NFDB
377:Remember – it's a long race and you can always outwork talent in the end. ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
378:The smallest and weakest of us proved the strongest and bravest in the end. ~ Emily Rodda, #NFDB
379:The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men. ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson, #NFDB
380:The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. ~ John Green, #NFDB
381:Those who trespass in others' souls will always get burned in the end. ~ Kazuki Takahashi, #NFDB
382:You can kill time or kill yourself, it comes to the same thing in the end. ~ Elsa Triolet, #NFDB
383:In the end, all it takes is one small action, by one person. One at a time. ~ Susan Cooper, #NFDB
384:In the end, this world will go under because of the stupidity of people. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB
385:In the end, we love people into belief. We do not argue them into belief. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
386:In the end what you don't surrender, well, the world just strips away. ~ Bruce Springsteen, #NFDB
387:Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
388:She lost her fury. He’d had none. That’s how you win, in the end. ~ Michael Marshall Smith, #NFDB
389:Some work hard to acquire money only to find in the end that money acquired them. ~ LeCrae, #NFDB
390:The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society. ~ Paul Krugman, #NFDB
391:There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men. —Heinrich Heine ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
392:The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
393:Women are like salmon: In the end, they all swim back to the same place. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
394:All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
395:And anything that might hurt me would just make me stronger in the end. ~ Elizabeth Eulberg, #NFDB
396:Because in the end, every girl wants a hero, and I just made Chase hers. ~ Rachel Van Dyken, #NFDB
397:But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
398:But in the end, one-sided views make for pretty flat-looking works of art. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
399:In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism. ~ Tina Brown, #NFDB
400:In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, ~ Charles Frazier, #NFDB
401:In the end, it's all about family. That's all we have that means anything. ~ Erica Spindler, #NFDB
402:in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement — you see the difference? ~ Sarah Perry, #NFDB
403:In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.” “Pride is all I have. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
404:In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
405:In the end, the truth finds a way to surface even if you don't want it to. ~ Jennifer Lopez, #NFDB
406:In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing. ~ Richard Paul Evans, #NFDB
407:In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone. ~ Craig Finn, #NFDB
408:It is only the darkness in our own hearts that will defeat us, in the end. ~ Alison Croggon, #NFDB
409:Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die. ~ Amy Engel, #NFDB
410:The language of solace, and comets, and the girls we all become, in the end. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
411:There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty, ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
412:you'll be loved and you be loved... and in the end, nothing else matters. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
413:Everything is going to be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
414:I'd do this all over again a hundred times as long as I met you in the end. ~ Mariana Zapata, #NFDB
415:In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are ~ Gaius Julius Caesar, #NFDB
416:In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
417:In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
418:In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
419:In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls. ~ Robert Harris, #NFDB
420:In the end there is nothing more unattractive to men than radical feminism. ~ Helen Fielding, #NFDB
421:In the end we're all searching for our home, that one place where we belong. ~ Masiela Lusha, #NFDB
422:In the fight between biology and morality, biology has commonly won in the end. ~ Semir Zeki, #NFDB
423:Learn that change may bother you at first, but it will save you in the end. ~ Jennae Cecelia, #NFDB
424:Life is uncertain; in the end we control only a single thing: our own thoughts. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
425:OPPORTUNITIES MAY COME AND GO, BUT IN THE END, HARD WORK IS ALL WE CAN MEASURE. ~ Jeff Goins, #NFDB
426:Satan is to be punished eternally in the end, but for a while he triumphs. ~ Benjamin Haydon, #NFDB
427:Somehow, it seems like in the end, I was the only person left behind, all alone. ~ Ai Yazawa, #NFDB
428:The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we'll get. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
429:We all face death in the end. But on the way, be careful never to hurt a human heart! ~ Rumi, #NFDB
430:We each have our belssings and our curses. In the end it makes us equals. ~ Elizabeth Haydon, #NFDB
431:We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
432:What does any of it matter in the end but who we loved and how we loved them. ~ Sandra Kring, #NFDB
433:What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
434:What will tell in the end will be character and not a knowledge of letters. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
435:With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
436:All thy passions in the end became virtues, and all thy devils, angels. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
437:But in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement—you see the difference? ~ Sarah Perry, #NFDB
438:Everything gets better in the end. If it's not better, it's not quite the end. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
439:He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
440:He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
441:In the end is my beginning… That’s a quotation I’ve often heard people say. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
442:In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are. ~ Gaius Julius Caesar, #NFDB
443:In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
444:It's ironic, isn't it? How hope keeps us breathing just to kill us in the end. ~ Nicole Lyons, #NFDB
445:Tell Liz,' I say, 'the mean girl totally got what she deserved in the end. ~ Courtney Summers, #NFDB
446:The greatest leaders build organizations that, in the end, don't need them. ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
447:the things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
448:We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
449:Wisdom makes a slow defense against trouble, though a sure one in the end. ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
450:Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
451:in the end it comes down to a who and a why. Only one who. And one lone why. ~ Henning Mankell, #NFDB
452:In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
453:In the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate. ~ Anthony Powell, #NFDB
454:In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
455:In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
456:In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world. ~ Graciela Iturbide, #NFDB
457:In the end, the only truly intimate relationships are those between two people. ~ Yasmina Reza, #NFDB
458:Maybe in the end you can’t run from who you are without destroying your life. ~ Kristin Harmel, #NFDB
459:Nature will always win in the end, as it must if our species is to survive. ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
460:The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
461:The things that you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. ~ John Green, #NFDB
462:We let it in, we give it out, and in the end what's it all about? It must be love. ~ Kate Bush, #NFDB
463:You can't play the role of a victim all your life without becoming one in the end. ~ Danilo Ki, #NFDB
464:you just want a thing hard enough and keep on trying, you do get it in the end. ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
465:A people without religion will in the end find out that it has nothing to live for. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
466:Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end. ~ Lauren DeStefano, #NFDB
467:Because, in the end, without love all our effort is wasted, all we do is in vain. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
468:Everything will be okay in the end. If it`s not okay, than there is always beer ~ Granger Smith, #NFDB
469:Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
470:Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
471:If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them. ~ Charles Yu, #NFDB
472:I have to admit, in the end, I like to surrender to someone; the person I love. ~ Laura Pausini, #NFDB
473:I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other. — ~ Sara Novi, #NFDB
474:In the end leaders are leaders. They get the credit and they get the blame. ~ Michael Heseltine, #NFDB
475:In the end, you can't censor the truth, especially when it comes packaged in hot music. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
476:Life is uncertain; in the end we control only a single thing: our own thoughts. He ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
477:The wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
478:They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
479:Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
480:Words too soft for me to hear at this distance. But in the end, the words reach me. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
481:Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
482:You can't play the role of a victim all your life without becoming one in the end. ~ Danilo Kis, #NFDB
483:And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
484:Because," I said finally, "in the end, she couldn't leave her family behind. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
485:Boomerang arrow, Kate -- It comes back to you in the end. Boomerang. Respect it. ~ Matt Fraction, #NFDB
486:Everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. —ANONYMOUS ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
487:Her Leo, so bright, so beautiful.
And in the end, so catastrophically flawed. ~ Sherry Thomas,#NFDB
488:He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end. ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
489:how hard you worked for what you wanted. how cruelly fate betrayed you in the end. ~ Lauren Kate, #NFDB
490:I don't really follow market research. In the end, I respond to my own instincts. ~ Anna Wintour, #NFDB
491:If you continue to dream, if you never abandon your dream, it will come true in the end. ~ Junsu, #NFDB
492:I have read the last page of the Bible and I know for sure that we win in the end. ~ Greg Laurie, #NFDB
493:...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other. ~ Sara Novi, #NFDB
494:In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination. ~ Steve Case, #NFDB
495:In the end, I sold my soul." he had said, and Abby had replied "That wasn’t the end. ~ Jo Walton, #NFDB
496:In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
497:In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
498:In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual. ~ Shahzia Sikander, #NFDB
499:In the end, we have two choices: both God and happiness neither God nor happiness ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
500:In the end we're all Springer guests, really, we just haven't been on the show. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
501:Man's tragedy is that when he can do something, in the end he will always do it ~ Jacques Attali, #NFDB
502:Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid in the end. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
503:Sometimes love
is that fucked up movie
where everyone dies
in the end. ~ Robert M Drake,#NFDB
504:The pace of growth goes on increasing and in the end it escapes our control. ~ David Lagercrantz, #NFDB
505:There is no weapon in the end as difficult to overcome as the tongue of an enemy. ~ Andre Norton, #NFDB
506:What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
507:What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
508:You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself. ~ Edna Ferber, #NFDB
509:And in the end, he would become a memory, pressed in my heart like a leaf in my book. ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
510:And in the end, I hadn't needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
511:And in the end, I hadn’t needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
512:Don't worry. I say that to myself every morning. It all works out in the end. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
513:Everything is going to be fine in the end, and if it's not fine, it's not the end. ~ Margaret Cho, #NFDB
514:If you just want a thing hard enough and keep on trying, you do get it in the end. ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
515:In the end everything will be okay. But hurdles have to be jumped through first. ~ Simone Elkeles, #NFDB
516:In the end, only what each of us could hold endured, and only while we endured. ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
517:In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
518:It's our choices that matter in the end. Not wishes, not words, not promises. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
519:Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
520:None of us want to make God look bad. But in the end, being fake makes God look worse. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
521:Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end. ~ Eugene Jarecki, #NFDB
522:She never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. But in the end, she hurt herself. ~ Mary Alice Monroe, #NFDB
523:Unforgiveness never brings anything but a sad life and a hard heart in the end. ~ Pepper D Basham, #NFDB
524:And then I realized, as I do right now, that in the end I’m going to break you apart. ~ K Bromberg, #NFDB
525:An inheritance gained hastily in the beginning will not be blessed in the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
526:But in the end, there were only two boys that really mattered.
Matt and Sam. ~ Sarah Ockler,#NFDB
527:Don't worry. Everything will be alright in the end. If it's alright, it's not the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
528:Especially ones where princesses get eaten by dragons and everyone dies in the end. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
529:Everything comes right in the end. Steady determination is what is required. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
530:Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end. ~ Deborah Moggach, #NFDB
531:In the end, dear friend, it is always between us and God, not between us and them. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
532:... in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
533:in the end, her innocence broke me. The very thing I would destroy, destroyed me. ~ Natasha Knight, #NFDB
534:In the end, Kaz Brekker was a just a boy, and she’d let him lead her to this fate. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
535:In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
536:…In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves. ~ Dan Brown, #NFDB
537:Life is full of constant ups and downs, and all I ask for is redemption in the end. ~ Robin Thicke, #NFDB
538:Looking for a thousand years is worth it, if in the end you find what you need. ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
539:Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know. ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
540:So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
541:Someone called actors 'sculptors in snow.' Very apt. In the end, it's all nothing. ~ Vincent Price, #NFDB
542:Some people like you, some people don't. In the end you just have to be yourself. ~ Andres Iniesta, #NFDB
543:The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, its about a woman & a city. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
544:We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories. ~ Mona Simpson, #NFDB
545:We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories. ~ Mona Simpson, #NFDB
546:You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
547:Death does not discriminate; whether saints or sinners, in the end, all are equal. ~ Tess Gerritsen, #NFDB
548:I'm convinced that, in the end, art is not for the artist but for their fellow man. ~ George Rickey, #NFDB
549:In the end all we have...are stories and methods of finding and using those stories. ~ Roger Schank, #NFDB
550:In the end, the only thing, the only person, you could ever count on was yourself. ~ Jennifer Estep, #NFDB
551:In the end, we all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to have changed. ~ Giles Deacon, #NFDB
552:Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit. ~ Storm Jameson, #NFDB
553:the things that you hope for the most are the things that will destroy you in the end. ~ John Green, #NFDB
554:Those loves which are for the sake of a colour are not love. In the end they are a disgrace. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
555:Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
556:What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures? ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
557:You don’t know what’s going to happen in the end, and that’s what the best plays are. ~ Katori Hall, #NFDB
558:You should never praise anyone until you see how he turns out in the end! ~ Saint Francis of Assisi, #NFDB
559:All love affairs are tragedies in the end unless the lovers die at the same moment. ~ Katharine Kerr, #NFDB
560:All the beautiful things in this world are lies. They count for nothing in the end. ~ Patrick McCabe, #NFDB
561:Are we not all called on to yield our children back to the world, in the end? ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
562:Everything will be alright in the end. If it's not alright, it isn't the end. ~ Kellie Bellamy Tayer, #NFDB
563:...in the end, all I want is to be with him. It's the only way my life feels complete. ~ Alyson Noel, #NFDB
564:In the end, aside from issues of pride, my screwup would make no difference at all. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
565:In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
566:. . . in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
567:In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how to let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
568:Mortals aren't meant to love perfection. It disillusions and destroys them in the end. ~ Julie Berry, #NFDB
569:Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end. ~ B J Novak, #NFDB
570:The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn’t prepare for. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
571:This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
572:Truth can be costly, but in the end it never falls short of value for the price paid. ~ Ellis Peters, #NFDB
573:All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end. ~ Czes aw Mi osz, #NFDB
574:All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end. ~ Czeslaw Milosz, #NFDB
575:And maybe that's all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking. ~ Nicole Kornher Stace, #NFDB
576:Boys never believe I can beat them, she told me back then. But I always win in the end. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
577:But in the end, it isn’t up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
578:Everything works out in the end. if it hasn't worked out yet, then it's not the end. ~ Tracy McMillan, #NFDB
579:I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
580:Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop. ~ Joy Williams, #NFDB
581:In the end it had all been too simple, too easy. But I feared my good fortune. ~ Antonio Di Benedetto, #NFDB
582:In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional. ~ Judith M Bardwick, #NFDB
583:In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie. ~ Megan Chance, #NFDB
584:In the end, the scent of books, even of autumn, depends on our sense of smell. ~ Armando Lucas Correa, #NFDB
585:In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
586:In the end, what your own troops do is more important than who they are marching against. ~ Don Meyer, #NFDB
587:In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
588:I say that habit's but a long practice, friend, and this becomes men's nature in the end. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
589:It's a risk to open your heart and care when you might find yourself alone in the end. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
590:It’s a risk to open your heart and care when you might find yourself alone in the end. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
591:Remember that in the end, the universe responds to our emotions, not to our words. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
592:Well, we’re tough,” Leonard said. “Ain’t nobody tough enough in the end,” Reba said. ~ Joe R Lansdale, #NFDB
593:What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us? ~ Naomi Alderman, #NFDB
594:Because it may seem like a small role now, but it matters. In the end, everything matters. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
595:Change is necessary and, deny it as we may, in the end change is always inevitable. ~ Frances Hardinge, #NFDB
596:I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end. Margaret Thatcher ~ Doug Dandridge, #NFDB
597:Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.’ There ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
598:If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, #NFDB
599:I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
600:In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
601:In the end, it only comes down to one thing: choosing the one you can’t live without. ~ Rachel Vincent, #NFDB
602:In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
603:In the end, The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go ~ Laozi, #NFDB
604:In the end we're all Jerry Springer guests, really, we just haven't been on the show. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
605:It stands to reason that those who assault nature will suffer at her hands in the end. ~ Emma Donoghue, #NFDB
606:It will all be better in the end and if it is not better then it must not be the end yet ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
607:Love conquers all - love is the grace that transcends any kind of injustice in the end. ~ Mark Ruffalo, #NFDB
608:No matter how bad things get, you always get yourself sorted out in the end, don’t you? ~ Joe McKinney, #NFDB
609:Protestors can have a big impact but, in the end, it’s governments that reshape the world. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
610:The truth hurts like a thorn at first; but in the end it blossoms like a rose. ~ Samuel ibn Naghrillah, #NFDB
611:the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all its birds. ~ R J Palacio, #NFDB
612:Ugliness is better than beauty. It lasts longer and in the end, gravity will get us all. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
613:You don't run amok for long with impunity, you're bound to be struck down in the end... ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
614:... all his ambitions were dust in his grave. It all came down to dust in the end. ~ Elizabeth Chadwick, #NFDB
615:Being sincere, dedicated and honest is the key. People of integrity triumph in the end. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
616:He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
617:I absentmindedly fantasize as I rest my chin in my hand. But in the end I can do nothing. ~ Osamu Dazai, #NFDB
618:I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
619:In the end I didn't get a top car any more. I had no toughness left. That was the reality. ~ Jacky Ickx, #NFDB
620:In the end, it's not the years in your life that counts. It's the life in your years. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
621:. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father. ~ Frank Pittman, #NFDB
622:In the end, you’ve got to be your own hero because everyone’s busy trying to save themselves. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
623:In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
624:The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner. ~ Mark Helprin, #NFDB
625:You can only sharpen a blade so far. In the end, it comes down to the quality of metal. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
626:And in the end it's not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
627:And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years. “I ~ Jay McLean, #NFDB
628:Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
629:But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end. ~ B J Novak, #NFDB
630:Everything works out in the end. If it hasn't worked out yet, it's not the end. Unknown ~ Tracy McMillan, #NFDB
631:In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
632:In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone. ~ Tim Willocks, #NFDB
633:In the end, I'd loved him enough to let go. From afar, I would love him forever. ~ Cynthia Leitich Smith, #NFDB
634:In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer. ~ Steve Wozniak, #NFDB
635:In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
636:In the end you can't always choose what to keep.
You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie,#NFDB
637:justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
638:Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
639:We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
640:we can teach and hope and pray, but in the end, each person controls their own actions. ~ Melissa Foster, #NFDB
641:When I was younger I wanted to be a caricaturist. In the end, I’ve become a caricature. ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
642:You know, you do need mentors, but in the end, you really just need to believe in yourself. ~ Diana Ross, #NFDB
643:And that's what destroyed you in the end: The longing for something you could never have. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
644:Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
645:Beauty doesn't matter because in the end, we all lose our looks and all we have is our heart. ~ Ann Curry, #NFDB
646:In the end, I get a really good song, and in the end, I get the hits. Yeah, I'm that good. ~ Steven Tyler, #NFDB
647:In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. ~ Richard Russo, #NFDB
648:in the end it’s the people in our lives, not the things we own, that make life worth living. ~ Cora Seton, #NFDB
649:...in the end you can't always choose what you keep. You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
650:Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
651:We can fall, but in the end we fall into God's hands, and God's hands are good hands. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
652:you can do whatever you want. In the end, we all live the life we choose for ourselves. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
653:And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans. ~ Ir ne N mirovsky, #NFDB
654:And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
655:And in the end, its not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~ James Van Praagh, #NFDB
656:A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into. ~ Helen Dunmore, #NFDB
657:As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
658:A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
659:Because, in the end, I’ve realized I’m not my father. I’m simply me. And that’s enough. ~ Jessica Sorensen, #NFDB
660:But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
661:but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all its birds. ~ R J Palacio, #NFDB
662:Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint. ~ George Clooney, #NFDB
663:Dreams are built around the word hello, but in the end fate only knows the word goodbye. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
664:Hope might leave me crushed in the end, but losing all hope somehow seemed even worse. I ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
665:I'd do this all over again a hundred times as long as I met you in the end - Tristan King ~ Mariana Zapata, #NFDB
666:If, in the end, you have not chosen Jesus Christ it will not matter what you have chosen. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
667:I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
668:In the end [after the 1905 revolution], Russia gained nothing more than a breathing spell. ~ Richard Pipes, #NFDB
669:In the end, bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren't divisible. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div, #NFDB
670:In the end, out life is simply the sum of all our consequences from the sum of all our choices. ~ Roy Huff, #NFDB
671:Is that, in the end - that capacity to hurt - the most essential ingredient for a ruler? ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
672:I think I learned pretty early that in the end, its only you. To an extent, youre all alone. ~ Lee Atwater, #NFDB
673:It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ Jack Vance, #NFDB
674:Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
675:Love is wonderful, but in the end you're better off with a man who's there for you. ~ Simone van der Vlugt, #NFDB
676:Nobody ever fails in Yoga....It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
677:The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy. ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
678:The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right. ~ Paul Farmer, #NFDB
679:We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have. ~ Marina Keegan, #NFDB
680:We come from nothing, we are going back to nothing-In the end what have we lost? Nothing! ~ Graham Chapman, #NFDB
681:You will find in the end, my dear friend, that there is nothing more oppressie than freedom. ~ Jude Morgan, #NFDB
682:You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first. ~ Ho Chi Minh, #NFDB
683:A judge who cannot punish, in the end associates themselves with the criminal. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
684:A little quiet reflection will remind me that yes to God always leads in the end to joy. ~ Elisabeth Elliot, #NFDB
685:And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
686:And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
687:German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men. ~ Susan Orlean, #NFDB
688:He who thinks to save anything by his religion, besides his soul, will be a loser in the end. ~ Joel Barlow, #NFDB
689:I am extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.” - Margaret Thatcher ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
690:In the beginning, there was house. In the end, there was house, and in the middle, there is Axwell ~ Axwell, #NFDB
691:In the end, I think it comes down to being comfortable with who you are versus where you are. ~ Eileen Cook, #NFDB
692:In the end, no matter how much you love your work, your work will not love you back. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
693:In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable. ~ Pete Hamill, #NFDB
694:In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia. ~ William Westmoreland, #NFDB
695:In the end we're all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven't been on the show. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
696:It’s about love, in the end, the ultimate message at the end of the journey to yourself. ~ Bethenny Frankel, #NFDB
697:My business is to enjoy and have fun. And why not, if in the end everything will end, right? ~ Janis Joplin, #NFDB
698:Nap time over. Gonna go be active. Do it people!!! In the end all you have is your health. ~ Scott Eastwood, #NFDB
699:Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy? ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
700:You're making an admirable go of it, but in the end, loyalty is about taking a
side. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
701:You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
702:Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how to let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
703:Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
704:But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. —Albert Camus, A Happy Death ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
705:Carry the cross patiently, and with perfect submission; and in the end it shall carry you. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
706:Everything works out in the end. If it looks like things aren’t working out, it’s not the end. ~ Mike Dooley, #NFDB
707:In the end, daughter of pandora that I am, my curiosity got the best of me. I wish it hadn't. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
708:In the end, it does not matter what a story is about. It only matters who gets to tell it. ~ Jess Rothenberg, #NFDB
709:In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
710:In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
711:Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end. ~ Sivananda, #NFDB
712:Men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing. ~ Anne Desclos, #NFDB
713:One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
714:Surely with all its greatness it could not be lost; surely in the end it must triumph over evil. ~ Zane Grey, #NFDB
715:The difference being that in films, unlike in life, good does always win over evil in the end. ~ Ajay Devgan, #NFDB
716:Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
717:You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
718:Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. ~ Helen Hayes, #NFDB
719:A poll earlier this year showed that 42 per cent of Americans believe we're in the End Times. ~ Andrew Denton, #NFDB
720:Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
721:Because in the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
722:Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end. ~ Donald Barthelme, #NFDB
723:Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
724:Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end. ~ Deborah Moggach, #NFDB
725:In the beginning, love is mostly about lying to each other. It's like that in the end, too. ~ Brian K Vaughan, #NFDB
726:In the beginning this man was my salvation but in the end it was his redemption that saved us all. ~ K C Lynn, #NFDB
727:In the end all that remains are numbers, the measurement of distances, the quantity of things. ~ Hisham Matar, #NFDB
728:In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground. ~ T a Obreht, #NFDB
729:In the end, it’s not the changes that will break your heart; it’s that tug of familiarity. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
730:In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world. ~ Jesmyn Ward, #NFDB
731:In the end, that's what it comes down to with Mitt Romney. He's running as the non-Barack Obama. ~ Howie Carr, #NFDB
732:It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ Christa Allan, #NFDB
733:No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
734:No one rides for free, and in the end, even the most seaworthy ship goes down, blub-blub-blub. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
735:The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally. ~ Joanne Greenberg, #NFDB
736:Ultimately what remains is a story. In the end, it’s the only thing any of us really owns. ~ Carole Radziwill, #NFDB
737:You can’t meet your heroes—because they are, in the end, just an idea, that lives inside you. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
738:After all, I got you in the end, didn’t I?”
“Nuhuh, I got you,” Merrick whispered in my ear. ~ Shelly Crane,#NFDB
739:And no matter how well we think we know people, the fact is we’re all strangers in the end. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
740:And so you see it is love- not scorn,not malice; only love- that makes me harm her, in the end. ~ Sarah Waters, #NFDB
741:And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have. He ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
742:Because in the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
743:Because in the end you cannot always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
744:I don't think I'm too mean to celebrities. I poke fun, but I think in the end, they always win. ~ Shane Dawson, #NFDB
745:In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. ~ Lee Iacocca, #NFDB
746:In the end, I think, the state's rigidity is a function of its own insecurity, its indecisiveness. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
747:In the end, it’s the bitches of the world who abide . . . and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya! ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
748:In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
749:In the end, the only real love in the world is found when you let yourself be truly known. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
750:In the end to add to the sum of human knowledge is the only thing a man can be truly proud of. ~ Daisy Goodwin, #NFDB
751:In the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it. ~ R K Milholland, #NFDB
752:My God, my Father, and my Friend, Do not forsake me in the end. ~ Wentworth Dillon, translation of Dies Iræ, #NFDB
753:randomness in the end is just unknowledge. the world is opaque and appearances fool us ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
754:The older she got, the quicker her mind went to death. Always, in the end, the thoughts of death. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
755:Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
756:What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
757:And in the end....the love you take....is equal to....the love you make ~ The Beatles The Beatles ~ The Beatles, #NFDB
758:(because in the end, creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience). ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
759:In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
760:In the end, love doesn’t just keep thinking about it or keep planning for it. Simply put: love does. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
761:It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
762:I've always believed in savoring the moments. In the end, they are the only things we'll have. ~ Anna Godbersen, #NFDB
763:That's all any of us have in the end, isn't it? there is death ahead of all of us. And so we live. ~ Amanda Sun, #NFDB
764:There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
765:Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could. ~ Barbara Vine, #NFDB
766:Don’t reject something just because it seems strange. It’s comfort that will kill you in the end. ~ Simon Morden, #NFDB
767:Evil might not prevail in the end, but it certainly doesn't fail to devastate in its time. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
768:for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
769:I don't see how you mortals do it, these feelings you must endure. they will ruin you in the end. ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
770:In the end,
The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on
and gained by those who let go. ~ Lao Tzu,#NFDB
771:In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
772:In the end, the only one you can ever really please is yourself. How other feels is up to them ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
773:In the end, what you do isn't going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with. ~ John Green, #NFDB
774:In the end, your creativity -- perhaps even your outrageousness -- will determine the final result. ~ Bobby Flay, #NFDB
775:I remember Mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. ~ Kayla Mueller, #NFDB
776: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
777:It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
778:it was all right to hope and noble to strive, but in the end it was doom alone which would count. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
779:Let no feeling of discouragement prey
upon you, and in the end you
are sure to succeed. ~ Abraham Lincoln,#NFDB
780:Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation. ~ Kim Stanley, #NFDB
781:The scandal happened and I made the best of it. I kind of feel like in the end it was a blessing. ~ Jessica Hahn, #NFDB
782:They live their lives, and in the end, I have to choose to live mine, no matter how much I care. ~ Abby McDonald, #NFDB
783:We really are one with Master or Bhagavan. The Master is God; one discovers it in the end. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
784:Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
785:A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself. ~ Livy, #NFDB
786:as happens in Wall Street all too often, what the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
787:For in the end, it is not Edwards or Piper or any other man who compels true faith, but God himself. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
788:I get it now. I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. ~ John Green, #NFDB
789:In the end, I didn’t know why I loved her to the point of distraction. I knew only that I did. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
790:In the end it wasn't death or terror that shattered them. It was someone else's love. How poetic. ~ Kelsey Sutton, #NFDB
791:In the end, the only one you can ever really please is yourself. How others feel is up to them. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
792:In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
793:I think you can do whatever you want. In the end, we all live the life we choose for ourselves. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
794:It's an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text. ~ Jack O Connell, #NFDB
795:Life is nothing but a bet that in the end everyone is doomed to lose. So you'd better get used! ~ William C Brown, #NFDB
796:One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
797:Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down. ~ Caryll Houselander, #NFDB
798:Proverbs 16:25 25 There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
799:Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
800:There are many things that we can understand, but in the end it is a case of 'anything is possible'. ~ David Icke, #NFDB
801:There may have been some strife between the two families, but in the end, tradition and power won out ~ Ker Dukey, #NFDB
802:They say things will work out in the end. What if they don't? Then you haven't come to the end. ~ Jeannette Walls, #NFDB
803:This was but a prelude;
where books are burnt
human-beings will be burnt
in the end ~ Heinrich Heine,#NFDB
804:To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN ~ Connie Willis, #NFDB
805:Deception may give us what we want for the present, but it will always take it away in the end. ~ Rachel Hawthorne, #NFDB
806:For a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death – the greatest leisure of all. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
807:In the end, every scheme and every science is justified by itself or it is not justified at all. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
808:In the end, it's not what you do for your children but what you've taught them to do for themselves. ~ Ann Landers, #NFDB
809:In the end i will forget you, I'm sorry to have to say that but, I will forget myself too ~ Steven Jesse Bernstein, #NFDB
810:In the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to. ~ John Green, #NFDB
811:In the end, the only person I truly want to comfort me is Haymitch, because he loves Peeta, too. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
812:In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love. ~ Dan Chaon, #NFDB
813:In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
814:In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life. ~ May Sarton, #NFDB
815:It doesn’t matter if you’re a Never, Ever, or whatever. In the end, the fairest of them all wins. ~ Soman Chainani, #NFDB
816:I think the movies that don't try to please people are movies that you respect more in the end. ~ Michael Angarano, #NFDB
817:I was just thinking that, in the end, separatism is a dead end where an awful lot of people die. ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
818:Not that they were married. They never would've married. All firemen are wedded to cinders, in the end. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
819:Only the soul matters, in the end. All else is dross. That is as true of an empire as it is of a man. ~ Eric Flint, #NFDB
820:O Rakshas, everything is always all right in the end. If it isn't all right, then it isn't the end ~ Ashwin Sanghi, #NFDB
821:Remember, in the end, it isn't what you are that holds you back, it's what you think you are not. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
822:So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
823:Sometimes it's hard to predict who will make a person happy. But in the end, that's what matters. ~ Kody Keplinger, #NFDB
824:We are all made of flesh and stars, but we all become dust in the end. Best to shine while you can. ~ Alice Feeney, #NFDB
825:We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
826:Everyone dies, but in the end it comes down to what you are willing to die for, Alexandria. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
827:Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
828:i get it now. i get it. the things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end. i ~ John Green, #NFDB
829:I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
830:I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself. ~ Kiera Van Gelder, #NFDB
831:...in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
832:In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn’t it often that way? ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
833:In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
834:In the end, maybe love just meant longing for something impossibly bright and forever out of reach. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
835:It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
836:Negotiations lasted a couple of stans but in the end, I believe we pounded out a lasting agreement. ~ Nathan Lowell, #NFDB
837:nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
838:Once I was doing a sponsored walk. In the end I managed to raise so much money, I could afford a taxi. ~ Jimmy Carr, #NFDB
839:People Should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
840:We can prevent Europe from becoming a spiritless machine that, in the end, grinds to a halt. ~ Jan Peter Balkenende, #NFDB
841:You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought. It’s still a play where everyone dies in the end. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
842:A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
843:- and since nothing lasts forever, in the end everything that once was good, always hurts like hell. ~ J A Redmerski, #NFDB
844:Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us. ~ Naomi Alderman, #NFDB
845:In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
846:In the end, the only 'good name' that matters is not how men feel about us, but how God feels about us. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
847: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
848:Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end. ~ Paul Russell, #NFDB
849:Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end. ~ John Gresham Machen, #NFDB
850:Maybe in the end it’s the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
851:No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation. ~ Frank Norris, #NFDB
852:That’s what made it worse, in the end ... when he found out. Nixon had lied to him, personally. ~ Richard Ben Cramer, #NFDB
853:the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
854:The record is about seeing death and growing from it, and in the end, being strong and being alive. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
855:the world is just as harsh a taskmaster as any other lord, and in the end it’s a lord without mercy. ~ Sigrid Undset, #NFDB
856:Thunder Road' knows who I am and what I feel, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
857:We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works. ~ Gabrielle Zevin,#NFDB
858:We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
859:Well in the end the world can crank itself up to sanctions, as it has with Zimbabwe, another sad case. ~ Helen Clark, #NFDB
860:What I like about pop music, and why I'm still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music. ~ Bono, #NFDB
861:Wishful thinking does wonders for a wishful mind; but in the end, reality always has the final say. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
862:You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought,. It's still a play where everyone dies in the end. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
863:You can't keep bearing all the weight. In the end, if you try to save everyone you'll only lose yourself. ~ Joe Hart, #NFDB
864:Aand in the end, Having my freedom, boast of nothing else But that I was a journeyman to grief? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
865:because in the end it’s the people in our lives, not the things we own, that make life worth living.” He ~ Cora Seton, #NFDB
866:Del didn’t know, but in the end, he didn’t care about thin lines and all that she-said, he-said stuff. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
867:Her brother had not yet learned that, in the end, nothing ever stayed the same. Least of all people. ~ Alison Goodman, #NFDB
868:how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
869:In the end, all we have is our memories … good or bad … and your attitudes will decide which. You ~ Steven Manchester, #NFDB
870:In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. ~ Lou Gerstner, #NFDB
871:In the end, I realized the quality of my life was determined by the people I surrounded myself with. ~ Angelica Chase, #NFDB
872:In the end it all comes down to enthusiasm. Your creativity is basically your expression of God-force. ~ Stuart Wilde, #NFDB
873:In the end, it was worth it. Every small piece of who made us who we are today. Stronger. Happier. Wholer. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
874:In the end, the only monument that matters may be the work of love we carve into the lives around us. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
875:In the end, though, maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
876:In the end we must, I think, somehow conclude that they have as much right to this planet as we have. ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
877:In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone. And i do choose to trust him. I do. ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
878:it’s easy to blame everyone else when it hurts to blame yourself. But in the end you have to face it. ~ Iris Johansen, #NFDB
879:Life is very interesting... in the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
880:Maybe, in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
881:Perhaps, in the end, the lesson is that it’s as important to say “I tried” as it is to say “I succeeded. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
882:She almost refused the food, but refusing something that might aid her in the end was simply foolish. ~ Erica Stevens, #NFDB
883:That's the point, isn't it? We have to live on, no matter how hard it gets. We'll win in the end. ~ Brandon Sanderson, #NFDB
884:The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. ~ Alexander Graham Bell, #NFDB
885:The only thing that matters in the end is your own survival. It's what humans and cockroaches are best at. ~ Susan Ee, #NFDB
886:The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end? ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
887:To lend each other a hand when we're falling, perhaps that's the only work that matters in the end. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
888:Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
889:What did she die of?
The same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances, ~ Jonathan Coe,#NFDB
890:And any anxiety that is to not especially anxious is in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
891:And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland. ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
892:Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
893:Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
894:For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
895:He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life. ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
896:He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end. ~ William Penn, #NFDB
897:I don't believe in the end that God gave me cancer, but He certainly could have stopped it and didn't. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
898:I just hug her, tell everything is fine, and walk with her to her house. It will be all OK in the end. ~ Dawn O Porter, #NFDB
899:In the end, all things, even the Beams, serve the Dark Tower. Did you think you would be any different? ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
900:In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs. ~ Martha Gellhorn, #NFDB
901:In the end it’s not the flashy and flamboyant who survive. It is those with steady hands and sober minds. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
902:In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him. ~ Kristin Cashore, #NFDB
903:In the end she just said..... All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free! ~ David Almond, #NFDB
904:In the end she was here and he was free. She had done every thing she could. And he didn't even know. ~ Marie Rutkoski, #NFDB
905:In the end the women of Christmas quietly stepped aside, making room for the One who truly matters. ~ Liz Curtis Higgs, #NFDB
906:In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence. ~ Nancy Horan, #NFDB
907:It was an odd bit of doggerel. First the flame and then the flood, in the end it's Blackthorn blood. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
908:I was afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
909:Pleasure from the senses seems like nectar at first, but it is bitter as poison in the end. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, #NFDB
910:The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
911:The odds are six to five that the light in the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train. ~ Paul Dickson, #NFDB
912:The parties are the gamesters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
913:There's no such thing as a life free of complications, Rory. We all end up making compromises in the end. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
914:Victory lies not only in the end goal but in the steps of faith we take every day toward that goal. ~ Susan May Warren, #NFDB
915:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
916:We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.”“Aye,” she said. “So it does. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
917:you don’t give up just because something is hard. The harder it is, the more it’s worth it in the end. ~ Emily Goodwin, #NFDB
918:Always trying new things is always more fun, and it can be scary, but it's always more fun in the end. ~ John Krasinski, #NFDB
919:A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good. ~ Rick Bass, #NFDB
920:... both had let him feel that interesting failures may be worth more in the end than dull successes... ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
921:God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
922:Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there's but a hair's breath between them. It's all one in the end. ~ Juliet Marillier, #NFDB
923:having tried and failed to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past”178 ~ Susan Cheever, #NFDB
924:High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless. ~ John Mayer, #NFDB
925:If you have to choose between terrible grief and terrible guilt, I think grief is easier, in the end. ~ Sharon J Bolton, #NFDB
926:In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it. ~ Louise Berliawsky Nevelson, #NFDB
927:In the end, didn’t everyone in the world at some point delude themselves in their own insular narrative? ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
928:In the end, it is not what you choose to do that changes your destiny. It is what you choose to love. ~ Matthew Sturges, #NFDB
929:In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
930:In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
931:Role models or not, in the end every man has to decide for himself just what kind of man he will be. ~ Jayne Ann Krentz, #NFDB
932:We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
933:We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
934:Yeah, well, who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy? ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
935:You saying I’m getting old?” Eddie asked, grinning. “It happens to us all, in the end. If we’re lucky. ~ Andy McDermott, #NFDB
936:All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
937:As in all good training, in the end it doesn’t much matter who trained whom; we all got what we wanted. ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
938:at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
939:Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form. ~ Franz Kafka, #NFDB
940:Haters never win. I just think that's true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB
941:He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
942:I mean what good does it do anyone to kill themselves working, because the worms will get you in the end. ~ Dorothy Gish, #NFDB
943:In the end, all we have are memories. I don't have nearly enough memories with you. I want to make some. ~ Penelope Ward, #NFDB
944:In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
945:In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. ~ Max De Pree, #NFDB
946:In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be, by remaining what we are. ~ Max DePree, #NFDB
947:In the end the number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him and he became silent. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
948:In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
949:Medals never tell the whole story. And like I said, in the end they’ve become more political than accurate. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
950:No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone. ~ Jackson Browne, #NFDB
951:One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
952:Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end—ogni ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
953:Perfection is too high a goal to strive for. Sometimes working hard brings
more satisfaction in the end. ~ Megan Hart,#NFDB
954:Procrastination is like masturbation: it's fun for awhile, but in the end, you're only screwing yourself. ~ Lauren Kunze, #NFDB
955:Sometimes, hard choices were necessary. Even if the ones you were trying to protect hated you in the end. ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
956:the odds were stacked against us. In the end, all we would ever have was the now. The beautiful now. ~ Michelle Leighton, #NFDB
957:The optimist and the pessimist both die in the end, but each lives is life in a completely different way. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
958:What’s the point? Everybody leaves you in the end. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was seventeen, ~ J L Merrow, #NFDB
959:Why not add another yarn? That’s all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories. ~ Iain Sinclair, #NFDB
960:Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
961:As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own! ~ Melissa de la Cruz, #NFDB
962:Basketball Rule #4
If you miss
enough of life's
free throws
you will pay
in the end. ~ Kwame Alexander,#NFDB
963:Being in charge can seem like a thing iron-forged, but in the end it’s just an idea everyone agrees to. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
964:Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
965:Death is inevitable for all of us. The only thing that really matters in the end is how we choose to live. ~ Aimee Carter, #NFDB
966:Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both. ~ Sarah Smarsh, #NFDB
967:He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
968:I am who I am. In the end, I feel that what I'm accountable for is doing a good job as a football coach. ~ Bill Belichick, #NFDB
969:I do not love strife, because I have always found that in the end each remains of the same opinion. ~ Catherine the Great, #NFDB
970:In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did. ~ Lisa Unger, #NFDB
971:In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
972:In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
973:I think I'll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up - it always does in the end. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
974:Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end... ~ Karel Capek, #NFDB
975:People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all. ~ Paul Russell, #NFDB
976:Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
977:All roads lead home in the end. You've got to keep that in mind always - in your work and in your life. ~ Chiwetel Ejiofor, #NFDB
978:Any concept of God, however sincerely held, that is contrary to Scripture is false, and in the end idolatrous. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
979:Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
980:He’s such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end. ~ Various, #NFDB
981:Hong Kong's people will get what they want, despite China's objections. Freedom invariably wins in the end. ~ Chris Patten, #NFDB
982:If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch, #NFDB
983:If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
984:I had a choice: Follow my heart or don’t break his. I think in the end I broke a bit of both our hearts. ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
985:In the end, we admire whatever will make us admirable. "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier ~ Bianca Bosker, #NFDB
986:It’ll all work out in the end. And if it hasn’t worked out yet, that’s because it is not the end. ~ Cap n Fatty Goodlander, #NFDB
987:It was about friendship, and pink vans, and doing the wrong thing, but still finding redemption in the end. ~ Cath Crowley, #NFDB
988:Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it. ~ Nova Ren Suma, #NFDB
989:The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being. ~ Alex Ross, #NFDB
990:They assure love from the beginning of life to its conclusion and, in the end, they govern our existence. ~ Jonathan Fenby, #NFDB
991:Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. — Heinrich Heine, German poet ~ Jennifer A Nielsen, #NFDB
992:And in the end, any lie is a hurt that burns and sometimes that burn can kill.”
-Tyra "Red" Masters ~ Kristen Ashley,#NFDB
993:As a writer you have as many bosses as you have readers...though in the end, you must answer to yourself. ~ Mark Rubinstein, #NFDB
994:As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end. ~ Robyn Hitchcock, #NFDB
995:Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, in the end, will attain the state of perfection. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
996:Fate and the roads that get placed in front of us. It’s like one huge puzzle that ultimately fits in the end. ~ Gail McHugh, #NFDB
997:In the beginning was the Word. In the end … past honor, past life, past caring … In the end will be the Word. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
998:In the end, this sort of ban can only be accomplished in one way, and that’s if gun advocates get behind it. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
999:In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was. ~ Dai Sijie, #NFDB
1000:Maybe money gets you killed in the end.” “No, no,” he said. “Money is what gets other people killed. By you. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
1001:RUNT is my FAVORITE book.It starts out small.Then,it gets exciting in the middle.In the end it settled. ~ Marion Dane Bauer, #NFDB
1002:There was no way of knowing. But in the end, he told me, “I just want to be part of a generation that tries. ~ Jon Mooallem, #NFDB
1003:The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
1004:When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself. ~ David Leavitt, #NFDB
1005:You are playing the traitor’s game, and no matter how well one wins, even the winner loses in the end. ~ Jennifer A Nielsen, #NFDB
1006:A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself. ~ Storm Jameson, #NFDB
1007:Being in charge can seem like a thing iron-forged, but in the end it’s just an idea everyone agrees to. By ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
1008:Bleed out your story. It's a painful process, but in the end you will feel lighter and we will feel enriched. ~ Ksenia Anske, #NFDB
1009:But he is the black to your grey. In the end, you are all stained with the evil that is the human condition. ~ Taran Matharu, #NFDB
1010:Determination is the thing on which you can depend. It plods along without a swing, but gets there in the end. ~ Edgar Guest, #NFDB
1011:Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it. ~ Luke Davies, #NFDB
1012:Everything, in the end, comes down to timing. One second, one minute, one hour could make all the difference. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
1013:had to go to hell to find the person I am today. And in the end, the road through hell led me straight to him. ~ A Zavarelli, #NFDB
1014:I believe that in the end that it is kindness and accommodation that are all the catalysts for real change. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
1015:I guess that's what makes life special. It's unexpected. Scary as hell. But in the end, totally worth it. ~ Rachel Van Dyken, #NFDB
1016:I haven't put much effort into my personal life and blithely believe it will turn out all right in the end. ~ David Walliams, #NFDB
1017:I’m not afraid of total failure. In the end, we’re all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about? ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
1018:In the beginning, sin is like a thread of a spider's web. But in the end, it becomes like the cable of a ship. ~ Rabbi Akiva, #NFDB
1019:In the end, all Republicans want to make sure we don't increase taxes. That's where we differ with the Democrats. ~ Tom Cole, #NFDB
1020:In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy. ~ Zo Heller, #NFDB
1021:In the end, raising money is basically a matter of going out there and asking. There are no shortcuts. ~ Georgette Mosbacher, #NFDB
1022:In the end, we all inherit a stone, after life’s waves have rolled over us—and hopefully, she’ll write upon it ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
1023:Please, don't worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this Earth. Life is fleeting. ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
1024:She read every author she could get her hands on who wrote a strong female protagonist who triumphed in the end. ~ Wendy Wax, #NFDB
1025:Sometimes what we want or don't want doesn't matter in the end. Sometimes magic doesn't listen after all. ~ Janni Lee Simner, #NFDB
1026:There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
I never even saw it coming. ~ Kami Garcia,#NFDB
1027:The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #NFDB
1028:We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end. ~ Daphne du Maurier, #NFDB
1029:We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end. ~ Daphne du Maurier, #NFDB
1030:We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it. ~ Susannah Cahalan, #NFDB
1031:We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us. ~ Sarah Ockler, #NFDB
1032:You're still alive. And that means you'll love and be loved...and in the end, nothing else really matters. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1033:and in the end, it's not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln ~ Abraham Lincoln,#NFDB
1034:As if in the end, it will be the question of whether a baker or a hunter will extend my longevity the most. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
1035:Complications are merely the road bumps of life,” he told her. “In the end, you still reach your final destination. ~ Kim Law, #NFDB
1036:For in the end, while vision guides analysis, analysis disciplines vision. The two cannot exist independently. ~ Anwar Shaikh, #NFDB
1037:I just hope it was okay, I know it wasn't perfect, I hope in the end we can laugh and say it was all worth it. ~ Ani DiFranco, #NFDB
1038:In the end, as a manager or coach, you have to keep your heart pure and do your best as a manager or a coach. ~ Tony La Russa, #NFDB
1039:In the end, I believe that the most important influence on my aesthetic has been the photographs I have taken. ~ Roger Ballen, #NFDB
1040:In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. ~ Douglas Hofstadter, #NFDB
1041:I think in the end, God's justice is redemptive, it's restorative, it's about giving life, not taking life. ~ Shane Claiborne, #NFDB
1042:I want you to remember that—it’s our choices that matter in the end. Not wishes, not words, not promises. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
1043:Maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. The universe takes care of its birds. ~ R J Palacio, #NFDB
1044:Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
1045:So this is the ride Mary chose as her last?” “Yep,” Crank said. “In the end, love is always the last ride. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
1046:The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
1047:There are, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: Is it basically about me or basically about Jesus? ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1048:Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down. ~ Brian W Aldiss, #NFDB
1049:All he had was the story of his life, which was as good as any other man’s, and in the end it is all we have. ~ Paulette Jiles, #NFDB
1050:But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. ~ Paula McLain, #NFDB
1051:Charity keepeth us in Faith and Hope, and Hope leadeth us in Charity. And in the end all shall be Charity. ~ Julian of Norwich, #NFDB
1052:Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
1053:If one only strives for caring solely about themselves in the end they will get what the wanted just themselves. ~ Paul Isaacs, #NFDB
1054:I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had. ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
1055:I know,' Roland said. 'And no matter. We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1056:I’m cancer, Luce. And not the kind that you can kill off with radiation. The kind that kills you in the end. ~ Nicole Williams, #NFDB
1057:In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1058:"In the end one has simply to admit that there are problems which one simply cannot solve on one's own resources." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1059:In the end, the church will either declare the truth of God's Word, or it will find a way to run away from it. ~ Albert Mohler, #NFDB
1060:It's not what you do, but HOW you do it. Because in the end everyone knows almost as much, just not the same way. ~ Caio Terra, #NFDB
1061:Man has tried his suicide with bigotry and hate, but in the end he'll kill himself with nothing but his waste. ~ Roger McGuinn, #NFDB
1062:Men make this great pretense of not wanting to be caught, but in the end they usually beg for a lady’s hand. ~ Elizabeth Boyle, #NFDB
1063:So, in the end, what did it matter? He could never have the girl, so why not his vengeance? Didn't he deserve it ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
1064:The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1065:What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
1066:Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love. ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
1067:All is good. Don't worry, the pain will help you. You'll get into some trouble, but it will work out in the end. ~ James Franco, #NFDB
1068:...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1069:And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB
1070:But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
1071:Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel. ~ Emir Kusturica, #NFDB
1072:He’d known only that, in the end, the Force hadn’t helped her. Or any of the other Jedi he’d heard about. ~ John Jackson Miller, #NFDB
1073:...how in the end it's impossible to understand the finality of certain things, certain words, certain moments. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
1074:In the end, democratic societies are stronger and more resilient than any autocracy. And more adaptable too. ~ Jens Stoltenberg, #NFDB
1075:In the end, it’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the matters that’s deluding mankind. It’s man himself. ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
1076:In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine. ~ Eudora Welty, #NFDB
1077:In the end, people should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1078:In the end, the effectiveness of our creative process comes down to whether we’re going to whine or do the work. ~ Blaine Hogan, #NFDB
1079:In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go? ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
1080:In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
1081:Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
1082:Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1083:The main thing is winning. Stats aren't that important, but I think in the end things will work themselves out. ~ John Harbaugh, #NFDB
1084:There is not a man born among us who dreams—at first—of service, although in the end, many are bent that way. ~ Michelle Sagara, #NFDB
1085:Use your voice for good in this world, it may not seem like it's getting you anywhere, but in the end good wins. ~ Heather Wolf, #NFDB
1086:What was it Grandmother Guri said? To be open to love? I wasn't, and it still got me in the end--unreasonable heart! ~ K M Shea, #NFDB
1087:Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1088:I always get what I want in the end. And I think I want...ornamental ironwork. For the windows of my bedchamber. ~ Robert Jordan, #NFDB
1089:I had a choice: Follow my heart or don’t break his. I think in the end I broke a bit of both our hearts. Which ~ Sophie Kinsella, #NFDB
1090:I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
1091:In the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1092:It is not where you begin, or what gifts you begin with, but what you do with them that matters in the end. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
1093:It was the stop that happened when you made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1094:Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end. ~ David Niven, #NFDB
1095:Love is the only thing that makes us strong. It’s all that matters in the end. Who we love and who loves us.” He ~ Susan Mallery, #NFDB
1096:Memories are who we are. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and Memories are what last. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1097:Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection—/in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
1098:Nothing remains the same. Everything moves on in the end. Even us. Death is nothing more than another change. ~ Santa Montefiore, #NFDB
1099:Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
1100:The things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. If not always in the way we expect. -Luna Loovegood ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1101:The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1102:This is a team game and one man doesn't win and one man doesn't lose. In the end, the best team usually wins. ~ Wilt Chamberlain, #NFDB
1103:Use your voice for good in this world, it may not seem like it is getting you anywhere, but in the end good wins. ~ Heather Wolf, #NFDB
1104:We all have a hole in our hearts. We can try to fill it with a lot of things … but in the end only Jesus fits. ~ Karen Kingsbury, #NFDB
1105:What did I tell you?" Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. "Everyone shuts their door in the end. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
1106:and in the end , we were all just humans.. drunk in the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1107:And in the end, we were all just humans...Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1108:And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1109:Because in the end, and no matter how hard it is, acceptance helps people move on with the rest of their lives. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1110:Forecasters tend to learn less and less about more and more, until in the end they know nothing about everything. ~ Edgar Fiedler, #NFDB
1111:Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end. ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
1112:I keep thinking the bad guys will win in the end and take it all away, but somehow it all seems to keep working. ~ Tom Scharpling, #NFDB
1113:In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished. ~ Brandon Sanderson, #NFDB
1114:In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1115:In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives—the climber, though he may die young, will have lived. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
1116:In the end we all agreed with their sensible view that they should not kill us, because we were their friends. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
1117:In the end, writing is not a full step toward self-healing, just a tiny, very tentative move in that direction. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1118:Life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1119:maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all its birds. ~ R J Palacio, #NFDB
1120:Once you start doing something bad, then it's easy to take the next step - and in the end, you're a moral sewer. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
1121:Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1122:The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights. ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
1123:Work, fight, live. All the sweeter. Mind after mind will shape and absorb. In the end, all will be quiet with wisdom. ~ Greg Bear, #NFDB
1124:And in the end, we were all just humans... drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1125:Anger was sharp edged and clear. Grief was messy, blurry.
But in the end both left you hollowed out inside. ~ Sarah Ockler,#NFDB
1126:Facades were heavy armor in the end. They might protect you, but they took a great deal of strength to lug around. ~ Beth Pattillo, #NFDB
1127:If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead. ~ William Law, #NFDB
1128:in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1129:In the end, people are unable to discard things either because they are attached to the past or afraid of the future. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1130:In the end we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge. ~ Charles Tart, #NFDB
1131:In the end, you will always look at the thing you're told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists. ~ Gemma Files, #NFDB
1132:Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it. ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
1133:Ka was like a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1134:one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
1135:Tibby is moderately a dear now," said Helen.
"There! I knew you'd say that in the end. Of course he's a dear. ~ E M Forster,#NFDB
1136:What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures? But what else was there to do? Give up? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1137:You think you will find meaning in your life by joining it with that of another, but in the end, you'll die alone. ~ Andy Peloquin, #NFDB
1138:Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
1139:Good, bad, they're just words. Who's to decide what is good or bad? In the end, only the consequences matter. ~ Denise Grover Swank, #NFDB
1140:I didn’t …” You start to say, I didn’t mean to, and stop. Because you never mean it, and it never matters in the end. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1141:In the end, as a leader, you are always going to get a combination of two things: what you create and what you allow. ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
1142:In the end, that's what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
1143:In the end, what will you fight for-- what got there first, what got there last or what has been there all along? ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
1144:I want you to remember that—it’s our choices that matter in the end. Not wishes, not words, not promises.” Etta ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
1145:Life is harsh and it is relentless. You will choose in the end—one way or the other. No one escapes the choice. ~ Stephen R Lawhead, #NFDB
1146:Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1147:The imposition of anomalous models and lifestyles are alien to people's identity and, in the end, are irresponsible. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1148:There’s no way to help a man who doesn’t want to be saved. In the end, it was me who needed the lifeline. Seeing ~ Corinne Michaels, #NFDB
1149:Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end? ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
1150:Also, sources of pain, such as overeating, sometimes appear to be sources of pleasure, but in the end they are not. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1151:And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ Christopher Poindexter, #NFDB
1152:Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
1153:...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
1154:But the meek (in the end) shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” (Ps. 37:11). ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
1155:Each dog marks a section of our lives, and in the end, we feed them to the dark, burying them there while we carry on. ~ Toby Barlow, #NFDB
1156:Forgiveness is tricky, Alexis, because in the end it’s more about you than it’s about the person who’s being forgiven ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
1157:He’s such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end. ~ Compton Mackenzie, #NFDB
1158:I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
1159:I didn't,,," You start to say, I didn't mean to, and stop. Because you never mean it, and it never matters in the end. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1160:If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing. ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
1161:I love sad stories,” said Enoch. “Especially ones where princesses get eaten by dragons and everyone dies in the end. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
1162:In the end countries, like people, are alone, and the real things that must be done have to be done without help. ~ Nayantara Sahgal, #NFDB
1163:In the end there doesn't
have to be anyone who
understands you...
There just has to be someone
who wants to. ~ E K Blair,#NFDB
1164:In the end, Tipping Points are the reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
1165:In the end, we always regret the choices we didn’t make, the love we didn’t accept and the dreams we didn’t fight for. ~ Savi Sharma, #NFDB
1166:In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
1167:It had been that strength that made him want her so badly, even if he wanted her to surrender it to him in the end. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
1168:I think that in the end, the people are not fooled by promotion. They want to know that something works and is right. ~ Emilio Pucci, #NFDB
1169:It's really easy to fall for someone on-set, but in the end you know, it's a representative and it's not really them. ~ Shia LaBeouf, #NFDB
1170:I've a long list of things I don't know how I've done, but I've done them. In the end, it's always about perseverance. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1171:That in the end, people should be judged by their actions, since in the end, it was actions that defined everyone. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1172:That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1173:The attention someone gives to what he or she makes is reflected in the end result, whether it is obvious or not. ~ Erik Spiekermann, #NFDB
1174:The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
1175:Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet. ~ Jeannette Walls,#NFDB
1176:We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
1177:You can’t fight destiny—taunt it, yes, but to fight it will only consume you and, in the end, destiny always wins. ~ Amelia Hutchins, #NFDB
1178:And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. ~ Christopher Poindexter, #NFDB
1179:And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you- I am at rest with you- I have come home. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1180:Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
1181:But what you bring back with you in the end, he said, might not be what you started out in search of to begin with ~ Susanna Kearsley, #NFDB
1182:I care about people. In the end, I think they feel it. It comes across, regardless of the character I'm portraying. ~ Forest Whitaker, #NFDB
1183:If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1184:...in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1185:In the end, he was not Nina or Matthias or Kaz or Inej or Jesper. He was just Wylan Van Eck. He told them everything. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1186:In the end, like any stray, I was conquered by the promise of continued food and shelter. Trust would take longer. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
1187:In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn't matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1188:In the end, the sign of Aretha Franklin's artistry is that she always leaves her mark - first, on the music, then on us. ~ Jon Landau, #NFDB
1189:in the end you’ll have to cede to Lord Mersey. He’s too much of a peer, you understand? And a bit of a prick as well. ~ Gail Carriger, #NFDB
1190:Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.’ Then ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
1191:Memories are who we are, Tul. In the end, that’s all the luggage you take with you. Love and memories are what last. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1192:Pilot season is always crazy because you audition for a million things, and really, in the end, it's not up to you. ~ Janina Gavankar, #NFDB
1193:Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1194:That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1195:The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality. ~ Marya Mannes, #NFDB
1196:Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
1197:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld, #NFDB
1198:Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass. ~ Bono, #NFDB
1199:For many, religion has to do with what we are allowed to do and not allowed to do. In the end, that doesn't bear fruit. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
1200:He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. ~ Gaston Leroux, #NFDB
1201:If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end. ~ A C Grayling, #NFDB
1202:In the beginning there was the Word and not the talk, and in the end there won´t be the propaganda but again the Word ~ Gottfried Benn, #NFDB
1203:In the end, I think that I will like that we were sitting on the bed, talking & wondering where the time had gone. ~ Brian Andreas, #NFDB
1204:In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. ~ Bill Kovach, #NFDB
1205:In the end, we always regret the choices we didn't make, the love we didn't accept & the dreams we didn't fight for. ~ Savi Sharma, #NFDB
1206:People try to help, but all they have to work with is their theory of you. In the end they’re talking to themselves. ~ M John Harrison, #NFDB
1207:Perhaps, in the end, there are no such things as creative people; there are only sharp observers with sensitive hearts. ~ Yasmin Ahmad, #NFDB
1208:So many things shape our lives, our choices, our decisions, but in the end we make our own destiny. – Jack Maguire (hero) ~ Emma Darcy, #NFDB
1209:So you see, in the end, it is nearly certain that the power of prediction must triumph over the arrogance of elegance. ~ Robert Haugen, #NFDB
1210:The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end. ~ Priya Ardis, #NFDB
1211:This cycle eloquently demonstrates that, in the end, dialects are all there is: the “language” part is just politics! ~ John McWhorter, #NFDB
1212:True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1213:Well, frenetic activity in the end suiting journos, running at the behest of little press secretaries does not pay off. ~ Paul Keating, #NFDB
1214:Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
1215:You can’t walk away from your demons,’ Theresa said, her eyes glazing over. ‘They’ll catch up with you in the end. ~ Caroline Mitchell, #NFDB
1216:You find that the things you let go of while following Jesus were the things that were going to destroy you in the end. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
1217:2If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end. ~ A C Grayling, #NFDB
1218:And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1219:But in the end, black can never be white, one plus one must always equal two, and Mara Lynn was a normal little girl. ~ Jake Vander Ark, #NFDB
1220:But, in the end, we editors just pass through. We all know that you, the readers, are the real carriers of the flame. ~ Alan Rusbridger, #NFDB
1221:Don't hang on to old hurts. You can spend your years blaming God, blaming other people. But in the end it was a choice. ~ Jenny B Jones, #NFDB
1222:Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
1223:I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
1224:If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1225:In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust! ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
1226:In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism. ~ Shirley Chisholm, #NFDB
1227:In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it. ~ Brad Parks, #NFDB
1228:In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1229:In the end, no one cared that her freedom didn’t look like the freedom of her sisters. 16 THE GATE OF SECRET TRUTHS ~ Roshani Chokshi, #NFDB
1230:In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own.
Or at least this is what I tell myself. ~ Jodi Picoult,#NFDB
1231:In the end, we always regret the choices we didn’t make, the love we didn’t accept and the dreams we didn’t fight for.’ I ~ Savi Sharma, #NFDB
1232:Laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1233:No, no, not in the law, it ain’t. Not in the end, I mean. When a man is dead, sense must be made of it; and it might ~ Francis Spufford, #NFDB
1234:oceans on Mars wouldn’t last. There might be some transient greenhouse warming, but in the end, Mars is just too cold. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
1235:Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1236:Technically, the professional takes money. Technically, the pro plays for pay. But in the end, he does it for love. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1237:Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end. ~ Kris Kristofferson, #NFDB
1238:The insane pursuit of the holy grail of a balanced budget in the end is going to drive the economy into a depression. ~ William Vickrey, #NFDB
1239:There is a choice you have to make in everything you do. So keep in mind that in the end, the choice you make, makes you. ~ John Wooden, #NFDB
1240:True love will triumph in the end-which may or may not be true,but if it's a lie,then it's the most beautiful lie we have. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1241:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. ~ Fran ois de La Rochefoucauld, #NFDB
1242:An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown ~ Richard Bach, #NFDB
1243:But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that’s all a man has to measure his life, and it’s plenty. ~ Justin Cronin, #NFDB
1244:Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
1245:Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone." ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1246:If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
1247:In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
1248:I think I have made an impact in the workplace and I do believe that will prevail over any of the other things in the end. ~ Paula Jones, #NFDB
1249:It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” —J. Krishnamurti “In the end, winning is ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1250:I won’t be your pawn,” I growled.
Puck’s lips formed a thin, knowing grin. “In the end, you’ll still serve the Fae. ~ Jamie Wyman,#NFDB
1251:People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones. ~ Lee Smith, #NFDB
1252:The flaw here is the same as the flaw in The End of Men—an all-or-nothing outlook, and an unwillingness to consider nuance. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1253:The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1254:There should have been a better farewell. But in the end, there never is. And we take what meagre scraps we can find. ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
1255:There's no guarantee I'll survive it, but that's sort of the human condition, isn't it? In the end, nobody gets out alive. ~ Ann Aguirre, #NFDB
1256:The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn't chase; in the end, you chase it just the same. ~ George Pelecanos, #NFDB
1257:This is kraken year zero,” Moore said. “This is Anno Teuthis. We’re in the end times. What d’you think’s been going on? ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB
1258:To reach your goal authentically is probably, in the end, going to mean much more to you than having reached it in a false way. ~ K naan, #NFDB
1259:Try your hardest. Never settle. Go after your dreams. In the end, the only regrets we have are the chances we didn’t take. ~ Stacey Lynn, #NFDB
1260:You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
1261:A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it's not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen. ~ Joyce Maynard, #NFDB
1262:A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they were all the same: Make me someone new. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1263:I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1264:I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1265:In the beginning was the Word.
In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . .
In the end will be the Word. ~ Dan Simmons,#NFDB
1266:In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint. It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. ~ Chris Ofili, #NFDB
1267:In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
1268:In the end, the focus on safety should be credited to the entire firearms-owning community, the “gun culture” if you will. ~ Massad Ayoob, #NFDB
1269:I really appreciate an actor who has paid their dues and who has learned hard knocks and has been rewarded in the end. ~ Enrico Colantoni, #NFDB
1270:love is never stationary. In the end, love doesn’t just keep thinking about it or keep planning for it. Simply put: love does. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
1271:We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1272:We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
1273:You'll work hard to create characters that are compelling and unforgettable. But in the end, it's the story that matters. ~ James Dashner, #NFDB
1274:Dream and deed are not as different as many think. All the deeds of men are dreams at first, and become dreams in the end. ~ Theodor Herzl, #NFDB
1275:Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
1276:Fletcher had always said that apologies were just empty words, and that actions were all that really mattered in the end. ~ Jennifer Estep, #NFDB
1277:In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. ~ Junot D az, #NFDB
1278:In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. ~ Junot Diaz, #NFDB
1279:In the end, each of us is alone, but in the meantime, we must all huddle together to give one another comfort and warmth. ~ Sidney Sheldon, #NFDB
1280:"In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go." ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1281:In the end, you have greater control over your actions than you do your results. Your results are created by your actions. ~ Brian P Moran, #NFDB
1282:It all came back to human time and utterly human impulses: in the end, gods did not appreciate godlike power, but humans did. ~ Neal Asher, #NFDB
1283:It was better to know what people were really like than put your trust in someone who just wanted to hurt you in the end. ~ Jennifer Estep, #NFDB
1284:No one will guide you in the right direction, in the end you have to learn for yourself. You have to grow up yourself. ~ Matthew Macfadyen, #NFDB
1285:The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race. ~ Booker T Washington, #NFDB
1286:Body Electric... It is the first song from my new short film called # Tropico that is coming out in the end of the month. ~ Lana Del Rey, #NFDB
1287:But in the end the least misleading ikon is to be found, not in the physical world outside us, but in the human heart. The ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
1288:Courage?" I gave a very soft laugh. "I find courage is just another of life's illusions. In the end, we all do what we must. ~ Anthony Ryan, #NFDB
1289:I have been mocked by beauty, too. But
it was the beauty which cost me nothing
that in the end turned upon me. ~ Katherine Paterson,#NFDB
1290:In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go? ~ Jack Kornfield,#NFDB
1291:In the end, everything will be okay. If it's not okay, it's not yet the end. ~Fernando Sabino, translated from Portuguese ~ Fernando Sabino, #NFDB
1292:In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level. ~ Damian Lewis, #NFDB
1293:In the end, we’re all searching for what will make us sleep well at night, give us peace even when everything isn’t perfect. ~ Portia Moore, #NFDB
1294:It wasn't awful to be a man's sex object if you wanted to be, if it made you feel good, if everyone was happy in the end. ~ Lacey Alexander, #NFDB
1295:...I've known damnable beauty - the turgid pull of swirling blackness - but in the end, it's futile - purity alone redeems... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
1296:Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter. ~ Charles Williams, #NFDB
1297:What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
1298:wow it was sad the break up thing in xmas but in the end they got back together but the father soo hush to the children ~ Jacqueline Wilson, #NFDB
1299:after all, in the end. oftentimes tragedy transforms into beauty delightful things occur in the aftermath of chaos just be patient ~ R H Sin, #NFDB
1300:Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1301:America, can always be counted upon to do the right thing in the end, having first exhausted the available alternatives. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1302:God. I wanted him. I wanted him so badly, but sometimes it was the things we wanted the most that would destroy us in the end. ~ A L Jackson, #NFDB
1303:He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1304:I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1305:I embraced, I think, the process of becoming No. 1 of the world, which was long and difficult, but it's sweeter in the end. ~ Novak Djokovic, #NFDB
1306:In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
1307:In the end faith always moves beyond mental assent and duty and will involve the whole self—mind, will, and emotions. Why ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1308:In the end… he would choose Campisi.
In the end… she would choose Abandonato.
In the end… there would be bloodshed. ~ Rachel Van Dyken,#NFDB
1309:In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief. ~ Simon Van Booy, #NFDB
1310:In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism. ~ Vladimir Lenin, #NFDB
1311:in the end when it's taken away, the people who protest or cry the loudest are the ones who have taken it for granted the most. ~ Tara Brown, #NFDB
1312:I think in the end we all know that our best friend is ourselves. We are born alone and we die alone. That's the journey. ~ Shirley MacLaine, #NFDB
1313:I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1314:places, even if in the end they don't resemble any one particular person. I try not to make the book too topical either, so that ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1315:The more I know, the best I believe. The more I know, the best I'm worshiping Him. Because, in the end Allah knows the best. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1316:Things usually work out in the end.
What if they don't?
That just means you haven't gotten to the end yet. ~ Jeannette Walls,#NFDB
1317:Those who realize the epic story of life is not about them but actually about the people around them somehow win in the end. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
1318:We must do all in our power to educate the public, for I believe that in the end only a change of heart is really effective. ~ Ruth Harrison, #NFDB
1319:We've all been wrong- I certainly have- and we should thank those who set us right. Not always fun, but always best in the end. ~ David Frum, #NFDB
1320:What was she like in the end?
The way most people are at the end. Scared and full of regret. The way you are all of the time. ~ Lisa Lutz,#NFDB
1321:Xena and Gabrielle were a couple...in the end, it was if not explicitly said, it was implicit that...yeah, they totally were. ~ Lucy Lawless, #NFDB
1322:God never fails. Even when it seems as if all is lost, if we put our faith and trust in God, He will work it out in the end. ~ Vanessa Miller, #NFDB
1323:He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. ~ Gaston Leroux, #NFDB
1324:I’d essentially compartmentalized my life so I could be two different people for a while, but it hadn’t worked in the end. ~ Monica Alexander, #NFDB
1325:If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’ ~ Louis Althusser, #NFDB
1326:In the end, the cure for numbing is developing tools and practices that allow you to lean into discomfort and renew your spirit. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1327:In the end, the truth will prevail. Good and evil keep at war.
Whichever wins, future will believe it as the prevailing truth. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
1328:In the end, the work of diplomats continues even while others fight. So, it's not necessarily true that everyone needs to march. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
1329:It all turns out just fine in the end. But only if you leave now. Otherwise, we're all going to die horribly. So you should go. ~ Kate Danley, #NFDB
1330:Like books before them, each of these songs, I know, could in the end prove to be the thing I need: a way out. A place to go. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
1331:Remember: In the end, you're not living to impress your friends or your relatives or your coworkers. All of life is for Jesus. ~ Chris Tomlin, #NFDB
1332:Sin creates the illusion of freedom. In the end it fools us into seeking freedom from God rather than finding freedom in God. ~ Erwin McManus, #NFDB
1333:Some gave me soft words and some blunt, some made excuses, some promises, some only lied. In the end words are just wind. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1334:Sometimes the action begets belief, and you need that now. In the end, it’s all that matters. Alex has it and he’ll be fine. ~ Katherine Reay, #NFDB
1335:...the pain of speaking from the heart was always, in the end, more endurable than the suffering that was the price of silence. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1336:Amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it's kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
1337:Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1338:Because, deep down, you care about her, and in the end, even if it means she has to kill you, you want her to love you.” As ~ Jessica Sorensen, #NFDB
1339:Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect. ~ Frank Norris, #NFDB
1340:Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
1341:Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
1342:he was with energetic young college girls. It was like playing with a kitten, fresh and fun at first, but tiring in the end. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1343:Hey. What is it that famous person said? 'It'll all work out in the end, and if it doesn't, that means it's not the end yet'? ~ Lauren Myracle, #NFDB
1344:If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end. ~ Adrienne Rich,#NFDB
1345:I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think? ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
1346:In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1347:It's funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
1348:So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what’s around the next bend. And isn’t that, in the end, what drives us? ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
1349:The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
1350:The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1351:This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end. ~ Peter F Hamilton, #NFDB
1352:Thr truth is inconvertible.
Malice may attack it
and ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is..... ~ Winston Churchill,#NFDB
1353:We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech - because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1354:We may place blame, give reasons, and even have excuses; but in the end, it is an act of cowardice to not follow your dreams. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
1355:What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers. ~ Matina Horner, #NFDB
1356:Who needs a fairytale? In the end, I only want to be happy with a guy I love, and who loves me just as much. That’s all I need. ~ Cherrie Lynn, #NFDB
1357:You can decide what kind of magic you practice. Just like you can decide who you are. In the end, it's really the same thing. ~ Danielle Paige, #NFDB
1358:Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1359:But in the end, a copy of an original is never as good. Like a fax, distorted by perception, made grainy by misinterpretation. And ~ Staci Hart, #NFDB
1360:But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
1361:I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
1362:I?d rather be rejected than used because they both amount to the same thing in the end, but being used takes a lot longer. ~ Marilyn vos Savant, #NFDB
1363:In my adult life I've understood that if I put an enormous amount of love and honesty into something, usually that shows in the end. ~ Tom Ford, #NFDB
1364:In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
1365:In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished—a life without heart is not worth living. ~ John Eldredge, #NFDB
1366:In the end just three things matter:
How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go ~ Jack Kornfield,#NFDB
1367:In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1368:In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
1369:...in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, ...it is never too late to find out how to do it. ~ Ruth Reichl, #NFDB
1370:Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us? ~ Ocean Vuong, #NFDB
1371:Quantum of Solace – the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1372:The efforts of governments alone will never be enough. In the end, the people must choose and the people must help themselves. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1373:The pattern's laid out on the bed With dozens of colors of thread But you've got the needle I guess that's the point in the end ~ Amanda Palmer, #NFDB
1374:"Those who give up dreams, do injury to their own hearts and cannot possibly enjoy a profound sense of fulfillment in the end. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
1375:What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
1376:Whosoever comes to me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
1377:You never let any of them lose! Even when giving them a run for their money, you always, always let them catch you in the end. ~ Tabitha Suzuma, #NFDB
1378:Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1379:Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1380:But it’s all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you’re in it, it’s all just day-to-day, right? ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
1381:Clay in the hands of a good potter suffers so many good turns, but in the end, we see its real and true shape and form! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
1382:Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
1383:In the end, a lack of focus is usually just fear: fear that whatever project I’m attempting will go nowhere or fail miserably. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1384:In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick, #NFDB
1385:In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1386:In the end, money should serve something greater than just money. It should serve you, your family, the people you want to touch. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
1387:In the end, nothing could be less important! It’s who utilizes an idea that matters. Inventing isn’t nearly as important as using. ~ Scott Meyer, #NFDB
1388:In the end, the boy was simply a dreamer, it was probably common among the rich, who don’t think that reality applies to them. ~ Pierre Lemaitre, #NFDB
1389:It is an encouraging observation that no good measure was ever proposed which, if duly pursued, failed to prevail in the end. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1390:It seems there's nothing so good or pure it cant be taken without a moment's notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway. ~ Sara Gruen, #NFDB
1391:Judge not lest ye be judged... for we all are sinners. But in the end Christians are only judged for the things they did do for God. ~ Relient K, #NFDB
1392:Life is like a roller coaster- it has its ups and downs but in the end you have smiles and giggles because you know...you did it. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
1393:Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1394:There are only really a few stories to tell in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of those good stories to tell. ~ Sean Lennon, #NFDB
1395:they had had some good times together, and Buddy had made a decent meal in the end. Really, what else could you ask from a parent? He ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
1396:You know Death will get you in the end, but if you are smart and have a sense of humor, you can thumb your nose at it for awhile ~ Jimmy Buffett, #NFDB
1397:Always Roland; and in the end, after the others had fallen, murdered away one by one in these bloody motions, Roland would remain. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1398:because it isn’t just a room one is leaving behind but the people in it. And in the end, nothing matters more than other people. ~ Peter Grainger, #NFDB
1399:Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. ~ Raymond Queneau, #NFDB
1400:Caring was all about surrender, in the end. The opposite of control. The difference between strangling someone and embracing them. ~ Cara McKenna, #NFDB
1401:Everyone contributes a word, a sentence, an image, but in the end it all makes sense: the happiness of one becomes the joy of all. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1402:his unending ambition to find death and conquer it or become it, which, poets said later, became the same thing in the end. ~ Patricia A McKillip, #NFDB
1403:How in the end can one possibly hold anyone responsible for our own underdeveloped visions, or undeveloped strength of character? ~ Ruth St Denis, #NFDB
1404:If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1405:I’m starting to think that we don’t fall for looks or gender in the end. We fall for the person as a whole. We fall for their souls. ~ L H Cosway, #NFDB
1406:In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1407:In the end, the innate desire of all people for truth, justice, and human understanding must triumph over ignorance and despair. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1408:In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you. ~ Paul Keating, #NFDB
1409:It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway. ~ Sara Gruen, #NFDB
1410:I've learned what it feels like to lose, believe me. But I think, in the end, that is just going to make winning that much better. ~ Kevin Durant, #NFDB
1411:No two sacrifices are the same, and yet all are, in the end. It is the commitment to belong, wholly, to that which claims one. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
1412:So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
1413:The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1414:War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
1415:You know, like that old Catch 42 expression that stands for the meaning of life is that in the end you always get screwed. ~ Jack Campbell, #NFDB
1416:If a person has built a sound character, it makes but little difference what people say about him, because he will win in the end. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1417:I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
1418:I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write. ~ Ellen Glasgow, #NFDB
1419:In the end, everything came down to money. It came down to what a person actually did, as opposed to who they thought they were. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
1420:I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
1421:Love is all you need" - The Beatles -
"And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love, you make"
- The Beatles - ~ The Beatles,#NFDB
1422:One thing I’ve learned in my life is that we can teach and hope and pray, but in the end, each person controls their own actions. ~ Melissa Foster, #NFDB
1423:Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1424:Shigri boy lost his marbles in the end but the plane General Zia is about to board has enough VX gas on it to wipe out a village. ~ Mohammed Hanif, #NFDB
1425:Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Má. ~ Monique Truong, #NFDB
1426:The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney, #NFDB
1427:All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
1428:For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1429:For talent was like a frail flower growing under solid rock. In the end, nothing could stop it from bursting through and blooming. ~ Sidney Sheldon, #NFDB
1430:He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1431:He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. ~ Ian Mcewan, #NFDB
1432:I have found that liars in the end communicate more truth than do truth tellers.” “How’s that?” “Because truth is the safest lie. ~ Douglas Preston, #NFDB
1433:In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1434:In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from. ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
1435:In the end, that's why some of us stupid humans get married. Because we know that we can lose each other and find each other again. ~ Courtney Maum, #NFDB
1436:My most-used word was no! I said no to pockets, no to zippers, no to extra loops. In the end, all the products were so slim and light. ~ Ueli Steck, #NFDB
1437:My relationships are based on personal reciprocity. Being a Dodger was a matter of heart, but in the end I felt they didn't want me. ~ Steve Garvey, #NFDB
1438:To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
1439:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1440:We were not rich, but my parents had adjusted their lifestyle to their incomes—and in the end that is a big part of the battle. ~ Joseph E Stiglitz, #NFDB
1441:All of this was mine, simply for agreeing to marry a man I did not love but who was, in the end, the only man who had ever asked. ~ Melanie Benjamin, #NFDB
1442:Always happens with men. They promise friendship. They promise to treat you as an equal. In the end, all they want is to possess you. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1443:I could choose what kind of people I preyed on, but in the end, I had to prey on someone. The lesser of the two evils was still evil. ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
1444:In the end, just three things matter:
How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go ~ Jack Kornfield,#NFDB
1445:in the end they grew tired of making all these efforts to stay young and active, and gave in to the temptation of simply resting. I ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1446:In the end, we are just animals. Primitives driven by urges we barely understand but, with the right person, find ourselves slave to. ~ Kennedy Ryan, #NFDB
1447:it argues that true love will triumph in the end (which may or may not be true) but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have! ~ John Green, #NFDB
1448:Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived and if one has lived nothing, he is not in the book of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1449:True love doesn't have a sick desperation to it, and undercurrent of doom. People who burn that brightly still get burned in the end. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
1450:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1451:You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1452:and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1453:Even if things don't unfold the way you expected, don't be disheartened or give up. One who continues to advance will win in the end. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
1454:For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle, and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1455:For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1456:I firmly believe the world will sort itself out in the end. Believe it with me. At least none of us will be around to be proven wrong. ~ Stuart Wilde, #NFDB
1457:I'm starting to think that we don't fall for looks or gender in the end.
We fall for the person as a whole. We fall for their souls. ~ L H Cosway,#NFDB
1458:In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
1459:In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know. ~ Elizabeth Kostova, #NFDB
1460:In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1461:In the end, you can slap a pretty label on it—like serendipity or fate. Or you can believe that it’s just the random way life unfolds. ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
1462:Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it's pretty hard when you've got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
1463:May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz, #NFDB
1464:No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil ~ Calvin Coolidge, #NFDB
1465:No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along. ~ Cus D Amato, #NFDB
1466:Not to aim to show God is not to love, bc God is what we need the most deeply. And to have all else without Him is to perish in the end. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1467:She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was impossible as the other. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1468:She took her secrets with her, into the cold earth, but I learned them in the end. I know a lot about secrets; I have made them my life ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
1469:She wants to give in to you; mind, body, and soul. All she needs from you is the assurance that you won’t make her regret it in the end. ~ Amari Soul, #NFDB
1470:Somedays will eat you alive. They’re promises you make to fool yourself into believing everything will turn out right in the end. ~ Ilsa Madden Mills, #NFDB
1471:The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring. ~ Northrop Frye, #NFDB
1472:The Monster’s crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked. ~ Douglas Preston, #NFDB
1473:There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible. But in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1474:This is the secret of the stars, I tell myself. In the end, we are alone. No matter how close you seem, no one else can touch you. ~ Amy ~ Beth Revis, #NFDB
1475:We all make mistakes, Gin, even the best of us. I like to think that it all evens out in the end. Remember that, and you’ll be fine. ~ Jennifer Estep, #NFDB
1476:We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1477:What was the point of trying at all, if in the end you were no better, no longer, no more real than a bathroom sink and a rust stain? ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
1478:And for some reason, that was even worse. In the end, it's not the changes that will break your heart; it's that tug of familiarity ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
1479:And in the end, we were all just humans . . . drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.” ~ Christopher Poindexter ~ E K Blair, #NFDB
1480:Eh, it’s not that great a book. I’ve read it. She’ll thank me for saving her five hours of her life. The main character dies in the end. ~ Chanda Hahn, #NFDB
1481:Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1482:He’d gone into their marriage determined that she would never be alone again. In the end, she’d made him as alone in the world as she. ~ Sherry Thomas, #NFDB
1483:He’s gone on a quest. He might take years and years. You can search and search, on a quest, and in the end you may never get there at all. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1484:How can two people love each other, create children together, cohabitiate, build a life together, and then end up hating each other in the end. ~ Zane, #NFDB
1485:I'm not going to sacrifice love, real love, for any *%@$n' war or any friend, or any business, because in the end you're alone at night. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
1486:Influence follows close upon the heels of character; and whatever we are, that we shall in the end be acknowledged to be. ~ Caroline Wells Healey Dall, #NFDB
1487:In the end, he turned the radio on, and fell asleep to the sounds of either country or Western—he could never work out which was which. ~ Claire North, #NFDB
1488:In the end, the boy was simply a dreamer, it was probably common among the rich, who don’t think that reality applies to them. Paris ~ Pierre Lemaitre, #NFDB
1489:In the end, they could think of no better solution than to put a bullet between his eyes, so they could go about their task in peace. ~ Jonas Jonasson, #NFDB
1490:I still couldn't see any rhyme or reason to fighting through countless obstacles for love only to have it leave you powerless in the end. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
1491:I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life. ~ Yayoi Kusama, #NFDB
1492:I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head... ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
1493:The fact of the matter is, in the end, the only way to walk away ... is to make sure there’s nothing you’re reluctant to leave behind. ~ Meagan Brandy, #NFDB
1494:think I’d say the same. I had to go to hell to find the person I am today. And in the end, the road through hell led me straight to him. ~ A Zavarelli, #NFDB
1495:To be grateful even for our flaws, because in the end, they make us stronger by giving us a chance to reach beyond our grasp. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
1496:We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life,which in the end we leave,only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness. ~ Omar Khayy m, #NFDB
1497:We know that all must, in the end, stand by the side of the Divine. There is no escape from it, because that is His will. ~ Charles Webster Leadbeater, #NFDB
1498:Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music. ~ Jenny Erpenbeck, #NFDB
1499:Who is to say, in the end, that the three guardians of Russia are not a witch, a frost-demon, and a chaos-spirit? I find it fitting. ~ Katherine Arden, #NFDB
1500:And in the end, letting go was a lot like finding love. I had to learn to say goodbye to the one who gave me the courage to say hello. ~ Robert M Drake, #NFDB
314 Integral Yoga
54 Poetry
34 Christianity
30 Yoga
29 Fiction
28 Occultism
23 Psychology
22 Philosophy
8 Mysticism
7 Integral Theory
6 Science
5 Baha i Faith
4 Hinduism
3 Education
2 Cybernetics
1 Sufism
1 Kabbalah
269 Sri Aurobindo
103 The Mother
101 Nolini Kanta Gupta
75 Satprem
29 H P Lovecraft
24 Carl Jung
16 Sri Ramakrishna
15 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
13 Saint Augustine of Hippo
13 Friedrich Nietzsche
9 Swami Vivekananda
9 Aleister Crowley
6 William Wordsworth
5 William Butler Yeats
5 Baha u llah
4 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
4 Jorge Luis Borges
4 A B Purani
3 Swami Krishnananda
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Rabindranath Tagore
3 Patanjali
3 Jordan Peterson
3 James George Frazer
2 Plato
2 Percy Bysshe Shelley
2 Norbert Wiener
2 Nirodbaran
2 Lucretius
2 Jalaluddin Rumi
2 George Van Vrekhem
2 Edgar Allan Poe
2 Aldous Huxley
70 The Synthesis Of Yoga
31 The Life Divine
29 Lovecraft - Poems
29 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
23 Letters On Yoga IV
22 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
21 The Human Cycle
19 Letters On Yoga II
17 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
16 Record of Yoga
16 Essays On The Gita
15 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
11 City of God
10 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
9 Mysterium Coniunctionis
9 Essays Divine And Human
9 Agenda Vol 03
9 Agenda Vol 01
8 Agenda Vol 10
7 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
7 Questions And Answers 1953
7 On the Way to Supermanhood
7 Agenda Vol 08
6 Wordsworth - Poems
6 Words Of Long Ago
6 The Phenomenon of Man
6 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
6 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
5 Yeats - Poems
5 The Future of Man
5 The Bible
5 Letters On Yoga I
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
5 Collected Poems
5 Agenda Vol 11
5 Agenda Vol 02
5 5.1.01 - Ilion
4 The Practice of Psycho therapy
4 Talks
4 Raja-Yoga
4 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
4 Questions And Answers 1956
4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
4 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
4 Magick Without Tears
4 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
4 Aion
4 Agenda Vol 12
4 Agenda Vol 07
4 Agenda Vol 06
3 Words Of The Mother II
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Study and Practice of Yoga
3 The Golden Bough
3 The Blue Cliff Records
3 Tagore - Poems
3 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
3 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
3 On Education
3 Maps of Meaning
3 Liber ABA
3 Labyrinths
3 Hymn of the Universe
3 Amrita Gita
3 Agenda Vol 13
3 Agenda Vol 09
2 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Lotus Sutra
2 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
2 The Book of Certitude
2 Shelley - Poems
2 Rumi - Poems
2 Preparing for the Miraculous
2 Poe - Poems
2 Of The Nature Of Things
2 Kena and Other Upanishads
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Cybernetics
2 Crowley - Poems
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Agenda Vol 05
2 Agenda Vol 04
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
'spiritual life': it was all so comfortable, for we had a supreme 'symbol' of it right there. She let us do as we pleased, She even opened up all kinds of little heavens in us, along with a few hells, since they go together. She even opened the door in us to a certain 'liberation,' which In the end was as soporific as eternity - but there was nowhere to get out: it WAS eternity. We were trapped on all sides. There was nothing left but these 4m2 of skin, the last refuge, that which we wanted to flee by way of above or below, by way of Guiana or the Himalayas. She was waiting for us just there, at the end of our spiritual or not so spiritual pirouettes. Matter was her concern. It took us seven years to understand that She was beginning there, 'where the other yogas leave off,' as Sri Aurobindo had already said twenty-five years earlier. It was necessary to have covered all the paths of the Spirit and all those of Matter, or in any case a large number geographically, before discovering, or even simply understanding, that 'something else' was really Something Else. It was not an improved
Spirit nor even an improved Matter, but ... it could be called 'nothing,' so contrary was it to all we know. For the caterpillar, a butterfly is nothing, it is not even visible and has nothing in common with caterpillar heavens nor even caterpillar matter. So there we were, trapped in an impossible adventure. One does not return from there: one must cross the bridge to the other side. Then one day in that seventh year, while we still believed in liberations and the collected Upanishads, highlighted with a few glorious visions to relieve the commonplace (which remained appallingly commonplace), while we were still considering 'the Mother of the Ashram' rather like some spiritual super-director (endowed, albeit, with a disarming yet ever so provocative smile, as though
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ignorance, certainly, is not man's ideal conditionit leads to death and dissolution. But knowledge also can be equally disastrous if it is not of the right kind. The knowledge that is born of spiritual disobedience, inspired by the Dark ones, leads to the soul's fall and its calvary through pain and suffering on earth. The seeker of true enlightenment has got to make a distinction, learn to separate the true and the right from the false and the wrong, unmask the luring Mra say clearly and unfalteringly to the dark light of Luciferapage Satana, if he is to come out into the true light and comm and the right forces. The search for knowledge alone, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the path of pure scientific inquiry and inquisitiveness, in relation to the mystic world, is a dangerous thing. For such a spirit serves only to encourage and enhance man's arrogance and In the end not only limits but warps and falsifies the knowledge itself. A knowledge based on and secured exclusively through the reason and mental light can go only so far as that faculty can be reasonably stretched and not infinitelyto stretch it to infinity means to snap it. This is the warning that Yajnavalkya gave to Gargi when the latter started renewing her question ad infinitum Yajnavalkya said, "If you do not stop, your head will fall off."
The mystic truth has to be approached through the heart. "In the heart is established the Truth," says the Upanishad: it is there that is seated eternally the soul, the real being, who appears no bigger than the thumb. Even if the mind is utilised as an instrument of knowledge, the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot uplike "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaksthrough the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly.
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
First of all, he has the Sun; it is the primary light by which he lives and moves. When the Sun sets, the Moon rises to replace it. When both the Sun and the Moon set, he has recourse to the Fire. And when the Fire, too, is extinguished, there comes the Word. In the end, when the Fire is quieted and the Word silenced, man is lighted by the Light of the Atman. This Atman is All-Knowledge; it is secreted within the life, within the heart: it is selfluminous Vijnamaya preu rdyantar jyoti..
The progression indicated by the order of succession points to a gradual withdrawal from the outer to the inner light, from the surface to the deep, from the obvious to the secret, from the actual and derivative to the real and original. We begin by the senses and move towards the Spirit.
--
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.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Mathur begged Sri Ramakrishna to take charge of the worship in the Kali temple. The young priest pleaded his incompetence and his ignorance of the scriptures. Mathur insisted that devotion and sincerity would more than compensate for any lack of formal knowledge and make the Divine Mother manifest Herself through the image. In the end, Sri Ramakrishna had to yield to Mathur's request. He became the priest of Kali.
In 1856 Ramkumar breathed his last. Sri Ramakrishna had already witnessed more than one death in the family. He had come to realize how impermanent is life on earth. The more he was convinced of the transitory nature of worldly things, the more eager he became to realize God, the Fountain of Immortality.
--
For the householders Sri Ramakrishna did not prescribe the hard path of total renunciation. He wanted them to discharge their obligations to their families. Their renunciation was to be mental. Spiritual life could not be acquired by flying away from responsibilities. A married couple should live like brother and sister after the birth of one or two children, devoting their time to spiritual talk and contemplation. He encouraged the householders, saying that their life was, in a way, easier than that of the monk, since it was more advantageous to fight the enemy from inside a fortress than in an open field. He insisted, however, on their repairing into solitude every now and then to strengthen their devotion and faith in God through prayer, japa, and meditation. He prescribed for them the companionship of sadhus. He asked them to perform their worldly duties with one hand, while holding to God with the other, and to pray to God to make their duties fewer and fewer so that In the end they might cling to Him with both hands. He would discourage in both the householders and the celibate youths any lukewarmness in their spiritual struggles. He would not ask them to follow indiscriminately the ideal of non-resistance, which ultimately makes a coward of the unwary.
--- FUTURE MONKS
--
Manomohan at first met with considerable opposition from his wife and other relatives, who resented his visits to Dakshineswar. But In the end the unselfish love of the Master triumphed over worldly affection. It was Manomohan who brought Rakhal to the Master.
--- SURENDRA
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But their aim is one In the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita3 Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities. But in both paths there was In the end an obscuration of principles, a deformation of symbols and a fall.
If, however, we leave aside, here also, the actual methods and practices and seek for the central principle, we find, first, that Tantra expressly differentiates itself from the Vedic methods of Yoga. In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their method is knowledge, though it is not always discernment by the intellect, but may be, instead, the knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out through action. In all of them the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the
Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered. But In the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, - it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here is the very heart of the mystery, the master-key to the problem. The advent of the superhuman or divine race, however stupendous or miraculous the phenomenon may appear to be, can become a thing of practical actuality, precisely because it is no human agency that has undertaken it but the Divine himself in his supreme potency and wisdom and love. The descent of the Divine into the ordinary human nature in order to purify and transform it and be lodged there is the whole secret of the sadhana in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. The sadhaka has only to be quiet and silent, calmly aspiring, open and acquiescent and receptive to the one Force; he need not and should not try to do things by his independent personal effort, but get them done or let them be done for him in the dedicated consciousness by the Divine Master and Guide. All other Yogas or spiritual disciplines in the past envisaged an ascent of the consciousness, its sublimation into the consciousness of the Spirit and its fusion and dissolution there In the end. The descent of the Divine Consciousness to prepare its definitive home in the dynamic and pragmatic human nature, if considered at all, was not the main theme of the past efforts and achievements. Furthermore, the descent spoken of here is the descent, not of a divine consciousness for there are many varieties of divine consciousness but of the Divine's own consciousness, of the Divine himself with his Shakti. For it is that that is directly working out this evolutionary transformation of the age.
It is not my purpose here to enter into details as to the exact meaning of the descent, how it happens and what are its lines of activity and the results brought about. For it is indeed an actual descent that happens: the Divine Light leans down first into the mind and begins its purificatory work therealthough it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary human consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very form and figure of the Light supernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly and surely the many-chambered and many-storeyed edifice that is human nature and human life into the mould of the Divine Truth in its perfect play and supreme expression. But this is a matter which can be closely considered when one is already well within the mystery of the path and has acquired the elementary essentials of an initiate.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came In the end to be looked upon as fundamentally a product of Ignorance: ignorance and suffering and incapacity and death were declared to be the very hallmark of things terrestrial. The Light that dwells above and beyond can be made to shed for a while some kind of lustre upon the mortal darkness but never altogether to remove or change itto live in the full light, to be in and of the Light means to pass beyond. Not that there have not been other strands and types of spiritual experiences and aspirations, but the one we are considering has always struck the major chord and dominated and drowned all the rest.
But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processes of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brahman, as though one has to leap from the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind, not synthetic-analytic2 in knowledge like Overmind and the highest mental intelligence, but inescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness Sachchidanandais ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in fundamental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the Many and the Many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One; it develops the spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. Perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective"introvert"and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off In the end with metaphysics.
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The supreme secret of the Gita, rahasyam uttamam, has presented itself to diverse minds in diverse forms. All these however fall, roughly speaking, into two broad groups of which one may be termed the orthodox school and the other the modem school. The orthodox school as represented, for example, by Shankara or Sridhara, viewed the Gita in the light of the spiritual discipline more or less current in those ages, when the purpose of life was held out to be emancipation from life, whether through desireless work or knowledge or devotion or even a combination of the three. The Modern School, on the other hand, represented by Bankim in Bengal and more thoroughly developed and systematised in recent times by Tilak, is inspired by its own Time-Spirit and finds in the Gita a gospel of life-fulfilment. The older interpretation laid stress upon a spiritual and religious, which meant therefore In the end an other-worldly discipline; the newer interpretation seeks to dynamise the more or less quietistic spirituality which held the ground in India of later ages, to set a premium upon action, upon duty that is to be done in our workaday life, though with a spiritual intent and motive.
This neo-spirituality which might claim its sanction and authority from the real old-world Indian disciplinesay, of Janaka and Yajnavalkyalabours, however, in reality, under the influence of European activism and ethicism. It was this which served as the immediate incentive to our spiritual revival and revaluation and its impress has not been thoroughly obliterated even in the best of our modern exponents. The bias of the vital urge and of the moral imperative is apparent enough in the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the lan of the ethical man,the spiritual element, as a consciousness of supreme unity in the Absolute (Brahman) or of love and delight in God, serving only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and In the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
However, individualism has given us a truth and a formula which collectivism ignored. Self-determination is a thing which has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us and we should see whether we can harmonise the two. Collectivism signifies that the individual should not look to himself alone, should not be shut up in his freedom but expand himself and envelop others in a wider freedom, see other creatures in himself and himself in other creatures, as the Gita says. Collectivism demands that the individual need not and should not exhaust himself entirely in securing and enjoying his personal freedom, but that he can and should work for the salvation of others; the truth it upholds is this that the individual is from a certain point of view only a part of the group and by ignoring the latter it ignores itself In the end.
Now, a spiritual communism embraces individualism and collectivism, fuses them in a higher truth, establishes them in an intimate and absolute harmony. The individual is the centre, the group is the circumference and the two form one whore circle. The individual by fulfilling the truth of his real individuality fulfils also the truth of a commonality. There are no different laws for the two. The individuals do not stand apart from and against one another, the dharma of one does not clash with the dharma of the other. The ripples in the bosom of the sea, however distinct and discrete in appearance, form but a single mass, all follow the same law of hydrodynamics that the mother sea incarnates. Stars and planets and nebulae, each separate heavenly body has its characteristic form and nature and function and yet all fulfil the same law of gravitation and beat the measure of the silent symphony of spaces. Individualities are the freedoms of the collective being and collectivity the concentration of individual beings. The same soul looking inward appears as the individual being and looking outward appears as the collective being.
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Our ideals have been mental constructions, rather than spiritual realitiesrealities of the deepest and highest being. And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the human adhara, it is the vital which holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is often much too exaggerated, even so the power of the body, that of physical and external rules and regulations. The mental or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent law of the vital. If the demands of the mental and the physical are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash and catastrophe is bound to come In the end.
This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeemability in human nature. And it, is this fact which a too hasty optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life. He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which is the basis of even this lower poise of the mental and vital and physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not the pattern of mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern of a supreme spiritual realism.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change In the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that In the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.
The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and In the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
Only this process of integration was not done in a day, it took some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant intermediary stages.
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Christian too accepts the dual principle, but does not give equal status to the two. Satan is there, an eternal reality: it is anti-God, it seeks to oppose God, frustrate his work. It is the great tempter whose task it is to persuade, to inspire man to remain always an earthly creature and never turn to know or live in God. Now the crucial question that arises is, what is the necessity of this Antagonist in God's scheme of creation? What is the meaning of this struggle and battle? God could have created, if he had chosen, a world without Evil. The orthodox Christi an answer is that in that case one could not have fully appreciated the true value and glory of God's presence. It is to manifest and proclaim the great victory that the strife and combat has been arranged in which Man triumphs In the end and God's work stands vindicated. The place of Satan is always Hell, but he cannot drag down a soul into his pit to hold it there eternally (although according to one doctrine there are or may be certain eternally damned souls).
Goe the carries the process of convergence and even harmony of the two powers a little further and shows that although they are contrary apparently, they are not contradictory principles in essence. For, Satan is, after all, God's servant, even a very obedient servant; he is an instrument in the hand of the Almighty to work out His purpose. The purpose is to help and lead man, although in a devious way, towards a greater understanding, a nearer approach to Himself.
--
Satan is jealous of man who is God's favourite. He tells God that his partiality to man is misplaced. God has put into man a little of his light (reason and intelligence and something more perhaps), but to what purpose? Man tries to soar, he thinks he flies high and wide, but in fact he is and will be an insect that "lies always in the grass and sings its old song in the grass." God answers that whatever the perplexity in which man now is, In the end he will come out and reach the Light with a greater and richer experience of it. Satan smiles in return and says he will prove otherwise. Given a free hand, he can do whatever he likes with man: "Dust shall he eat and with a relish." God willingly agrees to the challenge: there is no harm in Satan's trying his hand. Indeed, Satan will prove to be a good companion to man; for man is normally prone to inertia and sinks into repose and rest and stagnation. Satan will be the goad, the force that drives towards ceaseless activity. For activity is life, and without activity no progress.
Thus, as sanctioned by God, there is a competition, a wager between man and Satan. The pact between the parties is this that, on the one hand, Satan will serve man here in life upon earth, and on the other hand, in return, man will have to serve Satan there, on the other side of life. That is to say, Satan will give the whole world to man to enjoy, man will have to give Satan only his soul. Man in his ignorance says he does not care for his soul, does not know of a there or elsewhere: he will be satisfied if he gets what he wants upon earth. That, evidently, is the demand of what is familiarly known as life-force (lan vital): the utmost fulfilment of the life-force is what man stands for, although the full significance of the movement may not be clear to him or even to Satan at the moment. For life-force does not necessarily drag man down, as its grand finale as it were, into hellhowever much Satan might wish it to be so. In what way, we shall see presently. Now Satan promises man all that he would desire and even more: he would give him his fill so' that he will ask for no more. Man takes up the challenge and declares that his hunger is insatiable, whatever Satan can bring to it, it will take in and press on: satisfaction and satiety will never come in his way. Satan thinks he knows better, for he is armed with a master weapon to lay man low and make him cry halt!
--
The angels weave the symphony that is creation. They represent the various notes and rhythmsin their higher and purer degrees that make up the grand harmony of the spheres. It is magnificent, this music that moves the cosmos, and wonderful the glory of God manifest therein. But is it absolutely perfect? Is there nowhere any flaw in it? There is a doubting voice that enters a dissenting note. That is Satan, the Antagonist, the Evil One. Man is the weakest link in the chain of the apparently all-perfect harmony. And Satan boldly proposes to snap it if God only let him do so. He can prove to God that the true nature of his creation is not cosmos but chaos not a harmony in peace and light, but a confusion, a Walpurgis Night. God acquiesces in the play of this apparent breach and proves In the end that it is part of a wider scheme, a vaster harmony. Evil is rounded off by Grace.
The total eradication of Evil from the world and human nature and the remoulding of a terrestrial life in the substance and pattern of the Highest Good that is beyond all dualities is a conception which it was not for Goe the to envisage. In the order of reality or existence, first there is the consciousness of division, of trenchant separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of consciousness. But there is still a higher status, the status of transcendence in which evil is not simply embraced but dissolved and even transmuted into a supreme reality of which it is an aberration, a reflection or projection, a lower formulation. That is the mystery of a spiritual realisation to which Goe the aspired perhaps, but had not the necessary initiation to enter into.
0 1958 12 - Floor 1, young girl, we shall kill the young princess - black tent, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(This note was written by Mother in English. It concerns an attack of black magic that threatened her life and In the end completely changed her outer existence. A new stage begins.)
Two or three days after I retired to my room upstairs,1 early in the night I fell into a very heavy sleep and found myself out of the body much more materially than I do usually. This degree of density in which you can see the material surroundings exactly as they are. The part that was out seemed to be under a spell and only half conscious. When I found myself at the first floor where everything was absolutely black, I wanted to go up again, but then I discovered that my hand was held by a young girl whom I could not see in the darkness but whose contact was very familiar. She pulled me by the hand telling me laughingly, No, come, come down with me, we shall kill the young princess. I could not understand what she meant by this young princess and, rather unwillingly, I followed her to see what it was. Arriving in the anteroom which is at the top of the staircase leading to the ground floor, my attention was drawn in the midst of all this total obscurity to the white figure of Kamala2 standing in the middle of the passage between the hall and Sri Aurobindos room. She was as it were in full light while everything else was black. Then I saw on her face such an expression of intense anxiety that to comfort her I said, I am coming back. The sound of my voice shook off from me the semi-trance in which I was before and suddenly I thought, Where am I going? and I pushed away from me the dark figure who was pulling me and in whom, while she was running down the steps, I recognized a young girl who lived with Sri Aurobindo and me for many years and died five years back. This girl during her life was under the most diabolical influence. And then I saw very distinctly (as through the walls of the staircase) down below a small black tent which could scarcely be perceived in the surrounding darkness and standing in the middle of the tent the figure of a man, head and face shaved (like the sannyasin or the Buddhist monks) covered from head to foot with a knitted outfit following tightly the form of his body which was tall and slim. No other cloth or garment could give an indication as to who he could be. He was standing in front of a black pot placed on a dark red fire which was throwing its reddish glow on him. He had his right arm stretched over the pot, holding between two fingers a thin gold chain which looked like one of mine and was unnaturally visible and bright. Shaking gently the chain he was chanting some words which translated in my mind, She must die the young princess, she must pay for all she has done, she must die the young princess.
0 1959-03-26 - Lord of Death, Lord of Falsehood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In the end, only the Supramental will have the power to destroy it. When the hour comes, all this will disappear, without any need to do anything.
It was Theon.
0 1959-05-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
1) There is the destiny of the adventurer: it is the one in me that needs the sea or the forest and wide open spaces and struggles. This was the best part of my childhood. I can sit on it and tell myself that the adventure is within, and it might work for a while. But this untamed child in me continues to live all the same, and it is something very valuable in me. I cannot kill it through reasoning, even spiritual reasoning. And if I tell it that everything lies within, not without, it replies, Then why was I born, why this manifestation in the outer world? In the end, it is not a question of reasoning. It is a fact, like the wind upon the heaths.
2) There is the destiny of the writer in me. And this too is linked to the best of my soul. It is also a profound need, like adventuring upon the heaths, because when I write certain things, I brea the in a certain way. But during the five years I have been here, I have had to bow to the fact that, materially, there is no time to write what I would like (I recall how I had to wrench out this Orpailleur, which I have not even had time to revise). This is not a reproach, Mother, for you do all you can to help me. But I realize that to write, one must have leisure, and there are too many less personal and more serious things to do. So I can also sit on this and tell myself that I am going to write a Sri Aurobindo but this will not satisfy that other need in me, and periodically it awakens and sprouts up to tell me that it too needs to breathe.
0 1960-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Publisher and friend are here one in telling you that LOrpailleur is a beautiful book whose richness and force have struck me even more this time than before when I read the first version. I cannot tell you how much your Job is my brotherin his darkness as in his light. The joy, the wild, irrepressible joy that furtively yearns and at times bursts forth, embracing all, this joy at the heart of the book burns the reader for a few, in any case, who are prepared to be inflamed. In the end, I cant say if LOrpailleur will or will not be noticed, if the critics will or will not bestow an article, a comment, an echo upon it, if bookstores will or will not sell it (poor orpailleur!). But what I know is that for a few readers2, 3, 10 perhapsyour book will be the cry that will rip them from their sleep forever. To your song, another song in themselves will respond. Where, how shall this concert finish? Who knowsanything is possible!
My words are a bit disjointed but Im not in the mood to give an articulate discourse. Which is a way of saying, once again, how happy I amand grateful.
0 1960-07-12 - Mothers Vision - the Voice, the ashram a tiny part of myself, the Mothers Force, sparkling white light compressed - enormous formation of negative vibrations - light in evil, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
If no vibrations ever disappear, then what happens with all these horrible things coming from every corner of the world? Dont they pile up? Dont the bad vibrations take on a more and more enormous volume In the end?
They are transformed. And at times they are transformed almost immediately.
0 1960-08-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The little basket I put them in can no longer close! I take 45 minutes every morning upstairs to write letters. And I receive six, seven, eight, ten letters a day, so how can I manage? In the end, Sri Aurobindo spent the whole night writing letterstill he went blind.
Myself, I cant afford to do that, I have other things to do. And Im not keen on going blind either. I need my eyes, they are my work instruments.
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its an almost physical discipline. Moreover, I have seen that the japa has an organizing effect on the subconscient, on the inconscient, on matter, on the bodys cellsit takes time, but by persistently repeating it, in the long run it has an effect. It is the same principle as doing daily exercises on the piano, for example. You keep mechanically repeating them, and In the end your hands are filled with consciousness it fills the body with consciousness.
I have a hard time making X understand that I have work to do when Im with him. He doesnt understand that one can work.
--
Yes, he doesnt dare say a thing He doesnt understand it very well. What funny ideas, eh! He must think I have funny ideas, but anyway In the end, he tells himself, Oh, its just because shes born in France that she is still carrying this burden!
Its quite funny.
--
After that, I made a kind of pact with them the trouble, you see, is that there are constantly new ones. If only they were the same! They are constantly coming in new floods, so there was the need of a permanent formation over there. Ive tried to make this permanent formation, to take and absorb them, to calm them down and scatter them a little so they dont accumulate in one spot, which In the end could be dangerous.
I found this quite amusing.
0 1960-10-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And In the end, its quite fun.
***
0 1960-10-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Then suddenly I went into a little trance. And in it I saw you, but you were physically, you were on one plane, and then I saw another man on a different plane (I saw him quite concretely; he was rather tall, broad-shoulderednot so tall as broad, with a dark, European suit). And he took your hands and started shaking them enthusiastically!but you were quite indifferent, just as you are now, dressed in Indian fashion and sitting cross-legged. He took both your hands and started shaking them! And then I distinctly heard the words: Congratulations, its a great success!it had to do with your book.3 And at the same time, I saw all sorts of people and things who were touched by your bookall kinds of people, obviously French, or Westerners in any case women, men. There was even one woman (she must have been an actress or a singer or anyway, someone whose life was she was even dressed for the stage, with some kind of tightsa beautiful girl!) and she said to someone, Ah, it has even given me a taste for the spiritual life! It was extremely interesting All kinds of things of this nature. And then once again I came out of this trance and In the end, I tried to do some certain thing for you and it turned out well. It turned out quite well.
But then, just before that, there was this powdering of golden light coming down. And as it descended, it was white with a touch of gold (but it was white) and it came down in a column, with such POWER! And then, just at the end, this powdering of gold came and settled into this white light which had remained there the whole timeoh, it was so abundant. A great power of realization. I had a hard time coming out of it! At the start, I had decided to come out of it at half past, so I came out, but still not completely
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, the Agenda is simply Mother's long quest in search of the reality of Matter: what is Matter... truly? The 'transformation', perhaps, means simply to 'un-cover' what is actually there.
***
0 1961-02-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, the other day I had some zinnias (Endurance)literally works of art, as though each petal had been painted, and all together so harmonious and so varied at the same time. Oh, Nature is wonderful! In the end, we are just copycats, and clumsy ones at that.
(after a moment of silence)
0 1961-03-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In addition, I told them it was preferable not to hold any functions herethey can be held at Tapogiri in the Himalayas, or elsewhere and this is understood. They did hold a seminar here (a perfect fiasco, besides), but it had been arranged a long time ago. They invited people who promised to come (I think very few showed up In the end), and it was of very secondary importance. Nevertheless, I told them, This is the last time; dont do it here any more. At Tapogiri, as often as you like: its a beautiful spot in the mountains, a health resort, people go there in the summer for the fresh air and to sit around and chat!
What shocked me was. You know I rarely leave my house, but each time I would come to the Ashram for darshan or to see you, always, as if by chance, I would find J. off in a corner with some European visitor. The repetition of this coincidence made me wonder, Whats he doing so systematically with ALL the European visitors?! And it shocked me to imagine myself in their place: just suppose, I said to myself, you are coming to the Ashram for the first time, very open, in search of a great truth, and you stumble upon this man who tells you: Sri Aurobindo = World Union. Well, my first reaction would be, Im leaving, Im not interested!
--
But it doesnt matter, we must always keep smiling, mon petit. In the end, good always comes out of such thingsits a sorting-out! A splendid, splendid sifter!
The truth is, VERY FEW people are ready to be here, very few. We have taken in all typeswe accept, we accept, we acceptafterwards, we sift. And the sifting goes on more and more. Actually, we accept everything, the entire earth, and then (gesture) theres a churning. And everything useless goes away.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, individualization and the consequent necessity for the egoexists for the return to Divine Consciousness to be conscious and willed, with full, conscious participation.
Speaking of individualization, theres a question Ive been wondering about: when one speaks of the central being, this central being is not something here in physical life, is it? Its above.
0 1961-11-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, it would be a very interesting attempt: a stimulant for peoples intuitive capacities, instead of taking them all for donkeys and spoon-feeding them, going yum-yum-yum-yum-yum so that theyll digest it!
(silence)
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My elbow had ended up leaning on a little plastic tray I have there, where I keep pencils, ball-point pens, note pads and so forth. The body was leaning on this tray, evidently trying to get up, and the whole thing started cracking noisily under the weight. And in a diffuse but very clear consciousness I was saying to myself, But why? Whats all this ridiculous noise? And whats this heavy thing doing? What disorder. There shouldnt be such disorder. And it went on crack-crack-cracking. Then suddenly normal consciousness returnedto be exact, what returned was the normal RELATIONSHIP consciousness has with thingsand I said, Well, really! What a ridiculous situation! What is this elbow doing on that tray? It should realize its breaking it! And when things were all completely back to normal I told my body, What are you doing, you idiot! Come on, pick yourself up, get moving! Immediately, docile as a little child, it extricated itself, turned around, and stood up straightquite straight. I had scratched my knee, scratched my elbow, and taken three knocks on the head. Luckily there were no sharp edgesit was all hard enough, but no sharp edges. Anyway, In the end I was all right, no damage done.
No damage at all, but it was a bizarre sensation. So I tried to understand how it could have happened, how I could have so lost my sense of relation to things. For a long time my body had been telling me, Ive got to lie down, Ive got to lie down. And I would very sternly reply, You dont have time! (Laughing) So then this happened. Had I obeyed it and laid down, there would obviously have been no problem. But I was in my experience, going on with my experience, and at the same time I was getting ready to come downstairs. So I told my body, Its all right, its all right, youll lie down later. But it had its own way of lying down! (Laughing) It just stretched out right where it was. Actually it wasnt even stretched outit was all askew.
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some people succeed right away; for others it takes longer. But it always succeeds In the end. You just have to build a bridge, thats all.
And then, dont be in a hurry to get up, above all dont say, Oh, Ill be late. Just stay there, as if you had all eternity before you.
0 1962-06-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Naturally he says he has kept all he felt and saw for me. He had said he wanted to remove his yantram2 from the Ashram, but In the end he left it. He writes to Z telling him he is working on his arm. He had a visit from A. and from that fellow M.that was comical! M., of course, had come to the Ashram to stay, but anyway hes looking for some kind of power, I sense that well enough. He had been frequenting some character who had power but wasnt putting it to very good use, and he felt something similar with Xhe is instinctively in search of power. When he went down to see X, he may have felt a power coming into himso hes going away! I dont think he has any kind of attachment either to India or the Ashram: hes looking for power.
Thats how things stand.
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, thats how you manage to hold on. Its a great thing.
***
0 1962-07-07, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is a common feeling: In the end, maybe He DOESNT really know the things of this world as well as we do! (Mother laughs and laughs) Its very funny.
***
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Bengal this weakness has gone to the extreme. The Bengali has a quick intelligence, emotional capacity and intuition. He is foremost in India in all these qualities. All of them are necessary but they do not suffice. If to these there were added depth of thought, calm strength, heroic courage and a capacity for and pleasure in prolonged labor, the Bengali might be a leader not only of India, but of mankind. But he does not want that, he wants to get things done easily, to get knowledge without thinking, the fruits without labor, siddhi by an easy sadhana [discipline]. His stock is the excitement of the emotional mind. But excess of emotion, empty of knowledge, is the very symptom of the malady. In the end it brings about fatigue and inertia. The country has been constantly and gradually going down. The life-power has ebbed away. What has the Bengali come to in his own country? He cannot get enough food to eat or clothes to wear, there is lamentation on all sides, his wealth, his trade and commerce, his lands, his very agriculture have begun to pass into the hands of others. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and Shakti has abandoned us. We do the sadhana of Love, but where Knowledge and Shakti are not, there Love does not remain, there narrowness and littleness come, and in a little and narrow mind there is no place for Love. Where is Love in Bengal? There is more quarreling, jealousy, mutual dislike, misunderstanding and faction there than anywhere else even in India which is so much afflicted by division.
In the noble heroic age of the Aryan people4 there was not so much shouting and gesticulating, but the endeavor they undertook remained steadfast through many centuries. The Bengalis endeavor lasts only for a day or two.
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, its best not to worry, not to get agitated or depressed (thats the worst of all), not to get worked up or impatient or disgustedjust be calm and say, It will come when it comes, but with an unyielding stubbornness. Do what you feel has to be done, and keep on with it, keep on even if it seems utterly futile.
But if I only had a method!
0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
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.
0 1962-12-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
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.
0 1963-04-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He told the story to some friends, who in turn told it to some friends, so In the end the story became known. There was even a sort of collective thanks from the city for my intervention. But the whole thing stemmed from that: What Is this illness? Youre able to find out, arent you? (Laughter) Go and catch it!
But that feeling of being absolutely paralyzed, a prey to somethingabsolutely paralyzed, you cant You are no longer in your body, you understand, you cant act on it any more. And a sense of liberation when you are able to turn around.
0 1963-11-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, the conclusion of it all is that were fools! We want what were not given, we dont want what were given, and we mix in all kinds of personal desires with the care the Lord takes of us.
But I cant call unconsciousness a care! When Im unconscious, I feel it as something wrong!
0 1964-01-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Imperial MAHESHWARI is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mothers eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail In the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient and unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their Force and the truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away from her into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet has she more than any other the heart of the universal Mother. For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha6 and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
Ganapati, or Ganesh: the son of the supreme Mother, god of material knowledge and wealth. He is represented with an elephant's head.
0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I said and wrote somewhere, Love is not sexual intercourse. Love is not attraction. Love is not and so on, and In the end I said, Love is an almighty vibration coming straight from the One.2 It was a first perception of That.
But its a fantastic discovery, in the sense that once you have discovered it, it wont leave you no matter what happens. You may have your attention turned elsewhere while you are at work, as for instance last night when I had a quite symbolic activity: for an hour I went around all the Ashram rooms, and I wanted to find an armchair in a corner where I could sit down and do a certain inner workit was impossible! I went from room to room, and in every room there was a group of people, one or two people, or several groups of several people, each with a marvelous discovery, a marvelous invention, a marvelous projecteach one had brought the most marvelous thing he had! And each one wanted to show it to me and demonstrate it. So I was looking and looking (they were people I know; it must be the expression of their best thoughts: it was really full of a great goodwill [Mother laughs]), but there were scores and scores of them! I would simply look, say a word or two, then I would take a few steps in the hope of finding a solitary corner and an armchair in which I could do my work; and I was going from room to room, from room to room. It lasted an hour. One hour of invisible life is extremely long. I woke up, in other words, I emerged from that state without having been able to find an armchair! I woke up just as I said to myself, Its no use trying (there were corners with armchairs, but with so many people that it was impossible to go there), No use trying, itll be the same everywhere, its useless, Ill go back into myself, and as soon as I decided to go back into myself, it was over.
0 1965-07-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For two hours last night I saw that, with proof to back it up, examples. I looked, and I was almost horrified to see the extent to which senses distortand they distort (I dont know, there may be people who distort for the better, [laughing] Im not one of them! But they must be marvelous optimists), the senses distort all the vibrations and constantly turn them into disagreeable things, unpleasant ones at any rate, or even indications of danger, warnings of catastrophe. It was fairly repugnant. But I gave free rein to that whole movement in order to see clearly, and all the cellular and other organizations started moaning and groaning, as if saying, But this life is in-tol-er-a-ble, its intolerable. And I listened to that a little while to see; and here, there and everywhere, there was a general groan. And In the end (gesture of descent of the Will), in one second it all went away! It was a whole act those senses were putting on for themselves. We are ri-dic-u-lous beings, thats all (Mother laughs). That was my observation of last night.
Naturally, people arent openly and constantly like that because another consciousness is there a little and controls things, but if you leave them on their own I did the experiment, you see, of leaving that field of cellular consciousness fully free, and then there was moaning and groaning. But there was behind, in the background, deep down in the cells, that sort of faith, of absolute need for the Ananda; so they were complaining: We have been deceived; we are for That alone, why arent we given it? (I am adding words to it, but there were no words: there were sensations.)
0 1965-07-28, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"In the Yoga as in life it is the man who persists unwearied to the last in the face of every defeat and disillusionment and of all confronting, hostile and contradicting events and powers who conquers In the end and finds his faith justified because to the soul and Shakti in man nothing is impossible."
The Synthesis of Yoga, XXI.745
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So you were right, In the end!
I was right on what? Ah, your message to Delhi: India must fight.
0 1965-10-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem had sent Mother a letter complaining about his lack of experiences, in particular the fact that he never saw Sri Aurobindo, except once eleven years earlier, and that in addition Mother told him she saw him only rarely. In the end Satprem wrote, "I wonder what I am doing here?")
I am not going to eat you, dont be afraid!
0 1966-05-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But Ive noticed that when I do material thingssmall things there seems to be a tremendous vital force flowing into the work, and In the end I find myself exhausted through having done nothing at all! How come all that vital energy goes away?
Its because all the vital force is used to keep the bodys balance in the phase of transformation. Thats what I have called the change of government, its the phase of transformation. And during that change, well, all the vital force is there just to keep your balance so you dont topple over. Because its difficult.
0 1966-06-25, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Pavitra read me her letter. I spontaneously answered him, Oh, this woman is too perfect for me. You know, I can do this, I can do that, I do this so well, I do that so perfectly. There were pages of it, mon petit! So In the end I said, She is too perfect for me.
She is probably skillful.
0 1966-08-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats how the present moment is: the will may be like this (Mother raises a finger upward), or it may be like that (finger downward). Like that, it means dissolution; like this, it means continuation and progresscontinuation with the necessity of progress. There is something which is the consciousness of the cells (a consciousness that observes, and which, when it is awakened, is a wonderful witness), and that consciousness is the one which goes like this (same gesture) or like that. This is expressed by a will to endure or to last, or by a need for the annihilation of rest. And then, when these cells are full of that light that golden light, that splendor of divine Lovethere is a sort of thirst, a need to participate in That, which takes away all that is or can be difficult In the endurance: that disappears, it becomes a glory. Then
Thats what is being learned.
0 1966-10-08, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its a chapter entitled The End of the Intellect, in which I wrote that in the beginning Sri Aurobindo was an agnostic and had mainly cultivated the intellect. So V. has made a summary of this chapter, and In the end he asks: How can one practice yogic disciplines without believing in God or in the Divine?
How?Very simple. Because these are mere words. When you practice without believing in God or in the Divine, you practice to reach a perfection, to make progress, for all sorts of reasons.
0 1967-04-29, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I knew a woman in Paris, who claimed to be a disciple (of Mothers), she would always bring me flowers when she came to see me, and always, always, without a single exception, the flowers had wilted. She would arrive and tell me, But they were quite fresh when I bought them! (Mother laughs) And they were absolutely finished. So In the end I told her, Its because you take all their life into yourself!
She had taken away their life.
0 1967-08-05, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have never known any will of mine for one major event in the conduct of the world affairs to fail In the end, although it may take a long time for the world-forces to fulfil it.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1967-09-13, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told her everything, there came a lot of things like that. In the end she was chilled. It was a real battle.
You did good work.
0 1967-09-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, we would have the solution only if we found the how and the why.
Constantly, constantly (same gesture of tiny reversals).
0 1967-10-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But In the end, even so, he will find himself faced with the same eternal problem: religion versus freedom.
Thats simply from the intellectual standpoint. Because if he isnt a philosopher, if he doesnt live in ideas, it doesnt matter at all: its rather a question of EXPERIENCE. It seems that the experience he had3 was a descent of Ananda, something he had never felt before, which came to him all of a sudden. Then he told his Superior, Id like to go all alone into solitude, to the countryside, because he didnt like rites, ceremonies and all that. So that was the starting point, and then he felt the need to come to India. And in India he travelled all around, until he came here. He has been in Orders for only two or three years, its a recent conversion (not conversion from a religious standpoint but from the standpoint of life, because he must have been Catholic since his childhood, but he desired to leave life and become a monk), thats recent.
0 1967-10-07, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But even so, In the end he said, You too are part of the Roman unity.
Ah, but I was told the same thing. A leading light of the Church said to me, But what do you know? You belong to the universal Roman Church. I told him (laughing), Well, I dont mind, that doesnt bother me!
0 1967-10-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But this time, everything came together as if It was clearly with Sri Aurobindos humour (many of these cards have his portrait). And In the end came the tray! When I received this tray, Oh, I said, this is perfect! (Mother laughs)
And Sri Aurobindo himself was very insistent because To tell you the truth, I asked him (for that vision you would like to have, that state of vision), I asked him that it may be given to you, that you may have it since you aspire for it. Then he said to me (on one of the cards I wrote what he said), the vision you will have will be the vision of the Truth-Consciousness. Its the supreme vision, the true vision. (One may have visions in the subtle physical, in the vital, many in the mind, but none of that is satisfying, one always gets a sense of a not quite accurate transcription.) But the true vision is the vision of the Consciousness, the supreme Consciousness. And he told me thats what you would have.
0 1968-02-17, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, whatever happens in life, in action, is to make the movement of transformation and ascent as rapid as possible. Perhaps there are timesthere is a rhythm, and there are times more favorable to harmony, but a stagnant harmony, and so one tries to do away with, or at any rate suppress, all dangerous movements that might stop the progress or even lead towards destruction; but there are other times when there is a very strong push towards transformation, and, I must say with a risk of possible damage. Certainly since 1956, its plainly visible that there has been something pushing and pushing and pushing to hasten the movement, and it results in some very dangerous extravagances.
Its with this knowledge and this certaintythis vision of things that most of the time I remain as a noninterfering witness. Its only if things take a really nasty turn then one is forced to intervene.
0 1968-10-09, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And almost everything is like that, almost everything. And In the end But I must say that two or three times I wondered if I wasnt on the verge of madness; two or three times I wondered if EVERYTHING wasnt like that, except the Supreme.
So then, would He be putting on an act for Himself, to amuse Himself? But its no fun! I told him, Maybe its fun for You, but WE dont find it fun!
0 1968-11-09, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
She must have had a bad night, it must have been difficultbecause here it was very, very difficult, and I didnt know it had to do with her. As soon as I knew, I went and saw there (I knew it in the morning), because it wasnt a good place (but she didnt care, now shes gone out of it). But then her mind, constantly, constantly: What really happens after death? And for hours! I would do something else, be busy: for hours it kept coming back. In the end (it lasted the whole day yesterday, and this morning it was still there), this morning I told her, Listen, Bharatidi, be quiet, and if you are quiet, you will know. Since then, nothing anymore.
A mind so strong, and yes, essentially rebellious.
0 1969-07-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Things here are always cloaked in a number of clothes, its never the exact thing, but there, it is the exact thing. Just now Last night, I had a long activity, and I wondered, But why am I seeing all this? A long activity (Ill tell you what it was), and just now, Z was here and started telling me the difficulties they have with the servants. Ah, I thought, here we are, its my vision, what I saw last night! And in my vision You know that here, its P. who looks after the servants, but in the night, it was Amrita, and Amrita as he is now, not as he was physically (because when he left his body, Amrita came to me, and in fact, he hasnt left me, but he is free: now he rests, now he goes about). Last night, he was very active, and he symbolized Rs activity, as if his influence was what guided R But it was (Mother seems very amused) the symbols were so clear and so amusing, with such an amusing sense of humor! (The nights have really become very interesting.) Oh, last night, I did gymnastics! (Mother laughs) It was because of that business with the servants: In the end, at one spot a wall was needed as a protection from the servants invasion, and they had built a small wall (a small wall to protect a doorway); so I entered the house, and when I wanted to go out the other way, they had removed the staircase to build that small wall! So (laughing) there was a gaping hole, and I had to go back down (I was very agile) by clinging to the wall! Things of that sort, thoroughly amusing. They had put up a kind of big partition as a protection from a crowd of servants who had swarmed into the street, a partition so they wouldnt sweep in here; then Amrita came, opened the partition, and started talking with the people outside! I told him (laughing), There, youre ruining all our work!
And then, I go to America, I go to Europe, I go all the time. I go to some places in India. And all of that is work, work, workat night. But so living!
0 1969-08-06, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, its all a question of consciousness.
The body is growing INTENSELY conscious of what responds to the true Influence, and whats still the residue of habit and the universal, terrestrial development (general, terrestrial), very conscious. Sometimes, its almost painful, you know, that old way of being.
0 1969-08-16, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, I am absolutely convinced that confusion is to teach us to live from day to day, that is to say, without being preoccupied with what may happen or what will happen, just concerning ourselves from day to day with what we have to do. All thinking and foreseeing and devising and all that furthers disorder a lot.
To live almost from minute to minute, to be like this (gesture turned upward), attentive only to the thing one has to do every momentand to let the All-Consciousness decide We never know things, even with the most general vision; we never know things except VERY partiallyvery partially. So our attention is drawn to this, drawn to that, but such and such other thing exists, too. And to give a lot of importance to dangerous or harmful things is to give them strength.
0 1969-08-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, I had an experience like that (I dont know if it was this morning or yesterday morning or in the night, but anyway). For some time, I was in a consciousness in which the separate individuality no longer existed, but the principle (how should I Put it?) the particular principle of each individual persisted in the universal Consciousness. And then, mon petit, everything became so marvelous! It lasted maybe for an hour, a little more or a little less, I dont know, but anyway long enough to (Mother smiles), I mean, to lounge in it. There was no more, NO MORE separation, that had disappeared, but a certain (how to explain?), almost like an outlook; each individuals outlook (not just the outlook, but at the same time the stand in actionstand, that is, the part of the action initiated by that outlook), that persisted. It persisted in the Oneno separation. And then, each thing has its own placewith the whole marvelously effective. At the same time I cant say, words are impotent. At the time of the experience, I remembered a sentence of Sri Aurobindo in which he said that In the end, the Lord is only a child at play (you know it, he put it in a certain way4), and I understood WHY he used those words, it was it was something which our language obviously cant formulate, but to LIVE in that, to live that is you understand, its the impression of so, so perfect an omnipotence, so harmonious, and at the same time, yes, so harmonious that its all smiling. Its inexpressible. Inexpressible. I had the experience, then it went away It got mixed up with the daily work.
And I remember Its interesting because while I was in that state, I remembered the question youd asked me about Pavitra, whether the principle of individuality persists; so something in me said to you, Now you see, its like this! (Mother laughs) I remembered your question, I said, Its like this, there is NO MORE separation, but but this marvel of complexity remains the marvel of a complexity. And the impression is that everything, but everything that is has its own place, but when its in its place, then its perfectly harmonious.
0 1969-10-25, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And In the end, he was not too happy with me. I am sorry. I have the impression of having miserably failed.
Your somewhat puzzled child,
0 1969-10-29, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Poor man, he wept. But In the end, I think it did him good.
Hes leaving in a few days.
0 1969-11-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ill give you an example. For a few days I had difficulties with Z and there was a sort of need to exert a pressure on him so he would rectify a few of his movements. Today he made at least four or five mistakes (they werent perceptible, in the sense that I didnt have a sensation of them: it was taking place there, like that, some distance away), but he was conscious of them in a COMPLETELY different way from usually, and he admitted it (which he never did before), and In the end he said he was changing (which is true). And all of it not only without one word, but without one movement of consciousness: simply the Pressure. So there. Thats a proof. Everything would be done automatically, like an imposition of the Truth, without any need to intervene: simply remaining in the true consciousness, thats all, its enough.
There.
0 1969-11-29, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But you know, In the end, the impression I get from A.R. is that the man has a Christian atmosphere.
Quite possible.
0 1970-01-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, the value of an experience is measured by its power to transform life; otherwise, we are before an empty dream or a hallucination.
Sri Aurobindo leads us to a twofold discovery which we urgently need if we want not only to find a way out of our suffocating chaos, but also to transform our world. By following him step by step in his prodigious explorationhis technique of inner spaces, if we may say sowe are led to the most important discovery of all times, to the threshold of the Great Secret which is to change the face of this world, namely, that consciousness is power. Hypnotized as we are by the present inescapable scientific conditions in which we were born, we seem to find hope only in an ever more enormous proliferation of machines, which will see better than we do, hear better than we do, calculate better than we do, heal better than we doand finally perhaps live better than we do.
0 1970-02-07, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
320The anarchic is the true divine state of man In the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.
And what do I answer to the previous aphorism?
0 1970-04-18, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I remember the first time (that was very long ago, more than sixty years ago), the first time I asked, But why do we die? Why do we live to die?Thats idiotic! Then I was made to understand that all that we see as forms is (same gesture in perpetual movement). Its our clenched little consciousness; a clenched consciousness which makes it all appear a momentous phenomenon: we are small, we grow big, and In the end, we dissolve. But everything is like that (same gesture), everything is like that! There are very few thingsvery few that are eternal. They have a different quality. Its the first experience you get when you contact that which is eternal: it has a different vibratory quality And then, that will to make this last (Mother points to her body), this which is made, entirely made of wrong movementswrong movements and constantly in movement, constantly changing, constantly (same gesture). As Sri Aurobindo said, You want to make your body and everything around it last as it is?No, thank you! (Mother laughs) To last is, in fact, to become conscious, fully conscious in the eternal world.
(silence)
0 1970-04-29, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"I used to hate and avoid pain and resent its infliction; but now I find that had I not so suffered, I would not now possess, trained and perfected, this infinitely and multitudinously sensible capacity of delight in my mind, heart and body. God justifies himself In the end even when He has masked Himself as a bully and a tyrant."
Mother commented it thus:
0 1970-10-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo used a whole lot of terminologies, and only In the end did he adopt the one I brought, then we could understand each other. Before, at the beginning, when I came he used to speak of all kinds of things of this sort.
And on top of it (laughing) it doesnt interest me!
0 1971-01-27, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The power that works in this yoga is of a thorough-going character and tolerates In the end nothing great or small that is an obstacle to the Truth and its realisation.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1971-04-14, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end, what I regretted is that all this takes up so much of your time, and that we make so much fuss about it, thats all.
Oh, that doesnt matter.
0 1971-05-05, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, In the end, you stop speaking!
(Sujata:) Only, those who do want to understand will lose outthere are many.
0 1971-06-12, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As for sadhana, it is not that you have no capacity, but what has happened to many has happened to you the physical consciousness has risen up and veiled the psychic which was about to come forward. It has risen up with the insistence on the value of its own small ignorant ideas and feelings and refusing to let them go. When the psychic comes forward, all larger and more enlightened movements replace them. But usually before that happens, these things rise up and control the consciousness for a while. This state need not be a permanent condition and if one sees clearly and rejects them consciously, then it can be got over quickly but even if it lasts a long period, it can In the end be overcome and that is happening to many now. Naturally, the physical consciousness persuades the mind that it is everlasting and cannot be got over; but that is not true.
May 21, 1937
0 1972-02-16, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have never known any will of mine for any major event in the conduct of the world affairs to fail In the end, although it may take a long time for the world-forces to fulfil it.
(October 1932)
0 1972-03-10, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the end it always boils down to the same thing: a SUBSTANTIAL individual progress is requireda serious and sincere progress then everything works perfectly.
The atmosphere is dislocated; it has lost the cohesive power it had.
0 1972-04-04, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In a general and absolute way, difficulties are ALWAYS graces. And due to (how can I put it?) human weakness they fail to be helpful. Difficulties are ALWAYS graces. I have been on earth for quite a while this time and alwaysalways, always, always, without a single exception I have seen In the end that difficulties are nothing but graces. I can neither feel nor see things otherwise because it has been my experience all my life. I might be upset at first and say, How come, I am full of goodwill, yet difficulties keep piling up. But afterwards, I could have simply given myself a slap: Silly you! Its just to bring more perfection to your character and the work! There.
(silence)
02.01 - A Vedic Story, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here comes the second cardinal principle in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the reality, viz, that an inferior formulation of the Spirit, an involute on a lower plane is not essentially or truly, even in its outer and dynamic nature and character, a mere temporary or by-the-way reality, an epiphenomenon; its sole function is not simply to impede, diminish and obscure the real reality so that it has to be gradually rejected and eliminated on the way back to the source. As a matter of fact, an inferior formulation has a double function; in the line of descent it limits, obscures, deviates and In the end falsifies the higher reality; at the same time, however, it concretises, energises, incarnates what it obscures. But in the ascending line, that is to say, in the movement of reversal from the inferior to the superior, the movement need not be always that of disincarnation and dissolution, it may be that of purification and illumination and fulfilment. The analogy will not be, then, that of Matter being dematerialised into pure energy but that of Matter being transformed into a radiant substance, not losing itself in the process of radiation, being wholly made of the undying luminous stuff.
Such a movement of transforming evolution is not merely a possibility or a probability: it is a fact of Nature. Indeed, natural evolution means nothing less than that. First of all, evolution means the reversibility of Nature; for, it is the backward movement of an involutionary process. We have said that the supreme truth and realitysat-cit-ananda, as it is calledmultiplied and concretised itself gradually through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Supermind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents,the farthest apparently from the original source, the movement turns round and seeks to go up the ladder through the same gradations it has traversed. But this process of reversal is not merely a resolution and dissolution, it is a process of greater fulfilment and synthetisation, of sublimation as well as of integration.
--
Nature's attempt at the transcendence of Mind opens the door for a more and more direct and integral descent of the Divine Consciousness, and in its highest degrees the degrees of the Supermind the Descent means a reversal of the normal values, a swift and total transfiguration of earthly life into the mould of supernal spiritual realities. An absolute degree of the Descent, an irruption of the Divine Consciousness in its supreme purity and fullness becomes inevitable In the end: for that alone can bring about the fulfilment that Nature ultimately has in view. Matter will yield completely, and life power too, only to the direct touch and embrace of the Divine's own self.
In this age we stand at some such critical juncture in Nature's evolutionary history. Its full implications, the exact degree of the immediate achievement, the form and manner of the Descent are things that remain veiled till the fact is accomplished. Something of it is revealed, however, to the eye of vision and the heart of faith, something of it is seized by those to whom it chooses to disclose itself
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
These characters, it is true, are not clear and pronounced, do not lie in front, at the beginning of the human personality. The normal human person has his psyche very much behind; but it is still there as antarymin, as the secret Inner Controller. And whatever the vagaries of the outer instruments or their slavery to the mode of Ignorance, in and through all that, it is this Inner Guide that holds the reins and drives upward In the end.
Thus naturally there appear gradations of the human personality; as the consciousness in the human being rises higher and higher, the psychic centre organises a higher and higher a richer, wider, deeper personality. The first great conversion, the first turning of the human personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a conscious harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner nucleus of consciousness-force is formed, first, by the flaming aspiration, the upward drive within the developing and increasing psychic being itself, and secondly, by the descent, to a greater and greater degree, of the original Being from which it emanated. The final coalescence of the fully and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation returns to the point from which it started but with an added significance, a new fulfilment.
02.05 - Federated Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The present war puts the problem in the most acute way. Shall it be still a nation or shall it be a "commonwealth" that must henceforth be the dynamic unit? Today it is evident, it is a fact established by the sheer force of circumstances that isolated, self-sufficient nations are a thing of the past, even like the tribes of the Hebrews or the clans of the Hittites. A super-nation, that is to say, a commonwealth of nations is the larger unit that Nature is in travail to bring forth and establish. That is the inner meaning of the mighty convulsions shaking and tearing humanity today. The empire of the pastan empire of the Roman type and patternwas indeed in its own way an attempt in the direction of a closely unified larger humanity; but it was a crude and abortive attempt, as Nature's first attempts mostly are. For the term that was omitted in that greater synthesis was self-determination. Centralisation is certainly the secret of a large organic unity, but not over-centralisation; for this means the submission and sacrifice of all other parts of at! organism to the undue demands and interests of only one organ which is considered as the centre, the metropolis. Such a system dries up In the end the vitality of the organism: the centre, sucking in all nourishment from the outlying members suffers from oedema and the whole eventually decays and disintegrates. That is the lesson the Roman Empire teaches us.
The autocratic empire is dead and gone: we need not fear its shadow or ghostly regeneration. But the ideal which inspired it in secret and justified its advent and reign is a truth that has still its day. The drive of Nature, of the inner consciousness of humanity was always to find a greater and larger unit for the collective life of mankind. That unit today has to be a federation of free peoples and nations. In the place of nations, several such commonwealths must now form the broad systems of the body politic of human collectivity. That must give the pattern of its texture, the outline of its configuration the shape of things to come. Such unit is no longer a hypothetical proposition, a nebula, a matter of dream and imagination. It has become a practical necessity; first of all, because of the virtual impossibility of any single nation, big or small, standing all by itself alonemilitary and political and economic exigencies demand inescapable collaboration with others, and secondly, because of the still stricter geographical compulsion the speed and ease of communication has made the globe so small and all its parts so interdependent that none can possibly afford to be exclusive and self-centred.
02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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!
02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
India culminated in Mayavada. Our Yoga is a double movement of ascent and descent; one rises to higher and higher levels of consciousness, but at the same time one brings down their power not only into mind and life, but In the end even into the body.
And the highest of these levels, the one at which it aims is the supermind. Only when that can be brought down is a divine transformation possible in the earth-consciousness.
02.07 - George Seftris, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We are reminded of Jeanne d'Arc, the little maid who melted with great pity (grande piti) at the sight of the misery all around, ravaging her sweet France like a pest and which drove her In the end to a more than classical tragic end: Seferis too in the same manner wails
Great pain had fallen on Greece.3
02.10 - Independence and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If we had joined hands with the British in the war-work on their own termsto try to compel them to our terms is to put the cart before the horsewe would have seen that as we proceeded with the work, more and more of it came automatically under our charge, however small or slight it might have looked in the beginning. In the end or very soon we would have found that our possession of the field was an accomplished fact, there could be no question of denying or refusing, the fact had to be acceptedadmitted and ratified. It is the well-known policy of the camel which Aesop described in one of his Fables. We have to establish the inexorable logic of events which definitively solves the riddle, cuts the Gordian knot as it were. A theoretical, that is to say, a moral and legal pact or understanding is but a dam of sands.
Power is best gained and increased in this way, viz., through work, through practical application of it, in its painstaking executionno matter with what insignificant fund we start with. Let all power come into my hands, let me be legally and verbally recognised as free and invested with plenary power, then alone I can exercise my power, otherwise notthis is the cry of romantic idealism, of sentimental hunger: it has all the impatience and incompetence of visionariesillumins It is not the clear and solid wisdom of experience.
02.12 - The Ideals of Human Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nationhood, however, developed into such a firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels for its fulfilment. On three different lines a greater and larger unification of mankind has been attempted that goes beyond the unification brought about by the ideal of the country or people or nation. First, the political, that leads to the formation of Empires. But the faults and errors in this type of larger unit have been made very evident. It acts as a steam-roller, no doubt, crushing out and levelling parochial differences and local narrownesses; but it also means the overgrowth of a central organismcalled the metropolisat the expense of other member organisms forming part of the larger collectivity, viz., colonies and dependencies and subject races, which must In the end bring about a collapse and disruption of the whole structure. The Roman Empire was the typical example of this experiment. Next, there was what can be called the racial line. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but nothing very successful has taken shape. Pan-Slavism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Jewry are some of the expressions of this movement. It has the fatal fault of a basis that is uncertain and doubtful: for a pure race is a myth and in modern conditions the cry must necessarily be a cry in the wilderness. Many races and peoples have in the course of human history been thrown together, they have to live together, are compelled to lead a common social, political, economic and cultural life. That indeed was the genesis of nationhood. The hegemony of a so-called Nordic race over the world was one of the monsters produced by this attempt, a reductio ad absurdum of the principle.
The third is the religious principle. Religion, that is to say, institutional religion has also sought to unify mankind on a larger basis, as large indeed as the world itself. The aim of Christendom, of Islam was frankly a conquest of the whole human race for the one jealous Lord. Buddhism and Hinduism did not overtly or with a set purpose attempt any such worldwide proselytism, but their influence and actual working had almost a similar effect:at least in the case of the former, it was like a flood throwing down many local boundaries, overflooding distant countries, and peoples, giving them all one unified religious life and culture. But here too we meet the same objectionable feature as there is in the attempt at unity through the racial principle. For religious imperialism cannot succeed in unifying humanity, as amply demonstrated by the Roman Catholic Church; and like political imperialism it was more or less an experiment in the line, effecting nothing beyond a moral atmosphere. Even a federation of religions, contemplated by some idealists, seems hardly a practicable proposition; for it is only a mental conception and has no compelling vital force in it. At best it is only a sign-post, a pointer to the goal Nature and humanity have been endeavouring to evolve and realise.
A new type of imperialism for imperialism it is in essence has been developing in recent times; and it seems it shall have its day and contri bute its share of experimentation towards the goal we are speaking of. I am of course referring to what has been frankly and aptly termed as the Dictatorship of the Proletariate. It is an attempt to cut across all other boundaries and unities of human groupingsracial, national, religious, even familial. It seeks to unify and consolidate one whole stratum of humanity in a single stream-lined steel-frame organisation. At least that was the ideal till yesterday; there seems to be growing here too a movement towards decentralisation. Naturally, even as an organisation that is top-heavy is bound to topple down In the end, likewise an organisation that is bottom-heavy, that is to say, restricts to that portion only of its body all sap and dynamism, is also bound to deteriorate and disintegrate. A tree does not live by its branches and leaves and flowers alone, no doubt, nor does it live by its roots alone.
A different type of wider grouping is also being experimented upon nowadays, a federal grouping of national units. The nation is taken in this system as the stable indivisible fundamental unit, and what is attempted is a free association of independent nations that choose to be linked together because of identity of interests or mutual sympathy in respect of ideal and culture. The British Empire is a remarkable experiment on this line: it is extremely interesting to see how an old-world Empire is really being liquidated (in spite of a Churchill) and transformed into a commonwealth of free and equal nations. America too has been attempting a Pan-American federation. And in continental Europe, a Western and an Eastern Block of nations seem to be developing, not on ideal lines perhaps at present because of their being based upon the old faulty principle of balance of power hiding behind it a dangerously egoistic and exclusive national consciousness; but that may change when it is seen and experienced that the procedure does not pay, and a more natural and healthier approach may be adopted.
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet internationalism is not the one thing needful either. If it means the obliteration of all national values, of all cultural diversity, it will not certainly conduce to the greater enrichment and perfection of humanity. Taken by itself and in its absolute sense, it cannot be a practical success. The fact is being proved every moment these days. Internationalism in the economic sphere, however, seems to have a greater probability and utility than in the merely political sphere. Economics is forcing peoples and nations to live together and move together: it has become the soldering agent in modern times of all the elements the groups and types of the human family that were so long separate from each other, unknown to each other or clashing with each other. But that is good so far as it goes. Powerful as economic forces are, they are not the only deciding or directing agents in human affairs. That is the great flaw in the "International", the Marxian type of internationalism which has been made familiar to us. Man is not a political animal, in spite of Aristotle, nor is he an economic animal, in spite of Marx and Engels. Mere economics, even when working for a greater unity of mankind, tends to work more for uniformity: it reduces man to the position of a machine and a physical or material machine at that. By an irony of fate the human value for which the international proletariate raised its banner of revolt is precisely what suffers In the end. The Beveridge Plan, so much talked of nowadays, made such an appeal, no doubt because of the economic advantages it ensures, but also, by far and large, because it views man as a human being in and against the machine to which he belongs, because it is psychologically a scheme to salvage the manhood of man, so far as is possible, out of a rigidly mechanistic industrial organization.
Humanism
03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Virtues are not indications of the fire of the inner soul, nor are vices irremediable obstacles to its growth. The inner soul, we have said, feeds upon allit is indeed fire, the omnivorous, sarvabhuk,virtues and vices and everything else and gather strength from everywhere. The mystery of miracles, of a sudden change or reversal or revolution in consciousness and way of life lies in the omnipotency of the psychic being. The psychic being has the power of making the apparently impossible, for this reason that it is a portion of the almighty Divine, it is the supreme Conscious-Power crystallised and canalised in a centre for the sake of manifestation. It is a particle from the Being, a spark of the Consciousness, a ripple from the Delight cast into the fastnesses of Matter and the, material body. Now, it is the irresistible urge of this particle, this spark, this ripple to grow and expand, to become In the end the Vast the Ocean and the Sun and the sphere of Infinityto become that not merely in an essential status but in a dynamic and apparent becoming also. The little soul, originally no bigger than a thumb, goes forward through one life after another enlarging and intensifying itself till it recovers and establishes its parent reality in this material body here below, till it unveils what is latent within itself, what is its own, what is itself,its integral self-fulfilment, the Divine integrality.
Here in his inner being, as part and parcel of the Divine, man is absolutely free, has infinite capacity and unbounded aptitude; for here he is master, not slave of Nature, and it is slavery to Nature, that limits and baulks and stultifies man. So does the Upanishad declare in a magnificent and supreme utterance:
03.03 - A Stainless Steel Frame, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The institution of punishment is no longer respected or appreciated in modern times to the same extent as in the past, even a century ago. When character goes awry, punishment is of no avail. Punishment does not cure or redeem the criminal; it often hardens, fixes the trait that is sought to be eradicated. Fear of punishment does not always prevent one from doing wrong things. Often danger has an irresistible fascination for a certain type of temperament, especially danger of the wrong kindindeed the greater the wrong, the greater the danger and the greater the fascination. "To live dangerously" is the motto of the heroic soul, as well as of the lost soul. A strong penal system, a rigorous policing is of help no doubt to maintain "peace and order" of some kind in a society; but that is an external pressure which cannot last very long or be effective In the end.
So the ideal proposed is that of moral regeneration. But what is the kind of moral regeneration and how is it to be effected? All depends upon that. If you issue some moral rules and regulations, inscribe them on pillars, print them in pamphlets, preach them from the platform and the pulpit, these things have been done in the past and for ages, the result is not assured and the world goes its way as ever. Something more than mental and moral rules has to be discovered: some dynamic and irresistible element in man has to be touched, evoked and brought out, something that challenges the whole world and maintains its truth and the fiat of its truth. That is the inmost soul in man, the real being behind all the apparent forms of his personality, the divine element, the very Divine in him. It is the outer man, the marginal man, man in his inferior nature that lives and moves in normal circumstances; instead, the central man, man in his higher and highest nature has to come out and take his place in the world.
03.04 - The Other Aspect of European Culture, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In other words, the difference between Europe and Asia is the difference between two species; and there can be no fruitful union between them. So, the meeting and fusion of Europe and Asia is nothing but a barren ideal, a chimera. It is a hope and a desire cherished, no doubt, by sentimental visionaries, but it is bound to come to grief In the end, when brought to face the realities of life and the stern forces that shape the forms of the concrete world.
But is it after all an incontrovertible fact that Europe is Europe and Asia Asia? It is now too late in the day to maintain that Asia was always dreamy and metaphysical and that she always lacked the hold upon concrete reality. On the contrary, every new additional information regarding her past is continually bringing to light the fact that Asia was no less efficient than Europe in matters worldly and material; she had as great, if not greater control over the brute reality than the latter can claim even today. Only her conquest of the spiritual realms was also as efficient and sovereign.
03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Matter exists in the absolute Consciousness, not as Matter but as its fundamental substratum, as that radical mode of being or consciousness which by the devolution of consciousness and the interaction of Knowledge and Ignorance In the end works itself out as Matter. So also with regard to Life and with regard to Mind. If things are to exist in the highest status of consciousness, the Divine Consciousness, exactly as they exist now, there would be no point or meaning in creation or manifestation. Manifestation or creation does not mean merely unveiling or unrolling in the sense of unpacking. It means a gradual shift in the stress of consciousness, giving it a particular mode of action.
The unrolling or Involution is the path traced by consciousness in its changing modes of concentration. The principle of concentration is inherent in consciousness. Sri Aurobindo speaks of four modes or degrees of this concentration: (I) the essential, (2) the integral, (3) the total or global and (4) the separative. The first is a sole in-dwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own being it is the superconscient Silence, at one end, and the Inconscience, at the other. The second is the total Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, multiple or totalising overmental awareness; the fourth is the concentration of Ignorance. All the four, however, form the integral play of one indivisible consciousness.
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 Democracy of Tomorrow, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In India the spiritual life, it is true, was more or less the individual's free venture to the unknown. The Buddha said, Be thy own light; and the Gita too said, Raise thy self by thy own self. Yet here too, In the end, the individual did not stand, it rose but to get merged in the non-individual the universal, the Vast and the Infinite. The highest spiritual injunction is that God only existed and man has to annul his existence in Him.
The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening line of his famous book,The Social Contract, almost the Bible of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. It was really an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of democracy in politics and romanticism in art. The century that followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence, democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, In the end, social disintegration. A strong centralised power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group. Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on the move the other way round. Thus a never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.1
In this connection we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes it, (almost exactly as we have experienced it in our own days). But the most interesting point to which we can look with profit is Plato's view that the types are as men are, that is to say, the character and nature of man in a given period determines the kind of government or social system he is going to have. There has been this cyclic rotation of types, because men themselves were rotating types, because, in other words, the individuals composing human society had not found their true reality, their abiding status. Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to give our answer.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Buddha says, take off the elements that compose the creation one by one, nothing would remain In the end. Creation is only an agglomeration of discrete elements; there is nothing behind them or within them that is permanent and holding them together. When names and forms go, at the end there is only dissolution, pure and simple, Nothing, Nihil.
(III) This metaphysical position is faithfully translated, one may point out here, in their respective logical positions of the two.
03.09 - Sectarianism or Loyalty, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not only bad influences that affect you badly, even good influences do solike medicines that depend upon the particular constitution for their action. In ancient times this was called varasankara or dharmasakara, as for example, when a Kshatriya sought to follow the rule of life of a Brahmin or vice versa. This kind of admixture or msalliance was not favoured, as it was likely to bring about an obscurity in the consciousness and In the end frustration in the spiritual life. That was the original psychological reason why heresy was considered such a dangerous thing in all religions.
It is not sufficient to say that God is one and therefore wherever He is found and however He is found and whoever finds Him one must implicitly accept and obey and follow. God is one indeed: but it is equally true that he is multiple. God is not a point, but a limitless infinity, so that when one does reach Him one arrives at a particular spot, as it were, enters into only one of his many mansions. Likewise, God's manifestation upon earth has been infinitely diverse, his Vibhutis, Avataras, his prophets and viceregents have been of all sorts and kinds. Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and justification of creeds and dogmas. Only, it must be borne in mind, that one can be faithful even to a particular creed and dogma and yet transcend it, live a particular mode of life and yet possess at the back of it and as its support the very sense and consciousness of infinity itself. Where there is this synthetic and transcendent experience dogmatism has no place, nor conflict between creed and creed.
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Another personLaertesplaced in an analogous situation but not worried by the promptings of idealism and the sense of discrepancy between the ideal and the real, takes the world as it is, considers it all right and moves straight to his purpose; he is not a divided being, but in full and integral possession of himself and of his instruments of actioneven though this solid pragmatism does not avail him much In the end.
The crisis in Hamlet reminds us of another somewhat similar one, that is the basis and starting-point of the great episode in the Mahabharata the Gita. Arjuna, the ideal hero and man of action, in absolute self-confidence and certitude, with no doubt or hesitation about anything in the world, advances into the very thick of the bloody strife and lo! all is changed as with a magic wand! What was to him a moment before a clear duty, an evident act of righteousness, the noblest of deeds, now appears nothing less than an inglorious slaughter. The bow of victory slips from the hand of the mighty warrior and, all nerve and tremor, he sinks down in gloom and dejection and complete confusion.
03.11 - The Language Problem and India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It may be questioned whether too many languages are not imposed on us in this way and whether it will not mean In the end a Babel and inefficiency. It need not be so and it is not going to be so. We must remember the age we are in, its composite structure, its polyphonic nature. In the ancient and mediaeval ages, the ages of separatism and exclusiveness of clans and tribes and regions, even in the later age of the states and nations, the individual group-consciousness was strong and sedulously fostered. Languages and literature grew and developed more or less independently and with equal vigour, although always through some kind of give and take. But the modern world has been made so inextricably one, ease of communication and free interchange have obliterated the separating boundaries, not only geographical but psychological. The modern consciousness has so developed and is so circumstanced that one can very easily be bi-lingual or even trilingual: indeed one has to be so, speaking and writing with equal felicity not only one's mother tongue but one or more adopted tongues. Modern culture means that.
Naturally I am referring to the educated or cultured stratum of humanity, the lite. This restriction, however, does not vitiate or nullify our position. The major part of humanity is bound and confined to the soil where they are born and brought up. Their needs do not go beyond the assistance of their vernacular. A liberal education, extending even to the masses, may and does include acquaintance with one or two foreign languages, especially in these days, but in fact it turns out to be only a nodding acquaintance, a secondary and marginal acquisition. When Latin was the lingua franca in Europe or Sanskrit in India, it was the lite, the intelligentsia, the Brahmin, the cleric, who were the trustees and guardians of the language. That position has virtually been taken in modern times, as I have said, by English and French.
03.13 - Dynamic Fatalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If it is so, then what is the necessity at all of work and labour and travailthis difficult process of sadhana? The question is rather naive, but it is very often asked. The answer also could be very simple. The change decreed is precisely worked out through the travail: one is the end, the other is the means; the goal and the process, both are decreed and inevitable. If it is argued, supposing none made the effort, even then would the change come about, in spite of man's inaction? Well, first of all, this is an impossible supposition. Man cannot remain idle even for a moment: not only the inferior Nature, but the higher Nature too is always active in himremember the words of the Gita though behind the veil, in the inner consciousness. Secondly, if it is really so, if man is not labouring and working and making the attempt, then it must be understood that the time has not yet come for him to undergo the change; he has still to wait: one of the signs of the imminence of the change is this very intensity and extensiveness of the labour among mankind. If, however, a particular person chooses to do nothing, prefers to wait and seehopes In the end to jump at the fruit all at once and possess it or hopes the fruit to drop quietly into his mouthwell, this does not seem to be a likely happening. If one wishes to enjoy the fruit, one must share in the effort to sow and grow. Indeed, the process itself of reaching the higher consciousness involves a gradual heightening of the consciousness. The means is really part of the end. The joy of victory is the consummation of the joy of battle.
Man can help or retard the process of Nature, in a sense. If his force of consciousness acts in line with Nature's secret movement, then that movement is accelerated: through the soul or self that is man, it is the Divine, Nature's lord and master who drives and helps Nature forward. If, on the contrary, man follows his lesser self, his lower ego, rajasic and tamasic, then he throws up obstacles and barriers which hamper and slow down Nature's march.
03.13 - Human Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The danger in the growth and progress of the consciousness is that it progresses along a definite line or lines, cuts out a groove and In the end lands into a blind alley or cul-de-sac. This, as I have said, is perhaps the original or secret cause of decline and fall of many individual races and nations. But on the whole mankind steps back, it seems, just at the danger point and escapes the final catastrophe. A new vein of consciousness awakes in man and gives him a new power of self-adjustment. From Imperial Egypt to, say, modern France or Russia is a far cry; the two ends give very different connotations of the human consciousness, although there are many things common in certain life-instincts and some broad mental impulsions. And there is not only progress, that is to say, advancement on the same plane, but there is a kind of ascension on a somewhat different plane. Yajnavalkya represented a type of lite which is far away and far other than that of Vivekananda, for example, today.
We have described man, especially, modern man as homo fabricus; but that is a particular aspect of application of homo intellectualis. And it is a sign and warning that he must step back and look for a new connotation of his consciousness in order to go forward and continue to exist. If, as we have said in the beginning, man is capable of a durable youthfulness, by his very nature, it means he has a resiliency that will enable him to leap into new conditions and adapt himself to them more easily and without much delay.
03.16 - The Tragic Spirit in Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There runs a pessimistic vein in Nature's movement. Due to the original Inconscience out of which she is built and also because of a habit formed through millenniums it is not possible for her to expect or envisage anything else than decay, death and frustration In the end or on the whole. To every rise there must be a fall, a crest must end in a trough. Nature has not the courage nor the faculty to look for any kind of perfection upon earth. Not that within her realm one cannot or should not try for the good; the noble, even the perfect, but one must be ready to pay the price. Good there is and may be, but it is suffered only on payment of its Danegeld to Evil. That is the law of sacrifice that seems to be fundamental to Nature's governance.
The Evil, we have said, is nothing else than the basis of unconsciousness or Inconscience in Nature. It is this which pulls the beingwhatever structure of consciousness can be reared upon itdown to decay and frustration. It is the force of gravitation or inertia. Matter is unconsciousness; the body, formed basically of matter, is unconsciousness too. The natural tendency of Matter is towards disintegration and dissolution; the body, therefore, is mortalbhasmntamidam arram. The scope and range of mortality is measured by the scope and range of unconsciousness. Matter is the most concrete and solid form of unconsciousness; but it casts its shadow upon the higher levels toolife and mind always lie in the penumbra of this original evil.
03.17 - The Souls Odyssey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality. It is a nucleus, a centre of individuation, a projection in a particular name and form of the infinite and eternal Being and Consciousness and Bliss on this side of manifestation or evolutionary Nature. Being in and with the Divine, merged within it, the Soul has, at the same time, its own proper domain, exclusively its own, and its own inalienable identity. It is the domain where the Soul enjoys its swarjya, its absolute freedom, dwelling in its native light and happiness and glory. But the story changes, the curve of its destiny takes a sudden new direction when it comes down upon earth, when it inhabits a mortal body. Within the body, it no longer occupies its patent frontal position, but withdraws behind a veil, as it were: it takes its stand behind or within the depth of the heart, as spiritual practice experiences it. It hides there, as in a cavern, closed in now by the shades of the prison-house which its own body and life and mind build round it. Yet it is not wholly shut out or completely cut off; for from its secret home it exerts its influence which gradually, slowly, very slowly indeed, filters throughba thes, clarifies, illumines the encasement, makes it transparent and docile In the end. For that is the Soul's ultimate function and fulfilment.
In the meanwhile, however, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. A physical incarnation clouds the soul-consciousness and involves loss of memory, amnesia. The soul's travail therefore in a physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that that is also what Plato thought when he said that all knowledge, all true knowledge consists in reminiscence.
04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is a truth, a fact of creationgiving the whole clue to the riddle of this world that has not been envisaged at all in the past or otherwise overlooked and not given the value and importance that it has. Poets and seers, sages and saints along with common men from the very birth of humanity have mourned this vale of tears, this sorrowful transient earthly life, anityam asukha lokam ima1, into which they have been thrown: they have wished and willed and endeavoured to change or reform or re-create it, but have always failed, and In the end, finding it ultimately incorrigible, concluded that escape was the only solution, the only issue, either like the sage going out into Nirvana, spiritual dissolution, or like the atheist stoically going down with a crumbling world into a material disintegration. The truth of the matter is, however, different as Sri Aurobindo sees it. The spectacle is not so gloomy and irremediable. The world has a future and man has hope.
The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable felicity in pain and suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward drive of evolution that brings out gradually, step by step, the various modes of the consciousness in different degrees and potentials till the original summit is revealed.
04.06 - To Be or Not to Be, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It may be asked if even then there are not some types of activity and impulsion that are intrinsically evil, undivine they can under no circumstances be godly or God's instruments, they have to be rejected, cast aside in the very beginning, also in the middle and naturally In the end. But it must be remembered that the human mind cannot be the judge of what is divine or undivine, there are things the Divine may sanction which the mental being fights shy of. It must leave into the Divine to choose His instrument and His mode of activityit is sufficient if the mental being knows by whom it is impelled and where it falls as an arrow shot to its mark: keneitam patati preitam.6
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.
04.07 - Matter Aspires, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is asked now if the machine is capable of so much mathematics, may it not be capable also of poetic creation? The possibility has been discussed in a very lively and interesting manner in The Hibbert Journal (October, '49 and January, '50). The writer Sir Robert Watson-Watt thinks it is not impossible, indeed quite possible, for a machine to write, for example, a sonnet. Only the question will be with regard to the kind the quality and standardof the poetic creation. What will come out of the machine will depend upon what has been put into it, that is to say, what the brain that constructed it succeeded in transplanting into it. The writer after weighing the pros and cons arrives at the remarkable and amusing conclusion that a machine built by a second class brain may succeed in producing a poem of third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out In the end only a second class or worse production.
I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component parts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the parts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him whichupsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machine. Poetry, art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.
04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As, however, mortality bears ill the eternal's touch, the eternal too is intolerant of the mortal natureonly it is intolerant not in the ignorant blind squeamish weak human way, but in a divine way, for it is armed with weapons of light and knowledge, it assaults with its luminous force, the energy of ether and fire, the higher and nobler elements as against the dense dark dumb earth, the lowest element that clothes the human consciousness. Indeed, mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the unalloyed sheer delight in Eternity. It is out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra firma, the mud and slime. The human consciousness has been fleeing the Hound of Heaven down the corridors of Time, and yet it will be caught In the end and wholly transmuted in the divine embrace into the substance of the Divine Himself. All the unwillingness and protestation and revolt are meant to forge and hammer the final union into something perfect, faultless, absolute.
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05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A popular conundrum. Are the souls finite or infinite in number? Supposing they are finite, then a time is sure to come when there will be no more souls upon earth; for, as it is said, all souls are evolving and In the end will pass out of earthly life and get merged in their source, the Brahman, the absolute Reality. On the other hand, if they are infinite, then, since all of them cannot appear on earth at the same time, the number of human bodies that house the souls being limited (at the most, a few thousand millions, according to statisticians), what happens to those that are not embodied, where do they wait or what do they do in that period? Do all come down or embody in course of time? Will all have the chance, will it be needed for all to take a body and sojourn on earth? No doubt, there is a continual increase of population upon earth, does that mean that new souls are slowly coming away from the waiting list? Even then, the list cannot be exhausted, since it is infinite; so there is bound to be a very large number who would not get the chance of visiting the earth. For, however much the population increases, it cannot increase to infinity. It can do so only if the world continues to exist eternally and humanity too. But both science and religion say that the world will come to an end sometime. There is a pralayaan extinctionalthough it may be followed by a new creation and a new cycle of growth and evolution, but of a different kind and constituting quite other elements.
I have put the popular case in figures of popular mentality;almost foolish and childish on the face of it, as it would appear; but if one "tries to answer, one finds it is not easy, children's questions are always so. Let us then try to be wise and face the problem squarely. The whole difficulty comes from the popular, perhaps normal human conception of the soul; it is considered almost something like the physical body (even as Virochana of old did in the Upanishadic days), namely, it has a definite form and figure, even perhaps a definite mass: each is an isolated entity shut out from everyone else by a fixed contour within which each one is housed. In fact, however, it is not so. The soul is an individual, no doubt, it has even a kind of recognisable form, but nothing of the kind by which matter or a material body is characterised. It is an essential form, form of the form, swarpa; it is a basic or typal individuality, the individual seated within the 'individual. The characteristic of material individuality is, as I have said, exclusiveness, where -as the soul individuality is characterised by a comprehensiveness which does not diminish but gives a special mode and movement to that individuality. In the growth of life-forms, we know how a single unit, a cell, divides and subdivides itself and each division grows into a whole, a complete life-form. But the process is not reversible. Developed forms, coming out of a single parent cannot be resolved back into the original unit. Organisms do not combine to form a single unitary organism, although one or more may be taken up and assimilated into another: for this is not combination, but practically the annihilation of one into another. The second law of thermodynamics seems to hold good even in the biological field. On a still higher or deeper level, in the psychological and spiritual realm, such combinations or resolutions are however possible and form a characteristic movement of the occult world.
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.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Positivists are those who swear by facts. Facts to them mean naturally facts attested In the end by sense-experience. To a positivist the only question that matters and that needs to be answered and can be answered is whether a thing is or is not physically: other questions are otiose, irrelevant, misleading. So problems of the Good, of the Beautiful, of God are meaningless. When one says this is good, that is bad, well, it is a proposition that cannot be related to any fact, it is a subjective personal valuation. In the objective world a thing simply is or is not, one cannot say it is good or it is bad. The thing called good by one is called bad by another, the same thing that is good to you now will appear bad at another time. This is a region absolutely of personal and variable idiosyncrasy. The same with regard to the concept of beauty. That a thing is beautiful or ugly is a subjective judgment; it is not and cannot be an objective statement. Beauty is a formula in your mind and imagination, it is a changing mode of your apprehension. The concept of God too fares no better. God exists: it is a judgment based upon no fact or facts of sense-experience. However we may analyse it, it is found to have no direct or even indirect but inevitable rapport with the field of actual reality. There is between the two an unbridgeable hiatus. This is a position restated in a modern style, familiar to the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason.
There are two ways off acing the problem. First, the Kantian way which cuts the Gordian knot. We say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason, viz.,the Practical Reason; while the realities given by the senses and the judgments of the logical mind are of another section. It may be said one is physical, the other metaphysical. The positivists limit their field of enquiry and knowledge to the physical: they seek to keep the other domain quite apart as something imaginary, illusory, often unnecessary and not unoften harmful to true human interest.
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This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us, even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very small part of a much greater and wider form of knowing. Poets and artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form: without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Apart from that, modern inquiries and observations have established beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational perceptionof clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy, of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence. Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no great success. In the end she seems to say these freaks do not come within her purview and she is not concerned with them. However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for the moment.
The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in close contact with two disconcerting facts or two ends of one fact the infinitely small and the infinitely large. They have disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally, in the case of the infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the infinite we begin squaring the circle.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics, i.e., move in the line of least distance). Space is not a plain surface, smooth and uniform, but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely geometrical and science In the end resolves itself into geometry: the laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and psychological factors.
Apart from the standpoint of theoretical physics developed by Einstein, the more practical aspect as brought out in Wave Mechanics leads us into no less an abstract and theoretical domain. The Newtonian particle-picture, it is true, has been maintained in the first phase of modern physics which specialised in what is called Quantum Mechanics. But waves or particlesalthough the question as to their relative validity and verity still remains opendo not make much difference in the fundamental outlook. For in either view, the individual unit is beyond the ken of the scientist. A wave is not a wave but just the probability of a wave: it is not even a probable wave but a probability wave. Thus the pattern that Wave Mechanics weaves to show the texture of the ultimate reality is nothing more than a calculus of probabilities. By whichever way we proceed we seem to arrive always at the same inevitable conclusion.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But In the end a difficulty arose in the operation of observation. It proved to be not a simple process. The scientific observer requires for his observation the yard-stick and the time-piece. Now, we have been pushed to admit a queer phenomenon (partly by observation and partly by a compelling deduction) that these two measuring units are not constant; they change with the change of system, that is to say, according to the velocity of the system. In other words, each observer has his own unit of space and time measure. So the elimination of the personal element of the observer has become a complicated mathematical problem, even if one is sure of it finally.
There is still something more. The matter of calculating and measuring objectively was comparatively easy when the object in view was of medium size, neither too big nor too small. But in the field of the infinite and the infinitesimal, when from the domain of mechanical forces we enter into the region of electric and radiant energy, we find our normal measuring apparatus almost breaks down. Here accurate observation cannot be made because of the very presence of the observer, because of the very fact of observation. The ultimates that are observed are trails of light particles: now when the observer directs his eye (or the beam oflight replacing the eye) upon the light particle, its direction and velocity are interfered with: the photon is such a tiny infinitesimal that a ray from the observer's eye is sufficient to deflect and modify its movement. And there is no way of determining or eliminating this element of deflection or interference. The old Science knew certainly that a thermometer dipped in the water whose temperature it is to measure itself changes the initial temperature. But that was something calculable and objective. Here the position of the observer is something like a "possession", imbedded, ingrained, involved in the observed itself.
05.10 - Children and Child Mentality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are two failings which a teacher must guard againstto which he is usually proneif he wishes to secure respect and obedience and trust from children: (I) telling a lie and (2) losing temper. A child can easily find out whether you are spinning a long yarn or not. He is inquisitive, irrepressively curious and, above all, he has his own manner and angle of looking at things. He puts questions about all things and subjects and in all ways that seem queer to an adult view. His answers too to questions, his solutions of problems are very unorthodox, bizarre. But it is all the more the task of the elder not only to put up with all these vagaries, but also with great sympathy and patience to appreciate and understand what the child attempts to express. If you get irritated or angry and try to snub or brush him away, it would mean the end of all cordial relation between you and him. Or, again, if you try to hoodwink him, give a false answer to hide your ignorance, in that case too the child will not be deceived, he will find you out and lose all respect for you. It is far better to own your ignorance, saying you do not know than to pose as a knowing man; although that may affect to some extent his sense of hero-worship and he may not entertain any longer the unspoilt awe and esteem with which he was accustomed to look up to you, still you will not lose his affection and confidence. Infinite patience and a temper that is never frayed or ruffled are demanded of the teacher and the parent who wish to guide and control successfully and happily a child. With that you can mould In the end the most refractory child, without that you will fail even with a child of goodwill.
Wordsworth: We Are Seven
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has his being; according to others, the same may lead to a very different consummation, to Nothingness, the Great Void, Nihil. All existence is bounded by something unknown and intangible which differs according to your luck or taste,one would almost say to your line of approach, put philosophically, according either to the positive pole or the negative, God or Non-existence. The second alternative seems to be an inevitable corollary of the particular conception of the individual that is entertained by some, viz.,the individual existing only in relation to individuals. Indeed the leader of the French school, Jean-Paul Sartrenot a negligible playwright and novelistseems to conceive the individual as nothing more than the image formed in other individuals with whom he comes in contact. Existence literally means standing out or outside (ex+sistet), coming out of one-self and living in other's consciousnessas one sees one's exact image in another's eye. It is not however the old-world mystic experience of finding one's self in other selves. For here we have an exclusively level or horizontal view of the human personality. The personality is not seen in depth or height, but in line with the normal phenomenal formation. It looks as though, to save personality from the impersonal dissolution to which all monistic idealism leads, the present conception seeks to hinge all personalities upon each other so that they may stand by and confirm each other. But the actual result seems to have been not less calamitous. When we form and fashion each other, we are not building with anything more substantial than sand. Personalities are thus mere eddies in the swirl of cosmic life, they rise up and die down, separate and melt into each other and have no consistency and no reality In the end. The freedom too which is ascribed to such individuals, even when they feel it so, is only a sham and a make-believe. Within Nature nothing is free, all is mechanical lawKarma is supreme. The Sankhya posits indeed many Purushas, free, lodged in the midst of Prakriti, but there the Purusha is hardly an active agent, it is only an inactive, passive, almost impotent, witness. The Existentialist, on the contrary, seeks to make of the individual an active agent; he is not merely being, imbedded or merged in the original Dasein, mere existence, but becoming, the entity that has come out, stood out in its will and consciousness, articulated itself in name and form and act. But the person that stands out as part and parcel of Prakriti, the cosmic movement, is, as we have said, only an instrument, a mode of that universal Nature. The true person that informs that apparent formulation is something else. .
To be a person, it is said, one must be apart from the crowd. A person is the "single one", one who has attained his singularity, his individual wholeness. And the life's work for each individual person is to make the crowd no longer a crowd, but an association of single ones. But how can this be done? It is not simply by separating oneself from the crowd, by dwelling upon oneself that one can develop into one's true person. The individuals, even when perfect single ones, do not exist by themselves or in and through one another. The mystic or spiritual perception posits the Spirit or God, the All-self as the background and substance of all the selves. Indeed, it is only when one finds and is identified with the Divine in oneself that one is in a position to attain one's true selfhood and find oneself in other selves. And the re-creation of a crowd into such divine individuals is a cosmic work in which the individual is at best a collaborator, not the master and dispenser. Anyway, one has to come out of the human relationship, rise above the give-and-take of human individualshowever completely individual each one may beand establish oneself in the Divine's consciousness which is the golden thread upon which is strung all the assembly of individuals. It is only in and through the Divine, the Spiritual Reality and Person, that one enters into true relation and dynamic harmony with others.
05.30 - Theres a Divinity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is what man can do at his best, and even at his worst, rough-hew. Ignorant as he is, crude as his instruments are, he can do no better (and happily, no worse either). The ideals he has do not go very far, not much beyond his nosethey are limited by his senses, by his notions, by his immediate reactions to the circumstances of the moment. Even when the ends are commendable, the purposes decent, even when he is happily inspired, the materials and means at his disposal are crude and he uses them in a rough and ready manner. What he can achieve in this direction is not even a near but a very far approximate. And when he is otherwise inspired, when suggestions and impulsions come to him from the Hostiles, well, he hews his way, as Hitler didand some others are doing nowto wrong ends; even there he does not succeed wholly, realises his design very partially, grosso modo. The stone club in the hand of the palaeolithic man and the atom bomb in the hand of the modern are equally rough instruments, and the ends which they serve, whether for good or for evil, are also gross, neither far-visioned nor deep inspired, but superficial, strait and narrow, blindly immediate. In either case, however, the Divine remains unaffected, firmly seated behind and in and through both, in and through their ignorant and perverse wills, it is His Will that works itself out and finds fulfilment In the end. Whether one is for or against the Divine, whether one is a God or an Asura, each in his own way contri butes to the progressive realisation of the Cosmic Purpose. From a certain point of view even it may seem as though nothing helps or hinders, all are like a straw in a rushing current.
In our human reckoning, we seem to help the evolutionary course sometimes and sometimes hamper it with our efforts in so far as they are well directed or ill directed. In the practice of spiritual life too, one may be tempted to find a measurable proportion between the personal endeavour and the attainment. However that may be, at the end of all human efforts, the finishing touch always comes from the Divine Grace. Whether we succeed or fail, whatever be the human judgment of the situation, the Grace is sure to intervene in the final stage: to success it will bring more success giving it the peak of fulfilment, and failure too it will transmute into a glorious triumph.
05.33 - Caesar versus the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But then, it may be asked, how is it that in the history of the world we find men of action, great dynamic personalities to be mostly not spiritual but rather mundane in their character and outlook? Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Chandragupta, Akbar, even Shivaji, were not spiritual personalities; their actions were of the world and of worldly nature. And the force they wielded cannot be described as spiritual, and yet how effective it was, what mighty changes it brought about in the affairs of men! And do we not actually see in the lives of saints and true spiritual souls that the force of the spirit, if force it can be called, moves away from the field of dynamism, turns towards a plane or height where all incentives and impulses to action fall silent and vanish In the end? The spiritual force is applied to negate all mundane activity, to get out of the profane field of life. That is the skill of Yoga referred to in the Gita, that is how we are to understand the injunction to see "inaction in action", and "action in inaction".
Now there are several things to be distinguished here. First of all, even if it is accepted as true that in the past it is worldly men alone who were dynamically active in the world and that spiritual men were men of inaction whose role was to withdraw from the world, at least to be passive and indifferent with regard to mundane activities, that does not prove that it is an eternal truth and it is bound to be so ever and always. We must remember, if we admit the evolutionary character of Nature, of man and his growth and fulfilment, that spirituality in one of its forms at an early stage is and should be a movement of withdrawal, of diminishing dynamism in the sense of an "introversion". For when man still lives mostly in the vital domain and is full of the crude life urge, when the animal is still dominant in him (as the Tantrik discipline also points out), then a rigorous asceticism and self-denial is needed for the purification and sublimation of the nature. At that stage powers and dynamic capacities that often develop in the course of such discipline should also be carefully avoided and discarded; for they are more likely to bring down the consciousness to the ordinary level. But if that were the procedure and principle in the past, one need not eternise it into the present and the future. We Believe mankinda good part of mankind in its inner consciousness has advanced sufficiently on the vital level as to be able to give a new turn to his life and follow a different course of development. If he has not totally outgrown the animal, at least some higher element has been superimposed on it or infused into it and he can very well find the fulcrum of his nature in this superior station and order a new pattern of values and way of becoming. In other words, he need no longer altogether shun or avoid the so-called inferior forces the physico-vitalin him, but try to control and utilise them for higher diviner purposes in the world, upon the earth. For the earth embodies after all the crucial complex. Whatever is to be done In the end has to be done here, effected and established here. The withdrawal was needed for a purification and husbanding of the forces so that they may be brought forth and applied at the proper time and place, it is reculer pour mieux sauter, to fall back in order to leap forward all the better.
In reality, however, to a vision that sees behind and beyond the appearances, spirituality the force of the Spiritis ever dynamic: the spiritual soul, even when it appears passive and inert, is most active not merely in the subtle psychological domain, but also in the material field. To the gross pragmatic eye Ramakrishna, for example, appears as a less dynamic personality, a less strong and heroic, if not positively weaker character than Vivekananda. Well, that is only face-value reading. Vivekananda himself knew and felt and said that he was only one of hundreds of Vivekanandas that his simple and, modest-looking Guru could create if he chose. Even so a Ramdas. Ramdas was not merely a spiritual adviser to Shivaji, concerned chiefly with the inner salvation and development of his disciple, and only secondarily with the gross material activities, the things of Caesar. The two domains are not separate at least in this case: the spiritual here directly and dynamically affects the physical. The spiritual guide is the dynamo the matrixof the power, the power spiritual; he wields and marshals the hidden, the secret forces that are behind the outward forms and movements. And the disciple by his attitude of obeisance and receptivity becomes all the better a channel and instrument for the actual play and fulfilment of that force. A Govind Singh is another instance of spiritual power made dynamic in mundane things. And we always have the classical instance of Rajarshi Janaka.
06.03 - Types of Meditation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a third grade when the mind becomes a void, all thoughts being driven out, all vibrations tranquillised. It is a wide silence suffused with a still luminosity. The operation is difficult. For it means a kind of continuous and methodical drainage or rarefication which takes more or less a very long time. First you throw' out well-formed ideas and notions, processes and products of reasoning and judgment the bigger waves, as it were; as soon as these subside you find there are smaller waves below or behindhalf-formed thoughts, budding ideas, fugitive notions and so on; when these too are quieted down, you come across still another layer of smaller ripples of thought, close to sensations, nervous reactions, vibrations of the brain-mind, rudimentary precepts, etc., etc. One may go on like that if not ad infinitum, at least, to a considerable length. One arrives In the end at what is practically a vacuum, to all intents and purposes a silent mind. Even then it is a difficult and arduous process and may not be as absolute as one may expect. There are other surer and even perhaps easier processes to attain the same end. Thus instead of striving and struggling and forcing your will upon the restless waves, you simply relax yourself, bypass them as it were, await and aspire and open yourself towards the Silence that is above: call for the silence with trust and reliance and it comes not unoften as a massive inundation, a glacial sweep and automatically overwhelms you, drowning and filling you from top to toe. There is also another way: to contact, to enter into the Mother's Presence. Mother's Presence means all the realisations to which we aspire concretised, brought down, near to us, within our human reach. We have not to travel far and wide, mount to inaccessible heights, labour and strainwith blood and sweat and tearsto get what we want: all the gettings are ready-made there in our atmosphere, we have only to know and perceive, open something in us for them to flow in. That is perhaps the action of Grace: silence, absolute silence, not only in the mind, but in the whole being, can come this way too.
The last process gives us the clue to the fourth type of meditation the type, in fact, which is recommended for us, both because it is the easiestfollowing as it does the line of least resistance, also because it gives the fullness of the result demanded. Instead of trying to manipulate the mental force with one's personal will and effort, instead of seeking to control and comm and the consciousness, the best thing to do would be to remain quiet as far as it is normally possible for one without struggle and then turn the gaze to the other side, deep inward or high upward, become more conscious of the light, the Will that brought you to this Path, to be alive with the secret delight, the flaming aspiration that is there within you behind all the turbid turmoil of the surface life and consciousness. This Presence and Guidance will of itself place before you the elements and movements that are to be rejected and those that are to be accepted and given your sincere assent those that help you in doing the necessary gesture. Indeed, if you do not resist too much, it will throw out what is to be thrown out and bring in what is to be brought in. That is how the instrument will be cleansed and refined. Silence will be put in, for that is the basis; but not silence alone, for it will be unified with a new dynamism expressing the Divine's Willpersonal choice there will be none, neither for absolute quietude nor for mere activity.
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.
06.23 - Here or Elsewhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is easy and comfortable to go within and in an inner consciousness find and maintain a union, even a close union with the Divine. It is because of such a state of peace and bliss that many, nay, most who go there do not want to come back, to normal life upon this earth. And teachers, great or small, almost invariably, have taught that In the end it is best like that, and perhaps the only thing to do under the circumstances. For this life and this earth mean the very opposite of that inner heaven and that highest good. But some are not given this comfortable solution of the difficulty. They are asked to turn back and live the life of the earth. They are not allowed to remain cosy in a narrow room and be busy always with themselves alone. Indeed, is it not narrow egoism to seek only one's own salvation? When one has saved himself, is it not his duty the logical outcome and implication of his personal freedom that he should seek to help others in their salvation? Such was in fact the attitude of the Amitabha Buddha.
A house is on fire. It has a tarred roof. One can easily understand the fury of the fire. Some inmates who were trapped have managed to come out in time, although some-what bruised and scalded. But there were others, some children, left inside. One of those who came out rushes back again through the flames and comes and goes till all are saved. He is badly burnt, he has risked his life: he did not mind and could not remain at a safe distance. He could not be contented with saving himself, which was to be sure a sufficient gain in one respect. This soul had a consciousness of his wider self.
07.10 - Diseases and Accidents, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet there is still another moment. When you have fallen and are already hurt, you have still now the open chance whether it will turn well or ill, whether it will stop at being just a mishap or become something really serious or as serious as possible. I do not know if you have noticed that there are certain people who do not seem to miss any occasion for an accident. Every time there is a possibility, they have it. And the accident is never slight, it tends to be serious and often very serious. People say, what an unlucky fellow! Chance is never on his side! etc., etc. But all that is sheer ignorance. Everything depends absolutely upon the working of the consciousness. I could cite any number of instances and such striking ones. There are people who might have been killed but came out of the accident safe and sound. There are others for whom what was quite harmless in the beginning turns worse and worse and proves In the end, perhaps, fatal.
But you must understand it is not the working of thought, ordinary thought. The thought may be as good in one as in the other. It all depends upon the moment of choice. There are people who know to react in the right manner and at the right moment. It is the character that matters. Such people have a wakeful, alert consciousness; they are not asleep, they are on the watch constantly within themselves. And at the right moment they call for the aid, they invoke the divine force, yes, exactly at the right moment. And the danger is warded off. On the other hand, whenever there is something going wrong, some dislocation in the being, if you are seized by fear, dark foreboding or defeatism in the consciousness, then you are done for.
07.12 - This Ugliness in the World, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is this perfect truth, let me repeat, that has scattered itself abroad, into these innumerable little atoms, into these insignificant brain cells which, in spite of all their ignorance, are still moved by a secret stir of consciousness: these little specks of darkness reach out towards light which they can find, for it is within them. They will arrive at what they seek. It may take time more or less, but they will reach In the end. That is then the remedy: it lies in the very heart of evil itself.
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07.15 - Divine Disgust, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the case of the physical occurrence, the knowledge I speak of is the inner knowledge of the body cells, their existence, composition, distribution and the knowledge of the consequences of the blow, its natural and expected effects. Also at the same time there should be the knowledge of what the cells should be like, how they ought to react to the blow. And the procedure adopted too is quite different from that of physical Nature which takes hours, days, months to repair a damage; the inner knowledge can do the thing immediately. This inner knowledge can be brought down from its highest source. Instead of the mere psychological knowledge, one can call down the supramental knowledge and focus it upon the part of the body endangered. If the elements of the body, the cells come under the influence of the force of truth and receive it, then there can be an immediate new ordering of the elements according to the higher law. That will bring about not only the cure from the blow received, the mending of the accident, but initiate a big progress in the general consciousness. This power to comm and the consciousness has no limit. If you have committed an error, even a grave error, and if you can yet call upon the consciousness of truth, this power of the supramental and allow it to work, it will give you an occasion to make a formidable progress. In other words, never be discouraged if you have blundered, blundered even more than once. Only you must keep your will firm, and take sometimes the unshakable resolution not to repeat. Rest assured you will In the end triumph over your difficulty.
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07.25 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are many kinds of prayers. There is one external and physical, that is to say, simply words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much. It has usually one result, however, making you quiet. If you go on repeating a few words or sounds for some time, it puts you into a state of calmness In the end. There is another kind which is the natural expression of a wish; you want a particular thing and you express it clearly. You can pray for an, object or for a circumstance, you can pray also for a person or for yourself. There is still another kind in which the prayer borders on aspiration and the two meet: it is the spontaneous formulation of a living experience; it shoots out of the depth of your being, it is the utterance of something lived within: it wants to express gratitude for the experience, asks for its continuation or seeks an explanation. It is then, what I said, almost an aspiration. Aspiration, however, does not necessarily formulate itself in words; if it uses words at all, it makes of them a kind of invocation. Thus, you wish to be in a certain condition. You have, for example, found in you something which is not in harmony with your ideal, a movement of obscurity or ignorance or even bad will. You wish to see it changed. You do not express the thing in so many words, but it rises up in you like a flame, an ardent offering of the experience itself which seeks increase and greatening to be made more clear and precise. It is true all this is capable of being expressed in words, if one tries to recall and note down the experience. But the experience, the aspiration itself is, as I say, like a flame shooting up and contains within it the very thing it asks for. I say asks for, but the movement is not at all that of a desire; it is truly a flame, the flame of purifying will carrying at its centre the very object which it wished to be realised. The discovery of a fault in you impels you to make it an occasion for more progress, for greater self-discipline, for further ascension towards the Divine. It opens out a door upon your future, which you wish to be clearer, truer, intenser; all that gathers in you like a concentrated force and tosses you up in a movement of ascension. It needs no expression in words. It is indeed a flame that leaps up. Such is true aspiration. Prayer usually is something much more external; it is about a very precise object. It is always formulated; for the formulation itself makes what a prayer is. You may have an aspiration and you can transcribe it into a prayer, but the aspiration itself exceeds the prayer. It is something much more intimate, much more self-forgetful, living only in the object it wishes to be or the thing to do, almost identified with it. A prayer can be of a very high quality. Instead of being a request for a fulfilment of your particular desire, it may express your thankfulness and gratefulness for what the Divine has done and is doing for you. You are not busy with your little self and its egoistic interests, you ask for the Divine's ways in you and in the world. This leads you to the border of aspiration. For aspiration too has many degrees and it is expressed on many levels. But the core of aspiration is in the psychic being, it is there at its purest, for there is its origin and source. Prayers come from the other, the lower or secondary levels of being. That is to say, there are physical or material prayers, asking for physical or material things, vital prayers, mental prayers; there are psychic prayers and spiritual prayers too. Each has its own character and its own value. I say again there is a certain type of prayer which is so spontaneous and so disinterested, more like an appeal or a call, generally not for one's own sake, but acting sometimes like an intercession with the Divine on behalf of others. Such a prayer is extremely powerful. I have seen innumerable cases where such a prayer had brought about its immediate fulfilment. It means a great faith, a great fervour, a great sincerity and also a great simplicity of heart, something which does not calculate, which does not bargain or barter, does not give with the idea of receiving. The majority of prayers are precisely made with the idea of giving so that one may receive. But I was speaking of the rarer variety which also does exist, which is a kind of thanksgiving, a canticle or a hymn.
To sum up then it can be said that a prayer is always formed of words. Words have different values, according to the state of consciousness of the person when he formulates it. But always prayer is a formulated thing. But one can aspire without formulating. And then, prayer needs a person to whom one prays. There is, of course, a certain class of people whose conception of the universe is such that there is no room in it for the Divine (the famous French scientist Laplace, for example). Such people are not likely to favour the existence of any being superior to themselves to whom they can appeal or look up for guidance and help. There is no question of prayer for them. But even they, though they may not pray, may aspire. They may not believe in God, but they may believe, for example, in progress. They may conceive of the world as a progressive movement, that it is becoming better and better, rising higher and higher, growing constantly to a nobler fulfilment. They can ask for, will for, aspire for such progress; they need not look for the Divine. Aspiration requires faith, certainly, but not faith necessarily in a personal God. But prayer is always addressed to a person, a person who hears and grants it. There lies the great difference between the two. Intellectual people admit aspiration, but prayer they consider as something inferior, fit for unintellectual persons. The mystics say, aspiration is quite all right, but if your aspiration is to be heard and fulfilled, you must also pray, know how to pray and to whomwho else but the Divine? The aspiration need not be towards any person; the aspiration is not for a person, but for a state of consciousness, a knowledge, a realisation. Prayer adds to it the relation to a person. Prayer is a personal thing addressed to a person for a thing which he alone can grant.
07.32 - The Yogic Centres, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The centre at the bottom of the spine, which is the basis of the individual consciousness is seen as a serpenta serpent coiled up and asleep, with perhaps just the head sticking up in a very somnolent manner. It represents the normal human consciousness, bottled up, narrow, ignorant, asleep; human energy, too, at this level is obscure and mechanical, extremely limited. The whole energy potential, the consciousness-force is locked up in the physical body consciousness. Now the serpent does not remain asleep forever. It has to wake up, it wakes up. That is to say, man's consciousness awakes, grows and rises upward. The serpent one day shakes its head, lifts it up a little more, begins to sway its hood, as if trying to throw off the sleep and look about. It slowly uncoils itself and rises more and more. It rises and passes through the centres one by one, becomes more and more awake, gathers new light and potency at each centre. Finally, fully awakened, it rises to its full height, erect, straight like a rod, its tail-end at the bottom of the spine and its hood touching the crown of the man's head. The man is then the fully awakened, the perfectly self-conscious man. The movement does not stop there, however; for the serpent presses further on, it strikes with its hood the bottom of the crown and In the end breaks through and passes beyond like a flash of lightning. One need not fear the break through, there is no actual, physical breaking or fracture of the skull. Although it is said that once you have gone over and beyond your head, you are not likely to return, you go for good. In other words, the body does not hold together very long after the experience; it drops and dies. And yet it need not be so, it is not the whole truth. For when you have gone beyond, you can come back too, carrying the superconscient light with you. That is to say, the serpent, now luminous,pure and free energycan enter the body again, this time with its head down and the tail up. It enters blazing, illumining with its superconscient light the centres one by one, giving man richer and richer consciousness, energy and life, transforming the being more and more. The Light comes down easily enough to the heart region; then the difficulty begins, the regions below gradually become darker and denser and it is hard task for the Light to penetrate as it goes further down. If it succeeds in reaching the bottom of the spine, it has achieved something miraculous. But there is a further progress necessary, if man and the world with himis to realise a wholly transformed supraconscient life. In other words, the Light must touch and enter not only the physical stratum of our being but the others too that lie below, the subconscient and inconscient. That has been till now a sealed dungeon, something impossible to approach and tackle.
And yet it is not an impossibility. Not only is it not impossible, we have to make it possible. Not only so, man's destiny demands that it should be inevitable. If man is to be a transformed being, if he is to incarnate here below something of the Divine Reality, if his social life on earth is to be the expression of the light and harmony of the Spirit Consciousness, then he has to descend into these nether regions, break open the nethermost as he has done in regard to the uppermost and unite the two.
07.35 - The Force of Body-Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a state of consciousness in which you perceive that the effect of things, circumstances, movements, all the activities of life upon yourself depends almost exclusively upon your attitude towards them. You become then conscious, conscious to the extent of realising that things in themselves are neither good nor bad, they are so only in relation to ourselves: their effect, I say, depends entirely upon the way in which we regard these things. If we take, for example, a circumstance as a gift from God, as a divine Grace, as an outcome of the total harmony, it will help us to become more conscious and truer and stronger. The same identical circumstance, if we take it differently, as a blow of Fate, as a bad force wishing us harm, becomes, on the contrary, a damper on our consciousness, it saps our strength, brings obscurity, creates disharmony. And yet in either case it is altogether the same circumstance. I would like you to have the experience and make the experiment. For your ideal is to be master of yourselves. But not that only. You should not only be master of your own selves, but master of the circumstances of your life, the circumstances, at least, that immediately surround you and concern you. You must note further that it is an experience that is not confined to the mind alone: it need not happen in your head only, it may and indeed must continue into the body. Certainly, this is a realisation needing great labour, much concentration and self-mastery: you have to force the consciousness into the body, into dense Matter. It is the attitude of the body that will In the end determine everything: shocks and contacts of the outside world will change its nature according to the way in which they are received by the body. And if you attain perfection in that line, you can become even master of accidents. Such a thing is possible, not only possible, but it is bound to happen, for it is a forward step in man's progress. First of all, you have to realise the power in your mind to the extent that it can act upon circumstances and change their effect upon you. Then the power can descend into Matter, into the substance, the cells of your body and endow the body with this capacity of control over things outside and around you.
There is nothing impossible in the world. We ourselves put the bar: always we say, this is possible, that is impossible, one can do this, one cannot do that. Sometimes we admit a thing to be possible but ask who would do it, so it is impossible and so on. Like slaves, like prisoners we bind ourselves to our limits. You call it common sense, but it is a stupid, narrow and ignorant sense; it does not truly know the laws of life. The laws of life are not what we think them to be, what our mind or intellect conceives them to be; they are quite otherwise.
07.36 - The Body and the Psychic, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You ask why the body has a limited receptive power. The reason is that in the physical world things must not get mixed up, they must remain somewhat stable, in shape and position. For example, if your body suddenly began to melt and flow towards another, it would be rather troublesome; you would find it disgusting if the body of your neighbour, like a fluid, were to pour into your own fluid body. It is to prevent such a mixture that a greater concentration in masses was necessary, a kind of fixity of force that separates them. Indeed it was to separate one individuality from another that this fixity was needed. And it is precisely this fixity again that prevents the body from progressing as rapidly as it could and should. As you grow up and attain your normal size and constitution, you become more and more rigid in your body. As a child you have this plasticity of growth. Children change continually, they change visibly. This plasticity, this growth and development continue, so long as you remain young. But beyond, say, forty, people generally feel that they have reached their goal, they sit down to gather the fruits of their labour; they gradually become dry as dust, hard like old wood, and even like stone In the end. The body then not being able to adapt itself to the movement of the inner change, gets fossilised and crumbles, which means death.
After Death there is then no further progress?
07.37 - The Psychic Being, Some Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are two kinds of progress in the psychic and they are very different. One consists in its formation and building and organisation; for the psychic begins by being only a little divine spark hidden in the inner person and out of this spark comes and gradually develops an independent conscious person who has his own will and activity. As I say, the psychic being is originally like a spark from the divine consciousness: it grows into a conscious individuality through the experiences of successive lives. This progress then is like the progress of the growing child. It is a thing in formation and it remains so for a long time in most human beings. It is not a fully individualised being there, not fully conscious and master of itself; it needs many births, one after another, to build itself and become fully conscious. In the end, however, there does come a time when it is a completed personality, fully individualised, fully conscious of itself and its destiny. When such a psychic being incarnates in a human being, it makes a great difference. For the man is born free, so to say, he is not bound to his circumstances, his surroundings or his origin or atavism, like ordinary people. When he comes upon earth, he feels he has a work to do in the world, he has a mission to fulfil. To that extent then his cycle of progress is completed, that is to say, he has no more need to take birth in a body to make further progress. Till then rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation i.e. by taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, it is free either to take birth or not to do so at will. There then one kind of progress comes to an end. But if the fully formed being now wishes to become an instrument for the work of the Divine, if it chooses to be a worker upon earth to help in the fulfilment of the cosmic purpose of the Divine, instead of going away and resting in the psychic bliss of its own world, then he has to make a new kind of progress, a progress towards capacity to work, to organise and execute the work, to express and embody the will of the Divine. As long as the world continues, as long as he chooses to work for the Divine, he will continue to progress. But if he wishes to withdraw into the psychic world and gives up or refuses to work for the divine Plan, then he can remain in the static state beyond the range of progress. For, as I have said, progress exists only upon earth in the physical world. You cannot progress everywhere. In the psychic world there is a kind of blissful repose. You remain what and where you are without moving.
Everything upon earth progresses, has to progress. All men, without exception, even those who have no sense of the psychic, whether they wish it or not, must progress. The psychic progresses in them in spite of themselves and they have to follow the curve of its growth and development. That is to say, man ascends in the scale of life and grows, grows exactly as a child does. In the process of growth there comes a time when one reaches the summit and one changes the direction or the plane of progress. At the outset there is the purely physical progress, like that of the child; then there comes the mental progress, later on the psychic progress and the spiritual progress, so that unless progress changes it direction, when it has reached its limit on a particular level, one has to come down the curve, that is to say, instead of progression there will be retrogression, which means In the end disintegration and decomposition. Precisely because in the purely physical world there cannot be a perpetual and constant progress, there is in this domain this curve of growth, apogee, decline and decomposition. All that does not advance must recede. This is exactly what happens in the domain of matter. Matter does not know how to progress indefinitely, it has not learnt it; so after a time it is tired of progressing or growing. Given this constitution, one cannot go beyond a limit. But there is in man side by side with his physical growth, a vital growth and a mental growth as well. The mental especially can progress long after the body has ceased to progress. The body does not grow; even when it is declining, the mind still can continue to grow, to rise to higher heights. There is a mental ascension contrariwise to the physical descent. But they who do Yoga, who become conscious of their psychic being and are identified with it, who live with its life, never cease to progress, they move upward till the last breath of their life; even when they die their progress does not stop. The body is on the decline, because it cannot keep pace with the inner march forward, it cannot transform itself and mould itself into the rhythm of the inner consciousness. The discrepancy increases so much between the two, that there is a snap at the end and that is death. However, on the purely spiritual level too there is no progress. The domain of the pure spirit means a static condition; there is no progressive movement there, for it is beyond the field of progress, beyond all manifestation. For when you are merged in the Spirit, you have come out of creation and there is no question of progress, or even of any movement.
When the psychic is about to take rebirth does it choose its form beforehand?
07.45 - Specialisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From my childhood I have been hearing of the same lesson; I am afraid it was taught also in the days of our fathers and grandfa thers and great grandfa thers, namely, that if you wish to be successful in something you must do that only and nothing else. I was rebuked very much because I was busy with many different things at the same time. I was told I would be In the end good for nothing. I was studying, I was painting, I was doing music and many other things. I was repeatedly warned that my painting would be worthless, my music would be worthless, my studies would be incomplete and defective if I had my way. Perhaps it was true; but I found that my way, too, had its advantagesprecisely the advantages I was speaking of at the outset, namely, it widens and enriches the mind and consciousness, makes it supple and flexible, gives it a spontaneous power to understand and handle anything new presented to it. If, however, I had wanted to become an executant of the first order and play in concerts, then of course I would have had to restrict myself. Or in painting if my aim had been to be one of the great artists of the age, I could have done only that and nothing else. One understands the position very well, but it is only a point of view. I do not see why I should become the greatest musician or the greatest painter. It seems to me to be nothing but vanity.
But it is a very natural and spontaneous movement in man to change from one work to another in order to maintain a kind of balance. Change also means rest. We have often heard of great artists or scholars seeking for rest and having great need for it. They find it by changing their activity. For example, Ingres was a painter; painting was his normal and major occupation. But whenever he found time he took up his violin. Curiously, it was his violin which interested him more than his painting. He was not very good at music, but he took great pleasure in it. He was sufficiently good at painting, but it interested him less. But the real thing is that he needed a stable poise or balance. Concentration upon a single thing is very necessary, I have said, if one aims at a definite and special result; but one can follow a different line that is more subtle, more comprehensive and complete. Naturally, there is a physical limit somewhere to your comprehensiveness; for on the physical plane you are confined in respect of time and space; and also it is true that great things are difficult to achieve unless there is a special concentration. But if you want to lead a higher and deeper life, you can comm and capacities which are much greater than those available to the methods of restriction and limitation belonging to the normal consciousness. There is a considerable advantage in getting rid of one's limits, if not from the point of view of actual accomplishment, at least from the point of view of spiritual realisation.
08.05 - Will and Desire, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To say "no" does not cure, but to say "yes" does not cure either. I knew some persons who allowed their children to do as they pleased. There was one child who tried to eat anything he could get hold of. Naturally he fell sick and got disgusted In the end and cured of the habit. Still the method means risk. For example, a child one day got hold of a match-box and as he was not prevented, burnt himself in playing with it, although thereafter he did not touch a match-box any more. The method may be even catastrophic. For there are children who are dare-devils most children are soand when a desire possesses them they are stopped by nothing in the world. Some are fond of walking along the edge of walls or on house tops; some have an impulse to jump into water directly they see it. Even there are some who love to take the risk of crossing a road when a car is passing. If such children are allowed to go their way, the experiment may prove fatal sometimes. There are people who do allow their children to have this liberty arid take the risk. For they say prevention is not a cure. Children who are denied anything do not usually believe that what is denied is bad, they consider that a thing is called bad simply when one wishes to deny it. So would it not be better, it is argued, to concede the liberty? The theory is that individual liberty must be respected at all costs. Past experiences should not be placed before beings that are come newly into the world; they must get their own experiences, make their own experiments free from any burden of the past. Once I remonstrated with someone that a child should be forewarned about a possible accident, I was told in answer it was none of my business. And when I persisted in saying that the child might get killed, the answer was, "What if? Each one must follow his destiny. It is neither the duty nor the right of anybody to meddle in the affairs of others. If one goes on doing stupid things One will suffer the consequences oneself and most likely stop doing them of one's own accordwhich is hundredfold better than being forced by others to stop." But naturally there are cases when one stops indeed, but not in the way expected or wished for.
The matter gets difficult and involved, if you make a theory and try to follow it. In reality, each case is different and to be able to deal with each adequately needs a whole lifetime's occupation.
08.07 - Sleep and Pain, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You do many things at night in your sleep. You forget most of them. If however you recall them, become conscious of them, you can begin controlling them. Before being conscious, without being conscious of a thing, you cannot have control over it. It is by being conscious that you get the power for control. If you can control your activities in sleep, you can have a restful sleep. Sometimes when you get up you find yourself more tired than when you went to bed. It is because you are in the habit of doing very many useless things in your sleep, running about wildly in your vital, wandering chaotically in your mind, etc., etc. Naturally when you get up you do not seem to have tasted any rest. Sometimes you get into bad quarters, dark and ugly regions and you struggle there, fight there, receive blows, give blows and you are prostrate In the end. All that you can avoid, when you become conscious and gain control.
When one sees oneself dead or dying, it may mean several things. It may mean a spiritual death or a vital death or the death of some part in you that is to go; in the last case it means a progress in the consciousness. It may be also a premonition. The significance depends upon the context.
08.12 - Thought the Creator, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Human thought always creates forms in the mental world. It is a creative force. You are creating thought-forms constantly and sending them out into the atmosphere around; they go abroad to do their work. You are yourself surrounded always by such formations. No doubt there are people who cannot think clearly; they form around them only a kind of whirl. But they who think clearly and strongly create thought-forms that go out to accomplish their task and return to the source. There are cases of people who are troubled by their own formations that return to them or upon them as if to possess them and which they cannot get rid of; they do not know how to unmake a form which they make. When you have made a particularly strong formation, it remains always linked to you; it comes back again and again hitting your head and gathering force. In the end it becomes a necessity for you. There is a whole world of mystery to learn in this matter. Men live in ignorance; they have powers of which they are thoroughly unconscious or know very little.
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.
08.25 - Meat-Eating, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I will tell you then a story. I knew a young woman, Swedish, who was doing Sadhana. Normally she was a vegetarian, by habit as well as by inclination. One day she was invited to a dinner. She was given fowl to eat. She did not like to make a fuss and quietly ate her fowl. Now at night she found herself, in dream of course, in a basket and her head in between two bits of sticks and being shaken to and fro. She felt very unhappy, very miserable. And then she saw herself head down and legs up in the air and being shaken, shaken continually. She was thoroughly miserable. All on a sudden she felt she was being skinned, flayed and how painful it all was! And then someone came with a knife and cut off her head. She woke up at that. She told me the story and said she had never had such a frightful nightmare in her life. She had thought nothing of this kind before going to bed; it must have been simply the consciousness of the poor chicken that entered into her and she experienced in dream all the agonies of this creature when it was being carried to the market, her feathers pulled out and In the end the head severed. That is what happens. In other words, along with the meal that you take, you absorb also, in a large or small measure, the consciousness of the animal whose flesh you swallow. Of course it is nothing serious, but it is not always pleasant. Yet obviously it does not help you to be more on the side of man than on that of the animal kind. Primitive men, we know, were much nearer the animal level and used to take raw meat: that gave them evidently more strength and energy than cooked meat. They used to kill an animal, tear it to pieces and bite into the flesh. That is how they were robust and strong. Also it was for this reason perhaps that there was in their intestines an organ called appendix of a much bigger size than it is now: for it had to digest raw meat. As men however started cooking their food and found it more palatable that way the organ too gradually diminished in size and fell into atrophy; now it does not serve any purpose, it is an encumbrance and often a source of illness. This means that it is time to change the diet and take to something less bestial. It depends, however, on the state of the consciousness of each person. An ordinary man, who leads an ordinary life, has ordinary aspirations, thinks of nothing else than earning his livelihood, keeping good health and rearing a family, need not pick and choose, except on purely hygienic grounds. He may eat meat or anything else that he considers helpful and useful, doing good to him.
But if you wish to move from the ordinary life to a higher life, the problem acquires an interest. And again, for a higher life if you wish to move up still farther and prepare yourself for transformation, then the problem becomes very important. For there are certain foods that help the body to become more refined and others that keep it down to the level of animalhood. But it is only then that the question acquires an importance, not before. Before you come to that point, you have a lot of other things to do. It is certainly better to purify your mind, purify your vital before you think of purifying your body. For even if you take all possible precautions and live physically with every care to eat only the things that help to refine the body, but the mind and the vital remain full of desire and inconscience and obscurity and all the rest, your care will serve no purpose. Your body will become perhaps weak, disharmonious with your inner life and drop off one day.
08.31 - Personal Effort and Surrender, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is no difference In the end between the two if the goal to be attained is the Impersonal Divine, that is to say, if you want to unite and identify yourself with the Impersonal Divine, merge into it. But if your aspiration is to reach what is beyond, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental Reality, then there comes in a difference, a difference in the goal as well as in the way. For the way to the supramental realisation is essentially the way of surrender. It is a question of temperament perhaps. And if One has the temperament, the disposition, the path of surrender is infinitely more easy: three-fourths of your trouble and difficulty are got rid of automatically. But it may prove hard going for some.
Now as regards the result, in one case, I may say, it is linear, it ends at a point, as it were; in the other case, the path is spherical and ends in a totality. Each one individually can reach his origin and the optimum of his being; the origin and the optimum of one's being is the same as the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme. If you reach your origin, you reach the Supreme, but you reach along a single linedo not take the image literally, it is only a description to make the thing easy to understand. So it is, I say, a linear realisation terminating at a point and this point is one with the Supreme, your maximum possibility. By the other way, you arrive at, what I call, a spherical realisation; for it gives you the idea of something that contains all, it is not a point but a totality that excludes nothing.
09.01 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Prayers are of many kinds. There is a prayer, purely mechanical and physical, that is to say, merely words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much and generally has only one effect, making the person calm who prays; if you repeat a prayer several times, it calms you In the end.
There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also.
09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If you want to know what love is, you must love the Divine. It is a very well-known fact that In the end you become just like the thing you love. If you love the Divine, by the force of this love, little by little, you will become more and more like the Divine. And then one can identify oneself with the divine Love and know what it is, you cannot know it in any other way.
Necessarily, the love between two human beings is always made of ignorance, misunderstanding, weakness and a terrible sense of isolation. It would be as if you wanted to gain entrance into the presence of a unique Splendour and the first thing you do is to put a screen between yourself and this Splendour and you are very much astonished that you do not have even a vague impression of it! The first thing then to do is to do away with the screen, pass through and stand in the presence of the Splendour. Then you know what it is. But if you go on piling veil after veil between yourself and That, you will never see it. You may have just a vague impression, "there is something" and that is all.
1.001 - The Aim of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All our knowledge is insufficient, inadequate, temporal, empirical ultimately useless. It does not touch the core of life. Therefore, we will find that any learned person, whatever be the depth of his learning, whatever be the greatness of his scholarship, is miserable In the end. The reason is that life is different from this kind of knowledge. It is an all-comprehensive organic being in which the knowing individual is unfortunately included, a fact which misses the attention of every person. It is not possible for anyone to observe or see or know anything, inasmuch as the conditions which describe the object of observation also condition the subject of observation. The Veda points this out in a mystical formula:tam eva viditv atimtyum eti nnya panth vidyate ayanya. Now, when it is said, by knowing 'That', every problem is solved, the Veda does not mean knowing this object or that object, or this person or that person, or this thing or that thing, or this subject or that subject it is nothing of that kind. It is a 'That' with a capital 'T', which means to say, the true object of knowledge. The true object of knowledge is to be known, and when 'That' is known, all problems are solved.
What are problems? A problem is a situation that has arisen on account of the irreconcilability of one person, or one thing, with the status and condition of another person, or another thing. I cannot reconcile my position with your position; this is a problem. You cannot reconcile your position with mine; this is a problem. Why should there be such a condition? How is it that it is not possible for me to reconcile myself with you? It is not possible because there is no clear perception of my relationship with you. I have a misconceived idea of my relationship with you and, therefore, there is a misconceived adjustment of my personality with yours, and a misconception cannot solve a problem. The problem is nothing but this misconception nothing else. The irreconcilability of one thing with another arises on account of the basic difficulty I mentioned, that the person who wishes to bring about this reconciliation, or establish a proper relationship, misses the point of one's own vital connection underline the word 'vital' with the object or the person with which, or with whom, this reconciliation is to be effected. Inasmuch as this kind of knowledge is beyond the purview or capacity of the ordinary human intellect, the knowledge of the Veda is regarded as supernormal, superhuman: apaurusheya not created or manufactured by an individual. This is not knowledge that has come out of reading books. This is not ordinary educational knowledge. It is a knowledge which is vitally and organically related to the fact of life. I am as much connected with the fact of life as you are, and so in my observation and study and understanding of you, in my relationship with you, I cannot forget this fact. The moment I disconnect myself from this fact of life which is unanimously present in you as well as in me, I miss the point, and my effort becomes purposeless.
1.007 - Initial Steps in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
We have a wrong notion about everything, including our own self. And with this wrong notion we go headlong into such a serious practice as is meditation because, just as a small sand particle getting stuck in the eye causes us annoyance, so too a little mistake in the beginning will loom large and become a serious obstacle In the end a factor which can be studied from the history of institutions and the lives of saints, sages and sadhakas. These small mistakes look like normal things, and not serious obstacles, because they do not stand against us. They appear to be unconcerned externals; but there is no such thing as an unconcerned external. Every external is connected with us, and the very fact of our perception of it will be enough reason why it can take action, for or against us, one day or the other.
So, we have to chalk out very carefully, as in a spiritual diary, the little mistakes that a person can commit by injudicious thinking, irrational analysis of conditions due to a false view of life, a false judgement of things, and due to a woeful lack of knowledge of human nature and psychology. These are the difficulties that arise due to ignorance of the true nature of things that drives us into committing small mistakes, which will stand before us like devils one day and prevent us from going further. These mistakes must be avoided, and we have to consider them in some detail.
1.00c - INTRODUCTION, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
beginning, in the middle he becomes man, and In the end he
goes back to God. This is the method of putting it in the
--
is dark to us. Is the darkness In the end the same as in the
beginning? Certainly not; it is the difference of the two poles.
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Liberty must, In the end, lead to sedition, whose flames none can quench. Thus warneth you He Who is the Reckoner, the All-Knowing. Know ye that the embodiment of liberty and its symbol is the animal. That which beseemeth man is submission unto such restraints as will protect him from his own ignorance, and guard him against the harm of the mischief-maker. Liberty causeth man to overstep the bounds of propriety, and to infringe on the dignity of his station. It debaseth him to the level of extreme depravity and wickedness.
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10.13 - Go Through, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The best way to tackle the thing is, as the Mother says, to go through it. To go through means to stand and face it and not run away from it. To go through does not mean, however, to satisfy or to indulge the urge that makes you a slave of it more and more; you get all the more entangled and can never hope to be free. You stand and face in order to seize the truth, the reality of the thing you have to deal with. You have to purify it and clean it in order to remove the dust that covers the gold. If it is human love, to purify means to free it from selfishness, from egoistic desire, the sense of possession. Instead, you love simply for the joy of loving without any expectation or demand of return. You find In the end that this way of loving brings to you a greater delight, a new thrill and poignancy, proper to a pure feeling.
Indeed not only love but all human impulses and urges are to be dealt with in the same way. The Gita furnishes a beautiful and crucial example. The Gita teaches man to go through the field of activity and not to reject or avoid it. The whole of the Gita is an ideal lesson in the technique of going through. The Gita says, do not renounce work but dedicate itnot karmatyga but karmanysa. What does this dedication mean? The first step in the process of dedication is desirelessnessto do work without desire. It is usually thought that desire is the source and origin of work. If you have no desire, you have no need or impulse to work. But this is a very superficial view of things. The impulse for work springs from elsewhere, from a deeper and impersonal source. The true spirit in which you should work is, as the Gita enjoins, to do a work because it is a thing to be done, not because you desire it. So naturally you do not hanker for the fruit of your action. First then, no attachment to the action itself, then no attachment to the fruit that it brings. This can be done only when you are unselfish. Not only unselfishness but you have to go a step farther, to selflessness. So then there are these three stages in the process of dedication or purification. First to work without desire, without attachment to the result of the work. Then you will be able to see that you are an instrument only, the work is being done through you. At the beginning you are a desireless, unselfish doer of works, next you see yourself as a detached witness of your action and finally you see that the action happening in you is Nature working in you, Nature the instrument of the Divine. Finally yourself is no longer there, it is the Divine alone that is and acts.
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
not what, which will appear In the end to those who have pene-
trated to the very heart of reality.
1.01 - Appearance and Reality, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
Hylas has hitherto believed in matter, but he is no match for Philonous, who mercilessly drives him into contradictions and paradoxes, and makes his own denial of matter seem, In the end, as if it were almost common sense. The arguments employed are of very different value: some are important and sound, others are confused or quibbling. But Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity, and that if there are any things that exist independently of us they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations.
There are two different questions involved when we ask whether matter exists, and it is important to keep them clear. We commonly mean by
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
infinitely small. In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages and
peoples, only to find that everything most dear and precious to
--
finds the pearl on the bottom, and In the end offers it to the
highest divinity.
--
account has to be settled sooner or later. In the end one has to
admit that there are problems which one simply cannot solve on
1.01f - Introduction, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
Dharma that was good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good In the end. It was profound in meaning, elegant in speech, and endowed with the character of the pure path of discipline and integrity.
To those seeking for the rvaka vehicle he taught the Dharma with respect to the Four Noble Truths, causing them to overcome birth, old age, illness, and death and to attain nirvana. He taught the Dharma with respect to dependent origination to the pratyekabuddhas; and to the bodhisattvas he taught the Dharma with respect to the six perfections (pramits), causing them to attain highest, complete enlightenment and perfect all-knowledge
1.01 - Hatha Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
25. Relax all the muscles through Savasana. Do this Asana In the end.
26. Ujjayi, Sitkari, Sukha-Purvaka, Suryabheda are other kinds of Pranayama. Through the practice of these Pranayamas Kevala-Kumbhaka results.
1.01 - MAXIMS AND MISSILES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
historian looks backwards: In the end he also _believes_ backwards.
Contentment preserves one even from catching cold. Has a woman who knew
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
materialism. In the end, as we have seen, the vitalist proved too
much. Instead of building a wall between the claims of life and
1.01 - Prayer, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
There is not really so much difference between knowledge (Jnana) and love (Bhakti) as people sometimes imagine. We shall see, as we go on, that In the end they converge and meet at the same point. So also is it with Rja-Yoga, which when pursued as a means to attain liberation, and not (as unfortunately it frequently becomes in the hands of charlatans and mystery-mongers) as an instrument to hoodwink the unwary, leads us also to the same goal.
The one great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and the most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; its great disadvantage is that in its lower forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crew in Hinduism, or Mohammedanism, or Christianity, have always been almost exclusively recruited from these worshippers on the lower planes of Bhakti. That singleness of attachment (Nishth) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of the denunciation of everything else. All the weak and undeveloped minds in every religion or country have only one way of loving their own ideal, i.e. by hating every other ideal.
1.01 - Proem, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
Each In the end when each is overthrown.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
intensifying the world, and In the end intensifying suffering.
Though, as a scientist, Patanjali is bound to point out the
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contri bution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin which resides in purity, in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more cease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a convention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips than a reality of the life.
For the typal passes naturally into the conventional stage. The conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order,birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom,each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions and its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem to have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed itself, its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and education and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a hereditary groove. Thus the son of a Brahmin came always to be looked upon conventionally as a Brahmin; birth and profession were together the double bond of the hereditary convention at the time when it was most firm and faithful to its own character. This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance. Once the very basis of the system, it came now to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by the actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to be indispensable, it came inevitably to be dispensed with except as an ornamental fiction. Finally, even the economic basis began to disintegrate; birth, family custom and remnants, deformations, new accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual, the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old society. In the full economic period of caste the priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the Brahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under the name of the Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name of the Shudra. When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased decrepitude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham and must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society or else fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India.
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 Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:For the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, -- if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But In the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the written Truth, -- sabdabrahmativartate -- beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, -- srotaryasya srutasya ca. For he is not the Sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a Sadhaka of the Infinite.
8:Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
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14:But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujga, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the Sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga. In the end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he merges them in the divine Will and its transcendent and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth's spiritual progression or its transformation.
15:Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect way with the workings of the divine Force. It persists in applying to experience on a supernormal plane the ordinary terms of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the world. In the world we act with the sense of egoism; we claim the universal forces that work in us as our own; we claim as the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selective, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this frame of mind, life and body. Enlightenment brings to us the knowledge that the ego is only an instrument; we begin to perceive and feel that these things are our own in the sense that they belong to our supreme and integral Self, one with the Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. Our limitations and distortions are our contri bution to the working; the true power in it is the Divine's. When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant's groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
--
19:What is his method and his system? He has no method and every method. His system is a natural organisation of the highest processes and movements of which the nature is capable. Applying themselves even to the pettiest details and to the actions the most insignificant in their appearance with as much care and thoroughness as to the greatest, they In the end lift all into the Light and transform all. For in his Yoga there is nothing too small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is impersonal -- or superpersonal-and infinite.
20:The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in. the relative and attracting it, as one's highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a Divine Person within us and in the world, in one of his -- or her -- numerous forms and names or as the ideal which the mind conceives. In the end we perceive that he is all and more than all these things together- The mind's door of entry to the conception of him must necessarily vary according to the past evolution and the present nature.
21:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being (caitya guru or antaryamin), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
1.01 - The Highest Meaning of the Holy Truths, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
you see where Hsueh Tou helps people In the end.
Hsueh Tou feared that people would pursue intellectual
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
reducible In the end to some simple and unique kind of substance.
Thus the unity of homogeneity. To the cosmic corpuscles we
--
which In the end it must perforce accept.
We mean the sphere above the centres and enveloping them.
1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
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.
1.020 - The World and Our World, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
We cannot understand what our connection is with anything at all, and so we are in a helpless condition. Therefore we cannot even control the mind, because controlling the mind is an adjustment of the modifications of the mind in respect of the object of its cognition, and the object of its cognition is not properly understood because of its unintelligible character. Everything then becomes difficult, and our efforts become a source of failure In the end. Success does not seem to be forthcoming, because it is not clear to us what is the right direction that we have to take.
What is the mind to do, what are we to do, what is anyone to do in this prescription of yoga called 'mind-control'? Are we to subjugate the object, destroy the object, absorb the object into ourselves, or abstract the mind from the object and not cognise it? In an act of mind-control, what is to be done? Are we satisfied if we merely become unaware of the existence of the object, which is what is usually known as abstraction of the senses and the mind from objects, or is there anything to be done in respect of the object itself? This question arises on account of the necessity to understand the extent of influence the object exerts upon the subject, and the extent of influence that the subject exerts upon the object.
--
So, In the end, we will find that while the acceptance of the existence of things independent of the mind by way of what is known as Ishvara srishti may be necessary for the solution of our problem, the world also will modify itself accordingly when the individual advances further, because all spiritual advance is a parallel advance both from the side of the subject and the object. It is not only one side that is evolving. The evolution of the individual is, at the same time, a corresponding evolution of all conditions in which the individual is involved, including society and the world.
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the end the world itself becomes a doubt.||124.57||
It is true his survey of the universe, his knowledge of boundless Nature and the inexhaustible multiplicities of creation have given him a sense of the endless and the infinite but he has not the necessary light or capacity to follow those lines of infinity, on the contrary, there is a shrinking in him at the touch of such vastnesses; his small humanity makes him desperately earth-bound, his aspiration follows the lines of least resistance:
--
From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and In the end to Godhood.
But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation depends on the fullness of the incarnation. The Evil in the body, the Evil in the vital, the Evil in the mind are, whatever their virulence and intransigence, subsidiary agents, for they serve only a mightier Lord. The first original Sin is Death, the God of Denial, of non-existence. That is the very sourcefons et origo the fount and origin of all the misfortune, the fate that terrestrial life involves. This demon, this anti-Divine has to be tracked and destroyed or dissolved into its original origin. This is the Nihil that negates the DivineAsat that seeks to nullify Sat and that has created this world of ignorance and misery, that is to say, in its outward pragmatic form. So Savitri sees the one source and knows the remedy. Therefore she pursues death, pursues him to the end, that is, to the end of death. The luminous energy of the Supreme faces now its own shadow and blazes it up. The flaming Light corrodes into the substance of the darkness and makes of it her own transfigured substance. This then is the gift that Savitri brings to man, the Divine's own immortality, transfusing the mortality that reigns now upon earth.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
the fauna of a continent is betrayed In the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep
filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always
--
and engulfs itself. It unites the beginning and the end, being and becoming, In the endless circle of its
existence. It serves as symbol for the ground of reality itself. It is the set of all things that are not yet
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
that, In the end, we shall find that even the love of husbands
and wives, and children and friends, slowly decays.
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:If the change comes suddenly and decisively by an overpowering influence, there is no further essential or lasting difficulty. The choice follows upon the thought, or is simultaneous with it, and the self-consecration follows upon the choice. The feet are already set upon the path, even if they seem at first to wander uncertainly and even though the path itself may be only obscurely seen and the knowledge of the goal may be imperfect. The secret Teacher, the inner Guide is already at work, though he may not yet manifest himself or may not yet appear in the person of his human representative. Whatever difficulties and hesitations may ensue, they cannot eventually prevail against the power of the experience that has turned the current of the life. The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are In the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.
4:But this is not always the manner of the commencement. The Sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or perhaps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dictated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort, even much purification and many experiences other than those that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to the lower life, -- what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga a fall from the path. This lapse happens because there is a defect at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has yet determined the soul's future.
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23:The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will In the end exclude nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world and our will's ignorance. For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, -- of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe' It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
24:It is nothing less that is meant In the end when we speak of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
25:For here, there are two movements with a transitional stage between them, two periods of this Yoga, -- one of the process of surrender, the other of its crown and consequence. In the first the individual prepares himself for the reception o? the Divine into his members. For all this first period he has to work by means of the instruments of the lower Nature, but aided more and more from above. But in the later transitional stage of this movement our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more dwindles and a higher Nature acts; the eternal shakti descends into this limited form of mortality and progressively possesses and transmutes it. In the second period the greater movement wholly replaces the lesser, formerly indispensable first action; but this can be done only when our self-surrender is complete. The ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become. As long as the ego is at work in us, our personal action is and must always be in its nature a part of the lower grades of existence; it is obscure or half-enlightened, limited in its field, very partially effective in its power. If a spiritual transformation, not a mere illumining modification of our nature, is to be done at all, we must call in the Divine shakti to effect that miraculous work in the individual; for she alone has the needed force, decisive, all-wise and illimitable. But the entire substitution of the divine for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible. All interference from below that would falsify the truth of the superior action must first be inhibited or rendered impotent, and it must be done by our own free choice. A continual and always repeated refusal of the impulsions and falsehoods of the lower nature is asked from us and an insistent support to the Truth as it grows in our parts: for the progressive settling into our nature and final perfection of the incoming informing Light, Purity and Power needs for its development and sustenance our free acceptance of it and our stubborn rejection of all that is contrary to it, inferior or incompatible.
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have his whole life and action determined for him at every step and in every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.1 We might then have a curious new version, with very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakara the scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation the line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with its powers, privileges and duties there will be established an initial equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination of function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves and choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation and the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra. For each man there will be a long stage of work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps In the end a period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovator two important concessions. There was for the individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic and rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, there would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom and a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed to question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since that would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we should have a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function, guakarma, and rapidly petrifying by the inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long last be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probably by the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.
On the other hand, there are in operation forces which seem likely to frustrate or modify this development before it can reach its menaced consummation. In the first place, rationalistic and physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same time the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such as Nietzsches Will-to-live, Bergsons exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths. Already another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice which promise to give the succession of the individualistic age of society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which may well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be doubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle.
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, we see that whether for the fundamental teaching of the Gita, our present subject, or for spiritual life generally the external aspect has only a secondary importance. Such controversies as the one that has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, would seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any religious importance; for what does it matter In the end whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was done to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of
Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the
1.02 - THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
self-deceivers? Did he confess this to himself In the end, in the
wisdom of his courage before death. Socrates wished to die. Not Athens,
1.02 - THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[7] In the Consilium coniugii there is a similar quaternio with the four qualities arranged as combinations of two contraries, cold and moist, which are not friendly to heat and dryness.33 Other quaternions are: The stone is first an old man, In the end a youth, because the albedo comes at the beginning and the rubedo at the end.34 Similarly the elements are arranged as two manifesta (water and earth), and two occulta (air and fire).35 A further quaternio is suggested by the saying of Bernardus Trevisanus: The upper has the nature of the lower, and the ascending has the nature of the descending.36 The following combination is from the Tractatus Micreris: In it [the Indian Ocean]37 are images of heaven and earth, of summer, autumn, winter, and spring, male and female. If thou callest this spiritual, what thou doest is probable; if corporeal, thou sayest the truth; if heavenly, thou liest not; if earthly, thou hast well spoken.38 Here we are dealing with a double quaternio having the structure shown in the diagram on page 10.
[8] The double quaternio or ogdoad stands for a totality, for something that is at once heavenly and earthly, spiritual or corporeal, and is found in the Indian Ocean, that is to say in the unconscious. It is without doubt the Microcosm, the mystical Adam and bisexual Original Man in his prenatal state, as it were, when he is identical with the unconscious. Hence in Gnosticism the Father of All is described not only as masculine and feminine (or neither), but as Bythos, the abyss. In the scholia to the Tractatus aureus Hermetis39 there is a quaternio consisting of superius / inferius, exterius / interius. They are united into one thing by means of the circular distillation, named the Pelican:40 Let all be one in one circle or vessel. For this vessel is the true philosophical Pelican, nor is any other to be sought after in all the world. The text gives the following diagram:
1.02 - The Shadow, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
which In the end will completely envelop him.
J 9 One might assume that projections like these, which are so
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
Long before any distinct perception of progress, there rises in the student, from the hidden depths of the soul, a feeling that he is on the right path. This feeling should be cherished and fostered, for it can develop into a trustworthy guide. Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: "In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them." In the end it all resolves itself into the fact that man ordinarily carries body, soul and spirit about with him, and yet is conscious in a true sense only of his body, and not of his soul and spirit. The student becomes conscious of soul and spirit, just as the ordinary person is conscious of his body. Hence it is highly important to give the
p. 60
1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
19:What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must In the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana,7 the visvamanava8 as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine? "That which is immortal in mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers."9 It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities and labours subconsciously to fulfil.
20:But there is always a limit and an encumbrance, - the limit of the material field in the Knowledge, the encumbrance of the material machinery in the Power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial, so also the highest achievements of practical Science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless telegraphy is Nature's exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future.
1.03 - A Parable, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
And do not thirst after inferior objects, sounds, smells, avors, and tangibles. If you are attached to these objects and have desires, then you will be burned. Leave the triple world in haste and you will obtain the three vehicles the vehicles for the rvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and buddhas. I denitely guarantee this to you. In the end it will come true. You should be diligent and persistent!
The Tathgata attracts sentient beings through this skillful means, saying further:
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
the fauna of a continent is betrayed In the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep
filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always
1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
fortune and fame. W hat good are such things In the end? People
who don't see their nature and think reading sutras, invoking
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
P. T.: I am not in favour of that programme, because it will lead In the end to lust for power and then personal differences and jealousies would also creep in. We cannot, in that case, justify the high hopes which people have about our work.
Lajpat Rai: They expect you to usher in the golden age.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
pared ... at least in their elements, and In the end by a rapid
bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the ele-
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The life of the human creature, as it is ordinarily lived, is composed of a half-fixed, half-fluid mass of very imperfectly ruled thoughts, perceptions, sensations, emotions, desires, enjoyments, acts, mostly customary and self-repeating, in part only dynamic and self-developing, but all centred around a superficial ego. The sum of movement of these activities eventuates in an internal growth which is partly visible and operative in this life, partly a seed of progress in lives hereafter. This growth of the conscious being, an expansion, an increasing self-expression, a more and more harmonised development of his constituent members is the whole meaning and all the pith of human existence. It is for this meaningful development of consciousness by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading In the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the mental being, has entered into the material body. All the rest is either auxiliary and subordinate or accidental and otiose; that only matters which sustains and helps the evolution of his nature and the growth or rather the progressive unfolding and discovery of his self and spirit.
The aim set before our Yoga is nothing less than to hasten this supreme object of our existence here. Its process leaves behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. For the natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes, - though veiling a secret divine intervention and guidance. In Yoga we replace this confused crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us. In a certain sense it may be an error to speak of a goal anywhere in a progression which may well be infinite. Still we can conceive of an immediate goal, an ulterior objective beyond our present achievement towards which the soul in man can aspire. There lies before him the possibility of a new birth; there can be an ascent into a higher and wider plane of being and its descent to transform his members. An enlarged and illumined consciousness is possible that shall make of him a liberated spirit and a perfected force - and, if spread beyond the individual, it might even constitute a divine humanity or else a new, a supramental and therefore a superhuman race. It is this new birth that we make our aim: a growth into a divine consciousness is the whole meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only of the soul but of all the parts of our nature.
--
Our purpose in Yoga is to exile the limited outward-looking ego and to enthrone God in its place as the ruling Inhabitant of the nature. And this means, first, to disinherit desire and no longer accept the enjoyment of desire as the ruling human motive. The spiritual life will draw its sustenance not from desire but from a pure and selfless spiritual delight of essential existence. And not only the vital nature in us whose stamp is desire, but the mental being too must undergo a new birth and a transfiguring change. Our divided, egoistic, limited and ignorant thought and intelligence must disappear; in its place there must stream in the catholic and faultless play of a shadowless divine illumination which shall culminate In the end in a natural self-existent Truth-consciousness free from groping half-truth and stumbling error. Our confused and embarrassed ego-centred small-motived will and action must cease and make room for the total working of a swiftly powerful, lucidly automatic, divinely moved and guided unfallen Force. There must be implanted and activised in all our doings a supreme, impersonal, unfaltering and unstumbling will in spontaneous and untroubled unison with the will of the Divine. The unsatisfying surface play of our feeble egoistic emotions must be ousted and there must be revealed instead a secret deep and vast psychic heart within that waits behind them for its hour; all our feelings, impelled by this inner heart in which dwells the Divine, will be transmuted into calm and intense movements of a twin passion of divine Love and manifold Ananda. This is the definition of a divine humanity or a supramental race. This, not an exaggerated or even a sublimated energy of human intellect and action, is the type of the superman whom we are called to evolve by our Yoga.
In the ordinary human existence an outgoing action is obviously three-fourths or even more of our life. It is only the exceptions, the saint and the seer, the rare thinker, poet and artist who can live more within themselves; these indeed, at least in the most intimate parts of their nature, shape themselves more in inner thought and feeling than in the surface act. But it is not either of these sides separated from the other, but rather a harmony of the inner and the outer life made one in fullness and transfigured into a play of something that is beyond them which will create the form of a perfect living. A Yoga of works, a union with the Divine in our will and acts - and not only in knowledge and feeling - is then an indispensable, an inexpressibly important element of an integral Yoga. The conversion of our thought and feeling without a corresponding conversion of the spirit and body of our works would be a maimed achievement.
--
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
But how then shall we continue to act at all? For ordinarily the human being acts because he has a desire or feels a mental, vital or physical want or need; he is driven by the necessities of the body, by the lust of riches, honours or fame, or by a craving for the personal satisfactions of the mind or the heart or a craving for power or pleasure. Or he is seized and pushed about by a moral need or, at least, the need or the desire of making his ideas or his ideals or his will or his party or his country or his gods prevail in the world. If none of these desires nor any other must be the spring of our action, it would seem as if all incentive or motive power had been removed and action itself must necessarily cease. The Gita replies with its third great secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness; our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and In the end a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only motive. This transformation of the motive force and very character of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its initiative.
Equality, renunciation of all desire for the fruit of our works, action done as a sacrifice to the supreme Lord of our nature and of all nature, - these are the three first Godward approaches in the Gita's way of Karmayoga.
1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid, defaced or distorted; but from that first step it must proceed to others and In the end to a general questioning of the foundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life and action. A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.
In Europe and in modern times this has taken the form of a clear and potent physical Science: it has proceeded by the discovery of the laws of the physical universe and the economic and sociological conditions of human life as determined by the physical being of man, his environment, his evolutionary history, his physical and vital, his individual and collective need. But after a time it must become apparent that the knowledge of the physical world is not the whole of knowledge; it must appear that man is a mental as well as a physical and vital being and even much more essentially mental than physical or vital. Even though his psychology is strongly affected and limited by his physical being and environment, it is not at its roots determined by them, but constantly reacts, subtly determines their action, effects even their new-shaping by the force of his psychological demand on life. His economic state and social institutions are themselves governed by his psychological demand on the possibilities, circumstances, tendencies created by the relation between the mind and soul of humanity and its life and body. Therefore to find the truth of things and the law of his being in relation to that truth he must go deeper and fathom the subjective secret of himself and things as well as their objective forms and surroundings.
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
til In the end they rebelled. Is there not reason for Man, become
aware of the direction in which Life is taking him, to rebel at last;
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:It is true that the glimpse of supraphysical realities acquired by methodical research has been imperfect and is yet ill-affirmed; for the methods used are still crude and defective. But these rediscovered subtle senses have at least been found to be true witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justification, then, for scouting them as false witnesses when they testify to supraphysical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of consciousness. Like all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and arranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of great ranges of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are perceived by more subtle instruments than those of gross physical Matter, claims In the end the same validity as the truth of the material universe. The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses.
8:But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. To that witness the worlds and their objects appeal for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical equally with the supraphysical we have no other evidence that they exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
That Nirvana and Samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe; but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality. For ordinary, nice, unregenerate people to accept this truth by hearsay, and to act upon it in practice, is merely to court disaster. All the dismal story of antinomianism is there to warn us of what happens when men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all. And hardly less depressing than the spectacle of antinomianism is that of the earnestly respectable well-rounded life of good citizens who do their best to live sacramentally, but dont in fact have any direct acquaintance with that for which the sacramental activity really stands. Dr. Oman, in his The Natural and the Supernatural, writes at length on the theme that reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal; and in a recent volume, Science, Religion and the Future, Canon Raven applauds Dr. Oman for having stated the principles of a theology, in which there could be no ultimate antithesis between nature and grace, science and religion, in which, indeed, the worlds of the scientist and the theologian are seen to be one and the same. All this is in full accord with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and with such Christian teachings as St. Augustines Ama et fac quod vis and Father Lallemants advice to theocentric contemplatives to go out and act in the world, since their actions are the only ones capable of doing any real good to the world. But what neither Dr. Oman nor Canon Raven makes sufficiently clear is that nature and grace, Samsara and Nirvana, perpetual perishing and eternity, are really and experientially one only to persons who have fulfilled certain conditions. Fac quod vis in the temporal world but only when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart and your neighbor as yourself. If you havent learnt this lesson, you will either be an antinomian eccentric or criminal or else a respectable well-rounded-lifer, who has left himself no time to understand either nature or grace. The Gospels are perfectly clear about the process by which, and by which alone, a man may gain the right to live in the world as though he were at home in it: he must make a total denial of selfhood, submit to a complete and absolute mortification. At one period of his career, Jesus himself seems to have undertaken austerities, not merely of the mind, but of the body. There is the record of his forty days fast and his statement, evidently drawn from personal experience, that some demons cannot be cast out except by those who have fasted much as well as prayed. (The Cur dArs, whose knowledge of miracles and corporal penance was based on personal experience, insists on the close correlation between severe bodily austerities and the power to get petitionary prayer answered in ways that are sometimes supernormal.) The Pharisees reproached Jesus because he came eating and drinking, and associated with publicans and sinners; they ignored, or were unaware of, the fact that this apparently worldly prophet had at one time rivalled the physical austerities of John the Baptist and was practising the spiritual mortifications which he consistently preached. The pattern of Jesus life is essentially similar to that of the ideal sage, whose career is traced in the Oxherding Pictures, so popular among Zen Buddhists. The wild ox, symbolizing the unregenerate self, is caught, made to change its direction, then tamed and gradually transformed from black to white. Regeneration goes so far that for a time the ox is completely lost, so that nothing remains to be pictured but the full-orbed moon, symbolizing Mind, Suchness, the Ground. But this is not the final stage. In the end, the herdsman comes back to the world of men, riding on the back of his ox. Because he now loves, loves to the extent of being identified with the divine object of his love, he can do what he likes; for what he likes is what the Nature of Things likes. He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas. For him, there is complete reconciliation to the evanescent and, through that reconciliation, revelation of the eternal. But for nice ordinary unregenerate people the only reconciliation to the evanescent is that of indulged passions, of distractions submitted to and enjoyed. To tell such persons that evanescence and eternity are the same, and not immediately to qualify the statement, is positively fatalfor, in practice, they are not the same except to the saint; and there is no record that anybody ever came to sanctity, who did not, at the outset of his or her career, behave as if evanescence and eternity, nature and grace, were profoundly different and in many respects incompatible. As always, the path of spirituality is a knife-edge between abysses. On one side is the danger of mere rejection and escape, on the other the danger of mere acceptance and the enjoyment of things which should only be used as instruments or symbols. The versified caption which accompanies the last of the Oxherding Pictures runs as follows.
Even beyond the ultimate limits there extends a passageway,
1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Now come and be candid with yourself; you give credit to a false physician, to a false writer of charms and to a false astrologer, for the sake of being delivered from a day or two of illness in this world, and you even undergo suffering for the sake of it. But the learned in religion, for the sake of saving you from the malady of stupidity and rebellion and bringing you to everlasting health and felicity, have exerted themselves to make the verses of the Koran and the holy traditions to serve as a medicine to deliver you from bitter torment. Still you attach no credit to their words. You treat the Koran and the traditions with entire disregard, neither clinging to the commandments of God, nor avoiding forbidden things. You follow the bent of your own inclinations, instead of following the example and law of the prophet of God, and you indulge in many acts of transgression. Nor do you call to mind what will be your condition In the end of it all, nor how long a time you have yet to live in the world, nor what eternity is compared with this world. Do you not know that by choosing a very little pain in the business of religion during this short life and in this worthless world, you may gain eternal felicity, and riches that cannot be taken from you ? The pain which we may suffer in this world, however severe, yet does not weigh the amount of an atom in comparison with the pains and torment of the other world. This world is a fading shadow, but the future world is abiding and eternal.
The following is an illustration of the duration of eternity, so far as the human mind can comprehend it. If the space from between the empyreal heaven to the regions below the earth, embracing the whole universe, should be filled up with grains of mustard seed, and if a crow should [103] make use of them as food and come but once in a thousand years and take but a single grain away, so that with the lapse of time there should not remain a single grain, still at the end of that time not the amount of a grain of mustard seed would have been diminished from the duration of eternity.
1.04 - Te Shan Carrying His Bundle, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
6. Letting go, gathering in. At first too high, In the end too low.
When one realizes one's fault one should reform, but how many
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
instinct. It has a surprising way of always coming out right In the end. The
creative activity of imagination frees man from his bondage to the nothing
--
for hours with refractory brush and colours, only to produce In the end
something which, taken at its face value, is perfectly senseless. If it were
--
interior agent, only to discover In the end that it is eternally unknown and
alien, the hidden foundation of psychic life.
1.04 - The Need of Guru, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, In the end, will attain the state of perfection.
Whatever we are now is the result of our acts and thoughts in the past; and whatever we shall be in the future will be the result of what we think end do now. But this, the shaping of our own destinies, does not preclude our receiving help from outside; nay, in the vast majority of cases such help is absolutely necessary. When it comes, the higher powers and possibilities of the soul are quickened, spiritual life is awakened, growth is animated, and man becomes holy and perfect In the end.
This quickening impulse cannot be derived from books. The soul can only receive impulses from another soul, and from nothing else. We may study books all our lives, we may become very intellectual, but In the end we find that we have not developed at all spiritually. It is not true that a high order of intellectual development always goes hand in hand with a proportionate development of the spiritual side in Man. In studying books we are sometimes deluded into thinking that thereby we are being spiritually helped; but if we analyse the effect of the study of books on ourselves, we shall find that at the utmost it is only our intellect that derives profit from such studies, and not our inner spirit.
This inadequacy of books to quicken spiritual growth is the reason why, although almost every one of us can speak most wonderfully on spiritual matters, when it comes to action and the living of a truly spiritual life, we find ourselves so awfully deficient. To quicken the spirit, the impulse must come from another soul.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The law of sacrifice is the common divine action that was thrown out into the world in its beginning as a symbol of the solidarity of the universe. It is by the attraction of this law that a divinising principle, a saving power descends to limit and correct and gradually to eliminate the errors of an egoistic and self-divided creation. This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance. For with sacrifice as their companion, says the Gita, the All-Father created these peoples. The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service. Indeed, sacrifice is imposed and, where need be, compelled by the universal World-Force; it takes it even from those who do not consciously recognise the law,inevitably, because this is the intrinsic nature of things. Our ignorance or our false egoistic view of life can make no difference to this eternal bedrock truth of Nature. For this is the truth in Nature, that this ego which thinks itself a separate independent being and claims to live for itself, is not and cannot be independent nor separate, nor can it live to itself even if it would, but rather all are linked together by a secret Oneness. Each existence is continually giving out perforce from its stock; out of its mental receipts from Nature or its vital and physical assets and acquisitions and belongings a stream goes to all that is around it. And always again it receives something from its environment gratis or in return for its voluntary or involuntary tri bute. For it is only by this giving and receiving that it can effect its own growth while at the same time it helps the sum of things. At length, though at first slowly and partially, we learn to make the conscious sacrifice; even, In the end, we take joy to give ourselves and what we envisage as belonging to us in a spirit of love and devotion to That which appears for the moment other than ourselves and is certainly other than our limited personalities. The sacrifice and the divine return for our sacrifice then become a gladly accepted means towards our last perfection; for it is recognised now as the road to the fulfilment in us of the eternal purpose.
But, most often, the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoistically and without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning of the great world-rite. It is so that the vast majority of earth-creatures do it; and, when it is so done, the individual derives only a mechanical minimum of natural inevitable profit, achieves by it only a slow painful progress limited and tortured by the smallness and suffering of the ego. Only when the heart, the will and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The minds knowledge of the law and the hearts gladness in it culminate in the perception that it is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to the Supreme. Not for the sake of the wife, says Yajnavalkya in the Upanishad, but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to us. This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love; but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too which is not egoistic but divine. All true love and all sacrifice are in their essence Natures contradiction of the primary egoism and its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from which we have separated, a discovery of ones self in others.
1.04 - THE STUDY (The Compact), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
The best thou learnest, In the end
Thou dar'st not tell the youngstersnever!
1.05 - Bhakti Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
7. Para Bhakti and Jnana are one. Bhakti melts into wisdom In the end. Two have become one now.
8. Bhakti grows gradually just as you grow a flower or a tree in a garden. Cultivate Bhakti in the garden of your heart gradually.
1.05 - Character Of The Atoms, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
No power can quench; for In the end they conquer
By their own solidness; though hard it be
1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
that one begins to wonder whether, In the end, it was Christ who
was taken as a symbol of the stone rather than the other way
1.05 - Mental Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and In the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
1.05 - ON ENJOYING AND SUFFERING THE PASSIONS, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
or of the voluptuous or of the fanatic or of the vengeful, In the end all your passions became virtues and all
your devils, angels. Once you had wild dogs in your
cellar, but In the end they turned into birds and
lovely singers. Out of your poisons you brewed your
--
flame of jealousy, one will In the end, like the scorpion,
turn one's poisonous sting against oneself. Alas, my
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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 and 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 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 the other 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.
A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- 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-expressions-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.
1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:But this unity is in its nature indefinable. When we seek to envisage it by the mind we are compelled to proceed through an infinite series of conceptions and experiences. And yet In the end we are obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive experiences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. We arrive at the formula of the Indian sages, neti neti, "It is not this, It is not that", there is no experience by which we can limit It, there is no conception by which It can be defined.
3:An Unknowable which appears to us in many states and attributes of being, in many forms of consciousness, in many activities of energy, this is what Mind can ultimately say about the existence which we ourselves are and which we see in all that is presented to our thought and senses. It is in and through those states, those forms, those activities that we have to approach and know the Unknowable. But if in our haste to arrive at a Unity that our mind can seize and hold, if in our insistence to confine the Infinite in our embrace we identify the Reality with any one definable state of being however pure and eternal, with any particular attri bute however general and comprehensive, with any fixed formulation of consciousness however vast in its scope, with any energy or activity however boundless its application, and if we exclude all the rest, then our thoughts sin against Its unknowableness and arrive not at a true unity but at a division of the Indivisible.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
change with alteration In the ends we are pursuing (because facilitators in one situation may easily become obstacles
382
1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The subjective stage of human development is that critical juncture in which, having gone forward from symbols, types, conventions, having turned its gaze superficially on the individual being to discover his truth and right law of action and its relation to the superficial and external truth and law of the universe, our race begins to gaze deeper, to see and feel what is behind the outside and below the surface and therefore to live from within. It is a step towards self-knowledge and towards living in and from the self, away from knowledge of things as the not-self and from the living according to this objective idea of life and the universe. Everything depends on how that step is taken, to what kind of subjectivity we arrive and how far we go in self-knowledge; for here the dangers of error are as great and far-reaching as the results of right seeking. The symbolic, the typal, the conventional age avoid these dangers by building a wall of self-limitation against them; and it is because this wall becomes In the end a prison of self-ignorance that it has to be broken down and the perilous but fruitful adventure of subjectivism undertaken.
A psychic self-knowledge tells us that there are in our being many formal, frontal, apparent or representative selves and only one that is entirely secret and real; to rest in the apparent and to mistake it for the real is the one general error, root of all others and cause of all our stumbling and suffering, to which man is exposed by the nature of his mentality. We may apply this truth to the attempt of man to live by the law of his subjective being whether as an individual or as a social unit one in its corporate mind and body.
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From this egoistic self-vision flowed a number of logical consequences, each in itself a separate subjective error. First, since the individual is only a cell of the collectivity, his life must be entirely subservient to the efficient life of the nation. He must be made efficient indeed,the nation should see to his education, proper living, disciplined life, carefully trained and subordinated activity,but as a part of the machine or a disciplined instrument of the national Life. Initiative must be the collectivitys, execution the individuals. But where was that vague thing, the collectivity, and how could it express itself not only as a self-conscious, but an organised and efficient collective will and self-directing energy? The State, there was the secret. Let the State be perfect, dominant, all-pervading, all-seeing, all-effecting; so only could the collective ego be concentrated, find itself, and its life be brought to the highest pitch of strength, organisation and efficiency. Thus Germany founded and established the growing modern error of the cult of the State and the growing subordination driving In the end towards the effacement of the individual. We can see what it gained, an immense collective power and a certain kind of perfection and scientific adjustment of means to end and a high general level of economic, intellectual and social efficiency,apart from the tremendous momentary force which the luminous fulfilment of a great idea gives to man or nation. What it had begun to lose is as yet only slightly apparent,all that deeper life, vision, intuitive power, force of personality, psychical sweetness and largeness which the free individual brings as his gift to the race.
Secondly, since the State is supreme, the representative of the Divine or the highest realised functioning of human existence, and has a divine right to the obedience, the unquestioning service and the whole activity of the individual, the service of State and community is the only absolute rule of morality. Within the State this may include and sanction all other moral rules because there no rebel egoism can be allowed, for the individual ego must be lost in that of the State or become part of it and all condition of covert or overt war must be abrogated in obedience to the collective good as determined by the collective will. But in relation to other States, to other collective egos the general condition, the effective law is still that of war, of strife between sharply divided egoisms each seeking to fulfil itself, each hampered and restricted in its field by the others. War then is the whole business of the State in its relation to other States, a war of arms, a war of commerce, a war of ideas and cultures, a war of collective personalities each seeking to possess the world or at least to dominate and be first in the world. Here there can enter no morality except that of success, though the pretence of morality may be a useful stratagem of war. To serve the State, the German collectivity which is his greater and real self is the business of the German individual whether at home or abroad, and to that end everything which succeeds is justifiable. Inefficiency, incompetence, failure are the only immorality. In war every method is justified which leads to the military success of the State, in peace every method which prepares it; for peace between nations is only a covert state of war. And as war is the means of physical survival and domination, so commerce is the means of economic survival and domination; it is in fact only another kind of war, another department of the struggle to live, one physical, the other vital. And the life and the body are, so Science has assured us, the whole of existence.
1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
About Hitler's entering the Baltic, somebody commented that Hitler had blundered by extending the war front. Sri Aurobindo remarked, "It was a rash thing to do. These things depend In the end on sea-power. Without sea-power you can't transport supplies, mechanised troops, etc.... Aeroplanes are only a powerful aid. You can't conquer a country with them."
May 20, 1940
1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:For out of these false relations and by their aid the true have to be found. By the Ignorance we have to cross over death. So too the Veda speaks cryptically of energies that are like women evil in impulse, wandering from the path, doing hurt to their Lord, which yet, though themselves false and unhappy, build up In the end "this vast Truth", the Truth that is the Bliss. It would be, then, not when he has excised the evil in Nature out of himself by an act of moral surgery or parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned Death into a more perfect life, lifted the small things of the human limitation into the great things of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into their secret truth that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done and Heaven and Earth equalised join hands in the bliss of the Supreme.
17:Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
SERENITY: Hope In the ending of suffering (knowing ones individual experience, one logically infers that it can be generalised and become the experience of all).
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1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An ultimate inexpressible adoration offered by us to the Transcendent, to the Highest,1 to the Ineffable, is yet no complete worship if it is not offered to him wherever he manifests or wherever even he hides his godhead - in man2 and object and every creature. An Ignorance is there no doubt which imprisons the heart, distorts its feelings, obscures the significance of its offering; all partial worship, all religion which erects a mental or a physical idol is tempted to veil and protect the truth in it by a certain cloak of ignorance and easily loses the truth in its image. But the pride of exclusive knowledge is also a limitation and a barrier. For there is, concealed behind individual love, obscured by its ignorant human figure, a mystery which the mind cannot seize, the mystery of the body of the Divine, the secret of a mystic form of the Infinite which we can approach only through the ecstasy of the heart and the passion of the pure and sublimated sense, and its attraction which is the call of the divine Flute-player, the mastering compulsion of the AllBeautiful, can only be seized and seize us through an occult love and yearning which In the end makes one the Form and the Formless, and identifies Spirit and Matter. It is that which the spirit in Love is seeking here in the darkness of the Ignorance and it is that which it finds when individual human love is changed into the love of the Immanent Divine incarnate in the material universe.
As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attraction of all the myriad forms and presences that surround us, by which mentally and emotionally man escapes from the first limits of his ego, has to be taken up into a unifying divine love for the universal Divine. Adoration fulfilled in love, love in Ananda, - the surpassing love, the self-wrapped ecstasy of transcendent delight in the Transcendent which awaits us at the end of the path of Devotion, - has for its wider result a universal love for all beings, the Ananda of all that is; we perceive behind every veil the Divine, spiritually embrace in all forms the All-Beautiful. A universal delight in his endless manifestation flows through us, taking in its surge every form and movement, but not bound or stationary in any and always reaching out to a greater and more perfect expression. This universal love is liberative and dynamic for transformation; for the discord of forms and appearances ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind them all and understood their perfect significance. The impartial equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embracing ecstasy and million-bodied beatitude. All things become bodies and all movements the playings of the divine Beloved in his infinite house of pleasure. Even pain is changed and in their reaction and even in their essence things painful alter; the forms of pain fall away, there are created in their place the forms of Ananda.
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In any cult the symbol, the significant rite or expressive figure is not only a moving and enriching aesthetic element, but a physical means by which the human being begins to make outwardly definite the emotion and aspiration of his heart, to confirm it and to dynamise it. For if without a spiritual aspiration worship is meaningless and vain, yet the aspiration also without the act and the form is a disembodied and, for life, an incompletely effective power. It is unhappily the fate of all forms in human life to become crystallised, purely formal and therefore effete, and although form and cult preserve always their power for the man who can still enter into their meaning, the majority come to use the ceremony as a mechanical rite and the symbol as a lifeless sign, and because that kills the soul of religion, cult and form have In the end to be changed or thrown aside altogether.
There are those even to whom all cult and form are for this reason suspect and offensive; but few can dispense with the support of outward symbols and, even, a certain divine element in human nature demands them always for the completeness of its spiritual satisfaction. Always the symbol is legitimate in so far as it is true, sincere, beautiful and delightful, and even one may say that a spiritual consciousness without any aesthetic or emotional content is not entirely or at any rate not integrally spiritual. In the spiritual life the basis of the act is a spiritual consciousness perennial and renovating, moved to express itself always in new forms or able to renew the truth of a form always by the flow of the spirit, and to so express itself and make every action a living symbol of some truth of the soul is the very nature of its creative vision and impulse. It is so that the spiritual seeker must deal with life and transmute its form and glorify it in its essence.
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aware of in himself and finds all around him and has to struggle and combat incessantly to be rid of their grip and dislodge the long-entrenched mastery they have exercised over his own being as over the environing human existence. The difficulty is great; for their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible that it justifies the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a dog's tail, - for, straighten it never so much by force of ethics, religion, reason or any other redemptive effort, it returns In the end always to the crooked curl of Nature. And so great is the vim, the clutch of that more agitated Life-Will, so immense the peril of its passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently invasive, so obstinate up to the very gates of Heaven the fury of its attack or the tedious obstruction of its obstacles that even the saint and the Yogin cannot be sure of their liberated purity or their trained self-mastery against its intrigue or its violence. All labour to straighten out this native crookedness strikes the struggling will as a futility; a flight, a withdrawal to happy Heaven or peaceful dissolution easily finds credit as the only wisdom and to find a way not to be born again gets established as the only remedy for the dull bondage or the poor shoddy delirium or the blinded and precarious happiness and achievement of earthly existence.
A remedy yet there should be and is, a way of redress and a chance of transformation for this troubled vital nature; but for that the cause of deviation must be found and remedied at the heart of Life itself and in its very principle, since Life too is a power of the Divine and not a creation of some malignant
1.06 - The Breaking of the Limits, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Our look is false because it perceives everything through the distorting prism of its routine, which is multifarious and subtle, made of thousands of years of habits which are as distorting in their deviltry as they are in their wisdom. This is the residue of the anthropoid, which had to erect barriers to protect his little life, his little family, his little clan, draw a line here, a line there, boundary markers, and generally insure his precarious existence by encasing it in a shell of individual and collective self. It follows that there is good and evil, right and wrong, useful and harmful, dos and don'ts we have slowly become entangled in a huge police network in which we scarcely have the spiritual freedom to brea the and even that air is polluted by countless decalogues that are barely one step above the pollution by the carbon monoxide of our engines. In short, we are forever correcting the world. But we are beginning to realize that this correction is not all that straight. Never for a moment do we stop putting our multicolored glasses on things in order to see them in the blue of our hopes, the red of our desires, the yellow of our morals and ready-made laws, and in black, In the endless grayness of a machinery that keeps grinding and grinding forever. The look the true look that will have the power to break free from this mental spell is therefore the one that will be able to cast itself on things clearly, without immediately correcting them: to rest here, upon this face, that circumstance or object the way one gazes at the infinite sea, without trying to solidify something to let itself be carried by that tranquil and fluid infinity, to ba the in what we see, to sink into the thing, until slowly, as if from far away, from the depths of a tranquil sea, there emerges a perception of the thing seen, of the puzzling circumstance or face near us; a perception that is not a thought, not a judgment, hardly a sensation, but is like the true vibratory content of the thing, its special mode of being, its quality of being, its innermost music, its relation with the great Rhythm that flows everywhere. Then, slowly, the seeker of the new world will see a sort of little spark of pure truth in the heart of the object, circumstance, face or accident, a little cry of true being, a true vibration beneath all the black and yellow and blue and red coatings something that is the truth of each thing, each being, each circumstance, each accident, as if the truth were everywhere, every instant, every step, only coated in black. The seeker will thus have put his finger on the second rule of the passage and the greatest of all the simple secrets: Look at the truth that is everywhere.
Armed with these two rules, firmly established in his sunlit position, that quiet clearing, the seeker of the new world moves within a greater self, perhaps infinite, which embraces this street and these beings and all the little gestures of the hour; he moves steadily on, as though carried by a great rhythm, which also carries the beings and things around him, the thousands of encounters sprung from nowhere and disappearing into the distance; he looks at this little walking shadow, which seems to have walked so long, walked for many lives perhaps, repeated the same small gestures, stumbled here and there, exchanged the same comments on the mood of the times; and it all seems so similar, so mixed with sweetness that this street and these beings and passing encounters seem to be cast from the same mold, issued from the depths of night, recalled from the same identical story, under the sky of Egypt or India or Vermont, today, yesterday or five thousand years ago and what has really changed? There is a little being walking with his fire of truth, his fire of need, so intense amid the turmoil of time a fire is perhaps the only thing that is truly he, a call of being from the depths of time, an unchanging cry amid the immense flow of things. And what is he calling for, this being; what is he crying for? Is he not in that vast and growing sunlight, in that rhythm carrying everything? He is and he is not. He has one foot in an untroubled eternity and the other stumbling and groping in the dark the other in a little self of fire yearning to fill this second of time, this empty gesture, this step among thousands of similar steps, with a fullness of true existence as complete as all the millennia put together, with as unfailing an exactness as the crisscrossing of the stars above our heads; yearning for everything to be true, true, completely true and filled with meaning, in this enormous whirlwind of vanity; yearning for this line he crosses, this street he goes down, this hand he extends, this word he utters to be linked to the great flowing of the worlds, to the rhythm of the stars, to the lines, the countless lines that furrow this universe and form a total song, a truth filled with the whole and each fragment of the whole. So he looks at all these little passing things, he fills them with his fire of entreaty, he looks and looks at that little truth everywhere as if it were going to burst out, forced into being by his fire.
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And once again we are struck by the same phenomenon. These fleeting little bursts have nothing to do with big things, the sensational and earthshaking affairs of men. They are humble miracles, one could say meticulous miracles of detail, as if the real key were there in the little stumbling everyday trifle caught by surprise, at ground level, as if, in fact, a victory won over a minute point of matter were more pregnant with consequences than all the trips to the moon and the huge revolutions of men which In the end revolutionize nothing.
This new functioning seems indeed to be radically new. It is unlike any of the so-called spiritual or occult powers one can obtain by scaling the ladder of consciousness: these are not prophetic powers, or healing powers, or powers of levitation the thousand and one poor powers that have never healed the world's poverty they are not dazzling lights that comm and men's attention for an instant, only to leave them afterwards as they were before, half asleep and afflicted with cancer; not brief, compelling impositions from above that come and upset the laws of matter, only to let it fall back the next moment into its heavy and stubborn obstinacy. It is a new consciousness new, entirely new, like a young shoot on the tree of the world a direct power from matter to matter, without interference from above, without descending course, distorting intermediary or diluting passage. Truth here answers truth there, instantly and automatically. It is a global consciousness, innumerably and infinitesimally conscious of the truth of each point, each thing, each being, each second. We could say a divine consciousness of matter, the very one that one day cast this seed upon our good earth, and these millions of wild seeds, and these millions of stars, which knows perfectly every moment all the degrees of its unfolding, down to the tiniest leaf everything harmonizes when one harmonizes with the Law. Because, in fact, there is only one Law, a Law of Truth.
1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8:Imperial MAHESHWARI is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother s eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail In the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient and unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their force and the truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away from her into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet has she more than any other the heart of the universal Mother For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
9:MAHAKALI is of another nature. Not wideness but height, not wisdom but force and strength are her peculiar power. There is in her an overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effective process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it. Terrible is her face to the Asura, dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine; for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle. Intolerant of imperfection, she deals roughly with all in man that is unwilling and she is severe to all that is obstinately ignorant and obscure; her wrath is immediate and dire against treachery and falsehood and malignity, ill-will is smitten at once by her scourge. Indifference, negligence and sloth in the divine work she cannot bear and she smites awake at once with sharp pain, if need be, the untimely slumberer and the loiterer. The impulses that are swift and straight and frank, the movements that are unreserved and absolute, the aspiration that mounts in flame are the motion of Mahakali. Her spirit is tameless, her vision and will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath and she has a deep and passionate kindness. When she is allowed to intervene in her strength, then in one moment are broken like things without consistence the obstacles that immobilise or the enemies that assail the seeker. If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into strength and perfect truth, hammer straight what is wry and perverse and expel what is impure or defective. But for her what is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful but would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities. To knowledge she gives a conquering might, brings to beauty and harmony a high and mounting movement and imparts to the slow and difficult labour after perfection an impetus that multiplies the power and shortens the long way. Nothing can satisfy her that falls short of the supreme ecstasies, the highest heights, the noblest aims, the largest vistas. Therefore with her is the victorious force of the Divine and it is by grace of her fire and passion and speed if the great achievement can be done now rather than hereafter.
1.06 - Yun Men's Every Day is a Good Day, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
without fault or worry, this is still not the ultimate. In the end
though, what is? Look carefully at this quote; "I snap my fin
1.07 - Bridge across the Afterlife, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
son. It cant, In the end, explain human reason away without
explaining itself away. 5 And the eminently reasonable Brian
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
very much In the end. Every psycho therapist who knows his job will,
consciously or unconsciously, theory notwithstanding, ring all the changes
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:To those who can act only on a rigid standard, to those who can feel only the human and not the divine values, this truth may seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish only chaos. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that result for man in his ignorance. But even on the human level, if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant virtue. In its place we gain openness and a power of continual moral progression, charity, the capacity to enter into an understanding sympathy with all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that charity a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the end where the human closes and the divine commences, where the mental disappears into the supramental consciousness and the finite precipitates itself into the infinite, all evil disappears into a transcendent divine Good which becomes universal on every plane of consciousness that it touches.
7:This, then, stands fixed for us that all standards by which we may seek to govern our conduct are only our temporary, imperfect and evolutive attempts to represent to ourselves our stumbling mental progress in the universal self-realisation towards which Nature moves. But the divine manifestation cannot be bound by our little rules and fragile sanctities; for the consciousness behind it is too vast for these things. Once we have grasped this fact, disconcerting enough to the absolutism of our reason, we shall better be able to put in their right place in regard to each other the successive standards that govern the different stages in the growth of the individual and the collective march of mankind. At the most general of them we may cast a passing glance. For we have to see how they stand in relation to that other standardless spiritual and supramental mode of working for which Yoga seeks and to which it moves by the surrender of the individual to the divine Will and, more effectively, through his ascent by this surrender to the greater consciousness in which a certain identity with the dynamic Eternal becomes possible.
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16:Against this danger of suppression and immobilisation Nature in the individual reacts. It may react by an isolated resistance ranging from the instinctive and brutal revolt of the criminal to the complete negation of the solitary and ascetic. It may react by the assertion of an individualistic trend in the social idea, may impose it on the mass consciousness and establish a compromise between the individual and the social demand. But a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and In the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues. A new principle has to be called in other and higher than the two conflicting instincts and powerful at once to override and to reconcile them. Above the natural individual law which sets up as our one standard of conduct the satisfaction of our individual needs, preferences and desires and the natural communal law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of the needs, preferences and desires of the community as a whole, there had to arise the notion of an ideal moral law which is not the satisfaction of need and desire, but controls and even coerces or annuls them in the interests of an ideal order that is not animal, not vital and physical, but mental, a creation of the mind's seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right movement and true order. The moment this notion becomes powerful in man, he begins to escape from the engrossing vital and material into the mental life; he climbs from the first to the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. His needs and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light of purpose and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional desire begin to predominate over the demand of the physical and vital nature.
17:The natural law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equilibrium of forces, impulsions and desires; the higher ethical law proceeds by the development of the mental and moral nature towards a fixed internal standard or else a self-formed ideal of absolute qualities, - justice, righteousness, love, right reason, right power, beauty, light. It is therefore essentially an individual standard; it is not a creation of the mass mind. The thinker is the individual; it is he who calls out and throws into forms that which would otherwise remain subconscious in the amorphous human whole. The moral striver is also the individual; selfdiscipline, not under the yoke of an outer law, but in obedience to an internal light, is essentially an individual effort. But by positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute moral ideal the thinker imposes it, not on himself alone, but on all the individuals whom his thought can reach and penetrate. And as the mass of individuals come more and more to accept it in idea if only in an imperfect practice or no practice, society also is compelled to obey the new orientation. It absorbs the ideative influence and tries, not with any striking success, to mould its institutions into new forms touched by these higher ideals. But always its instinct is to translate them into binding law, into pattern forms, into mechanic custom, into an external social compulsion upon its living units.
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25:The later religions endeavour to fix the type of a supreme truth of conduct, erect a system and declare God's law through the mouth of Avatar or prophet. These systems, more powerful and dynamic than the dry ethical idea, are yet for the most part no more than idealistic glorifications of the moral principle sanctified by religious emotion and the label of a superhuman origin. Some, like the extreme Christian ethic, are rejected by Nature because they insist unworkably on an impracticable absolute rule. Others prove In the end to be evolutionary compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. The true divine law, unlike these mental counterfeits, cannot be a system of rigid ethical determinations that press into their cast-iron moulds all our life-movements. The Law divine is truth of life and truth of the spirit and must take up with a free living plasticity and inspire with the direct touch of its eternal light each step of our action and all the complexity of our life issues. It must act not as a rule and formula but as an enveloping and penetrating conscious presence that determines all our thoughts, activities, feelings, impulsions of will by its infallible power and knowledge.
26:The older religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta of Manu or Confucius, a complex Shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule and moral law with the declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the same ground as equally the expression of everlasting verities, sanatana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary and valid for a time, mental constructions, human readings of the will of the Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to certain social and moral formulas, had to share the fortunes of its forms. Either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable. The unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy and dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul's freedom by a fixed and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an inner death. Not this coercion or determination from outside, but the free discovery of his highest spirit and the truth of an eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
1.07 - The Fire of the New World, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
And we return again to our question: What is this new consciousness? Where did it come from if it is not the fruit of our precious brain?... At bottom, the dread of the materialist is to find himself suddenly face to face, without warning, with a God to adore, and we certainly sympathize with him when we see the puerile pictures the religions have painted of Him. The apes, too, if they had such an idea, would have painted as childish a picture of the supernatural and divine powers of man. Is to be worshipped what makes us wider, more beautiful, more sunlit; and ultimately, that wideness, beauty and sunlight are accessible to us only because they are already there in us, otherwise we would not recognize them. Only the like recognizes the like. This growing likeness is the only godhead worthy of worship. But we want to believe that it does not stop with the gilded mediocrity of our scientific feats, any more than it stopped with the prowess of the Pithecanthropus. This new consciousness is therefore not so new; it is our look which is new, the likeness which is growing more perfect (we should perhaps say the world's exactitude which is drawing closer). This world, as we now all know, is not as it appears; this matter, so solid to our eyes, this water so crystalline, this exquisite rose vanish into something else, and the rose never was rose, nor the water crystalline; this water flows and bubbles as much as this table and this rock, and nothing is immobile. We have widened our field of vision. But what destroyed the rose? Which is right, the microscope or our eyes? Probably both, and neither completely. The microscope neither cancels nor negates our superficial vision; it only touches another degree of reality, a second level of the same thing. And because the microscope sees differently, it can act differently and open up to us a whole spectrum of rays that are going to change our surface. But there may be a third, unexplored level of the same eternal Thing yet another look, for what is new under the stars except our look at the stars? And most likely there are still more levels, infinitely more levels awaiting our discovery, for what could possibly put a final stop to the great efflorescence? There is no stop, no distant Goal; there is our growing look and a Goal which is here at each instant. There is a great blossoming gradually stripping its marvel, petal by petal. And each new look changes our world and all the surface laws as drastically as the laws of Einstein have changed Newton's world. To see differently is to be able to do differently. That third level is the new consciousness. And it cancels neither the rose nor the microscope nothing is canceled In the end, except, gradually, our folly. It only links that rose to the great total blossoming, and that bubbling water, that chance pebble, that little being alone in his corner, to the great flow of the one and only Power which gradually molds us into the golden likeness of a great inner Look. And perhaps it will open for us the door to less monstrous miracles: tiny natural miracles that bring the great Goal alive at each instant and reveal the totality of the marvel in one point.
But where is the mysterious key to that third level? In reality, it is not mysterious after all, although it is full of mysteries. It does not depend on complicated instruments, does not hide under a secret knowledge, does not fall from the sky for the elect it is there, almost visible to the naked eye, utterly simple and natural. It has been there since the beginning of time, in that seed harboring a smoldering fire: a need to reach out and take; in that great nebula gathering its grains of atoms: a need to grow and be; under those sleeping waters already simmering with an impatient fire of life: a need for air and open space. And everything began to move, impelled by the same fire: the heliotrope toward the sun, the dove toward its companion and man toward we know not what. An immense Need in the heart of the worlds, all the way to the galaxies out there, to the limits of Andromeda, which drew each other into a mortal gravitational embrace. That need we see at our own level; it is small or less small, it asks for air or sunlight, a companion and children, books, art and music, objects by the millions but it has really only one object, it asks for only one music, a single sun and a single air. It is a need for infinity. For it was born out of infinity. And so long as it does not meet its one object, it will not stop, nor will the galaxies stop devouring each other, nor men struggling and toiling to seize the one thing they think they do not have, but which pushes and prods inside, poking its unsatisfied fire until we attain the ultimate satisfaction and at once the plenitude of millions of vain objects, of an ephemeral rose and a trivial little gesture. It is this Fire that is the key, because it is born out of the supreme Power that set the world on fire; it is this Fire that sees, because it is born out of the supreme Vision that conceived this seed; it is this Fire that knows, because it recognizes itself everywhere, in things and beings, in the pebble and the stars. This is the Fire of the new world which burns in the heart of man, This that wakes in the sleepers, says the Upanishad.14 And it will not rest until everything is restored to its full truth, and the world to its joy, for it is born of Joy and for Joy.
1.07 - The Ideal Law of Social Development, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Man, the mental being in Nature, is especially distinguished from her less developed creatures by a greater power of individuality, by the liberation of the mental consciousness which enables him finally to understand more and more himself and his law of being and his development, by the liberation of the mental will which enables him under the secret control of the universal Will to manage more and more the materials and lines of his development and by the capacity In the end to go beyond himself, beyond his mentality and open his consciousness into that from which mind, life and body proceed. He can even, however imperfectly at present, get at his highest to some consciousness of the Reality which is his true being and possess consciously also, as nothing else in terrestrial Nature can possess, the Self, the Idea, the Will which have constituted him and can become by that the master of his own nature and increasingly, not as now he is, a wrestler with dominant circumstance but the master of Nature. To do this, to arrive through mind and beyond mind at the Self, the Spirit which expresses itself in all Nature and, becoming one with it in his being, his force, his consciousness, his will, his knowledge, to possess at once humanly and divinelyaccording to the law and nature of human existence, but of human existence fulfilled in God and fulfilling God in the worldboth himself and the world is the destiny of man and the object of his individual and social existence.1
This is done primarily through the individual man; for this end man has become an individual soul, that the One may find and manifest Himself in each human being. That end is not indeed achieved by the individual human being in his unaided mental force. He needs the help of the secret Divine above his mentality in his superconscient self; he needs the help also of the secret Divine around him in Nature and in his fellow-men. Everything in Nature is an occasion for him to develop his divine potentiality, an occasion which he has a certain relative freedom to use or to misuse, although In the end both his use and misuse of his materials are overruled in their results by the universal Will so as to assist eventually the development of his law of being and his destiny. All life around him is a help towards the divine purpose in him; every human being is his fellow worker and assists him whether by association and union or by strife and opposition. Nor does he achieve his destiny as the individual Man for the sake of the individual soul alone,a lonely salvation is not his complete ideal,but for the world also or rather for God in the world, for God in all as well as above all and not for God solely and separately in one. And he achieves it by the stress, not really of his separate individual Will, but of the universal Will in its movement towards the goal of its cycles.
The object of all society should be, therefore, and must become, as man grows conscious of his real being, nature and destiny and not as now only of a part of it, first to provide the conditions of life and growth by which individual Man,not isolated men or a class or a privileged race, but all individual men according to their capacity, and the race through the growth of its individuals may travel towards this divine perfection. It must be, secondly, as mankind generally more and more grows near to some figure of the Divine in life and more and more men arrive at it,for the cycles are many and each cycle has its own figure of the Divine in man,to express in the general life of mankind, the light, the power, the beauty, the harmony, the joy of the Self that has been attained and that pours itself out in a freer and nobler humanity. Freedom and harmony express the two necessary principles of variation and oneness,freedom of the individual, the group, the race, coordinated harmony of the individuals forces and of the efforts of all individuals in the group, of all groups in the race, of all races in the kind, and these are the two conditions of healthy progression and successful arrival. To realise them and to combine them has been the obscure or half-enlightened effort of mankind throughout its history,a task difficult indeed and too imperfectly seen and too clumsily and mechanically pursued by the reason and desires to be satisfactorily achieved until man grows by self-knowledge and self-mastery to the possession of a spiritual and psychical unity with his fellow-men. As we realise more and more the right conditions, we shall travel more luminously and spontaneously towards our goal and, as we draw nearer to a clear sight of our goal, we shall realise better and better the right conditions. The Self in man enlarging light and knowledge and harmonising will with light and knowledge so as to fulfil in life what he has seen in his increasing vision and idea of the Self, this is mans source and law of progress and the secret of his impulse towards perfection.
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But within this general nature and general destiny of mankind each individual human being has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at his possible perfection by a growth from within. So only can the race itself attain to anything profound, living and deep-rooted. It cannot be done brutally, heavily, mechanically in the mass; the group self has no true right to regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is not so constituted. We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find, develop, work out from within. No State or legislator or reformer can cut him rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a mechanical salvation; no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious Shastra can be allowed to say to him permanently, In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy growth be permitted. These things may help him temporarily or they may curb and he grows in proportion as he can use them and then exceed them, train and teach his individuality by them, but assert it always In the end in its divine freedom. Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.
True, his life and growth are for the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self. True, he has to use the ideals, disciplines, systems of cooperation which he finds upon his path; but he can only use them well, in their right way and to their right purpose if they are to his life means towards something beyond them and not burdens to be borne by him for their own sake or despotic controls to be obeyed by him as their slave or subject; for though laws and disciplines strive to be the tyrants of the human soul, their only purpose is to be its instruments and servants and when their use is over they have to be rejected and broken. True it is, too, that he has to gather in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and to make the most of the experience of humanitys past ages and not confine himself in a narrow mentality; but this he can only do successfully by making all this his own through assimilation of it to the principle of his own nature and through its subservience to the forward call of his enlarging future. The liberty claimed by the struggling human mind for the individual is no mere egoistic challenge and revolt, however egoistically or with one-sided exaggeration and misapplication it may sometimes be advanced; it is the divine instinct within him, the law of the Self, its claim to have room and the one primary condition for its natural self-unfolding.
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
VIJAY: "But those who discriminate according to the Vedanta philosophy also realize Him In the end, don't they?"
Path of bhakti is easy
1.07 - The Process of Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The law is the same for the mass as for the individual. The process of human evolution has been seen by the eye of inspired observation to be that of working out the tiger and the ape. The forces of cruelty, lust, mischievous destruction, pain-giving, folly, brutality, ignorance were once rampant in humanity, they had full enjoyment; then by the growth of religion and philosophy they began in periods of satiety such as the beginning of the Christian era in Europe to be partly replaced, partly put under control. As is the law of such things, they have always reverted again with greater or less virulence and sought with more or less success to re-establish themselves. Finally in the nineteenth century it seemed for a time as if some of these forces had, for a time at least, exhausted themselves and the hour for sayama and gradual dismissal from the evolution had really arrived. Such hopes always recur and In the end they are likely to bring about their own fulfilment, but before that happens another recoil is inevitable. We see plenty of signs of it in the reeling back into the beast which is in progress in Europe and America behind the fair outside of Science, progress, civilisation and humanitarianism, and we are likely to see more signs of it in the era that is coming upon us. A similar law holds in politics and society. The political evolution of the human race follows certain lines of which the most recent formula has been given in the watchwords of the French Revolution, freedom, equality and brotherhood. But the forces of the old world, the forces of despotism, the forces of traditional privilege and selfish exploitation, the forces of unfraternal strife and passionate self-regarding competition are always struggling to reseat themselves on the thrones of the earth. A determined movement of reaction is evident in many parts of the world and nowhere perhaps more than in England which was once one of the self-styled champions of progress and liberty. The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution. It rises only to be defeated and crushed again. On the other hand the force of the democratic tendency is not a force which is spent but one which has not yet arrived, not a force which has had the greater part of its enjoyment but one which is still vigorous, unsatisfied and eager for fulfilment. Every attempt to coerce it in the past reacted eventually on the coercing force and brought back the democratic spirit fierce, hungry and unsatisfied, joining to its fair motto of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the terrible addition or Death. It is not likely that the immediate future of the democratic tendency will satisfy the utmost dreams of the lover of liberty who seeks an anarchist freedom, or of the lover of equality who tries to establish a socialistic dead level, or of the lover of fraternity who dreams of a world-embracing communism. But some harmonisation of this great ideal is undoubtedly the immediate future of the human race. On the old forces of despotism, inequality and unbridled competition, after they have been once more overthrown, a process of gradual sayama will be performed by which what has remained of them will be regarded as the disappearing vestiges of a dead reality and without any further violent coercion be transformed slowly and steadily out of existence.
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1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
( Buach - the ego centred in Tipharas) in every possible and conceivable way - he must get rid of it entirely In the end when it comes to the point of surrendering the self to the
SELF.
1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful In the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. Poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism,for it can be called by no other name,that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result In the end
in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest
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ligent policy, which will In the end assure him of the greatest
possible expectation of reward. It is thus the market game as
1.08 - Introduction to Patanjalis Yoga Aphorisms, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Now the question arises: Is going back to God the higher state, or not? The philosophers of the Yoga school emphatically answer that it is. They say that man's present state is a degeneration. There is not one religion on the face of the earth which says that man is an improvement. The idea is that his beginning is perfect and pure, that he degenerates until he cannot degenerate further, and that there must come a time when he shoots upward again to complete the circle. The circle must be described. However low he may go, he must ultimately take the upward bend and go back to the original source, which is God. Man comes from God in the beginning, in the middle he becomes man, and In the end he goes back to God. This is the method of putting it in the dualistic form. The monistic form is that man is God, and goes back to Him again. If our present state is the higher one, then why is there so much horror and misery, and why is there an end to it? If this is the higher state, why does it end? That which corrupts and degenerates cannot be the highest state. Why should it be so diabolical, so unsatisfying? It is only excusable, inasmuch as through it we are taking a higher groove; we have to pass through it in order to become regenerate again. Put a seed into the ground and it disintegrates, dissolves after a time, and out of that dissolution comes the splendid tree. Every soul must disintegrate to become God. So it follows that the sooner we get out of this state we call "man" the better for us. Is it by committing suicide that we get out of this state? Not at all. That will be making it worse. Torturing ourselves, or condemning the world, is not the way to get out. We have to pass through the Slough of Despond, and the sooner we are through, the better. It must always be remembered that man-state is not the highest state.
The really difficult part to understand is that this state, the Absolute, which has been called the highest, is not, as some fear, that of the zoophyte or of the stone. According to them, there are only two states of existence, one of the stone, and the other of thought. What right have they to limit existence to these two? Is there not something infinitely superior to thought? The vibrations of light, when they are very low, we do not see; when they become a little more intense, they become light to us; when they become still more intense, we do not see them it is dark to us. Is the darkness In the end the same darkness as in the beginning? Certainly not; they are different as the two poles. Is the thoughtlessness of the stone the same as the thoughtlessness of God? Certainly not. God does not think; He does not reason. Why should He? Is anything unknown to Him, that He should reason? The stone cannot reason; God does not. Such is the difference. These philosophers think it is awful if we go beyond thought; they find nothing beyond thought.
There are much higher states of existence beyond reasoning. It is really beyond the intellect that the first state of religious life is to be found. When you step beyond thought and intellect and all reasoning, then you have made the first step towards God; and that is the beginning of life. What is commonly called life is but an embryo state.
1.08 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS OF THE ATOM BOMB, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
matter? And have we not reason to hope that In the end we shall
be able to arrange every kind of matter, following the results we
1.08 - The Change of Vision, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
This change of vision is not spectacular or immediate; it is produced by small drops of a new outlook one hardly knows is a new outlook. One walks right past it, perhaps not unlike the caveman who walks past a gold nugget, glances at it because it glitters, and throws it away. Gold? What use is gold? We have to walk by the same futile point again and again, which does glitter a little and has a special something about it, before we understand that gold is gold we have to invent gold; we have to invent the whole world and find what is already there. The difficulty is not in discovering hidden secrets but in discovering the visible, and that unsuspected gold in the midst of banality actually, there is no banality; there is only unconsciousness. There is an age-old habit of looking at the world in relation to our needs and with respect to ourselves, like the logger in the forest who sees rosewood and only rosewood. Some measure of eccentricity is necessary to make the discovery. And In the end we realize that that eccentricity is the first step to a truer centricity and the key to a whole new set of relations. Our forest becomes stocked with a variety of unknown trees, and everything is a discovery. We have also been biased by what we could call the visionary's tradition. It has always seemed that the privileged among men were the ones who had visions, who could see our everyday grayness in pink and green and blue, see apparitions and supernatural phenomena a sort of supercinema one enjoys free of charge in the privacy of one's own room by pressing the psychic button. And that is all very well, there's nothing to say, but experience shows that this sort of vision changes absolutely nothing. Tomorrow millions of men could be given the power of vision by a stroke of grace, and they would turn on their little psychic television again and again; they would see gods laden with gold (and perhaps a few hells more in accord with their natural affinities), flowers more magnificent than any rose (and a scattering of awesome serpents), flying or haloed beings (but devils imitate halos very well, they are more showy than the gods, they like tinsel), landscapes of dream, sumptuous fruits, crystal dwellings but In the end, after the hundredth time, they would be as bored as before and leap avidly at the six-o'clock news. Something is sorely wanting in all that supernatural fireworks. And, to tell the truth, that something is everything. If our natural does not become truer, no amount of supernatural will remedy it; if our inner dwelling is ugly, no miraculous crystal will ever brighten our day, no fruit will ever quench our thirst. Unless Paradise is established on earth, it will never be anywhere. For we take ourselves everywhere we go, even into death, and so long as this stupid second is not filled with heaven, no eternity will ever be lit with any star. The transmutation must take place in the body and in everyday life; otherwise no gold will ever glitter, here or anywhere else, for ages of ages. What matters is not to see in pink or green or gold, but to see the truth of the world, which is so much more marvelous than any paradise, artificial or not, because the earth, this very small earth among millions of planets, is the experimental site where the supreme Truth of all the worlds has chosen to incarnate in what seems to be its very contradiction, and, by virtue of this very contradiction, to become all-light in darkness, all-breadth in narrowness, immortality in death, and living plenitude in each atom at each instant.
But we have to collaborate.
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One must build up nerves of steel in powerful and elastic muscles in order to be able to endure anything whenever it is indispensable. But at the same time great care must be taken not to demand more from the body than the effort which is strictly necessary, the expenditure of energy that fosters growth and progress, while categorically excluding everything that causes exhaustion and leads In the end to physical decline and disintegration.
A physical culture which aims at building a body capable of serving as a fit instrument for a higher consciousness demands very austere habits: a great regularity in sleep, food, exercise and every activity. By a scrupulous study of ones own bodily needs for they vary with each individuala general programme will be established; and once this has been done well, it must be followed rigorously, without any fantasy or slackness. There must be no little exceptions to the rule that are indulged in just for once but which are repeated very often for as soon as one yields to temptation, even just for once, one lessens the resistance of the will-power and opens the door to every failure. One must therefore forgo all weakness: no more nightly escapades from which one comes back exhausted, no more feasting and carousing which upset the normal functioning of the stomach, no more distractions, amusements and pleasures that only waste energy and leave one without the strength to do the daily practice. One must submit to the austerity of a sensible and regular life, concentrating all ones physical attention on building a body that comes as close to perfection as possible. To reach this ideal goal, one must strictly shun all excess and every vice, great or small; one must deny oneself the use of such slow poisons as tobacco, alcohol, etc., which men have a habit of developing into indispensable needs that gradually destroy the will and the memory. The all-absorbing interest which nearly all human beings, even the most intellectual, have in food, its preparation and its consumption, should be replaced by an almost chemical knowledge of the needs of the body and a very scientific austerity in satisfying them. Another austerity must be added to that of food, the austerity of sleep. It does not consist in going without sleep but in knowing how to sleep. Sleep must not be a fall into unconsciousness which makes the body heavy instead of refreshing it. Eating with moderation and abstaining from all excess greatly reduces the need to spend many hours in sleep; however, the quality of sleep is much more important than its quantity. In order to have a truly effective rest and relaxation during sleep, it is good as a rule to drink something before going to bed, a cup of milk or soup or fruit-juice, for instance. Light food brings a quiet sleep. One should, however, abstain from all copious meals, for then the sleep becomes agitated and is disturbed by nightmares, or else is dense, heavy and dulling. But the most important thing of all is to make the mind clear, to quieten the emotions and calm the effervescence of desires and the preoccupations which accompany them. If before retiring to bed one has talked a lot or had a lively discussion, if one has read an exciting or intensely interesting book, one should rest a little without sleeping in order to quieten the mental activity, so that the brain does not engage in disorderly movements while the other parts of the body alone are asleep. Those who practise meditation will do well to concentrate for a few minutes on a lofty and restful idea, in an aspiration towards a higher and vaster consciousness. Their sleep will benefit greatly from this and they will largely be spared the risk of falling into unconsciousness while they sleep.
1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
the Messianic element consists in a split which In the end be-
comes a complete polarity. This development is foreshadowed
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tale fashion, and In the end rescues Manu from the great flood. 46
On the twelfth day of the first month of the Indian year a
1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
But Kamalakanta's hopes are answered In the end; He swims in the Sea of Bliss, unmoved by joy or pain.
The kirtan went on:
1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:There are three stages of the ascent, - at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance. In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are halflights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and In the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process. In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever.
3:Whoever sincerely enters the path of works, must leave behind him the stage in which need and desire are the first law of our acts. For whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In effect, we find that once this surrender is done, - always provided the rejection is sincere, - egoistic indulgence of desire may for some time recur under the continued impulse of past nature but only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous, vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation or aspires to its own original god-nature. Afterwards the element of desire in those impulsions will be thrown away or persistently eliminated by a constant denying and transforming pressure. Only the pure force of action in them (pravr.tti) justified by an equal delight in all work and result that is inspired or imposed from above will be preserved in the happy harmony of a final perfection. To act, to enjoy is the normal law and right of the nervous being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment is only its ignorant will, not its right. Alone the supreme and universal Will must choose; action must change into a dynamic movement of that Will; enjoyment must be replaced by the play of a pure spiritual Ananda. All personal will is either a temporary delegation from on high or a usurpation by the ignorant Asura.
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5:For, even after he is free, the sadhaka will be in the world and to be in the world is to remain in works. But to remain in works without desire is to act for the good of the world in general or for the kind or the race or for some new creation to be evolved on the earth or some work imposed by the Divine Will within him. And this must be done either in the framework provided by the environment or the grouping in which he is born or placed or else in one which is chosen or created for him by a divine direction. Therefore in our perfection there must be nothing left in the mental being which conflicts with or prevents our sympathy and free self-identification with the kind, the group or whatever collective expression of the Divine he is meant to lead, help or serve. But In the end it must become a free selfidentification through identity with the Divine and not a mental bond or moral tie of union or a vital association dominated by any kind of personal, social, national, communal or credal egoism. If any social law is obeyed, it will not be from physical necessity or from the sense of personal or general interest or for expediency or because of the pressure of the environment or from any sense of duty, but solely for the sake of the Lord of works and because it is felt or known to be the Divine Will that the social law or rule or relation as it stands can still be kept as a figure of the inner life and the minds of men must not be disturbed by its infringement. If, on the other hand, the social law, rule or relation is disregarded, that too will not be for the indulgence of desire, personal will or personal opinion, but because a greater rule is felt that expresses the law of the Spirit or because it is known that there must be in the march of the divine All-Will a movement towards the changing, exceeding or abolition of existing laws and forms for the sake of a freer larger life necessary to the world's progress.
6:There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajogun.a) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called "soulhood", - for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment.
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14:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subcon- scious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, ansa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that In the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti.
15:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine.
1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nature starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a great mental effort to understand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be turned to the richest account, used in the best and most harmonious way, elevated to their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims by the action of that faculty which man alone of terrestrial creatures clearly possesses, the intelligent will. It is only in this fourth stage of her progress that she arrives at humanity. The atoms and the elements organise brute Matter, the plant develops the living being, the animal prepares and brings to a certain kind of mechanical organisation the crude material of Mind, but the last work of all, the knowledge and control of all these things and self-knowledge and self-control,that has been reserved for Man, Natures mental being. That he may better do the work she has given him, she compels him to repeat physically and to some extent mentally stages of her animal evolution and, even when he is in possession of his mental being, she induces him continually to dwell with an interest and even a kind of absorption upon Matter and Life and his own body and vital existence. This is necessary to the largeness of her purpose in him. His first natural absorption in the body and the life is narrow and unintelligent; as his intelligence and mental force increase, he disengages himself to some extent, is able to mount higher, but is still tied to his vital and material roots by need and desire and has to return upon them with a larger curiosity, a greater power of utilisation, a more and more highly mental and, In the end, a more and more spiritual aim in the return. For his cycles are circles of a growing, but still imperfect harmony and synthesis, and she brings him back violently to her original principles, sometimes even to something like her earlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and self-fulfilment.
It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is mans real business, these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die,the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner existence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Mans consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact of his existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society.
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But the intelligence of man is not composed entirely and exclusively of the rational intellect and the rational will; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and powerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly at all self-possessing light and force for which we have not even a name. But, at any rate, its character is to drive at a kind of illumination,not the dry light of the reason, nor the moist and suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar splendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge, which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of revelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a supernatural light a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by Reason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralists scheme of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous or imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which mans ordinary conduct of life hides away from his impulses and from his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading are its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this In the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and pious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of which the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations.
This very complexity of his mental being, with the absence of any one principle which can safely dominate the others, the absence of any sure and certain light which can guide and fix in their vacillations the reason and the intelligent will, is mans great embarrassment and stumbling-block. All the hostile distinctions, oppositions, antagonisms, struggles, conversions, reversions, perversions of his mentality, all the chaotic war of ideas and impulses and tendencies which perplex his efforts, have arisen from the natural misunderstandings and conflicting claims of his many members. His reason is a judge who gives conflicting verdicts and is bribed and influenced by the suitors; his intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the conflicts of the different estates of his realm and by the sense of his own partiality and final incompetence. Still in the midst of it all he has formed certain large ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his nature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony.
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The first results of this momentous change have been inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or streng thened it by this large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modern civilisation; a sensational activism is still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the sensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to coordinate or assimilate, for popularised scientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and which do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the cultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never had before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular success, to put the writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the cultured Greek slave in a Roman household where he has to work for, please, amuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught his fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised, sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet In the end effective will for their results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown phenomenon, a race of mennot only a classwho have to some extent found and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.
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1.09 - Concentration - Its Spiritual Uses, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Samadhi is divided into two varieties. One is called the Samprajnta, and the other the Asamprajnta. In the Samprajnata Samadhi come all the powers of controlling nature. It is of four varieties. The first variety is called the Savitarka, when the mind meditates upon an object again and again, by isolating it from other objects. There are two sorts of objects for meditation in the twenty-five categories of the Sankhyas, (1) the twenty-four insentient categories of Nature, and (2) the one sentient Purusha. This part of Yoga is based entirely on Sankhya philosophy, about which I have already told you. As you will remember, egoism and will and mind have a common basis, the Chitta or the mind-stuff, out of which they are all manufactured. The mind-stuff takes in the forces of nature, and projects them as thought. There must be something, again, where both force and matter are one. This is called Avyakta, the unmanifested state of nature before creation, and to which, after the end of a cycle, the whole of nature returns, to come out again after another period. Beyond that is the Purusha, the essence of intelligence. Knowledge is power, and as soon as we begin to know a thing, we get power over it; so also when the mind begins to meditate on the different elements, it gains power over them. That sort of meditation where the external gross elements are the objects is called Savitarka. Vitarka means question; Savitarka, with question, questioning the elements, as it were, that they may give their truths and their powers to the man who meditates upon them. There is no liberation in getting powers. It is a worldly search after enjoyments, and there is no enjoyment in this life; all search for enjoyment is vain; this is the old, old lesson which man finds so hard to learn. When he does learn it, he gets out of the universe and becomes free. The possession of what are called occult powers is only intensifying the world, and In the end, intensifying suffering. Though as a scientist Patanjali is bound to point out the possibilities of this science, he never misses an opportunity to warn us against these powers.
Again, in the very same meditation, when one struggles to take the elements out of time and space, and think of them as they are, it is called Nirvitarka, without question. When the meditation goes a step higher, and takes the Tanmatras as its object, and thinks of them as in time and space, it is called Savichra, with discrimination; and when in the same meditation one eliminates time and space, and thinks of the fine elements as they are, it is called Nirvichra, without discrimination. The next step is when the elements are given up, both gross and fine, and the object of meditation is the interior organ, the thinking organ. When the thinking organ is thought of as bereft of the qualities of activity and dullness, it is then called Snanda, the blissful Samadhi. When the mind itself is the object of meditation, when meditation becomes very ripe and concentrated, when all ideas of the gross and fine materials are given up, when the Sattva state only of the Ego remains, but differentiated from all other objects, it is called Ssmita Samadhi. The man who has attained to this has attained to what is called in the Vedas "bereft of body". He can think of himself as without his gross body; but he will have to think of himself as with a fine body. Those that in this state get merged in nature without attaining the goal are called Prakritilayas, but those who do not stop even there reach the goal, which is freedom.
1.09 - Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:At this stage of the Yoga and even throughout the Yoga this form of desire, this figure of the ego is the enemy against whom we have to be always on our guard with an unsleeping vigilance. We need not be discouraged when we find him lurking within us and assuming all sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to detect him in all his masks and inexorable in expelling his influence. The illumining Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, "To action thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit." The fruit belongs solely to the Lord of all works; our only business with it is to prepare success by a true and careful action and to offer it, if it comes, to the divine Master. Afterwards even as we have renounced attachment to the fruit, we must renounce attachment to the work also; at any moment we must be prepared to change one work, one course or one field of action for another or abandon all works if that is the clear comm and of the Master. Otherwise we do the act not for his sake but for our satisfaction and pleasure in the work, from the kinetic nature's need of action or for the fulfilment of our propensities; but these are all stations and refuges of the ego. However necessary for our ordinary motion of life, they have to be abandoned in the growth of the spiritual consciousness and replaced by divine counterparts: an Ananda, an impersonal and God-directed delight will cast out or supplant the unillumined vital satisfaction and pleasure, a joyful driving of the Divine Energy the kinetic need; the fulfilment of the propensities will no longer be an object or a necessity, there will be instead the fulfilment of the Divine Will through the natural dynamic truth in action of a free soul and a luminous nature. In the end, as the attachment to the fruit of the work and to the work itself has been excised from the heart, so also the last clinging attachment to the idea and sense of ourselves as the doer has to be relinquished; the Divine Shakti must be known and felt above and within us as the true and sole worker.
4:The renunciation of attachment to the work and its fruit is the beginning of a wide movement towards an absolute equality in the mind and soul which must become all-enveloping if we are to be perfect in the spirit. For the worship of the Master of works demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment of him in ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality is the sign of this adoration; it is the soul's ground on which true sacrifice and worship can be done. The Lord is there equally in all beings, we have to make no essential distinctions between ourselves and others, the wise and the ignorant, friend and enemy, man and animal, the saint and the sinner. We must hate none, despise none, be repelled by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised or manifested at his pleasure. He is a little revealed in one or more revealed in another or concealed and wholly distorted in others according to his will and his knowledge of what is best for that which he intends to become in form in them and to do in works in their nature. All is ourself, one self that has taken many shapes. Hatred and disliking and scorn and repulsion, clinging and attachment and preference are natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage: they attend upon or they help to make and maintain Nature's choice in us. But to the Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of the Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The child-soul needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult in the divine culture. In the God-nature to which we have to rise there can be an adamantine, even a destructive severity but not hatred, a divine irony but not scorn, a calm, clear-seeing and forceful rejection but not repulsion and dislike. Even what we have to destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised and temporary movement of the Eternal.
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14:Immediately he must take the further step of relegating himself to the position of the Witness. Aloof from the Prakriti, impersonal and dispassionate, he must watch the executive Nature-Force at work within him and understand its action; he must learn by this separation to recognise the play of her universal forces, distinguish her interweaving of light and night, the divine and the undivine, and detect her formidable Powers and Beings that use the ignorant human creature. Nature works in us, says the Gita, through the triple quality of Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the quality of passion and desire and the quality of obscurity and inertia. The seeker must learn to distinguish, as an impartial and discerning witness of all that proceeds within this kingdom of his nature, the separate and the combined action of these qualities; he must pursue the workings of the cosmic forces in him through all the labyrinth of their subtle unseen processes and disguises and know every intricacy of the maze. As he proceeds in this knowledge, he will be able to become the giver of the sanction and no longer remain an ignorant tool of Nature. At first he must induce the NatureForce in its action on his instruments to subdue the working of its two lower qualities and bring them into subjection to the quality of light and good and, afterwards, he must persuade that again to offer itself so that all three may be transformed by a higher Power into their divine equivalents, supreme repose and calm, divine illumination and bliss, the eternal divine dynamis, Tapas. The first part of this discipline and change can be firmly done in principle by the will of the mental being in us; but its full execution and the subsequent transformation can be done only when the deeper psychic soul increases its hold on the nature and replaces the mental being as its ruler. When this happens, he will be ready to make, not only with an aspiration and intention and an initial and progressive self-abandonment but with the most intense actuality of dynamic self-giving, the complete renunciation of his works to the Supreme Will. By degrees his mind of an imperfect human intelligence will be replaced by a spiritual and illumined mind and that can In the end enter into the supramental Truth-Light; he will then no longer act from his nature of the Ignorance with its three modes of confused and imperfect activity, but from a diviner nature of spiritual calm, light, power and bliss. He will act not from an amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with the drive of a still more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire of the life-being and the urge and instinct of the flesh, but first from a spiritualised self and nature and, last, from a supramental Truth-consciousness and its divine force of supernature.
15:Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is face to face with the Master of all existence and his activities are merged in the action of a supreme Energy which is pure, true, perfect and blissful for ever. Thus can he utterly renounce to the supramental Shakti his works as well as the fruits of his works and act only as the conscious instrument of the eternal Worker. No longer giving the sanction, he will rather receive in his instruments and follow in her hands a divine mandate. No longer doing works, he will accept their execution through him by her unsleeping Force. No longer willing the fulfilment of his own mental constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional desires, he will obey and participate in an omnipotent Will that is also an omniscient Knowledge and a myterious, magical and unfathomable Love and a vast bottomless sea of the eternal Bliss of Existence.
1.09 - Sleep and Death, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
until the day when, with the help of the pioneers of evolution, we can lift ourselves to a supramental plane, which will change the present destiny of the world as the Mind once changed its destiny around the Tertiary Era. And In the end if there is an end perhaps the earth will attain the supreme Determinism, which is supreme Freedom and perfect accomplishment. Through our work on consciousness, each of us contri butes to resisting the fatalities that assail our world, and acts as a leavening agent for the earth's freedom and divinization. Indeed,
the evolution of consciousness has a supreme meaning for the earth.
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and In the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the
Infinite. There it begins to come into contact with the universal
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Divine, the Divine is sure to give. If then you want Ananda and go on wanting, you will surely have it In the end. The only question is what is to be the chief power in your seeking, a vital demand or a psychic aspiration manifesting through the heart and communicating itself to the mental and vital and physical consciousness. The latter is the greatest power and makes the shortest way - and besides one has to come to that way sooner or later.
Let us first put aside the quite foreign consideration of what we would do if the union with the Divine brought eternal joylessness, Nirananda or torture. Such a thing does not exist and to drag it in only clouds the issue. The Divine is Anandamaya and one can seek him for the Ananda he gives; but he has also in him many other things and one may seek him for any of them, for peace, for liberation, for knowledge, for power, for anything else of which one may feel the pull or the impulse. It is quite possible for someone to say: "Let me have Power from the
1.1.03 - Brahman, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are two aspects of the Divine - the static Peace and the dynamic Force. In the end they unite.
It is in the inactive Brahman that one merges if one seeks laya or Moksha. One can dwell in the Personal Divine but does not merge in Him. As for the Supreme, He holds in Himself the world-existence and it is in His Consciousness that it moves; so by entering into the Supreme one rises above subjection to
1.10 - Concentration - Its Practice, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The Yogis say that the man who has discriminating powers, the man of good sense, sees through all that are called pleasure and pain, and knows that they come to all, and that one follows and melts into the other; he sees that men follow an ignis fatuus all their lives, and never succeed in fulfilling their desires. The great king Yudhishthira once said that the most wonderful thing in life is that every moment we see people dying around us, and yet we think we shall never die. Surrounded by fools on every side, we think we are the only exceptions, the only learned men. Surrounded by all sorts of experiences of fickleness, we think our love is the only lasting love. How can that be? Even love is selfish, and the Yogi says that In the end we shall find that even the love of husbands and wives, and children and friends, slowly decays. Decadence seizes everything in this life. It is only when everything, even love, fails, that, with a flash, man finds out how vain, how dream-like is this world. Then he catches a glimpse of Vairgya (renunciation), catches a glimpse of the Beyond. It is only by giving up this world that the other comes; never through holding on to this one. Never yet was there a great soul who had not to reject sense-pleasures and enjoyments to acquire his greatness. The cause of misery is the clash between the different forces of nature, one dragging one way, and another dragging another, rendering permanent happiness impossible.
16. The misery which is not yet come is to be avoided.
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
But wrong thoughts, too, are a surprising source of discoveries. As a matter of fact, more and more, he realizes that this kind of distinction is meaningless. What, In the end, is not for our own good? What does not ultimately turn out to be our greater good? The wrong paths are part of the right one and pave a broader way, a larger view of our indivisible estate. The only wrong is not to see; it is the vast grayness of the terra incognita of our limited maps. And we indeed limit our maps. We have attributed those thoughts, feelings, reactions and desires to the little Mississippi flowing through our lands, to the thriving Potomac rivers lined with stone buildings and fortresses and indeed, they have got into the habit of running through those channels, cascading here or there, boiling a little farther below, or disappearing into our marshes. It is a very old habit, going back even before us or the ape, or else a scarcely more recent one going back to our schooldays, our parents or yesterday's newspaper. We have opened paths, and the current follows them it follows them obstinately. But for the demechanized seeker, the meanders and points of entry begin to become more visible. He begins to distinguish various levels in his being, various channeling centers, and when the current passes through the solar plexus or through the throat, the reactions or effects are different. But, mostly, he discovers with surprise that it is one and the same current everywhere, above or below, right or left, and those which we call thought, desire, will or emotion are various infiltrations of the same identical thing, which is neither thought nor desire nor will nor anything of the sort, but a trickle, a drop or a cataract of the same conscious Energy entering here or there, through our little Potomac or muddy Styx, and creating a disaster or a poem, a millipede's quiver, a revolution, a gospel or a vain thought on the boulevard we could almost say at will. It all depends on the quality of our opening and its level. But the fundamental fact is that this is an Energy, in other words, a Power. And thus, very simply, quite simply, we have the all-powerful source of all possible changes in the world. It is as we will it! We can tune in either here or there, create harmony or cacophony; not a single circumstance in the world, not one fateful event, not one so-called ineluctable law, absolutely nothing can prevent us from turning the antenna one way or the other and changing this muddy and disastrous flood into a limpid stream, instantly. We just have to know where we open ourselves. At every moment of the world and every second, in the face of every dreadful circumstance, every prison we have locked ourselves alive in, we can, in one stroke, with a single cry for help, a single burst of prayer, a single true look, a single leap of the little flame inside, topple all our walls and be born again from top to bottom. Everything is possible. Because that Power is the supreme Possibility.
But if we believe only in our little Mississippi or our little Potomac, it is clearly hopeless. And we do indeed believe passionately, millennially in the virtue of our old ways. They also hold an immense power that of habit. It is remarkable, for they seem as solid as concrete, as convincing as all the old reasons of the world, the old habits of flowing in one direction or another, as irrefutable as Newton's apple, and yet, for the eye beginning to lose its scales, as unsubstantial as a cloud one blows on them and they fall away. This is the mental Illusion, the formidable illusion that is blinding us.
1.10 - Mantra Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
9. OM, Soham, Sivoham, Aham Brahmasmi are Moksha Mantras. They will help you to attain Self-realisation. Om Sri Ramaya Namah, Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya are Saguna Mantras which will enable you to attain Saguna realisation first and then Nirguna realisation In the end.
10. Mantra for curing scorpion stings and cobra bites should be repeated on eclipse days for getting Mantra Siddhi quickly. You should stand in the water and repeat the Mantra. This is more powerful and effective. They can be recited on ordinary days also for attaining Mantra-Siddhi.
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13. Mantra Siddhi should not be misused for the destruction of others. Those who misuse the Mantra power for destroying others are themselves destroyed In the end.
14. Those who utilise the Mantra power in curing snake bites, scorpion stings and chronic diseases should not accept any kind of presents or money. They must be absolutely unselfish. They should not accept even fruits or clothes. They will lose the power if they utilise the power for selfish purposes. If they are absolutely unselfish, if they serve the humanity with Sarvatma Bhava, their power will increase through the grace of the Lord.
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
either the supreme Truth is not of this world, as all the world religions have proclaimed, and we are wasting our time with futilities; or there is something else besides everything we have been told. The consideration is all the more relevant since it is not a theory but a practical experience. Here is what Sri Aurobindo reported: I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all . . . In the end it began to disappear into a greater Super-consciousness from above. . . . The aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth. . . . Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realization, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale.118
What kind of Transcendent was this, which seemed to stand not at the summit but at midpoint? To use a rather simple but correct analogy, we could say that sleep represents a transcendental state with respect to waking, but it is no higher or truer than waking, nor is it less true. It is simply another state of consciousness. The moment we withdraw from mental and vital activity, obviously everything vanishes, much as taking an anesthetic dulls all sense of feeling.
1.10 - The Yoga of the Intelligent Will, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga with something which is higher than itself and in which calm and self-mastery are inherent. And this Yoga can only arrive at its success by devoting, by consecrating, by giving up the whole self to the Divine, "to Me", says Krishna; for the Liberator is within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, nor our personal will, - they are only instruments. It is the Lord in whom, as we are told In the end, we have utterly to take refuge.
And for that we must at first make him the object of our whole being and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense of the phrase "he must sit firm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me"; but as yet it is the merest passing hint after the manner of the
11.13 - In these Fateful Days, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And In the end may it not be that the present ruins and ravages are merely a symptom or a resultant of the pressures that the forces of the new creation are exerting from behind or from above? It is always true, it is a fact that any creation, for that matter, any happening on the material plane is already prepared or pre-figured within or behind in a subtler region. We all know Gita's tremendous vision: "all these have already been slain by Me"the battle is fought, won or lost in another world beforehand; what we see on the material level are only the debris, disjecta membra, of forms and limbs thrown down from there. Only the sweeping or clearing is being done here for the appearance and establishment of what already has been built up unseen behind the material curtain. Or as it is sometimes given as an illustration or example, the breakage is that of the surface shell due to the pressing emergence of the fully formed living creature within.
One creates through one's consciousness, not through one's hands. A true creation must have at its origin the true consciousness, and a true consciousness has always the power to create invincibly; for consciousness is identified with essential energy. Chit and Tapas are one and the same.
1.11 - The Change of Power, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We have therefore come to a new change of power. A new power such as there has never been since the first anthropoids, a tidal wave of power that has nothing to do with our little philosophical and spiritual meditations of past ages, a worldwide, collective and perhaps universal phenomenon as radically new as the first surge of thought upon the world, when mind took over from the simian order and overthrew all its laws and instinctual mechanisms. But here and this is really the characteristic of the new world being born the power is not a power of abstraction, not a talent for getting a bird's-eye view of things and reducing the scattered data of the world into an equation in order to make a synthesis, which is always wobbly the mind has turned everything into abstraction; it lives in an image of the world, a yellow or blue reflection of the great bubble, like a man inside a glass statue not a discursive and contingent power that only adds and subtracts, not a gathering of knowledge that never makes a whole. It is a direct power of the truth of each instant and each thing harmonized with the total truth of the millions of instants and things, a power to enter the truth of each gesture and each circumstance, which accords with all other gestures and circumstances because Truth is one and the Self is unique, and if this point is touched, everything else is instantly touched, like cell and cell of the same body. It is a tremendous power of concretization of Truth, acting directly upon the same Truth contained in each point of space and each second of time, or rather, compelling each moment, each circumstance, each gesture, each cell of matter to yield its truth, its right note, its own innate power buried under all the layers of our vital and mental accretions a tremendous truing of the world and each being. We could say a tremendous Movement of realization the world is not real! It is a distorted appearance, a mental approximation, which looks more like a nightmare, a black and white translation of something we still have not seized. We do not have our real eyes yet! For, In the end, there is only one reality, and that is the reality of Truth a truth that has grown, that had to protect itself behind walls, to limit and dim itself under one shell or another, one bubble or another, to make itself felt by a caterpillar or a man, then bursts open in its own Sunlight when the wings of the great Self we always were begin to open.
But this change of power, this transition from the indirect and abstract truths of the mind to the direct and concrete Truth of the great Self is obviously not effected on the summits of the Spirit it has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, just as the other power had nothing to do with the ape's skills. It is effected in a most down-to-earth way, in everyday life, in the minuscule, the futility of the moment, which is futile only to us, if we understand that a speck of dust contains as much truth as the totality of all space, and just as much power. It therefore applies itself to utterly material mechanisms. The play takes place in the substance. Therefore it comes up against age-old resistances, against a bubble that is perhaps the first self-defensive bubble of the protoplasm in its water hole. But In the end resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover,26 and we do not know, finally, if there is a single shadow and pain that does not secretly build up the very power we are trying to manifest. If it emerged too soon, truth would be incomplete, or unbearable for the other animalcules that share our water hole and which would soon disgorge it we are a single human body, we always forget, and our mistakes or slowness are the mistakes and slowness of the world. But if we can win a victory here, in this little point of matter, each of us human beings has a formidable task to carry out, if he understands. Being born in this world is a far more powerful mystery than we had thought.
For a long time now the seeker has got rid of the mental machinery. He has also brought order to the vital machinery. And if old desires, wills or reactions still come to muddy his clearing, they are rather on the order of a motion-picture images projected onto a screen, out of habit, but without real substance. The seeker has lost the habit of sitting in the screen and identifying with the characters he looks; he is clear; he observes everything; he is centered in his fire which dissipates all those clouds. From then on, another level of entanglement comes more and more to light, another degree of the machine (this is truly a path of descent): a material, subconscious mechanism. But so long as he is not clear, he sees nothing; he cannot unravel those threads which are so intertwined with his habitual activities, and mentalized like all the rest, that they make up an altogether natural web. This material, subconscious mechanism then becomes extremely concrete, like the whirlings of the goldfish in its glass bowl. But let us emphasize that this is not the subconscious small fry of the psychoanalysts those fry belong to the mental bubble; they are merely the reverse of the little surface fellow, the action of his reactions, the knot of his desires, the constriction of his nurtured smallness, the past of his old little story inside a bubble, the goat tether of his small separate ego tied to the social and familial and religious stake, and the countless stakes that tie men inside a bubble. And we strongly suspect that those dreamers simply go on dreaming inside a psychoanalytical bubble, the way others dream inside a religious one of hells and paradises that exist only in man's mental imagination. But, as long as one is inside the bubble, it is implacable and irrefutable; its hells are real hells, its filth real filth, and one is the prisoner of a little bright or dark cloud. So let us say, in passing, that one does not free oneself from the mud by digging in the mud and unwholesomely plowing up the byways of the frontal fellow (one might as well take a bath in dirty water to get clean), one does not free oneself from the bubble by the lights of the bubble, or from evil by a good that is only its reverse, but by a something else that is not of the bubble: a very simple little fire within and everywhere, which is the key to freedom, all freedoms, and to the world.
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For there is an even greater Secret. We face this enormous universe bristling with difficulties and problems and negations and obstacles everything is a sort of constant impossibility to be overcome by dint of intelligence, willpower, material or spiritual muscles. But, by so doing, we are on equal terms with the caterpillar, on equal terms with the fear-stricken gnome in its death hole. And, because we believe in difficulty, we are compelled to believe in our muscles of steel or not which always collapse. And we believe in death, we believe in evil, we believe in suffering, as the mole believes in the virtues of its tunnels. But by our morbid belief, our age-old belief, our gray elf-look, we have hardened the difficulty, armed it with a host of instruments and remedies that inflated it even more, planted it more firmly in its implacable groove. The world is enveloped in a formidable elfin illusion. It is in the grip a of formidable Death, which is but our fear of immortality. It is being torn apart by a formidable suffering, which is our refusal of joy and sunshine. Yet everything is here, every possible miracle, in the great open sunlight, every dreamed and undreamed possibility, every simple, spontaneous and natural mastery, every simple power of the Great Harmony. It asks only to pour over the world, flow through our channels and our bodies. All it asks is that we open the passageway. If we let that lightness, that divine ease, that solar smile, flood for a second our little aggregate of flesh, everything melts, obstacles dissolve, illnesses vanish, circumstances are straightened out as if by miracle, the darkness is illumined, the wall collapses as though they never existed. And once again, it is not even a miracle; it is simplicity reestablished, reality restored. It is the point of harmony here contacting Harmony everywhere and spontaneously, automatically, instantly bringing (or restoring) harmony there, in that gesture, that circumstance, that word, that particular conjunction of events and everything is a marvel of conjunction because everything flows from the Law. The walls never were; the obstacles never were; evil, suffering and death never were. But we had that look of evil, that look of suffering and death, that look of the imprisoned elf. The world is as we see it, as we want it. There is another Look within us which can transfigure everything. My children, said She who continued Sri Aurobindo's work, you all live in an enormous sea of vibrations and you don't even realize it! Because you are not receptive. There is such a resistance in you that if something manages to penetrate, three quarters of what enters is violently thrown out because of an incapacity to contain it.... Take simply the example of the consciousness of Forces, such as the force of love, the force of comprehension, the force of creation (it is the same for all of them: the force of protection, the force of growth, the force of progress, all of them), just take Consciousness, the consciousness that covers everything, permeates everything, that is everywhere and in everything it is almost felt as something trying to impose itself violently on the being, which balks!... Whereas if you were open and simply breathed that's all, just breathed you would brea the in Consciousness, Light, Comprehension, Force, Love and all the rest.29 Everything is there under our eyes, the total marvel of the world, just waiting for our consent, our look of faith in beauty, in freedom, in the supreme possibility that is knocking at our doors, pounding on the walls of our intelligence, suffering and pettiness. This is the supreme change of power, which is knocking at the world's doors and hammering away at nations, churches and Sorbonnes, hammering at human consciousness and all our geometric and well-thought-out certainties. And if once, only once, man's consciousness opens up to one ray of that living miracle, if the consciousness of a single nation among all our blind nations opens up to one spark of that Grace, then this implacable civilization walled up in its science and laws, in an elf of terror and suffering this enormous structure in which we have been born and which seems so inescapable, so indestructible and triumphant in its heavy miracles of steel and uranium, this clever prison in which we go in circles will crumble as rust. Then we will be man at last, or superman rather. We will have joy, natural oneness, freedom without walls and power without tricks. Then we will realize that all this suffering, these walls and difficulties which besiege our life were only the spur of the Sun of Truth, an original restriction to increase our strength, our need for space and our power of truth, a veil of illusion to protect our eyes from too strong a light, a dark passage from the instinctive spontaneity of the animal to the conscious spontaneity of the superman and that In the end everything is simple, unbelievably simple, like Truth itself, and unbelievably easy, like the very Joy that conceived these worlds. For, in truth, the path of the gods is a sunlit path on which difficulties lose all reality.30
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and will lead us if we trust in it and will use our deficiencies and our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn In the end the secret of a more perfect walking. Let us not be in too furious a haste to acquire even peace, purity and perfection. Peace must be ours, but not the peace of an empty or devastated nature or of slam or mutilated capacities incapable of unrest because we have made them incapable of intensity and fire and force. Purity must be our aim, but not the purity of a void or of a bleak and rigid coldness. Perfection is demanded of us, but not the perfection that can exist only by confining its scope within narrow limits or putting an arbitrary full stop to the ever self-extending scroll of the Infinite. Our object is to change into the divine nature, but the divine nature is not a mental or moral but a spiritual condition, difficult to achieve, difficult even to conceive by our intelligence. The Master of our work and our Yoga knows the thing to be done, and we must allow him to do it in us by his own means and in his own manner.
The movement of the Ignorance is egoistic at its core and nothing is more difficult for us than to get rid of egoism while yet we admit personality and adhere to action in the half-light and half-force of our unfinished nature. It is easier to starve the ego by renouncing the impulse to act or to kill it by cutting away from us all movement of personality. It is easier to exalt it into self-forgetfulness immersed in a trance of peace or an ecstasy of divine Love. But our more difficult problem is to liberate the true Person and attain to a divine manhood which shall be the pure vessel of a divine force and the perfect instrument of a divine action. Step after step has to be firmly taken; difficulty after difficulty has to be entirely experienced and entirely mastered. Only the Divine Wisdom and Power can do this for us and it will do all if we yield to it in an entire faith and follow and assent to its workings with a constant courage and patience.
1.11 - The Reason as Governor of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the cause why all human systems have failed In the end; for they have never been anything but a partial and confused application of reason to life. Moreover, even where they have been most clear and rational, these systems have pretended that their ideas were the whole truth of life and tried so to apply them. This they could not be, and life In the end has broken or undermined them and passed on to its own large incalculable movement. Mankind, thus using its reason as an aid and justification for its interests and passions, thus obeying the drive of a partial, a mixed and imperfect rationality towards action, thus striving to govern the complex totalities of life by partial truths, has stumbled on from experiment to experiment, always believing that it is about to grasp the crown, always finding that it has fulfilled as yet little or nothing of what it has to accomplish. Compelled by nature to apply reason to life, yet possessing only a partial rationality limited in itself and confused by the siege of the lower members, it could do nothing else. For the limited imperfect human reason has no self-sufficient light of its own; it is obliged to proceed by observation, by experiment, by action, through errors and stumblings to a larger experience.
But behind all this continuity of failure there has persisted a faith that the reason of man would end in triumphing over its difficulties, that it would purify and enlarge itself, become sufficient to its work and at last subject rebellious life to its control. For, apart from the stumbling action of the world, there has been a labour of the individual thinker in man and this has achieved a higher quality and risen to a loftier and clearer atmosphere above the general human thought-levels. Here there has been the work of a reason that seeks always after knowledge and strives patiently to find out truth for itself, without bias, without the interference of distorting interests, to study everything, to analyse everything, to know the principle and process of everything. Philosophy, Science, learning, the reasoned arts, all the agelong labour of the critical reason in man have been the result of this effort. In the modern era under the impulsion of Science this effort assumed enormous proportions and claimed for a time to examine successfully and lay down finally the true principle and the sufficient rule of process not only for all the activities of Nature, but for all the activities of man. It has done great things, but it has not been In the end a success. The human mind is beginning to perceive that it has left the heart of almost every problem untouched and illumined only outsides and a certain range of processes. There has been a great and ordered classification and mechanisation, a great discovery and practical result of increasing knowledge, but only on the physical surface of things. Vast abysses of Truth lie below in which are concealed the real springs, the mysterious powers and secretly decisive influences of existence. It is a question whether the intellectual reason will ever be able to give us an adequate account of these deeper and greater things or subject them to the intelligent will as it has succeeded in explaining and canalising, though still imperfectly, yet with much show of triumphant result, the forces of physical Nature. But these other powers are much larger, subtler, deeper down, more hidden, elusive and variable than those of physical Nature.
The whole difficulty of the reason in trying to govern our existence is that because of its own inherent limitations it is unable to deal with life in its complexity or in its integral movements; it is compelled to break it up into parts, to make more or less artificial classifications, to build systems with limited data which are contradicted, upset or have to be continually modified by other data, to work out a selection of regulated potentialities which is broken down by the bursting of a new wave of yet unregulated potentialities. It would almost appear even that there are two worlds, the world of ideas proper to the intellect and the world of life which escapes from the full control of the reason, and that to bridge adequately the gulf between these two domains is beyond the power and province of the reason and the intelligent will. It would seem that these can only create either a series of more or less empirical compromises or else a series of arbitrary and practically inapplicable or only partially applicable systems. The reason of man struggling with life becomes either an empiric or a doctrinaire.
1.11 - The Second Genesis, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
But it is not in the beginning of things, it is before the beginning and outside of it, in the secret being of the Eternal that we can place what appears here only In the end. The birth to Love was for the being and is even to-day not its first but its second birth; its principle was foreign to the first act of creation, foreign at least for our distinctive categories; for in the Absolute all is one and it is by reason of that unity that in the relative the manifestation of any principle conditions that of all the rest and makes them enter into the becoming. Desire by affirming itself egoistically obliges Love to participate in its creations. And in this obligation upon Love to manifest we find the pre-creative justification of the beings coming into existence.
Moreover, however egoistic this desire itself may be, is it not made of the very stuff of love? Is it not a relative form of the absolute love of Being for itself, a love which retires into itself voluntarily limiting and rendering itself alien to all the possibles of the Infinite in order to concentrate on one of them? And whence does it draw this power of exclusive concentration, this right to absolute self-conscience if not from the power and the right of the Absolute itself?
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
HAZRA: "But it is very difficult to understand that. Take the case of the sadhu of Bhukailas. How people tortured him and; in a way, killed him! They had found him in samadhi. First they buried him, then they put him under water, and then they branded him with a hot iron. Thus they brought him back to consciousness of the world. But In the end the sadhu died as a result of these tortures. He undoubtedly suffered at the hands of men, though, as you say, he died by the will of God."
MASTER: "Man must reap the fruit of his own karma. But as far as the death of that holy man is concerned, it was brought about by the will of God. The kavirajs prepare makaradhvaja in a bottle. The bottle is covered with clay and heated in the fire. The gold inside the bottle melts and combines with the other ingredients, and the medicine is made. Then the physicians break the bottle carefully and take out the medicine. When the medicine is made, what difference does it make whether the bottle is preserved or broken? So people think that the holy man was killed. But perhaps his inner stuff had been made. After the realization of God, what difference does it make whether the body lives or dies?
1.11 - Works and Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism works, karma, are restricted to Vedic works and sometimes even to Vedic sacrifice and ritualised works, all else being excluded as not useful to salvation. Vedism of the Mimansakas insisted on them as the means, Vedantism taking its stand on the Upanishads looked on them as only a preliminary belonging to the state of ignorance and In the end to be overpassed and rejected, an obstacle to the seeker of liberation. Vedism worshipped the Devas, the gods, with sacrifice and held them to be the powers who assist our salvation. Vedantism was inclined to regard them as powers of the mental and material world opposed to our salvation (men, says the Upanishad, are the cattle of the gods, who do not desire man to know and be free); it saw the Divine as the immutable
Brahman who has to be attained not by works of sacrifice and worship but by knowledge. Works only lead to material results and to an inferior Paradise; therefore they have to be renounced.
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Meanwhile, urinary symptoms were worsening and now a trace of albumin was detected. He was informed, but made no comment. Then acetone appeared, a grave signal. He heard it in silence and said, "Tell the Mother." The Mother too heard it quietly. It all seemed so terribly mysterious. I was perplexed by their seeming indifference as compared with their former concern. Something must have gone amiss, surely. The mystery was too deep for my plummet to fathom, but I had faith that everything would turn out all right In the end.
The work on Savitri proceeded as usual, but slowed down in pace, especially when we came to a mighty confrontation with the two big Cantos of The Book of Fate. Revision after revision, addition of lines, even punctuations changed so many times! It seemed like a veritable "God's labour" against a rock of resistance. At his time the Press sent up a demand for a new book from him. The Future Poetry was given preference and some passages which were meant to be dovetailed into the text of the chapters were written. But since he wanted to write something on modern poetry and for his works of modern poets were needed, orders were sent to Madras for them while whatever few books were available from our small library were requisitioned. As I read them out, he said, "Mark that passage," or "These lines have a striking image" (once the lines referred to were, I think, from C. Day Lewis' Magnetic Mountain).He himself read out a poem of Eliot's to me I don't remember exactly which, and remarked, "This is fine poetry." In this way we proceeded. Since we had to wait for the arrival of the books, he said, "Let us go back to Savitri." His whole attention seemed to be focussed on Savitri, but again, the work had to be suspended owing to the pressure of various extraneous demands. They swelled up to such an extent that he was obliged to remark, "I find no more time for my real work." When the path was fairly clear and I was wondering what his next choice would be, he said in a distant voice, "Take up Savitri. I want to finish it soon." This must have been about two months before his departure. The last part of the utterance startled me, though it was said in a subdued tone. I wondered for a moment if I had heard rightly. I looked at him; my bewildered glance met an impassive face. In these twelve years this was the first time I had heard him reckoning with the time factor. An Avatar of poise, patience and equanimity, this was the picture that shone before our eyes whenever we had thought or spoken about him. Hence my wonder. We took up the same two Cantos that had proved so intractable. The work progressed slowly; words, ideas, images seemed to be repeated; the verses themselves appeared to flow with reluctance. Once a punctuation had to be changed four or five times. When the last revision was made and the Cantos were wound up, I said, "It is finished now." An impersonal smile of satisfaction greeted me, and he said, "Ah, it is finished?" How well I remember that flicker of a smile which all of us craved for so long! "What is left now?" was his next query. "The Book of Death and The Epilogue." "Oh, that? We shall see about that later on." That "later on" never came and was not meant to come. Having taken the decision to leave the body, he must have been waiting for the right moment to go, and for reasons known to himself he left the two last-mentioned Books almost as they were. Thus on Savitri was put the seal of incomplete completion about two weeks before the Darshan of November 24th. Other literary works too came to an end.
1.12 - The Left-Hand Path - The Black Brothers, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"Now Master!" (What reproach in the tone of your voice!) All right, all right! Keep your hair on! I know that is the precise term used in The Vision and the Voice, to describe the Great White Brother or the Babe of the Abyss; but to him it means victory; to the Left-Hander it would mean defeat, ruin devastating, irremediable, final. It is exactly that which he most dreads; and it is that to which he must In the end come, because there is no compensating element in his idea of structure. Nations themselves never grow permanently by smash-and-grab methods; one merely acquires a sore spot, as in the case of Lorraine, perhaps even Eire. (Though Eire is using just that formula of Restriction, shutting herself up in her misery and poverty and idiot pride, when a real marriage with and dissolution in, a real live country would give her new life. The "melting-pot" idea is the great strength of America.)
Consider the Faubourg St. Germain aristocracy now hardly even a sentimental memory. The guillotine did not kill them; it was their own refusal to adapt themselves to the new biological conditions of political life. It was indeed their restriction that rotted them in the first instance; had Lafayette or Mirabeau been trusted with full power, and supplied with adequate material, a younger generation of virtue, the monarchy might still be ruling France.
1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Meanwhile, the intellect performs its function; it leads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with unbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take him by the hand. It takes first the lower powers of his existence, each absorbed in its own urge, each striving with a blind self-sufficiency towards the fulfilment of its own instincts and primary impulses; it teaches them to understand themselves and to look through the reflecting eyes of the intelligence on the laws of their own action. It enables them to discern intelligently the high in themselves from the low, the pure from the impure and out of a crude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous formulas of their possibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide, teacher, purifier, liberator. For it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each other and to draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It streng thens and purifies the hedonistic and the aesthetic activities and softens their quarrel with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and seriousness, brings them to the support of the practical and dynamic powers and allies them more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the ethical will by infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and ennobles by all these separately or together the practical, dynamic and utilitarian temperament of the human being. At the same time it plays the part of a judge and legislator, seeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised combinations which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by a settled path and act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a balanced rhythm. Here it finds after a time that its legislative action becomes a force for limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system which it has imposed in the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause of petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to bring in its own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned by the obscure revolt of the oppressed springs of life, ethics, aesthetics, the social, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, if this at first brings in again some confusion, disorder and uncertainty, yet it awakens new movements of imagination, insight, self-knowledge and self-realisation by which old systems and formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments are made and In the end larger potentialities and combinations are brought into play. By this double action of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what it has seen and again in due season questioning what has been accomplished in order to make a new affirmation, fixing a rule and order and liberating from rule and order, the progress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem its steps and stages.
But the action of the intelligence is not only turned downward and outward upon our subjective and external life to understand it and determine the law and order of its present movement and its future potentialities. It has also an upward and inward eye and a more luminous functioning by which it accepts divinations from the hidden eternities. It is opened in this power of vision to a Truth above it from which it derives, however imperfectly and as from behind a veil, an indirect knowledge of the universal principles of our existence and its possibilities; it receives and turns what it can seize of them into intellectual forms and these provide us with large governing ideas by which our efforts can be shaped and around which they can be concentrated or massed; it defines the ideals which we seek to accomplish. It provides us with the great ideas that are forces (ides forces), ideas which in their own strength impose themselves upon our life and compel it into their moulds. Only the forms we give these ideas are intellectual; they themselves descend from a plane of truth of being where knowledge and force are one, the idea and the power of self-fulfilment in the idea are inseparable. Unfortunately, when translated into the forms of our intelligence which acts only by a separating and combining analysis and synthesis and into the effort of our life which advances by a sort of experimental and empirical seeking, these powers become disparate and conflicting ideals which we have all the difficulty in the world to bring into any kind of satisfactory harmony. Such are the primary principles of liberty and order, good, beauty and truth, the ideal of power and the ideal of love, individualism and collectivism, self-denial and self-fulfilment and a hundred others. In each sphere of human life, in each part of our being and our action the intellect presents us with the opposition of a number of such master ideas and such conflicting principles. It finds each to be a truth to which something essential in our being responds,in our higher nature a law, in our lower nature an instinct. It seeks to fulfil each in turn, builds a system of action round it and goes from one to the other and back again to what it has left. Or it tries to combine them but is contented with none of the combinations it has made because none brings about their perfect reconciliation or their satisfied oneness. That indeed belongs to a larger and higher consciousness, not yet attained by mankind, where these opposites are ever harmonised and even unified because in their origin they are eternally one. But still every enlarged attempt of the intelligence thus dealing with our inner and outer life increases the width and wealth of our nature, opens it to larger possibilities of self-knowledge and self-realisation and brings us nearer to our awakening into that greater consciousness.
1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
But the very conditions of the uprooting of the old order may for a long time falsify the quest for the new order. And at first, this new order does not exist; it has to be made. A whole world has to be invented. And the aspiring superman or let us simply say the aspirant to something else must confront a primary reality: the law of freedom is a very demanding one, infinitely more demanding than all the laws imposed by the Machine. It is not a coasting into just anything, but a methodical uprooting from thousands of little slaveries; it does not mean abandoning everything, but, on the contrary, taking charge of everything, since we no longer want to depend on anybody or anything. It is a supreme apprenticeship of responsibility that of being oneself, which In the end is being all. It is not an escape, but a conquest; not a vacation from the Machine, but a great Adventure into man's unknown. And anything that may hamper this supreme freedom, at whatever level or under whatever appearance, must be fought as fiercely as the police or lawmakers of the old world. We are not leaving the slavery of the old order to fall into the worse slavery of ourselves the slavery of drugs, of a party, of one religion or another, one sect or another, a golden bubble or a white one. We want the one freedom of smiling at everything and being light everywhere, identical in destitution and pomp, in prison and palace, in emptiness and fullness and everything is full because we burn with the one little flame that possesses everything forever.
What will they do, these wanderers, these transhumans of a new country that does not yet exist? In the first place, they will perhaps not move at all. They will perhaps have understood that the change has to be wrought inside and that, if nothing changes inside, nothing will ever change outside for centuries and centuries. They will perhaps stay right where they are, in this little street, this gray country, in a humble disguise, an old routine, but it will no longer be a routine because they will do everything with another look, in another way, with another attitude an inner way that changes all ways. And if they persevere, they will notice that this one little drop of true light they carry within themselves has the power to change everything about them surreptitiously. In their unpretentious little circle, they will have worked for the new world and precipitated a little more truth upon earth. But no circle is little when it has that center, since it is the center of everything. Or else, one day, perhaps they will feel impelled to join with their peers of the new world and with them build some living testimony of their common aspiration, as others built pyramids or cathedrals perhaps a city of the new world. And this is the beginning of a great enterprise, and a great danger.
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Those who know a little, who feel, who have begun to perceive the great Wave of Truth, will therefore not fall into the trap of superman recruiting. The earth is unequally prepared; men are spiritually unequal despite all our democratic protests to the contrary though they are essentially equal and vast in the great Self, and only one body with millions of faces they have not all become the greatness that they are. They are on the way, and some dawdle while others seem to travel more swiftly, but the detours of the former are also part of the great geography of our indivisible domain, their delay or the brake they seem to apply to our motion is part of the fullness of perfection that we seek and which compels us to a greater meticulousness of truth. They too are going there, by their own way and what is outside the way, In the end, since everything is the Way? He who knows a little, who feels, knows first and foremost, from having experienced it in his own flesh, that men are never truly brought together by artifices and when they persist in their artifice, everything finally collapses and the meeting is brief; the beautiful school, the lovely sect, the little iridescent bubble of a moment's enthusiasm or faith is short-lived they are brought together through a finer and more discreet law, a tiny little searchlight across time and space, and touches a similar ray here and there, a twin frequency, a light source with the same intensity and he goes. He goes haphazardly, takes a train, a plane, travels to this country and that one, believes he is searching for this or that, that he is in quest of adventure, the exotic, drugs or philosophy he believes. He believes a lot of things. He thinks he has to have this power or that solution, this panacea or that revolution, this slogan or that one. He thinks he set out because of that thirst or revolt, that unhappy love affair or need for action, this hope or that old insoluble discord in his heart. But then, there is none of that! One day he stops, without knowing why, without planning to be there, without having looked for that place or that face, that insignificant village under the stars of one hemisphere or the other and there it is. He has arrived. He has opened his one door, found his kindred fire, that look forever known; and he is exactly at the right place, at the right time, to do the right work. The world is a fabulous clockwork, if only we knew the secret of those little fires glowing in another space, dancing on a great inner sea where our skiffs sail as if guided by an invisible beacon.
There are ten or twenty, perhaps fifty, here or there, in one latitude or another, who yearn to till a truer plot of land, a small patch of man to grow a truer being within themselves, perhaps create together a laboratory of the superman, lay the first stone of the City of Truth on earth. They do not know, they do not know anything, except that they need something else and that there exists a Law of Harmony, a marvelous something of the Future seeking to be incarnated. They want to find the conditions of that incarnation, to lend themselves to the trial, to offer their substance for that living experiment. They know nothing except that everything must be different: in hearts, in gestures, in matter and the handling of matter. They are not seeking to create a new civilization, but another man; not a supercity among the millions of buildings of the world, but a listening post for the forces of the future, a supreme yantra of Truth, a conduit, a channel to try to capture and inscribe in matter a first note of the great Harmony, a first tangible sign of the new world. They do not pose as the champions of anything; they do not defend any liberty or attack any ism. They simply try together. They are the champions of their own pure little note, which is unlike the next person's and yet is everyone's note. They are no longer from a country, a family, a religion or a party; they belong to their own party, which is no one else's and yet is the party of the world, because what becomes true at one point becomes true for the whole world and brings the whole world together. They are from a family to be invented, from a country yet to be born. They do not try to correct others or anybody, to pour self-glorifying charities over the world, to cure the poor and the lepers; they try to cure the great poverty of smallness in themselves, the gray elf of the inner misery, to reclaim one single parcel of truth from themselves, one single ray of harmony. For if that Disease is cured in our own heart or a few hearts, the world will be that much lighter, and, through our clarity, the Law of Truth will better penetrate matter and radiate all around spontaneously. What liberation, what relief can a man who suffers in his own heart bring to the world? They do not work for themselves, though they are the primary ground of the experience, but as an offering, pure and simple, to that which they do not really know, but which shimmers at the edge of the world like the dawn of a new age. They are the prospectors of the new cycle. They have given themselves to the future, body and soul, the way one jumps into the fire, without a look back. They are the servants of the infinite in the finite, of the totality in the infinitesimal, of eternity in each second and each gesture. They create their heaven with each step and carve the new world out of the banality of the day. And they are not afraid of failure, for they have left behind the failures and success of the prison they live in the sole infallibility of a right little note.
1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It would seem then that reason is an insufficient, often an inefficient, even a stumbling and at its best a very partially enlightened guide for humanity in that great endeavour which is the real heart of human progress and the inner justification of our existence as souls, minds and bodies upon the earth. For that endeavour is not only the effort to survive and make a place for ourselves on the earth as the animals do, not only having made to keep it and develop its best vital and egoistic or communal use for the efficiency and enjoyment of the individual, the family or the collective ego, substantially as is done by the animal families and colonies, in bee-hive or ant-hill for example, though in the larger, many-sided way of reasoning animals; it is also, and much more characteristically of our human as distinguished from our animal element, the endeavour to arrive at a harmonised inner and outer perfection, and, as we find In the end, at its highest height, to culminate in the discovery of the divine Reality behind our existence and the complete and ideal Person within us and the shaping of human life in that image. But if that is the truth, then neither the Hellenic ideal of an all-round philosophic, aesthetic, moral and physical culture governed by the enlightened reason of man and led by the wisest minds of a free society, nor the modern ideal of an efficient culture and successful economic civilisation governed by the collective reason and organised knowledge of mankind can be either the highest or the widest goal of social development.
The Hellenic ideal was roughly expressed in the old Latin maxim, a sound mind in a sound body. And by a sound body the ancients meant a healthy and beautiful body well-fitted for the rational use and enjoyment of life. And by a sound mind they meant a clear and balanced reason and an enlightened and well-trained mentality,trained in the sense of ancient, not of modern education. It was not to be packed with all available information and ideas, cast in the mould of science and a rational utility and so prepared for the efficient performance of social and civic needs and duties, for a professional avocation or for an intellectual pursuit; rather it was to be cultured in all its human capacities intellectual, moral, aesthetic, trained to use them rightly and to range freely, intelligently and flexibly in all questions and in all practical matters of philosophy, science, art, politics and social living. The ancient Greek mind was philosophic, aesthetic and political; the modern mind has been scientific, economic and utilitarian. The ancient ideal laid stress on soundness and beauty and sought to build up a fine and rational human life; the modern lays very little or no stress on beauty, prefers rational and practical soundness, useful adaptation, just mechanism and seeks to build up a well-ordered, well-informed and efficient human life. Both take it that man is partly a mental, partly a physical being with the mentalised physical life for his field and reason for his highest attribute and his highest possibility. But if we follow to the end the new vistas opened by the most advanced tendencies of a subjective age, we shall be led back to a still more ancient truth and ideal that overtops both the Hellenic and the modern levels. For we shall then seize the truth that man is a developing spirit trying here to find and fulfil itself in the forms of mind, life and body; and we shall perceive luminously growing before us the greater ideal of a deeply conscious self-illumined, self-possessing, self-mastering soul in a pure and perfect mind and body. The wider field it seeks will be, not the mentalised physical life with which man has started, but a new spiritualised life inward and outward, by which the perfected internal figures itself in a perfected external living. Beyond mans long intelligent effort towards a perfected culture and a rational society there opens the old religious and spiritual ideal, the hope of the kingdom of heaven within us and the city of God upon earth.
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The former attitude has on its positive side played a powerful part in the history of human thought, has even been of a considerable utility in its own waywe shall have to note briefly hereafter how and whyto human progress and In the end even to religion; but its intolerant negations are an arrogant falsity, as the human mind has now sufficiently begun to perceive. Its mistake is like that of a foreigner who thinks everything in an alien country absurd and inferior because these things are not his own ways of acting and thinking and cannot be cut out by his own measures or suited to his own standards. So the thoroughgoing rationalist asks the religious spirit, if it is to stand, to satisfy the material reason and even to give physical proof of its truths, while the very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial Spirit and the play of a supraphysical consciousness. So too he tries to judge religion by his idea of its externalities, just as an ignorant and obstreperous foreigner might try to judge a civilisation by the dress, outward colour of life and some of the most external peculiarities in the social manners of the inhabitants. That in this he errs in company with certain of the so-called religious themselves, may be his excuse, but cannot be the justification of his ignorance. The more moderate attitude of the rational mind has also played its part in the history of human thought. Its attempts to explain religion have resulted in the compilation of an immense mass of amazingly ingenious perversions, such as certain pseudo-scientific attempts to form a comparative Science of Religion. It has built up in the approved modern style immense facades of theory with stray bricks of misunderstood facts for their material. Its mild condonations of religion have led to superficial phases of thought which have passed quickly away and left no trace behind them. Its efforts at the creation of a rational religion, perfectly well-intentioned, but helpless and unconvincing, have had no appreciable effect and have failed like a dispersing cloud, chinnbhram iva nayati.
The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, an absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience proceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light. The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light, will, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary conduct of mundane existence. Wherever religion really finds itself, wherever it opens itself to its own spirit,there is plenty of that sort of religious practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure of itself and in which reason can get in a word,its way is absolute and its fruits are ineffable.
1.13 - THE MASTER AND M., #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "Many a time you have said that a devotee, who loves God for the sake of love does not care to see God's powers. A true devotee wants to see God as Gopala. In the beginning God becomes the magnet, and the devotee the needle. But In the end the devotee himself becomes the magnet, and God the needle; that is to say, God becomes small to His devotee."
MASTER: "Yes, it is just like the sun at dawn. You can easily look at that sun. It doesn't dazzle the eyes; rather it satisfies them. God becomes tender for the sake of His devotees. He appears before them, setting aside His powers."
1.13 - The Supermind and the Yoga of Works, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed In the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate;
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1.14 - The Supermind as Creator, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:A PRINCIPLE of active Will and Knowledge superior to Mind and creatrix of the worlds is then the intermediary power and state of being between that self-possession of the One and this flux of the Many. This principle is not entirely alien to us; it does not belong solely and incommunicably to a Being who is entirely other than ourselves or to a state of existence from which we are mysteriously projected into birth, but also rejected and unable to return. If it seems to us to be seated on heights far above us, yet are they the heights of our own being and accessible to our tread. We can not only infer and glimpse that Truth, but we are capable of realising it. We may by a progressive expanding or a sudden luminous self-transcendence mount up to these summits in unforgettable moments or dwell on them during hours or days of greatest superhuman experience. When we descend again, there are doors of communication which we can keep always open or reopen even though they should constantly shut. But to dwell there permanently on this last and highest summit of the created and creative being is In the end the supreme ideal for our evolving human consciousness when it seeks not self-annulment but self-perfection. For, as we have seen, this is the original Idea and the final harmony and truth to which our gradual self-expression in the world returns and which it is meant to achieve.
2:Still, we may doubt whether it is possible, now or at all, to give any account of this state to the human intellect or to utilise in any communicable and organisable way its divine workings for the elevation of our human knowledge and action. The doubt does not arise solely from the rarity or dubiety of any known phenomena that would betray a human working of this divine faculty, or from the remoteness which separates this action from the experience and verifiable knowledge of ordinary humanity; it is strongly suggested also by the apparent contradiction in both essence and operation between human mentality and the divine Supermind.
1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Religion is the seeking after the spiritual, the suprarational and therefore in this sphere the intellectual reason may well be an insufficient help and find itself, not only at the end but from the beginning, out of its province and condemned to tread either diffidently or else with a stumbling presumptuousness in the realm of a power and a light higher than its own. But in the other spheres of human consciousness and human activity it may be thought that it has the right to the sovereign place, since these move on the lower plane of the rational and the finite or belong to that border-land where the rational and the infrarational meet and the impulses and the instincts of man stand in need above all of the light and the control of the reason. In its own sphere of finite knowledge, science, philosophy, the useful arts, its right, one would think, must be indisputable. But this does not turn out In the end to be true. Its province may be larger, its powers more ample, its action more justly self-confident, but In the end everywhere it finds itself standing between the two other powers of our being and fulfilling in greater or less degree the same function of an intermediary. On one side it is an enlightenernot always the chief enlightener and the corrector of our life-impulses and first mental seekings, on the other it is only one minister of the veiled Spirit and a preparer of the paths for the coming of its rule.
This is especially evident in the two realms which in the ordinary scale of our powers stand nearest to the reason and on either side of it, the aesthetic and the ethical being, the search for Beauty and the search for Good. Mans seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of his nature or his life from which it need or ought to be excluded,provided we understand beauty both in its widest and its truest sense. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a necessary character of the perfect individual and the perfect society. But in its origin this seeking for beauty is not rational; it springs from the roots of our life, it is an instinct and an impulse, an instinct of aesthetic satisfaction and an impulse of aesthetic creation and enjoyment. Starting from the infrarational parts of our being, this instinct and impulse begin with much imperfection and impurity and with great crudities both in creation and in appreciation. It is here that the reason comes in to distinguish, to enlighten, to correct, to point out the deficiencies and the crudities, to lay down laws of aesthetics and to purify our appreciation and our creation by improved taste and right knowledge. While we are thus striving to learn and correct ourselves, it may seem to be the true law-giver both for the artist and the admirer and, though not the creator of our aesthetic instinct and impulse, yet the creator in us of an aesthetic conscience and its vigilant judge and guide. That which was an obscure and erratic activity, it makes self-conscious and rationally discriminative in its work and enjoyment.
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What has been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that In the end the place of reason and the limits of its achievement are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence, but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious satisfaction, but not to it; it has In the end to hand them over to a higher faculty which is in direct touch with the suprarational and in its nature and workings exceeds the intellect.
And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is In the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels,for it is suprasensuous,nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel,for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual,but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God.
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1.15 - Conclusion, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
bad effects. In the end we have to acknowledge that the self is
a complexio oppositorum precisely because there can be no
1.15 - THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
shaping itself that In the end it will comprehend everything?
By no means; and for a series of reasons (or conditions to be
1.15 - The Suprarational Good, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But in other spheres of life, in the spheres of what by an irony of our ignorance we call especially practical life,although, if the Divine be our true object of search and realisation, our normal conduct in them and our current idea of them is the very opposite of practical,we are less ready to recognise the universal truth. We take a long time to admit it even partially in theory, we are seldom ready at all to follow it in practice. And we find this difficulty because there especially, in all our practical life, we are content to be the slaves of an outward Necessity and think ourselves always excused when we admit as the law of our thought, will and action the yoke of immediate and temporary utilities. Yet even there we must arrive eventually at the highest truth. We shall find out In the end that our daily life and our social existence are not things apart, are not another field of existence with another law than the inner and ideal. On the contrary, we shall never find out their true meaning or resolve their harsh and often agonising problems until we learn to see in them a means towards the discovery and the individual and collective expression of our highest and, because our highest, therefore our truest and fullest self, our largest most imperative principle and power of existence. All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine.
It is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the rational man has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a matter of reason, to determine its nature, its law, its practical action by some principle of reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can really succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences of the intellect building elegant and empty constructions with words and ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious failures which break down at the first strenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system of utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth century the great century of science and reason and utilityby one of its most positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discredited. Happily, we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious errors, its substitution of a practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and absolute motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough to the reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole instinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,the hedonistic theory which refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics to be no more than a system of formulas of conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social impulses and would regulate its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being escapes from all these formulas: it is a law to itself and finds its principle in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving mind, even though it may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine.
Not that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all errors of the human reason are false representations, a wrong building, effective misconstructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth. Utility is a fundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles of existence are In the end one; therefore it is true that the highest good is also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply the good of others and most widely the good of all is one ideal aim of our outgoing ethical practice; it is that which the ethical man would like to effect, if he could only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help to regulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its inner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces one of the many considerations by which we can feel our way along the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into the hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of utility, the judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as it is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one safe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be faithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true; better is the law of ones own nature though ill-performed, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility.
Neither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor self-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or even spiritual. It is true, here too, that the highest good is both in its nature and inner effect the highest bliss. Ananda, delight of being, is the spring of all existence and that to which it tends and for which it seeks openly or covertly in all its activities. It is true too that in virtue growing, in good accomplished there is great pleasure and that the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes this is a side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes to the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of strength by suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that higher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient normal part of our being which is the field of the struggle. The action of the ethical man is not motived by even an inner pleasure, but by a call of his being, the necessity of an ideal, the figure of an absolute standard, a law of the Divine.
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Our ethical impulses and activities begin like all the rest in the infrarational and take their rise from the subconscient. They arise as an instinct of right, an instinct of obedience to an ununderstood law, an instinct of self-giving in labour, an instinct of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, an instinct of love, of self-subordination and of solidarity with others. Man obeys the law at first without any inquiry into the why and the wherefore; he does not seek for it a sanction in the reason. His first thought is that it is a law created by higher powers than himself and his race and he says with the ancient poet that he knows not whence these laws sprang, but only that they are and endure and cannot with impunity be violated. What the instincts and impulses seek after, the reason labours to make us understand, so that the will may come to use the ethical impulses intelligently and turn the instincts into ethical ideas. It corrects mans crude and often erring misprisions of the ethical instinct, separates and purifies his confused associations, shows as best it can the relations of his often clashing moral ideals, tries to arbitrate and compromise between their conflicting claims, arranges a system and many-sided rule of ethical action. And all this is well, a necessary stage of our advance; but In the end these ethical ideas and this intelligent ethical will which it has tried to train to its control, escape from its hold and soar up beyond its province. Always, even when enduring its rein and curb, they have that inborn tendency.
For the ethical being like the rest is a growth and a seeking towards the absolute, the divine, which can only be attained securely in the suprarational. It seeks after an absolute purity, an absolute right, an absolute truth, an absolute strength, an absolute love and self-giving, and it is most satisfied when it can get them in absolute measure, without limit, curb or compromise, divinely, infinitely, in a sort of godhead and transfiguration of the ethical being. The reason is chiefly concerned with what it best understands, the apparent process, the machinery, the outward act, its result and effect, its circumstance, occasion and motive; by these it judges the morality of the action and the morality of the doer. But the developed ethical being knows instinctively that it is an inner something which it seeks and the outward act is only a means of bringing out and manifesting within ourselves by its psychological effects that inner absolute and eternal entity. The value of our actions lies not so much in their apparent nature and outward result as in their help towards the growth of the Divine within us. It is difficult, even impossible to justify upon outward grounds the absolute justice, absolute right, absolute purity, love or selflessness of an action or course of action; for action is always relative, it is mixed and uncertain in its results, perplexed in its occasions. But it is possible to relate the inner being to the eternal and absolute good, to make our sense and will full of it so as to act out of its impulsion or its intuitions and inspirations. That is what the ethical being labours towards and the higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner efforts.
1.15 - The Transformed Being, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
It will be the end of the Artifice. This fabulous, monstrous world bristling with machines on every floor and every level swallowed up by a machinery that swallows us and swallows life's slightest movement, the least breath of thought, the lightest heartbeat, that rolls us under its enormous armored tank in which those richest in false powers, most armed with deceptive words, most affluent in false colors and tinsel and fake, artificial television lights, whose shell of triumphant unconsciousness is the heaviest, dominate a hypnotized mass which consents to this barbarous sacrifice to Moloch, this universal and total slavery, detailed down to the tiniest subconscious reaction, in which even the most enlightened men are still impelled by the muffled reverberation of the Machine, alienated from their own powers of seeing, feeling and communicating, smothered beneath an enormous apparatus that conditions their thought and feelings and beliefs, regimented by science, regimented by the law, regimented by the Machine one must keep clicking in order to live, eat, brea the and travel, keep alive in order to stay alive will vanish like some unreal nightmare under the tranquil gaze of Truth, which will put each thing in its place, endow the truer ones with power, clo the each according to his own light, illuminate each one in his true color, expose the innermost vibration without subterfuge, without false clothing, rank beings spontaneously, automatically, visibly, according to the quality of their flame and the intensity of their joy, impart its powerful rhythm to the clearer ones, give to each a world in his measure, a dwelling in his color, an immortal body attuned to his joy, a scope of action commensurate with the scope of his own ray, a power to mold and use matter proportionate to his intensity of truth, his capacity for beauty and his degree of genuine imagination. For, In the end, Truth is Beauty, is supreme Imagination which, through those millions of years and billions of sorrows, sought to make us rediscover our own power of loving, of creating and of uprooting death through immortal joy.
But how will this matter, as heavy and stubborn as it is, this unfeeling rock, obey the power of the Spirit? How will the earth's matter allow itself to be transformed without being crushed, violated, pulverized by some sledgehammer of one kind or another, heated to a few thousand degrees in our nuclear kettles? We might as well ask how that rock could ever escape the tortuous climb of the caterpillar we see no farther than our mental conditioning, but our vision is false and the matter we crush without mercy is as living, active, responsive as the stream of stars above our heads or the invisible quivering of the lotus under the summer sun. Matter too is living; it too is a substance of the Eternal, and it can respond as much as the mind, heart or plant. Only we have to find the point of contact, to know the true language, just as we have found the language of numbers, only to extract a few monsters. Another language needs to be found for another vision, a concrete language that imparts the experience of what it names, brings to light what it says, touches what it expresses, which does not translate but materializes the vibrations and moves things by emitting the same note. A whole magic of the Word needs to be found again.
1.1.5 - Thought and Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yogic control can come in one of two ways or by their combination. (1) To separate the witness Soul in you from the movements of the mental, vital and physical Prakriti to which these things belong, learn to look upon them and In the end to feel them as not yourself, not a part of the inner or true being but occurring on the surface, and to experience the inner being as the Purusha eternally calm, silent and immovable. This separation once done, learn by abhysa to give the effective comm and of the Purusha to the movements of the Prakriti to ceaserefusing the sanction to all that you wish to eliminate. The process is long and laborious and the final perfection can only come by resolute and persevering practice. (2) To open yourself to the Divine Power and give up all into its hands, yourself only rejecting and refusing sanction to all that you feel to be false and contrary to truth and purity in you.
This is as an answer to your difficulty, but I cannot direct you or give you any Sadhana, which I give only to those who are called from within to my way of Yoga and not for any limited object like the one you have in view.
1.16 - Man, A Transitional Being, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Our language is false, as is our vision of the world. In reality, Being and Becoming, He and She, are two concurrent faces of the same eternal FACT. The universe is a perpetual phenomenon, as perpetual as the Silence beyond time: In the beginning, it is said, was the Eternal, the Infinite, the One. In the middle, it is said, is the finite, the transient, the Many. In the end, it is said, shall be the One, the Infinite, the Eternal. For when was the beginning? At no moment in Time, for the beginning is at every moment; the beginning always was, always is and always shall be. The divine beginning is before Time, in Time and beyond Time for ever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is an endless beginning. And where is the middle? There is no middle; for there is only the junction of the perpetual end and the eternal beginning; it is the sign of a creation which is new at every moment. The creation was for ever, is for ever, shall be for ever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is the magical middle-term of his own existence; it is he that is the beginningless and endless creation. And when is the end? There is no end. At no conceivable moment can there be a cessation. For all end of things is the beginning of new things which are still the same One in an ever developing and ever recurring figure. Nothing can be destroyed, for all is He who is forever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is the unimaginable end that is never closing upon new interminable vistas of his glory.316 And Sri Aurobindo added: The experience of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripetia,
the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols. The idea of eternal recurrence affects with a shudder of alarm the mind entrenched in the minute, the hour, the years, the centuries, all the finite's unreal defences. But the strong 316
1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Up to a certain point this recoil has its uses and may easily even, by tapasy, by the law of energy increasing through compression, develop for a time a new vigour in the life of the society, as happened in India in the early Buddhist centuries. But beyond a certain point it tends, not really to kill, for that is impossible, but to discourage along with the vital instincts the indispensable life-energy of which they are the play and renders them In the end inert, feeble, narrow, unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was the final result in India of the agelong pressure of Buddhism and its supplanter and successor, Illusionism. No society wholly or too persistently and pervadingly dominated by this denial of the life dynamism can flourish and put forth its possibilities of growth and perfection. For from dynamic it becomes static and from the static position it proceeds to stagnation and degeneration. Even the higher being of man, which finds its account in a vigorous life dynamism, both as a fund of force to be transmuted into its own loftier energies and as a potent channel of connection with the outer life, suffers In the end by this failure and contraction. The ancient Indian ideal recognised this truth and divided life into four essential and indispensable divisions, artha, kma, dharma, moka, vital interests, satisfaction of desires of all kinds, ethics and religion, and liberation or spirituality, and it insisted on the practice and development of all. Still it tended not only to put the last forward as the goal of all the rest, which it is, but to put it at the end of life and its habitat in another world of our being, rather than here in life as a supreme status and formative power on the physical plane. But this rules out the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, the perfectibility of society and of man in society, the evolution of a new and diviner race, and without one or other of these no universal ideal can be complete. It provides a temporary and occasional, but not an inherent justification for life; it holds out no illumining fulfilment either for its individual or its collective impulse.
Let us then look at this vital instinct and life dynamism in its own being and not merely as an occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really rebellious in its very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and persists even when it is trained by the growing application to it of the enlightening reason. Evidently it is in this natural form a thing of the earth, gross, earthy, full even of hideous uglinesses and brute blunders and jarring discords; but so also is the infrarational stage in ethics, in aesthetics, in religion. It is true too that it presents a much more enormous difficulty than these others, more fundamentally and obstinately resists elevation, because it is the very province of the infrarational, a first formulation of consciousness out of the Inconscient, nearest to it in the scale of being. But still it has too, properly looked at, its rich elements of power, beauty, nobility, good, sacrifice, worship, divinity; here too are highreaching gods, masked but still resplendent. Until recently, and even now, reason, in the garb no longer of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up all this physical and vital life and perfect it by the sole power of rationalism, by a knowledge of the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology and biology and health, by collectivism, by State education, by a new psychological education and a number of other kindred means. All this is well in its own way and in its limits, but it is not enough and can never come to a truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high idealistic, rational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes only a polishing, a gloss, a clothing and mannerising of the original uncouth savage. The modern attempt of reason in the form of a broad and thorough rational, utilitarian and efficient instruction and organisation of man and his life is not succeeding any better for all its insistent but always illusory promise of more perfect results in the future. These endeavours cannot indeed be truly successful if our theory of life is right and if this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned suprarational, if it has, as it then must have, the instinctive reaching out for something divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its blind strivings. Here too reason must be overpassed or surpass itself and become a passage to the Divine.
1.17 - Religion as the Law of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Western recoil from religion, that minimising of its claim and insistence by which Europe progressed from the mediaeval religious attitude through the Renascence and the Reformation to the modern rationalistic attitude, that making of the ordinary earthly life our one preoccupation, that labour to fulfil ourselves by the law of the lower members, divorced from all spiritual seeking, was an opposite error, the contrary ignorant extreme, the blind swing of the pendulum from a wrong affirmation to a wrong negation. It is an error because perfection cannot be found in such a limitation and restriction; for it denies the complete law of human existence, its deepest urge, its most secret impulse. Only by the light and power of the highest can the lower be perfectly guided, uplifted and accomplished. The lower life of man is in form undivine, though in it there is the secret of the divine, and it can only be divinised by finding the higher law and the spiritual illumination. On the other hand, the impatience which condemns or despairs of life or discourages its growth because it is at present undivine and is not in harmony with the spiritual life, is an equal ignorance, andha tama. The world-shunning monk, the mere ascetic may indeed well find by this turn his own individual and peculiar salvation, the spiritual recompense of his renunciation and Tapasya, as the materialist may find by his own exclusive method the appropriate rewards of his energy and concentrated seeking; but neither can be the true guide of mankind and its law-giver. The monastic attitude implies a fear, an aversion, a distrust of life and its aspirations, and one cannot wisely guide that with which one is entirely out of sympathy, that which one wishes to minimise and discourage. The sheer ascetic spirit, if it directed life and human society, could only prepare it to be a means for denying itself and getting away from its own motives. An ascetic guidance might tolerate the lower activities, but only with a view to persuade them In the end to minimise and finally cease from their own action. But a spirituality which draws back from life to envelop it without being dominated by it does not labour under this disability. The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it.
In spirituality, then, understood in this sense, we must seek for the directing light and the harmonising law, and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality. So long as it falls short of this, it is one human activity and power among others, and, even if it be considered the most important and the most powerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. If it seeks always to fix them into the limits of a creed, an unchangeable law, a particular system, it must be prepared to see them revolting from its control; for although they may accept this impress for a time and greatly profit by it, In the end they must move by the law of their being towards a freer activity and an untrammelled movement. Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of ones own nature, dharma. This liberty it will give to all the fundamental parts of our being. It will give that freedom to philosophy and science which ancient Indian religion gave,freedom even to deny the spirit, if they will,as a result of which philosophy and science never felt in ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselves from religion, but grew rather into it and under its light. It will give the same freedom to mans seeking for political and social perfection and to all his other powers and aspirations. Only it will be vigilant to illuminate them so that they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and restriction, but by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a many-sided finding of their greatest, highest and deepest potentialities. For all these are potentialities of the spirit.
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1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
of their human wills and the strife of their human fear, wrath and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine.2 Nor does it matter essentially in what form and name or putting forward what aspect of the Divine he comes; for in all ways, varying with their nature, men are following the path set to them by the Divine which will In the end lead them to him and the aspect of him which suits their nature is that which they can best follow when he comes to lead them; in whatever way men accept, love and take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in man. Ye yatha mam prapadyante tams tathaiva bhajamyaham.
2 janma karma ca me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah,
1.18 - M. AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Master exhorts M. not to reason & Different attitudes toward God MASTER (to M.): "Don't reason any more. In the end, reasoning only injures the aspirant. One should assume a particular attitude toward God while praying to Him-the attitude of friend or servant or son or 'hero'.
"I assume the attitude of a child. To me every woman is my mother. The divine Maya, seeing this attitude in an aspirant, moves away from his path out of sheer shame.
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The Master was weeping and praying to the Mother in a voice choked with emotion. He prayed to Her with tearful eyes for the welfare of the devotees: "Mother, may those who come to You have all their desires fulfilled! But please don't make them give up everything at once, Mother. Well, You may do whatever You like In the end. If You keep them in the world, Mother, then please reveal Yourself to them now and then.
Otherwise, how will they live? How will they be encouraged if they don't see You once in a while? But You may do whatever You like In the end."
Advice to M
1.18 - Mind and Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:In that case not only would it be possible to manifest and maintain the divine consciousness in the human mind and body but, even, that divine consciousness might In the end, increasing its conquests, remould mind, life and body themselves into a more perfect image of its eternal Truth and realise not only in soul but in substance its kingdom of heaven upon earth. The first of these victories, the internal, has certainly been achieved in a greater or less degree by some, perhaps by many, upon earth; the other, the external, even if never more or less realised in past aeons as a first type for future cycles and still held in the subconscious memory of the earth-nature, may yet be intended as a coming victorious achievement of God in humanity. This earthly life need not be necessarily and for ever a wheel of halfjoyous half-anguished effort; attainment may also be intended and the glory and joy of God made manifest upon earth.
5:What Mind, Life and Body are in their supreme sources and what therefore they must be in the integral completeness of the divine manifestation when informed by the Truth and not cut off from it by the separation and the ignorance in which presently we live, - this then is the problem that we have next to consider. For there they must have already their perfection towards which we here are growing, - we who are only the first shackled movement of the Mind which is evolving in Matter, we who are not yet liberated from the conditions and effects of that involution of spirit in form, that plunge of Light into its own shadow by which the darkened material consciousness of physical Nature was created. The type of all perfection towards which we grow, the terms of our highest evolution must already be held in the divine Real-Idea; they must be there formed and conscious for us to grow towards and into them: for that preexistence in the divine knowledge is what our human mentality names and seeks as the Ideal. The Ideal is an eternal Reality which we have not yet realised in the conditions of our own being, not a non-existent which the Eternal and Divine has not yet grasped and only we imperfect beings have glimpsed and mean to create.
1.18 - The Divine Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gun.as. "The man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal), 'I am doing nothing'; when he sees, hears, touches, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses." He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the grip of the three gunas, trigun.atta; he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it, this traigun.attya, is also a high sign of the divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and irresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not In the end Nature which mechanically determines its own action; it is the will of the Supreme which inspires her; he who has already slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the human instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the master of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all, sarva-loka-mahesvara. "With a consciousness identified with the
Self, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvan.i karman.i
1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the human cells, it is a frozen world that In the end must disinte-
grate entirely in a Universe without heart or ultimate purpose.
1.18 - The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In spirituality then would lie our ultimate, our only hope for the perfection whether of the individual or of the communal man; not the spirit which for its separate satisfaction turns away from the earth and her works, but that greater spirit which surpasses and yet accepts and fulfils them. A spirituality that would take up into itself mans rationalism, aestheticism, ethicism, vitalism, corporeality, his aspiration towards knowledge, his attraction towards beauty, his need of love, his urge towards perfection, his demand for power and fullness of life and being, a spirituality that would reveal to these ill-accorded forces their divine sense and the conditions of their godhead, reconcile them all to each other, illumine to the vision of each the way which they now tread in half-lights and shadows, in blindness or with a deflected sight, is a power which even mans too self-sufficient reason can accept or may at least be brought one day to accept as sovereign and to see in it its own supreme light, its own infinite source. For that reveals itself surely In the end as the logical ultimate process, the inevitable development and consummation of all for which man is individually and socially striving. A satisfying evolution of the nascent spirituality still raw and inchoate in the race is the possibility to which an age of subjectivism is a first glimmer of awakening or towards which it shows a first profound potentiality of return. A deeper, wider, greater, more spiritualised subjective understanding of the individual and communal self and its life and a growing reliance on the spiritual light and the spiritual means for the final solution of its problems are the only way to a true social perfection. The free rule, that is to say, the predominant lead, control and influence of the developed spiritual mannot the half-spiritualised priest, saint or prophet or the raw religionistis our hope for a divine guidance of the race. A spiritualised society can alone bring about a reign of individual harmony and communal happiness; or, in words which, though liable to abuse by the reason and the passions, are still the most expressive we can find, a new kind of theocracy, the kingdom of God upon earth, a theocracy which shall be the government of mankind by the Divine in the hearts and minds of men.
Certainly, this will not come about easily, or, as men have always vainly hoped from each great new turn and revolution of politics and society, by a sudden and at once entirely satisfying change and magical transformation. The advance, however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments; for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and In the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive turn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation. Such an evolution of the elements of a spiritualised society is that which a subjective age makes at least possible, and if at the same time it raises to the last height of active power things which seem the very denial of such a potentiality, that need be no index of a practical impossibility of the new birth, but on the contrary may be the sign of its approach or at the lowest a strong attempt at achievement. Certainly, the whole effort of a subjective age may go wrong; but this happens oftenest when by the insufficiency of its materials, a great crudeness of its starting-point and a hasty shallowness or narrow intensity of its inlook into itself and things it is foredoomed to a fundamental error of self-knowledge. It becomes less likely when the spirit of the age is full of freedom, variety and a many-sided seeking, a persistent effort after knowledge and perfection in all the domains of human activity; that can well convert itself into an intense and yet flexible straining after the infinite and the divine on many sides and in many aspects. In such circumstances, though a full advance may possibly not be made, a great step forward can be predicted.
We have seen that there are necessarily three stages of the social evolution or, generally, of the human evolution in both individual and society. Our evolution starts with an infrarational stage in which men have not yet learned to refer their life and action in its principles and its forms to the judgment of the clarified intelligence; for they still act principally out of their instincts, impulses, spontaneous ideas, vital intuitions or obey a customary response to desire, need and circumstance,it is these things that are canalised or crystallised in their social institutions. Man proceeds by various stages out of these beginnings towards a rational age in which his intelligent will more or less developed becomes the judge, arbiter and presiding motive of his thought, feeling and action, the moulder, destroyer and re-creator of his leading ideas, aims and intuitions. Finally, if our analysis and forecast are correct, the human evolution must move through a subjective towards a suprarational or spiritual age in which he will develop progressively a greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps In the end a more than intuitive, a gnostic consciousness. He will be able to perceive a higher divine end, a divine sanction, a divine light of guidance for all he seeks to be, think, feel and do, and able, too, more and more to obey and live in this larger light and power. That will not be done by any rule of infrarational religious impulse and ecstasy, such as characterised or rather darkly illumined the obscure confusion and brute violence of the Middle Ages, but by a higher spiritual living for which the clarities of the reason are a necessary preparation and into which they too will be taken up, transformed, brought to their invisible source.
These stages or periods are much more inevitable in the psychological evolution of mankind than the Stone and other Ages marked out by Science in his instrumental culture, for they depend not on outward means or accidents, but on the very nature of his being. But we must not suppose that they are naturally exclusive and absolute in their nature, or complete in their tendency or fulfilment when they come, or rigidly marked off from each other in their action or their time. For they not only arise out of each other, but may be partially developed in each other and they may come to coexist in different parts of the earth at the same time. But, especially, since man as a whole is always a complex being, even man savage or degenerate, he cannot be any of these things exclusively or absolutely,so long as he has not exceeded himself, has not developed into the superman, has not, that is to say, spiritualised and divinised his whole being. At his animal worst he is still some kind of thinking or reflecting animal: even the infrarational man cannot be utterly infrarational, but must have or tend to have some kind of play more or less evolved or involved of the reason and a more or less crude suprarational element, a more or less disguised working of the spirit. At his lucid mental best, he is still not a pure mental being, a pure intelligence; even the most perfect intellectual is not and cannot be wholly or merely rational,there are vital urgings that he cannot exclude, visits or touches of a light from above that are not less suprarational because he does not recognise their source. No god, but at his highest a human being touched with a ray of the divine influence, mans very spirituality, however dominant, must have, while he is still this imperfectly evolved human, its rational and infrarational tendencies and elements. And as with the psychological life of individuals, so must it be with the ages of his communal existence; these may be marked off from each other by the predominant play of one element, its force may overpower the others or take them into itself or make some compromise, but an exclusive play seems to be neither intended nor possible.
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At this point we see that Nature in her human mass tends to move forward slowly on her various lines of active mind and life towards a greater application of reason and spirituality which shall at last bring near the possibility of a rational and, eventually, a spiritual age of mankind. Her difficulties proceed from two sides. First, while she originally developed thought and reason and spirituality by exceptional individuals, now she develops them in the mass by exceptional communities or nations,at least in the relative sense of a nation governed, led and progressively formed and educated by its intellectually or spiritually cultured class or classes. But the exceptional nation touched on its higher levels by a developed reason or spirituality or both, as were Greece and later Rome in ancient Europe, India, China and Persia in ancient Asia, is surrounded or neighboured by enormous masses of the old infrarational humanity and endangered by this menacing proximity; for until a developed science comes in to redress the balance, the barbarian has always a greater physical force and unexhausted native power of aggression than the cultured peoples. At this stage the light and power of civilisation always collapses In the end before the attack of the outer darkness. Then ascending Nature has to train the conquerors more or less slowly, with long difficulty and much loss and delay to develop among themselves what their incursion has temporarily destroyed or impaired. In the end humanity gains by the process; a greater mass of the nations is brought in, a larger and more living force of progress is applied, a starting-point is reached from which it can move to richer and more varied gains. But a certain loss is always the price of this advance.
But even within the communities themselves reason and spirituality at this stage are always hampered and endangered by existing in a milieu and atmosphere not their own. The lite, the classes in charge of these powers, are obliged to throw them into forms which the mass of human ignorance they lead and rule will accept, and both reason and spirituality tend to be stifled by these forms, to get stereotyped, fossilised, void of life, bound up from their natural play. Secondly, since they are after all part of the mass, these higher enlightened elements are themselves much under the influence of their infrarational parts and do not, except in individuals, arrive at the entirely free play of the reason or the free light of the spirit. Thirdly, there is always the danger of these elements gravitating downward to the ignorance below or even collapsing into it. Nature guards herself by various devices for maintaining the tradition of intellectual and spiritual activity in the favoured classes; here she makes it a point of honour for them to preserve and promote the national culture, there she establishes a preservative system of education and discipline. And in order that these things may not degenerate into mere traditionalism, she brings in a series of intellectual or spiritual movements which by their shock revivify the failing life and help to bring about a broadening and an enlarging and to drive the dominant reason or spirituality deeper down into the infrarational mass. Each movement indeed tends to petrify after a shorter or longer activity, but a fresh shock, a new wave arrives in time to save and regenerate. Finally, she reaches the point when, all immediate danger of relapse overcome, she can proceed to her next decisive advance in the cycle of social evolution. This must take the form of an attempt to universalise first of all the habit of reason and the application of the intelligence and intelligent will to life. Thus is instituted the rational age of human society, the great endeavour to bring the power of the reason and intelligence to bear on all that we are and do and to organise in their light and by their guiding force the entire existence of the race.
1.19 - Equality, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But it is to be noted that, although In the end we must arrive at a superiority to all the three gunas of the lower nature, it is yet in its incipience by a resort to one or other of the three that the movement must begin. The beginning of equality may be sattwic, rajasic or tamasic; for there is a possibility in the human nature of a tamasic equality. It may be purely tamasic, the heavy equability of a vital temperament rendered inertly irresponsive to the shocks of existence by a sort of dull insensibility undesirous of the joy of life. Or it may result from a weariness of the emotions and desires accumulated by a surfeit and satiety of the pleasure or else, on the contrary, a disappointment and a disgust and shrinking from the pain of life, a lassitude, a fear and horror and dislike of the world: it is then in its nature a mixed movement, rajaso-tamasic, but the lower quality predominates.
Or, approaching the sattwic principle, it may aid itself by the intellectual perception that the desires of life cannot be satisfied, that the soul is too weak to master life, that the whole thing is nothing but sorrow and transient effort and nowhere in it is there any real truth or sanity or light or happiness; this is the sattwotamasic principle of equality and is not so much equality, though it may lead to that, as indifference or equal refusal. Essentially, the movement of tamasic equality is a generalisation of Nature's principle of jugupsa or self-protecting recoil extended from the shunning of particular painful effects to a shunning of the whole life of Nature itself as in sum leading to pain and self-tormenting and not to the delight which the soul demands.
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whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage of settled understanding. Who in all things is without affection though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom." If one abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the object of sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, the rasa, remains; it is only when, even in the exercise of the sense, it can keep back from seeking its sensuous aim in the object, artha, and abandon the affection, the desire for the pleasure of taste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by using the mental organs on the objects, "ranging over them with the senses," vis.ayan indriyais caran, but with senses subject to the self, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled but not disturbed: so In the end all desires can be abandoned.
To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attraction is repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberated status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which cannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes. "He who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire, is the Yogin, the happy man." Titiks.a, the will and power to endure, is the means. "The material touches which cause heat and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure. For the man whom these do not trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality." The equalsouled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death, suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquished by a high indifference.1 Not to flee appalled from Nature in her
1.19 - Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:In some recent discoveries3 which, if their conclusions are accepted, must throw an intense light on the problem of Life in Matter, a great Indian physicist has pointed attention to the response to stimulus as an infallible sign of the existence of life. It is especially the phenomenon of plant-life that has been illumined by his data and illustrated in all its subtle functionings; but we must not forget that in the essential point the same proof of vitality, the response to stimulus, the positive state of life and its negative state which we call death, have been affirmed by him in metals as in the plant. Not indeed with the same abundance, not indeed so as to show an essentially identical organisation of life; but it is possible that, could instruments of the right nature and sufficient delicacy be invented, more points of similarity between the metal and plant life could be discovered; and even if it prove not to be so, this might mean that the same or any life organisation is absent, but the beginnings of vitality could still be there. But if life, however rudimentary in its symptoms, exists in the metal, it must be admitted as present, involved perhaps or elementary and elemental in the earth or other material existences akin to the metal. If we can pursue our inquiries farther, not obliged to stop short where our immediate means of investigation fail us, we may be sure from our unvarying experience of Nature that investigations thus pursued will In the end prove to us that there is no break, no rigid line of demarcation between the earth and the metal formed in it or between the metal and the plant and, pursuing the synthesis farther, that there is none either between the elements and atoms that constitute the earth or metal and the metal or earth that they constitute. Each step of this graded existence prepares the next, holds in itself what appears in that which follows it. Life is everywhere, secret or manifest, organised or elemental, involved or evolved, but universal, all-pervading, imperishable; only its forms and organisings differ.
11:We must remember that the physical response to stimulus is only an outward sign of life, even as are breathing and locomotion in ourselves. An exceptional stimulus is applied by the experimenter and vivid responses are given which we can at once recognise as indices of vitality in the object of the experiment. But during its whole existence the plant is responding constantly to a constant mass of stimulation from its environment; that is to say, there is a constantly maintained force in it which is capable of responding to the application of force from its surroundings. It is said that the idea of a vital force in the plant or other living organism has been destroyed by these experiments. But when we say that a stimulus has been applied to the plant, we mean that an energised force, a force in dynamic movement has been directed on that object, and when we say that a response is given, we mean that an energised force capable of dynamic movement and of sensitive vibration answers to the shock. There is a vibrant reception and reply, as well as a will to grow and be, indicative of a submental, a vital-physical organisation of consciousness-force hidden in the form of being. The fact would seem to be, then, that as there is a constant dynamic energy in movement in the universe which takes various material forms more or less subtle or gross, so in each physical body or object, plant or animal or metal, there is stored and active the same constant dynamic force; a certain interchange of these two gives us the phenomena which we associate with the idea of life. It is this action that we recognise as the action of Life-Energy and that which so energises itself is the Life-Force. Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, material Energy are different dynamisms of one World-Force.
1.19 - The Curve of the Rational Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This process has to continue until the reason can find a principle of society or else a combination and adjustment of several principles which will satisfy it. The question is whether it will ever be satisfied or can ever rest from questioning the foundation of established things,unless indeed it sinks back into a sleep of tradition and convention or else goes forward by a great awakening to the reign of a higher spirit than its own and opens into a suprarational or spiritual age of mankind. If we may judge from the modern movement, the progress of the reason as a social renovator and creator, if not interrupted in its course, would be destined to pass through three successive stages which are the very logic of its growth, the first individualistic and increasingly democratic with liberty for its principle, the second socialistic, In the end perhaps a governmental communism with equality and the State for its principle, the thirdif that ever gets beyond the stage of theoryanarchistic in the higher sense of that much-abused word, either a loose voluntary cooperation or a free communalism with brotherhood or comradeship and not government for its principle. It is in the transition to its third and consummating stage, if or whenever that comes, that the power and sufficiency of the reason will be tested; it will then be seen whether the reason can really be the master of our nature, solve the problems of our interrelated and conflicting egoisms and bring about within itself a perfect principle of society or must give way to a higher guide. For till this third stage has its trial, it is Force that in the last resort really governs. Reason only gives to Force the plan of its action and a system to administer.
We have already seen that it is individualism which opens the way to the age of reason and that individualism gets its impulse and its chance of development because it follows upon an age of dominant conventionalism. It is not that in the pre-individualistic, pre-rational ages there were no thinkers upon society and the communal life of man; but they did not think in the characteristic method of the logical reason, critical, all-observing, all-questioning, and did not proceed on the constructive side by the carefully mechanising methods of the highly rationalised intelligence when it passes from the reasoned perception of a truth to the endeavour after its pure, perfect and universal orderly application. Their thought and their building of life were much less logical than spontaneously intelligent, organic and intuitive. Always they looked upon life as it was and sought to know its secret by keen discernment, intuition and insight; symbols embodying the actual and ideal truth of life and being, types setting them in an arrangement and psychological order, institutions giving them a material fixity in their effectuation by life, this was the form in which they shaped their attempt to understand and mentalise life, to govern life by mind, but mind in its spontaneously intuitive or its reflectively seeing movements before they have been fixed into the geometrical patterns of the logical intelligence.
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It is true that this inevitable character of socialism is denied or minimised by the more democratic socialists; for the socialistic mind still bears the impress of the old democratic ideas and cherishes hopes that betray it often into strange illogicalities. It assures us that it will combine some kind of individual freedom, a limited but all the more true and rational freedom, with the rigours of the collectivist idea. But it is evidently these rigours to which things must tend if the collectivist idea is to prevail and not to stop short and falter in the middle of its course. If it proves itself thus wanting in logic and courage, it may very well be that it will speedily or In the end be destroyed by the foreign element it tolerates and perish without having sounded its own possibilities. It will pass perhaps, unless guided by a rational wisdom which the human mind in government has not yet shown, after exceeding even the competitive individualistic society in its cumbrous incompetence.1 But even at its best the collectivist idea contains several fallacies inconsistent with the real facts of human life and nature. And just as the idea of individualistic democracy found itself before long in difficulties on that account because of the disparity between lifes facts and the minds idea, difficulties that have led up to its discredit and approaching overthrow, the idea of collectivist democracy too may well find itself before long in difficulties that must lead to its discredit and eventual replacement by a third stage of the inevitable progression. Liberty protected by a State in which all are politically equal, was the idea that individualistic democracy attempted to elaborate. Equality, social and political equality enforced through a perfect and careful order by a State which is the organised will of the whole community, is the idea on which socialistic democracy stakes its future. If that too fails to make good, the rational and democratic Idea may fall back upon a third form of society founding an essential rather than formal liberty and equality upon fraternal comradeship in a free community, the ideal of intellectual as of spiritual Anarchism.2
In fact the claim to equality like the thirst for liberty is individualistic in its origin,it is not native or indispensable to the essence of the collectivist ideal. It is the individual who demands liberty for himself, a free movement for his mind, life, will, action; the collectivist trend and the State idea have rather the opposite tendency, they are self-compelled to take up more and more the compulsory management and control of the mind, life, will, action of the community and the individuals as part of ituntil personal liberty is pressed out of existence. But similarly it is the individual who demands for himself equality with all others; when a class demands, it is still the individual multiplied claiming for himself and all who are of his own grade, political or economic status an equal place, privilege or opportunity with those who have acquired or inherited a superiority of status. The social Reason conceded first the claim to liberty, but in practice (whatever might have been the theory) it admitted only so much equalityequality before the law, a helpful but not too effective political equality of the voteas was necessary to ensure a reasonable freedom for all. Afterwards when the injustices and irrationalities of an unequalised competitive freedom, the enormity of the gulfs it created, became apparent, the social Reason shifted its ground and tried to arrive at a more complete communal justice on the basis of a political, economic, educational and social equality as complete as might be; it has laboured to make a plain level on which all can stand together. Liberty in this change has had to undergo the former fate of equality; for only so much libertyperhaps or for a timecould survive as can be safely allowed without the competitive individual getting enough room for his self-assertive growth to upset or endanger the equalitarian basis. But In the end the discovery cannot fail to be made that an artificial equality has also its irrationalities, its contradictions of the collective good, its injustices even and its costly violations of the truth of Nature. Equality like individualistic liberty may turn out to be not a panacea but an obstacle in the way of the best management and control of life by the collective reason and will of the community.
But if both equality and liberty disappear from the human scene, there is left only one member of the democratic trinity, brotherhood or, as it is now called, comradeship, that has some chance of survival as part of the social basis. This is because it seems to square better with the spirit of collectivism; we see accordingly the idea of it if not the fact still insisted on in the new social systems, even those in which both liberty and equality are discarded as noxious democratic chimeras. But comradeship without liberty and equality can be nothing more than the like association of allindividuals, functional classes, guilds, syndicates, soviets or any other unitsin common service to the life of the nation under the absolute control of the collectivist State. The only liberty left at the end would be the freedom to serve the community under the rigorous direction of the State authority; the only equality would be an association of all alike in a Spartan or Roman spirit of civic service with perhaps a like status, theoretically equal at least for all functions; the only brotherhood would be the sense of comradeship in devoted dedication to the organised social Self, the State. In fact the democratic trinity, stripped of its godhead, would fade out of existence; the collectivist ideal can very well do without them, for none of them belong to its grain and very substance.
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These hesitations of social democracy, its uneasy mental poise between two opposing principles, socialistic regimentation and democratic liberty, may be the root cause of the failure of socialism to make good in so many countries even when it had every chance on its side and its replacement by the more vigorous and ruthlessly logical forces of Communism and Fascism. On the other hand, in the northernmost countries of Europe a temporising, reformist, practical Socialism compromising between the right regulation of the communal life and the freedom of the individual has to some extent made good; but it is still doubtful whether it will be allowed to go to the end of its road. If it has that chance, it is still to be seen whether the drive of the idea and the force it carries in it for complete self-effectuation will not prevail In the end over the spirit of compromise.
In the theory of communism State socialism is only a passage; a free classless Stateless communal life is the eventual ideal. But it is not likely that the living State machine once in power with all that are interested in its maintenance would let go its prey or allow itself to be abolished without a struggle.
1.2.01 - The Call and the Capacity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For those who have within them a sincere call for the Divine, however the mind or vital may present difficulties or attacks come or the progress be slow and painful, - even if they fall back or fall away from the path for a time, the psychic always prevails In the end and the Divine Help proves effective. Trust in that and persevere - then the goal is sure.
There is only one logic in spiritual things: when a demand is there for the Divine, a sincere call, it is bound one day to have its fulfilment. It is only if there is a strong insincerity somewhere, a hankering after something else - power, ambition, etc. - which counterbalances the inner call that the logic is no longer applicable. Supramental realisation is another matter: I am speaking now of the realisation of the Divine, of the contact with the
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You will find that the obstinate spiritual difficulty disappears In the end like a mirage. It belongs to the maya and, where the inner call is sincere, cannot hold even the outer consciousness always: its apparent solidity will dissolve.
Turning towards the Divine
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It is difficult to say that any particular quality makes one fit or the lack of it unfit. One may have strong sex impulses, doubts, revolts and yet succeed In the end, while another may fail. If one has a fundamental sincerity, a will to go through in spite of all things and a readiness to be guided, that is the best security in the sadhana.
Fitness for Yoga is a very relative term - the real fitness comes by the soul's call and the power to open oneself to the Divine.
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surrender even to a greater Light and Knowledge, even to the divine Influence - these are frequent obstacles. But these things are not universal in Westerners, and they are on the other hand present in many Indian sadhaks, and they are, like the difficulties of the typical Indian nature, superstructural formations, not the very grain of the being. They cannot permanently stand in the way of the soul, if the soul's aspiration is strong and firm, if the spiritual aim is the chief thing in the life. They are impediments which the fire within can easily burn away if the will to get rid of them is strong, and which it will surely burn away In the end, - though less easily - even if the outer nature clings long to them and justifies them - provided that central will, that deeper impulse is behind all, real and sincere.
This conclusion of yours about the incapacity of the nonOriental for Indian Yoga is simply born of a too despondently acute sense of your own difficulties, - you have not seen those, equally great, that have long troubled or are still troubling others. Neither to Indian nor to European can the path of Yoga be smooth and easy; their common human nature is there to see to that. To each his own difficulties seem enormous and radical and even incurable by their continuity and persistence and induce long periods of despondency and crises of despair.
To have faith enough or enough psychic sight to react at once or almost at once and prevent these attacks is given hardly to two or three in a hundred. But one ought not to settle down into a fixed idea of one's own incapacity or allow it to become an obsession; for such an attitude has no true justification and unnecessarily renders the way harder. Where there is a soul that has once become awake, there is surely a capacity within that can outweigh all surface defects and can In the end conquer.
If your conclusion were true, the whole aim of this Yoga would be a vain thing; for we are not working for a race or a people or a continent or for a realisation of which only Indians or only Orientals are capable. Our aim is not, either, to found a religion or a school of philosophy or a school of Yoga, but to create a ground and a way of spiritual growth and experience which will bring down a greater Truth beyond the mind but not
12.02 - The Stress of the Spirit, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet, at bottom, it is not such an absolute determinism, this cosmos, however apparently it may prove itself to be so. It is found, actually, that behind and in and through this ineluctable fatalism there are aberrations, freaks that do not adhere to the common pattern. In the overall macrocosmic view the reign of the fixed law is perhaps absolute but in the microcosm of infinitesimals fissures appear, discrepancies show themselves. All strict calculations turn out In the end to be mere approximations, only they tend to become more and more approximate. It is like the asymptote or the race between the hare and the tortoise in the famous storya mathematical puzzlewhere the hare starting behind can never catch up with the tortoise however fast he may run. With the discovery of new factors (sometimes only a new way of calculation) the gap is sought to be reduced, but the approximation remains. For example, the bending of a ray of light from a star passing by the solar sphere is a subject for interesting calculation: between the figure as given by the Einstein equation and the actual measurement there is a difference, although slight, yet a difference. Such differences are usually explained by some kind of intervention and if that intervention does not fully explain it, another intervention is brought in, and still the hiatus continues. This is just an example. The ultimate particles of matter, points of electric charge (or no-charge), points of tension are incalculables; their position or velocity is an indeterminate, not because of the infinitesimal size of the quantum, their very nature is so; they are erratic in their own essence. And one can justifiably ascribe a kind of free will to these ultimate, almost immaterial material particles, although when they are in bundles or groups they behave quite reasonably and are very obedient to the law, but singly each possesses or is capable of possessing a free independent movement. There is a basis here of the spirit of independence that shows itself more clearly in the biological units, and of course, very overtly and patently in the human mental consciousness.
There seems to be an entity lying at the other end away from Matter, it is the Spirit, the individual Conscious Being. If Matter is Bondage, Law, Determinism, Spirit is Freedom, Liberty, Self-choice. That is the well-known dualityPurusha and Prakriti, that divide existence between themselves. Purusha is the conscient Being, and Prakriti the inconscient becoming. These dual realities are however not irrevocably distinct and separate incommensurables. They are not unbridgeable units foreign to each other. The conscient being infuses itself into the inconscient becoming and initiates a conscious movement in the unconscious field. Thus where there was the absolute determinism of matter, sparks from the free consciousness intervene and modify the settled balance. That is the inner sense of the aberrations that one observes in the play even of physical laws. It is just the beginning of the stress of consciousness in unconscious matter. That stress increases in the march of time, in the process of evolution; and the natural freedom of the subject impinges on the rigid law of the object making it more and more pliable and plastic, more and more malleable and even reversible. In man a balance is struck between freedom and bondage although apparently bondage overweighs freedom. In the higher evolved status of being man arrives and can arrive at yet greater degrees of freedom and In the end eliminate altogether the element of bondage and transmute it into the self-expressed rhythm of the higher consciousness. The supreme Divine Consciousness or Being is that where Nature's determinism is dissolved in the self-law of the All Spirit, the Divine Will becoming the law of the being.
The whole process of creation, the final goal of the Divine Lila is the liberation of Nature, Prakriti. Prakriti is born in Bondage as inconscient Energy. Prakriti itself is a prison-house made of, wholly made of unconsciousness. The conscious Being is there involved, imprisoned and suffers and is miserable. For the gloom of unconsciousness covers it and almost swallows it up. That is the immanent Godhead in creation and is in man his soul, an emanation and representative of the Godhead. As it is commonly understood, liberation means the release of the Godhead out of the prison escaping into the Transcendent. The riddle of this creation is therefore to be solved by this process of escape of the Conscious Principle from out of the unconscious covering beyond into the pure Consciousness laya for the human being and pralaya for the creation. Actually the Upanishad gives graphically the direction to the human soul to pull himself out, out of the containing form: even as one draws the inner stem of a blade of grass out of its covering, for that which is Pure, Stainless is not here but out there.
12.05 - The World Tragedy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the end all traces of good are wiped away: it is sheer black, bleak, cursed track, this creation.
Yes, if you want to cure this ailing and insane world, if you have the ambition to strike a wholesome light in this dismal darkness, if you exert yourself a little to turn it and set it on the right path, pour a little of goodwill in the Mephistophelian stuff that the world is, well, your fate is Hamlet'syou create a yet greater desolation around you. That is the way out of this tragedy.
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Dante, the great Christian poet speaks likewise of a life in Hell and a life in Paradise, first, the tragedy, the life of sorrows, transmuted In the end into the Divine Comedy, the life of happiness and bliss. There is an intermediary passage in between through which the poet leads us from the one to the other: the transition is spoken of as a stage of purification through which one has to pass to shake off the human dross from his nature and put on and become in substance the noble metal.
It is to be noted that death does not mean literally or exclusively the physical event, disintegration and disappearance of the body: it is rather the symbol of the corrosive consciousness of the ordinary ignorant life. There is the ignorant consciousness making up the lower half circle of the integral life and there is the luminous consciousness making up the higher half circle. In between there is, as I have said, a border range which partakes of the nature of both. In psychological terms, the lower is the predominantly vital and physical ranges with a modicum of the mental shading into the higher mental. Up till here it is more or less the region of ignorance. Then comes the higher mind with its aspiring will: this is the purificatory agent the purgatory the crucible where forces are generated to stir and change and renovate the inferior sphere of our life. Indeed it is the region of the j-cakra in Tantric terminology: in modern terms you may call it the control-room, or in most modern lunar vocabulary, the command-module. It is from here that the first changes towards a higher and purer functioning are initiated in our lower limbs, the body, the vital and even the lower mental. Beyond is the overhead and overmental and still higher ranges. The luminous consciousness, the touch of immortality begins with the overhead and the overmental. As we enter the overhead, we shake off the shadow of death upon us and our mortal nature. The Upanishad speaks of two kinds of knowledge that have to be known, two forms of consciousness that have to be acquired in order to become the full integral Divine being. First you have to know, to become aware of the existence of ignorance, the primal or primitive nature and through that awareness or knowledge probe into its character and movement and destiny. Ignorance, pure ignorance leads towards disintegration and death, but to be aware of the ignorance is already a step towards enlightening the ignorance and redeeming it into knowledge. By this knowledge of the ignorance you release it from the grip of death; when you have the full consciousness of the ignorance you transcend the region of death, and free from death, free from ignorance you have the knowledge of knowledge and with the knowledge of knowledge, that is to say, with the full revelation of it you are one with Truth that is Immortality. The delight of immortality is love; love's own status and home is Paradise.
1.2.06 - Rejection, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That is a known fact that everything comes from outside, from universal Nature. But the individual is not bound to accept everything that comes; he can accept and he can reject. The rejection may not succeed at once, if there is a strong habit of past acceptance; but if it is steadily persisted in, the rejection will succeed In the end.
What you should do, is always to reject the lower experiences and concentrate on a fixed and quiet aspiration towards the one thing needed, the Light, the Calm, the Peace, the Devotion that you felt for two or three days. It is because you get interested in the lower vital experiences and in observing and thinking about them that they take hold, and then comes the absence of the Contact and the confusion. You have surely had enough of this kind of experience already and should make up your mind to steadily reject it when it comes.
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The practice of rejection prevails In the end; but with personal effort only, it may take a long time. If you can feel the Divine
Power working in you, then it should become easier.
1.2.08 - Faith, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If still they come, one has only to get through them as soon as possible and get back into the sun. Your dream of the sea was a perfectly true one - In the end the storm and swell do not prevent the arrival of the state of Grace in the sadhak and with it the arrival of the Grace itself. That I suppose is what something in you is always asking for - the suprarational miracle of Grace, something that is impatient of the demand for tapasya and selfperfection and long labour. Well, it can come, it has come to several here after years upon years of blank failure and difficulty or terrible internal struggles. But it comes usually in that way - as opposed to a slowly developing Grace - after much difficulty and not at once. If you go on asking for it in spite of the apparent failure of response, it is sure to come.
Faith
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Do not allow any discouragement to come upon you and have no distrust of the Divine Grace. Whatever difficulties are outside you, whatever weaknesses are inside you, if you keep firm hold on your faith and your aspiration, the secret Power will carry you through and bring you back here. Even if you are oppressed with opposition and difficulties, even if you stumble, even if the way seems closed to you, keep hold on your aspiration; if faith is clouded for a time, turn always in mind and heart to us and it will be removed. As for outer help in the way of letters we are perfectly ready to give it to you. But keep firm on the way - then In the end things open out of themselves and circumstances yield to the inner spirit.
Whatever adverse things present themselves you must meet them with courage and they will disappear and the help come. Faith and courage are the true attitude to keep in life and work always and in the spiritual experience also.
12.09 - The Story of Dr. Faustus Retold, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But man, the human soul, has to go through hell, that is to say, through trials and tribulations and ordeals in order to reach heaven. We know there are innumerable legends to illustrate the point. You must have read, all of you, stories of saints, how they were tempted and obstructed by hostile forces, the armies of the undivine. The great Buddha before his illumination as he sat under the Bo-tree firmly resolved on pursuing in his inner consciousness the path of realisation till the very end, was surroundedwe should say today, 'gheraoed'by all the varieties of dark forces, forces of ambition, of passion, of attachment, of enjoyment: they pleaded, they threatened, tried to draw him away by violence and trickery and temptation, but his was a great heroic soul, he refused all invitations and threats, unmoved he held fast to his resolution and In the end came out into the vast illumination. To the Christ too, the same thing happened. Satan came to him, showed to him all the luxury and grandeur and majesty that lay at his disposal if he would only consent to follow him. Christ only told him "Get thee behind, Satan" (Apage Satana) and he was free. In the Upanishads also, we know of the story of the boy Nachiketas who wanted to possess the truth, the Immortality, and Yama came to him or rather he came to Yam a and asked for these things. Yama, the King of Immortality, said in effect, a young boy like him need not strive for such abstract things that confuse the mind even of gods, "I will give you better things these beautiful chariots and horses, the resounding musical instruments or these abounding riches and even these beautiful women that take and be happy." You all know Nachiketas, the boy's answer: "Dear Sir, all these good things keep for your good self, let me have the one thing that I need, the Divine Knowledge." I am sure many of our children here will be bold enough to say as Nachiketas did.
In our Puranas too we see whenever and wherever the Rishis assemble and start doing tapasya, the hostiles they are called rakshasasrush in, try to break their tapasya, even kill them. The akshasas are the embodiments of the dark forces, agents and armies of the Devil himself. The Rishis had to seek refuge in the help of the gods, that is to say, take refuge in the strength and sincerity of their souls, that is the only way to safety and security, to the achievement of their goal.
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And yet there is a still more mysterious mystery. Satan or his armies do not quite belong to the outside world apart from you, they are within you, at least their foothold is within you. In fact man is a twofold being, one half of him belongs to the Divine, the other half to the un-Divine. His nature is a twofold string, the two inextricably intertwined, there is a luminous ray and there is its shadow, the shadow makes the light unstable, flickering, at times even completely obscures and eclipses it. The Hostile outside gains its strength and its hold upon you because of the obscurity within you; the greater the obscurity within the greater the dimension and power of the force outside. One has to dwell upon the luminous ray insidewhich is what we have termed the soul and slowly, or in proper time dissolve or dissipate the obscurity. In proportion as the obscurity within recedes, the darkness outside also retires and vanishes. And one sees In the end that it was only an illusion that seized us, and it was never there. We were and we are always a glorious sunshine. Only the experience through the Illusion has served to add a new dimension to the original Glory where we return.
These lines of Marlowe are often quoted by Sri Aurobindo as an example to show the height of poetic beauty which the English language is capable of expressing.
1.20 - Equality and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
vanity of the world's differences and distinctions, the superiority of the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an equality of philosophic indifference; it brings a high calm, but not the greater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like that of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-top whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous waters from which he has escaped, - In the end something after all aloof and ineffective. The Gita admits the philosophic motive of indifference as a preliminary movement; but the indifference to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can be at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It is indeed a position as of one seated above, udasnavat, but as the Divine is seated above, having no need at all in the world, yet he does works always and is present everywhere supporting, helping, guiding the labour of creatures. This equality is founded upon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to the philosophic equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it is the soul of love. It sees all beings without exception in the Divine, it is one self with the Self of all existences and therefore it is in supreme sympathy with all of them. Without exception, ases.en.a, not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing and no one, however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance, can be excluded from this universal, this whole-souled sympathy and spiritual oneness. Here there is no room, not merely for hatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness, disdain or any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for the ignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth on it all light and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for the apparent man; but for the divine Soul within him there will be more, there will be adoration and love. For from all, from the thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and the sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, "This is I." "He who loves Me in all beings," - what greater word of power for the utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universal love, has been uttered by any philosophy or any religion?
Resignation is the basis of a kind of religious equality, submission to the divine will, a patient bearing of the cross, a
1.20 - The End of the Curve of Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The pity of it is that this excellent theory, quite as much as the individualist theory that ran before it, is sure to stumble over a discrepancy between its set ideas and the actual facts of human nature; for it ignores the complexity of mans being and all that that complexity means. And especially it ignores the soul of man and its supreme need of freedom, of the control also of his lower members, no doubt,for that is part of the total freedom towards which he is struggling,but of a growing self-control, not a mechanical regulation by the mind and will of others. Obedience too is a part of its perfection,but a free and natural obedience to a true guiding power and not to a mechanised government and rule. The collective being is a fact; all mankind may be regarded as a collective being: but this being is a soul and life, not merely a mind or a body. Each society develops into a sort of sub-soul or group-soul of this humanity and develops also a general temperament, character, type of mind, evolves governing ideas and tendencies that shape its life and its institutions. But the society has no discoverable common reason and will belonging alike to all its members; for the group-soul rather works out its tendencies by a diversity of opinions, a diversity of wills, a diversity of life, and the vitality of the group-life depends largely upon the working of this diversity, its continuity, its richness. Since that is so, government by the organised State must mean always government by a number of individuals,whether that number be in theory the minority or the majority makes In the end little fundamental difference. For even when it is the majority that nominally governs, in fact it is always the reason and will of a comparatively few effective men and not really any common reason and will of all that rules and regulates things with the consent of the half-hypnotised mass.1 There is no reason to suppose that the immediate socialisation of the State would at all alter, the mass of men not being yet thoroughly rationalised and developed minds, this practical necessity of State government.
In the old infrarational societies, at least in their inception, what governed was not the State, but the group-soul itself evolving its life organised into customary institutions and self-regulations to which all had to conform; for the rulers were only its executors and instruments. This entailed indeed a great subjection of the individual to the society, but it was not felt, because the individualistic idea was yet unborn and such diversities as arose were naturally provided for in one way or another,in some cases by a remarkable latitude of social variation which government by the State tends more and more to suppress. As State government develops, we have a real suppression or oppression of the minority by the majority or the majority by the minority, of the individual by the collectivity, finally, of all by the relentless mechanism of the State. Democratic liberty tried to minimise this suppression; it left a free play for the individual and restricted as much as might be the role of the State. Collectivism goes exactly to the opposite extreme; it will leave no sufficient elbow-room to the individual free-will, and the more it rationalises the individual by universal education of a highly developed kind, the more this suppression will be felt,unless indeed all freedom of thought is negated and the minds of all are forced into a single standardised way of thinking.
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The question remains whether anarchistic thought supervening upon the collectivistic can any more successfully find a satisfying social principle. For if it gets rid of mechanism, the one practical means of a rationalising organisation of life, on what will it build and with what can it create? It may be contended as against the anarchistic objection that the collectivist period is, if not the last and best, at least a necessary stage in social progress. For the vice of individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and a harmless freedom can be founded. Collectivism at least insists upon that unity by entirely subordinating the life of the isolated ego to the life of the greater group-ego, and its office may be thus to stamp upon the mentality and life-habits of the individual the necessity of unifying his life with the life of others. Afterwards, when again the individual asserts his freedom, as some day he must, he may have learned to do it on the basis of this unity and not on the basis of his separate egoistic life. This may well be the intention of Nature in human society in its movement towards a collectivist principle of social living. Collectivism may itself In the end realise this aim if it can modify its own dominant principle far enough to allow for a free individual development on the basis of unity and a closely harmonised common existence. But to do that it must first spiritualise itself and transform the very soul of its inspiring principle: it cannot do it on the basis of the logical reason and a mechanically scientific ordering of life.
Anarchistic thought, although it has not yet found any sure form, cannot but develop in proportion as the pressure of society on the individual increases, since there is something in that pressure which unduly oppresses a necessary element of human perfection. We need not attach much importance to the grosser vitalistic or violent anarchism which seeks forcibly to react against the social principle or claims the right of man to live his own life in the egoistic or crudely vitalistic sense. But there is a higher, an intellectual anarchistic thought which in its aim and formula recovers and carries to its furthest logical conclusions a very real truth of nature and of the divine in man. In its revolt against the opposite exaggeration of the social principle, we find it declaring that all government of man by man by the power of compulsion is an evil, a violation, a suppression or deformation of a natural principle of good which would otherwise grow and prevail for the perfection of the human race. Even the social principle in itself is questioned and held liable for a sort of fall in man from a natural to an unnatural and artificial principle of living.
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This would seem to lead us either towards a free cooperative communism, a unified life where the labour and property of all is there for the benefit of all, or else to what may better be called communalism, the free consent of the individual to live in a society where the just freedom of his individuality will be recognised, but the surplus of his labour and acquisitions will be used or given by him without demur for the common good under a natural cooperative impulse. The severest school of anarchism rejects all compromise with communism. It is difficult to see how a Stateless Communism which is supposed to be the final goal of the Russian ideal, can operate on the large and complex scale necessitated by modern life. And indeed it is not clear how even a free communalism could be established or maintained without some kind of governmental force and social compulsion or how it could fail to fall away In the end either on one side into a rigorous collectivism or on the other to struggle, anarchy and disruption. For the logical mind in building its social idea takes no sufficient account of the infrarational element in man, the vital egoism to which the most active and effective part of his nature is bound: that is his most constant motive and it defeats In the end all the calculations of the idealising reason, undoes its elaborate systems or accepts only the little that it can assimilate to its own need and purpose. If that strong element, that ego-force in him is too much overshadowed, cowed and depressed too much rationalised, too much denied an outlet, then the life of man becomes artificial, top-heavy, poor in the sap of vitality, mechanical, uncreative. And on the other hand, if it is not suppressed, it tends In the end to assert itself and derange the plans of the rational side of man, because it contains in itself powers whose right satisfaction or whose final way of transformation reason cannot discover.
If Reason were the secret highest law of the universe or if man the mental being were limited by mentality, it might be possible for him by the power of the reason to evolve out of the dominance of infrarational Nature which he inherits from the animal. He could then live securely in his best human self as a perfected rational and sympathetic being, balanced and well-ordered in all parts, the sattwic man of Indian philosophy; that would be his summit of possibility, his consummation. But his nature is rather transitional; the rational being is only a middle term of Natures evolution. A rational satisfaction cannot give him safety from the pull from below nor deliver him from the attraction from above. If it were not so, the ideal of intellectual Anarchism might be more feasible as well as acceptable as a theory of what human life might be in its reasonable perfection; but, man being what he is, we are compelled In the end to aim higher and go farther.
A spiritual or spiritualised anarchism might appear to come nearer to the real solution or at least touch something of it from afar. As it expresses itself at the present day, there is much in it that is exaggerated and imperfect. Its seers seem often to preach an impossible self-abnegation of the vital life and an asceticism which instead of purifying and transforming the vital being, seeks to suppress and even kill it; life itself is impoverished or dried up by this severe austerity in its very springs. Carried away by a high-reaching spirit of revolt, these prophets denounce civilisation as a failure because of its vitalistic exaggerations, but set up an opposite exaggeration which might well cure civilisation of some of its crying faults and uglinesses, but would deprive us also of many real and valuable gains. But apart from these excesses of a too logical thought and a one-sided impulsion, apart from the inability of any ism to express the truth of the spirit which exceeds all such compartments, we seem here to be near to the real way out, to the discovery of the saving motive-force. The solution lies not in the reason, but in the soul of man, in its spiritual tendencies. It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone create a perfect human order. It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords. A deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it. But this brotherhood and love will not proceed by the vital instincts or the reason where they can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings and other discordant instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there are plenty of other passions to combat it. It is in the soul that it must find its roots; the love which is founded upon a deeper truth of our being, the brotherhood or, let us say,for this is another feeling than any vital or mental sense of brotherhood, a calmer more durable motive-force,the spiritual comradeship which is the expression of an inner realisation of oneness. For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the unique godhead in each man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race; for the Spirit, the inmost self, the universal Godhead in every being is that whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal life and nature.
12.10 - The Sunlit Path, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The modern, particularly the western mind captured by the rational or scientific spirit cannot but pursue the same line even in the domain of other and higher realities. The father and the great representative of the movement was Descartes, the very famous French thinker. To find the pure and unalloyed truth, he taught, one must keep away all possibility of error: so to dispel all doubt one must begin by doubting everything, to avoid being the dupe of imagination, delusion or hallucination it is always safe to doubt everything. A second reflection, however, raises the question, but who doubts: it is I who doubt, the one who doubts is I; the doubter cannot be doubted, so he exists. Thus we arrive at the first undoubtable reality. But the irony of the argument is that even the doubter came to be doubted In the end: there is no guarantee that even the doubter is not an illusion. Thus we wander into a blind lane, a cul de sac: we knock our head against a dead wall.
Modern scientific agnosticism or scepticism has been thus compelled to modify a little the Cartesian way: not to doubt outright, but to accept a probability, a working hypothesis as it is called: to see how it works provisionally, whether it is or it is not contradicted by other elements. If it gives a cogent and consistent and unchallenged view of things then it can be with the largest amount of certainty accepted as true. Even then we are in a world of suppositions and relativities, only approximations and nowhere near the absolute truth. The hope of finding the pure absolute truth is deferred indefinitely and "hope deferred sickeneth the heart."
1.2.11 - Patience and Perseverance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You have only to remain quiet and firm in your following of the path and your will to go to the end. If you do that, circumstances will In the end be obliged to shape themselves to your will, because it will be the Divine Will in you.
1.21 - The Ascent of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:The second term of the original status of life is subconscious will which in the secondary status becomes hunger and conscious desire, - hunger and desire, the first seed of conscious mind. The growth into the third status of life by the principle of association, the growth of love, does not abolish the law of desire, but rather transforms and fulfils it. Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange; it is a commerce between being and being. Physical life does not desire to give itself, it desires only to receive. It is true that it is compelled to give itself, for the life which only receives and does not give must become barren, wither and perish, - if indeed such life in its entirety is possible at all here or in any world; but it is compelled, not willing, it obeys the subconscious impulse of Nature rather than consciously shares in it. Even when love intervenes, the self-giving at first still preserves to a large extent the mechanical character of the subconscious will in the atom. Love itself at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving and surrendering to others which it admits chiefly as a necessary price for the thing that it desires. But here it has not yet attained to its true nature; its true law is to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving is equal to the joy of receiving and tends In the end to become even greater; but that is when it is shooting beyond itself under the pressure of the psychic flame to attain to the fulfilment of utter unity and has therefore to realise that which seemed to it not-self as an even greater and dearer self than its own individuality. In its life-origin, the law of love is the impulse to realise and fulfil oneself in others and by others, to be enriched by enriching, to possess and be possessed because without being possessed one does not possess oneself utterly.
10:The inert incapacity of atomic existence to possess itself, the subjection of the material individual to the not-self, belongs to the first status of life. The consciousness of limitation and the struggle to possess, to master both self and the not-self is the type of the secondary status. Here, too, the development to the third status brings a transformation of the original terms into a fulfilment and a harmony which repeat the terms while seeming to contradict them. There comes about through association and through love a recognition of the not-self as a greater self and therefore a consciously accepted submission to its law and need which fulfils the increasing impulse of aggregate life to absorb the individual; and there is a possession again by the individual of the life of others as his own and of all that it has to give him as his own which fulfils the opposite impulse of individual possession. Nor can this relation of mutuality between the individual and the world he lives in be expressed or complete or secure unless the same relation is established between individual and individual and between aggregate and aggregate. All the difficult effort of man towards the harmonisation of self-affirmation and freedom, by which he possesses himself, with association and love, fraternity, comradeship, in which he gives himself to others, his ideals of harmonious equilibrium, justice, mutuality, equality by which he creates a balance of the two opposites, are really an attempt inevitably predetermined in its lines to solve the original problem of Nature, the very problem of Life itself, by the resolution of the conflict between the two opposites which present themselves in the very foundations of Life in Matter. The resolution is attempted by the higher principle of Mind which alone can find the road towards the harmony intended, even though the harmony itself can only be found in a Power still beyond us.
1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The normal society treats man essentially as a physical, vital and mental being. For the life, the mind, the body are the three terms of existence with which it has some competence to deal. It develops a system of mental growth and efficiency, an intellectual, aesthetic and moral culture. It evolves the vital side of human life and creates an ever-growing system of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more and more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops. Depressing by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour of the physical and animal man, it tries to set the balance right by systems of physical culture, a cumbrous science of habits and remedies intended to cure the ills it has created and as much amelioration as it can manage of the artificial forms of living that are necessary to its social system. In the end, however, experience shows that society tends to die by its own development, a sure sign that there is some radical defect in its system, a certain proof that its idea of man and its method of development do not correspond to all the reality of the human being and to the aim of life which that reality imposes.
There is then a radical defect somewhere in the process of human civilisation; but where is its seat and by what issue shall we come out of the perpetual cycle of failure? Our civilised development of life ends in an exhaustion of vitality and a refusal of Nature to lend her support any further to a continued advance upon these lines; our civilised mentality, after disturbing the balance of the human system to its own greater profit, finally discovers that it has exhausted and destroyed that which fed it and loses its power of healthy action and productiveness. It is found that civilisation has created many more problems than it can solve, has multiplied excessive needs and desires the satisfaction of which it has not sufficient vital force to sustain, has developed a jungle of claims and artificial instincts in the midst of which life loses its way and has no longer any sight of its aim. The more advanced minds begin to declare civilisation a failure and society begins to feel that they are right. But the remedy proposed is either a halt or even a retrogression, which means In the end more confusion, stagnation and decay, or a reversion to Nature which is impossible or can only come about by a cataclysm and disintegration of society; or even a cure is aimed at by carrying artificial remedies to their acme, by more and more Science, more and more mechanical devices, a more scientific organisation of life, which means that the engine shall replace life, the arbitrary logical reason substitute itself for complex Nature and man be saved by machinery. As well say that to carry a disease to its height is the best way to its cure.
It may be suggested on the contrary and with some chance of knocking at the right door that the radical defect of all our systems is their deficient development of just that which society has most neglected, the spiritual element, the soul in man which is his true being. Even to have a healthy body, a strong vitality and an active and clarified mind and a field for their action and enjoyment, carries man no more than a certain distance; afterwards he flags and tires for want of a real self-finding, a satisfying aim for his action and progress. These three things do not make the sum of a complete manhood; they are means to an ulterior end and cannot be made for ever an aim in themselves. Add a rich emotional life governed by a well-ordered ethical standard, and still there is the savour of something left out, some supreme good which these things mean, but do not in themselves arrive at, do not discover till they go beyond themselves. Add a religious system and a widespread spirit of belief and piety, and still you have not found the means of social salvation. All these things human society has developed, but none of them has saved it from disillusionment, weariness and decay. The ancient intellectual cultures of Europe ended in disruptive doubt and sceptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline. Modern society has discovered a new principle of survival, progress, but the aim of that progress it has never discovered,unless the aim is always more knowledge, more equipment, convenience and comfort, more enjoyment, a greater and still greater complexity of the social economy, a more and more cumbrously opulent life. But these things must lead In the end where the old led, for they are only the same thing on a larger scale; they lead in a circle, that is to say, nowhere: they do not escape from the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, they do not really find the secret of self-prolongation by constant self-renewal which is the principle of immortality, but only seem for a moment to find it by the illusion of a series of experiments each of which ends in disappointment. That so far has been the nature of modern progress. Only in its new turn inwards, towards a greater subjectivity now only beginning, is there a better hope; for by that turning it may discover that the real truth of man is to be found in his soul. It is not indeed certain that a subjective age will lead us there, but it gives us the possibility, can turn in that direction, if used rightly, the more inward movement.
It will be said that this is an old discovery and that it governed the old societies under the name of religion. But that was only an appearance. The discovery was there, but it was made for the life of the individual only, and even for him it looked beyond the earth for its fulfilment and at earth only as the place of his preparation for a solitary salvation or release from the burden of life. Human society itself never seized on the discovery of the soul as a means for the discovery of the law of its own being or on a knowledge of the souls true nature and need and its fulfilment as the right way of terrestrial perfection. If we look at the old religions in their social as apart from their individual aspect, we see that the use society made of them was only of their most unspiritual or at any rate of their less spiritual parts. It made use of them to give an august, awful and would-be eternal sanction to its mass of customs and institutions; it made of them a veil of mystery against human questioning and a shield of darkness against the innovator. So far as it saw in religion a means of human salvation and perfection, it laid hands upon it at once to mechanise it, to catch the human soul and bind it on the wheels of a socio-religious machinery, to impose on it in the place of spiritual freedom an imperious yoke and an iron prison. It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church, a priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to accept and to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below. This false socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind.
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The spiritual aim will recognise that man as he grows in his being must have as much free space as possible for all its members to grow in their own strength, to find out themselves and their potentialities. In their freedom they will err, because experience comes through many errors, but each has in itself a divine principle and they will find it out, disengage its presence, significance and law as their experience of themselves deepens and increases. Thus true spirituality will not lay a yoke upon science and philosophy or compel them to square their conclusions with any statement of dogmatic religious or even of assured spiritual truth, as some of the old religions attempted, vainly, ignorantly, with an unspiritual obstinacy and arrogance. Each part of mans being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow In the end, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgment, with no other first propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes. Science and philosophy are not bound to square their observations and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. In the end, if left free in their action, they will find the unity of Truth with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give us. But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God and good and beauty if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them. For all these rejections must come round In the end of their circling and return to a larger truth of the things they refuse. Often we find atheism both in individual and society a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth: one has sometimes to deny God in order to find him; the finding is inevitable at the end of all earnest scepticism and denial.
The same law holds good in Art; the aesthetic being of man rises similarly on its own curve towards its diviner possibilities. The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit. But in order that it may come to do this greatest thing largely and sincerely, it must first endeavour to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them has to be revealed. The dogma that Art must be religious or not be at all, is a false dogma, just as is the claim that it must be subservient to ethics or utility or scientific truth or philosophic ideas. Art may make use of these things as elements, but it has its own svadharma, essential law, and it will rise to the widest spirituality by following out its own natural lines with no other yoke than the intimate law of its own being.
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The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a fullness of life and mans being in the individual and the race which will be the base for the heights of the spirit,the base becoming In the end of one substance with the peaks. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty and the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy as poor, negligible or misleading intellectual pursuits,though the temporary utility even of these exaggerations as against the opposite excesses need not be denied; it will be all things to all, but in all it will be at once their highest aim and meaning and the most all-embracing expression of themselves in which all they are and seek for will be fulfilled. It will aim at establishing in society the true inner theocracy, not the false theocracy of a dominant Church or priesthood, but that of the inner Priest, Prophet and King. It will reveal to man the divinity in himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty, Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhvena,1 and so find it and live in it, that howevereven in all kinds of wayshe lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,2 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.
Gita.
1.22 - The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nietzsches idea that to develop the superman out of our present very unsatisfactory manhood is our real business, is in itself an absolutely sound teaching. His formulation of our aim, to become ourselves, to exceed ourselves, implying, as it does, that man has not yet found all his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown? It is something divine, is the answer, a divinity Olympian, Apollonian, Dionysiac, which the reasoning and consciously willing animal, man, is labouring more or less obscurely to become. Certainly, it is all that; but in what shall we find the seed of that divinity and what is the poise in which the superman, once self-found, can abide and be secure from lapse into this lower and imperfect manhood? Is it the intellect and will, the double-aspected buddhi of the Indian psychological system? But this is at present a thing so perplexed, so divided against itself, so uncertain of everything it gains, up to a certain point indeed magically creative and efficient but, when all has been said and done, In the end so splendidly futile, so at war with and yet so dependent upon and subservient to our lower nature, that even if in it there lies concealed some seed of the entire divinity, it can hardly itself be the seed and at any rate gives us no such secure and divine poise as we are seeking. Therefore we say, not the intellect and will, but that supreme thing in us yet higher than the Reason, the spirit, here concealed behind the coatings of our lower nature, is the secret seed of the divinity and will be, when discovered and delivered, luminous above the mind, the wide ground upon which a divine life of the human being can be with security founded.
When we speak of the superman, we speak evidently of something abnormal or supernormal to our present nature, so much so that the very idea of it becomes easily alarming and repugnant to our normal humanity. The normal human does not desire to be called out from its constant mechanical round to scale what may seem to it impossible heights and it loves still less the prospect of being exceeded, left behind and dominated,although the object of a true supermanhood is not exceeding and domination for its own sake but precisely the opening of our normal humanity to something now beyond itself that is yet its own destined perfection. But mark that this thing which we have called normal humanity, is itself something abnormal in Nature, something the like and parity of which we look around in vain to discover; it is a rapid freak, a sudden miracle. Abnormality in Nature is no objection, no necessary sign of imperfection, but may well be an effort at a much greater perfection. But this perfection is not found until the abnormal can find its own secure normality, the right organisation of its life in its own kind and power and on its own level. Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality,he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labour of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory. A kingdom is offered to him beside which his present triumphs in the realms of mind or over external Nature will appear only as a rough hint and a poor beginning.
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Life cannot be entirely rational, cannot conform entirely to the ethical or the aesthetic or the scientific and philosophic mentality; mind is not the destined archangel of the transformation. All appearances to the contrary are always a trompe loeil, an intellectual, aesthetic or ethical illusion. Dominated, repressed life may be, but it reserves its right; and though individuals or a class may establish this domination for a time and impose some simulacrum of it upon the society, Life In the end circumvents the intelligence; it gets strong elements in it for always there are traitor elements at workto come over to its side and reestablishes its instincts, recovers its field; or if it fails in this, it has its revenge in its own decay which brings about the decay of the society, the disappointment of the perennial hope. So much so, that there are times when mankind perceives this fact and, renouncing the attempt to dominate the life-instinct, determines to use the intelligence for its service and to give it light in its own field instead of enslaving it to a higher but chimerical ideal.
Such a period was the recent materialistic age, when the intellect of man seemed decided to study thoroughly Life and Matter, to admit only that, to recognise mind only as an instrument of Life and Matter, and to devote all its knowledge to a tremendous expansion of the vital and physical life, its practicality, its efficiency, its comfort and the splendid ordering of its instincts of production, possession and enjoyment. That was the character of the materialistic, commercial, economic age of mankind, a period in which the ethical mind persisted painfully, but with decreasing self-confidence, an increasing self-questioning and a tendency to yield up the fortress of the moral law to the life-instinct, the aesthetic instinct and intelligence flourished as a rather glaring exotic ornament, a sort of rare orchid in the button-hole of the vital man, and reason became the magnificent servant of Life and Matter. The titanic development of the vital Life which followed, is ending as the Titans always end; it lit its own funeral pyre in the conflagration of a world-war, its natural upshot, a struggle between the most efficient and civilised nations for the possession and enjoyment of the world, of its wealth, its markets, its available spaces, an inflated and plethoric commercial expansion, largeness of imperial size and rule. For that is what the great war signified and was in its real origin, because that was the secret or the open intention of all pre-war diplomacy and international politics; and if a nobler idea was awakened at least for a time, it was only under the scourge of Death and before the terrifying spectre of a gigantic mutual destruction. Even so the awakening was by no means complete, nor everywhere quite sincere, but it was there and it was struggling towards birth even in Germany, once the great protagonist of the vitalistic philosophy of life. In that awakening lay some hope of better things. But for the moment at least the vitalistic aim has once more raised its head in a new form and the hope has dimmed in a darkness and welter in which only the eye of faith can see chaos preparing a new cosmos.
1.23 - Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What then will be that state of society, what that readiness of the common mind of man which will be most favourable to this change, so that even if it cannot at once effectuate itself, it may at least make for its ways a more decisive preparation than has been hitherto possible? For that seems the most important element, since it is that, it is the unpreparedness, the unfitness of the society or of the common mind of man which is always the chief stumbling-block. It is the readiness of this common mind which is of the first importance; for even if the condition of society and the principle and rule that govern society are opposed to the spiritual change, even if these belong almost wholly to the vital, to the external, the economic, the mechanical order, as is certainly the way at present with human masses, yet if the common human mind has begun to admit the ideas proper to the higher order that is In the end to be, and the heart of man has begun to be stirred by aspirations born of these ideas, then there is a hope of some advance in the not distant future. And here the first essential sign must be the growth of the subjective idea of life,the idea of the soul, the inner being, its powers, its possibilities, its growth, its expression and the creation of a true, beautiful and helpful environment for it as the one thing of first and last importance. The signals must be there that are precursors of a subjective age in humanitys thought and social endeavour.
These ideas are likely first to declare their trend in philosophy, in psychological thinking, in the arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, in the main idea of ethics, in the application of subjective principles by thinkers to social questions, even perhaps, though this is a perilous effort, to politics and economics, that hard refractory earthy matter which most resists all but a gross utilitarian treatment. There will be new unexpected departures of science or at least of research,since to such a turn in its most fruitful seekings the orthodox still deny the name of science. Discoveries will be made that thin the walls between soul and matter; attempts there will be to extend exact knowledge into the psychological and psychic realms with a realisation of the truth that these have laws of their own which are other than the physical, but not the less laws because they escape the external senses and are infinitely plastic and subtle. There will be a labour of religion to reject its past heavy weight of dead matter and revivify its strength in the fountains of the spirit. These are sure signs, if not of the thing to be, at least of a great possibility of it, of an effort that will surely be made, another endeavour perhaps with a larger sweep and a better equipped intelligence capable not only of feeling but of understanding the Truth that is demanding to be heard. Some such signs we can see at the present time although they are only incipient and sporadic and have not yet gone far enough to warrant a confident certitude. It is only when these groping beginnings have found that for which they are seeking, that it can be successfully applied to the remoulding of the life of man. Till then nothing better is likely to be achieved than an inner preparation and, for the rest, radical or revolutionary experiments of a doubtful kind with the details of the vast and cumbrous machinery under which life now groans and labours.
A subjective age may stop very far short of spirituality; for the subjective turn is only a first condition, not the thing itself, not the end of the matter. The search for the Reality, the true self of man, may very easily follow out the natural order described by the Upanishad in the profound apologue of the seekings of Bhrigu, son of Varuna. For first the seeker found the ultimate reality to be Matter and the physical, the material being, the external man our only self and spirit. Next he fixed on life as the Reality and the vital being as the self and spirit; in the third essay he penetrated to Mind and the mental being; only afterwards could he get beyond the superficial subjective through the supramental Truth-Consciousness to the eternal, the blissful, the ever creative Reality of which these are the sheaths. But humanity may not be as persistent or as plastic as the son of Varuna, the search may stop short anywhere. Only if it is intended that he shall now at last arrive and discover, will the Spirit break each insufficient formula as soon as it has shaped itself and compel the thought of man to press forward to a larger discovery and In the end to the largest and most luminous of all. Something of the kind has been happening, but only in a very external way and on the surface. After the material formula which governed the greater part of the nineteenth century had burdened man with the heaviest servitude to the machinery of the outer material life that he has ever yet been called upon to bear, the first attempt to break through, to get to the living reality in things and away from the mechanical idea of life and living and society, landed us in that surface vitalism which had already begun to govern thought before the two formulas inextricably locked together lit up and flung themselves on the lurid pyre of the world-war. The vital lan has brought us no deliverance, but only used the machinery already created with a more feverish insistence, a vehement attempt to live more rapidly, more intensely, an inordinate will to act and to succeed, to enlarge the mere force of living or to pile up a gigantic efficiency of the collective life. It could not have been otherwise even if this vitalism had been less superficial and external, more truly subjective. To live, to act, to grow, to increase the vital force, to understand, utilise and fulfil the intuitive impulse of life are not things evil in themselves: rather they are excellent things, if rightly followed and rightly used, that is to say, if they are directed to something beyond the mere vitalistic impulse and are governed by that within which is higher than Life. The Life-power is an instrument, not an aim; it is in the upward scale the first great subjective supraphysical instrument of the Spirit and the base of all action and endeavour. But a Life-power that sees nothing beyond itself, nothing to be served except its own organised demands and impulses, will be very soon like the force of steam driving an engine without the driver or an engine in which the locomotive force has made the driver its servant and not its controller. It can only add the uncontrollable impetus of a high-crested or broad-based Titanism, or it may be even a nether flaming demonism, to the Nature forces of the material world with the intellect as its servant, an impetus of measureless unresting creation, appropriation, expansion which will end in something violent, huge and colossal, foredoomed in its very nature to excess and ruin, because light is not in it nor the souls truth nor the sanction of the gods and their calm eternal will and knowledge.
But beyond the subjectivism of the vital self there is the possibility of a mental subjectivism which would at first perhaps, emerging out of the predominant vitalism and leaning upon the already realised idea of the soul as a soul of Life in action but correcting it, appear as a highly mentalised pragmatism. This first stage is foreshadowed in an increasing tendency to rationalise entirely man and his life, to govern individual and social existence by an ordered scientific plan based upon his discovery of his own and of lifes realities. This attempt is bound to fail because reason and rationality are not the whole of man or of life, because reason is only an intermediate interpreter, not the original knower, creator and master of our being or of cosmic existence. It can besides only mechanise life in a more intelligent way than in the past; to do that seems to be all that the modern intellectual leaders of the race can discover as the solution of the heavy problem with which we are impaled. But it is conceivable that this tendency may hereafter rise to the higher idea of man as a mental being, a soul in mind that must develop itself individually and collectively in the life and body through the play of an ever-expanding mental existence. This greater idea would realise that the elevation of the human existence will come not through material efficiency alone or the complex play of his vital and dynamic powers, not solely by mastering through the aid of the intellect the energies of physical Nature for the satisfaction of the life-instincts, which can only be an intensification of his present mode of existence, but through the greatening of his mental and psychic being and a discovery, bringing forward and organisation of his subliminal nature and its forces, the utilisation of a larger mind and a larger life waiting for discovery within us. It would see in life an opportunity for the joy and power of knowledge, for the joy and power of beauty, for the joy and power of the human will mastering not only physical Nature, but vital and mental Nature. It might discover her secret yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realise itself in the act, inner means of overcoming the obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous achievements of material Science. A development of this kind is far enough away from the dreams of the mass of men, but there are certain pale hints and presages of such a possibility and ideas which lead to it are already held by a great number who are perhaps in this respect the yet unrecognised vanguard of humanity. It is not impossible that behind the confused morning voices of the hour a light of this kind, still below the horizon, may be waiting to ascend with its splendours.
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A spiritual age of mankind will perceive this truth. It will not try to make man perfect by machinery or keep him straight by tying up all his limbs. It will not present to the member of the society his higher self in the person of the policeman, the official and the corporal, nor, let us say, in the form of a socialistic bureaucracy or a Labour Soviet. Its aim will be to diminish as soon and as far as possible the need of the element of external compulsion in human life by awakening the inner divine compulsion of the spirit within and all the preliminary means it will use will have that for its aim. In the end it will employ chiefly if not solely the spiritual compulsion which even the spiritual individual can exercise on those around him, and how much more should a spiritual society be able to do it,that which awakens within us in spite of all inner resistance and outer denial the compulsion of the Light, the desire and the power to grow through ones own nature into the Divine. For the perfectly spiritualised society will be one in which, as is dreamed by the spiritual anarchist, all men will be deeply free, and it will be so because the preliminary condition will have been satisfied. In that state each man will be not a law to himself, but the law, the divine Law, because he will be a soul living in the Divine Reality and not an ego living mainly if not entirely for its own interest and purpose. His life will be led by the law of his own divine nature liberated from the ego.
Nor will that mean a breaking up of all human society into the isolated action of individuals; for the third word of the Spirit is unity. The spiritual life is the flower not of a featureless but a conscious and diversified oneness. Each man has to grow into the Divine Reality within himself through his own individual being, therefore is a certain growing measure of freedom a necessity of the being as it develops and perfect freedom the sign and the condition of the perfect life. But also, the Divine whom he thus sees in himself, he sees equally in all others and as the same Spirit in all. Therefore too is a growing inner unity with others a necessity of his being and perfect unity the sign and condition of the perfect life. Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek ones own individual liberation or perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being. If the divinity sought were a separate godhead within oneself and not the one Divine, or if one sought God for oneself alone, then indeed the result might be a grandiose egoism, the Olympian egoism of a Goe the or the Titanic egoism imagined by Nietzsche, or it might be the isolated self-knowledge or asceticism of the ivory tower or the Stylites pillar. But he who sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but the perfection of all. He will not feel his individuality perfect except in the largest universality, nor his own life to be full life except as it is one with the universal life. He will not live either for himself or for the State and society, for the individual ego or the collective ego, but for something much greater, for God in himself and for the Divine in the universe.
1.23 - FESTIVAL AT SURENDRAS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Their love for Krishna destroyed their attachment to worldly things. Neither the threats of their relatives nor the criticism of others could make them desist from seeking the company of Krishna. In the love of the gopis for Krishna there was not the slightest trace of worldliness. It was the innate attraction of God for pure souls, as of the magnet for iron. The author of the Bhagavata has compared this love to the all-consuming love of a woman for her beloved. Before the on rush of that love all barriers between man and God are swept away. The devotee surrenders himself completely to his Divine Beloved and In the end becomes one with Him.
Radha was the foremost of the gopis, and Krishna's chief playmate. She felt an indescribable longing for union with Him. A moment's separation from Krishna would rend her heart and soul.
1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:The true soul secret in us - subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, - this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the existence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcendence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul, caitya purus.a, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting by their development and experience. These other person-powers in man, these beings of his being, are also veiled in their true entity, but they put forward temporary personalities which compose our outer individuality and whose combined superficial action and appearance of status we call ourselves: this inmost entity also, taking form in us as the psychic Person, puts forward a psychic personality which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and death and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold and changing vesture. The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine. It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. On the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-developed, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in character and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an apparent lord and victor. It is then the outer desire-soul, the pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience.7 If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature of mind, life and body, then these can be cast into soul images of what is true, right and beautiful and In the end the whole nature can be turned towards the real aim of life, the supreme victory, the ascent into spiritual existence.
11:But it might seem then that by bringing this psychic entity, this true soul in us, into the front and giving it there the lead and rule we shall gain all the fulfilment of our natural being that we can seek for and open also the gates of the kingdom of the Spirit. And it might well be reasoned that there is no need for any intervention of a superior Truth-Consciousness or principle of Supermind to help us to attain to the divine status or the divine perfection. Yet, although the psychic transformation is one necessary condition of the total transformation of our existence, it is not all that is needed for the largest spiritual change. In the first place, since this is the individual soul in Nature, it can open to the hidden diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light and power and experience, but another, a spiritual transformation from above is needed for us to possess our self in its universality and transcendence. By itself the psychic being at a certain stage might be content to create a formation of truth, good and beauty and make that its station; at a farther stage it might become passively subject to the worldself, a mirror of the universal existence, consciousness, power, delight, but not their full participant or possessor. Although more nearly and thrillingly united to the cosmic consciousness in knowledge, emotion and even appreciation through the senses, it might become purely recipient and passive, remote from mastery and action in the world; or, one with the static self behind the cosmos, but separate inwardly from the world-movement, losing its individuality in its Source, it might return to that Source and have neither the will nor the power any further for that which was its ultimate mission here, to lead the nature also towards its divine realisation. For the psychic being came into Nature from the Self, the Divine, and it can turn back from Nature to the silent Divine through the silence of the Self and a supreme spiritual immobility. Again, an eternal portion of the Divine,8 this part is by the law of the Infinite inseparable from its Divine Whole, this part is indeed itself that Whole, except in its frontal appearance, its frontal separative self-experience; it may awaken to that reality and plunge into it to the apparent extinction or at least the merging of the individual existence. A small nucleus here in the mass of our ignorant Nature, so that it is described in the Upanishad as no bigger than a man's thumb, it can by the spiritual influx enlarge itself and embrace the whole world with the heart and mind in an intimate communion or oneness. Or it may become aware of its eternal Companion and elect to live for ever in His presence, in an imperishable union and oneness as the eternal lover with the eternal Beloved, which of all spiritual experiences is the most intense in beauty and rapture. All these are great and splendid achievements of our spiritual self-finding, but they are not necessarily the last end and entire consummation; more is possible.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: We have become rooted in forms and so we require a concrete form for meditating upon. Only that which we contemplate will In the end remain over. When you contemplate the other thoughts disappear. So long as you need to contemplate there are other thoughts, Where are you? You contemplate because you exist. For the contemplator must contemplate.
The contemplation can only be where he is. Contemplation wards off all other thoughts. You should merge yourself in the source. At times we merge in the source unconsciously, as in sleep, death, swoon, etc.
1.24 - PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Three yogas explained by Master "Innumerable are the ways that lead to God. There are the paths of jnna, of karma, and of bhakti. If you are sincere, you will attain God In the end, whichever path you follow. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of yoga: jnanayoga, karma yoga, and bhaktiyoga.
"What is jnanayoga? The Jnni seeks to realize Brahman. He discriminates, saying, 'Not this, not this'. He discriminates, saying, 'Brahman is real and the universe illusory.' He discriminates between the Real and the unreal. As he comes to the end of discrimination, he goes into samdhi and attains the Knowledge of Brahman.
1.24 - The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A great access of spirituality in the past has ordinarily had for its result the coming of a new religion of a special type and its endeavour to impose itself upon mankind as a new universal order. This, however, was always not only a premature but a wrong crystallisation which prevented rather than helped any deep and serious achievement. The aim of a spiritual age of mankind must indeed be one with the essential aim of subjective religions, a new birth, a new consciousness, an upward evolution of the human being, a descent of the spirit into our members, a spiritual reorganisation of our life; but if it limits itself by the old familiar apparatus and the imperfect means of a religious movement, it is likely to register another failure. A religious movement brings usually a wave of spiritual excitement and aspiration that communicates itself to a large number of individuals and there is as a result a temporary uplifting and an effective formation, partly spiritual, partly ethical, partly dogmatic in its nature. But the wave after a generation or two or at most a few generations begins to subside; the formation remains. If there has been a very powerful movement with a great spiritual personality as its source, it may leave behind a central influence and an inner discipline which may well be the starting-point of fresh waves; but these will be constantly less powerful and enduring in proportion as the movement gets farther and farther away from its source. For meanwhile in order to bind together the faithful and at the same time to mark them off from the unregenerated outer world, there will have grown up a religious order, a Church, a hierarchy, a fixed and unprogressive type of ethical living, a set of crystallised dogmas, ostentatious ceremonials, sanctified superstitions, an elaborate machinery for the salvation of mankind. As a result spirituality is increasingly subordinated to intellectual belief, to outward forms of conduct and to external ritual, the higher to the lower motives, the one thing essential to aids and instruments and accidents. The first spontaneous and potent attempt to convert the whole life into spiritual living yields up its place to a set system of belief and ethics touched by spiritual emotion; but finally even that saving element is dominated by the outward machinery, the sheltering structure becomes a tomb. The Church takes the place of the spirit and a formal subscription to its creed, rituals and order is the thing universally demanded; spiritual living is only practised by the few within the limits prescribed by their fixed creed and order. The majority neglect even that narrow effort and are contented to replace by a careful or negligent piety the call to a deeper life. In the end it is found that the spirit in the religion has become a thin stream choked by sands; at the most brief occasional floodings of its dry bed of conventions still prevent it from becoming a memory in the dead chapters of Time.
The ambition of a particular religious belief and form to universalise and impose itself is contrary to the variety of human nature and to at least one essential character of the Spirit. For the nature of the Spirit is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature. Again and this is yet another source of inevitable failure the usual tendency of these credal religions is to turn towards an after-world and to make the regeneration of the earthly life a secondary motive; this tendency grows in proportion as the original hope of a present universal regeneration of mankind becomes more and more feeble. Therefore while many new spiritual waves with their strong special motives and disciplines must necessarily be the forerunners of a spiritual age, yet their claims must be subordinated in the general mind of the race and of its spiritual leaders to the recognition that all motives and disciplines are valid and yet none entirely valid since they are means and not the one thing to be done. The one thing essential must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life of the human being to the lead of the spirit. The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course.
1.25 - The Knot of Matter, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:Especially and most fatally, the ignorance, inertia and division of Matter impose on the vital and mental existence emerging in it the law of pain and suffering and the unrest of dissatisfaction with its status of division, inertia and ignorance. Ignorance would indeed bring no pain of dissatisfaction if the mental consciousness were entirely ignorant, if it could halt satisfied in some shell of custom, unaware of its own ignorance or of the infinite ocean of consciousness and knowledge by which it lives surrounded; but precisely it is to this that the emerging consciousness in Matter awakes, first, to its ignorance of the world in which it lives and which it has to know and master in order to be happy, secondly, to the ultimate barrenness and limitation of this knowledge, to the meagreness and insecurity of the power and happiness it brings and to the awareness of an infinite consciousness, knowledge, true being in which alone is to be found a victorious and infinite happiness. Nor would the obstruction of inertia bring with it unrest and dissatisfaction if the vital sentience emerging in Matter were entirely inert, if it were kept satisfied with its own half-conscient limited existence, unaware of the infinite power and immortal existence in which it lives as part of and yet separated from it, or if it had nothing within driving it towards the effort really to participate in that infinity and immortality. But this is precisely what all life is driven to feel and seek from the first, its insecurity and the need and struggle for persistence, for self-preservation; it awakes In the end to the limitation of its existence and begins to feel the impulsion towards largeness and persistence, towards the infinite and the eternal.
10:And when in man life becomes wholly self-conscious, this unavoidable struggle and effort and aspiration reach their acme and the pain and discord of the world become finally too keenly sensible to be borne with contentment. Man may for a long time quiet himself by seeking to be satisfied with his limitations or by confining his struggle to such mastery as he can gain over this material world he inhabits, some mental and physical triumph of his progressive knowledge over its inconscient fixities, of his small, concentrated conscious will and power over its inertlydriven monstrous forces. But here, too, he finds the limitation, the poor inconclusiveness of the greatest results he can achieve and is obliged to look beyond. The finite cannot remain permanently satisfied so long as it is conscious either of a finite greater than itself or of an infinite beyond itself to which it can yet aspire. And if the finite could be so satisfied, yet the apparently finite being who feels himself to be really an infinite or feels merely the presence or the impulse and stirring of an infinite within, can never be satisfied till these two are reconciled, till That is possessed by him and he is possessed by it in whatever degree or manner. Man is such a finite-seeming infinity and cannot fail to arrive at a seeking after the Infinite. He is the first son of earth who becomes vaguely aware of God within him, of his immortality or of his need of immortality, and the knowledge is a whip that drives and a cross of crucifixion until he is able to turn it into a source of infinite light and joy and power.
11:This progressive development, this growing manifestation of the divine Consciousness and Force, Knowledge and Will that had lost itself in the ignorance and inertia of Matter, might well be a happy efflorescence proceeding from joy to greater and at last to infinite joy if it were not for the principle of rigid division from which Matter has started. The shutting up of the individual in his own personal consciousness of separate and limited mind, life and body prevents what would otherwise be the natural law of our development. It brings into the body the law of attraction and repulsion, of defence and attack, of discord and pain. For each body being a limited conscious-force feels itself exposed to the attack, impact, forceful contact of other such limited conscious-forces or of universal forces and, where it feels itself broken in upon or unable to harmonise the contacting and the recipient consciousness, it suffers discomfort and pain, is attracted or repelled, has to defend itself or to assail; it is constantly called upon to undergo what it is unwilling or unable to suffer. Into the emotional and the sense-mind the law of division brings the same reactions with the higher values of grief and joy, love and hatred, oppression and depression, all cast into terms of desire, and by desire into straining and effort, and by the straining into excess and defect of force, incapacity, the rhythm of attainment and disappointment, possession and recoil, a constant strife and trouble and unease. Into the mind as a whole, instead of a divine law of narrower truth flowing into greater truth, lesser light taken up into wider light, lower will surrendered to higher transforming will, pettier satisfaction progressing towards nobler and more complete satisfaction, it brings similar dualities of truth pursued by error, light by darkness, power by incapacity, pleasure of pursuit and attainment by pain of repulse and of dissatisfaction with what is attained; mind takes up its own affliction along with the affliction of life and body and becomes aware of the triple defect and insufficiency of our natural being. All this means the denial of Ananda, the negation of the trinity of Sachchidananda and therefore, if the negation be insuperable, the futility of existence; for existence in throwing itself out in the play of consciousness and force must seek that movement not merely for itself, but for satisfaction in the play, and if in the play no real satisfaction can be found, it must obviously be abandoned In the end as a vain attempt, a colossal mistake, a delirium of the self-embodying spirit.
12:This is the whole basis of the pessimist theory of the world, - optimist, it may be, as to worlds and states beyond, but pessimist as to the earthly life and the destiny of the mental being in his dealings with the material universe. For it affirms that since the very nature of material existence is division and the very seed of embodied mind is self-limitation, ignorance and egoism, to seek satisfaction of the spirit upon earth or to seek an issue and divine purpose and culmination for the world-play is a vanity and delusion; only in a heaven of the Spirit and not in the world, or only in the Spirit's true quietude and not in its phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only recover itself by rejecting as an error and a false step its attempt to find itself in the finite. Nor can the emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of Mind into which Mind brings its own rule of division and ignorance. Therefore within this illusion Mind can only find itself; it can only travel between the three terms of the divided existence it has created: it cannot find there the unity of the Spirit or the truth of the spiritual existence.
1.26 - PERSEVERANCE AND REGULARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
If a sharp penance had been laid upon me, I know of none that I would not very often have willingly undertaken, rather than prepare myself for prayer by self-recollection. And certainly the violence with which Satan assailed me was so irresistible, or my evil habits were so strong, that I did not betake myself to prayer; and the sadness I felt on entering the oratory was so great that it required all the courage I had to force myself in. They say of me that my courage is not slight, and it is known that God has given me a courage beyond that of a woman; but I have made a bad use of it. In the end Our Lord came to my relief, and when I had done this violence to myself, I found greater peace and joy than I sometimes had when I had a desire to pray.
St. Teresa
1.27 - Succession to the Soul, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
practices which must In the end destroy them. The Polynesians seem
regularly to have killed two-thirds of their children. In some parts
1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:Yet, as in our subliminal or inner Mind, so in this Mind also a larger power of communication and mutuality still remains, a freer play of mentality and sense than human mind possesses, and the Ignorance is not complete; a conscious harmony, an interdependent organisation of right relations is more possible: mind is not yet perturbed by blind Life forces or obscured by irresponsive Matter. It is a plane of Ignorance, but not yet of falsehood or error, - or at least the lapse into falsehood and error is not yet inevitable; this Ignorance is limitative, but not necessarily falsificative. There is limitation of knowledge, an organisation of partial truths, but not a denial or opposite of truth or knowledge. This character of an organisation of partial truths on a basis of separative knowledge persists in Life and subtle Matter, for the exclusive concentration of Consciousness-Force which puts them into separative action does not entirely sever or veil Mind from Life or Mind and Life from Matter. The complete separation can take place only when the stage of Inconscience has been reached and our world of manifold Ignorance arises out of that tenebrous matrix. These other still conscient stages of the involution are indeed organisations of Conscious Force in which each lives from his own centre, follows out his own possibilities, and the predominant principle itself, whether Mind, Life or Matter, works out things on its own independent basis; but what is worked out are truths of itself, not illusions or a tangle of truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. But when by an exclusive concentration on Force and Form Consciousness-Force seems phenomenally to separate Consciousness from Force, or when it absorbs Consciousness in a blind sleep lost in Form and Force, then Consciousness has to struggle back to itself by a fragmentary evolution which necessitates error and makes falsehood inevitable. Nevertheless, these things too are not illusions that have sprung out of an original Non-Existence; they are, we might say, the unavoidable truths of a world born out of Inconscience. For the Ignorance is still in reality a knowledge seeking for itself behind the original mask of Inconscience; it misses and finds; its results, natural and even inevitable on their own line, are the true consequence of the lapse, - in a way, even, the right working of the recovery from the lapse. Existence plunging into an apparent Non-Existence, Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience, Delight of existence into a vast cosmic insensibility are the first result of the fall and, in the return from it by a struggling fragmentary experience, the rendering of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood, knowledge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleasure are the necessary process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of Truth, Knowledge, Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a contradiction of the truth of things. It could only be otherwise if all beings in the evolution were quiescently responsive to the psychic element within them and to the Supermind underlying Nature's operations; but here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles, would be the emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted characters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence. Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind and Supermind too must In the end fulfil themselves in this apparently opposite organisation from a dark Infinite.
16:Two things render that culmination more facile than it would otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has originated modifications of itself, - Intuition especially with its penetrative lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of country in our consciousness, - which can bring the concealed truth of things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and overmental beings, not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable. But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their action is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the medium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recognisable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind intervention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: We have become rooted in forms and so we require a concrete form for meditating upon. Only that which we contemplate will In the end remain over. When you contemplate the other thoughts disappear. So long as you need to contemplate there are other thoughts, Where are you? You contemplate because you exist. For the contemplator must contemplate.
The contemplation can only be where he is. Contemplation wards off all other thoughts. You should merge yourself in the source. At times we merge in the source unconsciously, as in sleep, death, swoon, etc.
1.3.04 - Peace, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
mountain may feel the touch of the stones, but the thing would be so slight and superficial that it would not be in the least affected. In the end even that reaction disappears.
The peace liberates from all dependence on outer contacts - it brings what the Gita calls the atmarati. But at first there is a difficulty in keeping it intact when there is the contact with others because the consciousness has the habit of running outwards in speech or external interchange or else of coming down to the normal level. One must therefore be very careful until it is fixed; once fixed it usually defends itself, for all outer contacts become surface things to a consciousness full of the higher peace.
1.33 - The Gardens of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
which finds vent in shrieks and shouts, In the endless discharge of
carronades and muskets, and the explosion of fire-works of every
1.3.5.01 - The Law of the Way, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Strive rightly and thou shalt have; trust and thy trust shall In the end be justified; but the dread Law of the Way is there and none can abrogate it.
1.3.5.03 - The Involved and Evolving Godhead, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The true knowledge of things is denied to our reason, because that is not our spirit's greatest essential power but only an expedient, a transitional instrument meant to deal with the appearance of things and their phenomenal process. True knowledge commences only when our consciousness can pass beyond its present normal limit in man: for then it becomes directly aware of its self and of the Power in the world and begins to have at least an initial knowledge by identity which is the sole true knowledge. Henceforward it knows and sees, no longer by the reason groping among external data, but by an ever increasing and always more luminous self-illumining and all illuminating experience. In the end it will become a conscious part of the
Divine revealing itself in the world; its life will be a power for the conscious evolution of that which is still unmanifested in the material universe.
1.39 - Prophecy, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
In the end now, that's the question; answer that!
Had I seen, perhaps, what hand was holding mine,
1.4.01 - The Divine Grace and Guidance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have said also that the Grace can at any moment act suddenly, but over that one has no control, because it comes by an incalculable Will which sees things that the mind cannot see. It is precisely the reason why one should never despair, - that and also because no sincere aspiration to the Divine can fail In the end.
Trust in the Divine Grace
Face all these things [inner disturbances] quietly and firmly with perseverance In the endeavour of the sadhana. Trust firmly in the Divine Grace and the Divine Grace will not fail you.
The best possible way [to "repay" the Divine Grace] is to allow the Divine Grace to work in you, never to oppose it, never to be ungrateful and turn against it - but to follow it always to the goal of Light and Peace and unity and Ananda.
--
Light which is felt as a presence other than one's personal self, not part of one's personal nature, but something that comes from above, though In the end it possesses the nature - or there is the Presence itself which carries with it indeed the absolute liberation, happiness, certitude. But the first responses of the
Divine are not often like that - they come rather as a touch, a pressure one must be in a condition to recognise and to accept, or it is a voice of assurance, sometimes a very "still small voice", a momentary Image or Presence; a whisper of Guidance sometimes, - there are many forms it may take. Then it withdraws and the preparation of the nature goes on till it is possible for the touch to come again and again, to last longer, to change into something more pressing and near and intimate. The Divine in the beginning does not impose himself - he asks for recognition, for acceptance. That is one reason why the mind must fall silent, not put tests, not make claims - there must be room for the true intuition which recognises at once the true touch and accepts it.
1.41 - Speaks of the fear of God and of how we must keep ourselves from venial sins., #The Way of Perfection, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
may be kept under control! In the end, whether willingly or no, we shall all serve Him-they by
compulsion and we with our whole heart. So that, if we please Him, they will be kept at bay and
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: So it was with Arjuna. For he says In the end nashto mohah
smritirlabdha (lost is my ignorance; memory restored).
D.: It was In the end. Before then he asked so many questions.
M.: The Truth was revealed even at the start. For the very first sloka of Sri
--
What happens In the end? Karna was ever the son of Kunti. The
tenth man was such all along. Rama was Vishnu all the time. Such
--
M.: Well - well. Let us see who succeeds In the end (After a short
time Sri Bhagavan went out).
1.45 - Unserious Conduct of a Pupil, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
To advance that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn't matter In the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.
But for you, having got so far in this incarnation, there must be a revolution. You must no longer hesitate, no longer plan; you must leap into the dark, and leap at once.
1.4 - Readings in the Taittiriya Upanishad, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
their own temporal purposes, but prove ineffective In the end,
because they do not bring to the highest good; they lead to no
15.07 - Souls Freedom, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Earth or material nature does not easily tolerate any thing unknown and foreign to it. Even if it is for its own well-being, a foreign touch makes it shrink and turn on itself. It is even painful for it to bear. In the end the earth is not to be goaded on or driven along: it has to go on its own. It must depend entirely on itself, bring out what it carries within itself or has acquired or stored. It has to outgrow its childhood or apprenticeship, the period when an intelligent amount of pressure or even coercion might be needed or inevitable. But that stage passed, the higher realisation is to be the natural expression of ordinary earth-life: its normal state is to be the state of the higher consciousness, its life naturally moved by its self-nature expressing its own truth.
If there is to be a Divine destiny for earth, it must be because of its free choice. There must be no pressure or even solicitude from any agent outside itself to compel it or force it that way. It must be a glad and spontaneous impulse from within to follow the line of destiny it has itself chosen.
15.09 - One Day More, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Naturally, this is not the end, the culmination. One step has still to be taken the material matter too has to be touched and remoulded and that means a hiatus, a time-lag In the end. The process of creation always follows this line, a thing to be created or embodied upon earth is first created in a subtle world. When it is ready, ready-made in that world, then it precipitates itself upon the material world, slowly or gradually or suddenly according to the cosmic will. An illustration to explain the point, the Mother herself gives it.
Once, asked about the liberation of India, sometime in 1915 when India was completely in bondage, she answered without the least hesitation: "India is free". She did not say "India will be free", she said simply "India is free" as though stating an actual fact. The physical fact however came about in the year 1947, that is to say, 32 years after the thing happened in the subtle world. Mother comments that is the exact image of the resistance to the manifestation, the physical realisation.
1.55 - Money, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
You ask me for the initiated view about the power of money. As the poet says: "O.k. oke; I'm yer bloke." F. Marion Crawford, a Victorian novelist, now (I think deservedly) obsolescent, thought I saw one of his books last week on the shelves of a tuppenny shark-library,*[AC48] wrote a tale Mr. Isaacs based on the life of one Mr. Jacobs, the Indian Rothschild of two generations ago, financing princes, little wars everything. One night in Bombay the burden of his wealth broke his nerve; he stood at the window of his hotel, and flung masses of money to the mob. Soon after came a stranger, and said to him, "You have insulted the fourth of the great powers that rule this world; it shall be taken from you." It was so; he lost all. In the end he became, after a fashion, Sannyasi, and died (I suppose) in the usual odour.
I thought of this incident in Paris in the twenties, when I saw American tourists plaster the bonnets of their cars with 1000 franc notes, or tear them up and strew the floors of banks with them. Grimly I prognosticated Twenty-Nine. And it was so.
--- Overview of adv in_the_end
The adv in the end has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (9) in the long run, in the end ::: (after a very lengthy period of time; "she will succeed in the long run")
2. (5) ultimately, finally, in the end, at last, at long last ::: (as the end result of a succession or process; "ultimately he had to give in"; "at long last the winter was over")
Wikipedia - In the End -- 2000 single by Linkin Park
Wikipedia - Jewish eschatology -- Area of Jewish theology and philosophy concerned with events that will happen in the end of days and related concepts
Wikipedia - Living in the End Times -- book by Slavoj ZiM-EM->ek
Wikipedia - Temple garment -- Type of underwear worn by adherents of the Latter Day Saint movement after they have taken part in the endowment ceremony
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Black Clover Movie -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Comedy Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Black Clover Movie Black Clover Movie -- (No synopsis yet.) -- Movie - ??? ??, ???? -- 43,935 N/ASeitokai Yakuindomo Movie -- -- GoHands -- 1 ep -- 4-koma manga -- Slice of Life Comedy School Shounen -- Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie -- Ousai Academy was originally an all-girls high school. Due to the declining birth rates in recent years, it was converted into a co-ed school. The first year male students would find themselves surrounded by girls and unfortunately, Tsuda Takatoshi is one of them. What's worse, he gets scolded on his first day by the student council president Shino Amakusa, which did not give a good first impression of him. Tsuda also meets the other student council members while getting scolded, and in the end, he gets late for class. As an apology for ruining his morning, Shino lets him join the student council for various of "reasons" and he accepts it, or rather, he's forced to accept. Thus begins his days as Tsuda soon realizes that he's the only normal student in Ousai Academy... -- Movie - Jul 21, 2017 -- 43,848 7.87
Chu Feng: B.E.E -- -- Haoliners Animation League -- 6 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Comedy Romance Fantasy Mecha School -- Chu Feng: B.E.E Chu Feng: B.E.E -- In 2017, a group of genius scientists achieve a remarkable breakthrough in bioengineering. However, all the new technologies are put into military use, beginning a new round of arms race. Vanguards, as the most significant achievement of the modern bioengineering and the most advanced weapon, are widely utilized in the race. Although vanguards are exceptionally combat-effective, their life expectancy is shortened by the nanomachines they use. Usually, most vanguards will retire from the army after a number of years in service. -- -- The heroine Liuli has also consumed too much of her lifespan after executing missions for a long time. With only 380 days left in her life, Liuli receives a new mission, to rescue a hostage being held in a civilian facility. It is without doubt a difficult mission for a vanguard like Liuli, who only knows how to kill and battle. However, Liuli obediently decides to accept the mission in the end. -- -- During the mission, Liuli surprisingly finds that the man who holds the hostage was once a vanguard. The former vanguard Zhongrong Zhou cries and asks the government to hand over the son of Eden. As a vanguard, Liuli feels deep contempt against Zhou. To eliminate the scum of the vanguards, a battle between two vanguards begins... -- -- (Source: Official site, edited) -- ONA - Jul 23, 2015 -- 15,845 5.90
Gall Force 1: Eternal Story -- -- AIC, animate Film, Artmic -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Adventure Space Mecha -- Gall Force 1: Eternal Story Gall Force 1: Eternal Story -- Two advanced civilizations, the Paranoids (a race of alien humanoids) and the Solenoids (who are all women) are waging a war that has gone on for centuries. When the Solenoid fleet leaves a battle to defend an experimentally terraformed world from the Paranoids, one damaged Solenoid ship, the Star Leaf, is separated from the fleet. -- -- Only seven women remain alive on the ship: Eluza, the captain, Rabby, the solid more or less main character, Lufy, the brash pilot, Catty, the mysterious science officer, Pony, the pink-haired ditzy tech, Patty, a solid crew member, and Remy, the cute one. -- -- After narrowly escaping the battle, the crew of the Star Leaf decides to continue with their orders and rendezvous at planet Chaos to defend it. It turns out, however, that their ship is the subject of a Paranoid experiment. In the end, it is up to the remaining crew Star Leaf to defend the artificial paradise of Chaos from the Paranoid fleet and the plans of the Solenoid leaders. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media -- Movie - Jul 28, 1986 -- 5,485 6.46
Hataraku Saibou!! -- -- David Production -- 8 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Shounen -- Hataraku Saibou!! Hataraku Saibou!! -- The cells of the human body never rest for too long; there's always something new to do and learn every day. At least, that's what Hakkekkyuu U-1146 feels as he rushes to and fro, searching for any pathogens that could cause harm to the body. Despite his dangerous line of work, it's all worth it to protect the happy smiles of Sekkekkyuu AE3803, the platelet crew, his fellow neutrophils, and the other cells he meets along the way. -- -- In his latest pathogen-hunting adventures, Hakkekkyuu U-1146 discovers how important cells can sometimes make mistakes, and that not all bacteria are actually bad. Everybody has their bad days, but everything eventually works out when their comrades have their backs. In the end, it's just another normal day for these hardworking cells! -- -- 175,777 7.31
Inyouchuu Shoku: Ryoushokutou Taimaroku - Kanzenban -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Demons Fantasy Hentai Horror Supernatural -- Inyouchuu Shoku: Ryoushokutou Taimaroku - Kanzenban Inyouchuu Shoku: Ryoushokutou Taimaroku - Kanzenban -- Inyouchuu Shoku Complete Edition is a compilation of both Inyouchuu Shoku episodes with an additional 10 minutes of extra footage at the end with the twins. These extra scenes are credited as "episode 3" in the end credits and constitute this entry. -- -- The demon hunters are back! Mikoto, Sui, and Takeru are sent to investigate a mysterious island where people have been disappearing repeatedly and dark yoma are rumored to be the cause. When the team first arrives it almost feels like a vacation to them, but it doesn't take them long to the feel the presence of something dark and evil... -- OVA - Jun 18, 2010 -- 3,692 6.08
Jewelpet Twinkle☆ -- -- Studio Comet -- 52 eps -- Original -- Fantasy Magic School Shoujo -- Jewelpet Twinkle☆ Jewelpet Twinkle☆ -- In Jewel Land, Jewelpets, creatures who has the natural ability to use magic lived in harmony with the Witches, attending the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to learn to use magic with their Jewel Eyes. However for Ruby, a white Japanese Hare whose magic sometimes fail, is appointed to go to the Human World to search for her partner. But when she used the card the magicians gave her, she was sent to the Human World by accident. In the Human World, A girl named Akari Sakura met her on the beach on her way to school. At first, Akari can't understand her due to her Jewel Land Language until Ruby took a special candy so she could speak and understand human language. As the day passes, Ruby knew about her problems and later apologized. A Jewel Charm appeared on Akari's hand and she realized it that she's chosen by Ruby to be her partner. After that, she decided to enter the Jewel Star Grand Prix, on the prize is that any wish that they wanted will be granted. Will she be the Next Jewel Star and her wish be granted in the end? Or It'll just end in one big disaster... -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- TV - Apr 3, 2010 -- 8,832 7.38
KanColle Movie -- -- Diomedéa -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Military Sci-Fi Drama -- KanColle Movie KanColle Movie -- The movie starts off after the events of Episode 3, when Kisaragi had sunk. The Mikawa Fleet (Furutaka, Aoba, Kako, Kinugasa and Tenryuu) are in the middle of Night Battle. Choukai uses Searchlight and gets medium damage, but they win in the end. A New Fleet Girl gets "dropped", emerging from the sea. It is Kisaragi. Kisaragi is brought back to the temporary base in Solomon Islands, but she is suffering from PTSD and has amnesia, unable to remember anyone from back in the anime, excluding Mutsuki... -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- Movie - Nov 26, 2016 -- 33,888 7.52
Kenju Giga -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Parody Psychological -- Kenju Giga Kenju Giga -- A dog race is interrupted by a ringmaster, who attaches fish to the dog’s collars and makes them run in circles. The crowd is incensed, but the ringmaster insists that the audience is no better off than the dogs. In the end the ringmaster is assassinated and the race continues, but a single red rose sprouts from the ringmaster’s blood; a symbol of truth in a crazy world? -- -- -AniDB -- Movie - ??? ??, 1970 -- 902 4.98
Kochira Katsushikaku Kameari Kouenmae Hashutsujo -- -- Gallop -- 373 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy Police -- Kochira Katsushikaku Kameari Kouenmae Hashutsujo Kochira Katsushikaku Kameari Kouenmae Hashutsujo -- Ryoutsu, being an underpaid policeman, is always coming up with underhanded schemes in order to make a quick buck. But in the end, his plans (which are ridiculous to begin with) always go wrong and land him in big trouble with the chief. -- 12,631 7.76
Lady Jewelpet -- -- Studio Comet, Zexcs -- 52 eps -- Original -- Fantasy Magic Romance Shoujo -- Lady Jewelpet Lady Jewelpet -- Momona is an ordinary junior-high school student hailing from Jewel Land. At her cousin's wedding, she envies the bride, Lady Diana, due to the fact that she is marrying the cousin who she had a slight crush on. However, once she sees Lady Diana and her cousin together, Momona begins to like her, and accepts her as her cousin's bride. Just as Lady Diana is about to properly meet her and introduce herself, Momona is transported to a snowy place in Jewel Land where the ruler, Lady Jewel, is giving a speech to the Petit Ladies, girls who are chosen as Jewel Candidates to be the next Lady Jewel. Momona meets her partner and mentor, Ruby, a white rabbit, who will guide her through the tasks in becoming Lady Jewel. Whoever passes the most tasks wins and becomes the next Lady Jewel, but standing in her way is Lillian, a girl who also aims to win the title of Lady Jewel, so she can choose her brother, Cayenne, to be her King alongside her. Momona soon also begins to fall in love with Cayenne, yet Lillian doesn't want her to get too close to him. Cayenne also seems to harbor feelings for Momona, but who will be chosen in the end as Lady Jewel to decide it all? And will Momona and Lillian ever become true friends and will Cayenne and Momona ever be together? -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- TV - Apr 5, 2014 -- 8,229 7.38
Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari -- -- Shaft -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Magic Psychological Thriller -- Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari -- Though Sayaka Miki's wish was fulfilled, the unforeseen consequences that came with it overwhelm her, causing her soul gem to become tainted as she succumbs to despair and eventually loses her humanity. Homura Akemi reveals to Kyouko Sakura and Madoka Kaname the ultimate fate of magical girls: once their soul gem becomes tainted, it transforms into a Grief Seed, and they are reborn as witches—a truth Homura learned only through repeating history countless times in a bid to prevent Madoka's tragedy. -- -- Kyuubey only compounds their despair when he confesses his true intentions: to harness the energy created from magical girls and use it to prolong the life of the universe. As the threat of Walpurgisnacht, a powerful witch, looms overhead, Homura once again vows to protect Madoka and the world from a grim fate. -- -- Caught between honoring Homura's wish and saving the world, which one will Madoka choose in the end? -- Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari is a story of inescapable destiny, and an unlikely hero who could change it all. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - Oct 13, 2012 -- 166,656 8.39
Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari -- -- Shaft -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Magic Psychological Thriller -- Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari -- Though Sayaka Miki's wish was fulfilled, the unforeseen consequences that came with it overwhelm her, causing her soul gem to become tainted as she succumbs to despair and eventually loses her humanity. Homura Akemi reveals to Kyouko Sakura and Madoka Kaname the ultimate fate of magical girls: once their soul gem becomes tainted, it transforms into a Grief Seed, and they are reborn as witches—a truth Homura learned only through repeating history countless times in a bid to prevent Madoka's tragedy. -- -- Kyuubey only compounds their despair when he confesses his true intentions: to harness the energy created from magical girls and use it to prolong the life of the universe. As the threat of Walpurgisnacht, a powerful witch, looms overhead, Homura once again vows to protect Madoka and the world from a grim fate. -- -- Caught between honoring Homura's wish and saving the world, which one will Madoka choose in the end? -- Mahou Shoujo Madoka� -- Magica Movie 2: Eien no Monogatari is a story of inescapable destiny, and an unlikely hero who could change it all. -- -- Movie - Oct 13, 2012 -- 166,656 8.39
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Mo Ri Shu Guang -- -- Dawn Animation -- 20 eps -- Novel -- Action Horror Psychological Supernatural Thriller Shounen Ai -- Mo Ri Shu Guang Mo Ri Shu Guang -- In the year of 2013, the tide of zombies outbreak exploded in everyone's homeland, humanity launches a large-scale battle in the endless nights awaiting for the arrival of the dawn. -- -- The end is approaching, is there going to be a way out for them? -- Their faiths were shattered into pieces and buried in ashes in the raging fire. But within the blazing fire, a newborn hope arise once again. -- -- (Source: polarbearadise) -- ONA - May 20, 2018 -- 3,851 6.19
Nomad: Megalo Box 2 -- -- TMS Entertainment -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Sports Drama -- Nomad: Megalo Box 2 Nomad: Megalo Box 2 -- In the end, "Gearless" Joe was the one that reigned as the champion of Megalonia, a first ever megalobox tournament. Fans everywhere were mesmerized by the meteoric rise of Joe who sprung out from the deepest underground ring to the top in mere three months and without the use of gear. Seven years later, "Gearless" Joe was once again fighting in underground matches. Adorned with scars and once again donning his gear, but now known only as Nomad… -- -- (Source: TMS Entertainment) -- -- 88,409 8.16
Nomad: Megalo Box 2 -- -- TMS Entertainment -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Sports Drama -- Nomad: Megalo Box 2 Nomad: Megalo Box 2 -- In the end, "Gearless" Joe was the one that reigned as the champion of Megalonia, a first ever megalobox tournament. Fans everywhere were mesmerized by the meteoric rise of Joe who sprung out from the deepest underground ring to the top in mere three months and without the use of gear. Seven years later, "Gearless" Joe was once again fighting in underground matches. Adorned with scars and once again donning his gear, but now known only as Nomad… -- -- (Source: TMS Entertainment) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 88,409 8.16
Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie -- -- OLM -- 1 ep -- Game -- Adventure Kids Fantasy -- Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie -- The story is set in Diamond Ore Country, of which Diancie is the princess.This is a country located deep underground, where the Pokémon Carbink live together in peace. The energy source of this country is a giant diamond called the Sacred Diamond, which can only be created by princess Diancie. However, the current princess doesn't yet possess the power to create such a diamond, and the current Sacred Diamond's power is soon going to run out, which would result in the end of the country. Diancie meets up with Ash and Pikachu, and set off together with them to search for the legendary Pokemon Xerneas, which possesses sacred power, but on the way, they find the cocoon where the Destruction Pokémon, Yveltal, who was said to have once destroyed life in Kalos, lies in wait. -- -- (Source: serebii.net) -- -- Licensor: -- The Pokemon Company International -- Movie - Jul 19, 2014 -- 30,648 6.46
Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie -- -- GoHands -- 1 ep -- 4-koma manga -- Slice of Life Comedy School Shounen -- Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie Seitokai Yakuindomo Movie -- Ousai Academy was originally an all-girls high school. Due to the declining birth rates in recent years, it was converted into a co-ed school. The first year male students would find themselves surrounded by girls and unfortunately, Tsuda Takatoshi is one of them. What's worse, he gets scolded on his first day by the student council president Shino Amakusa, which did not give a good first impression of him. Tsuda also meets the other student council members while getting scolded, and in the end, he gets late for class. As an apology for ruining his morning, Shino lets him join the student council for various of "reasons" and he accepts it, or rather, he's forced to accept. Thus begins his days as Tsuda soon realizes that he's the only normal student in Ousai Academy... -- Movie - Jul 21, 2017 -- 43,848 7.87
Shugo Chara!! Doki -- -- Satelight -- 51 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Magic School Shoujo -- Shugo Chara!! Doki Shugo Chara!! Doki -- Now Utau has left Easter and restarted her singing career, while Ikuto still remains at Easter. To replace Utau Easter hires a new character, Lulu. Lulu has the power to create question mark eggs, instead of x-eggs. Throughout this season we start to see all the love interests more so then in the first season. Tadase and Amu seem to be a couple now, but they have their problem, especially when Amu starts hiding Ikuto in her room. She lies to Tadase, her family and all the Guardians about it, which in the end causes more problems then she expected. Easter also has a new plan to control Ikuto. Using his violin Easter controls Ikuto so that he transforms into Death Rebel. The sound of his violin turns all the heart eggs with in distance into x-eggs. With a large amount of x-eggs gathered, the embryo will soon turn up. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Episode numbers continue as 52, 53, 54, etc. -- TV - Oct 4, 2008 -- 89,878 7.42
Ten Little Gall Force -- -- animate Film, Artmic -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Space Comedy Parody Mecha -- Ten Little Gall Force Ten Little Gall Force -- A super deformed parody which depicts the "making of " Eternal Story and Destruction. A very humorous behind-the-scenes look (if "Gall Force" were a live-action series instead of being animated). -- -- Cast and crew members run into severe and embarrassing difficulties as things do not turn out as they should; for example, Lufy totally drowns in embarrassment as she is object of a whole crowd of spectators while in the nude; the director's obsession with realistic filming causes some real high-voltage friction with Catty; and in the end, after the premiere, the girls end up in an ongoing on-stage tussle about which one is the most popular character. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- -- Licensor: -- AnimEigo -- OVA - Jul 3, 1988 -- 1,378 6.21
Vie Durant -- -- Marine Entertainment, Radix -- 8 eps -- Original -- Sci-Fi Drama Vampire -- Vie Durant Vie Durant -- The Antarctic thaws and it is an era when most of the land has been submerged in water. The extinction of Mankind already draws near. Mankind who were born from Adam and Eve, were now deteriorating as they repeatedly get cloned from generation to generation. Things essential for the survival of living things were lost. -- -- Even so, the ones remaining cling on to survive... -- -- "We should get what we need for survival from something else...!" -- -- And so, a mere small group of humans began a new life upon the surface of water, exhausting the resources of each and every other living thing to survive. In the end, they discover people who posess a huge quantity of things necessary for survival. -- -- The young men who posessed such things continues their journey even today, to escape from those who were pursuing them. They just wanted to find that something somewhere. They were seeking for the one and only "help" there was... -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- ONA - Jul 15, 2003 -- 1,428 4.85
Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 1 ep -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy Romance Seinen Slice of Life -- Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi -- The light-hearted Working!! franchise comes to a close in this final episode of the concluding season. Will Aoi Yamada get the closure she so desperately needs with her distant mother? Will the relationship between Yachiyo Todoroki and Jun Satou continue to remain stagnant and awkward? Perhaps even Souta Takanashi and Mahiru Inami will take a step forward in deepening their eccentric friendship. And in the end, Wagnaria Restaurant might finally get a new chief! -- -- Beautifully connected, all these events intertwine to give these characters a final ending to their stories. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Special - Mar 30, 2016 -- 85,277 8.19
Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 1 ep -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy Romance Seinen Slice of Life -- Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi Working!!!: Lord of the Takanashi -- The light-hearted Working!! franchise comes to a close in this final episode of the concluding season. Will Aoi Yamada get the closure she so desperately needs with her distant mother? Will the relationship between Yachiyo Todoroki and Jun Satou continue to remain stagnant and awkward? Perhaps even Souta Takanashi and Mahiru Inami will take a step forward in deepening their eccentric friendship. And in the end, Wagnaria Restaurant might finally get a new chief! -- -- Beautifully connected, all these events intertwine to give these characters a final ending to their stories. -- -- Special - Mar 30, 2016 -- 85,277 8.19
Alone in the Endzone
And in the End...
Angels in the Endzone
Everything Will Be Alright in the End
In the End
In the End (album)
In the End (Black Veil Brides song)
In the End (disambiguation)
In the End (Kat DeLuna song)
In the End of Human Existence
We All Lay Down in the End
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