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

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Hymn_of_the_Universe
Integral_Life_Practice_(book)
Know_Yourself
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
On_Interpretation
Process_and_Reality
The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People
the_Book
The_Categories
The_Seals_of_Wisdom
The_Study_and_Practice_of_Yoga
The_Tarot_of_Paul_Christian
The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History
The_Yoga_Sutras
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.008_-_The_Principle_of_Self-Affirmation

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
01.03_-_Rationalism
01.10_-_Principle_and_Personality
01.11_-_The_Basis_of_Unity
01.13_-_T._S._Eliot:_Four_Quartets
0_1961-04-29
0_1962-12-15
02.01_-_The_World_War
03.09_-_Buddhism_and_Hinduism
03.10_-_The_Mission_of_Buddhism
04.02_-_Human_Progress
05.01_-_At_the_Origin_of_Ignorance
05.02_-_Gods_Labour
05.03_-_Of_Desire_and_Atonement
05.06_-_The_Birth_of_Maya
05.11_-_The_Place_of_Reason
05.19_-_Lone_to_the_Lone
06.05_-_The_Story_of_Creation
06.36_-_The_Mother_on_Herself
1.008_-_The_Principle_of_Self-Affirmation
1.009_-_Perception_and_Reality
1.00_-_The_way_of_what_is_to_come
1.010_-_Self-Control_-_The_Alpha_and_Omega_of_Yoga
1.01_-_Adam_Kadmon_and_the_Evolution
1.01_-_A_NOTE_ON_PROGRESS
1.01_-_Fundamental_Considerations
1.01_-_The_Human_Aspiration
1.02.3.1_-_The_Lord
1.024_-_Affiliation_With_Larger_Wholes
1.02_-_In_the_Beginning
1.02_-_Taras_Tantra
1.02_-_The_Three_European_Worlds
1.02_-_The_Two_Negations_1_-_The_Materialist_Denial
1.02_-_The_Ultimate_Path_is_Without_Difficulty
1.03_-_PERSONALITY,_SANCTITY,_DIVINE_INCARNATION
1.03_-_Preparing_for_the_Miraculous
1.03_-_The_Two_Negations_2_-_The_Refusal_of_the_Ascetic
1.03_-_The_Uncreated
1.03_-_VISIT_TO_VIDYASAGAR
1.045_-_Piercing_the_Structure_of_the_Object
1.04_-_Reality_Omnipresent
1.04_-_The_Aims_of_Psycho_therapy
1.04_-_What_Arjuna_Saw_-_the_Dark_Side_of_the_Force
1.04_-_Wherefore_of_World?
1.052_-_Yoga_Practice_-_A_Series_of_Positive_Steps
1.053_-_A_Very_Important_Sadhana
1.056_-_Lack_of_Knowledge_is_the_Cause_of_Suffering
1.057_-_The_Four_Manifestations_of_Ignorance
1.05_-_Buddhism_and_Women
1.05_-_Hsueh_Feng's_Grain_of_Rice
1.05_-_The_Creative_Principle
1.05_-_The_Destiny_of_the_Individual
1.05_-_The_Principle_of_Earth
1.06_-_Being_Human_and_the_Copernican_Principle
1.06_-_Man_in_the_Universe
1.06_-_Quieting_the_Vital
1.06_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_2_The_Works_of_Love_-_The_Works_of_Life
1.06_-_The_Desire_to_be
1.06_-_The_Objective_and_Subjective_Views_of_Life
1.070_-_The_Seven_Stages_of_Perfection
1.07_-_The_Primary_Data_of_Being
1.08_-_The_Depths_of_the_Divine
1.097_-_Sublimation_of_Object-Consciousness
1.098_-_The_Transformation_from_Human_to_Divine
1.09_-_SKIRMISHES_IN_A_WAY_WITH_THE_AGE
1.09_-_Sri_Aurobindo_and_the_Big_Bang
1.09_-_The_Absolute_Manifestation
1.09_-_The_Pure_Existent
11.05_-_The_Ladder_of_Unconsciousness
1.10_-_The_Absolute_of_the_Being
1.10_-_Theodicy_-_Nature_Makes_No_Mistakes
1.11_-_The_Kalki_Avatar
1.11_-_The_Second_Genesis
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Solution
1.1.2_-_Intellect_and_the_Intellectual
1.12_-_The_Office_and_Limitations_of_the_Reason
1.12_-_The_Significance_of_Sacrifice
1.12_-_The_Sociology_of_Superman
1.12_-_TIME_AND_ETERNITY
1.13_-_Dawn_and_the_Truth
1.14_-_The_Supermind_as_Creator
1.15_-_THE_DIRECTIONS_AND_CONDITIONS_OF_THE_FUTURE
1.16_-_The_Process_of_Avatarhood
1.16_-_The_Triple_Status_of_Supermind
1.16_-_WITH_THE_DEVOTEES_AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.17_-_Religion_as_the_Law_of_Life
1.19_-_The_Curve_of_the_Rational_Age
1.19_-_THE_MASTER_AND_HIS_INJURED_ARM
1.20_-_Death,_Desire_and_Incapacity
1.21_-_The_Ascent_of_Life
1.21_-_The_Spiritual_Aim_and_Life
1.22_-_The_Problem_of_Life
1.240_-_Talks_2
1.25_-_ADVICE_TO_PUNDIT_SHASHADHAR
1.25_-_SPIRITUAL_EXERCISES
1.28_-_Supermind,_Mind_and_the_Overmind_Maya
1.300_-_1.400_Talks
1954-11-10_-_Inner_experience,_the_basis_of_action_-_Keeping_open_to_the_Force_-_Faith_through_aspiration_-_The_Mothers_symbol_-_The_mind_and_vital_seize_experience_-_Degrees_of_sincerity_-Becoming_conscious_of_the_Divine_Force
1956-02-29_-_Sacrifice,_self-giving_-_Divine_Presence_in_the_heart_of_Matter_-_Divine_Oneness_-_Divine_Consciousness_-_All_is_One_-_Divine_in_the_inconscient_aspires_for_the_Divine
1956-09-26_-_Soul_of_desire_-_Openness,_harmony_with_Nature_-_Communion_with_divine_Presence_-_Individuality,_difficulties,_soul_of_desire_-_personal_contact_with_the_Mother_-_Inner_receptivity_-_Bad_thoughts_before_the_Mother
1957-05-08_-_Vital_excitement,_reason,_instinct
1957-10-09_-_As_many_universes_as_individuals_-_Passage_to_the_higher_hemisphere
1958-10-22_-_Spiritual_life_-_reversal_of_consciousness_-_Helping_others
1958-11-12_-_The_aim_of_the_Supreme_-_Trust_in_the_Grace
1960_03_09
1970_06_07
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shunned_House
1f.lovecraft_-_Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silver_Key
2.01_-_Indeterminates,_Cosmic_Determinations_and_the_Indeterminable
2.01_-_Mandala_One
2.01_-_The_Object_of_Knowledge
2.02_-_Brahman,_Purusha,_Ishwara_-_Maya,_Prakriti,_Shakti
2.02_-_Habit_2__Begin_with_the_End_in_Mind
2.02_-_THE_DURGA_PUJA_FESTIVAL
2.03_-_Indra_and_the_Thought-Forces
2.03_-_The_Eternal_and_the_Individual
2.03_-_The_Supreme_Divine
2.04_-_ADVICE_TO_ISHAN
2.04_-_Agni,_the_Illumined_Will
2.04_-_The_Divine_and_the_Undivine
2.05_-_The_Cosmic_Illusion;_Mind,_Dream_and_Hallucination
2.06_-_Reality_and_the_Cosmic_Illusion
2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST
2.1.01_-_God_The_One_Reality
2.1.02_-_Nature_The_World-Manifestation
2.1.03_-_Man_and_Superman
2.10_-_Knowledge_by_Identity_and_Separative_Knowledge
2.10_-_THE_MASTER_AND_NARENDRA
2.13_-_The_Book
2.1.4_-_The_Lower_Vital_Being
2.14_-_The_Origin_and_Remedy_of_Falsehood,_Error,_Wrong_and_Evil
2.15_-_Reality_and_the_Integral_Knowledge
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.17_-_The_Progress_to_Knowledge_-_God,_Man_and_Nature
2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration
2.2.01_-_The_Problem_of_Consciousness
2.2.02_-_Consciousness_and_the_Inconscient
2.20_-_The_Philosophy_of_Rebirth
2.21_-_IN_THE_COMPANY_OF_DEVOTEES_AT_SYAMPUKUR
2.22_-_THE_STILLEST_HOUR
2.23_-_The_Core_of_the_Gita.s_Meaning
2.24_-_The_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Man
2.25_-_The_Triple_Transformation
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
23.11_-_Observations_III
2_-_Other_Hymns_to_Agni
3.02_-_The_Psychology_of_Rebirth
3.07_-_The_Formula_of_the_Holy_Grail
3.08_-_The_Mystery_of_Love
3.1.01_-_The_Problem_of_Suffering_and_Evil
3.16.1_-_Of_the_Oath
3.16_-_THE_SEVEN_SEALS_OR_THE_YES_AND_AMEN_SONG
3.2.06_-_The_Adwaita_of_Shankaracharya
3.3.1_-_Illness_and_Health
3.4.01_-_Evolution
3.6.01_-_Heraclitus
3.7.1.05_-_The_Significance_of_Rebirth
3.7.1.06_-_The_Ascending_Unity
3.7.1.07_-_Involution_and_Evolution
3.7.1.08_-_Karma
3.7.1.09_-_Karma_and_Freedom
3.7.1.12_-_Karma_and_Justice
3.7.2.04_-_The_Higher_Lines_of_Karma
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.11_-_The_Perfection_of_Equality
4.1.3_-_Imperfections_and_Periods_of_Arrest
4.2.3_-_Vigilance,_Resolution,_Will_and_the_Divine_Help
4.3_-_Bhakti
5.01_-_EPILOGUE
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
Aeneid
Avatars_of_the_Tortoise
Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
BOOK_VIII._-_Some_account_of_the_Socratic_and_Platonic_philosophy,_and_a_refutation_of_the_doctrine_of_Apuleius_that_the_demons_should_be_worshipped_as_mediators_between_gods_and_men
BOOK_XII._-_Of_the_creation_of_angels_and_men,_and_of_the_origin_of_evil
BOOK_XVI._-_The_history_of_the_city_of_God_from_Noah_to_the_time_of_the_kings_of_Israel
ENNEAD_06.03_-_Plotinos_Own_Sense-Categories.
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries
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Sophist
Tablets_of_Baha_u_llah_text
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Coming_Race_Contents
The_Divine_Names_Text_(Dionysis)
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
the_Eternal_Wisdom
The_Riddle_of_this_World
Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra_text

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
affirmation

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

Affirmation of the consequent: The fallacy of affirmation of the consequent is the fallacious inference from B and A ⊃ B to A. The law of affirmation of the consequent is the theorem of the propositional calculus, q ⊃ [p ⊃ q]. -- A. C.

affirmation ::: n. --> Confirmation of anything established; ratification; as, the affirmation of a law.
The act of affirming or asserting as true; assertion; -- opposed to negation or denial.
That which is asserted; an assertion; a positive statement; an averment; as, an affirmation, by the vender, of title to property sold, or of its quality.
A solemn declaration made under the penalties of


affirmation of the consequent;


TERMS ANYWHERE

"A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is fourfold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is is the Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure self-status neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be affirmed about Brahman; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence; this state of deep sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos; — this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the support of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya.” The Life Divine

“A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is fourfold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is is the Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure self-status neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be affirmed about Brahman; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence; this state of deep sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos;—this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the support of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya.” The Life Divine

affirmance ::: n. --> Confirmation; ratification; confirmation of a voidable act.
A strong declaration; affirmation.


Affirmation of the consequent: The fallacy of affirmation of the consequent is the fallacious inference from B and A ⊃ B to A. The law of affirmation of the consequent is the theorem of the propositional calculus, q ⊃ [p ⊃ q]. -- A. C.

affirmatory ::: a. --> Giving affirmation; assertive; affirmative.

affirm ::: v. t. --> to assert or confirm, as a judgment, decree, or order, brought before an appellate court for review.
To assert positively; to tell with confidence; to aver; to maintain as true; -- opposed to deny.
To declare, as a fact, solemnly, under judicial sanction. See Affirmation, 4. ::: v. i.


"An OMNIPRESENT Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality.” The Life Divine ::: *reality, absolute See **absolute reality**

“An OMNIPRESENT Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality.” The Life Divine

apavAda. (T. skur 'debs; C. sunjian; J. songen; K. son'gam 損減). In Sanskrit, "denigration" or "slander"; denying the presence of positive qualities and falsely ascribing negative qualities. Philosophically, the term is used to describe the underestimation or denigration of the status of phenomena, by claiming, for example, that phenomena do not exist conventionally. Wrong views (MITHYADṚstI) themselves are considered to be the "denigration" of that which really exists, such as the truth of suffering (DUḤKHA); other specific sorts of wrong views may also be the "erroneous affirmation" or "superimposition" (SAMAROPA) of things that actually do not exist in reality. Four types of apavAda are mentioned in the ABHIDHARMAMAHAVIBHAsA: denigration of (1) cause, which is countered by understanding the noble truth of origination; (2) effect, which is countered by the noble truth of suffering; (3) the path, which is countered by the noble truth of the path; and (4) cessation, which is countered by the noble truth of cessation.

ARRESTS IN SADHANA. ::: A difficulty comes or an arrest in some movement which you have begun or have been carrying on for some time. Such arrests are inevitably frequent enough; one might almost say that every step forward is followed by an arrest. It is to be dealt with by becoming always more quiet, more firm in the will to go through, by opening oneself more and more so that any obstructing non-receptivity in the nature may diminish or disappear, by an affirmation of faith even in the midst of obscurity, faith in the presence of a Power that is working behind the cloud and the veil, in the guidance of the Guru, by an observation of oneself to find any cause of the arrest, not in a spirit of depression or discouragement but with the will to find out and remove it. This is the only right attitude and, if one is persistent in taking it, the periods of arrest are not abolished, - for that cannot be at this stage, - but greatly shortened and lightened in their incidence. Sometimes these arrests are periods, long or short, of assimilation or unseen preparation, their appearance of sterile immobility is deceptive ::: in that case, with the right attitude, one can after a time, by opening, by observation, by accumulated experience, begin to feel, to get some inkling of what is being prepared or done. Sometimes it is a period of true obstruction in which the Power at work has to deal with the obstacles in the way, obstacles in oneself, obstacles of the opposing cosmic forces or any other or of all together, and this kind of arrest may be long or short according to the magnitude or obstinacy or complexity of the impediments that are met. But here, too, the right attitude can alleviate or shorten and, if persistently taken, help to a more radical removal of the difficulties and greatly diminish the necessity of complete arrests hereafter.
On the contrary, an attitude of depression or unfaith in the help or the guidance or in the certitude of the victory of the guiding Power, a shutting up of yourself in the sense of the difficulties, helps the obstructions to recur with force instead of progressively diminishing in their incidence.


assertion ::: n. --> The act of asserting, or that which is asserted; positive declaration or averment; affirmation; statement asserted; position advanced.
Maintenance; vindication; as, the assertion of one&


asseveration ::: n. --> The act of asseverating, or that which is asseverated; positive affirmation or assertion; solemn declaration.

(a) The mental act of asserting (affirming or denying) an assertible content. Traditionally a judgment is said to affirm or to deny a predicate of a subject. As generalized by modern logicians this becomes affirmation or denial of a relation (not necessarily that of predication) among certain terms (not necessarily two). One classification of judgments lists them as problematic, assertoric, or apodeictic, depending on whether they are asserted as probable (or improbable or possible), true (or false), or necessary (or impossible). Since a judgment in this sense always involves a truth claim it is either correct or erroneous.

atmaslagha (atmaslagha; atma slagha) ::: self-affirmation, "the high atmaslagha self-confidence of power, capacity, character and courage indispensable to the man of action", an attribute of the ks.atriya.

aum; Om appears first in the Upanishads as a mystic monosyllable used as the object of profound religious meditation, the highest spiritual effects being attributed not only to the whole word but also to the three sounds a, u, m of which it consists. In later times is used as the mystic name for the Hindu triad, the union of the three gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Also considered as a divine affirmation of respectful assent sometimes translated by 'yes, verily, so be it'(in this sense compared with Amen), and also regarded as a divine salutation as 'hail!'.  

averment ::: v. t. --> The act of averring, or that which is averred; affirmation; positive assertion.
Verification; establishment by evidence.
A positive statement of facts; an allegation; an offer to justify or prove what is alleged.


affirmation ::: n. --> Confirmation of anything established; ratification; as, the affirmation of a law.
The act of affirming or asserting as true; assertion; -- opposed to negation or denial.
That which is asserted; an assertion; a positive statement; an averment; as, an affirmation, by the vender, of title to property sold, or of its quality.
A solemn declaration made under the penalties of


affirmation of the consequent;

being ::: 1. The state or quality of having existence. 2. The totality of all things that exist. 3. One"s basic or essential nature; self. 4. All the qualities constituting one that exists; the essence. 5. A person; human being. 6. The Divine, the Supreme; God. Being, being"s, Being"s, beings, Beings, beings", earth-being"s, earth-beings, fragment-being, non-being, non-being"s, Non-Being, Non-Being"s, world-being"s.

Sri Aurobindo: "Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” *The Life Divine :::

   "The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” *The Life Divine

"What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming.” Letters on Yoga

"Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness.” The Upanishads :::

   "Our whole apparent life has only a symbolic value & is good & necessary as a becoming; but all becoming has being for its goal & fulfilment & God is the only being.” *Essays Divine and Human

"Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.” The Synthesis of Yoga*


Being ::: Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 33


being ::: “Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” The Life Divine

belief ::: n. --> Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact, opinion, or assertion as real or true, without immediate personal knowledge; reliance upon word or testimony; partial or full assurance without positive knowledge or absolute certainty; persuasion; conviction; confidence; as, belief of a witness; the belief of our senses.
A persuasion of the truths of religion; faith.
The thing believed; the object of belief.


"But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure.” *The Life Divine

“But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure.” The Life Divine

Conservation of Energy A scientific theory that the total energy of any material system is a quantity which cannot be increased or decreased by any action among the parts, and that when energy seems to disappear it is merely transformed into an equivalent quantity of another mode of energy. The theory, interpreted in its widest sense, means no more than an affirmation that something cannot be created out of nothing or resolved into nothing, and so would seem a perfectly harmless generalization. However, theosophy teaches that there is a constant inflow of force into any such physical or material system, which in the scientific view is from sources exterior to a “closed material system.” Theosophy does not regard such forces as exterior but looks upon closed material systems as merely phenomena on the physical plane of inner and powerful forces which produce such physical systems as an appearance — real enough for the entities within it while it lasts, but vanishing once the inner, controlling forces are withdrawn. Then the atoms simply vanish because the cohering energies which make them are likewise withdrawn.

Copula: The traditional analysis of a proposition into subject and predicate involves a third part, the copula (is, are, is not, are not), binding the subject and predicate together into an assertion either of affirmation or of denial. It is now, however, commonly held that several wholly different meanings of the verb to be should be distinguished in this connection, including at least the following: predication of a monadic propositional function of its argument (the sun is hot, 7 is a prime number, mankind is numerous); formal implication (gold is heavy, a horse is a quadruped, mankind is sinful); identity (China is Cathay, that is the sun, I am the State); formal equivalence (lightning is an electric discharge between parts of a cloud and the earth). -- A.C.

Creed(s) ::: A general term (from Latin) for “belief” declarations or summaries such as the Christian apostles' or Nicene creeds, or in Judaism the shema affirmation, or in Islam the shahada kalima).

defining experience"; this negation is "the affirmation by the Unknowable . . . of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, ::: freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself", not denying these terms "as a real expression of Itself", but denying "Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever".

denial ::: n. --> The act of gainsaying, refusing, or disowning; negation; -- the contrary of affirmation.
A refusal to admit the truth of a statement, charge, imputation, etc.; assertion of the untruth of a thing stated or maintained; a contradiction.
A refusal to grant; rejection of a request.
A refusal to acknowledge; disclaimer of connection with; disavowal; -- the contrary of confession; as, the denial of a fault


"Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe. . . " The Life Divine

“Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe…” The Life Divine

disaffirmation ::: n. --> The act of disaffirming; negation; refutation.

ebhih. stomebhih. ::: by these hymns of affirmation. [R.g Veda 7.62.2]

Empiricism: (1) A proposition about the sources of knowledge: that the sole source of knowledge is experience, or that either no knowledge at all or no knowledge with existential reference is possible independently of experience. Experience (q.v.) may be understood as either all conscious content, data of the senses only, or other designated content. Such empiricism may take the form of denial that any knowledge or at least knowledge about existents can be obtained a priori (q.v.), that is, denial that there are universal and necessary truths, denial that there is knowledge which holds regardless of past, present, or future experience; denial that there is instinctive, innate, or inborn knowledge; denial that the test of truth is clarity to natural reason or self-evidence, denial that one can gain certain knowledge by finding something the opposite of which is inconceivable; denial thit there are any necessary presuppositions of all knowledge or of anything known certainly, denial that any truths can be established by the fact that to deny them implies their reaffirmation; or denial that conventional or aibitrary definitions or assumptions yield knowledge.

enantiosis ::: n. --> A figure of speech by which what is to be understood affirmatively is stated negatively, and the contrary; affirmation by contraries.

epistrophe ::: n. --> A figure in which successive clauses end with the same word or affirmation; e. g., "Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I."

erotesis ::: n. --> A figure o/ speech by which a strong affirmation of the contrary, is implied under the form o/ an earnest interrogation, as in the following lines; -

Exponible: Employed as a noun and as an adjective, applied to an obscure proposition which needs an exposition or explanation owing to a hidden composition. Kant applied it to propositions including an affirmation and a concealed negation, which an exposition makes apparent. -- J.J.R.

hongaku. (本覺). In Japanese, "original enlightenment." The notion that enlightenment was a quality inherent in the minds of all sentient beings (SATTVA) initially developed in East Asia largely due to the influence of such presumptive APOCRYPHA as the DASHENG QIXIN LUN. The Dasheng qixin lun posited a distinction between the potentiality to become a buddha that was inherent in the minds of every sentient being, as expressed by the term "original enlightenment" (C. BENJUE; pronounced hongaku in Japanese); and the soteriological process through which that potential for enlightenment had to be put into practice, which it called "actualized enlightenment" (C. SHIJUE; J. shikaku). This distinction is akin to the notion that a person may in reality be enlightened (original enlightenment), but still needs to learn through a course of religious training how to act on that enlightenment (actualized enlightenment). This scheme was further developed in numerous treatises and commentaries written by Chinese exegetes in the DI LUN ZONG, HUAYAN ZONG, and TIANTAI ZONG. ¶ In medieval Japan, this imported soteriological interpretation of "original enlightenment" was reinterpreted into an ontological affirmation of things just as they are. Enlightenment was thence viewed not as a soteriological experience, but instead as something made manifest in the lived reality of everyday life. Hongaku thought also had wider cultural influences, and was used, for example, to justify conceptually incipient doctrines of the identity between the buddhas and bodhisattvas of Buddhism and the indigenous deities (KAMI) of Japan (see HONJI SUIGAKU; SHINBUTSU SHuGo). Distinctively Japanese treatments of original enlightenment thought begin in the mid-eleventh century, especially through oral transmissions (kuden) within the medieval TENDAISHu tradition. These interpretations were subsequently written down on short slips of paper (KIRIGAMI) that were gradually assembled into more extensive treatments. These interpretations ultimately came to be attributed by tradition to the great Tendai masters of old, such as SAICHo (767-822), but connections to these earlier teachers are dubious at best and the exact dates and attributions of these materials are unclear. During the late Heian and Kamakura periods, hongaku thought bifurcated into two major lineages, the Eshin and Danna (both of which subsequently divided into numerous subbranches). This bifurcation was largely a split between followers of the two major disciples of the Tendai monk RYoGEN: GENSHIN (942-1017) of Eshin'in in YOKAWA (the famous author of the oJo YoSHu); and Kakuun (953-1007) of Danna'in in the Eastern pagoda complex at ENRYAKUJI on HIEIZAN. The Tendai tradition claims that these two strands of interpretation derive from Saicho, who learned these different approaches while studying Tiantai thought in China under Daosui (J. Dosui/Dozui; d.u.) and Xingman (J. Gyoman; d.u.), and subsequently transmitted them to his successors in Japan; the distinctions between these two positions are, however, far from certain. Other indigenous Japanese schools of Buddhism that developed later during the Kamakura period, such as the JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu, seem to have harbored more of a critical attitude toward the notion of original enlightenment. One of the common charges leveled against hongaku thought was that it fostered a radical antinomianism, which denied the need for either religious practice or ethical restraint. In the contemporary period, the notion of original enlightenment has been strongly criticized by advocates of "Critical Buddhism" (HIHAN BUKKYo) as an infiltration into Buddhism of Brahmanical notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAN); in addition, by valorizing the reality of the mundane world just as it is, hongaku thought was said to be an exploitative doctrine that had been used in Japan to justify societal inequality and political despotism. For broader East Asian perspectives on "original enlightenment," see BENJUE.

If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities, throws up a multiplicity of divergent viewpoints, divergent lines of action and lets them work themselves out side by side or in collision or in a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle. …

It can be shown that the following principles of duality hold in the propositional calculus (where A* and B* denote the duals of the formulas A and B respectively): if A is a theorem, then ∼A* is a theorem; if A ⊃ B is a theorem, then B* ⊃ A* is a theorem; if A ≡ B is a theorem, then A* ≡ B* is a theorem. Special names have been given to certain particular theorems and forms of valid inference of the propositional calculus. Besides § 2 following, see: absorption; affirmation of the consequent; assertion; associative law; commutative law; composition; contradiction, law of; De Morgan's laws; denial of the antecedent; distributive law; double negation, law of; excluded middle, law of; exportation; Hauber's law; identity, law of; importation; Peirce's law; proof by cases; reductio ad absurdum; reflexivity; tautology; transitivity; transposition. Names given to particular theorems of the propositional calculus are usually thought of as applying to laws embodied in the theorems rather than to the theorems as formulas; hence, in particular, the same name is applied to theorems differing only by alphabetical changes of the variables appearing; and frequently the name used for a theorem is used also for one or more forms of valid inference associated with the theorem. Similar remarks apply to names given to particular theorems of the functional calculus of first order, etc.

life-self ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . our self-view is vitiated by the constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego.” *The Life Divine

Münsterberg, Hugo: (1863-1916) German-born philosopher and psychologist, for many years professor of psychology at Harvard University. One of the advance guard of present axiological development, he is affiliated with the ideological criticism stemming from Fichte. Agrees that pure reason is endowed with a priori principles which enable it to achieve objective super-individual affirmations which transcend and which can neither be confirmed nor denied by psychological investigation. Main works: Der Ursprung d. Sittlichkeit, 1889; Beiträge z. Experim. Psychol., 1889-92; Psychol. u. Lehre, 1906; Philos. der Werte, 1908 (Eng. tr. The External Values); Grundzüge d. Psychotechnik, 1914. -- H.H.

negation ::: adv. --> The act of denying; assertion of the nonreality or untruthfulness of anything; declaration that something is not, or has not been, or will not be; denial; -- the opposite of affirmation.
Description or definition by denial, exclusion, or exception; statement of what a thing is not, or has not, from which may be inferred what it is or has.


Negation: The act of denying a proposition as contrasted with the act of affirming it. The affirmation of a proposition p, justifies the negation of its contradictory, p', and the negation of p justifies the affirmation of p'. Contrariwise the affirmation of p' justifies the negation of p and the negation of p' justifies the affirmation of p. -- C.A.B.

Nishitani Keiji. (西谷啓治) (1900-1990). Japanese philosopher and member of what came to be known as the KYOTO SCHOOL, a contemporary school of Japanese philosophy that sought to synthesize ZEN Buddhist thought with modern Western, and especially Germanic, philosophy. Nishitani was schooled in Ishikawa prefecture and Tokyo and graduated from Kyoto University in 1924 with a degree in philosophy. A student of NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyoto School, Nishitani became a professor in the Department of Religion at Kyoto University in 1935 and from 1937 to 1939 studied with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany. He later chaired the Department of Modern Philosophy at Kyoto Prefectural University from 1955 to 1963. In such works as his 1949 Nihirizumu (translated in 1990 as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism) and Shukyo to wa nani ka ("What Is Religion?," 1961, translated in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness), Nishitani sought to synthesize German existentialism, Christian mysticism, and what he considered to be Zen experience. Where German philosophy, which is governed by logic and cognitive thinking, addressed ontological questions regarding the self, he argued that such means as Christian mysticism and Zen meditation could complement German philosophy in constructing a path to a complete realization of the self. Nishitani took issue with Nietzsche's nihilism by borrowing from the Buddhist concept of emptiness (suNYATĀ) to argue that recognition of the self as empty brings one to an understanding of things as they are (viz., the Buddhist concept of suchness, or TATHATĀ), and hence a true understanding and affirmation of oneself. Nishitani's philosophical justification of Japan's wartime activities, notably his contributions to the well-known journal Chuokoron ("Central Review") in the early 1940s, has become a controversial aspect of his work.

Non sequitur is any fallacy which has not even the deceptive appearance of valid reasoning, or in which there is a complete lack of connection between the premisses advanced and the conclusion drawn. By some, however, non sequitur is identified with Aristotle's fallacy of the consequent, which includes the two fallacies of denial of the antecedent (q. v.) and affirmation of the consequent (q. v.). -- A.C.

oath ::: n. --> A solemn affirmation or declaration, made with a reverent appeal to God for the truth of what is affirmed.
A solemn affirmation, connected with a sacred object, or one regarded as sacred, as the temple, the altar, the blood of Abel, the Bible, the Koran, etc.
An appeal (in verification of a statement made) to a superior sanction, in such a form as exposes the party making the appeal to an indictment for perjury if the statement be false.


Om ::: A word considered very holy in the Brahmanical literature. It is a syllable of invocation, as well as ofbenediction and of affirmation, and its general usage (as elucidated in the literature treating of it, which israther voluminous, for this word Om has attained almost divine reverence on the part of vast numbers ofHindus) is that it should never be uttered aloud, or in the presence of an outsider, a foreigner, or anon-initiate, and it should be uttered in the silence of one's mind, in peace of heart, and in the intimacy ofone's "inner closet." There is strong reason to believe, however, that this syllable of invocation wasuttered, and uttered aloud in a monotone, by the disciples in the presence of their teacher. This word isalways placed at the beginning of any scripture or prayer that is considered of unusual sanctity.It is said that by prolonging the uttering of this word, both of the o and the m, with the mouth closed, thesound re-echoes in and arouses vibration in the skull, and affects, if the aspirations be pure, the differentnervous centers of the body for good.The Brahmanas say that it is an unholy thing to utter this word in any place which is unholy. It issometimes written Aum.

Ordinarily, man is limited in all the parts of his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and its past deve- lopment and associations. Therefore God meets us first in diffe- rent limited affirmations of his divine qualities and nature ; he presents himself to the seeker as an absolute o! the things he can understand and to which his will and heart can respond ; he discloses some name and aspect of his Godhead. This is what is called in Yoga the iffa^devaid, the name and form elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ,

“… our self-view is vitiated by the constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego.” The Life Divine

perjury ::: v. --> False swearing.
At common law, a willfully false statement in a fact material to the issue, made by a witness under oath in a competent judicial proceeding. By statute the penalties of perjury are imposed on the making of willfully false affirmations.


Personal Idealism: The affirmation of reality in the person and the personal nature of the World-Ground. Synonymous with Absolutist P ersonalism. -- R.T.F.

positive ::: n. 1. An affirmative element or characteristic; reality. adj. 2. Characterized by or displaying certainty, acceptance, or affirmation. 3. Independent of circumstances; absolute or unqualified.

Pragmaticism: Pragmatism in Peirce's sense. The name adopted in 1905 by Charles S. Peirce (1893-1914) for the doctrine of pragmatism (q.v.) which had been enunciated by him in 1878. Peirce's definition was as follows: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". According to Peirce, W. James had interpreted pragmatism to mean "that the end of man is action", whereas Peirce intended his doctrine as "a theory of logical analysis, or true definition," and held that "its merits are greatest in its application to the highest metaphysical conceptions". "If one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it". Peirce hoped that the suffix, -icism, might mark his more strictly defined acception of the doctrine of pragmatism, and thus help to distinguish it from the extremes to which it had been pushed by the efforts of James, Schiller, Papini, and others. -- J.K.F.

predication ::: n. --> The act of predicating, or of affirming one thing of another; affirmation; assertion.
Preaching.


predicative ::: a. --> Expressing affirmation or predication; affirming; predicating, as, a predicative term.

protestation ::: n. --> The act of making a protest; a public avowal; a solemn declaration, especially of dissent.
Formerly, a declaration in common-law pleading, by which the party interposes an oblique allegation or denial of some fact, protesting that it does or does not exist, and at the same time avoiding a direct affirmation or denial.


reaffirmance ::: n. --> Alt. of Reaffirmation

reaffirmation ::: n. --> A second affirmation.

sad brahman ::: brahman as sat, pure Being, which "is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence", same as sat brahman.

samāropa. (T. sgro 'dogs; C. zengyi; J. zoyaku; K. chŭngik 增益). In Sanskrit, "superimposition," "reification," or "erroneous affirmation"; the mistaken attribution to an object of a quality that the object does not in fact possess. The term samāropa is sometimes paired with APAVĀDA ("denigration" or "denial"), where samāropa would refer to the claim or belief that something that in fact does not exist, does exist, while apavāda would refer to the claim or belief that something that in fact does exist, does not exist (such as the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS). In Buddhist philosophy, the most important of such erroneous superimpositions is the attribution of a perduring self (ĀTMAN) to the impermanent aggregates (SKANDHA). In MADHYAMAKA, samāropa refers to the false ascription of intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA) to phenomena (DHARMA). The purpose of the Madhyamaka critique is to refute these false qualities that have been superimposed by ignorance onto the objects of experience; the conventionally existent objects that serve as the object of these false projections are not refuted. In YOGĀCĀRA, samāropa is often used to refer to the superimposition of objective existence to phenomena that are in fact of the nature of consciousness.

SaMmitīya. (T. Mang bkur ba; C. Zhengliang bu; J. Shoryobu; K. Chongnyang pu 正量部). One of the "mainstream" (that is, non-Mahāyāna) schools of Indian Buddhism, a subsect of the VĀTSĪPUTRĪYA, and remembered primarily for its affirmation of the notion of a "person" (PUDGALA) that is neither the same as nor different from the aggregates (SKANDHA). Because of their assertion of such an "inexpressible" (avācya) person, the adherents of the school were dubbed PUDGALAVĀDA ("proponents of the person") and were criticized by other Buddhist schools for asserting the existence of a self, a position anathema to the mainstream Buddhist position of nonself (ANĀTMAN). Despite this apparent heresy, the school enjoyed considerable popularity in India; the seventh-century Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG describes it as the largest of the mainstream Buddhist schools in India, representing one quarter of all active monks. See VĀTSĪPUTRĪYA.

sandi. (J. santai; K. samje 三諦). In Chinese, "three truths," "threefold truth," or "three judgments"; a tripartite exegetical description of reality as being empty, provisional, and their mean, used in both the SAN LUN ZONG and TIANTAI ZONG of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. The three truths are said to have been first taught by SŬNGNANG (c. 450-c. 520), whom tradition considers an important vaunt courier in the development of the Chinese San lun school, the Chinese counterpart of the MADHYAMAKA branch of Indian philosophical exegesis, and then developed by later thinkers in both the San lun and Tiantai traditions. This Chinese notion of three truths is said to derive from a verse appearing in the Chinese translation of NĀGĀRJUNA's MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ (C. Zhong lun): "All phenomena that are produced from causes and conditions,/These in fact are empty. /They are also provisional names. /This as well is the meaning of the middle way." This account is then systematized by Chinese exegetes into: (1) the authentic truth of emptiness (kongdi), viz., all things are devoid of inherent existence and are empty in their essential nature: (2) the conventional truth of being provisionally real (jiadi), viz., all things are products of a causal process that gives them a derived reality; and (3) the ultimate truth of the mean (zhongdi), viz., all things, in their absolute reality, are neither real nor unreal, but simply thus. This three-truth schema may have been influenced by indigenous Chinese scriptures (see APOCRYPHA) such as the RENWANG JING and the PUSA YINGLUO BENYE JING. The Renwang jing, for example, discusses a three-truth SAMĀDHI (sandi sanmei), in which these three types of concentrations are named worldly truth (shidi), authentic truth (zhendi), and supreme-meaning truth (diyiyidi). In this treatment, worldly truth is the affirmation of the dualistic phenomena of ordinary existence, while authentic truth is presumed to be the denial of the reality of those phenomena; both are therefore aspects of what is typically called conventional truth (SAMVṚTISATYA) in the two-truth schema (see SATYADVAYA). The supreme-meaning truth transcends all dichotomies, including affirmation and negation, to provide an all-embracing perspective and corresponds to ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA). This schema is peculiar, and betrays its Chinese origins, because "authentic truth" and "supreme-meaning truth" are actually just different Chinese renderings of the same Sanskrit term, paramāthasatya. Zhiyi also interprets the statement "neither the same nor different" in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") as referring implicitly to the three-truth schema: "different" is the conventional truth of provisional reality, "same" is the authentic truth of emptiness, and the whole phrase is the ultimate truth of the mean. These presentations demonstrate that the Chinese were grappling with what they considered to be an unresolved internal tension in Indian presentations of conventional and ultimate truth and were exploring a three-truth schema as one means of resolving that tension.

sanguan. (J. sangan; K. samgwan 三觀). In Chinese, "threefold contemplation"; several versions of such a threefold contemplation are elaborated in Chinese exegetical traditions, of which the most influential was the TIANTAI version outlined by TIANTAI ZHIYI in his MOHE ZHIGUAN. Zhiyi's version entails a system of contemplative practice that leads to the attainment of insight into the nature of reality. Zhiyi's "threefold contemplation" consists of the contemplations of the "three truths: (SANDI): emptiness, conventional existence, and their mean (C. kong jia zhong sanguan; J. ku ge chu sangan; K. kong ka chung samgwan). The first, "contemplation on emptiness" (kongguan), is the step of practice that advances beyond naïve realism by penetrating into the conditionally constructed, and therefore insubstantial, nature of all phenomena (see suNYATĀ). The second, the "contemplation on conventionality" (jiaguan), involves the reaffirmation of the conventional existence of all phenomena, whereby a bodhisattva actively engages the world in spite of his awareness of the reality of emptiness. The third, the "contemplation of their mean" (zhongguan), is understood as a dialectical transcendence of the previous two modes of practice. This transcendence has two aspects: it is transcendent because it is neither ("the middle that negates both," C. shuangfei zhi zhong) and because it affirms both ("the middle that illuminates both," C. shuangzhao zhi zhong). It is "neither" because the middle way is not fixed exclusively on either abiding in emptiness or on wallowing in mundane existence. It is "both" because it elucidates that "emptiness" and "conventionality" are not opposing realities but are in fact mutually validating. "The threefold contemplation" is understood variously as a gradual or a simultaneous practice ("two kinds of 'threefold contemplation,'" C. erzhong sanguan; J. nishu no sangan; K. ijong samgwan). The gradual practice of the "threefold contemplation" begins with the contemplation of emptiness, advances to that of conventional existence, and culminates in the contemplation of their mean. Tiantai exegetes variously labeled this approach "the threefold contemplation" by either "graduated stages" (C. cidi sanguan; J. shidai sangan; K. ch'aje samgwan) or "differentiation" (C. biexiang sanguan; J. besso no sangan; K. pyolsang samgwan). As a simultaneous practice, all three aspects of the reality are to be contemplated simultaneously within any given instant of thought: a true understanding of "emptiness" is the same as the correct understanding of "conventional existence," for they are just different emphases of the same truth of conditionality; only an erroneous construction of "emptiness" and "conventional existence" would lead to the conclusion that they are separate, contradictory realities. This approach is variously referred to as "the threefold contemplation that does not involve graduated stages" (C. bucidi sanguan; J. fushidai sangan; K. pulch'aje samgwan), "the perfectly interfused threefold contemplation" (C. yuanrong sanguan; J. ennyu no sangan; K. wonyung samgwan), or "the threefold contemplation [that is to be conducted within] a single moment of thought" (C. yixin sanguan; J. isshin sangan; K. ilsim samgwan). See also SANZHI.

SaNjaya Vairātīputra. [alt. SaMjayin Vairātīputra] (P. SaNjaya/SaNcaya Belatthiputta; T. Smra 'dod kyi bu mo'i bu yang dag rgyal ba can; C. Shansheye Piluozhizi; J. Sanjaya Birateishi; K. Sansaya Pirajija 刪闍耶毘羅胝子). One of the so-called "six heterodox teachers" often mentioned in Buddhist sutras, whose views and/or practices were criticized by the Buddha, along with PuRAnA-KĀsYAPA, MASKARIN GOsĀLĪPUTRA, AJITA KEsAKAMBALA, KAKUDA KĀTYĀYANA, and NIRGRANTHA-JNĀTĪPUTRA. SaNjaya was a skeptic who doubted the possibility of knowledge and the validity of logic. On questions such as the presence of a world beyond the visible world, the nature of the postmortem condition, and whether actions done in this life had effects in the next, he found the four traditional answers-affirmation, negation, partial affirmation and partial negation, and neither affirmation or negative-to each be unacceptable, and therefore gave evasive answers when asked such speculative questions. The Buddha's two foremost disciples, sĀRIPUTRA and MAHĀMAUDGALYĀYANA, were originally disciples of SaNjaya before encountering the teachings of the Buddha. They are said to have each taken 250 of SaNjaya's followers with them when they abandoned him for the Buddha. Upon hearing the news of their departure, SaNjaya vomited blood and fainted.

Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …

stoma ::: a stabilising mantra; a hymn at once of affirmation and submission. [Ved.]

stomah. ::: affirmations. stomah

Taharah (ritual &

Tahwid (A) God’s unity and its affirmation

tat ::: that; "That which escapes definition or description and is yet not only real but attainable", a word used to indicate parabrahman as "something utterly Transcendent, something that is unnameable and mentally unknowable, a sheer Absolute". Since this Absolute "is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech", it can only "be approached through experience", either "through an absolute negation of existence, as if it were itself a supreme Non-Existence, a mysterious infinite Nihil" (asat) or else "through an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence, . . . through an inexpressible absolute of being" (sat).

testify ::: v. i. --> To make a solemn declaration, verbal or written, to establish some fact; to give testimony for the purpose of communicating to others a knowledge of something not known to them.
To make a solemn declaration under oath or affirmation, for the purpose of establishing, or making proof of, some fact to a court; to give testimony in a cause depending before a tribunal.
To declare a charge; to protest; to give information; to bear witness; -- with against.


testimony ::: n. --> A solemn declaration or affirmation made for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact.
Affirmation; declaration; as, these doctrines are supported by the uniform testimony of the fathers; the belief of past facts must depend on the evidence of human testimony, or the testimony of historians.
Open attestation; profession.
Witness; evidence; proof of some fact.


The most strange development was Ch'an (Meditation, Zen, c. 500). It is basically a method of "direct intuition into the heart to find Buddha-nature," a method based, on the one hand, on the eightfold negation of production and extinction, annihilation and permanence, unity and diversity, and coming and departing, and, on the other hand, on the affirmation of the reality of the Buddha-nature in all things. Its sole reliance on meditation was most un-Chinese, but it imposed on the Chinese mind a severe mental and spiritual discipline which was invigorating as well as fascinating. For this reason, it exerted tremendous influence not only on Taoism which had much in common with it and imitated it in every way, but also on Neo-Confucianism, which stood in diametrical opposition to it.

thesis ::: n. --> A position or proposition which a person advances and offers to maintain, or which is actually maintained by argument.
Hence, an essay or dissertation written upon specific or definite theme; especially, an essay presented by a candidate for a diploma or degree.
An affirmation, or distinction from a supposition or hypothesis.
The accented part of the measure, expressed by the downward


  "The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement but fruits of the soul"s inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple.” *The Foundations of Indian Culture

“The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple.” The Foundations of Indian Culture

Thetics: (from Gr. Thetikos) According to Kant the sum total of all affirmations. -- K.F.L.

This time, for sure! "exclamation" Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted {debugging} sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g. attempts to bring up a {UUCP} connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" The {canonical} response is, of course, "But that trick *never* works!" See {hacker humour}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-09-27)

This time, for sure! ::: (exclamation) Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g. attempts to bring up a UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose.Also heard: Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! The canonical response is, of course, But that trick *never* works!See hacker humour.[Jargon File] (1995-09-27)

transcendent ::: a. --> Very excellent; superior or supreme in excellence; surpassing others; as, transcendent worth; transcendent valor.
Transcending, or reaching beyond, the limits of human knowledge; -- applied to affirmations and speculations concerning what lies beyond the reach of the human intellect.


Truth ::: The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 20, Page: 181


Tumah (ritual &

vouch ::: v. t. --> To call; to summon.
To call upon to witness; to obtest.
To warrant; to maintain by affirmations; to attest; to affirm; to avouch.
To back; to support; to confirm; to establish.
To call into court to warrant and defend, or to make good a warranty of title.


whereas ::: adv. --> At which place; where. ::: conj. --> Considering that; it being the case that; since; -- used to introduce a preamble which is the basis of declarations, affirmations, commands, requests, or like, that follow.
When in fact; while on the contrary; the case being in


yes ::: adv. --> Ay; yea; -- a word which expresses affirmation or consent; -- opposed to no.



QUOTES [12 / 12 - 659 / 659]


KEYS (10k)

   5 Sri Aurobindo
   2 Pasteur
   1 Sri Aurobindo
   1 Niels Bohr
   1 Nicholas of Cusa
   1 Ken Wilber
   1 is to shatter the faith of men here

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   14 Hal Elrod
   13 Anonymous
   12 Louise L Hay
   11 Friedrich Nietzsche
   10 Louise Hay
   7 Florence Scovel Shinn
   6 John C Maxwell
   6 bell hooks
   6 Albert Schweitzer
   5 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   5 Peter Rollins
   5 Paul Tillich
   5 Martin Luther King Jr
   5 Marcus J Borg
   5 Madeleine L Engle
   5 Henri J M Nouwen
   5 Charles Bradlaugh
   4 Victor Hugo
   4 Sri Aurobindo
   4 Robert Anthony

1:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr,
2:Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Death, Desire and Incapacity,
3:Our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge,
4:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
5:The ineffable God is spoken of more precisely by one who maintains that He dwells in light inaccessible to the intellect, beyond all affirmation and negation, all positing and removing, all opposition, all change and unchangingness. ~ Nicholas of Cusa, De Dato Patris Luminum 3,
6:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur,
7:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, the Eternal Wisdom
8:There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 250,
9:The truth is that my work ~ I was going to say my mission ~ is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire. ~ Miguel de Unamuno,
10:THE AFFIRMATION of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.02,
11:A difficulty comes or an arrest in some movement which you have begun or have been carrying on for some time. How is it to be dealt with?—for such arrests are inevitably frequent enough, not only for you, but for everyone who is a seeker; one might almost say that every step forward is followed by an arrest—at least, that is a very common, if not a universal experience. It is to be dealt with by becoming always more quiet, more firm in the will to go through, by opening oneself more and more so that any obstructing non-receptivity in the nature may diminish or disappear, by an affirmation of faith even in the midst of the obscurity, faith in the presence of a Power that is working behind the cloud and the veil, in the guidance of the Guru, by an observation of oneself to find any cause of the arrest, not in a spirit of depression or discouragement but with the will to find out and remove it. This is the only right attitude and, if one is persistent in taking it, the periods of arrest are not abolished,—for that cannot be at this stage,—but greatly shortened and lightened in their incidence. Sometimes these arrests are periods, long or short, of assimilation or unseen preparation, their appearance of sterile immobility is deceptive: in that case, with the right attitude, one can after a time, by opening, by observation, by accumulated experience, begin to feel, to get some inkling of what is being prepared or done. Sometimes it is a period of true obstruction in which the Power at work has to deal with the obstacles in the way, obstacles in oneself, obstacles of the opposing cosmic forces or any other or of all together, and this kind of arrest may be long or short according to the magnitude or obstinacy or complexity of the impediments that are met. But here too the right attitude can alleviate or shorten and, if persistently taken, help to a more radical removal of the difficulties and greatly diminish the necessity of complete arrests hereafter.

On the contrary, an attitude of depression or unfaith in the help or the guidance or in the certitude of the victory of the guiding Power, a shutting up of yourself in the sense of the difficulties impedes the recovery, prolongs the difficulties, helps the obstructions to recur with force instead of progressively diminishing in their incidence. It is an attitude whose persistence or recurrence you must resolutely throw aside if you want to get over the obstruction which you feel so much—which the depressed attitude only makes, while it lasts, more acute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, LOY4, Imperfections and Periods of Arrest,
12:The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience. It can be approached through an absolute negation of existence, as if it were itself a supreme Non-Existence, a mysterious infinite Nihil. It can be approached through an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence, through an absolute of Light and Knowledge, through an absolute of Love or Beauty, through an absolute of Force, through an absolute of peace or silence. It can be approached through an inexpressible absolute of being or of consciousness, or of power of being, or of delight of being, or through a supreme experience in which these things become inexpressibly one; for we can enter into such an ineffable state and, plunged into it as if into a luminous abyss of existence, we can reach a superconscience which may be described as the gate of the Absolute. It is supposed that it is only through a negation of individual and cosmos that we can enter into the Absolute. But in fact the individual need only deny his own small separate ego-existence; he can approach the Absolute through a sublimation of his spiritual individuality taking up the cosmos into himself and transcending it; or he may negate himself altogether, but even so it is still the individual who by self-exceeding enters into the Absolute. He may enter also by a sublimation of his being into a supreme existence or super-existence, by a sublimation of his consciousness into a supreme consciousness or superconscience, by a sublimation of his and all delight of being into a super-delight or supreme ecstasy. He can make the approach through an ascension in which he enters into cosmic consciousness, assumes it into himself and raises himself and it into a state of being in which oneness and multiplicity are in perfect harmony and unison in a supreme status of manifestation where all are in each and each in all and all in the one without any determining individuation - for the dynamic identity and mutuality have become complete; on the path of affirmation it is this status of the manifestation that is nearest to the Absolute. This paradox of an Absolute which can be realised through an absolute negation and through an absolute affirmation, in many ways, can only be accounted for to the reason if it is a supreme Existence which is so far above our notion and experience of existence that it can correspond to our negation of it, to our notion and experience of nonexistence; but also, since all that exists is That, whatever its degree of manifestation, it is itself the supreme of all things and can be approached through supreme affirmations as through supreme negations. The Absolute is the ineffable x overtopping and underlying and immanent and essential in all that we can call existence or non-existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove
2:... Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove
3:Life is our greatest possession and love its greatest affirmation. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove
4:An affirmation opens the door. It's a beginning point on the path to change. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
5:To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove
6:The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove
7:The miracle of the seed and the soil is not available by affirmation; it is only available by labor. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove
8:There is more to joy than looking only for affirmation; refusing to be challenged is the only bigotry. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove
9:When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove
10:We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
11:Every thought we think and every word we speak is an affirmation of what we believe about life and it's the same with magnetism. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
12:An affirmation to say everyday: The healing power of God is working in me right now. Eveyr day I get better and better in every way. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove
13:A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove
14:Affirmation statements are going beyond the reality of the present into the creation of the future through the words you use in the now. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
15:One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
16:When we have sold our identity to the judges of this world, we are bound to become restless, because of a growing need for affirmation and praise. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove
17:That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove
18:Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
19:Every thought and every word you speak is an affirmation. So why not choose to use only positive affirmations to create an exceptional life? I know you can do it! ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
20:Faith is a state of mind which may be induced, or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind, through the principle of auto-suggestion . ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove
21:We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
22:I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove
23:The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove
24:Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove
25:A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove
26:Make New Year's goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you're interested in fully living life in the year to come. ~ melody-beattie, @wisdomtrove
27:Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he is a child of God. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
28:Rebuilding us. Isn't that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury. ~ richard-bach, @wisdomtrove
29:Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
30:Explain to people that everything they say is an affirmation. Everything they think is an affirmation. Everything! What you want to do is to get control of what you are saying and thinking, so these things bring you good experiences in life rather than rotten experiences. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
31:We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
32:Because I have confidence in the power of truth and in the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Affirmation of the world and of life contains within itself an optimistic willing and hoping which can never be lost. It is, therefore, never afraid to face the dismal reality and to see it as it really is. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
33:The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove
34:Every single thought I have and every sentence I speak is an affirmation. It is either positive or negative. Positive affirmations create positive experiences, and negative affirmations create negative experiences. My new affirmation habit is to only speak of the good I want in my life. Then, only good will come to me. I use my affirmations wisely. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove
35:What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it." ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
36:Real greatness is often humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove
37:Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me - is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
38:If a person opens his mouth to say affirmation or denial, he is lost. Zen is gone. But keeping silence does not go away. The stone on the ground is silent, the blossoming flower under the window is also silent, but they do not understand Zen. There must be some way to find the silence and the speech to be the same, ie. denial and affirmation to be unified in a higher form of utterance. We do that, so we have met Zen. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove
39:The essence of spirituality does not consist in a specialised or narrow interest in some imagined part of life, but in a certain enlightened attitude to all the various situations which obtain in life. It covers and includes the whole of life. All the material things of this world can be made subservient to the divine game, and when they are thus subordained they become auxiliary to the self-affirmation of the spirit. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove
40:The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
41:When you learn to embrace your self with a sense of appreciation and affection, you begin to glimpse the goodness and light that is in you and gradually you will realize that you are worthy of respect from yourself. When you recognize your limits, but still embrace your life with affection and graciousness, the sense of inner dignity begins to grow. You become freer and less dependent on the affirmation of outer voices and less troubled by the negativity of others. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove
42:At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values... .In contrast to the ethical relativism of [totalitarianism], Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove
43:The angels also said, When people arrive in this world from the physical one and hear that they are in another world, they gather together in many places to form groups. They ask where heaven and hell are, and also where God is. After they have been taught, they start arguing, disputing, and fighting about whether God exists. This is a result of the great number of materialists in the physical world today. When the topic of religion comes up, materialists start to debate about it with one another and with other groups. The ensuing proposition and debate rarely results in an affirmation of the faith that God exists. Materialists associate more and more with the evil, because only from God can one do something good with a love for what is good. ~ emanuel-swedenborg, @wisdomtrove
44:T hat wisdom (which all men by their very nature desire to know and consequently seek after with such great affection of mind) is known in no other way than that it is higher than all knowledge and utterly unknowable and unspeakable in all language. It is unintelligible to all understanding, immeasurable by all measure, improportionable by every proportion, incomparable by all comparison, infigurable by all figuration, unformable by all. formation, ... imimaginable by all imagination, ... inapprehensible in all apprehension and unaffirmable in all affirmation, undeniable in all negation, indoubtable in ail doubt, inopinionable in all opinion; and because in all speech it is inexpressible, there can be no limit to the means of expressing it, being incognitable in all cognition… ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove
45:But see that none of the uninitiated hear these things. I mean those who cleave to created things, and suppose not that anything exists after a supernatural manner, above nature; but imagine that by their own natural understanding they know Him who has made darkness His secret place. But if the principles of the divine mysteries are above the understanding of these, what is to be said of those yet more untaught, who call the absolute First Cause of all after the lowest things in nature, and say that He is in no way above the images which they fashion after various designs; of whom they should declare and affirm that in Him as the cause of all, is all that may be predicated positively of created things; while yet they might with more propriety deny these predicates to Him, as being far above all; holding that here denial is not contrary to affirmation, since He is infinitely above all notion of deprivation, and above all affirmation and negation. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove
46:Because in proportion as we ascend higher our speech is contracted to the limits of our view of the purely intelligible; and so now, when we enter that darkness which is above understanding, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, and the negation of thought. Thus in the other treatises our subject took us from the highest to the lowest, and in the measure of this descent our treatment of it extended itself; whereas now we rise from beneath to that which is the highest, and accordingly our speech is restrained in proportion to the height of our ascent; but when our ascent is accomplished, speech will cease altogether, and be absorbed into the ineffable. But why, you will ask, do we add in the first and begin to abstract in the last? The reason is that we affirmed that which is above all affirmation by comparison with that which is most nearly related to it, and were therefore compelled to make a hypothetical affirmation; but when we abstract that which is above all abstraction, we must distinguish it also from those things which are most remote from it. Is not God more nearly life and goodness than air or a stone; must we not deny more fully that He is drunken or enraged, than that He can be spoken of or understood? ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove
47:Again, ascending, we say that He is neither soul nor intellect; nor has He imagination, nor opinion or reason; He has neither speech nor understanding, and is neither declared nor understood; He is neither number nor order, nor greatness nor smallness, nor equality nor likeness nor unlikeness; He does not stand or move or rest; He neither has power nor is power; nor is He light, nor does He live, nor is He life; He is neither being nor age nor time; nor is He subject to intellectual contact; He is neither knowledge nor truth. nor royalty nor wisdom; He is neither one nor unity, nor divinity, nor goodness; nor is He spirit, as we understand spirit; He is neither sonship nor fatherhood nor anything else known to us or to any other beings, either of the things that are or the things that are not; nor does anything that is, know Him as He is, nor does He know anything that is as it is; He has neither word nor name nor knowledge; He is neither darkness nor light nor truth nor error; He can neither be affirmed nor denied; nay, though we may affirm or deny the things that are beneath Him, we can neither affirm nor deny Him; for the perfect and sole cause of all is above all affirmation, and that which transcends all is above all subtraction, absolutely separate, and beyond all that is. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Art is affirmation. ~ N Scott Momaday,
2:Affirmation + Imagery + Emotion = Success ~ Robert Anthony,
3:Man lives more by affirmation than by bread. ~ Victor Hugo,
4:Affirmation plus action equals miracles. ~ Cheryl Richardson,
5:Documentation is an affirmation of order. ~ Michael E Gerber,
6:He wanted AFFIRMATION rather than INFORMATION. ~ Barbara W Tuchman,
7:Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life. ~ William Gay,
8:Make an affirmation immediately upon waking. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
9:Acceptance is an affirmation that you’re good enough. ~ Bill Konigsberg,
10:Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion. ~ Jim Rohn,
11:Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread. ~ Victor Hugo,
12:Very simply, an affirmation is anything you say or think. ~ Louise L Hay,
13:...Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread. ~ Victor Hugo,
14:No more verbal tap-dancing for pennies of affirmation. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
15:affirmation speaks to the relevance of the doctrine of inerrancy ~ R C Sproul,
16:DO SOMETHING TODAY TO CREATE
AN ENVIRONMENT OF AFFIRMATION. ~ John C Maxwell,
17:Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are. ~ Esther Perel,
18:Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission. ~ Blaise Pascal,
19:The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity. ~ Wynton Marsalis,
20:A life worth living can’t be made of denial. It must be made of affirmation. ~ Anonymous,
21:An affirmation opens the door. It's a beginning point on the path to change. ~ Louise Hay,
22:Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg. ~ Sarah Gailey,
23:There at least is a first affirmation, I mean negation, on which to build. ~ Samuel Beckett,
24:To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer. ~ Henri Nouwen,
25:An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so. ~ Shakti Gawain,
26:I am a moment illuminating eternity....I am affirmation...I am ecstasy. ~ Alexander Scriabin,
27:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. ~ Niels Bohr,
28:Cursing is an affirmation, worrying is an affirmation, and hatred is an affirmation. ~ Louise L Hay,
29:People go into politics because they want the affirmation, and they want the applause. ~ Andrew Cuomo,
30:The affirmation of one's essential being in spite of desires and anxieties creates joy. ~ Paul Tillich,
31:The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation. ~ Frederick Lenz,
32:Words of affirmation are powerful. Words change lives; words and ideas change the world. ~ Bryant McGill,
33:Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
34:learn to love others intelligently rather than demand their affirmation and adoration. ~ David A Powlison,
35:Prayer is the way we communicate with God. Affirmation is the way we reprogram the mind. ~ Iyanla Vanzant,
36:But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
37:Choosing one's leaders is an affirmation that the person making the choice has inherent worth. ~ Linda Chavez,
38:Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. ~ Romain Gary,
39:A baby nursing at a mother's breast... is an undeniable affirmation of our rootedness in nature. ~ David Suzuki,
40:Do we exist because others perceive our existence, or is, indeed, our own affirmation enough? ~ Neal Shusterman,
41:The miracle of the seed and the soil is not available by affirmation; it is only available by labor. ~ Jim Rohn,
42:Even the cry from the depths is an affirmation: Why cry if there is no hint of hope of hearing? ~ Martin E Marty,
43:Courage is not the absence of fear and pain, but the affirmation of life despite fear and pain. ~ Earl A Grollman,
44:It would not be necessary to make an affirmation more than once if one had perfect faith. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
45:Affirmation for Today: I am strong enough to refrain from killing any or all members of my family. ~ Susan Donovan,
46:It's a great affirmation of the possibility of overcoming conflict through reason and good will. ~ Mary Ann Glendon,
47:There is more to joy than looking only for affirmation; refusing to be challenged is the only bigotry. ~ Criss Jami,
48:The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love. ~ Erich Fromm,
49:I cared for me. Je n’appartiens qu’à moi. I am mine. The French affirmation was ridiculously perfect. ~ Pepper Winters,
50:When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments. ~ Zhuangzi,
51:I've always looked for my affirmation through my peers, the people I race against, and within my team. ~ Jimmie Johnson,
52:Idle and meaningless ... a form less solemn to me than the affirmation I would have reverently made. ~ Charles Bradlaugh,
53:The minute you say "I can't", it is another wrong affirmation to your subconscious that you choose to lose. ~ Tsem Tulku,
54:Negative self-talk and negative affirmation can keep you anchored in old thought patterns and identities. ~ Bryant McGill,
55:Nostalgic longing is always for an elsewhere. Remembrance is the affirmation of what brought us here. ~ Iris Marion Young,
56:The sincerity of intellectual affirmation has nothing to do with the naturalness of spontaneous emotion. ~ Fernando Pessoa,
57:Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. ~ Wynton Marsalis,
58:Trump’s need for constant affirmation and his almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself. ~ Michael Wolff,
59:This isn't romance. This isn't a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more. ~ Melina Marchetta,
60:We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
61:Christians must begin with the affirmation that all human beings are equally created in the image of God. ~ R Albert Mohler Jr,
62:If you're depressed and called Morgan spend the first half of the day in Germany for some positive affirmation. ~ Milton Jones,
63:I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. ~ Charles Bradlaugh,
64:Sometimes just the affirmation that a situation sucks can turn a mood around and inspire strength and optimism. ~ Melissa Hart,
65:There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours ~ Ayn Rand,
66:The drop in pending home sales is an affirmation that we are experiencing a modest slowing in the housing sector. ~ David Lereah,
67:My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement. ~ Martha Graham,
68:What affirmation and denial are in the case of thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in the case of longing for something. ~ Aristotle,
69:One man's affirmation of the consecuent is another's man inference to the best explanation (Psychosemantics, pp. 149) ~ Jerry A Fodor,
70:Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson,
71:For everyone, whatever his state--single, married, widowed, or priest-chastity is a triumphant affirmation of love. ~ Josemaria Escriva,
72:Here is an affirmation for today: I feel passionately about my life, and this passion fills me with excitement and energy! ~ Wayne Dyer,
73:I forgive you for not being the way I wanted you to be. I forgive you and I set you free.” This affirmation sets us free. ~ Louise L Hay,
74:The twenty first century will require a re-affirmation and re-definition of our alliances and international organisations. ~ Chuck Hagel,
75:admittance into the true church of Christ is based on regeneration, not merely on an affirmation of a creed or doctrine. The ~ John Bunyan,
76:Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy. ~ Henry Kissinger,
77:The paper was Catholic, but she embraced a philosophy of personalism, which is an affirmation of the dignity of each person, ~ David Brooks,
78:Every thought we think and every word we speak is an affirmation of what we believe about life and it's the same with magnetism. ~ Louise Hay,
79:There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace. ~ Michael Malone,
80:Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society. ~ Emile Zola,
81:More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question. ~ Mortimer Adler,
82:A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional. ~ Stephen Covey,
83:Science is an affirmation of a world others than ours, and therefore the negation of our world, which is the world of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
84:A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional. ~ Stephen R Covey,
85:Look for affirmation from everyone around you. Ignore your own sorrows, passions, and music. Whine about how nobody understands you. ~ Regina Brett,
86:The expressions Positive (or affirmation), Negation, and Negation of the Negation, are also known as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. ~ Anonymous,
87:Affirmation statements are going beyond the reality of the present into the creation of the future through the words you use in the now. ~ Louise Hay,
88:And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way, ~ Greil Marcus,
89:A painting of any quality is always going to have nerdy energy, an affirmation behind it. It's gonna be like a kid playing a video game. ~ John Currin,
90:Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. ~ Leonard Cohen,
91:a Preamble, a Short Statement, Nineteen Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and a more ample Exposition. Materials submitted at the meeting ~ R C Sproul,
92:We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside. ~ Pankaj Mishra,
93:An affirmation to say everyday:

The healing power of God is working in me right now. Eveyr day I get better and better in every way. ~ Joyce Meyer,
94:In order to qualify as a judgment, an affirmation must aim at getting it right aptly, through competence, and not just through a lucky guess. ~ Ernest Sosa,
95:And so I’m waiting for another rejection, another affirmation that I don’t belong among these people. That it’s not safe for me to be here. ~ Mindy McGinnis,
96:One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
97:That which distinguishes the new thought from the old is not a denial of this Divine Reality, but an affirmation of its immediate availability. ~ Ernest Holmes,
98:It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love. ~ Cornel West,
99:Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses. ~ Ernest Sosa,
100:When we have sold our identity to the judges of this world, we are bound to become restless, because of a growing need for affirmation and praise. ~ Henri Nouwen,
101:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.

[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr,
102:When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. ~ Sharon Salzberg,
103:Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. ~ Emma Goldman,
104:For the people of the village every activity was an affirmation of continuity. At dawn the first of the family to go outside formally greeted the sun. ~ Wade Davis,
105:That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. ~ David Hume,
106:The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe . ~ Paul Tillich,
107:There’s a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don’t need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way. ~ Harriet Lerner,
108:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr, #2index,
109:I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living. ~ Antonin Artaud,
110:Affirmation literally means to validate or confirm. So when we think a thought over and over again, we are validating or confirming it as the truth. ~ Robert Anthony,
111:To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce. ~ Paulo Freire,
112:Customers aren’t looking for brands that are filled with doubt and want affirmation; they’re looking for brands that have solutions to their problems. ~ Donald Miller,
113:It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. ~ Anonymous,
114:bringing our understanding of motivation into the twenty-first century is more than an essential move for business. It’s an affirmation of our humanity. ~ Daniel H Pink,
115:Real confidence comes from knowing and accepting yourself- your strengths and your limitations -in contrast to depending on affirmation from others. ~ Judith M Bardwick,
116:sometimes you just need that visceral affirmation that the people you love are all right, that they’re just there in front of you. Close enough to touch. ~ Dot Hutchison,
117:The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. ~ Simone Weil,
118:But, unfortunately, sometimes that affirmation creates a sense that you deserve special treatment and recognition in areas where you're not so talented. ~ Taylor Hackford,
119:Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Death, Desire and Incapacity,
120:I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water. ~ Donald Miller,
121:Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
122:Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God. ~ Patrick Swift,
123:but sometimes you just need that visceral affirmation that the people you love are all right, that they’re just there in front of you. Close enough to touch. ~ Dot Hutchison,
124:Our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge,
125:There is no more direct statement or more clear affirmation
of the deity of Christ to be found anywhere in Scripture than in the first verse of John's Gospel. ~ R C Sproul,
126:You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.' ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
127:Every thought and every word you speak is an affirmation. So why not choose to use only positive affirmations to create an exceptional life? I know you can do it! ~ Louise Hay,
128:Denial and affirmation are games which people play.
There are people who deny that they are capable of denying, and who would insist that people do not insist. ~ Idries Shah,
129:Farewell is said by the living, in life, every day. It is said with love and friendship, with the affirmation that the memories are lasting if the flesh is not. ~ R A Salvatore,
130:I don’t want to be an anti, against anybody. I simply want to be the builder of a great affirmation: the affirmation of God,who loves us and who wants to save us. ~ Oscar Romero,
131:The girl was not specifically religious; [...] yet although her faith was nameless her way of living was somehow an affirmation of life rather than a negation of it. ~ R D Laing,
132:It is the potential in the soul for the heroic affirmation of life and for self-overcoming that is to become important to the future destiny of the human spirit. ~ Keiron Le Grice,
133:I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation. ~ Michael Schur,
134:Our every thought, image or affirmation is a prayer. Therefore, if everything you think, feel, say or do is a form of prayer, then make it uplifted and exalted. ~ Mark Victor Hansen,
135:Faith is a state of mind which may be induced, or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind, through the principle of auto-suggestion . ~ Napoleon Hill,
136:And the Lord added to their number is again an affirmation of God’s sovereignty in salvation, since he alone can change the human heart to enable true repentance and faith. ~ Anonymous,
137:Le mal est un mystère plus profond que le bien car, dans le bien, il y a une lumière, un dynamisme, une affirmation de la vie. Comment peut-on choisir l'obscur. ~ ric Emmanuel Schmitt,
138:Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation. ~ Eric Maisel,
139:What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation. ~ Judith Butler,
140:For darkness is the rule and light its exception, as death is the rule and life its exception. Light and life are anomalies, the dawn is their continual affirmation. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd,
141:In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This ~ Azar Nafisi,
142:I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis—the God of Abraham. ~ Dan Simmons,
143:I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle." ~ Madeleine L Engle,
144:We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
145:Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development. ~ Henry Kissinger,
146:The lecturer points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's decision to get engaged while in prison as his "positive statement that life will go on," his affirmation of the power of love. ~ J Rufus Fears,
147:Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. ~ Fernando Pessoa,
148:EMPATH AFFIRMATION I vow to honor my sensitivities and treat myself lovingly as I explore what it means to be an empath and embrace my gifts. I will appreciate myself every day. ~ Judith Orloff,
149:I'm not turned away from the church through anger, although I have criticisms of it. It's through finding affirmation of life and illumination of life through creativity and art. ~ Steve Coogan,
150:A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
151:Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness. ~ Simon Critchley,
152:People crave encouragement, and sometimes the greatest encouragement is the writing of words that endure. Perhaps you can pen a note of affirmation and approval to someone today. ~ David Jeremiah,
153:I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life. ~ Ansel Adams,
154:Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. ~ Bell Hooks,
155:Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. ~ bell hooks,
156:This means, agree that the adverse situation is good, be undisturbed by it, and it falls away of its own weight. "None of these things move me," is a wonderful affirmation. The ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
157:Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in "justice" or in affirmation of "rights" or in defense of "peace" do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation. ~ Wendell Berry,
158:Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level. ~ Alexander Haig,
159:This, it seems to me, is the lesson of the Bible: this affirmation of the importance of reflection, and of revision, enough revision to do away with the tired, old, even faulty laws. ~ Chinelo Okparanta,
160:affirmations depends entirely on how much you believe them when you say them. If there is no belief, then the affirmation is just words that have no power. Belief adds power to your words. ~ Rhonda Byrne,
161:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
162:Humanism is the affirmation of man as a free and responsible being. Nothing degrades man more than the proclamation of irresponsibility. Man is responsible, animals and things are not. ~ Alija Izetbegovi,
163:Using the word CHARISMA as an acrostic, we can define the outstanding characteristics of charismatic people: Concern Help Action Results Influence Sensitivity Motivation Affirmation Keep ~ John C Maxwell,
164:I do not deny "God", because that word conveys to me no idea, and I cannot deny that which presents to me no distinct affirmation, and of which the would-be affirmer has no conception. ~ Charles Bradlaugh,
165:Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom. ~ Bill Maher,
166:People don't want novelty - they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation. ~ Lauren Beukes,
167:Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power. ~ Albert Camus,
168:The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth. ~ Maria Montessori,
169:In the affirmation ofArticle III, the words "in its entirety" are significant. There are those who have claimed that the Bible contains revelation from God here and there, in specified places, but ~ R C Sproul,
170:Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay— ~ Thomas Mann,
171:So much affirmation ends up sounding like a murder of crows passing overhead and it is easy to be afraid of murder-by-crow-- though sometimes you have to start flapping your arms and follow them. ~ Lucia Perillo,
172:Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. ~ Bell Hooks,
173:Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. ~ bell hooks,
174:A positive affirmation can have a negative vibration. Most affirmations don’t work because the Law of Attraction doesn’t respond to words – it responds to how you feel about the words you use. On ~ Michael J Losier,
175:My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself. ~ Miguel de Unamuno,
176:Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I call dionysian ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
177:Affirming others isn't 'flattering' them-it's when you genuinely and consistently acknowledge their efforts and accomplishments, both large and small. Make affirmation a habit and watch what happens! ~ Leon F Lee Ellis,
178:In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life. ~ Stephen Covey,
179:Descartes’ s faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.”34 Evolutionary ~ Jaak Panksepp,
180:Toute maladie, presque sans exception, peut céder à l’autosuggestion, si hardie et si invraisemblable que puisse paraître mon affirmation ; je ne dis pas cède toujours, mais peut céder, ce qui est différent. ~ mile Cou,
181:Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. ~ Henri Nouwen,
182:May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, misery, toil, and moil. Besides ~ Peter Linebaugh,
183:The adhesion of Coca-Cola is an affirmation of the expansion of the Global Pact and the importance it assumes worldwide, especially on the US market where more and more enterprises have decided to get involved. ~ George Kell,
184:What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things. ~ Martin Buber,
185:No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning. Thus the Bible begins with God's free affirmation, free acknowledgment, free revelation of himself: In the beginning God created... ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
186:The word 'yes' is just a sound. It's nothing without context. It can signal the end of a life, an exultation after a scored basket or a vanquished foe; it can answer questions or refute them; it's an affirmation. ~ Josh Hanagarne,
187:Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward. Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world. And let us be joyful in the homecoming. ~ George McGovern,
188:It is not enough to say, 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
189:People must have affirmation and praise in order to maintain a high level of performance. Withholding negative or critical comments is not nearly as important as giving positive input through compliments and praise. ~ John C Maxwell,
190:He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation. ~ P D James,
191:Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country. ~ Simon Hoggart,
192:The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity. ~ Richard Dawkins,
193:My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can't be done. ~ Marianne Faithfull,
194:Repeating an affirmation several times a day keeps you focused on your goal, strengthens your motivation, and programs your subconscious by sending an order to your crew to do whatever it takes to make that goal happen. ~ Jack Canfield,
195:While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
196:A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God. ~ Walt Disney,
197:It's a career that's enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can't go into acting for that because it's really your own self-belief that's going to get you through. ~ Miranda Otto,
198:When you shoot, that is opportunity number one to make a statement. When you edit, you have opportunity number two to make your statement. It could be an affirmation of your first choice or could go off in another direction. ~ Jay Maisel,
199:I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. ~ Edward Said,
200:Make New Year's goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you're interested in fully living life in the year to come. ~ Melody Beattie,
201:Mystical identification transcends the aristocratic virtue of courageous self-sacrifice. It is self- surrender in a higher, more complete, and more complete and more radical form. It is the perfect form of self-affirmation. ~ Paul Tillich,
202:The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they'll prove it to you every single day. ~ Biz Stone,
203:Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive. ~ Stephen Leacock,
204:I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. ~ Edward W Said,
205:Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. ~ Richard Flanagan,
206:Absolute faith is not the place of self-affirmation, but the place of self-negation. Life of faith is not limited to our spiritual life. What is important is how our spiritual sensitivity is applied to our relative environment. ~ Sun Myung Moon,
207:Our agenda, our definition of what a good God should give us, is a life that is comfortable, pleasurable, and predictable; one in which there’s lots of human affirmation and an absence of suffering. But consider God’s agenda, ~ Paul David Tripp,
208:Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,
209:Forgive me for my unbelief [in myself]. If I realized how valuable I am, my insatiable need for affirmation would be quieted. Forgive me for being such a perfectionist that I resist doing something good out of fear that it won't be great. ~ Beth Moore,
210:I think of Martin Luther King phrase a lot when I'm deciding public issues. He said: "Here I stand: I can do no other." It is basically an affirmation of my ultimate responsibility to obey my conscience in my acts as a public official. ~ Bruce Babbitt,
211:We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender. ~ Jay Michaelson,
212:All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I’d bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh! ~ Ralph Ellison,
213:In my personal life I wasn't someone who cried easily, someone who was extremely vulnerable, you know, in that way that's constantly seeking out affirmation from other people. I've always been much more the person who took care of everyone else. ~ Demi Moore,
214:I think death is not simply the last few moments of life, death is something that runs throughout the whole of life. Each of our moments is not only the possibility of affirmation, but it's also we're saying farewell at each moment to something. ~ Kevin Hart,
215:The point of my work is to show that culture and education arent simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences. ~ Pierre Bourdieu,
216:And there, as the sun begins to rise, he is overcome with thoughts of an affirmation, a proclamation, a promise—a promise to shine everywhere and always to very depths of the last days—which, after all, is all that anyone has ever asked of love. ~ Amor Towles,
217:Rebuilding us. Isn't that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury. ~ Richard Bach,
218:Rebuilding us. Isn’t that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury. ~ Richard Bach,
219:The Constitution had provided that all the public functionaries of the Union...should be under oath or affirmation for its support. The homage of religious faith was thus superadded to all the obligations of temporal law to give it strength. ~ John Quincy Adams,
220:Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he is a child of God. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
221:And there, as the sun begins to rise, he is overcome with thoughts of an affirmation, a proclamation, a promise - a promise to shine everywhere and always to very depths of the last days - which, after all, is all that anyone has ever asked of love. ~ Amor Towles,
222:Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life’s rattle and hum. Without a “yes” in our hearts, nothing would be done. And to be done with our existence en masse would be the most ambitious affirmation of all. ~ Thomas Ligotti,
223:We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance. ~ Martha Graham,
224:All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thoughts, and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning. ~ Henri Poincare,
225:the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves ~ Guy Debord,
226:We appeal not for vanity, but for self-respect; not for the negation of others, but for the affirmation of ourselves – for the free expression of our desire to pick our own fruit and not grovel in the waste baskets of others for mere shells long discarded. ~ Anonymous,
227:An affirmation is almost like a mantra. It does not really matter if what you are affirming is not totally true as yet. By repeating an affirmation over and over again, it becomes embedded in the subconscious mind, and eventually it becomes your reality. ~ Stuart Wilde,
228:Prayer is not an attempt to get God to agree with you or provide for your selfish desires, but that it is both an affirmation of His sovereignty, righteousness, and majesty and an exercise to conform your desires and purposes to His will and Glory ~ John F MacArthur Jr,
229:prayer is not an attempt to get God to agree with you or provide for your selfish desires but that it is both an affirmation of His sovereignty, righteousness, and majesty and an exercise to conform your desires and purposes to His will and glory. ~ John F MacArthur Jr,
230:« Aucun ouvrage de référence au monde, avec ses citations, ne peut remplacer le lien organique qu'une affirmation trouvée par nous-même établit avec notre intuition et notre attention, si bien qu'il se forme une véritable richesse pour notre esprit. » ~ Jacob Burckhardt,
231:Leisure draws its vitality from affirmation. It is not the same as non-activity, nor is it identical with tranquility; it is not even the same as inward tranquility. Rather, it is like the tranquil silence of lovers, which draws its strength from concord. ~ Josef Pieper,
232:for the rival candidate, an effort must be made to destroy his chance by establishing by dint of affirmation, repetition, and contagion that he is an arrant scoundrel, and that it is a matter of common knowledge that he has been guilty of several crimes. ~ Gustave Le Bon,
233:Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
234:Yes.” MiMi’s affirmation infuses the air with power. “Strength. Dignity. Courage. All these things belong to you. Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.” Yours to keep and yours to share. ~ Kennedy Ryan,
235:A thought that's imbued with the power of emotion produces the feeling that brings it to life. When this happens, we've created an affirmation as well as a prayer. Both are based in feeling-and more precisely, in feeling as if the outcome has already happened. ~ Gregg Braden,
236:While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself: and this "no" is its creative deed. This ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
237:Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life's breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth. ~ David Suzuki,
238:To get an Emmy nomination for a show that was the first-ever science talk show on television to us was an affirmation that there is an appetite for this content in the mainstream public, not just the erudite public. So we're all completely thrilled by it. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
239:To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. ~ Richard Misrach,
240:It's enough for a small betrayal, a distancing, an affirmation of independence to provoke wrath, fear and also hatred from the adult. How many husbands and boyfriends kill the woman they say they love because she has decided to leave. It's in the news every day. ~ Dacia Maraini,
241:the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form. ~ Guy Debord,
242:We can help a person to be himself by our own willingness to steep ourselves temporarily in his world, in his private feelings and experiences. By our affirmation of the person as he is, we give him support and strength to take the next step in his own growth. ~ Clark Moustakas,
243:In fact, the best of modern theology is revealing a strong “turn toward participation,” as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging. There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant. ~ Richard Rohr,
244:The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
245:Entitlement closes in upon itself in a kind of narcissistic bubble, distorting anything and everything in such a way as to reinforce itself. People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. ~ Mark Manson,
246:However much some journalists may criticize me, I know that I look, feel, and behave several decades younger than my actual age, and much of that is because I believe you are what you think you are. This is called positive affirmation, and it's a really strong tool. ~ Joan Collins,
247:Abby pulled me closer to her. Each movement she made was further affirmation of her answer. She felt the same. She cared about me. She wanted me. I wanted to run around the block screaming in celebration, and at the same time, didn’t want to move my mouth from hers. ~ Jamie McGuire,
248:A Course In Miracles is a constant affirmation that you are created by an unconditional thought of love that appears to have lost itself in a world of fear. Freedom, joy and peace of mind are yours again, when you remember and re-connect to your unconditional self. ~ Robert Holden,
249:The day I stood in front of the mirror and saw and loved my face and my hair for the first time in my life I was alone--completely utterly alone. We are always alone when we find the truth.
The fact that we are alone makes the taste of affirmation no less sweet. ~ Marita Golden,
250:The roses don’t care if anyone enjoys their beauty; they simply are beautiful. They are beautiful for themselves, because of what they are. No one made them that way, and they are not dependent on any outsider’s affirmation. How would it be to have such self-confidence? ~ G P Ching,
251:Explain to people that everything they say is an affirmation. Everything they think is an affirmation. Everything! What you want to do is to get control of what you are saying and thinking, so these things bring you good experiences in life rather than rotten experiences. ~ Louise Hay,
252:The mansion was one more affirmation of Kroner’s belief that nothing of value changed; that what was once true is always true; that truths were few and simple; and that a man needed no knowledge beyond these truths to deal wisely and justly with any problem whatsoever. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
253:Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace ~ Brennan Manning,
254:I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me - my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts - and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards, instead of developing them for the glory of God. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
255:There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares. ~ Jim Butcher,
256:Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n'y est engagé; c'est pourquoi la femme n'y trouve pas le motif d'une affirmation hautaine de son existence; elle subit passivement son destin biologique. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
257:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur,
258:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur,
259:We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
260:Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. ~ Don DeLillo,
261:Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
262:Creation is the work of the Word; it is also, and by this very fact, His manifestation, his outward affirmation; and this is why the world is like a divine language, for those who know how to understand it: Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei (The heavens declare the glory of God, Ps. XIX:2) ~ Ren Gu non,
263:We all sought affirmation. That’s why, as a species, we were such hypercritical assholes. We wanted proof we’d picked the right career or married the right person, even if said proof was of the at least we’re not them variety. We wanted our lives to tally in the positives column. ~ Deborah Wilde,
264:Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
265:But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that. ~ Hunter S Thompson,
266:Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful. ~ Gregory Bateson,
267:So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
268:Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
269:Healing does not come through intense affirmation of divinity, or by simply pouring out love and the expression of a vague mysticism.It comes through mastering an exact science of contact, impression, of invocation plus an understanding of the subtle apparatus of the etheric vehicle. ~ Alice Bailey,
270:The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought - he himself no longer thinks... The instinct for self-defense has in his case become soft; otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar - a decadent. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
271:He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
272:Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self. ~ Paul Tillich,
273:Affirmation and visualization are forms of programming, and we must be certain that we do not submit ourselves to any programming that is not in harmony with our basic center or that comes from sources centered on money-making, self interest, or anything other than correct principles. ~ Stephen R Covey,
274:We tend to become what the most important person in our life thinks we will become. Think the best, believe the best, and express the best in others. Your affirmation will not only make you more attractive to them, but you will help play an important part in their personal development. ~ John C Maxwell,
275:For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
276:I also hope you’ll understand that prayer is not an attempt to get God to agree with you or provide for your selfish desires but that it is both an affirmation of His sovereignty, righteousness, and majesty and an exercise to conform your desires and purposes to His will and glory. ~ John F MacArthur Jr,
277:A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence. ~ Jean Francois Revel,
278:Yet it seems so easy to take a photograph! One forgets that, apart from the technical aspects, photography can be a mental creation and the affirmation of a personality. What is marvelous about a photograph is that its possibilities are infinite; there aren't any subjects 'done to death'. ~ Gisele Freund,
279:Autobiography is the most fascinating thing you can do because you get to touch the human condition. And in the end, what else is there? To me, it's the ultimate affirmation of life, and a miracle of this transient, extremely fragile organism. To celebrate that, I think, is a noble thing to do. ~ Jim Dine,
280:Every thought you think and every word you speak is an affirmation. All of your self-talk, your internal dialogue, is a stream of affirmations. You’re using affirmations every moment whether you know it or not. You’re affirming and creating your life experiences with every word and thought. ~ Louise L Hay,
281:One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. ~ bell hooks,
282:Remind Youth: It is not necessary to look for confidence. It is there – potentially yours and never hidden; awaiting a commanding voice of faith, hope and affirmation. Speak repetitiously with authority and conviction the self-assurance which only seems lacking, but you simply lost touch with. ~ T F Hodge,
283:Some young ladies are so starved for male approval that what should be a normal attraction to men is accelerated into an obsessive need for male affirmation. Tragically, these dear ladies allow themselves to be devoured in the arms of men who have neither regard not respect for them as people. ~ T D Jakes,
284:All life is sacred. Since life is an affirmation of the Creator, I shall live on, even when I am gone. In trailing clouds of glory shall I return to my Creator only to find that I had never really left. I shall walk among the lilies of the field and leave my trail in stardust in the sky. ~ John Harricharan,
285:Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements. ~ Wynton Marsalis,
286:In the early stages of feminist movement we used the phrase “woman-identified woman” or “man-identified woman” to distinguish between those activists who did not choose lesbianism but who did choose to be woman-identified, meaning their ontological existence did not depend on male affirmation. ~ bell hooks,
287:The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
288:Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration. ~ Ivan Illich,
289:He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments - negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard,
290:He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say. ~ Jean Fran ois Lyotard,
291:Tereza's death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. One was full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back. It grew like grass and straw, all mixed up together, and turned into an icy affirmation on my brow. That was my damn stupid plant. ~ Herta M ller,
292:Make an affirmation immediately upon waking. For example: "Thy will be done this day! Today is a day of completion, I give thanks for this perfect day, miracle shall follow miracle and wonders shall never cease." Make this a habit, and one will see wonders and miracles come into his life. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
293:Psychologically, faith has two entirely different meanings. It can be the expression of an inner relatedness to mankind and affirmation of life; or it can be a reaction formation against a fundamental feeling of doubt, rooted in the isolation of the individual and his negative attitude toward life. ~ Erich Fromm,
294:There can be no question to-day of a paper rich enough to allow its contributors to air their personal opinions, and such opinions would be of slight weight with readers who only ask to be kept informed or to be amused, and who suspect every affirmation of being prompted by motives of speculation. ~ Gustave Le Bon,
295:Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength. ~ Michael Shermer,
296:The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor. ~ Reza Aslan,
297:Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself. ~ Gilles Deleuze,
298:The affirmation of an intervention amidst all our doubt and uncertainty concerning its source thus represents the Christian idea that we have been marked by a life-giving event that invites us to passionately respond with our entire being. It is out of this that a deep and sustained questioning arises. ~ Peter Rollins,
299:Love is everywhere, and I am loving and lovable,” and to hold on to that new affirmation and to repeat it often, then it will become true for me. Now, loving people will come into my life, the people already in my life will become more loving to me, and I will find myself easily expressing love to others. ~ Louise L Hay,
300:...For action has no sense. It merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irrationalism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
301:Les femmes n'ont pas de nom. Elles ont un prénom. Leur nom est un prêt transitoire, un signe instable, leur éphémère. Elles trouvent d'autres repères. Leur affirmation au monde, leur "être là", leur création, leur signature, en sont déterminés. Elles s'inventent dans un monde d'hommes, par effraction. ~ Marie Darrieussecq,
302:Production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution. ~ Mark McMorris,
303:To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation. ~ Norman Cousins,
304:Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding. ~ Aleister Crowley,
305:All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread. ~ Victor Hugo,
306:The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. ~ Founding Fathers,
307:This desire for personal affirmation is perhaps the smartphone’s strongest lure, and it is only amplified when we feel the sting of loneliness or suffering in our lives. At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging. ~ Tony Reinke,
308:Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western civilization”. Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure. ~ Josef Pieper,
309:Because I have confidence in the power of truth and in the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Affirmation of the world and of life contains within itself an optimistic willing and hoping which can never be lost. It is, therefore, never afraid to face the dismal reality and to see it as it really is. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
310:You can walk with the Shintoist through his sacred groves, or chant an affirmation with the Hindu on the banks of the Ganges...and still be a student of Unity... As the Christ becomes greater to you in Unity, the Buddha also becomes greater, and the greater the Buddha becomes, the greater the Christ becomes. ~ James Marcus Bach,
311:Captain,” said Khaavren, both by way of affirmation and correction, thus conveying the maximum amount of information in the fewest possible words; a custom of his, and one that this historian has, in fact, adopted for himself, holding efficiency of language to be a high virtue in all written works without exception. ~ Steven Brust,
312:Thanks to my parents, whose unconditional love, encouragement, and affirmation freed me to chart my own course and follow my dream. As the years go by, my appreciation grows for the example they set and the wisdom they passed down. Boundless thanks to my wife, Kristin, who never let me forget how much she believed ~ Tommy Newberry,
313:Her love was like armor that covered him as he went into the world. A man required that from his queen. A black man would likely die without it. It was the reason so many brothers perished too early, because they never received that affirmation from a queen. It was the black woman that strengthened the black man. ~ Ashley Antoinette,
314:In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy man's need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. ~ Eldridge Cleaver,
315:of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no ~ Founding Fathers,
316:That is the mission of the proletariat: to bring forth supreme dignity from supreme humiliation. Through its suffering
and its struggles, it is Christ in human form redeeming the collective sin of alienation. It is, first of all, the multiform
bearer of total negation and then the herald of definitive affirmation. ~ Albert Camus,
317:Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere. ~ Adrienne Rich,
318:What the best fiction does is make powerful affirmations of familiar truths...the trivial fiction which times filters out is that which either makes wrong affirmations or else makes affirmations in a squeaky little voice. Powerful affirmation comes from strong intellect and strong emotions supported by adequate technique. ~ John Gardner,
319:Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of an "object"; it is not an "affect" but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves. ~ Erich Fromm,
320:If you agree with an outside person's interpretation of you, that's a happy bit of affirmation. It means you're communicating externally what you believe to be true internally. If you disagree, it helps clarify how you understand yourself. And maybe makes you productively question how to improve your communication skills. ~ Heidi Julavits,
321:In the end, despite the large volume of bad news, we can conclude with an affirmation. We can say with Wallace Stevens that 'after the final no there comes a yes.' Yes, we can save what is left. Yes, we can repair and make amends. We can reclaim nature and restore ourselves. There is a bridge at the end of the world. ~ James Gustave Speth,
322:A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson,
323:Earthly love… is temporal and slight so that is has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God’s love, God’s voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much we would be willing to die for them. ~ Donald Miller,
324:I counter whatever ‘doesn’t work’ in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love’s protest: for all the wealth of ‘good reasons’ for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the intractable lover ~ Roland Barthes,
325:Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion. ~ Cornel West,
326:Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution. ~ Karl Marx,
327:Dissent is verbal resistance. It is the affirmation of our voices, of our worth. It is, in a democracy, a fundamental right. And, in fact, dissent is not unrelated to love. They are complementary forces. In a climate where bigotry is an explicit value of those in institutional power, speaking love is an act of dissent. ~ Carolina De Robertis,
328:Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution. ~ Peter Singer,
329:For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. ~ Richard Rhodes,
330:There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares. It seemed that, lately, I had barely been touched at all. ~ Jim Butcher,
331:Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent. ~ Robert Hughes,
332:Bhutan is the land of la. The monosyllabic word serves as all-purpose affirmation, honorific, and verbal tic. Mostly, it is a softener, appended to almost everything. La means “sir” but also “ya know.” I like the way it sounds and, during my weeks in Bhutan, use it myself, but always self-consciously, never finding the right rhythm. ~ Eric Weiner,
333:First, evangelicals cannot appeal to church tradition to settle an issue. The affirmation of sola scriptura means that Scripture is the sole authority on matters of faith and practice. Christians should not easily set aside traditional perspectives, but they can and must do so if traditional views disagree with Scripture. Second, ~ Gregory A Boyd,
334:Focus the mind with ease, lucidity, and vibrancy, not allowing it to fall under the influence of either dullness or excitation. This is presented by the following line:             Place your mind on the basis-of-all, the actual path.175 You should identify the ordinary mind and place it in a state free of negation or affirmation. ~ Thupten Jinpa,
335:The greatest joy a parent can have and an affirmation of being an outstanding role model is when your child tells you she wants to be just like you. So be the most outstanding you because when you become a parent one day, your children will be proud to be just like you. - Kailin Gow on Life, Balance, Parenting, and Being a Role Model ~ Kailin Gow,
336:Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge and affirm differences, variety. ~ bell hooks,
337:When the words ‘like a girl’ are used to mean something bad, it is profoundly disempowering. I am proud to partner with Always to shed light on how this simple phrase can have a significant and long-lasting impact on girls and women. I am excited to be a part of the movement to redefine ‘like a girl’ into a positive affirmation. ~ Lauren Greenfield,
338:The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered. ~ Felix Adler,
339:[...] le fait que toute manifestation formelle implique des limites qui contribueront indirectement à sa fin, n'est pas une raison suffisante pour qu'une tradition ne se manifeste pas ; la parole du Christ : « Celui qui frappe par l'épée, périra par l'épée » est d'une portée universelle : celui qui affirme, périra par l'affirmation. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
340:We can learn to control our thoughts in the same way, by gentle determination, not force. We take an affirmation and repeat it continually, while our thoughts are on the rampage. We cannot always control our thoughts, but we can control our words, and repetition impresses the subconscious, and we are then master of the situation. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
341:As for the people of Tasawwuf, they affirm the love of Allah, and this is more evident among them than all other issues....the affirmation of the love of Allah is well-known in the speech of their [old] and recent masters, just as it is affirmed in the Holy Qur'an and the Sunnah and in agreement of the ways of the early generation (Salaf) ~ Ibn Taymiyyah,
342:Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. ~ Carl Jung,
343:There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 250,
344:Participatory eschatology involves a twofold affirmation: we are to do it with God, and we cannot do it without God. In St. Augustine’s brilliant aphorism, God without us will not; we without God cannot. We who have seen the star and heard the angels sing are called to participate in the new birth and new world proclaimed by these stories. ~ Marcus J Borg,
345:The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. ~ Hermann Hesse,
346:The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. ~ Hermann Hesse,
347:The Truth in Christianity is not described but experienced. This is not then the affirmation of some objective description concerning Truth but rather describes a relation with the Truth. In other words, Truth is God and having knowledge of the Truth is evidenced, not in a doctrinal system, but in allowing that Truth to be incarnated in one’s ~ Peter Rollins,
348:To our surprise, they readily agreed. Suddenly, we were making two ambitious feature films at once—doubling our theatrical output overnight. This was a little scary, but it also felt like an affirmation of our core values. As we staffed up, I felt proud that we had insisted on quality. Decisions like that, I believed, would ensure future success. ~ Ed Catmull,
349:Every single thought I have and every sentence I speak is an affirmation. It is either positive or negative. Positive affirmations create positive experiences, and negative affirmations create negative experiences. My new affirmation habit is to only speak of the good I want in my life. Then, only good will come to me. I use my affirmations wisely. ~ Louise Hay,
350:It's crazy how your mind works because you can receive hundreds and thousands of all these love posts and all this good affirmation on Instagram or Twitter. And then that one person writes one thing that dims your light but that's the thing you can't let it dim your light, because what I've realized - it's really not your problem, it's theirs. ~ Danielle Brooks,
351:OUR CULTURE PUTS FORWARD THE NARRATIVE THAT WE really only have two options in our relationship with the LGBT community—affirmation or alienation. Jesus shows us that a third response—a gospel response—is possible. He shows us how to respond with grace and truth, how to hold out God’s truth and God’s love, not having to choose between the two. ~ Russell D Moore,
352:If you have ever grumbled at your mother telling you to put on a coat or felt your blood pressure rise when your boss micro-manages you, you have experienced what psychologists call “reactance,” the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy. However, when a request is coupled with an affirmation of the right to choose, reactance is kept at bay. ~ Nir Eyal,
353:J'écris : j'écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j'ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps ; j'écris parce qu'ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l'écriture : leur souvenir est mort à l'écriture ; l'écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et l'affirmation de ma vie. ~ Georges Perec,
354:Although Jesus deeply affirms our suffering, and although he catches every tear and profoundly understands every trial we have walked through, the suffering isn't meant to be the focus of our lives. Jesus must be the focus. Anytime we take Jesus' affirmation of our suffering as carte blanche to worship our pain rather than him, we've missed the point. ~ Ann Swindell,
355:Conclusions which are merely verbal cannot bear fruit, only those do which are based on demonstrated fact. For affirmation and talk are deceptive and treacherous. Wherefore one must hold fast to facts in generalizations also, and occupy oneself with facts persistently, if one is to acquire that ready and infallible habit which we call "the art of medicine". ~ Hippocrates,
356:I would say that deconstruction is affirmation rather than questioning, in a sense which is not positive: I would distinguish between the positive, or positions, and affirmations. I think that deconstruction is affirmative rather than questioning: this affirmation goes through some radical questioning, but it is not questioning in the field of analysis. ~ Jacques Derrida,
357:He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and a self-indulgent exploration, a means of making sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation. The diary, which had become a routine part of his life, was pointless if he had to censor, to leave out, if he had to deceive not illumine. ~ P D James,
358:When, however, it is proposed to imbue the mind of a crowd with ideas and beliefs—with modern social theories, for instance—the leaders have recourse to different expedients. The principal of them are three in number and clearly defined—affirmation, repetition, and contagion. Their action is somewhat slow, but its effects, once produced, are very lasting. ~ Gustave Le Bon,
359:In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society. ~ Tom Stoppard,
360:In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms. ~ Sarah Hall,
361:The atheist does not say 'there is no God,' but he says 'I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God'; the word 'God' is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. ... The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me. ~ Charles Bradlaugh,
362:People who do not love themselves can adore others, because adoration is making someone else big and ourselves small. They can desire others, because desire comes out of sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled. But they can not love others, because love is an affirmation of the living growing being in all of us. If you don’t have it, you cant give it. ~ Andrew Matthews,
363:The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination. ~ Jean Genet,
364:Biblical inerrancy and the absolute authority of the Bible are thus a post-Reformation Protestant development. The first time the Bible was described as “inerrant” and “infallible” was in a book of Protestant theology written in the second half of the 1600s. Widespread affirmation of biblical inerrancy is even more recent, largely the product of the past one hundred years. ~ Marcus J Borg,
365:He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. ~ Michel Faber,
366:if I am willing to release that belief and to affirm for myself that “Love is everywhere, and I am loving and lovable,” and to hold on to that new affirmation and to repeat it often, then it will become true for me. Now, loving people will come into my life, the people already in my life will become more loving to me, and I will find myself easily expressing love to others. ~ Louise L Hay,
367:I look for external validations of worth, and I always end up crazy over it,” I said. “It’s good you can acknowledge that,” Terri said. “How long have you been doing that?” “My whole life. Isn’t that what we learn as children? To look for affirmation in the external? Our fathers and mothers?” I said. “Some children are taught self-esteem from a young age,” she said. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot,
368:Real greatness is often humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love. ~ Henri Nouwen,
369:If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made. ~ John Howard,
370:This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse. ~ Wilhelm Reich,
371:Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me - is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
372:The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. ~ Audre Lorde,
373:If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made. ~ John Howard Yoder,
374:And what’s the difference between us, that you’ll brush his sins aside and not my own?”
Maati smiled. “You aren’t him,” he said.
“And you love him.”
Maati took a pose of affirmation.
“And love is more important than justice,” Seedless said.
“Sometimes. Yes.”
Seedless smiled and nodded.
“What a terrible thought,” he said. “That love and injustice should be married. ~ Daniel Abraham,
375:Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men. ~ Betty Friedan,
376:We live in a world filled with evil and moral confusion. There is only one way out: affirmation of a God Whose primary demand of us is that we treat our fellow human beings decently. Faith in any god who makes any other primary demand will ultimately fail to solve the problem of evil. And any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail ~ Dennis Prager,
377:Indeed, the term body (jism), organs ('arad), extent (mutahayyiz) and their like are all newly-invented terminologies. We have mentioned many a time before that the Salaf and the Imaams have not spoken about such things, neither by way of a negation nor by way of affirmation. Rather, they declared those who spoke about such matters to be innovators and went to great lengths to censure them. ~ Ibn Taymiyyah,
378:We live in a world filled with evil and moral confusion. There is only one way out: affirmation of a God Whose primary demand of us is that we treat our fellow human beings decently. Faith in any god who makes any other primary demand will ultimately fail to solve the problem of evil. And any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail. ~ Dennis Prager,
379:For instance, some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman’s job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women, memorized by Jewish husbands for the purpose of honoring their wives at the family table. It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard. ~ Sarah Bessey,
380:The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you, in effect, acknowledge that it is there…in effect. Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God; an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate. Appreciate. ~ Neale Donald Walsch,
381:Isn’t it profound the influence one is afforded—even the smallest among us—when affirmation comes clean off our tongue and clear from our hearts? All great progress and problem solving with others begins when at least one party is willing to place what is already good on the table. From there it is much easier to know where to begin and how to lead the interaction to a mutually beneficial end. ~ Dale Carnegie,
382:Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do something for the glory of God, you will know God’s peace in your heart and find rest there. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
383:If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
384:I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals. ~ Stanley Milgram,
385:The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you in effect, acknowledge that it is there...in effect. Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God - an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate... Appreciate. ~ Neale Donald Walsch,
386:Affirmation, in contrast to flattery, requires seeing someone well enough to sense what to affirm, knowing someone well enough to be aware of what really matters. Flattery is usually an admittance of insensibility, a betrayal of trust. We say things we think we should say, but in reality we aren’t thinking at all. What message does flattery send? “You don’t matter enough for me to pay you much mind. ~ Dale Carnegie,
387:Given its more substantial aim, a judgment is apt only if its constitutive alethic affirmation is not only apt but aptly apt. The subject must attain aptly not only the truth of his affirmation but also its aptness. And that in turn requires not only the proper operation of one's perception, memory, inference, etc., but also that one deploy such competences through competent epistemic risk assessment. ~ Ernest Sosa,
388:If you're in music for the right reasons, you don't pay much attention to the grueling industry. For sure, it's great to have your work appreciated, but it should never be the driving factor. If you don't depend solely on affirmation from the industry to continue to find love in what you do, then you can have as along of a career as you want. I've always been in this for the music and that won't change. ~ Nikki Yanofsky,
389:I’d never experienced sex like this before. There was the insanely good fucking component but that wasn’t the whole story. It was the feeling of it all. The emotion behind every thrust, the intention in every kiss, the promise in every breath we shared. This kind of sex was an affirmation, and an ever-growing part of me knew I could scavenge the earth and not find anything else like it. Like him. ~ Kate Canterbary,
390:God, please use me" is the most powerful affirmation we can say for an abundant career. It is the miracle-worker's prayer. Everybody wants a great job. Accept that it's already been given you. The fact that you're alive means a function has been assigned to you: open your heart to everyone and everything. That way you're a vessel of God. Don't worry about what to say or what to do. He'll let you know. ~ Marianne Williamson,
391:The actual existence of the subject of the proposition is therefore only apparently, not really, implied in the predication, if an essential one: we may say, A ghost is a disembodied spirit, without believing in ghosts. But an accidental, or non-essential, affirmation, does imply the real existence of the subject, because in the case of a non-existent subject there is nothing for the proposition to assert. ~ John Stuart Mill,
392:THE AFFIRMATION of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.02,
393:heart, it’s driven by a deep human desire for collaboration and a deep human desire for recognition and affirmation of work well done—not financial reward. It is amazing how much value you can create with the words “Hey, what you added is really cool. Nice job. Way to go!” Millions of hours of free labor are being unlocked by tapping into people’s innate desires to innovate, share, and be recognized for it. ~ Thomas L Friedman,
394:What is home? My favorite definition is "a safe place," a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It's a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable. ~ Gladys M Hunt,
395:The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich,
396:The essence of spirituality does not consist in a specialised or narrow interest in some imagined part of life, but in a certain enlightened attitude to all the various situations which obtain in life. It covers and includes the whole of life. All the material things of this world can be made subservient to the divine game, and when they are thus subordained they become auxiliary to the self-affirmation of the spirit. ~ Meher Baba,
397:The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement. ~ Joseph Campbell,
398:Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty,
399:When someone you love dies, people ask you how you're doing, but they don't really want to know. They seek affirmation that you're okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (its three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that's about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will). ~ Sarah Ockler,
400:Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves. ~ John C Maxwell,
401:Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991),
the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves. ~ John C Maxwell,
402:I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized. ~ Stephen Covey,
403:Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another. ~ Rollo May,
404:The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire. ~ Miguel de Unamuno,
405:The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire. ~ Miguel de Unamuno,
406:I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis -the God of Abraham. ~ Dan Simmons,
407:richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice—doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves. So, in the end, repairing the mismatch and bringing our understanding of motivation into the twenty-first century is more than an essential move for business. It’s an affirmation of our humanity. ~ Daniel H Pink,
408:Everything that can be denied, deserves to be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning. It can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly opposed to the laws of our present life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
409:I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural. ~ Anne Rice,
410:Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life. ~ Thomas Mann,
411:By itself the affirmation of life can only produce a partial and imperfect civilization. Only if it turns inward and becomes ethical can the will to progress attain the ability to distinguish the valuable from the worthless. We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of humankind. How ~ Albert Schweitzer,
412:Erotic intimacy is the revelation of our memories, wishes, fears, expectations, and struggles within a sexual relationship. When our innermost desires are revealed, and are met by our loved one with acceptance and validation, the shame dissolves. It is an experience of profound empowerment and self-affirmation for the heart, body, and soul. When we can be present for both love and sex, we transcend the battleground of Puritanism and hedonism. ~ Esther Perel,
413:The Dalai Lama has said: “My religion is kindness.” If we all adopted such a stance and embodied it in thought and action, inner and outer peace would be immediate, for in reality they are never not present, only obscured, waiting to be discovered. This is the work and the power of lovingkindness, the embrace that allows no separation between self, others, and events—the affirmation and honoring of a core goodness in others and in oneself. ~ Sharon Salzberg,
414:But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system. ~ Nadeem Aslam,
415:I know there still are barriers and biases out there, often unconscious,” she finally said, and the room roared in relief and affirmation. “You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States.” She paused. People screamed. “And that is truly remarkable. ~ Rebecca Traister,
416:If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride. ~ Simon Critchley,
417:The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of the hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, subvert the law that governs it, and change its future. The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing ~ Michel Foucault,
418:In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part. ~ Paul Tillich,
419:When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation.

Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguish gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no record of wrong. This is the criterion, sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God. ~ Brennan Manning,
420:How is a positive affirmation practiced? Let us say that you have chosen the positive words “Everything will definitely get better!” Whenever you have a chance, say this phrase aloud over and over again. Or, you could try inhaling deeply, then repeating the phrase in your mind many times while holding your breath. Many people have found that, through this practice, their thought habits really do change, and their circumstances take a turn for the better. ~ Ervin Laszlo,
421:She knew her husband would never stray, so highly did he value that which he’d waited nearly six thousand years to know, so precious was it to him: love. She knew he would be there with her until the very end, that he would cherish each wrinkle, every line in her face, because in the final analysis they were not a negation of life but an affirmation of a life well lived. Proof positive of laughter and tears, of joy and grief, of passion, of living. ~ Karen Marie Moning,
422:Stranger: 'Are not thought and speech the same, with this exception, that what is called thought is the unuttered conversation of the soul with herself?

Theatetus: Quite true.

Stranger: But the stream of thought which flows through the lips and is audible is called speech?

Theatetus: True.

Stranger: And we know that there exists in speech...

Theatetus: What exists?

Stranger: Affirmation

Theatetus: Yes, we know it. ~ Plato,
423:Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation. ~ Lester Bangs,
424:Black Power, in short, is an attitude, an inward affirmation of the essential worth of blackness. It means that the black man will not be poisoned by the stereotypes that others have of him, but will affirm from the depth of his soul : "Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone." 16 And "if the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that `sho good eatin' that he persists in imagining. ~ James H Cone,
425:To make every little thing special is to grant a magical quality to your life. Once your life becomes charmed in such a way, whatever blocks you may have experienced in the past melt in the light of that inner energy pouring from your heart. From a businessman's point of view, this is beautiful, for everything you touch turns to gold. Further, it helps you to believe in yourself. In seeing worth all around, you make your every act an affirmation of your strength. ~ Stuart Wilde,
426:Too many readers regularly overestimate Augustine’s affirmation here and seem to regularly ignore his persistent affirmation that “justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone” (19.23). Because this is de facto ruled out as a possibility in the earthly city (whose very origin is the misdirection of the fall), the earthly city can never be home to “true justice ~ James K A Smith,
427:Even after we have been saved our sinful flesh craves unrighteousness. In fact, the presence of the struggle itself can be affirmation that God’s Spirit is at work within you. Before God’s Spirit came into you, you didn’t struggle against sin—you ran toward it eagerly! An unbeliever might “struggle” with sin, but typically they are struggling only with its unwanted consequences or the feelings of guilt and shame that accompany it. A believer’s struggle is much deeper. ~ J D Greear,
428:Affirmations are quality ideas and quality thoughts. The quality of our thoughts reflects the quality of our life. Hence, if we were to raise the quality of our thoughts, we would automatically improve the quality of our life Affirmation literally means to validate or confirm. So when we think a thought over and over again, we are validating or confirming it as the truth Using affirmations on a daily basis is one of the easiest things we can do to change our lives. ~ Robert Anthony,
429:Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 44.,
430:Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation. ~ Lester Bangs,
431:We see that affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act... Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does no belong to him alone. ~ Albert Camus,
432:Self-Criticizing Is Totally Missing the Mark It will only intensify the procrastination and laziness. The place to put the mental energy is into releasing the old and creating a new thought pattern. Say: “I am willing to release the need to be unworthy. I am worthy of the very best in life, and I now lovingly allow myself to accept it. “As I spend a few days doing this affirmation over and over, my outer effect pattern of procrastination will automatically begin to fade. ~ Louise L Hay,
433:Please realize that every complaint is an affirmation of something you think you don’t want in your life. Every time you get angry, you’re affirming that you want more anger in your life. Every time you feel like a victim, you’re affirming that you want to continue to feel like a victim. If you feel that Life isn’t giving you what you want, then it’s certain that you will never have the goodies that Life gives to others—that is, until you change the way you think and talk. ~ Louise L Hay,
434:In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial. ~ Peter Sloterdijk,
435:One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this al the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused. ~ bell hooks,
436:Let’s review, shall we?     1. List off your old stories that you’ve gotten into the habit of thinking and saying.     2. Journal about the false rewards you get from them.     3. Feel into these false rewards, thank them for their help, and decide to let them go.     4. Take each false reward and write a new, powerful story to replace it with.     5. Repeat this new story, or affirmation, over and over and over until it becomes your truth.     6. Behold your awesome new life. ~ Jen Sincero,
437:But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
438:When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life. ~ Walter Lippmann,
439:At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values....In contrast to the ethical relativism of [totalitarianism], Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable. ~ Martin Luther,
440:Of course, even the general designation 'religious' includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. ~ Adolf Hitler,
441:An affirmation states that a goal is already happening. I'm not crazy about this because, often when we affirm something that is not yet real, the little voice in our head usually responds with This isn't true, this is BS...On the other hand, a declaration is not saying something is true, it's saying we have an intention of doing or being something. This is a position the little voice can buy, because we're not stating it's true right now, but again, it's an intention for us ion the future. ~ T Harv Eker,
442:Just as every color, by its negation of darkness and its affirmation of light, provides the possibilty of discovering the ray that makes it visible and of tracing this ray back to the luminous source, so all forms, all symbols, all religions, all dogmas, by their negation of error and their affirmation of Truth, makes it possible to follow the ray of Revelation, which is no other than the ray of the Intellect, back to its Divine Source. Frithjof Schuon, Transcendental Unity of Religions ~ Frithjof Schuon,
443:For you deal here above all with human life, and human life is sacred; no one may dare make an attempt upon it. Respect for life, even with regard to the great problem of the birth rate, must find here in your Assembly its highest affirmation and its most rational defense. Your task is to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables of mankind, and not to encourage an artificial control of births, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life. ~ Pope Paul VI,
444:I wish more of us could understand that our increasing isolation, no matter how much it seems to express pride and self-affirmation, is not the answer to our problems. Rather, the answer is a revival of our ancient commitment to God, who rules over all the peoples of the world and exalts no one over any other, and to the moral and spiritual values which were once legendary in America. We must reach out our hand in friendship both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy. ~ Arthur Ashe,
445:Particularly deep in human evolutionary history is yes & no. By coos of affirmation and snorts of disapproval, elders reinforce the successes and errors of the youths they teach—a pattern that must antedate any accompanying words. Primates condition each other with painful bites and comforting strokes. Reward & punishment imprints yes & no into the neuronal wetware, encouraging certain activities in life’s arena, banishing others behind walls of taboo. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind,
446:The new sensibility has become, by this very token, praxis: it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself. ~ Herbert Marcuse,
447:I do not deny God, because that word conveys to me no idea, and I cannot deny that which presents to me no distinct affirmation, and of which the would-be affirmer has no conception. I cannot war with a nonentity. If, however, God is affirmed to represent an existence which is distinct from the existence of which I am a mode, and which it is alleged is not the noumenon of which the word I represents only a speciality of phenomena, then I deny God, and affirm that it is impossible God can be. ~ Charles Bradlaugh,
448:During an Ecstasy, LSD or mushroom experience, many people feel unbounded compassion for others and themselves. During a trip, the typical boundaries of our identity dissolve and you're able to experience your unity with all dimensions of reality simultaneously. It can be overwhelming, but it can also be a guidepost and affirmation of the soul's mission in life. A good trip can help us see and feel how perfect, beautiful and precious the world is, despite news reports to the contrary we get from CNN. ~ Alex Grey,
449:Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers. ~ Richard Rodriguez,
450:What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. ~ John Cage,
451:Their eyes met for a moment. And the glance that flickered between them had been a wordless message of understanding, the affirmation of a sympathetic secret alliance from which everyone else was excluded by natural law - the close mysterious blood-bond between two mutants, of which she had not yet heard. But, in some indescribable fashion, it had seemed, even then, that, obscurely, everything was already known and had been accepted, accepted finally and absolutely, in the depths of her unconscious self. ~ Anna Kavan,
452:David Simon: Everybody has an expectation that much of American television is about redemption and about affirmation. We were trying to make a show that was basically an argument of dissent. It was political dissent. It was saying our systems are not functioning. Our policies are incorrect. We're not going to find a way out of this unless we stand back and take stock and turn one hundred eighty degrees from what we've been doing, particularly in regard to the drug war and inequality that we were depicting. ~ Jonathan Abrams,
453:The people's community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy...Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. ~ Joseph Goebbels,
454:I think what happens in a religious life is that we have those experiences of affirmation and that one starts to live a Christian life or a Jewish life or a Muslim life or a Buddhist life, by affirming that affirmation each day. Each day you say 'Yes' to that Yes. So the life of being a Christian for example, is always a life of double affirmation, that you each day say 'Yes' to those counter-experiences of saying 'Yes', even when you're not experiencing them at that time, you're remaining loyal to that experience. ~ Kevin Hart,
455:Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. The concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were one's own, ie, they had the same ego form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body. ~ Carl Jung,
456:Sometimes “inner work” requires an act of loyalty rather than an effort at transformation. Knowing what makes us happy (Venus), expressing this to others (Mercury), and standing firm in the face of opposition (Mars) may seem very petty against the more profound concerns of the outer world. Yet in their own way, these things are equally profound, for it is these small acts of self-affirmation that define the ego and ultimately the capacity to mediate the heavy planets with their destructive and transformative potentials. ~ Liz Greene,
457:Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. ~ William James,
458:Establishing a positive affirmation habit first thing in the morning can impact the outcome of your entire day. Used this way, affirmations can change the way we view the world and even influence our actions. Neuroscience now proves that our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains. Positive affirmations, when practiced deliberately and repeatedly, can reinforce chemical pathways in the brain, making the connection between two neurons stronger, and therefore more likely to conduct the same message again. ~ S J Scott,
459:True resignation consists of this: that man, feeling his subordination to the course of world events, makes his way toward inward freedom from the fate that shapes his external existence. Inward freedom gives him the strength to triumph over the difficulties of everyday life and to become a deeper and more inward person, calm, and peaceful. Resignation, therefore, is the spiritual and ethical affirmation of one’s own existence. Only he that has gone through the trial of resignation is capable of accepting the world. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
460:That old Bobby Kennedy 1968 form of liberalism where you could be holding hands with the Appalachian family on one day and then be in Harlem the next day and nobody thinks it's weird, that is something that isn't as strong. It was strong in 2008. It hasn't been as strong since then. That's just a reality that we have to deal with that it's not just that the Republicans ran a terrible candidate who had bad ideas, it's also that the circle of love and affirmation that we have as progressives can sometimes just not be big enough. ~ Van Jones,
461:One has either got to be a Jew or stop reading the Bible. The Bible cannot make sense to anyone who is not “spiritually a Semite.” The spiritual sense of the Old Testament is not and cannot be a simple emptying out of its Israelite content. Quite the contrary! The New Testament is the fulfillment of that spiritual content, the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, the promise that Abraham believed in. It is never therefore a denial of Judaism, but its affirmation. Those who consider it a denial have not understood it. ~ Thomas Merton,
462:Progressive Christianity is about both negation and affirmation. It rejects biblical inerrancy, literal interpretation, and the beliefs that Jesus died to pay for our sins and that Christianity is the only way of salvation. Thus progressive Christians are often better known for what they do not believe than for what they do affirm. This is not surprising: to a large extent, progressive Christianity has emerged as a “no” to the conventional Christianity of the recent past and the conservative Christianity of the present. But ~ Marcus J Borg,
463:That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in this kingdom that Jesus ever delivered. And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation shouting, "He is risen!" to a chorused response of "He is risen indeed!" Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that distinction would always belong to a woman. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
464:If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God's existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him. ~ Annie Besant,
465:For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable—a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one—or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen. ~ Charles M Blow,
466:You’re not going to find any magazines on the newsstands with articles encouraging you to show humility. Instead, we are saturated with messages about power, independence, and control. We are bombarded with advice telling us to listen to our own hearts, to do whatever we feel like doing. The constant affirmation of the world and the pull of our own hearts make it so easy to believe that we deserve to be treated in a certain way. We should not have to listen to anyone telling us what to do; after all, we are strong and independent. ~ Francis Chan,
467:An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. ~ Bertrand Russell,
468:bedtime affirmation and telling myself that I was going to wake up feeling energized in the morning:  “Thank you for giving me these five hours of sleep tonight. Five hours is exactly what I need to feel rested and energized in the morning. My body is capable of miraculous things, the least of which is generating an abundance of energy from five restful hours of sleep. I believe that I create my experience of reality, and I choose to create waking up tomorrow feeling energized and excited to take on my day, and I’m grateful for that.”  ~ Hal Elrod,
469:Who are these sons and daughters? They are the ones who know the love and affirmation of a father. They are not governed by their hormones, but governed by the commands of God. They are not propped up by some cheap, self-help, build-your-self-esteem plan, but have been baptized in confidence because they’ve heard the voice of a father saying, “You are my beloved son.” And they rule as a father for their father. They stand in the face of every intimidating Jezebel because they build their house on the rock of obedience to God’s Word. ~ James W Goll,
470:I said. I’m a maid. I’m a dancer, she said. She stuck her elbows out and snapped her fingers. Well, I said. I get paid. Well, she said. I get applause. Well, I said. I get paid and with that money I rent an apartment and buy food. And a television. Well, she said. I get applause and with that affirmation of my amazing talent I feel happy and confident and cool. Well, I said. Enjoy your life as a dancer. Well, she said. Enjoy your life as a maid. Thanks, I will, I said. Good, she said. We walked in grim silence towards something else. ~ Miriam Toews,
471:Your main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. You have your own inner knowledge to answer that question. Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do something for the glory of God, you will know God’s peace in your heart and find rest there. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
472:in order to confer their lost Nationality upon exiled Jews , the British with the help of the League of Nations began to rehabilitate the old Hebrew country, Palestine, with its long lost children. The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language; and all they wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality. The reconstruction of the Hebrew Nation on Palestine is just an affirmation of the fact that Country, Race, Religion, Culture and Language must exist unequivocally together to form the Nation idea. ~ M S Golwalkar,
473:I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa. ~ Abraham Verghese,
474:Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation. ~ Karl Marx,
475:Undoubtedly the master enjoys total freedom first as regards the slave, since the latter recognizes him
totally, and then as regards the natural world, since by his work the slave transforms it into objects of
enjoyment which the master consumes in a perpetual affirmation of his own identity. However, this
autonomy is not absolute. The master, to his misfortune, is recognized in his autonomy by a
consciousness that he himself does not recognize as autonomous. Therefore he cannot be satisfied and his
autonomy is only negative. ~ Albert Camus,
476:In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. ~ Azar Nafisi,
477:I think that I have anticipated my answer to the third objection, namely, that the will is something universal which is predicated of all ideas, and that it only signifies that which is common to all ideas, namely, an affirmation, whose adequate essence must, therefore, in so far as it is thus conceived in the abstract, be in every idea, and be, in this respect alone, the same in all, not in so far as it is considered as constituting the idea's essence: for, in this respect, particular affirmations differ one from the other, as much as do ideas. ~ Baruch Spinoza,
478:Social media is a curious thing. On the one hand, it offers an endless parade of ephemera from the daily lives of friends, family, and strangers—discussions of a fondness for yogurt, a picture of a barista’s decoration in latte foam, descriptions of excellent meals, pictures of pets and small children or maybe an abandoned easy chair on a crowded street corner. There’s all manner of self-promotion and relentless affirmation. There are knee-jerk, ill-informed reactions to, well, everything. The abundance of triviality is as hypnotic as it is repulsive. ~ Roxane Gay,
479:Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. . . . Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity. . . . It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness. . . . And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.35 ~ Timothy J Keller,
480:This fantasy-bonded person is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, his children, his job. He is especially dependent on his children. A fantasy-bonded person never has a real connection or a real relationship with anyone. There is no real, authentic self there for another to relate to. The real parents, who only accepted the child when he pleased them, remain as introjected voices. The true self hides from these introjected voices just as the real child did. The “loneliness of the parental home” is replaced by “isolation within the self. ~ John Bradshaw,
481:The flower sees the propagation of its pollen in the bee, while the bee sees sweet food for its larvae in the flower. In the embrace of the two organisms each sees “itself as if in a mirror” (Phaedro 255d) in the disposition of the other. Neither knows whether its affirmation coincides with the other’s or whether conversely its affirmation deprives the other of the future— killing it; each knows only that this is good for it and uses the other as a means to its own end,material for its own life,while it is itself the material for the other’s life. ~ Carlo Michelstaedter,
482:It had never occurred to me that what we call “God” could be experienced. For me, the word had referred to a being who might or might not exist, and in whom one could believe or disbelieve or about whom one could remain uncertain. But I realized there is a cloud of witnesses, Christian and non-Christian, for whom God, the sacred, is real, an element of experience, not a hypothetical being who may or may not exist and whom we can only believe in. For the first time in my life, I understood the affirmation that the earth is full of “the glory of God.” Perhaps ~ Marcus J Borg,
483:Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. The trouble to which it led. He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings. ~ Richard Flanagan,
484:Praise your partner in public. Have you ever been out with another couple, and one partner criticizes or diminishes the other in front of you? Everyone laughs awkwardly and tries to move on, but you can see the hurt and betrayal in the wounded partner’s eyes. When partners cherish one another, they not only avoid demeaning each other in public, but rather they find ways to give praise. You want others to see the best qualities in your partner, and you make a point to offer words of affirmation and appreciative looks to your significant other in front of everyone. ~ S J Scott,
485:I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides. ~ Neil Peart,
486:That gospel message should both humble and lift the believer up at the same time. It teaches us that we are indeed self-centered sinners. It perforates our illusions about our goodness and superiority. But the gospel also fills us with more love and affirmation than we could ever imagine. It means we don’t need to earn our self-worth through incessant service and work. It means also that we don’t mind so much when we are deprived of some comfort, compliment, or reward. We don’t have to keep records and accounts anymore. We can freely give and freely receive. ~ Timothy J Keller,
487:Even after we have been saved our sinful flesh craves unrighteousness. In fact, the presence of the struggle itself can be affirmation that God’s Spirit is at work within you. Before God’s Spirit came into you, you didn’t struggle against sin—you ran toward it eagerly! An unbeliever might “struggle” with sin, but typically they are struggling only with its unwanted consequences or the feelings of guilt and shame that accompany it. A believer’s struggle is much deeper. Their struggle is with the wickedness of the sin itself and the grievousness of its offense to God. ~ J D Greear,
488:Pieper writes: Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. . . . Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity. . . . It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness. . . . And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation. 35 ~ Timothy J Keller,
489:I came across an article recently that reported how growing numbers of employers today complain that many young job applicants exhibit all thesigns of having been -- there's no other word for it-- SPOILED. These young people feel entitled to jobs and salaries they haven't earned. They have unrealistic views of their own capabilities. They don't take criticism well, and they demand lots of attention and guidance from their employres. They "were raised with so much affirmation and positive reinforcement that they come into the workplace needy for more," said one manager. ~ Sarah Palin,
490:One of the most powerful concepts, one which is a sure cure for lack of confidence, is the thought that God is with you and helping you. This is one of the simplest teachings in religion, namely, that Almighty God will be your companion, will stand by you, help you, and see you through. No other idea is so powerful in developing self-confidence as this simple belief when practiced. To practice it simply affirm "God is with me; God is helping me; God is guiding me." Spend several minutes each day visualizing his presence. Then practice believing that affirmation. ~ Norman Vincent Peale,
491:Eschatology is one of the great and fundamental options of the human spirit. It is a profoundly explicit no to the profoundly implicit yes by which we usually accept life’s normalcies, culture’s presuppositions, and civilization’s discontents. It is a basic and unusual world-negation or rejection as opposed to an equally basic but more usual world-affirmation or acceptance. For myself, left to myself, I would prefer to bury the term eschatological and use instead a term such as world-negation. But I presume that eschatological is here to stay, so I continue to use it. ~ John Dominic Crossan,
492:It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex? ~ Michel Foucault,
493:The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. [...] If something is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us. I could see it so clearly, and I could see it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. ~ Donald Miller,
494:The future teachers I try to recruit are those show have refused to let themselves be neutered in this way, either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead in school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves, with their capacity to leave each place they've been ... a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it. ~ Jonathan Kozol,
495:Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable. ~ Carson McCullers,
496:No other idea is so powerful in developing self-confidence as this simple belief when practiced. To practice it simply affirm “God is with me; God is helping me; God is guiding me.” Spend several minutes each day visualizing His presence. Then practice believing that affirmation. Go about your business on the assumption that what you have affirmed and visualized is true. Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself. The release of power which this procedure stimulates will astonish you. Feelings of confidence depend upon the type of thoughts that habitually occupy your mind. ~ Anonymous,
497:It was in my 'Genealogy of Morals' that I first gave a psychological exposition of the idea of the antithesis noble and resentment-morality, the latter having arisen out of an attitude of negation to the former: but this is Judæo-Christian morality heart and soul. In order to be able to say Nay to everything that represents the ascending movement of life, prosperity, power, beauty, and self-affirmation on earth, the instinct of resentment, become genius, bad to invent another world, from the standpoint of which that Yea-saying to life appeared as the most evil and most abominable thing. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
498:Paramhansa Yogananda gave the following prayer-affirmation to help us creatively develop our individual qualities while tuning into divine guidance:
I will use my creative thinking ability to gain success in every worth‑while project that I undertake. I will help myself that I may bring into proper use all my God‑given powers.
I buried dead disappointments in the cemeteries of yesterday. Today I will plow the garden of life with my new creative efforts. God will help me if I help myself, praying to Him to help me to bring success to my efforts. (Metaphysical Meditations, 1932 Ed.) ~ Paramhansa Yogananda,
499:On one side it seems there is faith in a Creator-God - and at the same time, the rejection of his creation; and on the other side there is an affirmation of the world, yet a world that is horrible in its meaninglessness, for the one who alone has the possibility of using and enjoying this world - man- is in this world an accidental guest, destined for total annihilation. And so this horrible and frightening dilemma brings us to the one question that each of us must pose: in the final analysis, how do *I* personally relate to this inescapable, universal, and relentless question about death? ~ Alexander Schmemann,
500:Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. ~ Daniel C Dennett,
501:The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms her possession of divine authority for the use of the sacred name, Jesus Christ, as the essential part of her distinctive designation. In view of this exalted claim, it is pertinent to inquire as to what special or particular message the Church has to give to the world concerning the Redeemer and Savior of the race, and as to what she has to say in justification of her solemn affirmation, or in vindication of her exclusive name and title. As we proceed with our study, we shall find that among the specific teachings of the Church respecting... ~ James E Talmage,
502:The film [March of the Penguins] has been endorsed by religious conservatives not only as a demonstration of God’s presence in nature but as an affirmation of “traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child-rearing.” These penguin family values, however, mandate monogamy for only one reproductive cycle: mama and papa penguin, once their chick is old enough to survive on its own, flop back into the ocean and never see each other or their offspring again. In the next mating cycle, they choose new partners. But why quibble? Serial monogamy, if ordained by a supreme being, is apparently good enough. ~ Susan Jacoby,
503:library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. ~ Susan Orlean,
504:All love on this earth involves choice. When, for example, a young man expresses his love to a young woman and asks her to become his wife, he is not just making an affirmation of love; he is also negating his love for anyone else. In that one act by which he chooses her, he rejects all that is not her. There is no other real way in which to prove we love a thing than by choosing it in preference to something else. Word and signs of love may be, and often are, expressions of egotism or passion; but deeds are proofs of love. We can prove we love our Lord only by choosing Him in preference to anything else. ~ Fulton J Sheen,
505:Without this bedrock of affirmation, this core of assurance, a man will move unsteadily through the rest of his life, trying to prove his worth and earn belovedness through performance or achievement, through sex, or in a thousand other ways. Quite often he doesn’t know this is his search. He simply finds himself uncertain in some core place inside, ruled by fears and the opinions of others, yearning for someone to notice him. He longs for comfort, and it makes him uneasy because at thirty-seven or fifty-one shouldn’t he be beyond that now? A young place in his heart is yearning for something never received. ~ John Eldredge,
506:The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates. ~ Michael D O Brien,
507:In short, power discourses operate at the level of command. For instance, if someone is convinced that there is a place where they will be tormented after death, and that the only way to avoid this terror is by affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord, then they will no doubt make that affirmation, regardless of whether they are genuinely moved by Christ or not. This type of discourse endeavours to compel individuals to bow their knee regardless of their motives or the nature of their desire. Like a lover of nuts who is offered thousands of shells with no centre, so we offer God thousands of ‘converts’ with no heart. ~ Peter Rollins,
508:I can see that you go through life athwart it. You see the flow of events, you are able to tell how you could most easily fit yourself into it. But you dare to oppose it. And why? Simply because you look at it and say, 'this fate does not suit me. I will not allow it to befall me.'" Amber shook her head, but her small smile made it an affirmation. "I have always admired people who can do that. So few do. Many, of course, will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and on it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm. ~ Robin Hobb,
509:The Universal Power Never Judges or Criticizes Us It only accepts us at our own value. Then it reflects our beliefs in our lives. If I want to believe that life is lonely and that nobody loves me, then that is what I will find in my world. However, if I am willing to release that belief and to affirm for myself that “Love is everywhere, and I am loving and lovable,” and to hold on to that new affirmation and to repeat it often, then it will become true for me. Now, loving people will come into my life, the people already in my life will become more loving to me, and I will find myself easily expressing love to others. ~ Louise L Hay,
510:My friends, I think we need to face how difficult it is for us to become empathic with other spiritual traditions and accept their legitimate needs for recognition and affirmation, their needs for being seen and given significant respect. Why? Kohut said that when we were children, we had not yet developed what he called “the cohesive self,” or what we would call a self-system that is integrated and stable. What we needed from others he called “mirroring.” We need to be seen. We need to be recognized and affirmed. You and I in our spiritual traditions would say we need to be blessed. We long for an experience of blessing.4 ~ Robert L Moore,
511:The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s). ~ H W Brands,
512:I confess that I felt something closer to exaltation than fear. Something inexplicable was happening. Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science. I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of séance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis – the God of Abraham. ~ Dan Simmons,
513:By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool's fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe. ~ Thomas Ligotti,
514:A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library. ~ Rebecca Solnit,
515:[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such ‘self affirmations,’ by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.2 ~ Philip G Zimbardo,
516:Agree with thine adversary quickly." This means, agree that the adverse situation is good, be undisturbed by it, and it falls away of its own weight. "None of these things move me," is a wonderful affirmation. The inharmonious situation comes from some inharmony within man himself. When there is, in him, no emotional response to an inharmonious situation, it fades away forever, from his pathway. So we see man's work is ever with himself. People have said to me, "Give treatments to change my husband, or my brother." I reply, "No, I will give treatments to change you; when you change, your husband and your brother will change. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn,
517:Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heartbeats & these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness. ~ R my de Gourmont,
518:The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. ~ Modris Eksteins,
519:the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
520:Heart pounding, he collapsed on top of her, claiming her lips with his as he did so, making love to her mouth with his tongue as his spent c#ck continued to spasm inside her p#ssy. Wanting to give her pleasure even as the steel left his length.
She wrapped her arms around his back, tangling her legs with his as she returned his kiss. The pulsing pressure of her fading orgasm on his dick was an unbearable caress he would willingly endure until the end of time. An affirmation of the pleasure he gave her.
A confirmation of what his heart had been telling him since he’d first laid eyes on her: he was hers. Irrevocably and unquestionably. ~ Lexxie Couper,
521:Do you think he even knows?” Oscar whispered.
Ira sat with a plunk on the couch. “Knows what?”
“You’ve obviously never had the privilege of meeting Stuart McGreenery,” Camille said.
Ira snorted. “I’d certainly like to meet the bastard now, that’s for sure.”
The ceiling above their heads creaked with the weight of Samuel’s steps. A door opened and closed lightly.
“From the looks of it”-Camille searched Oscar’s face for affirmation-“you’ve just met his son.”
Ira scooted to the edge of the couch cushion. “Holy gallnipper! You mean that McGreenery bloke and your mum pulled the wool over your father’s eyes a time or two way back? ~ Angie Frazier,
522:Solitude is never where you are; it is always where you are not, and is only possible with a stranger present; whatever the place or whoever the person, it must be one that is wholly ignorant concerning you, and concerning which or whom you are equally ignorant, so that will and sensation remain suspended and confused in an anxious uncertainty, while with the ceasing of all affirmation on your part, your own inner consciousness ceases at the same time. True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself. ~ Luigi Pirandello,
523:Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. The trouble to which it led. He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings. ~ Richard Flanagan,
524:Living out this spiritual fatherhood requires the radical discipline of being home. As a self-rejecting person always in search of affirmation and affection, I find it impossible to love consistently without asking for something in return. But the discipline is precisely to give up wanting to accomplish this myself as a heroic feat. To claim for myself spiritual fatherhood and the authority of compassion that belongs to it, I have to let the rebellious younger son and the resentful elder son step up on the platform to receive the unconditional, forgiving love that the Father offers me, and to discover there the call to be home as my Father is home. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
525:Women make these calls based on so many things that men can only begin to speculate about. Every situation is unique and every woman is right when she decides what is right for herself. At the core of a belief in reproductive freedom is an affirmation of diversity. The right to our human diversity, more than the right to privacy, is what we’re really talking about when we talk about the freedom of choice. Like religious freedom and the freedom of speech, reproductive freedom in America should be understood as a fundamental right of reasonable people to be different from one another and to understand things differently. Our freedom to have differences of ~ Ani DiFranco,
526:One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. ~ bell hooks,
527:I now want to examine a second major feature of Western civilization that derives from Christianity. This is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the 'affirmation of ordinary life.' It is the simple idea that ordinary people are fallible, and yet these fallible people matter. In this view, society should organize itself in order to meet their everyday concerns, which are elevated into a kind of spiritual framework. The nuclear family, the idea of limited government, the Western concept of the rule of law, and our culture's high emphasis on the relief of suffering all derive from this basic Christian understanding of the dignity of fallible human beings. ~ Dinesh D Souza,
528:C’est ainsi que, par exemple, l’idée de l’Infini, qui est en réalité la plus positive de toutes, puisque l’Infini ne peut être que le tout absolu, ce qui, n’étant limité par rien, ne laisse rien en dehors de soi, cette idée disons-nous, ne peut s’exprimer que par un terme de forme négative, parce que, dans le langage, toute affirmation directe est forcément l’affirmation de quelque chose, c’est-à-dire une affirmation particulière et déterminée ; mais la négation d’une détermination ou d’une limitation est proprement la négation d’une négation, donc une affirmation réelle, de sorte que la négation de toute détermination équivaut au fond à l’affirmation absolue et totale. ~ Ren Gu non,
529:Oh, Father, how we praise You. How we thank You that You did not call us to subsistence living. We don’t have to live on the alms of others. You had more in mind for us than that. We don’t have to seek some other means of satisfaction or a substitute that never fulfills us. I pray that today we can look in our right hand and say, “This is a lie if it’s not from You.” Father, help us to loosen our grip on the things that we crave so much in life, the things that we want affirmation and approval from so desperately. Help us to release our grip on them and hang onto You instead, because Your love is better than life. In the sweetest name I know, the name of Jesus, amen. ABOUT ~ Beth Moore,
530:Affirmations are wonderful because it is much better to speak positively than to speak negatively. But the universe is not responding to your words; it responds to your vibration, and your vibration is being indicated to you by the way you feel. If you don’t believe what you are saying, your vibration hasn’t shifted, so nothing changes for you. The key to affirmations is to work yourself into a place where you really feel it. We have never talked about this before anywhere, but a very good application of an affirmation would be to affirm your way up the emotional scale. Start with an affirmation of where you are emotionally, then keep reaching for a better feeling thought. ~ Esther Hicks,
531:The difference between what people call “community” and what the Bible calls the “church” comes down to the question of authority. Jesus actually gave authority to the local assembly called a church (Matt 16:13–20; 18:15–20; Heb 13:7, 17; 1 Pet 5:1–5). This assembly is not only a fellowship but an accountability fellowship. It’s not just a group of believers at the park; it preaches the gospel and possesses the keys of the kingdom for binding and loosing through the ordinances. It declares who does and does not belong to the kingdom. It exercises oversight. And exercising such affirmation and oversight meaningfully means gathering regularly and getting involved in one another’s lives. ~ Mark Dever,
532:The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation. This reductionism turns at last into the drooling blankness of 'Waiting for Godot' or 'Krapp's Last Tape,' with their representation of boredom and tedium as the inevitable climax of human existence. This in itself is a sardonic final commentary on the mechanical world picture, the power system, and the subjective non-values derived from them. For a technology that denies reality to the subjective life cannot claim any human value for even its own highest products. ~ Lewis Mumford,
533:For the West, restraint, compromise, and keeping promises are all attributes one can expect to find in a rational actor; the Russian political elite, however, interpret these attributes as signs of weakness. For them, rational behavior includes unpredictability, tolerance for the use of force, and a callous disregard for human lives in the service of their objective. This is exactly the reason why the Kremlin cannot afford to cave in the face of sanctions, even if doing so risks economic collapse. The absence of external restraints (along with the lack of internal ones, such as independent institutions and strong public opinion) will drive the Kremlin toward even riskier experiments in self-affirmation. ~ Anonymous,
534:You see, life’s hard. We may get some affirmation during the course of the day, but in some workplaces people receive very little edifying. And family situations may not be particularly healthy or encouraging. But our message from God each and every day is, “Child, you are tremendously significant to Me. You are everything to Me.” Christ says, “I laid down My life. Your love to Me, child, is better than My life.” Do you understand what He’s saying? Loving you was better than sparing Christ’s life. And He wants to tell you these things before anybody else begins to tear away at you during the course of the day, before you are worn and torn by the interactions and activities of the next twenty-four hours. He ~ Beth Moore,
535:Forgive me for turning too many things into competitions. For being so fixated on what I don't have that I leave the gifts You've given me underdeveloped and much less effective than You intended them to be. Forgive me for thinking pitifully little of the person You've made me. Forgive me for committing the flagrant sin of despising myself and considering myself inferior to others. Forgive me equally for every time I sighed with relief at the thought that I might be superior after all. Forgive me for my unbelief. If I realized how valuable I am, my insatiable need for affirmation would be quieted. Forgive me for being such a perfectionist that I resist doing something good out of fear that I won't be great. ~ Beth Moore,
536:If we mean by love the passionate affirmation and active relatedness to the esssence of a particular person, if we mean by it the union with another person on the basis of the independence and integrity of the two persons involved, then masochism and love are opposites. Love is based on equality and freedom. If it is based on subordination and loss of integrity of one partner, it is masochistic dependence regardless of how the relationship is rationalized. Sadism also appears frequently under the disguise of love. To rule over another person, if one can claim that to rule him is for that person’s own sake, frequently appears as an expression of love, but the essential factor is the enjoyment of domination. ~ Erich Fromm,
537:If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
538:Entitlement closes in upon itself in a kind of narcissistic bubble, distorting anything and everything in such a way as to reinforce itself. People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. If something good happens to them, it’s because of some amazing feat they accomplished. If something bad happens to them, it’s because somebody is jealous and trying to bring them down a notch. Entitlement is impervious. People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them. ~ Mark Manson,
539:Mais on fera sans doute ici une objection: est-il donc possible de dépasser ainsi la nature? Nous n'hésiterons pas à répondre très nettement: non seulement cela est possible, mais cela est. Ce n'est là qu'une affirmation, dira-t-on encore; quelles preuves peut-on en donner? Il est vraiment étrange qu'on demande de prouver la possibilité d'une connaissance au lieu de chercher à s'en rendre compte par soi-même en faisant le travail nécessaire pour l'acquérir. Pour celui qui possède cette connaissance, quel intérêt et quelle valeur peuvent avoir toutes ces discussions ? Le fait de substituer la «théorie de la connaissance» à la connaissance elle-même est peut-être le plus bel aveu d'impuissance de la philosophie moderne. ~ Ren Gu non,
540:An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses—even destruction and ruin—the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
541:He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice. ~ V S Naipaul,
542:This woman discovered that the treasure house was within her. Her prayer was felt as true in her heart, and her affirmation sank down by osmosis into her subconscious mind, which is the creative medium. The moment she succeeded in bringing about a subjective embodiment, her subconscious mind brought about the answer through the law of attraction. Her deeper mind, full of wisdom and intelligence, brought both of them together in divine order. Be sure that you think on whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. PHIL. 4:8. ~ Joseph Murphy,
543:Nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. There is always a chance for conversion--a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle. ...Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done through one's own affirmation of one's worth--an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.
A love ethic has nothing to do with sentimental feelings or tribal connections. Rather it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people. ~ Cornel West,
544:Be like Bob: Practice interrogative self-talk. Next time you’re getting ready to persuade others, reconsider how you prepare. Instead of pumping yourself up with declarations and affirmations, take a page from Bob the Builder and pose a question instead. Ask yourself: “Can I move these people?” As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind. But don’t simply leave the question hanging in the air like a lost balloon. Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes. These reasons will remind you of the strategies that you’ll need to be effective on the task, providing a sturdier and more substantive grounding than mere affirmation. ~ Daniel H Pink,
545:When the stories were over, four or five of us walked out the home of our host. The surrounding land, in the persistent light of a far northern summer, was still visible for miles--striated, pitched massifs of the Brooks Range; the shy, willow-lined banks of the John River flowing south from Anaktuvuk Pass; and the flat tundra plain, opening with great affirmation to the north. The landscape seemed alive because of the stories. It was precisely these ocherous tones, the kind of willow, exactly this austerity that had informed the wolverine narratives. I felt exhilaration, and a deeper confirmation of what I had heard. The mundane task that awaited me I anticipated now with pleasure. The stories had renewed in me a sense of the purpose of my life. ~ Barry Lopez,
546:Just as a sailboat is not free to sail unless it confines itself in significant ways, so you will never know the freedom of love unless you limit your choices in significant ways. There is no greater feeling of liberation than to feel and be loved well. The affirmation that comes from love liberates you from fears and self-doubts. It frees you from having to face the world alone, with only your own ingenuity and resources. Your friend or mate will be crucial to helping you achieve many of your goals in life. In all these ways love is liberating—perhaps the most liberating thing. But the minute you get into a love relationship, and the deeper and the more intimate and the more wonderful it gets, the more you also have to give up your independence. ~ Timothy J Keller,
547:The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come. ~ Susan Orlean,
548:We need to give children ways to help themselves feel good,” she tells me. “Parents can start with simple messages throughout the morning that children can repeat—messages such as: It’s so easy to get dressed. I love getting dressed. Breakfast is always a fun time. We’re all so glad to see each other. We love eating breakfast together. Breakfast makes my body feel good. “Parents can even go around the table and have each family member share one thing they love about themselves. Or they can put affirmations in a bowl and choose one for the whole family to focus on during the day. This can become a morning ritual for couples, families, roommates, and so on. Each person can even decide on one experience they’d like to have that day and create an affirmation for ~ Louise L Hay,
549:By affirming that all 'meaning,' every assertion about the significance of life and reality, must be judged by reference to a brief succession of contingent events in Palestine, Christianity - almost without realizing it - closed off the path to 'timeless truth.' That is to say, it becomes increasingly difficult in the Christian world to see the ultimately important human experience as an escape into the transcendent, a flight out of history and the flesh. There is a demand for the affirmation of history, and thus of human change and growth, as significant. If the heart of 'meaning' is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story with all it's oddity and ambivalence becomes open to interpretation in terms of God's redemptive work. ~ Rowan Williams,
550:Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. ~ Azar Nafisi,
551:The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through.
Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within. ~ Muhammad Iqbal,
552:The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. The grace of a minuet by Handel or Couperin, the sensuality sublimated into delicate gesture to be found in many Italian composers or in Mozart, the tranquil, composed readiness for death in Bach – always there may be heard in these works a defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let that same note also sound in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and sufferings. ~ Hermann Hesse,
553:In chapter V of the first Epistle of St. John, these words strike the visitor, "There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, and the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are One." If these two verses are authentic, they would be an affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, dating from the first century, at a time when the Gospels, the Acts, and St. Paul ignore it. It was first pointed out in 1806 that these verses were an interpolation, for they do not appear in the best manuscripts, notably all the Greek manuscripts down to the fifteenth century. The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. The Congregation of the Index, on January 13, 1897, with the approbation of Leo XIII, forbade any question as to the authenticity of the text relating to the "three heavenly witnesses. ~ Anonymous,
554:Je dus faire très tôt la connaissance d'un syndrome très répandu parmi les militants noirs. En peu de mots, ils confondaient leurs activités politiques avec l'affirmation de leur virilité. Ils pensaient - et certains continuent à le penser - que le fait d'être un homme noir leur donnait des droits sur les femmes noires. Ces hommes pensaient que les femmes noires menaçaient les acquis de leur masculinité - et particulièrement celles qui prenaient des initiatives et travaillaient à devenir des leaders de leur plein droit. Les hommes de l'organisation de Karenga me harcelèrent en m'enjoignant de redistribuer mon énergie et de l'utiliser à donner à mon homme force et inspiration, afin qu'il puisse mettre plus efficacement ses talents au servcie de la lutte pour la libération des Noirs.
p.189 ~ Angela Y Davis,
555:Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.  

Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.  

Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.  

Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues. 

A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,
556:This city did not deserve what happened to it. Neither does any other shrinking city. Half a century after the Kerner Report tried to inspire a new approach to urban life, we are at another crossroads between how things were once done and how we can choose to do t hem in the future. In a way, public drinking water systems are the perfect embodiment of the ideal that we might reach toward. The sprawling pipelines articulate the shape of a community. House by house, they are a tangible affirmation that each person belongs. They tie the city together, and often the metropolitan region as well. If only some have good, clean water and others do not, the system breaks down. It isn't safe. The community gets sick. But when we are all connected to the water, and to each other, it is life-giving - holy, even. ~ Anna Clark,
557:All great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of a negative feeling, but always by a local victory. And this is true from the very beginning. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice and so on. Because they always have that, it’s their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place a small group of slaves finds new means finally to create a victory—a small victory, a local victory. And after that, as the effect of enthusiasm, of affirmation, of the possibility of something new, we have the possibility of the creation of a new subjectivity at the general level. ~ Anonymous,
558:We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
559:By the time I left college, I realized I'd never be happy unless I undid a lifetime of conformist conditioning.

Thus, I reversed my directives. I shunned affirmation and craved contempt. I sought arguments from argumentative people. I encouraged judgement from judgmental people. I went out of my way to trigger all kinds of scorn from anyone who was willing to give it, and there was never a shortage of volunteers. It wasn't the easiest phase of my life. In fact, there were dozens of nights I cried myself to sleep. But like the most determined of body builders, I stuck to my regimen and eventually began to see results. Eventually, I became a human fortress, impervious to even the most subtle and penetrating forms of disdain. At long last, my mind became a peaceful, self-sufficient entity. Life got easier from there. ~ Daniel Price,
560:Since Iraq, it's been... hard... for me to believe that there is anything after this life. Or, for that matter, any purpose to this one. We're born, we suffer, we see people we love suffer, we die. It just all seemed so... so pointless. So cruel. Ans so final." Ambrose paused, letting the memory of Paulie's voice warm him and urge him forward.

"But after tonight, I can't say that anymore. There's a lot I don't understand... but not understanding is better than not believing." Ambrose stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked at Joshua Taylor for affirmation. "Does that make any sense at all?"

Joshua Taylor reached for the arm of the nearest chair and sat abruptly, like his legs could no longer bear his weight.

"Yes. Yes. It makes perfect sense," he said quietly, nodding his head. "Perfect sense ~ Amy Harmon,
561:Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine. ~ Azar Nafisi,
562:I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used. Human ~ Chris Voss,
563:[O]ne need only be attentive … to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve; now it becomes an act, and therefore it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distinct from the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this positing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjective nature, when the world is separated from it? ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
564:Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage. ~ Timothy J Keller,
565:For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged - will ultimately judge himself - on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort."

Robert F. Kennedy Speeches
Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966 ~ Robert F Kennedy,
566:The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our "highly selective self-representations." We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb-or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmations of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones. ~ Tony Reinke,
567:Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can ‘surmount,’ without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency. I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again. ~ Roland Barthes,
568:Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. “Compulsive” is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same—more work, more money, more friends. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
569:We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote:

"I go into the museum
and look at all the pictures on the walls.
Instead of feeling my own insignificance
I want to go straight home and paint."

A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can't wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else. ~ Madeleine L Engle,
570:Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
571:What, actually, does it mean to be a tragic figure firmly in the grip of one's daimon? It means to possess great talent, to relentlessly pursue the expression of that talent through the unswerving affirmation of the causa-sui project that alone gives it birth and form. One is consumed by what he must do to express his gift. The passion of his character becomes inseparable from his dogma. Jung says the same thing beautifully when he concludes that Freud "must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma...like a religious numen."
Eros is precisely the natural energy of the child's organism that will not let him rest, that keeps propelling him forward in a driven way while he fashions the lie of his character-which ironically permits that very drivenness to continue, but now under the illusion of self-control. ~ Ernest Becker,
572:When I have passed that same reality on to another human being, the result most often has been the inner healing of their heart through the touch of my affirmation. To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful. When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation. FINALLY, BRETHREN, WHATEVER IS TRUE, WHATEVER IS HONORABLE, WHATEVER IS RIGHT, WHATEVER IS PURE, WHATEVER IS LOVELY, WHATEVER IS OF GOOD REPUTE, IF THERE IS ANY EXCELLENCE AND IF ANYTHING WORTHY OF PRAISE, DWELL ON THESE THINGS. (PHIL. 4:8 NASB) ~ Brennan Manning,
573:Massachusetts’s search and seizure provision was the work of John Adams, who had been so strongly moved by Otis’s monumental speech nearly twenty years earlier. Through Adams, Article XIV of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights declared: “Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to the civil officer, to make search in suspected places, to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the person or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws. ~ Sean Patrick,
574:You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light. Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. […] Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself. ~ John Lewis,
575:If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. ~ James K A Smith,
576:I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied -- not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain. ~ Ralph Ellison,
577:One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don’t want to forget your identity. I am glad that you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh.”
In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it…, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. ~ Thomas L Friedman,
578:The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!’ John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (Rev 13:10). The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause an effect but one of cross and resurrection. ~ John Howard Yoder,
579:APRIL 15 Peculiar Treasure Now therefore, if you will obey My voice in truth and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own peculiar possession and treasure from among and above all peoples; for all the earth is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation [consecrated, set apart to the worship of God]. EXODUS 19:5-6 Self-rejection and self-hatred can almost seem pious in a sense. They can become a way of punishing yourself for your mistakes, failures, and inabilities. People cannot be perfect, so they sometimes reject and despise themselves. Do you lack appreciation for your own worth and value? You may not feel treasured or even acceptable, but you are. In Ephesians 1:6, Paul says that all who believe in Christ have been “accepted in the beloved.” What joyous and amazing affirmation! Surely you are valuable; otherwise your heavenly Father would not have paid such a heavy price for your redemption. ~ Joyce Meyer,
580:Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality - a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. ~ James K A Smith,
581:If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself. ~ Osho,
582:The projection of one's feeling toward oneself upon a cosmic scale may seem to hinge on a metaphysical premise, but it can be defended empirically. That I am here, now, doing this - that depends on an awe-inspiring series of antecedent events, on millions of seemingly accidental moves and decisions, both by myself and many others whose moves and decisions in turn depended on yet other people. And our very existence, our being as we are, required that our parents had to choose each other, not anyone else, and beget us at the precise moment when we were actually begotten; and the same consideration applies to their parents, and to all our ancestors, going back indefinitely. Thus any affirmation of the present moment points far beyond the present - and it is a significant psychological corollary, on which Nietzsche frequently insists, that those who are dissatisfied with themselves usually project their dissatisfaction upon the world. ~ Walter Kaufmann,
583:library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. ~ Susan Orlean,
584:A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. ~ Susan Orlean,
585:Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution — his attempted overcoming of nihilism — consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such — all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time's. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative. ~ Ray Brassier,
586:Cooking for Life shuns all things caloric and fatty, so this version of boeuf bourguignon will not include bacon or pancetta as it should, nor will I use even half as much olive oil as I'd like to. I will increase the wine, and it'll be pretty good beef stew without the potatoes, essentially, which will delight Uncle Benny when I take him his casserole dish tonight. It certainly won't hurt me to eat gourmet lite for dinner, I think, then shake my head to clear it. It's amazing how one five-minute conversation with my mother can undo every affirmation I've ever taped to my bathroom mirror.
After giving the beef another poke or two, I scrub the cutting board in the dish-crowded sink, then chop and stir in carrots, celery, and onions. I mince fresh thyme and Italian parsley for flavor and color, pour in defatted beef stock, then leave it to simmer for a while, the individual aromas already commingling and filling the apartment. ~ Jennie Shortridge,
587:Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. ~ John Banville,
588:I look at people holding hands in the hallways, and I try to think how it all works. At the school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to ‘their song.’ In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys’ jackets, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are.
Bill looked at me looking at people, and after class, he asked me what I was thinking about, and I told him. He listened, and he nodded and made "affirmation" sounds. When I finished, his face changed into a "serious talk" face.
"Do you always think this much, Charlie?"
"Is that bad?" I just wanted someone to tell me the truth.
"Not necessarily. It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life."
"Is that bad?"
"Yes."
"I think I participate, though. Don't you think I am?"
"Well, are you dancing at these dances?"
"I'm not a very good dancer. ~ Stephen Chbosky,
589:Over the years I have written many a letter for the wedding of one of the brothers and preached many a wedding sermon. The chief characteristic of such occasions essentially rested in the fact that, in the face of the "last" times (I do not mean this to sound quite so apocalyptic), someone dares to take a step of such affirmation of the earth and its future. It was then always very clear to me that a person could take this step as a Christian truly only from within a very strong faith and on the basis of grace. For here in the midst of the final destruction of all things, one desires to build; in the midst of a life lived from hour to hour and from day to day, one desires a future; in the midst of being driven out from the earth, one desires a bit of space; in the midst of the widespread misery, one desires some happiness. And the overwhelming thing is that God says yes to this strange longing, that here God consents to our will, whereas it usually meant to be just the opposite. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
590:No, I was waiting for the train. The three forty-seven to Yass. Comes every afternoon and, according to the station master, it’s never late and I knew that. And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. My mum wouldn’t. She told me later that she couldn’t, because she was scared to see that I might hate her. She feels like she didn’t protect me from him. But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can’t do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.”
“Do what to me? I don’t think that leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs,” I lie.
“You being on that platform changed mine.”
This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.
“I wasn’t there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass,” he says. “I was there to throw myself in front of it. ~ Melina Marchetta,
591:Not one people has ever yet organised itself according to the principles of science and reason. Never has there been a single example of that, except only for a brief moment, out of stupidity.... Reason and science in the life of peoples always, now and from the beginning of time, have fulfilled merely a secondary and auxiliary function; and that will be their function until the end of time. Peoples are formed and moved by another force that rules and dominates them, but whose origin is unknown and inexplicable. This force is the force of an unquenchable desire to go on to the end, while at the same time denying the end. This is the force of a ceaseless and tireless affirmation of its own being and the denial of death. It is the spirit of life, as the Scriptures say, "of living water", the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It is the aesthetic principle, as the philosophers say, the moral principle, as they also identify it. "The search for God", as I call it more simply. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
592:Par un matin de dimanche, quand nous entendons bourdonner les vieilles cloches, nous nous demandons: mais est-ce possible? Tout cela pour un Juif crucifié il y a deux mille ans et qui disait être le fils de Dieu - encore qu'il n'y ait pas de preuve de cette affirmation. Un dieu qui engendre avec une femme mortelle. Un sage qui recommande de ne plus travailler, de ne plus rendre la justice, mais de guetter les signes de la fin du monde imminente. Une justice qui accepte de prendre un innocent comme victime suppléante. Un maître qui ordonne à ses disciples de boire son sang. Des prières pour obtenir des miracles. Des péchés commis contre un dieu, expiés par un dieu. La peur d'un au-delà dont la mort est la porte. La figure de la croix pour symbole, à une époque qui ne sait plus rien de la fonction ni de l'ignominie de la croix. Quel frisson d'horreur nous vient de tout cela, comme un souffle exhalé par le sépulcre d'un passé sans fond? Qui peut croire que l'on croie encore à une chose pareille? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
593:But each of us comes to marriage with a disordered inner being. Many of us have sought to overcome self-doubts by giving ourselves to our careers. That will mean we will choose our work over our spouse and family to the detriment of our marriage. Others of us hope that unending affection and affirmation from a beautiful, brilliant romantic partner will finally make us feel good about ourselves. That turns the relationship into a form of salvation, and no relationship can live up to that. Do you see why Paul introduces the subject of marriage with a summons to love one another “out of the fear of Christ”? We come into our marriages driven by all kinds of fears, desires, and needs. If I look to my marriage to fill the God-sized spiritual vacuum in my heart, I will not be in position to serve my spouse. Only God can fill a God-sized hole. Until God has the proper place in my life, I will always be complaining that my spouse is not loving me well enough, not respecting me enough, not supporting me enough. ~ Timothy J Keller,
594:Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of that term, toward something that I cheerfully and readily acknowledge to be absolutely incomprehensible to me?

(...)
No man can be sure that he is in faith; and we can say of no man with certainty that he has or does not have faith.
(...)

Not only does faith always carry its opposite uncertainty within itself, but also this faith is never a static condition that is -had-, but a movement toward... And toward what? In the nature of the case we cannot state this "what." We cannot make a flat assertion about our faith like a simple assertion that we have blue eyes or are six feet tall. More than this, the affirmation of our faith can never be made in the simple indicative mood at all. The statement "I believe" can only be uttered as a prayer. ~ William Barrett,
595:She peered out after a moment; he was staring fixedly across the cut, with his gun resting on his left forearm. He raised it abruptly and fired twice more, waited, shrugged, and then trudged off. Quietly sat watching him in utter amazement and disgust. Far off on the hillside she could discern the jerky motions of a rock-squirrel kicking and kicking its life away. The man had hit it with his first bullet, and had fired again as it writhed there. It was wanton; it was useless. Quietly felt no particular pity for the animal; she was not a sentimentalist, and had a scale of values for the lower orders. What offended her was the waste of a life, of powder, even of skill—the skill of the man himself and that of the precision workers who had made his weapon. He had not wanted the creature for fur or flesh, but had as his only apparent desire an affirmation of the evident fact that he was bigger and stronger and more intelligent than a chipmunk. Enter civilization she would, but not in the company of this pervert. ~ Theodore Sturgeon,
596:Theoretically, people might form intentional communities (the current term for communes) and/or polyamorous clans of one hundred to one hundred fifty in Ecotopia (the term for a theoretical independent Pacific Northwest), living off the land, all local and sustainable-like. But these utopian societies won't be able to count on being left alone to live peacefully. The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn't think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach niggers a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn't fit into their vision of what and who is right. ¶ Anarchist may opt out of revolution, but counterrevolution will come to them. ~ Ted Rall,
597:Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the air's harsh damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. ~ John Banville,
598:Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if , like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky... ~ Jan Siegel,
599:The Christian approach begins with a different analysis of the situation. We believe that, as badly wounded as persons may be, the resulting self-absorption of the human heart was not caused by the mistreatment. It was only magnified and shaped by it. Their mistreatment poured gasoline on the fire, and the flame and smoke now choke them, but their self-centeredness already existed prior to their woundedness. Therefore, if you do nothing but urge people to “look out for number one,” you will be setting them up for future failure in any relationship, especially marriage. This is not to say that wounded people don’t need great gentleness, tender treatment, affirmation, and patience. It is just that this is not the whole story. Both people crippled by inferiority feelings and those who have superiority complexes are centered on themselves, obsessed with how they look and how they are being perceived and treated. It would be easy to help someone out of an inferiority complex into a superiority complex and leave them no better furnished to live life well. ~ Timothy J Keller,
600:AFFIRMATION CREED OF THE ARRIVIST: I am God, and all other gods are my imagery. I gave birth to myself. I am millions of forms excreating; eternal; and nothing exists except through me; yet I am not them—they serve me. I am inconceivable because I make the conceivable as I so will. I am beyond Law, for my casualness rationalizes all things to my pleasure. I am the stranger, ever. We, the new Arrivists have a lusty heritage from the hierocracy of ancient Egypt, and such great familiars as Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Sappho, Socrates, Zeno and others who have substantiated their beliefs (and like them we have been spat on by the ugliest denominators): our great copula is the giving. 'Arrivism' formulates from our integrals: our 'thisness' into 'as if becoming 'as now'—the intentional becoming extentional; action by spontaneity conforming everything critical and subvertive to itself, which is the mechanism of evoking our 'thisness'. 'As now' has no pendency: things are, because we are always the potential of what we last were. The gospel of the Arrivist is always his own. ~ Anonymous,
601:When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words. In the act of overcoming our fear of speech, of being seen as threatening, in the process of learning to speak as subjects, we participate in the global struggle to end domination. When we end our silence, when we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence. Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited" to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important. It is our responsibility collectively and individually to distinguish between mere speaking that is about self-aggrandizement, exploitation of the exotic "other," and that coming to voice which is a gesture of resistance, an affirmation of struggle. ~ bell hooks,
602:However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory. ~ liphas L vi,
603:I’m always shocked when I run into people who don’t believe in God. I’ll even ask them, “How can you not believe that there’s a power greater than you who’s engineering this whole system of things?” Usually they’ll tell me something like, “Man, God is just some mythical fairy tale. God is no different than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.” I disagree wholeheartedly, but that mind-set is honestly one of the reasons I don’t sell that junk about holiday headliners to my daughters. Maybe it’s the Witness influence on me, but to this day I’m not a fan of holidays. I think it’s a mistake to hype your kids on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy on one hand, and then try to sell them on God with the other. When they get older and realize Santa and the Easter Bunny aren’t real, it becomes too easy for them to dismiss God as well. “So you were lying to me about everybody else, but this God character is real?” they’ll say. “Yeah, right.” And then they’ll miss out on the affirmation, confidence, and faith that religion can provide when they’re older and really need it. ~ Charlamagne Tha God,
604:[...] Si encore ils ne faisaient que se complaire dans l’affirmation de la supériorité imaginaire qu’ils s’attribuent, cette illusion ne ferait de tort qu’à eux-mêmes ; mais ce qui est le plus terrible, c’est leur fureur de prosélytisme : chez eux, l’esprit de conquête se déguise sous des prétextes « moralistes », et c’est au nom de la « liberté » qu’ils veulent contraindre le monde entier à les imiter ! Le plus étonnant, c’est que, dans leur infatuation, ils s’imaginent de bonne foi qu’ils ont du « prestige » auprès de tous les autres peuples : parce qu’on les redoute comme on redoute une force brutale, ils croient qu’on les admire ; l’homme qui est menacé d’être écrasé par une avalanche est-il pour cela frappé de respect et d’admiration ? La seule impression que les inventions mécaniques, par exemple, produisent sur la généralité des Orientaux, c’est une impression de profonde répulsion ; tout cela leur parait assurément plus gênant qu’avantageux, et, s’ils se trouvent obligés d’accepter certaines nécessités de l’époque actuelle, c’est avec l’espoir de s’en débarrasser un jour ou l’autre ; cela ne les intéresse pas et ne les intéressera jamais véritablement. ~ Ren Gu non,
605:They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities, and their audacities are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotion and principle, every great and every insignificant thought, belongs not to the individual, but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man brings sudden and profound trouble to the heart. To the sentiment of one's loneliness, to the loneliness of one's thoughts and one's sensations. To the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous. A suggestion of things vague uncontrollable and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike. ~ Joseph Conrad,
606:Often this shift occurs in reaction to apparent failings of previous generations or leadership. We see the outsider criticizing the previous leader or the church in general for a perceived arrogance and harshness and so, to win their respect or to gain a hearing—for the best possible motives of their salvation—we seek to establish ourselves as distinct from those that are disliked, and then present ourselves in such a way that the sinner is struck by our warmth, care and inclusiveness. This will almost certainly lead to growth. We will gain much positive feedback and on occasion great affirmation as the representatives of a kind of Christianity that is so much more appealing. However, the critical thing to note is that this path will always only buy short-term impact at the cost of long-term gain. Very shortly we will either have to display a very different side—in proclaiming the hard edges of a love that clearly has boundaries (to the disillusionment or greater disdain of the community, for having been conned), or we will shift our presentations so as to never disappoint our newly won audience. In doing this we will have taken the first steps on the path of compromise. ~ Anonymous,
607:...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King.
What a laugh. ~ Blaise Cendrars,
608:​"So it will be appropriate to offer a brief exposition of the subject. We can speak of three factors that led Mussolini to confront the problem of race in 1938. [181] On 5 August 1938, an official document [182] declared, ‘The climate is now ripe for an Italian racism’, for which the Grand Council outlined the fundamental directives the following October. The first legislative provisions ‘for the defence of the Italian race’ were promulgated the following month. Of the three factors, the one that concerned the Hebraic problem was the most incidental. There are few or no references to this problem in Mussolini’s early writings. One can only cite an old article that mentions a well-known theme, that the Hebrew, subjugated and deprived of the usual means to compete directly in the modern world, had recourse to the indirect means constituted by money, finance and intelligence (in the profane sense) to exercise power and for self-affirmation. In addition, in an article from 1919, Mussolini wondered whether Bolshevism, which was supported in its origins by Jewish bankers in London and New York and counted (at that time) numerous Hebrews among its leaders, did not represent ‘Israel’s revenge against the Aryan race’. [183]"​ ~ Julius Evola,
609:But with regard to incomposites, what is being or not being, and truth or falsity? A thing of this sort is not composite, so as to 'be' when it is compounded, and not to 'be' if it is separated, like 'that the wood is white' or 'that the diagonal is incommensurable'; nor will truth and falsity be still present in the same way as in the previous cases. In fact, as truth is not the same in these cases, so also being is not the same; but (a) truth or falsity is as follows--contact and assertion are truth (assertion not being the same as affirmation), and ignorance is non-contact. For it is not possible to be in error regarding the question what a thing is, save in an accidental sense; and the same holds good regarding non-composite substances (for it is not possible to be in error about them). And they all exist actually, not potentially; for otherwise they would have come to be and ceased to be; but, as it is, being itself does not come to be (nor cease to be); for if it had done so it would have had to come out of something. About the things, then, which are essences and actualities, it is not possible to be in error, but only to know them or not to know them. But we do inquire what they are, viz. whether they are of such and such a nature or not. ~ Aristotle,
610:I am a child of the everlasting King.
I am forgiven.
I am a warrior.
I am cloaked in righteous armor.
I was made for adventure.
I was built for battle.
I am part of a larger story.
My true and lasting affirmation comes only from my King.
I am unique above all creation--planned and perfect in design.
I have been created for a glorious destiny.
All my ways are established by you, my King, and I walk in them.
My life and actions are real, authentic, and without compromise.
I am quickened and made alive through the power of your Spirit.
My whole life is before me.
I am a shining gift from God to this lost world.
I know my name, I understand my calling, and I am worthy to walk in it.
I am strong, brave, and courageous in the face of my enemies.
Whatever is good, whatever is pure, whatever is true, dwell on these things.
My sins are scattered as far as the east is from the west.
I am a good husband to my wife.
I am a good father to my daughters.
The past is over, and the future glimmers with radiant light.
I will look to the new day, the dawning of hope.
I will step forward with the truth before me and will no longer look on the day that is gone.
The past is over; the future has begun
. ~ James L Rubart,
611:Among us, on the other hand, 'the righteous man lives by faith.' Now, if you take away positive affirmation, you take away faith, for without positive affirmation nothing is believed. And there are truths about things unseen, and unless they are believed, we cannot attain to the happy life, which is nothing less than life eternal. It is a question whether we ought to argue with those who profess themselves ignorant not only about the eternity yet to come but also about their present existence, for they [the Academics] even argue that they do not know what they cannot help knowing. For no one can 'not know' that he himself is alive. If he is not alive, he cannot 'not know' about it or anything else at all, because either to know or to 'not know' implies a living subject. But, in such a case, by not positively affirming that they are alive, the skeptics ward off the appearance of error in themselves, yet they do not make errors simply by showing themselves alive; one cannot err who is not alive. That we live is therefore not only true, but it is altogether certain as well. And there are many things that are thus true and certain concerning which, if we withhold positive assent, this ought not to be regarded as a higher wisdom but actually a sort of dementia. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo,
612:You will have guessed what has really happened here, beneath all this: that will to self-tormenting, that repressed cruelty of the animal-man made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the “state” so as to be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked—this man of the bad conscience has seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture to him. He apprehends in “God” the ultimate antithesis of his own ineluctable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as a form of guilt before God (as hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the “Lord,” the “father,” the primal ancestor and origin of the world); he stretches himself upon the contradiction “God” and “Devil” he ejects from himself all his denial of himself, of his nature, naturalness, and actuality, in the form of an affirmation, as something existent, corporeal, real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as the beyond, as eternity, as torment without end, as hell, as the immeasurability of punishment and guilt. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
613:The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. ~ Stanley Kubrick,
614:Make New Year's goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you're interested in fully living life in the year to come.

Goals give us direction. They put a powerful force into play on a universal, conscious, and subconscious level. Goals give our life direction.

What would you like to have happen in your life this year? What would you like to do, to accomplish? What good would you like to attract into your life? What particular areas of growth would you like to have happen to you? What blocks, or character defects, would you like to have removed?

What would you like to attain? Little things and big things? Where would you like to go? What would you like to have happen in friendship and love? What would you like to have happen in your family life?

What problems would you like to see solved? What decisions would you like to make? What would you like to happen in your career?

Write it down. Take a piece of paper, a few hours of your time, and write it all down - as an affirmation of you, your life, and your ability to choose. Then let it go.

The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals. ~ Melody Beattie,
615:Insufficient hope. Please deposit more faith to make a withdrawal.

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Those dark feelings might not be so dark. They might actually mean something. They may be a flashing red warning: “Do that other thing.” Or “Don’t settle here forever.”

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It’s okay to take a risk on your own, and dream big.

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God endorses your dissatisfaction with the world’s self-concept package: “Large, with a side of self-doubt and a sprinkle of guilt".

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Find the fire. Our twenties can be an anesthesia — they can numb us to pain and motivation. If we can stop the morphine drip of despondency, we will find that our unbearable existential angst is not a doom — it is the pain of depressurization, rising out of the depths. 

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God does not expect you to be a Wall Street executive. God does not wish you were making six figures. God does not wish you had a happy-go-lucky personality. God does not wish you would just “Get yourself together already!” You can depend on Him for love, affirmation, affection, correction, a guiding hand, and His never-forsaking care. Breathe.

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The possibilities for embarrassment and greatness exist in the same space.

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Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live. Appreciate the moment, every loved one. here now. ~ Anonymous,
616:Faiza Ghaffar
1 min ·
Motherly love... is unconditional affirmation of the child's life and his needs... Affirmation of the child's life has two aspects; one is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child's life and his growth. The other aspect goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives him the feeling: it is good to be alive, it is good to be a little boy or girl, it is good to be on this earth! ... in... Biblical symbolism.. The promised land (land is always a mother symbol) is described as "flowing with milk and honey." Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirmation. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive.

Most mothers are capable of giving "milk," but only a minority of giving "honey" too. In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a "good mother," but a happy person—and this aim is not achieved by many. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother's love for life is as infectious as her anxiety is. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child's whole personality; one can distinguish indeed, among children—and, adults—those who got only "milk" and those who got "milk and honey. ~ Erich Fromm,
617:Articles of Affirmation and Denial. (The Preamble and the Short Statement were also subjected to editorial revisions. The Exposition was left largely as received.) After considerable discussion, the Draft Committee's submission received a very substantial endorsement by the participants: 240 (out of a total of 268) affixed their signatures to the Nineteen Articles.
It was indicated that the Draft Committee would meet within the year to review and, if necessary, revise the statement. That meeting took place in the fall of 1979, with Drs. Geisler, Hoehner, Nicole, and Radmacher in attendance. It was the consensus of those present that we should not undertake to modify a statement that so many people had signed, both at the summit meeting and afterward. But
in order to ward off misunderstandings and to provide an exposition of the position advocated by the ICBI, it was thought desirable to provide a commentary on each of the articles. A draft commentary was prepared by Dr. Sproul and was submitted to the members of the Draft Committee. A number of editorial changes were made, and the final result is what is contained in this booklet.
Dr. Sproul is well qualified to write such a commentary. He had prepared the first draft of the Nineteen Articles, and although they underwent considerable change in the editing process, Dr. Sproul ~ R C Sproul,
618:You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...

Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.

The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction). ~ Roland Barthes,
619:Just as life is made up of day and night, and song is made up of music and silence, friendships, because they are of this world, are also made up of times of being in touch and spaces in-between. Being human, we sometimes fill these spaces with worry, or we imagine the silence is some form of punishment, or we internalize the time we are not in touch with a loved one as some unexpressed change of heart. Our minds work very hard to make something out of nothing. We can perceive silence as rejection in an instant, and then build a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick. The only release from the tensions we weave around nothing is to remain a creature of the heart. By giving voice to the river of feelings as they flow through and through, we can stay clear and open. In daily terms, we call this checking in with each other, though most of us reduce this to a grocery list: How are you today? Do you need any milk? Eggs? Juice? Toilet paper? Though we can help each other survive with such outer kindnesses, we help each other thrive when the checking in with each other comes from a list of inner kindnesses: How are you today? Do you need any affirmation? Clarity? Support? Understanding? When we ask these deeper questions directly, we wipe the mind clean of its misperceptions. Just as we must dust our belongings from time to time, we must wipe away what covers us when we are apart. ~ Mark Nepo,
620:In the nineteen-forties in Nazi-occupied Paris, an artist named Marcel Carné made a movie. He filmed it on location on the Street of Thieves, the old Parisian theater street where at one time there was everything from Shakespearean companies to flea circuses, from grand opera to girlie shows. Carné's film was a period piece and required hundreds of extras in nineteenth-century costume. It required horses and carriages and jugglers and acrobats. The movie turned out to be over three hours long. And Carné made it right under the Nazi's noses. The film is a three hour affirmation of life and an examination of the strange and sometimes devastating magnetism of love. Romantic? Oh, babe, it's romantic enough to make a travel poster sigh and a sonnet blush. But completely uncompromising. It's a celebration of the human spirit in all of its goofy, gentle, and grotesque guises. And he made it in the very midst of Nazi occupation, filmed this beauty inside the belly of the beast. He called it Les Enfants du Paradis–Children of Paradise–and forty years later it's still moving audiences around the world.

Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance. Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul. ~ Tom Robbins,
621:When Madison began his fight in the House for amendments protecting personal liberties, he was without a single supporter. He intended to convince the great body of Americans who withheld their approval of the Constitution because they felt it should secure them against governmental abuse. When he proposed an amendment on searches and seizures, he opted for granting the maximum protection possible at the time: “The rights of the people to be secured in their persons, their houses, and their other property, from all unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated by warrants issued without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, or not particularly describing the places to be searched, or the persons or things to be seized.” He dropped the questionable “ought not” for the assertive “shall not,” he contributed the significant phrase “probable cause,” and above all, he granted rights to the people, not just restrictions on the government. After deliberations, the House adopted Madison’s wording with only two minor changes: “rights” became “right,” and “secured” became “secure.” The final wording was as follows: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. ~ Sean Patrick,
622:Human beings are the only living creatures who have this choice—of following the part that is great, or the part that is trivial. The difference depends upon the unique human faculty of imagination. When an animal is in a dull situation, it becomes dull; the fiercest of all birds, the hawk, becomes quiescent when a black bag is placed over its head. Man’s superior consciousness means that he can see further; his sense of purpose stretches into the distance. But we are still 99 per cent animal; few of us bother to develop this unique capacity. We drift along from day to day, becoming bored when things are dull, depressed when immediate prospects look poor, using our powers of foresight and imagination only when confronted by an interesting challenge, and allowing them to lie fallow in between. And this situation, we must admit, applies most of the time to all of us, including the Beethovens and Einsteins. ‘Involvement’ is our common lot. But what makes us uniquely human are the strange moments of non-involvement. The pressure vanishes. Suddenly we are seeing life from a distance, as if we were gods; seeing it from above, from a bird’s-eye view rather than the usual worm’s-eye view. In these moments of optimism and affirmation, it seems absurd that we should ever have sunk into a condition of depression or defeat, for it is suddenly obvious that we are undefeatable and indestructible. Every compromise or retreat is seen to be the result of absurd miscalculation. I ~ Colin Wilson,
623:Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.

By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe. ~ Thomas Ligotti,
624:Think for a moment of a tomato plant. A healthy plant can have over a hundred tomatoes on it. In order to get this tomato plant with all these tomatoes on it, we need to start with a small dried seed. That seed doesn’t look like a tomato plant. It sure doesn’t taste like a tomato plant. If you didn’t know for sure, you would not even believe it could be a tomato plant. However, let’s say you plant this seed in fertile soil, and you water it and let the sun shine on it. When the first little tiny shoot comes up, you don’t stomp on it and say, “That’s not a tomato plant.” Rather, you look at it and say, “Oh boy! Here it comes,” and you watch it grow with delight. In time, if you continue to water it and give it lots of sunshine and pull away any weeds, you might have a tomato plant with more than a hundred luscious tomatoes. It all began with that one tiny seed. It is the same with creating a new experience for yourself. The soil you plant in is your subconscious mind. The seed is the new affirmation. The whole new experience is in this tiny seed. You water it with affirmations. You let the sunshine of positive thoughts beam on it. You weed the garden by pulling out the negative thoughts that come up. And when you first see the tiniest little evidence, you don’t stomp on it and say, “That’s not enough!” Instead, you look at this first breakthrough and exclaim with glee, “Oh boy! Here it comes! It’s working!” Then you watch it grow and become your desire in manifestation. ~ Louise L Hay,
625:Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home, and must look far and wide to find one. Home is the center of my being, where I can hear the voice that says, “You are my beloved. On you my favor rests,” the same voice that gave life to the first Adam and spoke to Jesus, the second Adam. The same voice that speaks to all the children of God and sets them free to live in the midst of a dark world while remaining in the light. I have heard that voice. It has spoken to me in the past and continues to speak to me now. It is the never-interrupted voice of love speaking from eternity and giving life and love wherever it is heard. When I hear that voice, I know that I am home with God and have nothing to fear. As the beloved of my heavenly Father, “I can walk in the valley of darkness: no evil would I fear.” As the beloved I can “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils.” Having “received without charge,” I can “give without charge.” As the Beloved, I can confront, console, admonish, and encourage without fear of rejection or need for affirmation. As the Beloved I can suffer persecution without desire for revenge and receive praise without using it as a proof of my goodness. As the Beloved I can be tortured and killed without ever having to doubt that the love that is given to me is stronger than death. As the Beloved I am free to live and give life, free also to die while giving life.
Jesus has made it clear to me that the same voice that he heard at the river Jordan and on Mount Tabor can also be heard by me. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,
626:Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all. ~ Bruce Catton,
627:Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”
“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a
live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking
leech when I was minding my own business in the past.”
“Don’t you call me dim!”
“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.
“Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help
me out.”
“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband
that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”
“I was getting to it,” I whined.
“Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal
nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!”
“An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my
husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum.
“—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”
“You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.”
Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned. ~ MaryJanice Davidson,
628:...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a ...more "...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King.
What a laugh. ~ Blaise Cendrars,
629:The True-Blue American
Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American,
For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must
Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about,
Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy,
Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity
For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and
Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah
Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split
He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it
Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
“Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed
By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten,
Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of
Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon,
Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and
Shining in the darkness, of the light
On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures,
The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light
Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus,
Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.
~ Delmore Schwartz,
630:L’art comme idéologie La « justification esthétique du monde » L’art contre la science et contre la morale Le classicisme Entre bien et mal « L’éternel absent » L’existence L’esprit « Regardez la mère, regardez l’enfant » La politique, l’art, la religion « Tous sont idolâtres et mécontents de l’être » Un philosophe et un maître « Noblesse oblige » Un spiritualisme laïque Moralisme et volontarisme « Tout seul, universellement » Les vertus Le bonheur L’action Le philosophe contre les pouvoirs La société, la famille, l’enfance Bourgeois et prolétaires Le sommeil, la peur Le droit et la force : « Tout pouvoir est militaire » La contradiction : « l’ordre est terrifiant » et nécessaire L’individu et le groupe : « Léviathan est sot » Individualisme contre totalitarisme L’humanisme : « L’homme est un dieu pour l’homme » L’égoïsme et le marché Les passions et la guerre La République, la démocratie, la gauche Obéir sans adorer Résister « Se priver du bonheur de l’union sacrée » « Il court-circuite l’enthousiasme » Le Dieu et l’idole Spinoza, philosophe du plaisir et de la joie Du monisme au dualisme Refus du matérialisme et du Dieu-Objet Refus du fatalisme « L’existence n’est pas Dieu » Désespoir ou idolâtrie ? Simone Weil et Spinoza Le nécessaire et le Bien Une idolâtrie de la nature Humanisme ou décréation L’absurde dans Le Mythe de Sisyphe L’absurde Une pensée délivrée de l’espoir Le refus du suicide Révolte et sagesse De l’absurde à l’amour L’Orientation philosophique de Marcel Conche PRÉFACE Un cheminement philosophique Le mal absolu De l’athéisme au tragique Une philosophie du devenir et de l’apparence Contre la sophistique La vie comme affirmation de la différence ~ Andr Comte Sponville,
631:But today marks an achievement unheard of in the annals of history. And you, my horde, are the titans who have risen to prove your worth of becoming gods!” The horde rumbled again in affirmation. “We are on the verge of a war the likes of which will change the world forever. And we are the agents of change. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” She paused again for dramatic effect. And she received it. The ground vibrated from the noise of the Nephilim. “We are about to occupy the Garden of the mountain of God. This god, who was born with a golden spoon in his mouth, this deity who claims to own everything and leaves nothing for the ninety-nine percent of the rest of us, we are about to show him who is god!” She paused for another moment of rumbling before finishing. “You are about to storm a fortress guarded by mighty Cherubim. I know you are exhausted. I know you have been worked to the bone. I know you barely have anything left to give to this campaign because you have given all you have and more. But I ask you this one thing. When you are crossing the lake, when you are climbing the rocks, when you hear the horns of war bid you attack, when you find yourself battling the evil Cherubim, when you have reached the end of your strength and have nothing left to fight with, just remember one thing: tomorrow you will taste of the Tree of Life and you will be gods, and you will tire no longer -- for you shall live forever!” The horde rumbled yet again. They caught the spirit of the moment. She knew no amount of exhaustion could quench their strength in the light of that hope. And she was proud of her ability to lie through her fangs with every single word she spoke. ~ Brian Godawa,
632:Not Marble Nor The Gilded Monuments
THE praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes
Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered
These were lies
The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten
The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more
The sleek throat is gone -and the breast that was troubled to listen
Shadow from door
Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
Telling you men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue
I shall say you were young and your arms straight and you!
mouth scarlet
I shall say you will die and none will remember you
Your arms change and none remember the swish of your garments
Nor the click of your shoe
Not with my hand's strength not with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember
(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation
Like dream words most)
Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!
~ Archibald MacLeish,
633:Step number four to receiving answered prayer is guard against every evil thought that comes into your mind to try to make you doubt God’s Word. Thoughts are governed by observation, association, and teaching. So this step is closely associated with step number three. The Bible says we are to cast down every imagination that exalts itself against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5). That’s why you should stay away from all places and things that do not support your affirmation that God has answered your prayer. Your thoughts are governed and affected by observations, associations, and teaching. That means that sometimes you will have to stay away from the kind of churches that can put more unbelief in you than anything else. Also, be sure to enjoy fellowship with those who contribute to your faith.   2 CORINTHIANS 10:5 5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.   PHILIPPIANS 4:8 8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are TRUE, whatsoever things are HONEST, whatsoever things are JUST, whatsoever things are PURE, whatsoever things are LOVELY, whatsoever things are OF GOOD REPORT; if there be ANY VIRTUE, and if there be ANY PRAISE, think on these things.   The Bible tells us in Philippians exactly what to think on. Many people are thinking on the wrong things, and they’re defeated in life as a result. But if you will guard against every evil thought and think only on those things which affirm that God has heard and answered your prayers, you will be cooperating with God in faith. You will have to guard your mind in order to develop in faith. And as you stand your ground firm in faith, your faith will see you through to victory. ~ Kenneth E Hagin,
634:And then she kissed him on the mouth. It was one of those Russian kisses, the sort that are exchanged in that vast, soulful land at high Christian feasts, as a token and seal of love. But even as we record this kiss exchanged between a notoriously “subtle” young man and a charming, slinking, and still equally young woman, we cannot help finding in it a reminder of Dr. Krokowski’s elaborate, if not always unobjectionable way of speaking about love in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms. Are we doing the same thing here, or were Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat doing the same with their Russian kiss? But what would be our readers’ reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question? In our opinion, it is analytically correct, although—to use Hans Castorp’s phrase—“terribly gauche” and downright life-denying, to make a “tidy” distinction between sanctity and passion in matters of love. What’s this about “tidy”? What’s this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity? Isn’t it grand, isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love – from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay – caritas is assuredly found in the most admirable and most depraved passions. Irresolute? But in God’s good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved – that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it. ~ Thomas Mann,
635:Uh-oh, I forgot about the whole saying grace aspect of Thanksgiving. I watch Dad closely as hands begin to link around the table. Will he go along? Kyle snatches Dad’s left hand. I exhale in relief as he doesn’t pull away, and I pick up his right. When the circle is fully linked, Betty begins. “Dear Lord, we just want to thank you for the glory and power of your amazing works in bringing us such a magnificent dinner this year….. “Uh-huh.” Vonda and Wesley murmur an affirmation. I should have known this wouldn’t be the quick and tidy Episcopal grace of my grandmother’s table. I cast a furtive glance from under my bangs. How’s Dad holding up? Everyone else is looking down, but Dad is studying Betty intently. “…and Lord, we want to offer up praise for gathering in so many of your lambs that we thought might be lost, but they ain’t lost no more…” “Praise Jesus!” Vonda shouts. Ty and Marcus manage to look both embarrassed and grateful. Dad’s gaze hasn’t left Betty’s face. I’m hoping Betty might be winding down, but she seems to be gathering more steam. “…and Lord we want to shout our praise for sending us the gift of a woman who opened up her home to us today and who gave our Ty a second chance and that would be your sweet child, Audrey…” “Shout it out!’ Vonda calls. “Uh-huh,” the rest of the guests murmur. Dad is silent. I feel his fingers twitch in my hand. Poor little Kyle is ready to face-plant into the mashed potatoes as Betty takes yet another breath. “Lord, ain’t none of us know what tomorrow will bring. Might be joy, might be pain. We try to walk on a righteous path, Lord, but let’s face it, we all sinners and we probably gonna stray. But we know you gonna forgive us. That’s what keeps us goin’. Brothers and sisters, believe the good news—we are forgiven!” Silence shimmers and twists before us. I can’t look up. “Amen. ~ S W Hubbard,
636:But one of the dangers of eagerly diving in to the political sphere is that it tends to underestimate the strength of the currents already swirling around in that “sphere.” In other words, such Pylesque eagerness tends to think of politics just as a matter of strategy (and hence getting the right strategy in place), as something that we do, and underestimates the formative impact of political practices, that they do something to us.16 It is here that I think Augustine’s more nuanced analysis of the politics of the empire has something to teach us in the twenty-first century. Because he defines the political in terms of love, and because the formation of our loves is bound up with worship, Augustine is primed to recognize what we might call the “liturgical” power of political practices, which engenders critical nuance. As we noted in Augustine’s definition of a “people” (City of God 19.24), the earthly city’s different political configurations qualify as “commonwealths,” but they fail to be just because they are aimed at the wrong objects of love (that is, they wrongly constitute objects of love). So Augustine’s revised account of the empire yields a fundamentally critical evaluation, nothing like the rather rosy affirmation of the “earthly city” we tend to hear from those who (mistakenly) invoke Augustine as if he fathered the Holy Roman Empire.17 In this respect, Augustine’s “liturgical” analysis of the political enables him to be attentive to an antithesis that evangelical (Pylesque) enthusiasm for political activism seems to not recognize: that at stake in participation in the political configurations of the earthly city are matters of worship and religious identity. The public practices of the empire are not “merely political” or “merely temporal”; they are “loaded,” formative practices aimed at a telos that is ultimately antithetical to the city of God. ~ James K A Smith,
637:The message of Islam is by no means a closed value system at variance or conflict with other value systems. From the very start, the Prophet did not conceive the content of his message as the expression of pure otherness versus what the Arabs or the other societies of his time were producing. Islam does not establish a closed universe of reference but rather relies on a set of universal principles that can coincide with the fundamentals and values of other beliefs and religious traditions (even those produced by a polytheistic society such as that of Mecca at the time). Islam is a message of justice that entails resisting oppression and protecting the dignity of the oppressed and the poor, and Muslims must recognize the moral value of a law or contract stipulating this requirement, whoever its authors and whatever the society, Muslim or not. Far from building an allegiance to Islam in which recognition and loyalty are exclusive to the community of faith, the Prophet strove to develop the believer's conscience through adherence to principles transcending closed allegiances in the name of a primary loyalty to universal principles themselves. The last message brings nothing new to the affirmation of the principles of human dignity, justice, and equality: it merely recalls and confirms them. As regards moral values, the same intuition is present when the Prophet speaks of the equalities of individuals before and in Islam: 'The best among you [as to their human and moral qualities] during the era before Islam [al-jahiliyyah] are the best in Islam, provided they understand it [Islam].' The moral value of a human being reaches far beyond belonging to a particular universe of reference; within Islam, it requires added knowledge and understanding in order to grasp properly what Islam confirms (the principle of justice) and what it demands should be reformed (all forms of idol worship). ~ Tariq Ramadan,
638:Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and “normal” people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls “peak experiences”); and examination of peak experiences has led Maslow to conclude that the evolutionary drive (which is so clear in art and philosophy) is as basic a part of human psychology as the Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to self-assertion.

— Colin Wilson, “‘Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time‘: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard” (1965)

(Wilson C. “Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard // Stanley C. (Ed.). Colin Wilson: Collected Essays on Philosophers. — Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 110–111.) ~ Colin Wilson,
639:Christine,” he mumbled between their lips, “we must be married soon.” She couldn’t find the words to answer him. She’d never imagined anyone would ever want to marry her. And now Guy had asked her not once, but twice. And he wanted it to be soon. Surely if anything were a miracle, this was it. She smiled, and the movement caused him to pause and pull back a fraction so that their noses touched. “What?” he asked breathlessly. “You’ve finally made me a believer in miracles.” “I have?” “It’s a miracle that you want to marry me.” “I have witnessed miracles,” he said, letting his fingers linger at the nape of her neck, driving her mad with his caress. “And my desire to marry you is the furthest thing from one. Any man would want you; I’m just glad God brought you to me first.” She leaned in, wanting once more to feel the warmth and closeness of his lips. But he pulled away, his brows creased. “Christine,” he said, “you’re a treasure worth more than anything I’ve ever had or could hope to have. And I want to spend the rest of my life showing you that.” His affirmation was difficult for her to understand. “Perhaps if you tell me often enough, I’ll finally believe you,” she whispered. “Does this mean you’ll agree to marry me?” His eyes overflowed with anticipation of her reply. What reason did she possibly have to say no? Not when she loved him. Yes, she loved him. She raised her chin, hoping he’d claim another kiss. And when he did, she arched into him and met his passion with her own. At the carriage door opening, Guy broke away from her. Neither of them had noticed the vehicle rolling to a stop or the handle rattling. With the rain pattering around him, Ridley stood hunched under an umbrella, his lips twitching against a smile. Once again he’d caught them in a passionate embrace. Guy cleared his throat and shifted on the seat in an attempt to put space between them. Christine slipped her hand over Guy’s and then straightened her shoulders and faced Ridley. “I’m getting married to Reverend Bedell.” Ridley nodded. “Very soon I hope. ~ Jody Hedlund,
640:no wonder, then, if the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey . . . When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the violated say to each other with the vindictive cunning of powerlessness: ‘Let us be different from evil people, let us be good! And a good person is anyone who does not rape, does not harm anyone, who does not attack, does not retaliate, who leaves the taking of
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First essay
revenge to God, who keeps hidden as we do, avoids all evil and asks little from life in general, like us who are patient, humble and upright’ – this means, if heard coolly and impartially, nothing more than: ‘We weak people are just weak; it is good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough’ – but this grim state of affairs, this cleverness of the lowest rank which even insects possess (which play dead, in order not to ‘do too much’ when in great danger), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self- deception of powerlessness, clothed itself in the finery of self-denying, quiet, patient virtue, as though the weakness of the weak were itself – I mean its essence, its effect, its whole unique, unavoidable, irredeemable reality – a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment. This type of man needs to believe in an unbiased ‘subject’ with freedom of choice, because he has an instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self- deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their par- ticular mode of existence as an accomplishment. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
641:This popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate; it is an enchanted stream for embittered souls and still waters for troubled spirits. The person “who comes in from the field, weary” (Gen. 25:29), from the battlefield and campaigns of life, from the secular domain which is filled with doubts and fears, contradictions and refutations, clings to religion as does a baby to its mother and finds in her lap “a shelter for his head, the nest of his forsaken prayers” and there is comforted for his disappointments and tribulations. This Rousseauian ideology left its stamp on the entire Romantic movement from the beginning of its growth until its final (tragic!) manifestations in the consciousness of contemporary man. Therefore, the representatives of religious communities are inclined to portray religion, in a wealth of colors that dazzle the eye, as a poetic Arcadia, a realm of simplicity, wholeness, and tranquillity. This ideology is intrinsically false and deceptive. That religious consciousness in man’s experience, which is most profound and most elevated, which penetrates to the very depths and ascends to the very heights, is not that simple and comfortable. On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and tortuous. Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. The consciousness of homo religiosis flings bitter accusations against itself and immediately is filled with regret, judges its desires and yearnings with excessive severity, and at the same time steeps itself in them, casts derogatory aspersions on its own attributes, flails away at them, but also subjugates itself to them. It is in a condition of spiritual crisis, of psychic ascent and descent, of contradiction arising from affirmation and negation, self-abnegation and self-appreciation. Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments. ~ David Brooks,
642:(…) contrairement à l’opinion courante, il n’y a jamais eu nulle part aucune doctrine réellement « polythéiste », c’est-à-dire admettant une pluralité de principes absolue et irréductible. Ce « pluralisme » n’est possible que comme une déviation résultant de l’ignorance et de l’incompréhension des masses, de leur tendance à s’attacher exclusivement à la multiplicité du manifesté : de là l’« idolâtrie » sous toutes ses formes, naissant de la confusion du symbole en lui-même avec ce qu’il est destiné à exprimer, et la personnification des attributs divins considérés comme autant d’êtres indépendants, ce qui est la seule origine possible d’un « polythéisme » de fait. Cette tendance va d’ailleurs en s’accentuant à mesure qu’on avance dans le développement d’un cycle de manifestation, parce que ce développement lui-même est une descente dans la multiplicité, et en raison de l’obscuration spirituelle qui l’accompagne inévitablement. C’est pourquoi les formes traditionnelles les plus récentes sont celles qui doivent énoncer de la façon la plus apparente à l’extérieur l’affirmation de l’Unicité ; et, en fait, cette affirmation n’est exprimée nulle part aussi explicitement et avec autant d’insistance que dans l’Islamisme où elle semble même, si l’on peut dire, absorber en elle toute autre affirmation.
La seule différence entre les doctrines traditionnelles, à cet égard est celle que nous venons d’indiquer : l’affirmation de l’Unité est partout, mais, à l’origine, elle n’avait pas même besoin d’être formulée expressément pour apparaître comme la plus évidente de toutes les vérités, car les hommes étaient alors trop près du Principe pour la méconnaître ou la perdre de vue. Maintenant au contraire, on peut dire que la plupart d’entre eux, engagés tout entiers dans la multiplicité, et ayant perdu la connaissance intuitive des vérités d’ordre supérieur, ne parviennent qu’avec peine à la compréhension de l’Unité ; et c’est pourquoi il devient peu à peu nécessaire, au cours de l’histoire de l’humanité terrestre, de formuler cette affirmation de l’Unité à maintes reprises et de plus en plus nettement, nous pourrions dire de plus en plus énergiquement.
"Et-Tawhid ~ Ren Gu non,
643:L'Art d’avoir toujours raison La dialectique 1 éristique est l’art de disputer, et ce de telle sorte que l’on ait toujours raison, donc per fas et nefas (c’est-à-dire par tous les moyens possibles)2. On peut en effet avoir objectivement raison quant au débat lui-même tout en ayant tort aux yeux des personnes présentes, et parfois même à ses propres yeux. En effet, quand mon adversaire réfute ma preuve et que cela équivaut à réfuter mon affirmation elle-même, qui peut cependant être étayée par d’autres preuves – auquel cas, bien entendu, le rapport est inversé en ce qui concerne mon adversaire : il a raison bien qu’il ait objectivement tort. Donc, la vérité objective d’une proposition et la validité de celle-ci au plan de l’approbation des opposants et des auditeurs sont deux choses bien distinctes. (C'est à cette dernière que se rapporte la dialectique.) D’où cela vient-il ? De la médiocrité naturelle de l’espèce humaine. Si ce n’était pas le cas, si nous étions foncièrement honnêtes, nous ne chercherions, dans tout débat, qu’à faire surgir la vérité, sans nous soucier de savoir si elle est conforme à l’opinion que nous avions d’abord défendue ou à celle de l’adversaire : ce qui n’aurait pas d’importance ou serait du moins tout à fait secondaire. Mais c’est désormais l’essentiel. La vanité innée, particulièrement irritable en ce qui concerne les facultés intellectuelles, ne veut pas accepter que notre affirmation se révèle fausse, ni que celle de l’adversaire soit juste. Par conséquent, chacun devrait simplement s’efforcer de n’exprimer que des jugements justes, ce qui devrait inciter à penser d’abord et à parler ensuite. Mais chez la plupart des hommes, la vanité innée s’accompagne d’un besoin de bavardage et d’une malhonnêteté innée. Ils parlent avant d’avoir réfléchi, et même s’ils se rendent compte après coup que leur affirmation est fausse et qu’ils ont tort, il faut que les apparences prouvent le contraire. Leur intérêt pour la vérité, qui doit sans doute être généralement l’unique motif les guidant lors de l’affirmation d’une thèse supposée vraie, s’efface complètement devant les intérêts de leur vanité : le vrai doit paraître faux et le faux vrai. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
644:There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us. In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner. The parallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet — knowing what to consume and what to avoid — has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity. Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right? Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences. Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don’t affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated. ~ Clay A Johnson,
645:A child who has been denied the experience of connecting with his own emotions is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the internal identification with the parent) dependent on his parents. Alice Miller writes: He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs and is alienated from himself to the highest degree. Such a person cannot separate from his parents. He is fantasy bonded with them. He has an illusion (fantasy) of connection, i.e., he really thinks there is a love relationship between himself and his parents. Actually he is fused and enmeshed. This is an entrapment rather than a relationship. Later on this fantasy bond will be transferred to other relationships. This fantasy-bonded person is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, his children, his job. He is especially dependent on his children. A fantasy-bonded person never has a real connection or a real relationship with anyone. There is no real, authentic self there for another to relate to. The real parents, who only accepted the child when he pleased them, remain as introjected voices. The true self hides from these introjected voices just as the real child did. The “loneliness of the parental home” is replaced by “isolation within the self.” Grandiosity is often the result of all this. The grandiose person is admired everywhere and cannot live without admiration. If his talents fail him, it is catastrophic. He must be perfect, otherwise depression is near. Often the most gifted among us are driven in precisely this manner. Many of the most gifted people suffer from severe depression. It cannot be otherwise because depression is about the lost and abandoned child within. “One is free from depression,” writes Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child, “when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.” Emotional abandonment is most often multigenerational. The child of the narcissistically deprived parent becomes an adult with a narcissistically deprived child and will use his children as he was used for his narcissistic supplies. That child then becomes an adult child and the cycle is repeated. ~ John Bradshaw,
646:Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as groups, tribes, nations and civilisations, we are engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive. All this we know, and though the terminology may change from age to age, people have known it for a very long time indeed. But here and there we see acts, personalities, lives, that seem to come from somewhere else, that breathe a larger air. They chime with the story we read in chapter 1, about a God who creates in love, who has faith in us, who summons us to greatness and forgives us when, as from time to time we must, we fall, the God whose creativity consists in self-effacement, in making space for the otherness that is us. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws, Darwinian or otherwise, governing biology, and everything to do with the making of meaning out of the communion of souls linked in loyalty and love. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin see such flowerings of the spirit as ‘spandrels’, decorative motifs that have nothing to do with the weight-bearing architecture of life.15 Like most people, I see them as the redemption of life from mere existence to the fellowship of the divine. As Isaiah Berlin said, there are people tone deaf to the spirit. There is no reason to expect everyone to believe in God or the soul or the music of the universe as it sings the improbability of its existence. God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love. ~ Jonathan Sacks,
647:Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.

By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.

Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Admittedly, this is not a practice likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society by the bad-standing of their memberships elsewhere, some of their outside affiliations having been cancelled as early as birth. But those who have gotten a good whiff of other worlds and sampled a cuisine marginal to stable existence will not be able to stay themselves from the uncanny feast of horrors that has been laid out for them. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemeteries, waiting for some propitious moment to crash the gates and see what is inside.

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: “We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb…and find them to our liking. ~ Thomas Ligotti,
648:Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendor. They wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humor. The lone wolves who know no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space,who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere—for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and manyfaceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too, in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (or for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though "one possessed nothing," to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor alone to make efficacious. ~ Hermann Hesse,
649:To sum up—what can you do now to build up your self-confidence? Following are ten simple, workable rules for overcoming inadequacy attitudes and learning to practice faith. Thousands have used these rules, reporting successful results. Undertake this program and you, too, will build up confidence in your powers. You, too, will have a new feeling of power. 1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. That is most dangerous, for the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. So always picture “success” no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment. 2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out. 3. Do not built up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. Difficulties must be studied and efficiently dealt with to be eliminated, but they must be seen for only what they are. They must not be inflated by fear thoughts. 4. Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as YOU can. Remember also that most people, despite their confident appearance and demeanor, are often as scared as you are and as doubtful of themselves. 5. Ten times a day repeat these dynamic words, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) (Stop reading and repeat them NOW slowly and confidently.) 6. Get a competent counselor to help you understand why you do what you do. Learn the origin of your inferiority and self-doubt feelings which often begin in childhood. Self-knowledge leads to a cure. 7. Ten times each day practice the following affirmation, repeating it out loud if possible. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians 4:13) Repeat those words NOW. That magic statement is the most powerful antidote on earth to inferiority thoughts. 8. Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent. Do not become egotistical, but develop a wholesome self-respect. Believe in your own God-released powers. 9. Put yourself in God’s hands. To do that simply state, “I am in God’s hands.” Then believe you are NOW receiving all the power you need. “Feel” it flowing into you. Affirm that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) in the form of adequate power to meet life’s demands. 10. Remind yourself that God is with you and nothing can defeat you. Believe that you now RECEIVE power from him. ~ Anonymous,
650:She looks surprised, and then suspicious. “What do you mean?” “I mean that smells and scents have strong evocations for people, and usually, when you cannot place what is making you comfortable with someone or some place, it is often the smell of them.” It is the longest sentence he has spoken to her, and she likes the sound and timbre of his voice. It is reassuring and gentle. “Are you trying to get me to smell you?” “No,” he laughs. “Only if you want to.” “No, thank you. Some things should be kept for the future.” She cannot think why she has said that. About the future. Without any thought, it just flew out of her mouth, and now he is smiling, he looks happy, as though he is hoping to see her again. She smiles too, suddenly. After all, something has drawn her to this man; perhaps his eyes, which are open and honest and intelligent. “How old are you?” she asks. “Do you want to guess?” “No,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “I just want to know. I can’t tell from the look of you, whether you are eighteen or thirty.” “I am twenty five” “Like me.” She smiles, as though this satisfies her in some way, and then she closes her eyes. Etched into the skin between those eyes is a furrow of concentration. Alexander watches her, pausing only to ask the girl to pour two more drinks. When Katya opens her eyes, she sees the young man standing before her with his own eyes tightly shut, and a look of absorption on his face. She laughs. “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to see what you were concentrating on so suddenly.” “And? What was it?” “The music?” he ventures, and she smiles her affirmation. The musicians are playing more quietly now, and are almost drowned out under the rising of voices made freer by alcohol and laughter, but the music is there, behind everything, and it is soft and emotive. An older man has joined them, and with his balalaika is wafting a mournful tune that twines out over the heads of the crowd like a long curl of blue-tinged smoke. “I love this song,” Katya says, so quietly that Alexander can barely hear her. “So do I. Doesn’t it remind you of your childhood?” “Yes. That’s exactly it.” She looks away from him. “My grandmother used to sing it. She’d make my father play the piano to accompany her, and she’d sing it to my brother and me before we went to sleep.” “Is she still alive?” Katya shakes her head, but offers nothing more and Alexander looks around, at the deaf crowd, and then back at the liquid eyes of the girl before him. “Nobody can hear it except for us, I think.” “Perhaps he is only playing it for us,” she suggests. Alexander smiles at the idea. “Yes,” he says, and he quickly asks her to dance again, for she seems to be on the verge of tears, as she stands there, alone, listening. His question wakes her from some faraway reverie, from unbid ~ Shamim Sarif,
651:The person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The person is an identity that emerges through relationship; it is an 'I' that can exist only as long as it relates to a 'thou' which affirms it's existence and it's otherness. If we isolate the 'I' from the 'thou' we lose not only it's otherness but also it's very being; it simply cannot be without the other.
Personhood is freedom. In its anthropological significance, personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say 'different' instead of 'other', because 'different' can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, etc.), which is not what the person is about. Person implies not simply the freedom to have qualities, but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself.
And yet because, as we have already observed, one person is no person, this freedom is not freedom *from* the other but freedom *for* the other. Freedom thus becomes identical with *love*. We can love only if we are persons, that is, if we allow the other to be truly other, and yet to be in communion with us. If we love the other not only in spite of his of her being different from us but *because* he or she is different from us, or rather *other* than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom .
[In this way] personhood is creativity. Freedom is not *from* but *for* someone or something other than ourselves. This makes the person *ec-static*, that is, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the 'self'. But this *ecstasis* is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite [an arbitrary, abstract *othering* for the sake of itself]; it is a movement of *affirmation of the other*.
This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that it is not limited to the 'other' that already exists, but wants to affirm an 'other' which is [the product of] the totally free grace of the person. The person [out of totally free grace] wants to create its own 'other'. This is what happens in art; and it is only the person that can be an artist in the true sense, that is, a creator that brings about a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion.
The subject of otherness, then, is raised in its absolute ontological significance. Otherness is not secondary to unity; it is primary and constitutive of the very idea of being. Respect for otherness is a matter not [only] of ethics but of ontology: if otherness disappears, beings simply cease to be. There is simply no room for ontological totalitarianism. All communion must involve otherness as a primary and constitutive ingredient. It is this that makes freedom part of the notion of being. Freedom is not simply 'freedom of will'; it is the freedom to be other in an absolute ontological sense. ~ John D Zizioulas,
652:If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle.

Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself;
(p. 6)

In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin.
...
…; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
(p. 8)

At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10)

It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12)

Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17)

That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism.
(p. 31)

Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32)

The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism.
(p. 38)

The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42)

Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42)

According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43)

It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49)

Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49) ~ Erich Fromm,
653:Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words:

That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved—even as our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results?
No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES—we now know THAT. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT—not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes.
The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate. ~ William James,
654:There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world.

Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these songs.

It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone.

It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been.

Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen?

We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth.

It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold. ~ Tom Robbins,
655:Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick.

The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard
Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15).
Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change.

Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge.

[Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own.

We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us.

The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution.

We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time.

The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts.

We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence.

We are indeed in relationship to all that is. ~ George Leonard,
656:Causerie
. . . party on the stage of the Earl Carroll Theatre on
Feb. 23. At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl,
bathed in the nude in a bathtub filled with alleged
wine. New York Times.
What are the springs of sleep? What is the motion
Of dust in the lane that has an end in falling?
Heroes, heroes, you auguries of passion,
Where are the heroes with sloops and telescopes
Who got out of bed at four to vex the dawn?
Men for their last quietus scanned the earth,
Alert on the utmost foothill of the mountains;
They were the men who climbed the topmost screen
Of the world, if sleep but lay beyond it,
Sworn to the portage of our confirmed sensations,
Seeking our image in the farthest hills.
Now bearing a useless testimony of strife
Gathered in a rumor of light, we know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
I’ve done no rape, arson, incest, no murder,
Yet cannot sleep. The petty crimes of silence
(Wary pander to whom the truth's chief whore)
I have omitted; no fool can say my tongue
Reversed its fetish and made a cult of conscience.
This innermost disturbance is a babble,
It is a sign moved to my face as well
Where every tide of heart surges to speech
Until in that loquacity of visage
One speaks a countenance fitter for death than hell.
Always your features lean to one direction
And by that charted distance know your doom.
For death is 'morality touched with emotion,'
The syllable and full measure of affirmation;
Give life the innocent crutch of quiet fools.
Where is your house, in which room stands your bed?
What window discovers these insupportable dreams?
In a lean house spawned on baked limestone
Blood history is the murmur of grasshoppers
11
Eastward of the dawn. Have you a daughter,
Daughters are the seed of occupations,
Of asperities, such as wills, deeds, mortgages,
Duels, estates, statesmen, pioneers, embezzlers,
'Eminent Virginians,' reminiscences, bastards,
The bar-sinister hushed, effaced by the porcelain tub.
A daughter is the fruit of occupations;
Let her not read history lest knowledge
Of her fathers instruct her to be a petty bawd.
Vittoria was herself, the contemporary strumpet
A plain bitch.
For miracles are faint
And resurrection is our weakest clause of religion,
I have known men in my youth who foundered on
This point of doctrine: John Ransom, boasting hardy
Entelechies yet botched in the head, lacking grace;
Warren thirsty in Kentucky, his hair in the rain, asleep;
None so unbaptized as Edmund Wilson the unwearied,
That sly parody of the devil. They lacked doctrine;
They waited. I, who watched out the first crisis
With them, wait:
For the incredible image. Now
I am told that Purusha sits no more in our eyes.
Year after year the blood of Christ will sleep
In the holy tree, the branches sagged without bloom
Till the plant overflowing the stale vegetation
In May the creek swells with the anemone,
The Lord God wastes his substance towards the ocean.
In Christ we have lived, on the flood of Christ borne up,
Who now is a precipitate flood of silence,
We a drenched wreck off an imponderable shore:
A jagged cloud is our memory of shore
Whereon we figure hills below ultimate ranges.
You cannot plot the tendency of man,
Whither it leads is not mysterious
In the various grave; but whence the impulse
To lust for the apple of apples on Christ's tree,
To desire in the eye, to penetrate your sleep,
Perhaps to catch in unexpected leaves
The light incentive of your absolute suspicion?
Over the mountains, the last barrier, you'd spill
12
These relics of your sires in a pool of sleep,
The sun being drained.
We have learned to require
In the infirm concessions of memory
The privilege never to hear too much.
What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue;
It perches there for secret tutelage
And gets it, of inscrutable instructionWhich is a puzzle like crepuscular light
That has no visible source but fills the trees
With equal foliage, as if the upper leaf
No less than the under were only imminent shade.
Manhood like a lawyer with his formulas
Sesames his youth for innocent acquittal.
The essential wreckage of your age is different,
The accident the same; the Annabella
Of proper incest, no longer incestuous:
In an age of abstract experience, fornication
Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,
And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;
Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule,
Are precious.
Was it for this that Lucius
Became the ass of Thessaly? For this did Kyd
Unlock the lion of passion on the stage?
To litter a race of politic pimps? To glut
The Capitol with the progeny of thievesWhere now the antique courtesy of your myths
Goes in to sleep under a still shadow?
~ Allen Tate,
657:Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.'

But it is hardly strange.

Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.

We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.

Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution.

Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine.

...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession.

In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken.

{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925} ~ Thomas A Edison,
658:THE STILLEST HOUR

What happened to me, my friends? You see me distracted, driven away, unwillingly obedient, prepared to
go-alas, to go away from you. Indeed, Zarathustra
must return once more to his solitude; but this time
the bear goes back to his cave without joy. What happened to me? Who ordered this? Alas, my angry mistress wants it, she spoke to me; have I ever yet
mentioned her name to you? Yesterday, toward evening,
there spoke to me my stillest hour: that is the name of
my awesome mistress. And thus it happened; for I must
tell you everything lest your hearts harden against me
for departing suddenly.
Do you know the fright of him who falls asleep? He
is frightened down to his very toes because the ground
gives under him and the dream begins. This I say to
you as a parable. Yesterday, in the stillest hour, the
ground gave under me, the dream began. The hand
moved, the clock of my life drew a breath; never had
I heard such stillness around me: my heart took fright.
Then it spoke to me without voice: "You know it,
Zarathustra?" And I cried with fright at this whispering,
and the blood left my face; but I remained silent.
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You know
it, Zarathustra, but you do not say itl" And at last I
answered defiantly: "Yes, I know it, but I do not want
to say itl"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You do
not want to, Zarathustra? Is this really true? Do not
hide in your defiance." And I cried and trembled like
a child and spoke: "Alas, I would like to, but how can
I? Let me off from this! It is beyond my strength!"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
146
you matter, Zarathustra? Speak your word and break"
And I answered: "Alas, is it my word? Who am l?
I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even of being
broken by it."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
you matter? You are not yet humble enough for me.
Humility has the toughest hide." And I answered:
'
at the foot of my height. How high are my peaks? No
one has told me yet. But my valleys I know well."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "O Zarathustra, he who has to move mountains also moves
valleys and hollows." And I answered: "As yet my
words have not moved mountains, and what I said did
not reach men. Indeed, I have gone to men, but as yet
I have not arrived."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What do
you know of that? The dew falls on the grass when the
night is most silent." And I answered: "They mocked
me when I found and went my own way; and in truth
my feet were trembling then. And thus they spoke to
me: 'You have forgotten the way, now you have also
forgotten how to walk.'"
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "What
matters their mockery? You are one who has forgotten
how to obey: now you shall command. Do you not
know who is most needed by all? He that commands
great things. To do great things is difficult; but to
comm and great things is more difficult. This is what
is most unforgivable in you: you have the power, and
you do not want to rule." And I answered: "I lack the
lion's voice for commanding."
Then it spoke to me again as a whisper: "It is the
stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that
come on doves' feet guide the world. 0 Zarathustra, you
147
shall go as a shadow of that which must come: thus you
will comm and and, commanding, lead the way." And I
answered: "I am ashamed."
Then it spoke to me again without voice: "You must
yet become as a child and without shame. The pride of
youth is still upon you; you have become young late;
but whoever would become as a child must overcome
his youth too." And I reflected for a long time and
trembled. But at last I said what I had said at first; "I
do not want to."
Then laughter surrounded me. Alas, how this laughter tore my entrails and slit open my heart! And it
spoke to me for the last time: "O Zarathustra, your
fruit is ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruit. Thus
you must return to your solitude again; for you must
yet become mellow." And again it laughed and fled;
then it became still around me as with a double stillness. But I lay on the ground and sweat poured from
my limbs.
Now you have heard all, and why I must return to
my solitude. Nothing have I kept from you, my friends.
But this too you have heard from me, who is still the
most taciturn of all men-and wants to be. Alas, my
friends, I still could tell you something, I still could
give you something. Why do I not give it? Am I stingy?
But when Zarathustra had spoken these words he was
overcome by the force of his pain and the nearness of
his parting from his friends, and he wept loudly; and
no one knew how to comfort him. At night, however,
he went away alone and left his friends.
148

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Third Part
You look up when you feel the need for elevation.
And I look down because I am elevated. Who
among you can laugh and be elevated at the same
time? Whoever climbs the highest mountains
laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.
(Zarathustra, "On Reading and Writing," I, p.
40)
TRANSLATOR S NOTES

1. The Wanderer: The contrast between Zarathustra's sentimentality and his praise of hardness remains characteristic
of the rest of the book.
2. On the Vision and the Riddle: Zarathustra's first account
of the eternal recurrence (see my Nietzsche, .i, II) is
followed by a proto-surrealistic vision of a triumph over
nausea.
3. On Involuntary Bliss: Zarathustra still cannot face the
thought of the eternal recurrence.
4. Before Sunrise: An ode to the sky. Another quotation
from Zweig's essay on Nietzsche seems pertinent: "His
nerves immediately register every meter of height and
every pressure of the weather as a pain in his organs, and
they react rebelliously to every revolt in nature. Rain or
gloomy skies lower his vitality ('overcast skies depress me
deeply'), the weight of low clouds he feels down into his
very intestines, rain 'lowers the potential,' humidity debilitates, dryness vivifies, sunshine is salvation, winter is a kind
of paralysis and death. The quivering barometer needle of
his April-like, changeable nerves never stands still-most
nearly perhaps in cloudless landscapes, on the windless tablelands of the Engadine." In this chapter the phrase "beyond
good and evil" is introduced; also one line, slightly varied,
of the "Drunken Song" (see below). Another important
149
theme in Nietzsche's thought: the praise of chance and "a
little reason" as opposed to any divine purpose.
5. On Virtue That Makes Small: "Do whatever you will,
but . . .": What Nietzsche is concerned with is not casuistry but character, not a code of morals but a kind of man,
not a syllabus of behavior but a state of being.
6. Upon the Mount of Olives: "'The ice of knowledge will
yet freeze him to death!' they moan." Compare Stefan
George's poem on the occasion of Nietzsche's death (my
Nietzsche, Prologue, II): "He came too late who said to thee
imploring: There is no way left over icy cliffs."
7. On Passing By: Zarathustra's ape, or "grunting swine,"
unintentionally parodies Zarathustra's attitude and style.
His denunciations are born of wounded vanity and vengefulness, while Zarathustra's contempt is begotten by love;
and "where one can no longer love, there one should pass
by."
8. On Apostates: Stylistically, Zarathustra is now often little
better than his ape. But occasional epigrams show his old
power: the third paragraph in section 2, for instance.
9. The Return Home: "Among men you will always seem
wild and strange," his solitude says to Zarathustra. But
"here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter
you, for they want to ride on your back. On every parable
you ride to every truth." The discipline of communication might have served the philosopher better than the
indiscriminate flattery of his solitude. But in this respect
too, it was not given to Nietzsche to live in blissful
ignorance: compare, for example, "The Song of Melancholy" in Part Four.
io. On the Three Evils: The praise of so-called evil as an
ingredient of greatness is central in Nietzsche's thought,
from his early fragment, Homer's Contest, to his Antichrist.
There are few problems the self-styled immoralist pursued
so persistently. Whether he calls attention to the element
of cruelty in the Greek agon or denounces Christianity for
vilifying sex, whether he contrasts sublimation and extirpation or the egoism of the creative and the vengeful: all
these are variations of one theme. In German, the three
evils in this chapter are Wollust, Herrschsucht, Selbstsucht.
For the first there is no exact equivalent in English. In
this chapter, "lust" might do in some sentences, "voluptuousness" in others, but each would be quite inaccurate
half the time, and the context makes it imperative that
the same word be used throughout. There is only one
word in English that renders Nietzsche's meaning perfectly
in every single sentence: sex. Its only disadvantage: it is,
to put it mildly, a far less poetic word than Wollust, and
hence modifies the tone though not Nietzsche's meaning.
But if we reflect on the three things which, according to
Nietzsche, had been maligned most, under the influence of
Christianity, and which he sought to rehabilitate or revaluate-were they not selfishness, the will to power, and sex?
Nietzsche's early impact was in some ways comparable to
that of Freud or Havelock Ellis. But prudery was for him
at most one of three great evils, one kind of hypocrisy, one
aspect of man's betrayal of the earth and of himself.
i1. On the Spirit of Gravity: It is not only the metaphor
of the camel that points back to the first chapter of Part
One: the dead weight of convention is a prime instance of
what is meant by the spirit of gravity; and the bird that
outsoars tradition is, like the child and the self-propelled
wheel at the beginning of the book, a symbol of creativity.
The creator, however, is neither an "evil beast" nor an
"evil tamer of beasts"-neither a profligate nor an ascetic:
he integrates what is in him, perfects and lavishes himself, and says, "This is my way; where is yours?" Michelangelo and Mozart do not offer us "the way" but a challenge and a promise of what is possible.
12. On Old and New Tablets: Attempt at a grand summary,
full of allusions to, and quotations from, previous chapters
Its unevenness is nowhere more striking than in section 12,
with its puns on "crusades." Such sections as 5, 7, and 8,
on the other hand, certainly deserve attention. The despot
in section ii, who has all history rewritten, seems to point
forward in time to Hitler, of whose racial legislation it
151
could indeed be said: "with the grandfa ther, however,
time ends." Section 15 points back to Luther. Section zo
exposes in advance Stefan George's misconception when he
ended his second poem on Nietzsche (my Nietzsche, p.
iil):
"The warner went-the wheel that downward rolls /
To emptiness no arm now tackles in the spokes." The
penultimate paragraph of this section is more "playful"
in the original: Ein Vorspiel bin ich besserer Spieler, oh
meine Braiderl Ein Beispiell In section 25 the key word is
Versuch, one of Nietzsche's favorite words, which means
experiment, attempt, trial. Sometimes he associates it with
suchen, searching. (In Chapter 2, "On the Vision and
the Riddle," Sucher, Versucher has been rendered "searchers, researchers.") Section 29, finally, is used again, with
minute changes, to conclude Twilight of the Idols.
13. The Convalescent: Zarathustra still cannot face the
thought of the eternal recurrence but speaks about human
speech and cruelty. In the end, his animals expound the
eternal recurrence.
14 On the Great Longing: Hymn to his soul: Zarathustra
and his soul wonder which of them should be grateful to
the other.
15. The Other Dancing Song: Life and wisdom as women
again; but in this dancing song, life is in complete control,
and when Zarathustra's imagination runs away with him
he gets his face slapped. What he whispers into the ear
of life at the end of section 2 is, no doubt, that after his
death he will yet recur eternally. The song at the end,
punctuated by the twelve strokes of the bell, is interpreted
in "The Drunken Song" in Part Four.
i6. The Seven Seals: The eternal recurrence of the small
man no longer nauseates Zarathustra. His affirmation now is
boundless and without reservation: "For I love you, 0
eternity."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE STILLEST HOUR
,
659: THE

(on:

THE SEVEN SEALS

YES AND AMEN SONG)

1

If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit
which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an
enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can
neither die nor live-in its dark bosom prepared for
lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying
lightning bolts-blessed is he who is thus pregnant!
And verily, long must he hang on the mountains like a
dark cloud who shall one day kindle the light of the
future: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and
after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
2

If ever my wrath burst tombs, moved boundary
stones, and rolled old tablets, broken, into steep depths;
if ever my mockery blew moldy words into the wind,
and I came as a broom to the cross-marked spiders and
as a sweeping gust to old musty tomb chambers; if ever
I sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old worldslanders-for I love even churches and tombs of gods,
once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with its
229
pure eyes, and like grass and red poppies, I love to sit
on broken churches: Oh, how should I not lust after
eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of
recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
3

If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath
and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents
to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of
creative lightning which is followed obediently but
grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever
played dice with gods at the gods' table, the earth, till
the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of
fire-for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with
creative new words and gods' throws: Oh, how should
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
4

If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice and blend-mug in which all things are well blended; if
my hand ever poured the farthest to the nearest, and
fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and the most wicked to
the most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which makes all things blend well in the
blend-mug-for there is a salt that unites good with
evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of being used
230
as spice for the last foaming over: Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring or recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
5

If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's
kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that
delight in searching which drives the sails toward the
undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer's delight is in my
delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has
vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the
boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and
time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
6
If my virtue is a dancer's virtue and I have often
jumped with both feet into golden-emerald delight; if
my sarcasm is a laughing sarcasm, at home under rose
slopes and hedges of lilies-for in laughter all that is
evil comes together, but is pronounced -holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and
omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become
light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit, bird and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh, how should
231
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the fing of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity
7
If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared
on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances, and the bird-wisdom
of my freedom came-but bird-wisdom speaks thus:
"Behold, there is no above, no below Throw yourself
around, out, back, you who are lightly Sing! Speak no
morel Are not all words made for the grave and heavy?
Are not all words lies to those who are light? Single
Speak no morel" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity

Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
Fourth and Last Part
Alas, where in the world has there been more
folly than among the pitying? And what in the
world has caused more suffering than the folly of
the pitying? Woe to all who love without having
a height that is above their pityl
232
Thus spoke the devil to me once: "God too has
his hell: that is his love of man." And most recently I heard him say this: "God is dead; God
died of his pity for man." (Zarathustra, II, p. go)
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

Part Four was originally intended as an intermezzo, not
as the end of the book. The very appearance of a collection
of sayings is abandoned: Part Four forms a whole, and
as such represents a new stylistic experiment-as well as
a number of widely different stylistic experiments, held
together by a unity of plot and a pervasive sense of
humor.
1.

The Honey Sacrifice: Prologue. The "queer fish" are not

long in coming: the first of them appears in the next chapter.
2. The Cry of Distress: Beginning of the story that continues to the end of the book. The soothsayer of Part Two
reappears, and Zarathustra leaves in search of the higher
man. Now that he has overcome his nausea, his final
trial is: pity.
3. Conversation with the Kings: The first of seven encounters in each of which Zarathustra meets men who have
accepted some part of his teaching without, however,
embodying the type he envisages. Their revolting and tiresome flatteries might be charged to their general inadequacy. But Zarathustra's own personality, as it emerges
in chapter after chapter, poses a more serious problem. At
least in part, this is clearly due to the author's deliberate
malice: he does not want to be a "new idol": "I do not
want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a
buffoon. And nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless-for
there has never been anybody more mendacious than
saints-truth speaks out of me" (Ecce Homo). Earlier in
the same work he says of Shakespeare: "What must a
man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be
a buffoon!" In these pages Nietzsche would resemble the
233
dramatist rather than the hagiographer, and a Shakespearean fool rather than the founder of a new cult.
4. The Leech: Encounter with "the conscientious in spirit."
5. The Magician: In the magician some of Nietzsche's
own features blend with some of Wagner's as conceived
by Nietzsche. The poem appears again in a manuscript of
a888, which bears the title "Dionysus Dithyrambs" and
the motto: "These are the songs of Zarathustra which he
sang to himself to endure his ultimate loneliness." In this
later context, the poem is entitled "Ariadne's Lament,"
and a new conclusion has been added by Nietzsche:
(Lightning.
beauty.)

Dionysus becomes

DIONYSUS:

visible in emerald

Be clever, Ariadnel

You have small ears, you have my ears:
Put a clever word into them
Must one not first hate each other
if one is to love each other?
I am your labyrinth.
The song is not reducible to a single level of meaning. The
outcry is (1) Nietzsche's own; and the unnamable, terrible
thought near the beginning is surely that of the eternal
recurrence; it is (2) projected onto Wagner, who is here
imagined as feeling desperately forsaken after Nietzsche
left him (note especially the penultimate stanza); it is
(3) wishfully projected onto Cosima Wagner-Nietzsche's
Ariadne (see my Nietzsche, i, 11)-who is here imagined as desiring and possessed by Nietzsche-Dionysus.
Part Four is all but made up of similar projections. All the
characters are caricatures of Nietzsche. And like the magician, he too would lie if he said: "'I did all this only as a
game.' There was seriousness in it too."
6. Retired: Encounter with the last pope. Reflections on
the death and inadequacies of God.
7. The Ugliest Man: The murderer of God. The sentence
beginning "Has not all success . . ." reads in German:
234
War nicht aller Erfolg fisher bei den Gut-Verfolgten? Und
wer gut verfolgt, lernt leicht folgen:-ist er doch einmalhinterherl
8. The Voluntary Beggar: A sermon on a mount-about
cows.
9. The Shadow: An allusion to Nietzsche's earlier work,
The Wanderer and His Shadow (188o).
10. At Noon: A charming intermezzo.
:i. The Welcome: Zarathustra rejects his guests, though
together they form a kind of higher man compared to their
contemporaries. He repudiates these men of great longing
and nausea as well as all those who enjoy his diatribes and
denunciations and desire recognition and consideration
for being out of tune with their time. What Nietzsche
envisages is the creator for whom all negation is merely
incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing
lions."
12. The Last Supper: One of the persistent themes of Part
Four reaches its culmination in this chapter: Nietzsche not
only satirizes the Gospels, and all hagiography generally,
but he also makes fun of and laughs at himself.
13. On the Higher Man: A summary comparable to "On
Old and New Tablets" in Part Three. Section 5 epitomizes
Nietzsche's praise of "evir"-too briefly to be clear apart
from the rest of his work-and the conclusion should be
noted. The opening paragraph of section 7 takes up the
same theme: Nietzsche opposes sublimation to both license
and what he elsewhere calls "castratism." A fine epigram
is mounted in the center of section 9. The mellow moderation of the last lines of section 15 is not usually associated
with Nietzsche. And the chapter ends with a praise of
laughter.
14. The Song of Melancholy: In the 3888 manuscript of
the "Dionysus Dithyrambs" this is the first poem and it
bears the title "Only Fooll Only Poetl" The two introductory sections of this chapter help to dissociate Nietzsche
from the poem, while the subsquent references to this song
show that he considered it far more depressing than it
235
appears in its context. Though his solitude sometimes
flattered him, "On every parable you ride to every truth"
("The Return Home"), he also knew moments when he
said to himself, "I am ashamed that I must still be a poet"
("On Old and New Tablets"). Although Zarathustra's
buffooneries are certainly intended as such by the author,
the thought that he might be "only" a fool, "only" a poet
"climbing around on mendacious word bridges," made
Nietzsche feel more than despondent. Soon it led him to
abandon further attempts to ride on parables in favor of
some of the most supple prose in German literature.
15. On Science: Only the origin of science is considered.
The attempt to account for it in terms of fear goes back to
the period of The Dawn (188i), in which Nietzsche tried
to see how far he could reduce different phenomena to
fear and power. Zarathustra suggests that courage is crucial
-that is, the will to power over fear.
i6. Among Daughters of the Wilderness: Zarathustra, about
to slip out of his cave for the second time because he cannot stand the bad smell of the "higher men," is called
back by his shadow, who has nowhere among men smelled
better air-except once. In the following song Nietzsche's
buffoonery reaches its climax. But though it can and should
be read as thoroughly delightful nonsense, it is not entirely
void of personal significance. Wilste means "desert" or
"wilderness," and wdist can also mean wild and dissolute;
and the "flimsy little fan-, flutter-, and tinsel-skirts" seem
to have been suggested by the brothel to which a porter
in Cologne once took the young Nietzsche, who had asked
to be shown to a hotel. (He ran away, shocked; cf. my
Nietzsche, 3, I.) Certainly the poem is full of sexual
fantasies. But the double meaning of "date" is not present
in the original.
17. The Awakening: The titles of this and the following
chapter might well be reversed; for it is this chapter that
culminates in the ass festival, Nietzsche's version of the
Black Mass. But "the awakening' here does not refer to the
moment when an angry Moses holds his people accountable
236
for their worship of the golden calf, but to the moment
when "they have learned to laugh at themselves." In this
art, incidentally, none of the great philosophers excelled
the author of Part Four of Zarathustra.
i8. The Ass Festival: Five of the participants try to justify
themselves. The pope satirizes Catholicism (Luther was
last made fun of at the end of the song in Chapter i6),
while the conscientious in spirit develops a new theology
-and suggests that Zarathustra himself is pretty close to
being an ass.
19. The Drunken Song: Nietzsche's great hymn to joy invites comparison with Schiller's-minus Beethoven's music.
That they use different German words is the smallest difference. Schiller writes:
Suffer bravely, myriadsl
Suffer for the better world
Up above the firmament
A great God will give rewards.
Nietzsche wants the eternity of this life with all its agonies
-and seeing that it flees, its eternal recurrence. As it is expressed in sections 9, io, and 3i, the conception of the
eternal recurrence is certainly meaningful; but its formulation as a doctrine depended on Nietzsche's mistaken belief
that science compels us to accept the hypothesis of the
eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals.
(See "On the Vision and the Riddle" and "The Convalescent," both in Part Three, and, for a detailed discussion,
my Nietzsche, 11, II.)
20. The Sign: In "The Welcome," Zarathustra repudiated
the "higher men" in favor of "laughing lions." Now a lion
turns up and laughs, literally. And in place of the single
dove in the New Testament, traditionally understood as a
symbol of the Holy Ghost, we are presented with a whole
flock. Both the lion and the doves were mentioned before
("On Old and New Tablets," section 3) as the signs for
which Zarathustra must wait, and now afford Nietzsche an
237
opportunity to preserve his curious blend of myth, irony,
and hymn to the very end.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SEVEN SEALS OR THE YES AND AMEN SONG
,

IN CHAPTERS [225/225]



  104 Integral Yoga
   16 Yoga
   9 Philosophy
   7 Christianity
   4 Occultism
   3 Psychology
   2 Science
   2 Poetry
   2 Fiction
   2 Buddhism
   1 Integral Theory
   1 Baha i Faith
   1 Alchemy


  117 Sri Aurobindo
   18 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   9 The Mother
   9 Swami Krishnananda
   8 Paul Richard
   7 Sri Ramakrishna
   6 George Van Vrekhem
   4 Satprem
   3 Saint Augustine of Hippo
   3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   3 Friedrich Nietzsche
   3 Carl Jung
   3 Aldous Huxley
   2 Jean Gebser
   2 H P Lovecraft
   2 Bokar Rinpoche
   2 Aleister Crowley


   54 Record of Yoga
   25 The Life Divine
   9 The Study and Practice of Yoga
   9 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   7 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   6 Preparing for the Miraculous
   6 Essays Divine And Human
   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   5 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   5 Letters On Yoga IV
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   4 The Human Cycle
   4 Essays On The Gita
   4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
   3 The Secret Of The Veda
   3 The Perennial Philosophy
   3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   3 City of God
   2 The Future of Man
   2 The Ever-Present Origin
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Tara - The Feminine Divine
   2 Talks
   2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
   2 Lovecraft - Poems
   2 Liber ABA
   2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire


01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.
   It may be retorted that if Reason is condemned, it is condemned by itself and by no other authority. All argumentation against Reason is a function of Reason itself. The deficiencies of Reason we find out by the rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die, it is because it consents to commit suicide; there is no other power that kills it. But to this our answer is that Reason has this miraculous power of self-destruction; or, to put it philosophically, Reason is, at best, an organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ par excellence for that purpose. But criticism is one thing and creation another. And whether we know or act, it is fundamentally a process of creation; at least, without this element of creation there can be no knowledge, no act. In knowledge there is a luminous creativity, Revelation or Categorical Imperative which Reason does not and cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.

01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The world is full of ikons and archons; we cannot escape them, even if we try the world itself being a great ikon and as great an archon. Those who swear by principles, swear always by some personality or other, if not by a living creature then by a lifeless book, if not by Religion then by Science, if not by the East then by the West, if not by Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly they change one set of personalities for another and believe they have rejected them all. The veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle and you think you have entirely escaped her when you have only run away from one fold to fall into another. The wise do not attempt to reject and negate Maya, but consciously accept herfreedom lies in a knowing affirmation. So we too have accepted and affirmed an icon, but we have done it consciously and knowingly; we are not bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and we serve and utilise it as best as we may.
   ***

01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The rise of this spirit in modern times and conditions is a phenomenon that has to be explained and faced: it is a ghost that has come out of the past and has got to be laid and laid for good. First of all, it is a reaction from modernism; it is a reaction from the modernist denial of certain fundamental and eternal truths, of God, soul, and immortality: it is a reaction from the modernist affirmation of the mere economic man. And it is also a defensive gesture of a particular complex of consciousness that has grown and lives powerfully and now apprehends expurgation and elimination.
   In Europe such a contingency did not arise, because the religious spirit, rampant in the days of Inquisitions and St. Bartholomews, died away: it died, and (or, because) it was replaced by a spirit that was felt as being equally, if not more, au thentic and, which for the moment, suffused the whole consciousness with a large and high afflatus, commensurate with the amplitude of man's aspiration. I refer, of course, to the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a spirit profane and secular, no doubt, but on that level it brought a catholicity of temper and a richness in varied interesta humanistic culture, as it is calledwhich constituted a living and unifying ideal for Europe. That spirit culminated in the great French Revolution which was the final coup de grace to all that still remained of mediaevalism, even in its outer structure, political and economical.

01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There must be a beginning, an affirmation. The other side of nature is not merely transcended and excluded, it must be taken up too, given some place, its proper place in the totality, in the higher synthesis:
   So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Men are such fools (laughing: it doesnt get any better!) that they can change anything at all into a religion, so great is their need for a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They dont feel secure unless they can affirm: This is true and that is not but such an affirmation becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and yoga are not situated on the same plane of the being, and the spiritual life can exist in its purity only if it is free from all mental dogma.
   People must really be made to understand this.

0 1962-12-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Yes, theyre stupid. They are affirmations of contradictions I mean affirmations aimed at contradicting certain things. Its not meant at all to affirm something that has been SEEN, seen and transmitted, but to contradict all the stories of original sin and all the religions, which, according to Thon, always address themselves to more or less hostile beings.
   Theon also used to say that man was born perfect, but had taken a tumble.

02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Humanists once affirmed that nothing that concerned man was alien to them, all came within their domain. The spiritual man too can make the affirmation with the same or even a greater emphasis. Indeed the spiritual consciousness in the highest degree and greatest compass must needs govern and fashion man in his entire being, in all his members and functions. The ideal, as we have said, has seldom been accepted; generally it has been considered as a chimera and an impossibility. That is why, we repeat, even to this day the world has its cup of misery full to the brimaniryam asukham.
   All this has to be said by way of explanation and apology. For if we are spiritual seekers even then, or rather because of. That, we too, we declare, have our say in a matter which looks so mundane as this war. We refuse to own the nature and character so often ascribed to us by the "West, which finds a graphic description in the well-known lines of Matthew Arnold:

03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Buddhist logic considers negation as a simple contrary to affirmation; it is not an entity, it is the lack of entity. Zero or cypher means simple absence. Hindu logic makes of negation a positive statement but on the minus side, even as Hindu mathematics did not consider a zero as valueless but gave a special value, a value of position to it. Do we not hear of negative positives (positron) in modern science today?
   The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material.

03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Buddhism has sometimes been called the rebel child of Hinduism. The word need not be a term of abuse. A rebel is not always a mere destroyer, a pure negator. A negation can be only a form of stating something positive, an affirmation of a truth and reality. Not unoften a rebel means a call back to a truth that has been neglected, inadequately treated or completely omitted and by-passed; it is an urgent demand that that which has been forgotten and left behind, uncared for and undeveloped, must now be taken up again and brought forward, made a full-grown and mature element in a greater and more perfect organisation of human consciousness.
   Buddhism cried halt because of two omissions: it turned man's mind to two new directions. In our eagerness to reach the spiritual and the supra-sensual, we gave scant recognition to the mental and the rational; and yet mind and reason should be the very basis of the life spiritual. And in the pursuit of God and the gods and the things divine, we became blind to human problems, things concerning man in the human way. The earlier vision gives us a happy picture of humanity. The world moves, it was said, from delight to delight, it was born in delight and it consummates in delight. One sang of immortality, of the solar light, of men being children of Heaven and Beatitude. That this material structure on which man leads his precarious existence is a texture of age and disease and death, that misery and undelight is of the very substance of human life was a hard fact that did not get due recognition. Perhaps it was an earlier, that is to say, a younger humanity

04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We have said that this methodologism the knowledge of means and the consequent control over means the hall-mark of modern scientific knowledgeis a new degree of self-consciousness which is the special characteristic of the human consciousness. Put philosophically, we can say that the discovery of the subject and its growing affirmation as an independent factor in a subject-object relation marks the evolutionary course of the human consciousness.
   A still further unveiling seems to be in progress now. The subject has discovered itself as separate from the observed object and still embracing it: but a given subject-object relationship in its turn again is being viewed as itself an object to another subject consciousness, a super-subject. That way lie the ever widening horizons of consciousness opened up by Yoga and spiritual discipline.

05.01 - At the Origin of Ignorance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   What seemed, however, to be nothing more than an accident is pregnant nevertheless with a profound meaning and significance. Indeed God has not created the world in jest. Spirit became Matter, that is to say, an apparent negation of the Spirit, to demonstrate that the negation is a way of affirmation, a more integral way of affirmation of the Spirit. Matter has been brought out to express another poise of the spirit, spirit concretised and embodied.
   ***

05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is not as though it were a foreign country; he comes to his own,only he seeks to rebuild it on another scale, the scale of unity and infinity, instead of the present scale of separativism and finiteness. He comes among men not simply because he is' moved by human miseries; he is no extra-terrestrial person, a bigger human being, but is himself this earth, this world, all these miseries; he is woven into the fabric of the universe, he is the warp and woof that constitute creation. It is not a mere movement of sympathy or benevolence that actuates him, it is a total and absolute identification that is the ground and motive of his activity. When he assumes the frame of mortality, it is not that something outside and totally incongruous is entering into him, it is part and parcel of himself, it is himself in one of his functions and phases. Consequently, his work in and upon the material world and life may be viewed as that of self-purification and self-illumination, self-discipline and selfrealisation. Also, the horrors of material existence, being part of the cosmic play and portion of his infinity, naturally find shelter in the individual divine incarnation, are encompassed in his human embodiment. It is the energy of his own consciousness that brought out or developed even this erring earth from within it: that same energy is now available, stored up in the individual formation, for the recreation of that earth. The advent and acceptance of material existence meant, as a kind of necessity in a given scheme of divine manifestation, the appearance and play of Evil, the negation of the very divinity. Absolute Consciousness brought forth absolute unconsciousness the inconscientbecause of its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisation. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifies itself with Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the body itself, to make of the negation a concrete affirmation. The inconscient will be embodied consciousness.
   The humanist said, Nothing human I reckon foreign to me," In a deeper and more absolute sense the divine Mystic of the integral Yoga says the same. He is indeed humanity incarnate, the whole mankind condensed and epitomised in his single body. Mankind as imbedded in ignorance and inconscience, the conscious soul lost in the dark depths of dead matter, is he and his whole labour consists in working in and through that obscure "gravitational" mass, to evoke and bring down the totality of the superconscient force, the creative delight which he is essentially in his inmost and topmost being. The labour within himself is conterminous with the cosmic labour, and the change effected in his being and nature means a parallel change in the world outside, at least a ready possibility of the change. All the pains and weaknesses normal humanity suffers from, the heritage of an inconscient earthly existence, the Divine takes into his incarnated bodyall and more and to the highest degreeinto a crucible as it were, and works out there the alchemy. The natural man individually shares also each other's burden in some way, for all are interconnected in lifeaction at one point has a reaction at all other points: only the sharing is done unconsciously and is suffered or imposed than accepted and it tends to be at a minimum. An ordinary mortal would break under a greater pressure. It is the Avatar who comes forward and carries on his shoulders the entire burden of earthly inconscience.

05.03 - Of Desire and Atonement, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Every apparent Negation is an index to an affirmation waiting behind it.
   You increase your difficulty by thinking it difficult; consider it easy and it will be made easy to you.

05.06 - The Birth of Maya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Where there is the utmost Denial, there was to arise the very perfection of the affirmation of the Divine.
   ***

05.11 - The Place of Reason, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In Sri Aurobindo, Reason and Intuition possess a dual relation of mutual negation and mutual affirmation, of exclusiveness and inclusiveness, as indeed is the relation of Brahman and the World. One negates the other in the sphere of ignorance but in knowledge one affirms the other. That is to say, Reason or mental logic, so long as it is dominated by the senses, by the external impressions from things and by its analytic or exclusively separative method of procedure, is a denial of Intuition and a bar to spiritual experience. But Reason can be purified, relieved of its dross, illumined (sam-buddha)sublimated and uplifted then it comes to its own, becomes what it really is and should bea frame to give body to what is beyond and unembodied, a mirror in conceptual terms to what is supra-conceptual. It loses its hard rigidity and becomes supple, loses its obscurity, density and becomes transparent: it attains a new rhythm and gait and capacity. Many of the Upanishadic mantras, a good part of the Gita, do that. And Sri Aurobindo's own exposition is a miracle in that style. "Reason was a helper, Reason is the bar"and, we can add, Reason will again be an aid. The world, as it is, is anything but Divine; and yet it is nothing but the Divine essentially and fundamentally; it can and will attain the divine figure apparently and externally too. Even so with regard to man's mind and reason and all his other limbs.
   Calcutta Review, January 1949.

06.05 - The Story of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In the graded descent, in the hierarchy of planes and levels, there appeared forces and beings also proper to each domain. The earliest, the first among them are the Asuras, rather the original Asuras the first quaternary (some memory of them seemed to linger in the Greek legend of Chronos and his brood). For they embody the powers of division, of Inconscience: they are the affirmations of the Negation. Against the Asuras there came and ranged-at the first line of division, on the one side of the descent of the Light the first godheads, the major powers and personalities of the Divine Consciousness. The battle of the gods and Titans for the possession of the earth has been going on ever since. The end will come one day: it will mean the dissolution of the forces of Negation, at least within the earthly sphere, and the establishment there of the reign of ,Light.
   ***

06.36 - The Mother on Herself, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There are two things that should not be confused with each other, namely, what one is and what one does, what one is essentially and what one does in the outside world. They are very different. I know what I am. And what others think or say or whatever happens in the world, that truth remains unaffected, unaltered, a fact. It is real to itself and the world's denial or affirmation does not increase or diminish that reality. But being what I am, what I do actually is altogether a different question: that will depend upon the conditions and circumstances in which things are and in and through which I am to work. I know the truth I bring, but how much of it finds expression in the world depends upon the world itself. What I bring, the world must have the capacity and the will to accept: otherwise even if I bring with me the highest and the most imperative truth, it will be, absolutely as it were, non-existent for a consciousness that does not recognise or receive it: the being with that consciousness will not profit a jot by it.
   You will say if the truth I bring is supreme and omnipotent, why does it not compel the world to accept it, why can it not break the world's resistance, force man to accept the good it refuses? But that is not the way in which the world was created nor the manner in which it moves and develops. The origin of creation is freedom: it is a free choice in the consciousness that has projected itself as the objective world. This freedom is the very character of its fundamental nature. If the world denies its supreme truth, its highest good, it does so in the delight of its free choice; and if it is to turn back and recognise that truth and that good, it must do so in the same delight of free choice. If the erring world was ordered to turn right and immediately did so, if things were done in a trice, through miracles, there would be then no point in creating a world. Creation means a play of growth: it is a journey, a movement in time and space through graded steps and stages. It is a movement awayaway from its source and a movement towards: that is the principle or plan on which it stands. In this plan there is no compulsion on any of the elements composing the world to forswear its natural movement, to obey to a dictate from outside: such compulsion would break the rhythm of creation.

1.008 - The Principle of Self-Affirmation, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Asmita or egoism, which is the principle of the affirmation of a particular condition of individuality, is the reason for a particular love or hatred under given conditions. This affirmation of individuality is a peculiar thing, which cannot be understood by the intellect, by ordinary logic. Whatever be the condition with which consciousness identifies itself, that is affirmed by the ego, so that the ego does not have a set pattern it goes on changing itself. "Today I assert myself as a collector; tomorrow I assert myself as a minister." Though the principle of assertion is the same, the way of its function is different. The principle, and not merely the function, has to be tackled. It is not important to know what kind of food we want. We may want chapatti, or rice, or dal, or bread, or jam, or butter; that is not important. What is important is why we are feeling hungry that is the principle behind eating. What we eat is a minor detail, but it is why we eat that is important.
  Likewise, what type of assertion we are making is a different matter it is a detail. But why we are making this assertion at all is the subject for analysis in yoga. Why is it that today we identify ourself as a sannyasi "I am a mandaleshwar" and we go on asserting that we are mandaleshwars; we are officers; we are such and such; we are this and that. This principle of affirmation is a peculiar twist in consciousness that has got identified with a changing condition. Every condition changes. We cannot have a permanent condition in life, so the affirmation of the ego also goes on changing. How do we know what we were in the previous birth? We had a different type of affirmation at that time. Who was our father in a previous birth? Who was our mother? And what has happened to that father and that mother? We have completely forgotten them. We now have another father and mother. In the next birth, what will happen to us? We will have some other father and mother. How many fathers? How many mothers? How many sisters? How many brothers? How many friends? How many enemies? So, who is our friend and who is our enemy? Who is our father and who is our mother.
  The ego does not want all these questions to be raised; it cannot answer these questions. It is a terrific sword that we brandish before it, to put these questions to it. It will become mad if such questions are put. It doesn't want to listen to all these things; it will affirm a particular condition only. Immediately there is a ramification with two tentacles on one side there is love and on the other side there is hatred. They are automatic manifestations of the principle of individuality. The moment we assert ourselves in a particular condition, love and hatred must be there, because love is an automatic projection of the mind in respect of the counterpart of our present condition, which also explains hatred.

1.009 - Perception and Reality, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Why has this situation arisen? Why this vehement affirmation of the ego, this assertion of the mind in respect of a particular condition which is passing, transitory, phenomenal? The attachment of the mind to a particular condition is the principle of egoism. Why does it happen? Why does it breed the further problems of like, dislike, love of physical life, individual life, fear of death, etc.? This happens because of a background which is still deeper than this particular psychological involvement. The very belief in the reality of externals is the cause for this calamity, because the moment we have a conviction that an object of perception is real, we have to develop a real attitude towards it. The perception of the object as something real is the beginning of the trouble. The trouble then intensifies itself as a compulsive activity towards the development of an attitude towards that object. The precondition of this attitude is egoism.
  To describe the series or the successive stages of this development there is, first, a perception of the object, such as a tree, for example, in front. I perceive an object in front of me such as a tree, and I am convinced that it is a real tree. The tree is really there; it is not an unreal perception. The existence of the tree is real. It is really there outside me. The 'outsideness' of the tree is also real. The tree is real, its externality to me is real and, therefore, I am now compelled to develop a real attitude towards it.
  --
  We are going from the lower stage to a higher stage, from the immediate experience of a concrete trouble to the causes thereof. We have a complex problem in the form of like and dislike for objects, and we want to maintain this condition of like and dislike. Therefore, there is love of life and fear of death, which, of course, requires the affirmation of the individual subject maintaining this attitude. We have now arrived at the stage where we understand that the reason behind all this psychological activity is the perception of an object as a real something, external to oneself. Why do we perceive the object? We are not deliberately, or of our own accord, perceiving the object; here also, we are forced. Ultimately we will find that everything that we do is under a compulsion. Though people parade under the notion that they are free people and they can do whatever they want, it is not so. There is no free person in this world. Everybody is a slave of an urge, a force, a compulsion that is at the back of all these psychological activities. Just as we cannot see our own back, we cannot see the existence of these forces they are behind.
  The perception of an object is caused by a subtle activity that has taken place in the cosmos itself. We have to go back to the Upanishads and texts which are akin in nature. The human mind is not made in such a way as to be able to comprehend what has happened, ultimately. This is what they call the cosmological analysis of human experience. Why do we exist at all as individuals, and then are compelled to perceive objects, and then to have to undergo all this tragedy and suffering of positive and negative attitudes, etc.? This is a mystery for the human intellect. While we may be able to understand and explain what things are like in the world, we will not be able to explain ourselves why we are what we are. Can we explain why we are what we are? "I am what I am, that is all. It has no reason behind it." But there is a reason, which is the reason behind the reason itself. Here we go back to a condition beyond human intellect. Great masters like Acharya Sankara, Ramanuja, etc. tell us that here we land in a realm where intellect should not interfere. The intellect has a boundary, and beyond that boundary, it is useless.
  Now I am touching upon a realm where intellect will not work and it is not supposed to work at all because this is a cosmic question, and intellect is made in such a way that it cannot understand cosmic relationships. The reason is that intellect is an individualised endowment; it is not a cosmic principle. It is a function of the individual psychological principle. This is what we call the intellect and, therefore, it will work only in terms of the affirmation of individuality. The intellect will always take for granted that the individual exists. But now we are trying to find out why the individual exists at all, so we know why our intellect will not work here. The intellect cannot work here because of the simple reason that we are trying to find the cause of the intellect itself so intellect fails, as it has to fail.
  Here we go to a realm where the revelations of the ancient masters, which are embodied in the sacred scriptures, become our guide. Otherwise we shall be blind we will know nothing. The great masters who are the Gurus of mankind, who had plumbed the depths of being and had vision of the cosmic mystery, tell us something which the intellect cannot explain inductively, logically or scientifically. Our individual existence is caused by something which is prior to the manifestation of individuality and, therefore, let not the individual intellect interfere with this subject.
  --
  This universal condition which has ramified itself, as if in dream, into the individual segments, is the cause for the affirmation of individuality and the perception of objects, and the likes and dislikes and the sorrows of this world. Our very sorrow is due to our loss of identity with the Cosmic. Otherwise, there would be no sorrow in this world. We are suffering due to an agony felt on account of our isolation from that Cosmic of which we are a part. So, the philosophical and spiritual advice in this context is that the mystery of life cannot be explained, and the sorrow of life cannot be obviated unless the original cause is discovered and it is dealt with in a manner which is requisite. This requisite manner of dealing with the ultimate question is yoga. As I mentioned earlier, yoga is a gradual process of identification of the part with the whole.
  Now, analogically speaking, if the one has become two, and two has become four, four has become eight, etc., so that we are today what we are, in this condition, the reverse process of returning to the original unity would be by a successive recession of the very same process, stage by stage, missing not a single link. These are the stages of yoga. The steps in yoga, or the stages of knowledge, are the process of the recession of the effect into the cause, the condition of the effect in which one is 'A' or 'B' or 'XYZ'. So we have to determine our present condition, and from that condition we must retrace our steps back not suddenly to the topmost unity, but to the immediately-above condition. The step that is next to us, the condition above us, the stage ahead of us, is our goal for the present or the time being, with which we have to get united in meditation, in yoga. And that second step would effect a further stage ahead, and so on and so forth, until the final unity is achieved.

1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
  35. This affirmation occurs a number of times in Jung's later writings see for example, Jane Pratt,
  Notes on a talk given by C. G. Jung: Is analytical psychology a religion? Springjournal of

1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  ry, in his complete and catholic affirmation, has drawn
  the unconditional conclusion from the Vedantic statement

1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  That is in no way a "sentimental" affirmation.
  The proof that the growing coextension of our soul and the

1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
  Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the unperspectival age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the aperspectival age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the new.Aperspectival is not to be thought of as merely the opposite or negation of perspectival; the antithesis of perspectival is unperspectival. The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral. We have employed here the designation aperspectival to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and negation. The so-called primal words (Urworte), for example, evidence two antithetic connotations: Latin altus meant high as well as low; sacer meant sacred as well as cursed. Such primal words as these formed an undifferentiated psychically-stressed unity whose bivalent nature was definitely familiar to the early Egyptians and Greeks. This is no longer the case with our present sense of language; consequently, we have required a term that transcends equally the ambivalence of the primal connotations and the dualism of antonyms or conceptual opposites.
  Hence we have used the Greek prefix a- in conjunction with our Latin-derived word perspectival in the sense of an alpha privativum and not as an alpha negativum, since the prefix has a liberating character (privativum, derived from Latin privare, i.e., to liberate). The designation aperspectival, in consequence, expresses a process of liberation from the exclusive validity of perspectival and unperspectival, as well as pre-perspectival limitations. Our designation, then, does not attempt to unite the inherently coexistent unperspectival and perspectival structures, nor does it attempt to reconcile or synthesize structures which, in their deficient modes, have become irreconcilable. If aperspectival were to represent only a synthesis it would imply no more than perspectival-rational and it would be limited and only momentarilyvalid, inasmuch as every union is threatened by further separation. Our concern is with integrality and ultimately with the whole; the word aperspectival conveys our attempt to deal with wholeness. It is a definition which differentiates a perception of reality that is neither perspectivally restricted to only one sector nor merely unperspectivally evocative of a vague sense of reality.

1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2:These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, - this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.
  3:For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body. The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.

1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  We may call it "That" to show that we exile from our affirmation
  all term and definition. We may equally call it "He", provided

1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Infinity is hidden in every grain of sand. It can be directly contacted by the mind, by the application of suitable methods or techniques. These techniques are nothing but the affirmation of Reality in every particular form of reality, which in ordinary life is mistaken for an absolutely independent existence. These so-called absolutely independent existences called realities, which attract the mind in different directions, are aspects of a more comprehensive system which includes these realities.
  Therefore, it would be profitable for the mind to pay attention to this higher system, rather than to pay attention to a single, isolated individuality which it has misconstrued as a whole reality by itself. No particular individual, nothing that is isolated, can be regarded as an entire reality. It is only an aspect or a face of reality and, therefore, it is not advantageous to the mind to engage itself entirely in any kind of action in respect of that particular form of reality. It is disadvantageous, because a part cannot give the whole.

1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  And by God when it emerges at all from its puerile anthropomorphic notions, that theology understands the first Unity, the pure Essence which is preexistent of all multiplicity. But by this conception it erects before it, in its very first affirmation, the most insoluble of problems. For out of absolute unity nothing at all can issue.
  One can conceive such a unity, it is true, as an existence without cause, but it is only by totally ignoring the conditions of thought and the fundamental demands of Reason that one can see in it the cause of existences. Mere unity is by its very definition entire sterility; it is multiplicity alone that can produce multiplicity. The notion of cause is exclusive of the notion of unity; for the essence of unity is an indivisible, indiscernable, immobile identity.

1.02 - Taras Tantra, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  subscribe to scientific affirmation like blind people.
  In the Vajrayana, it is somewhat similar. As long as

1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
  Pausing for a new Paragraph, he continues with these surprising words: "My gaze, fully satisfied by contemplating the mountain [i.e., only after a conscious and exhaustive survey of the Panorama], my eyes turned inward [in me ipsuminterioresoculosreflexi]; and then we fell silent . . " Although obscured by psychological reservations and the memory of his physical exertion, the concluding lines of his letter suggest an ultimate affirmation of his ascent and the attendant experience: "So much perspiration and effort just to bring the body a little closer to heaven; the soul, when approaching God. must be similarly terrified.
  The struggle initiated by his internalization of space into his soul - or, if you will, the externalization of space out of his soul - continued in Petrarch from that day on Mount Ventoux until the end of his life. The old world where only the soul is wonderful and worthy of contemplation, as expressed succinctly in Augustine's words "Time resides in the soul," now begins to collapse. There is a gradual but increasingly evident shift from time to space until the soul wastes away in the materialism of the nineteenth century, a loss obvious to most people today that only the most recent generations have begun to counter in new ways.

1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  1:THE affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.
  2: Nor is this, even, enough to guard us against a recoil from life in the body unless, with the Upanishads, perceiving behind their appearances the identity in essence of these two extreme terms of existence, we are able to say in the very language of those ancient writings, "Matter also is Brahman", and to give its full value to the vigorous figure by which the physical universe is described as the external body of the Divine Being. Nor, - so far divided apparently are these two extreme terms, - is that identification convincing to the rational intellect if we refuse to recognise a series of ascending terms (Life, Mind, Supermind and the grades that link Mind to Supermind) between Spirit and Matter. Otherwise the two must appear as irreconcilable opponents bound together in an unhappy wedlock and their divorce the one reasonable solution. To identify them, to represent each in the terms of the other, becomes an artificial creation of Thought opposed to the logic of facts and possible only by an irrational mysticism.
  --
  4:The materialist has an easier field; it is possible for him by denying Spirit to arrive at a more readily convincing simplicity of statement, a real Monism, the Monism of Matter or else of Force. But in this rigidity of statement it is impossible for him to persist permanently. He too ends by positing an unknowable as inert, as remote from the known universe as the passive Purusha or the silent Atman. It serves no purpose but to put off by a vague concession the inexorable demands of Thought or to stand as an excuse for refusing to extend the limits of inquiry. Therefore, in these barren contradictions the human mind cannot rest satisfied. It must seek always a complete affirmation; it can find it only by a luminous reconciliation. To reach that reconciliation it must traverse the degrees which our inner consciousness imposes on us and, whether by objective method of analysis applied to Life and Mind as to Matter or by subjective synthesis and illumination, arrive at the repose of the ultimate unity without denying the energy of the expressive multiplicity. Only in such a complete and catholic affirmation can all the multiform and apparently contradictory data of existence be harmonised and the manifold conflicting forces which govern our thought and life discover the central Truth which they are here to symbolise and variously fulfil. Then only can our Thought, having attained a true centre, ceasing to wander in circles, work like the Brahman of the Upanishad, fixed and stable even in its play and its worldwide coursing, and our life, knowing its aim, serve it with a serene and settled joy and light as well as with a rhythmically discursive energy.
  5:But when that rhythm has once been disturbed, it is necessary and helpful that man should test separately, in their extreme assertion, each of the two great opposites. It is the mind's natural way of returning more perfectly to the affirmation it has lost. On the road it may attempt to rest in the intervening degrees, reducing all things into the terms of an original Life-Energy or of sensation or of Ideas; but these exclusive solutions have always an air of unreality. They may satisfy for a time the logical reason which deals only with pure ideas, but they cannot satisfy the mind's sense of actuality. For the mind knows that there is something behind itself which is not the Idea; it knows, on the other hand, that there is something within itself which is more than the vital Breath. Either Spirit or Matter can give it for a time some sense of ultimate reality; not so any of the principles that intervene. It must, therefore, go to the two extremes before it can return fruitfully upon the whole. For by its very nature, served by a sense that can perceive with distinctness only the parts of existence and by a speech that, also, can achieve distinctness only when it carefully divides and limits, the intellect is driven, having before it this multiplicity of elemental principles, to seek unity by reducing all ruthlessly to the terms of one. It attempts practically, in order to assert this one, to get rid of the others. To perceive the real source of their identity without this exclusive process, it must either have overleaped itself or must have completed the circuit only to find that all equally reduce themselves to That which escapes definition or description and is yet not only real but attainable. By whatever road we may travel, That is always the end at which we arrive and we can only escape it by refusing to complete the journey.
  6:It is therefore of good augury that after many experiments and verbal solutions we should now find ourselves standing today in the presence of the two that have alone borne for long the most rigorous tests of experience, the two extremes, and that at the end of the experience both should have come to a result which the universal instinct in mankind, that veiled judge, sentinel and representative of the universal Spirit of Truth, refuses to accept as right or as satisfying. In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, - or of some of them, - it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. Nor has the intellect, which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found satisfaction in the answer that it has received.
  7:Therefore the time grows ripe and the tendency of the world moves towards a new and comprehensive affirmation in thought and in inner and outer experience and to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfilment in an integral human existence for the individual and for the race.
  8:From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to the Unknowable which they both represent, there arises also a difference of effectiveness in the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of the materialist although more insistent and immediately successful, more facile in its appeal to the generality of mankind, is yet less enduring, less effective finally than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the ascetic. For it carries within itself its own cure. Its most powerful element is the Agnosticism which, admitting the Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends all that is merely unknown. Its premiss is that the physical senses are our sole means of Knowledge and that Reason, therefore, even in its most extended and vigorous flights, cannot escape beyond their domain; it must deal always and solely with the facts which they provide or suggest; and the suggestions themselves must always be kept tied to their origins; we cannot go beyond, we cannot use them as a bridge leading us into a domain where more powerful and less limited faculties come into play and another kind of inquiry has to be instituted.

1.02 - The Ultimate Path is Without Difficulty, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
  As soon as you have affirmation and negation, "this is picking
  and choosing," "this is clarity." As soon as you understand this

1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  The word personality is derived from the Latin, and its upper partials are in the highest degree respectable. For some odd philological reason, the Saxon equivalent of personality is hardly ever used. Which is a pity. For if it were usedused as currently as belch is used for eructationwould people make such a reverential fuss about the thing connoted as certain English-speaking philosophers, moralists and theologians have recently done? Personality, we are constantly being assured, is the highest form of reality, with which we are acquainted. But surely people would think twice about making or accepting this affirmation if, instead of personality, the word employed had been its Teutonic synonym, selfness. For selfness, though it means precisely the same, carries none of the high-class overtones that go with personality. On the contrary, its primary meaning comes to us embedded, as it were, in discords, like the note of a cracked bell. For, as all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have constantly insisted, mans obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to the to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue. It is the memory of these utterances that calls up the unfavourable overtones with which the word selfness is associated. The all too favourable overtones of personality are evoked in part by its intrinsically solemn Latinity, but also by reminiscences of what has been said about the persons of the Trinity. But the persons of the Trinity have nothing in common with the flesh-and-blood persons of our everyday acquaintancenothing, that is to say, except that indwelling Spirit, with which we ought and are intended to identify ourselves, but which most of us prefer to ignore in favour of our separate selfness. That this God-eclipsing and anti-spiritual selfness, should have been given the same name as is applied to the God who is a Spirit, is, to say the least of it, unfortunate. Like all such mistakes it is probably, in some obscure and subconscious way, voluntary and purposeful. We love our selfness; we want to be justified in our love; therefore we christen it with the same name as is applied by theologians to Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
  But now thou askest me how thou mayest destroy this naked knowing and feeling of thine own being. For per-adventure thou thinkest that if it were destroyed, all other hindrances were destroyed; and if thou thinkest thus, thou thinkest right truly. But to this I answer thee and I say, that without a full special grace full freely given by God, and also a full according ableness on thy part to receive this grace, this naked knowing and feeling of thy being may in nowise be destroyed. And this ableness is nought else but a strong and a deep ghostly sorrow. All men have matter of sorrow; but most specially he feeleth matter of sorrow that knoweth and feeleth that he is. All other sorrows in comparison to this be but as it were game to earnest. For he may make sorrow earnestly that knoweth and feeleth not only what he is, but that he is. And whoso felt never this sorrow, let him make sorrow; for he hath never yet felt perfect sorrow. This sorrow, when it is had, cleanseth the soul, not only of sin, but also of pain that it hath deserved for sin; and also it maketh a soul able to receive that joy, the which reaveth from a man all knowing and feeling of his being.
  --
  What is the nature of this stinking lump of selfness or personality, which has to be so passionately repented of and so completely died to, before there can be any true knowing of God in purity of spirit? The most meagre and non-committal hypodiesis is that of Hume. Mankind, he says, are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. An almost identical answer is given by the Buddhists, whose doctrine of anatta is the denial of any permanent soul, existing behind the flux of experience and the various psycho-physical skandhas (closely corresponding to Humes bundles), which constitute the more enduring elements of personality. Hume and the Buddhists give a sufficiently realistic description of selfness in action; but they fail to explain how or why the bundles ever became bundles. Did their constituent atoms of experience come together of their own accord? And, if so, why, or by what means, and within what kind of a non-spatial universe? To give a plausible answer to these questions in terms of anatta is so difficult that we are forced to abandon the doctrine in favour of the notion that, behind the flux and within the bundles, there exists some kind of permanent soul, by which experience is organized and which in turn makes use of that organized experience to become a particular and unique personality. This is the view of the orthodox Hinduism, from which Buddhist thought parted company, and of almost all European thought from before the time of Aristotle to the present day. But whereas most contemporary thinkers make an attempt to describe human nature in terms of a dichotomy of interacting psyche and physique, or an inseparable wholeness of these two elements within particular embothed selves, all the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy make, in one form or another, the affirmation that man is a kind of trinity composed of body, psyche and spirit. Selfness or personality is a product of the first two elements. The third element (that quidquid increatum et increabile, as Eckhart called it) is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being. Mans final end, the purpose of his existence, is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by dying to selfness and living to spirit.
  What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?

1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  18:For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit - and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing - it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contri bution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.
  19:We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, "One without a second", has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula equally imperative, "All this is the Brahman". The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.

1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  They are far from being the affirmations for which we take them; they are only negations which mark the most distant limits of our comprehension, the boundaries of our mental horizon. They are the halting-place of our search, not its point of arrival; they are the subterfuge by which we suppress the problem which we have failed to resolve. Far from elucidating the mystery, they render it yet more profound if we try to give to the words we use a positive significance. For if the notion of an Absolute, an Infinite, an Eternal beyond Time were not in itself negative, it would still be a negation when set against the relativities of Time and Space.
  But it is not in a negation that we shall discover the positive relation of cause, nor is it in the antinomy of opposites that we can find the secret of the Beginning.

1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Only through affirmation, never negation, can you know Him; Neither through Veda nor through Tantra nor the six darsanas.
  It is in love's elixir only that He delights, O mind; He dwells in the body's inmost depths, in Everlasting Joy.

1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  5:Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.
  6:But, still, there is the absolute withdrawal, there is the NonBeing. Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient Scripture, Being appeared.2 Then into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of discrimination and multiple realisation, does not the NonBeing at least, as primal state and sole constant reality, negate and reject all possibility of a real universe? The Nihil of certain Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic solution; the Self, like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by an illusory phenomenal consciousness.
  --
  9:Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence. We give the name of Non-Being to a contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, - freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself, even from the most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them as a real expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by all expression or any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the Being, even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but complementary to each other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-being as a reality and the Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible for the Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissantly in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth.
  10:When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own opinions and partial experiences against the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.
  11:We recognise, then, that it is possible for the consciousness in the individual to enter into a state in which relative existence appears to be dissolved and even Self seems to be an inadequate conception. It is possible to pass into a Silence beyond the Silence. But this is not the whole of our ultimate experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth. For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was perhaps the real gist of the Buddha's teaching, - this superiority to ego and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with mutable form and idea, not the petty ideal of an escape from the trouble and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man would combine in himself the silence and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the eternal miracle of the divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it were, beyond itself. The opposite experience could only be a concentration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the result of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being.
  12:Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
  13:If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony - and on what other can harmony be founded? - the various conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them representing a truth beyond conception, must be understood as far as possible in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual Maya. If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, - a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil, - an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure.
  14:For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself, since no such thing exists. Nor can we suppose that It submits unwillingly to something partial within Itself which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradiction of an All and something other than the All. Even if we say that the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.
  --
  16:We start, then, with the conception of an omnipresent Reality of which neither the Non-Being at the one end nor the universe at the other are negations that annul; they are rather different states of the Reality, obverse and reverse affirmations. The highest experience of this Reality in the universe shows it to be not only a conscious Existence, but a supreme Intelligence and Force and a self-existent Bliss; and beyond the universe it is still some other unknowable existence, some utter and ineffable Bliss. Therefore we are justified in supposing that even the dualities of the universe, when interpreted not as now by our sensational and partial conceptions, but by our liberated intelligence and experience, will be also resolved into those highest terms. While we still labour under the stress of the dualities, this perception must no doubt constantly support itself on an act of faith, but a faith which the highest Reason, the widest and most patient reflection do not deny, but rather affirm. This creed is given, indeed, to humanity to support it on its journey, until it arrives at a stage of development when faith will be turned into knowledge and perfect experience and Wisdom will be justified of her works.

1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  person is characterized by a contraction of forces, by the affirmation of
  what has been achieved, and by the curtailment of further growth. His

1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  der, warranted by the Vedantic affirmation that all is the
  Brahman and that our souls have chosen to incarnate in

1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  But what is meant by consciousness or unconsciousness? The distinction which we express by these words, has reference to our own modes of activity and to our own special conditions. And, certainly, it is no less erroneous to refuse than to attri bute what we call consciousness to the principle of the universe. For, perhaps, what for us would be a supreme unconsciousness, is indistinguishable from an entire superconsciousness in the All; and a single term cannot be applied to the manner of thought in the individual and the way in which the universe reflects. Two opposite terms would both be justified, if they could be used as simultaneous affirmations.
  The terms, Force and Will, which are often opposed to each other by the materialistic and the spiritual conceptions of the universe, are such affirmations and we have only to complete one by the other in the domain proper to each by conceiving Will as a force seen from within in its subjective principle and Force as a will seen from without in its objective manifestations.
  Thus these contradictory hypotheses and exclusive doctrines appear insufficient and too exiguous in their Simplicity, if they are considered separately, but reconcilable, if more deeply regarded, and capable of completing each other by their reconciliation.

1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  It is the pressure of the senses towards objects that prevents the mind from taking to exclusive spiritual meditations. The objects of sense are so real to the senses that they cannot easily be ignored or forgotten. Even the very thought of an object will draw the mind towards it, and every particularised thought in the direction of an object is a further affirmation of the falsity that Reality is only in some place, in some object, in some thing, in some person, etc., and it is not universal in its nature. The universality of Truth is denied by the senses, at every moment of time, in their activities towards sense gratification.
  The very purpose of the senses is to bring about this refusal of the ultimate universality of Godhead, to affirm the diversity of objects and to push the mind forcefully towards these external things. If this undesirable activity on the part of the senses can be ended to the extent possible, this force with which the mind moves towards objects can be harnessed for a better purpose, for a more positive aim than the indulgence of the senses in objects. The very restraint of the senses from their movement towards objects is a meditation by itself, at least in some sense, because energy cannot be bottled up, unused; it always finds expression in some way or the other. If we do not utilise it in more beneficial ways for spiritual purposes, the only alternative would be for this mental energy to leak out through the senses towards objects of sense. If this leakage is blocked and prevented, the energy wells up within like the waters of a river that will rise up when a bund is constructed across it.
  --
  The purpose of sense control, study of scripture and adoration of God is all single namely, the affirmation of the supremacy and the ultimate value of Godhead. This requires persistent effort, no doubt, and as has been pointed out earlier, it is a strenuous effort on the part of the mind to prevent the incoming of impressions of desire from objects outside on the one hand, and to create impressions of a positive character in the form of love of God on the other hand. Vijatiya vritti nirodha and sajatiya vritti pravah these two processes constitute sadhana. Vijatiya vritti nirodha means putting an end to all incoming impressions from external objects and allowing only those impressions which are conducive to contemplation on the Reality of God. Vijati means that which does not belong to our category, genus, or species.
  What is our species? It is not mankind, human nature, etc. Our species is a spiritual spark, a divine location in our centre. The soul that we are is the species that we are. So all impressions, thoughts, feelings and ideas which are in agreement with the character of the soul, which is our jati, or species, should be allowed, and anything that is contrary or different from this should not be allowed. The vijatiya vritti nirodha is the inhibition or putting an end to all those vrittis or modifications of the mind in respect of things outside, because the soul is not anything that is outside. Sajatiya vritti pravah is the movement like the flow of a river, or the pouring of oil continuously, without break, in a thread of such ideas which are of the character of the soul which is universality.

1.056 - Lack of Knowledge is the Cause of Suffering, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Tanu, or the attenuated condition, or what they call the thinned-out condition of the desire, is that state of mind which we can see in some of the sadhakas or seekers the students of yoga where, due to continued affirmation in a different direction altogether, the desires which are inside as dormant get manifest no doubt, yet remain in a very thin form because the activity of the mind in the student of yoga is in a different direction altogether. There is a constant rotation of japa, chanting of mantra; or study, svadhyaya; or meditation, or satsanga. All these things attenuate the mind. They keep it in a very fine, thin form, and desire cannot work with the force that is necessary to fulfil itself. Thus, in students of yoga, in sadhakas in general, the desires look absent. They are not absent; they are present there, but they look as if they are not there due to the pressure exerted upon the mind by other types of activity, such as what we call the practice of sadhana.
  Or, they can be in this attenuated condition when we are in places like Gangotri or Badrinath, where these desires cannot be fulfilled normally because the conditions are not favourable. Either we cannot get the objects of desire, or there are other reasons for which the desires cannot be fulfilled. There are various causes behind the inability of the mind to fulfil the desire, though it is trying to find an avenue of escape. It is trying its best, but it cannot get an outlet. In this condition, it is attenuated in a very thin form.

1.057 - The Four Manifestations of Ignorance, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Every one of these effects of avidya is properly being described. While the nature of ignorance is of this particular feature mentioned, its immediate progeny, which is asmita, or the self-affirming faculty which becomes egoism later on, is again a kind of mix-up of values between the perceiver and what is perceived. This is what is known in Vedanta as adhyasa the character of the Self getting transferred to the object and, vice versa, the character of the object getting transferred to the Self. The confirmation that one exists as an individual the rootedness of oneself in the feeling I am as a separate individual is called asmita. This feeling that you exist, or I exist, is also a mistake. It is not wisdom, because the affirmation I am is the outcome of a confusion between two types of character: the character that belongs to Pure Consciousness, and the character that belongs to what is not the Self. The conviction that one exists is due to the Being of Consciousness. The atman or the purusha that is within is responsible for this affirmation.
  The existence aspect of this affirmation belongs to the nature of True Being, which is at the background of all these phenomena. But, this affirmation of Being in the feeling I am is not merely an affirmation of Being; there is some other element also which infects this feeling of Being namely, the isolatedness of a part of Being from other parts. When we say I am, or feel I am, we imply thereby that I am different from others, though we do not make that statement openly. The implication of the affirmation of oneself as an individual is that one is cut off from other individuals; otherwise, the feeling of I am itself cannot be there. How do we know that we are different from others? There is no reason behind this. We have a prejudiced notion that we are different from others, and this irrational prejudice is the basis of all our actions even the so-called altruistic actions. Even the most philanthropic of deeds is based upon this notion that we are different from others, which itself cannot be justified rationally.
  The peculiar differentiating character of space, time and cause interferes with the character of Being which is in Consciousness, and then there is the rise of the phenomenal individuality, which is asmita. The I am-ness of an individual, the feeling of the individuality of a person the egoism, or the isolated existence of anyone is, therefore, the effect of two factors coming together into activity. A new feature is made to rise due to the mix-up of these two peculiar characters. Space and time act on one side, and Pure Consciousness acts on the other side. The spatial character of the way in which the mind works goes hand in hand with the Being character of Consciousness, and then there is the conviction I am. Well, this is an effect of ignorance because space is nothing but the not-Self, and it was pointed out that the not-Self is perceived on account of an action of ignorance.
  --
  Thus, an artificial life is created. The sorrow of life is the result of this peculiar artificial atmosphere compelled upon the individual on account of its double attitude of affirmation of individuality on the one side, and the feeling of necessity for relationship with others on the other side.

1.05 - Buddhism and Women, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  that these affirmations were made by the Buddha 2500
  years ago, at a time when women's condition-as we

1.05 - The Creative Principle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  And, on the other hand, is not this formula of a creative God, which is the conclusion of the majority of the other theories, itself the most supremely agnostic of all formulas? Does it not unconsciously disguise in its appeal to the miracle, the mystery of the primal act, the very ignorance that the partisans of the Unknowable avow? Does not the affirmation of an eternal Being, creator of things, amount in fact to the statement of a principle of uncreated force or substance from which things must have arisen?
  No doubt, in one of these points of view we find the elements of a psychological explanation of the world conceived as the result of a free act of will, of thought; in the other, on the contrary, are resumed all the data of a mechanical conception assuring the fact of evolution on the concrete base of a substantial realism, But, however contradictory all these theories may be in their form, they agree, in substance, in postulating as first fact an essential principle of existence, an absolute cause, personal or impersonal, a thing that is the mother of beings or a being that is the former of things.
  --
  Absolute, relative, these words return with an indefatigable monotony at the term of each view of the problem. For the problem, in whatever aspect we may envisage it, is precisely that of the relations between the Absolute and the relative. It cannot then be resolved by the simple affirmation of the eternal Being or of the eternal substance which are postulated by the various theories. It is not in the Absolute alone, under the form of person or thing, that we must seek for the principle of the relative, but in a sort of relation between the two, between that which is, if we may use the expression, most absolute in the relative and that which is most relative in the Absolute. This relation cannot, indeed, be one of dependence or causality. But nothing prevents us from conceiving it as allowing the pure spontaneities of the relative to find in the absolute realities their own possible conditions or, if you prefer, the pure possibilities of the Absolute to realise themselves as relative. Why should not the Absolute have the power of forgetting itself in the relative?
  These two abstract terms, which appear to us so irreducible, are in fact exclusive only from one point of view, that of our own relative conceptions. There can be no exclusion in the Absolute. And here appears as something essentially distinctive and specific that character of exclusive affirmation which is assumed by the very principle of existence.
  But if we must attribute this form of relative affirmation to some power of primary activity and of creation, we may at least discover a preliminary and fundamental antecedent in the affirmation, also creative, of the Absolute itself in which all is included.
  If this Absolute escapes our thought, it is because all our contradictories become indistinguishable in its identity. It is indivisible and indiscernable unity. And nevertheless it discerns in this very unity the infinite multiplicity. It is the non-manifest which manifests itself to itself. And in its eternal objectivisation at once conscient and substantial is contained the foundation of the principle of distinction, determination, differentiation, without which things and the idea of things could not be.
  In order that from their absolute creation relative creations should come into existence, it suffices that to this principle of differentiation there should be added the principle of exclusive affirmation imposing as an absolute relativity that which was only a relative determination in the Absolute; or, rather, it is sufficient that from the infinity of being that which is to be the finite existence should exclude itself, should cut itself off by self-limitation.
  ***
  --
  The philosophical theories are therefore right, both those which place in the universe itself its immanent cause and those which seek its cause outside it in some transcendent beyond. And when their respective affirmations oppose and exclude each other, in that very opposition, unknown to them, lies the secret for which they seek. For if the wherefore of things is founded on the decree of the Eternity which includes them all, it resides also in the law of mutual exclusion which they impose on themselves. Participating in the infinite possibilities of the Being, they draw from its essence their power of becoming and from its pure liberty the bond of their future determinisms. Being, they make themselves. Children of the Uncreated, they create themselves, give birth to themselves, bring themselves into the world. From the play of the Absolute they pass into that which every relativity plays for itself. And their initial principle becomes by their own initiative that which affirms and manifests itself in every being, which becomes conscious in every ego as the desire to exist for oneself.
  A thing in itself and a desire to exist for oneself, a cause without cause, eternal and incognizable, mother of beings and things, and the spontaneity of an effort evolving things towards being, is not this the double origin absolute and relative, the double reason for existence of all that is, the creative principle of the worlds?

1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  1:AN OMNIPRESENT Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.
  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.
  --
  18:But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment.
  19:Through Avidya, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transitional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate; through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the immortality and the beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.

1.05 - The Principle of Earth, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  It has been said of the principle of air that it does not represent an element proper and this affirmation goes for the principle of earth likewise. Now this means that out of the interaction of the three foresaid elements the earthy principle has been born as the last element which by its specific quality, the solidification involves all the three elements. It is this quality in particular which has given a concrete shape to the three aforesaid elements. But at the same time the action of the three elements has been limited with the result of space, measure, weight and time having been born. The reciprocal action of the three elements together with that of the earth, thus, has become tetrapolar so that the earthy principle may be labelled now as a 4-pole magnet. The fluid in the polarity of the earthy element is electromagnetic. All the life created can therefore be explained by the fact that all elements are active in the fourth, i.e., the earth element. Through realization in this element came out the Fiat, It shall be.
  Details concerning the specific influences of the elements in the various spheres and kingdoms, such as the kingdoms of nature, of animals and of human beings will be found in the following chapters. The main point is that the reader gets a general impression about the workshop and the effect of the elemental principles in the entire Universe.

1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  it can prove its affirmations mathematically and experi
  mentally, and that it has conquered the Earth. Yet the first
  --
  ily dominant paradigm. The second affirmation, that of sci
  ences worldwide triumph, can also be questioned if one
  --
  sequence of the doubt of any affirmations by any authority,
  until the Renaissance so docilely accepted in all places of
  --
  supported its dogmatic affirmations with a literature from
  bygone times, outmoded despite being declared the eter

1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  4:The Unknowable knowing itself as Sachchidananda is the one supreme affirmation of Vedanta; it contains all the others or on it they depend. This is the one veritable experience that remains when all appearances have been accounted for negatively by the elimination of their shapes and coverings or positively by the reduction of their names and forms to the constant truth that they contain. For fulfilment of life or for transcendence of life, and whether purity, calm and freedom in the spirit be our aim or puissance, joy and perfection, Sachchidananda is the unknown, omnipresent, indispensable term for which the human consciousness, whether in knowledge and sentiment or in sensation and action, is eternally seeking.
  5:The universe and the individual are the two essential appearances into which the Unknowable descends and through which it has to be approached; for other intermediate collectivities are born only of their interaction. This descent of the supreme Reality is in its nature a self-concealing; and in the descent there are successive levels, in the concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form of an ascent; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive. For each successive level in the descent of the Divine is to man a stage in an ascension; each veil that hides the unknown God becomes for the God-lover and God-seeker an instrument of His unveiling. Out of the rhythmic slumber of material Nature unconscious of the Soul and the Idea that maintain the ordered activities of her energy even in her dumb and mighty material trance, the world struggles into the more quick, varied and disordered rhythm of Life labouring on the verges of self-consciousness. Out of Life it struggles upward into Mind in which the unit becomes awake to itself and its world, and in that awakening the universe gains the leverage it required for its supreme work, it gains self-conscious individuality. But Mind takes up the work to continue, not to complete it. It is a labourer of acute but limited intelligence who takes the confused materials offered by Life and, having improved, adapted, varied, classified according to its power, hands them over to the supreme Artist of our divine manhood. That Artist dwells in supermind; for supermind is superman. Therefore our world has yet to climb beyond Mind to a higher principle, a higher status, a higher dynamism in which universe and individual become aware of and possess that which they both are and therefore stand explained to each other, in harmony with each other, unified.
  --
  11:To the Life-Spirit, therefore, the individual in whom its potentialities centre is pre-eminently Man, the Purusha. It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God. This Man is the Manu, the thinker, the Manomaya Purusha, mental person or soul in mind of the ancient sages. No mere superior mammal is he, but a conceptive soul basing itself on the animal body in Matter. He is conscious Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through which Person can deal with substance. The animal life emerging out of Matter is only the inferior term of his existence. The life of thought, feeling, will, conscious impulsion, that which we name in its totality Mind, that which strives to seize upon Matter and its vital energies and subject them to the law of its own progressive transformation, is the middle term in which he takes his effectual station. But there is equally a supreme term which Mind in man searches after so that having found he may affirm it in his mental and bodily existence. This practical affirmation of something essentially superior to his present self is the basis of the divine life in the human being.
  12:Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality, - Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God, - yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night, - a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality.
  13:And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknowable to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite, - and still mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to him; he cannot fathom their essential reality.

1.06 - Quieting the Vital, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  but if it was not there to besiege and defy us, we would long ago have seized the eternal Truth and turned it into a nice, tidy piece of platitude. Truth moves on; it has legs; and the princes of darkness are there to make sure, however brutally, that it does not slumber. God's negations are as useful to us as His affirmations,68 says Sri Aurobindo. The Adversary will disappear only when he is no longer necessary in the world, remarked Mother. He is undoubtedly necessary, as is the touchstone for gold, to make sure we are true.
  Indeed, God may not be a pure mathematical point, external to this world; perhaps He is all this world and all this impurity laboring and suffering to become perfect, and to remember Itself here on earth.

1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Divine Nature. The prominence of this true vital being under the lead of the true inmost soul within us is the condition for the divine fulfilment of the objects of the Life-Force. Those objects will even remain the same in essence, but transformed in their inner motive and outer character. The Divine Life-Power too will be a will for growth, a force of self- affirmation, but affirmation of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on the surface, - growth into the true divine Individual, the central being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by
  176

1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  If the secret of the being is concealed at once in his absolute conditionment and in his relative affirmation, it is in the latter first that he must seek for it. It is by scrutinising its primary data that we shall succeed, perhaps, in perceiving through and behind them the final reason of his existence, the cause of his cause. It is by reaching down to his roots that we shall discover the profundities of that antecedent, not previous in time but permanent, to which Knowledge gives the name of Unknowable.
  For the secret of the being is within him.
  --
  Now, for the being, to create himself means to appear. And to appear means to define himself, to become distinct, to affirm himself in the relativity. But what name are we to give to the principle of this distinctive affirmation and exclusive delimitation of the ego which is the foundation of all manifestation, of all relative creation?
  The word, Thought, says too much and too little,too much if that conscient thought is meant which appears at the term of progressive evolution, and too little if it means a pure abstraction of the being previous to its coming into existence. This abstraction may very well define the essence of all its possibilities, but not its power to act and to become. To become implies not only pure thought, but tendency, effort, or, to express all in a single word, if that be possibledesire.
  --
  Desire is more than force, for it is force directed towards an end, it is the unconscious will that no reason governs, the primary, spontaneous, formidable affirmation of that which wills to be. It dwells in all that lives and its power is already active in all that seems not to be alive.
  From the obscurest affinity to the supreme aspiration of the spirit, in the apparent inertia of bodies as in the irresistible impulsion of the thoughts, desire is the principle, the hidden spring, the essence of all that is and even of all that is not yet but will be.
  --
  In the exclusive affirmation of the personal ego there resides at the same time as the principle of egoism its natural corollary, the principle of ignorance.
  For consciousness of self is necessarily the result of an inconscience or at least of an imperfect consciousness of all that becomes alien to self. In order to enter into the relative the being renounces all the Absolute.
  --
  The law of formation of the being may thus find its symbolic equivalent in that of the formation of Matter; it is by a sort of condensation of universal forces imprisoning themselves in ever narrower limits of forms always more and more concrete that the elements of Matter are constructed as well as those of conscious individuality. And the primordial nebula whose condensation around centres of etheric revolution will form one day material worlds, is our image and translation in space of that progressive condensation of the formidable desire to be around more and more distinet and multiple centres of conscious polarisation and individual affirmation.
  So, being in its origin can be conceived as the immense desire, global and nebular, whose virtual elements, obeying the same law of mutual exclusion, are to form the indefinitely differentiated elements, the conflicting forces of the manifested world.
  --
  For the consciousness of the universal to awaken in them, the slow progress of objective sensibility is needed, effected by the opposing violence of their brutal affirmations, by the incessant shock of their mutual action and reaction.
  By conflict the being shall learn that he is not unique and that other desires similar to his own, exclusive of his own, form this universe of which he is a part.
  --
  For though all in the universe is tendency and finality, its individual affirmations are multiple and contradictory and each of them finds itself incessantly thwarted and in collision with all the rest. Thus from their conflict unforeseen results are born, realisations alien to the desire of the being. For this reason it would be puerile to explain all the effects of Nature by conscious and preconceived movement of will. Things are neither fortuitous nor intentional. And if their end responds to any predetermination, it can be only to that which is identical with the absolute liberty of the Unknowable.
  Desire creates what it knows not; the being is not what it wish to be, but what it has been made by the spontaneities of the universe within it and without, conformable to its own or contrary to them. Thus, wishing to be sole, he loses himself in a multitude; striving towards duration he fixes himself in the impermanent; seeking to taste exclusively the joy of being, he enters into the great struggle and creates a world of suffering. This universe to which he is attached by his desire, discovers itself to him as a formidable assemblage of alien forces which he believes, to be blind and of elements which he takes for hostile, not knowing that in them as in him there inhabits one and the same principle,a single soul, the soul of desire.

1.070 - The Seven Stages of Perfection, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Therefore, the perfection of understanding, or the viveka khyati referred to, is a gradual widening of the grasp which consciousness has over the substances of nature. At present, one has no grasp over anything because there is an isolation of oneself from the cosmic substance due to the affirmation of the ego, or the asmita, and the weakness of personality. Whatever be the type of that weakness physical or psychological it is due to the inability of cosmic forces to enter into oneself, just as the sunlight cannot enter the rooms of a house if all the doors and windows are closed. Even if the sun is blazing outside, we may be shivering inside due to the doors and windows being closed, preventing the light of the sun from entering.
  Likewise the forces of nature, which are really what are meant by the powers of nature, cannot enter into the personality of an individual on account of the very presence of individuality. What we call individuality is nothing but the closed house of the asmita, where every avenue of entry of cosmic force is closed completely due to the intensity of self-consciousness. One is so intensely aware of oneself as an individual that it is impossible for cosmic forces to enter that person, so that one begins to rot from within due to this ego, and undergoes intense suffering which is the direct outcome of the absence of freedom which is equivalent to the harmony of oneself with nature.

1.07 - The Primary Data of Being, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The desire to be implies, in fact, a tendency towards the beings particular affirmation, towards the distinction of itself from the Absolute. It contains in this tendency a first principle of activity which is the very principle of Time.
  Of the two categories, Time and Space, that of Time appears then to be the more necessary of the two, the more inseparable from the notion of being.
  --
  Thus is explained its becoming in Time; Time is the very stuff of its existence. It exists only by working incessantly to substitute its modes of being one in the place of the other, by replacing itself by itself, by building upon two Nothings, two negations, on that which is not yet and that which no longer is, the exclusive affirmation of its being, by creating the moment in the very bosom of eternity.
  It is, then, by multiplying itself in a continual succession that it persists in its character of definite unity emergent out of the infinite One.
  --
  It is therefore by the simple prolongation in its effect of the desire for individual manifestation according to the sole law of a rigorously egoistic affirmation that universal being unrolls the whole process of its material evolution.
  Arisen from the formidable inconscience of its origin, it manifests itself progressively to itself. And the Matter in which it appears at the term of its successive self-integrations becomes the mirror which accurately reflects its own image. It finds there at once the evidence of all the imperfections it bore unknowingly in itself and the field of experience, of trial and atonement in which it undergoes their evil consequences and redeems them.

1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
  At the same time, this is no mere solipsism. It is a higher Self or I, most assuredly, but also a higher Truth (or It) and a wider Community (or We)-the Over-Soul as the World Soul in the commonwealth of all beings as an objective State of Affairs.24 The Big Three in yet deeper unfoldings, higher reaches, wider communities, stronger affirmations. .
  At the subtle level, this process of "interiorization" or "within-and-beyond" intensifies-a new transcendence with a new depth, a new embrace, a higher consciousness, a wider identity-and the soul and God enter an even deeper interior marriage, which discloses at its summit a divine union of Soul and Spirit, a union prior to any of its manifestations as matter or life or mind, a union that outshines any conceivable nature, here or anywhere else.

1.097 - Sublimation of Object-Consciousness, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  No one can reconstitute the structure of the mind in such a way as to prevent it from the affirmation of its own old conviction that world experience is real. Not only that it feels that it is the only reality. Who among us here is not convinced about the reality of world experience? Who has the guts to believe that there is another sort of experience other than world experience? All that we see here with our eyes and sense with our senses is the only reality for us. That is why we cling to the things of the world so much. Neither can we believe that there are other grades of experience than the present one, nor can we believe that there is something wrong in the ways of sense perception as provided now, in this condition of the mind. Therefore, it is a herculean task, indeed, to bring the mind round to a new type of conviction, which is what is called viveka right appreciation and a perception of the character of Reality.
  The sutra which I stated just now is a precise statement of the conditions of spiritual meditation. What the sutra literally means is: sattva and the purusha namely, the mind and the ultimate consciousness, purusha are opposed to each other in their characters. In what way are they opposed? That is not mentioned here. We have to understand what this difference is by studying the meaning of the implications provided in other sutras. The purusha is infinite, whereas the mind is externalised. This is the primary distinction. The mind cannot have infinite awareness. It is always projected outwardly through the senses, whereas the purusha is eternally aware of an infinitude of being. This is a great difference indeed.

1.098 - The Transformation from Human to Divine, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Hence, the usual mistaken idea people may carry with them into the field of yoga that what they achieve in the higher stages of yoga is only an expanded, or perhaps a more intensified form of worldly happiness, worldly authority, worldly power or worldly acquisition is a great mistake, and nothing can be worse than that. We are not going to have enjoyments of a worldly kind in the progress of yoga, nor are we going to exercise power as we exercise it in the world of sense and ego. There is such a change as can be compared with the change from an animal to a human being, which cannot be regarded as merely a continuation of the animal species. When we rise from the animal kingdom of consciousness to the human level, we have not simply become better animals; that is not what has happened to us. We have become something quite different from animals. Are we only advanced animals just because we have evolved from the animal state? No. There is a change in intrinsic character. There is a transformation of quality. The human is different from the animal in the intrinsic structure itself, and not merely in the extrinsic expansion of sensory perception or egoistic affirmation.
  Likewise is the transformation from the human to the higher levels of yoga, which are the stages of the ascent to the divine. We are becoming we are going to become divine, in different stages. So, we may say that every stage is a new encounter with a qualitative transformation of the personality, a condition with which we cannot compare anything in this world. There is nothing here with which we can compare that state of experience.
  --
  The objects whatever be their nature outside in the world with which we come in contact, are what are invoked and evoked by our inner potentialities. We cannot see anything which we do not deserve, or which is not intended to be a teacher for us or a means of passing through experience. Here, in ordinary life, the life that we are living today, many of these tendencies are pressed down, repressed by the power of a particular form of desire which we are fulfilling in our daily life and a particular form of ego- affirmation, which sets aside every other affirmation. Every time one particular aspect comes to the surface, it pushes the other aspects to the background, so that we appear to be only one thing at a time, and not two things. We do not have two moods at one moment; there is always one mood only, though these moods may go on changing every day, or even in the same day at different times. The different experiences we pass through and the different objects we face in life are the activities of these predominant aspects in our inner personality which work gradually, stage by stage, according to the convenience of the time or when circumstances become favourable.
  But in yoga, something different happens. We are not pushing aside certain aspects of our personality and presenting only certain predominant features for the purpose of objective experience. The entire thing is stirred up into action, because the purpose of yoga is to liberate the soul from the total bondage to which it is subject in the form of phenomenal experience. Therefore, we have to face everything, every day, at one stroke. This happens, says the Yoga Shastra, at a particular stage not in the very advanced stage of prajna jyotis or atikranta bhavaniya, where we have completely mastered everything and we know things very well, nor when nothing has happened and we are just at the rudimentary, beginning stage of practice. These difficulties start when we are about to transcend the first level this is what the Yoga Shastra tells us. When we have entered the stage called prathama kalpita and we are about to rise to the next one, namely, the madhu bhumika, then there is this dramatic encounter of the meditating consciousness with everything blessed on earth or in heaven.
  --
  Thus, there are two oppositions to the progress in yoga the one that comes from the ego, and the other that comes from the senses. All the obstacles or impediments that we may have to face in future are only these the desires of the senses, and the affirmations of the ego. For this purpose Patanjali has been warning us, again and again, that a thorough grasp of the conditions for the practice are essential before the practice is commenced.
  The two terms, vairagya and abhyasa, sum up the requisites for yoga practice. Is there a taste lingering in the senses and a subtle longing of the personality or the ego? No one can openly admit that there are lingering desires of the senses; nor would the ego permit such an analysis, because any such analysis is the death of the ego and a frustration of the senses. So one cannot, for oneself, know where one stands, inasmuch as one always stands only on the level of a predominant manifested feature of ones personality, and not the total features. One cannot know oneself wholly, because the whole of the personality does not manifest in conscious life. That is the difficulty.

1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  and synthetic are keywords in it. His affirmation was a
  Sri Aurobindo: Essays Divine and Human, p. 65.192
  --
  catholic affirmation, his faith a faith which the highest
  Reason, the widest and most patient reflection do not deny,

1.09 - The Absolute Manifestation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  For if the principle of the relative, such as it is known to us in the manifested world, is an exclusive affirmation, a desire to be, that is to say, to preserve the fixed form of an ego, are we not led thereby logically to postulate a state anterior to this desire in which all the numberless possible forms of the absolute I affirmed themselves, not exclusively?
  The antecedent of the manifested world would be, then, not the state of pure and indiscernable unity, but, on the contrary, a state of perfect solidarity, of constant reciprocity of all the possibles, a state of impersonal manifestation, as it were, foreign to all desire of individual existence.

1.09 - The Pure Existent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2:For this boundless Movement does not regard us as unimportant to it. Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its works even as on the largest. This mighty energy is an equal and impartial mother, samam brahma, in the great term of the Gita, and its intensity and force of movement is the same in the formation and upholding of a system of suns and the organisation of the life of an ant-hill. It is the illusion of size, of quantity that induces us to look on the one as great, the other as petty. If we look, on the contrary, not at mass of quantity but force of quality, we shall say that the ant is greater than the solar system it inhabits and man greater than all inanimate Nature put together. But this again is the illusion of quality. When we go behind and examine only the intensity of the movement of which quality and quantity are aspects, we realise that this Brahman dwells equally in all existences. Equally partaken of by all in its being, we are tempted to say, equally distributed to all in its energy. But this too is an illusion of quantity. Brahman dwells in all, indivisible, yet as if divided and distributed. If we look again with an observing perception not dominated by intellectual concepts, but informed by intuition and culminating in knowledge by identity, we shall see that the consciousness of this infinite Energy is other than our mental consciousness, that it is indivisible and gives, not an equal part of itself, but its whole self at one and the same time to the solar system and to the ant-hill. To Brahman there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits by the whole of Brahman. Quality and quantity differ, the self is equal. The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely, but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.
  3:Therefore the first reckoning we have to mend is that between this infinite Movement, this energy of existence which is the world and ourselves. At present we keep a false account. We are infinitely important to the All, but to us the All is negligible; we alone are important to ourselves. This is the sign of the original ignorance which is the root of the ego, that it can only think with itself as centre as if it were the All, and of that which is not itself accepts only so much as it is mentally disposed to acknowledge or as it is forced to recognise by the shocks of its environment. Even when it begins to philosophise, does it not assert that the world only exists in and by its consciousness? Its own state of consciousness or mental standards are to it the test of reality; all outside its orbit or view tends to become false or non-existent. This mental self-sufficiency of man creates a system of false accountantship which prevents us from drawing the right and full value from life. There is a sense in which these pretensions of the human mind and ego repose on a truth, but this truth only emerges when the mind has learned its ignorance and the ego has submitted to the All and lost in it its separate self-assertion. To recognise that we, or rather the results and appearances we call ourselves, are only a partial movement of this infinite Movement and that it is that infinite which we have to know, to be consciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the commencement of true living. To recognise that in our true selves we are one with the total movement and not minor or subordinate is the other side of the account, and its expression in the manner of our being, thought, emotion and action is necessary to the culmination of a true or divine living.

11.05 - The Ladder of Unconsciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Now, the curious and most interesting thing is that the end is not the end of things; for beyond the zero there is the minus sign and what does minus mean? I t does not mean mere negation, it means a realitya negative real. It is a moot problem in philosophyphilosophers have questioned, argued, discussed at length about itwhether negation means only denial, just the contrary of affirmation. If affirmation means a real, negation means simply the unreal. It has been declared by competent authorities that negation, like affirmation, is also a reality but of the opposite sign. We know in mathematics the minus sign is as real as the plus.
   The minus consciousness is something like the minus numerical figure. And indeed in its pure and essential reality, its ultimate, it has or is a figurea very ominous figure It is Death. And as such it becomes an altogether real, living entity, of the opposite sign as I said. This minus reality stretches downward and goes round and touches as it were, the back of the Supreme plus reality, 'the Supreme Consciousness. That is the negative infinite, the great shadow of the Infinite Light.

1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  The integral Vedantic affirmation agrees with the
  mystics, because its perception of God is a matter of spir-
  --
  rishis, seers, yogis, mystics. According to this affirmation
  all is God, all is the Brahman, all is That, all is the Self, and
  --
  the cosmic consciousness the supreme affirmation that all
  is good or right as it is. It is however in the vision and work

1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  Avatar? An outright affirmation would, in the first place,
  have been contradictory with his delicate, tactful character.

1.11 - The Second Genesis, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Something of that Absolute may well think itself relative, that is to say, separated from the whole, something may well exclude itself from the whole in its desire to be for its own sake, in its will of individual affirmation, but the whole excludes nothing and everywhere where this relative something manifests itself, the entire Absolute is present along with it.
  No doubt, in its form of egoistic manifestation nothing is manifest except that egoism. But the indissoluble unity which renders inseparable and identical in being all the principles of the identical One, creates even in that egoistic form all the possibilities of the integral manifestation; and as these possibilities come to be deployed in the progress of the becoming, each of those principles in its own turn comes also to be revealed.
  --
  Nothing, then, can break the bond of unity which attaches the possibilities of the manifested world in spite of their desire of exclusion to all unmanifested possibilities. And it is precisely because each ego, although indissolubly bound to all other egos, yet wishes to be isolated and thinks itself distinct, that the law of struggle becomes the law of existence; for in this world of desire their very tie of interdependence creates the causes of their hostility. In their attempt at exclusive affirmation inseparable forms become antagonistic, common and mutual needs become rivals and that which is called love takes the form of strife.
  How could this love which in its primary forms is only a more passionate egoistic desire and in its origin appears no other than the need of a prey, change one day into the supreme gift, into self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, if the desire to be had alone formed the being and alone reigned over his becoming?

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  E ARRIVE then at this affirmation of an all-cognitive
  Principle superior to Mind and exceeding it in nature,
  --
  and birth, affirmation and negation; for it has transcended name
  and form. This victory, this supreme immortality it must achieve

1.12 - Delight of Existence - The Solution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  16:Such then is the view of the universe which arises out of the integral Vedantic affirmation. An infinite, indivisible existence all-blissful in its pure self-consciousness moves out of its fundamental purity into the varied play of Force that is consciousness, into the movement of Prakriti which is the play of Maya. The delight of its existence is at first self-gathered, absorbed, subconscious in the basis of the physical universe; then emergent in a great mass of neutral movement which is not yet what we call sensation; then further emergent with the growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and indifference originating from the limitation of the force of consciousness in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and standard; finally, the conscious emergence of the full Sachchidananda in its creations by universality, by equality, by self-possession and conquest of Nature. This is the course and movement of the world.
  17:If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence - in its mutable becoming, not in its immutable being, - lies precisely in the variable realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of Sachchidananda in that which seems to be its own opposite and its self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. Infinite being loses itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance of a finite Soul; infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of a vast indeterminate inconscience and emerges in the appearance of a superficial limited consciousness; infinite selfsustaining Force loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the appearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference; infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other. In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge. Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things; his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the harmony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

1.1.2 - Intellect and the Intellectual, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The intellect of most men is extremely imperfect, ill trained, half developed therefore in most the conclusions of the intellect are hasty, ill founded and erroneous or, if right, right more by chance than by merit or right working. The conclusions are formed without knowing the facts or the correct or sufficient data, merely by a rapid inference and the process by which it comes from the premisses to the conclusion is usually illogical or faulty the process being unsound by which the conclusion is arrived at, the conclusion also is likely to be fallacious. At the same time the intellect is usually arrogant and presumptuous, confidently asserting its imperfect conclusions as the truth and setting down as mistaken, stupid or foolish those who differ from them. Even when fully trained and developed, the intellect cannot arrive at absolute certitude or complete truth, but it can arrive at one aspect or side of it and make a reasonable or probable affirmation; but untrained, it is a quite insufficient instrument, at once hasty and peremptory and unsafe and unreliable.
  ***

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 Significance of Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  That this is the sense of the passage is made clear in what follows, by the affirmation of lokasangraha as the object of works, of Prakriti as the sole doer of works and the divine
  Purusha as their equal upholder, to whom works have to be given up even in their doing, - this inner giving up of works and yet physical doing of them is the culmination of sacrifice,
  - and by the affirmation that the result of such active sacrifice with an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondage of works. "He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when he acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for sacrifice, all his action is dissolved," leaves, that is to say, no result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of the meaning of yajna in the language of the Gita which leaves no doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious, poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni, is no material flame, but brahmagni, the fire of the Brahman, or it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacrifice, into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar
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1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  The first wave of this new consciousness is quite visible. It is perfectly chaotic. It has caught human beings unawares. Its ebb and flow can be seen everywhere: men have been seized with errantry, or aberrancy. They have set out in search of something they did not understand, but which pushed and prodded them inside; they have taken to the road to anywhere, knocked on every door, the good as well as the bad, broken through walls and windmills, or, suddenly seized with laughter, they have left bag and baggage and said goodbye to the old establishment. It is natural that the first reaction is aberrant, since by definition it leaves the old circuit, as the primate suddenly left the instinctive wisdom of the herd. Each transition to a higher equilibrium is at first a dis-equilibrium and total disruption of the old equilibrium. Therefore, these apprentice supermen, who do not even know each other, will more likely be found among the unorthodox elements of society, the so-called misfits, the bastards, the recalcitrants of the general prison, the rebels against they don't know what except they have had enough of it. They are the new crusaders without a crusade, the partisans without a party, the antis who are so much against that they no longer want any against or for; they want something else altogether, without plus or minus, offensive or defensive, without black, good, yes or no, something completely different and completely free from all the twists and turns of the Machine, which still would like to catch them in the nets of its negations as in the nets of its affirmations. Or else, at the opposite end of the spectrum, these apprentice supermen will perhaps be found among those who have traveled the long road of the mind, its labyrinths, its endless grind, its answers that answer nothing, that raise another question and still another, its solutions that solve nothing, and its whole painful round its sudden futility at the end of the road, after a thousand questions and a thousand triumphs ever ruined, that little cry, at the end, of a man gaping at nothing and suddenly becoming like a helpless child again, as if all those days and years and labor had never been, as if nothing had happened, not a single real second in thirty years! These too, then, set out on the road. There, too, there is a crack for the Possible.
  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.

1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  But the God who comes so terribly as Time also exists timelessly as the Godhead, as Brahman, whose essence is Sat, Chit, Ananda, Being, Awareness, Bliss; and within and beyond mans time-tortured psyche is his spirit, uncreated and uncreatable, as Eckhart says, the Atman which is akin to or even identical with Brahman. The Gita, like all other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, justifies Gods ways to man by affirming and the affirmation is based upon observation and immediate experience that man can, if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfness and so come to union with timeless Spirit. It affirms, too, that the Avatar becomes incarnate in order to assist human beings to achieve this union. This he does in three waysby teaching the true doctrine in a world blinded by voluntary ignorance; by inviting souls to a carnal love of his humanity, not indeed as an end in itself, but as the means to spiritual love-knowledge of Spirit; and finally by serving as a channel of grace.
  God who is Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and for his own sake; but God in time is normally worshipped by material means with a view to achieving temporal ends. God in time is manifestly the destroyer as well as the creator; and because this is so, it has seemed proper to worship him by methods which are as terrible as the destructions he himself inflicts. Hence, in India, the blood sacrifices to Kali, in her aspect as Nature-the-Destroyer; hence those offerings of children to the Molochs, denounced by the Hebrew prophets; hence the human sacrifices practised, for example, by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Druids, the Aztecs. In all such cases the divinity addressed was a god in time, or a personification of Nature, which is nothing else but Time itself, the devourer of its own offspring; and in all cases the purpose of the rite was to obtain a future benefit or to avoid one of the enormous evils which Time and Nature for ever hold in store. For this it was thought to be worth while to pay a high price in that currency of suffering, which the Destroyer so evidently valued. The importance of the temporal end justified the use of means that were intrinsically terrible, because intrinsically time-like. Sublimated traces of these ancient patterns of thought and behaviour are still to be found in certain theories of the Atonement, and in the conception of the Mass as a perpetually repeated sacrifice of the God-Man.

1.13 - Dawn and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   all apply; there would be no meaning in a constant affirmation that Dawn follows the path of the sacrifice or follows the path of the water. We can only escape from the obvious significance if we choose to understand by pantha r.tasya the path, not of the
  Truth, but of the Sun. But the Veda describes rather the Sun as following the path of Usha and this would be the natural image suggested to an observer of the physical Dawn. Moreover, even if the phrase did not clearly in other passages mean the path of the Truth, the psychological significance would still intervene; for the sense would then be that the dawn of illumination follows the path of the True or the Lord of the Truth, Surya

1.14 - The Supermind as Creator, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  19:This is the justification of the current religious notions of the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Divine Being. Far from being an irrational imagination they are perfectly rational and in no way contradict either the logic of a comprehensive philosophy or the indications of observation and experience. The error is to make an unbridgeable gulf between God and man, Brahman and the world. That error elevates an actual and practical differentiation in being, consciousness and force into an essential division. But this aspect of the question we shall touch upon afterwards. At present we have arrived at an affirmation and some conception of the divine and creative Supermind in which all is one in being, consciousness, will and delight, yet with an infinite capacity of differentiation that deploys but does not destroy the unity, - in which Truth is the substance and Truth rises in the Idea and Truth comes out in the form and there is one truth of knowledge and will, one truth of self-fulfilment and therefore of delight; for all self-fulfilment is satisfaction of being. Therefore, always, in all mutations and combinations a self-existent and inalienable harmony.

1.15 - THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  idea. Applying this in its widest sense, the surest affirmation we
  can make about the human future is that nothing will ever

1.16 - The Process of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Gita, however, goes much farther. It speaks clearly of the Lord himself being born; Krishna speaks of his many births that are past and makes it clear by his language that it is not merely the receptive human being but the Divine of whom he makes this affirmation, because he uses the very language of
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1.16 - The Triple Status of Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  13:It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole eternal truth and states it in the terms of our all-dividing mental logic that the necessity for mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises. Thus, emphasising the sole truth of the unitarian consciousness, we observe the play of the divine unity, erroneously rendered by our mentality into the terms of real difference, but, not satisfied with correcting this error of the mind by the truth of a higher principle, we assert that the play itself is an illusion. Or, emphasising the play of the One in the Many, we declare a qualified unity and regard the individual soul as a soul-form of the Supreme, but would assert the eternity of this qualified existence and deny altogether the experience of a pure consciousness in an unqualified oneness. Or, again, emphasising the play of difference, we assert that the Supreme and the human soul are eternally different and reject the validity of an experience which exceeds and seems to abolish that difference. But the position that we have now firmly taken absolves us from the necessity of these negations and exclusions: we see that there is a truth behind all these affirmations, but at the same time an excess which leads to an ill-founded negation. Affirming, as we have done, the absolute absoluteness of That, not limited by our ideas of unity, not limited by our ideas of multiplicity, affirming the unity as a basis for the manifestation of the multiplicity and the multiplicity as the basis for the return to oneness and the enjoyment of unity in the divine manifestation, we need not burden our present statement with these discussions or undertake the vain labour of enslaving to our mental distinctions and definitions the absolute freedom of the Divine Infinite.

1.16 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  "In the beginning, when a man reasons following the Vedantic method of 'Not this, not this', he realizes that Brahman is not the living beings, not the universe, not the twenty-four cosmic principles. All these things become like dreams to him. Then comes the affirmation of what has been denied, and he feels that God Himself has become the universe and all living beings.
  "Suppose you are climbing to the roof by the stairs. As long as you are aware of the roof, you are also aware of the stairs. He who is aware of the high is also aware of the low. But after reaching the roof you realize that the stairs are made of the same materials-brick, lime, and brick-dust-as the roof.

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.

1.19 - The Curve of the Rational Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The first natural result has been the transition of the rational mind from democratic individualism to democratic socialism. Socialism, labouring under the disadvantageous accident of its birth in a revolt against capitalism, an uprising against the rule of the successful bourgeois and the plutocrat, has been compelled to work itself out by a war of classes. And, worse still, it has started from an industrialised social system and itself taken on at the beginning a purely industrial and economic appearance. These are accidents that disfigure its true nature. Its true nature, its real justification is the attempt of the human reason to carry on the rational ordering of society to its fulfilment, its will to get rid of this great parasitical excrescence of unbridled competition, this giant obstacle to any decent ideal or practice of human living. Socialism sets out to replace a system of organised economic battle by an organised order and peace. This can no longer be done on the old lines, an artificial or inherited inequality brought about by the denial of equal opportunity and justified by the affirmation of that injustice and its result as an eternal law of society and of Nature. That is a falsehood which the reason of man will no longer permit. Neither can it be done, it seems, on the basis of individual liberty; for that has broken down in the practice. Socialism therefore must do away with the democratic basis of individual liberty, even if it professes to respect it or to be marching towards a more rational freedom. It shifts at first the fundamental emphasis to other ideas and fruits of the democratic ideal, and it leads by this transference of stress to a radical change in the basic principle of a rational society. Equality, not a political only, but a perfect social equality, is to be the basis. There is to be equality of opportunity for all, but also equality of status for all, for without the last the first cannot be secured; even if it were established, it could not endure. This equality again is impossible if personal, or at least inherited right in property is to exist, and therefore socialism abolishesexcept at best on a small scale the right of personal property as it is now understood and makes war on the hereditary principle. Who then is to possess the property? It can only be the community as a whole. And who is to administer it? Again, the community as a whole. In order to justify this idea, the socialistic principle has practically to deny the existence of the individual or his right to exist except as a member of the society and for its sake. He belongs entirely to the society, not only his property, but himself, his labour, his capacities, the education it gives him and its results, his mind, his knowledge, his individual life, his family life, the life of his children. Moreover, since his individual reason cannot be trusted to work out naturally a right and rational adjustment of his life with the life of others, it is for the reason of the whole community to arrange that too for him. Not the reasoning minds and wills of the individuals, but the collective reasoning mind and will of the community has to govern. It is this which will determine not only the principles and all the details of the economic and political order, but the whole life of the community and of the individual as a working, thinking, feeling cell of this life, the development of his capacities, his actions, the use of the knowledge he has acquired, the whole ordering of his vital, his ethical, his intelligent being. For so only can the collective reason and intelligent will of the race overcome the egoism of individualistic life and bring about a perfect principle and rational order of society in a harmonious world.
  It is true that this inevitable character of socialism is denied or minimised by the more democratic socialists; for the socialistic mind still bears the impress of the old democratic ideas and cherishes hopes that betray it often into strange illogicalities. It assures us that it will combine some kind of individual freedom, a limited but all the more true and rational freedom, with the rigours of the collectivist idea. But it is evidently these rigours to which things must tend if the collectivist idea is to prevail and not to stop short and falter in the middle of its course. If it proves itself thus wanting in logic and courage, it may very well be that it will speedily or in the end be destroyed by the foreign element it tolerates and perish without having sounded its own possibilities. It will pass perhaps, unless guided by a rational wisdom which the human mind in government has not yet shown, after exceeding even the competitive individualistic society in its cumbrous incompetence.1 But even at its best the collectivist idea contains several fallacies inconsistent with the real facts of human life and nature. And just as the idea of individualistic democracy found itself before long in difficulties on that account because of the disparity between lifes facts and the minds idea, difficulties that have led up to its discredit and approaching overthrow, the idea of collectivist democracy too may well find itself before long in difficulties that must lead to its discredit and eventual replacement by a third stage of the inevitable progression. Liberty protected by a State in which all are politically equal, was the idea that individualistic democracy attempted to elaborate. Equality, social and political equality enforced through a perfect and careful order by a State which is the organised will of the whole community, is the idea on which socialistic democracy stakes its future. If that too fails to make good, the rational and democratic Idea may fall back upon a third form of society founding an essential rather than formal liberty and equality upon fraternal comradeship in a free community, the ideal of intellectual as of spiritual Anarchism.2

1.19 - THE MASTER AND HIS INJURED ARM, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Process of negation and affirmation & God Himself has become everything MASTER: "God alone is the Master, and again, He is the Servant. This attitude indicates Perfect Knowledge. At first one discriminates, 'Not this, not this', and feels that God alone is real and all else is illusory. Afterwards the same person finds that it is God Himself who has become all this-the universe, maya, and the living beings. First negation and then affirmation. This is the view held by the Puranas. A vilwa-fruit, for instance, includes flesh, seeds, and shell. You get the flesh by discarding the shell and seeds. But if you want to know the weight of the fruit, you cannot find it if you discard the shell and seeds. Just so, one should attain Sarchidananda by negating the universe and its living beings. But after the attainment of Satchidananda one finds that Satchidananda Itself has become the universe and the living beings. It is of one substance that the flesh and the shell and seeds are made, just like butter and buttermilk.
  The world does not exist apart from God

1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Thus spirituality will respect the freedom of the lower members, but it will not leave them to themselves; it will present to them the truth of the spirit in themselves, translated into their own fields of action, presented in a light which illumines all their activities and shows them the highest law of their own freedom. It will not, for instance, escape from scientific materialism by a barren contempt for physical life or a denial of Matter, but pursue rather the sceptical mind into its own affirmations and denials and show it there the Divine. If it cannot do that, it is proved that it is itself unenlightened or deficient, because onesided, in its light. It will not try to slay the vitality in man by denying life, but will rather reveal to life the divine in itself as the principle of its own transformation. If it cannot do that, it is because it has itself not yet wholly fathomed the meaning of the creation and the secret of the Avatar.
  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.

1.22 - The Problem of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:The first of these four positions, the source of all this progressive relation between Consciousness and Force, is their poise in the being of Sachchidananda where they are one; for there the Force is consciousness of being working itself out without ever ceasing to be consciousness and the Consciousness is similarly luminous Force of being eternally aware of itself and of its own Delight and never ceasing to be this power of utter light and self-possession. The second relation is that of material Nature; it is the poise of being in the material universe which is the great denial of Sachchidananda by Himself: for here there is the utter apparent separation of Force from Consciousness, the specious miracle of the all-governing and infallible Inconscient which is only the mask but which modern knowledge has mistaken for the real face of the cosmic Deity. The third relation is the poise of being in Mind and in the Life which we see emerging out of this denial, bewildered by it, struggling - without any possibility of cessation by submission, but also without any clear knowledge or instinct of a victorious solution - against the thousand and one problems involved in this perplexing apparition of man the half-potent conscient being out of the omnipotent Inconscience of the material universe. The fourth relation is the poise of being in Supermind: it is the fulfilled existence which will eventually solve all this complex problem created by the partial affirmation emerging out of the total denial; and it must needs solve it in the only possible way, by the complete affirmation fulfilling all that was secretly there contained in potentiality and intended in fact of evolution behind the mask of the great denial. That is the real life of the real Man towards which this partial life and partial unfulfilled manhood is striving forward with a perfect knowledge and guidance in the so-called Inconscient within us, but in our conscient parts with only a dim and struggling prevision, with fragments of realisation, with glimpses of the ideal, with flashes of revelation and inspiration in the poet and the prophet, the seer and the transcendentalist, the mystic and the thinker, the great intellects and the great souls of humanity.
  7:From the data we have now before us we can see that the difficulties which arise from the imperfect poise of Consciousness and Force in man in his present status of mind and life are principally three. First, he is aware only of a small part of his own being: his surface mentality, his surface life, his surface physical being is all that he knows and he does not know even all of that; below is the occult surge of his subconscious and his subliminal mind, his subconscious and his subliminal life-impulses, his subconscious corporeality, all that large part of himself which he does not know and cannot govern, but which rather knows and governs him. For, existence and consciousness and force being one, we can only have some real power over so much of our existence as we are identified with by self-awareness; the rest must be governed by its own consciousness which is subliminal to our surface mind and life and body. And yet, the two being one movement and not two separate movements, the larger and more potent part of ourselves must govern and determine in the mass the smaller and less powerful; therefore we are governed by the subconscient and subliminal even in our conscious existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us.
  8:This is what the old wisdom meant when it said that man imagines himself to be the doer of the work by his free will, but in reality Nature determines all his works and even the wise are compelled to follow their own Nature. But since Nature is the creative force of consciousness of the Being within us who is masked by His own inverse movement and apparent denial of Himself, they called that inverse creative movement of His consciousness the Maya or Illusion-Power of the Lord and said that all existences are turned as upon a machine through His Maya by the Lord seated within the heart of all existences. It is evident then that only by man so far exceeding mind as to become one in self-awareness with the Lord can he become master of his own being. And since this is not possible in the inconscience or in the subconscient itself, since profit cannot come by plunging down into our depths back towards the Inconscient, it can only be by going inward where the Lord is seated and by ascending into that which is still superconscient to us, into the Supermind, that this unity can be wholly established. For there in the higher and divine Maya is the conscious knowledge, in its law and truth, of that which works in the subconscient by the lower Maya under the conditions of the Denial which seeks to become the affirmation. For this lower Nature works out what is willed and known in that higher Nature. The Illusion-Power of the divine knowledge in the world which creates appearances is governed by the Truth-Power of the same knowledge which knows the truth behind the appearances and keeps ready for us the affirmation towards which they are working. The partial and apparent Man here will find there the perfect and real Man capable of an entirely self-aware being by his full unity with that Self-existent who is the omniscient lord of His own cosmic evolution and procession.
  9:The second difficulty is that man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity of sympathy a rough mental construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge, - existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest is hidden; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal; and the fullness of the universal exists consciently only in that which is superconscient to us, in the Supermind: for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity.

1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  D.: Is not affirmation of God more effective than the quest, who am
  I? affirmation is positive, whereas the other is negation. Moreover, it indicates separateness.
  M.: So long as you seek to know how to realise, this advice is given to find your Self. Your seeking the method denotes your separateness.

1.25 - ADVICE TO PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  MASTER: "If there is butter, there must be buttermilk also. If you think of butter, you must also think of buttermilk along with it; for there cannot be any butter without buttermilk. Just so, if you accept the Nitya, you must also accept the Lila. It is the process of negation and affirmation. You realize the Nitya by negating the Lila. Then you affirm the Lila, seeing in it the manifestation of the Nitya. One attains this state after realizing Reality in both aspects: Personal and Impersonal. The Personal is the embodiment of Chit, Consciousness; and the Impersonal is the Indivisible Satchidananda.
  "Brahman alone has become everything. Therefore to be vijnni this world is a 'mansion of myrth'. But to the Jnni it is a 'framework of illusion'. Ramprasad described the world as a 'framework of illusion'. Another man said to him by way of retort: This very world is a mansion of myrth;
  --
  (To the pundit) "One can attain spiritual consciousness through both affirmation and negation. There is the positive path of love and devotion, and there is the negative path of knowledge and discrimination. You are preaching the path of knowledge. But that creates a very difficult situation: there the guru and the disciple do not see each other.
  Sukadeva went to Janaka for instruction about the Knowledge of Brahman. Janaka said to him: 'You must pay me the guru's fee beforehand. When you attain the knowledge of Brahman you won't pay me the fee, because the knower of Brahman sees no difference between the guru and the disciple.'
  --
  "Both negation and affirmation are ways to realize one and the same goal. Infinite are the opinions and infinite are the ways. But you must remember one thing. The injunction is that the path of devotion described by Nrada is best suited to the Kaliyuga. According to this path, first comes bhakti; then bhava, when bhakti is mature. Higher than bhava are mahabhava and prema. An ordinary mortal does not attain mahabhava and prema.
  He who has achieved these has realized the goal, that is to say, has attained God."

1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  In India the repetition of the divine name or the mantram (a short devotional or doctrinal affirmation) is called japam and is a favourite spiritual exercise among all the sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. The shortest mantram is OMa spoken sym bol that concentrates within itself the whole Vedanta philosophy. To this and other mantrams Hindus attribute a kind of magical power. The repetition of them is a sacramental act, conferring grace ex opere operato. A similar efficacity was and indeed still is attri buted to sacred words and formulas by Buddhists, Moslems, Jews and Christians. And, of course, just as traditional religious rites seem to possess the power to evoke the real presence of existents projected into psychic objectivity by the faith and devotion of generations of worshippers, so too long-hallowed words and phrases may become channels for conveying powers other and greater than those belonging to the individual who happens at the moment to be pronouncing them. And meanwhile the constant repetition of this word GOD or this word LOVE may, in favourable circumstances, have a profound effect upon the subconscious mind, inducing that selfless one-pointedness of will and thought and feeling, without which the unitive knowledge of God is impossible. Furthermore, it may happen that, if the word is simply repeated all whole, and not broken up or undone by discursive analysis, the Fact for which the word stands will end by presenting itself to the soul in the form of an integral intuition. When this happens, the doors of the letters of this word are opened (to use the language of the Sufis) and the soul passes through into Reality. But though all this may happen, it need not necessarily happen. For there is no spiritual patent medicine, no pleasant and infallible panacea for souls suffering from separateness and the deprivation of God. No, there is no guaranteed cure; and, if used improperly, the medicine of spiritual exercises may start a new disease or aggravate the old. For example, a mere mechanical repetition of the divine name can result in a kind of numbed stupefaction that is as much below analytical thought as intellectual vision is above it. And because the sacred word constitutes a kind of prejudgment of the experience induced by its repetition, this stupefaction, or some other abnormal state, is taken to be the imme thate awareness of Reality and is idolatrously cultivated and hunted after, with a turning of the will towards what is supposed to be God before there has been a turning of it away from the self.
  The dangers which beset the practicer of japam, who is insufficiently mortified and insufficiently recollected and aware, are encountered in the same or different forms by those who make use of more elaborate spiritual exercises. Intense concentration on an image or idea, such as is recommended by many teachers, both Eastern and Western, may be very helpful for certain persons in certain circumstances, very harmful in other cases. It is helpful when the concentration results in such mental stillness, such a silence of intellect, will and feeling, that the divine Word can be uttered within the soul. It is harmful when the image concentrated upon becomes so hallucinatingly real that it is taken for objective Reality and idolatrously worshipped; harmful, too, when the exercise of concentration produces unusual psycho-physical results, in which the person experiencing them takes a personal pride, as being special graces and divine communications. Of these unusual psycho-physical occurrences the most ordinary are visions and auditions, foreknowledge, telepathy and other psychic powers, and the curious bodily phenomenon of intense neat. Many persons who practise concentration exercises experience this heat occasionally. A number of Christian saints, of whom the best known are St. Philip Neri and St. Catherine of Siena, have experienced it continuously. In the East techniques have been developed whereby the accession of heat resulting from intense concentration can be regulated, controlled and put to do useful work, such as keeping the contemplative warm in freezing weather. In Europe, where the phenomenon is not well understood, many would-be contemplatives have experienced this heat, and have imagined it to be some special divine favour, or even the experience of union, and being insufficiently mortified and humble, have fallen into idolatry and a God-eclipsing spiritual pride.

1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  12:If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities, throws up a multiplicity of divergent view-points, divergent lines of action and lets them work themselves out side by side or in collision or in a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle.
  13:And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena,5 into the material Inconscience, - the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, - and if the One is born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.

1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  D.: Is not affirmation of God more effective than the quest, "who am
  I?" affirmation is positive, whereas the other is negation. Moreover, it indicates separateness.
  M.: So long as you seek to know how to realise, this advice is given to find your Self. Your seeking the method denotes your separateness.

1954-11-10 - Inner experience, the basis of action - Keeping open to the Force - Faith through aspiration - The Mothers symbol - The mind and vital seize experience - Degrees of sincerity -Becoming conscious of the Divine Force, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  The mind and vital have a very bad habit: when one has succeeded through aspiration in having an experience, being in contact with the divine force, immediately they rush forward to make it their own property, you see, like that (gesture), as a cat jumps on a mouse. And then they catch it and say, It is for me. And then the mind turns it into all kinds of speculations and affirmations and constructions and takes great pride in it, and the vital uses the power to fulfil its own desires.
  So, in order to avoid this it is said that they must be clear, quiet, peaceful, and must not rush at the force which is trying to manifest and make of it a tool for their personal use. For the mind to be clear it must be silentat least to a certain extent, and for the vital to be clear it must give up its desires, have no desires and impulses and passions. This indeed is the essential condition. Later, if one goes into details, neither of them should have any preferences, attachments, any particular way of being or particular set of ideas.

1956-02-29 - Sacrifice, self-giving - Divine Presence in the heart of Matter - Divine Oneness - Divine Consciousness - All is One - Divine in the inconscient aspires for the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  And this is the great secret of the Gita: the affirmation of the divine Presence in the very heart of Matter. And that is why, Matter must sacrifice itself to the Divine, automatically, even unconsciouslywhe ther one wants it or not, this is what happens.
  Only, when it is done unconsciously, one doesnt have the joy of sacrifice; while if it is done consciously, one has the joy of sacrifice which is the supreme joy.

1957-05-08 - Vital excitement, reason, instinct, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  And this is much more frequent than one thinks. To us it seems absurd, for we have something else which is of course more interesting than smoking and drinking, but for ordinary men the satisfaction of their desires is the very reason for existence. For them it seems to be an affirmation of their independence and their purpose in life. And it is simply a perversion, a deformation which is a denial of the life-instinct, it is an unhealthy interference of thought and vital impulse in physical life. It is an unhealthy impulse which does not usually exist even in animals. In this case, instinct in animals is infinitely more reasonable than human instinctwhich, besides, doesnt exist any more, which has been replaced by a very perverted impulse.
  Perversion is a human disease, it occurs only very rarely in animals, and then only in animals which have come close to man and therefore have been contaminated by his perversion.

1957-10-09 - As many universes as individuals - Passage to the higher hemisphere, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  If one enters into a somewhat philosophical, psychological and subjective consciousness, one can very easily become aware of a sort of objective unreality of things; and the one thing which is real, tangible, concrete, measurable, so to speak, for the ordinary consciousness becomes so fluid, almost unsubstantial, and has a reality only in the consciousness that perceives itan absolutely variable reality and at times quite contradictory according to the perception of the consciousness. If we put before us the different explanations that have been given about the world, the different ways in which it has been expressed, we shall have a series of notions that are sometimes absolutely contradictory, which are nevertheless perceptions of one identical thing by different consciousnesses. In fact, with this last paragraph, we have an extreme point which is the affirmation that all that is, is the total and complete expression of the Divine Willthere is what could be called a certain school of thinkers who, on the basis of their personal experience, have asserted that everything is the expression of the Divine Will in a perfect wayand then, at the other extreme, the affirmation that the world is a sort of chaos without rhyme or reason, which has come into being one doesnt know how or why, which is going one doesnt know where, which has no logic, no reason, no coordinationit is just chance. It happens to be like this, one doesnt know why. Well, if you take these two extremes and put before you all that has been said, written, taught, thought about the world from one end to the other, and if you can see all that together, you will realise that, since it is all about the same world and yet the explanations are so totally different, this world exists, so to say, only in the consciousness of the one who sees it. There must indeed be something there, but that something must be beyond what men think about itfar beyond, very different. And so the whole feeling is of an elusive unreality.
  And in fact, the reality of the world is entirely subjective for each persons consciousness. The world has no objective reality, for in one case it can be said that it is the result of the supremely conscious, supreme Will and that all is ruled by that, and in the other case, it may be said that it is something without any reason for existence except an elusive chance and yet, these two notions apply to one and the same thing.

1958-10-22 - Spiritual life - reversal of consciousness - Helping others, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    But this is not the standpoint from which the true significance of the spiritual evolution in man or the value of spirituality can be judged or assessed; for its real work is not to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a universal love and compassion, the will to spend the energies for the good of all creatures, are central to the dynamic outflowering of the spirit: he has turned therefore to help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis or the prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with something of the direct power of the Spirit, the results have been prodigious. But the solution of the problem which spirituality offers is not a solution by external means, though these also have to be used, but by an inner change, a transformation of the consciousness and nature.
    If no decisive but only a contri butory result, an accretion of some new finer elements to the sum of the consciousness, has been the general consequence and there has been no life-transformation, it is because man in the mass has always deflected the spiritual impulsion, recanted from the spiritual ideal or held it only as a form and rejected the inward change. Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual method or attempt to cure its ills by the panaceas, the political, social or other mechanical remedies which the mind is constantly attempting and which have always failed and will continue to fail to solve anything. The most drastic changes made by these means change nothing; for the old ills exist in a new form: the aspect of the outward environment is altered, but man remains what he was; he is still an ignorant mental being misusing or not effectively using his knowledge, moved by ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body, unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and the forces that drive and use him. Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference. To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing or very little more is possible.

1960 03 09, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   These two Aphorisms are illustrations of the affirmation of the Divine Presence in all things and all beings, and they also develop the idea which has already been touched on, that there is nothing and no one to forgive, since the Divine is the originator of all things.
   This is how this sentence, God struck me with a human hand, should be read and understood. If you see nothing but the appearances, it is only one man hitting another. But for one who sees and knows the Truth, it is the supreme Lord who gives the blow through that human hand, and the blow necessarily does good to the one who receives it, that is to say, brings about a progress in his consciousness, for the ultimate aim of creation is to awaken all beings to the consciousness of the Divine.

1970 06 07, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   540Gods negations are as useful to us as His affirmations. It is He who as the Atheist denies His own existence for the better perfecting of human knowledge. It is not enough to see God in Christ and Ramakrishna and hear His words, we must see Him and hear Him also in Huxley and Haeckel.
   All mental ways of knowing the Divine are incomplete and insufficient, even if we accept them all. Only a knowledge that is lived can give us a glimpse of the truth.

1f.lovecraft - The Shunned House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome,
   was a seamans son.

1f.lovecraft - Through the Gates of the Silver Key, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   back an impatient affirmation; confident that the Silver Key, which he
   felt was with him and which he knew had tilted both world and personal

2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  At the stage when from the mental it has to move towards its supramental status, one most liberatingly helpful, if not indispensable experience that may intervene is the entry into a total Nirvana of mentality and mental ego, a passage into the silence of the Spirit. In any case, a realisation of the pure Self must always precede the transition to that mediating eminence of the consciousness from which a clear vision of the ascending and descending stairs of manifested existence is commanded and the possession of the free power of ascent and descent becomes a spiritual prerogative. An independent completeness of identity with each of the primal aspects and powers - not narrowing as in the mind into a sole engrossing experience seeming to be final and integral, for that would be incompatible with the realisation of the unity of all aspects and powers of existence is a capacity inherent in consciousness in the Infinite; that indeed is the base and justification of the overmind cognition and its will to carry each aspect, each power, each possibility to its independent fullness. But the Supermind keeps always and in every status or condition the spiritual realisation of the Unity of all; the intimate presence of that unity is there even within the completest grasp of each thing, each state given its whole delight of itself, power and value: there is thus no losing sight of the affirmative aspects even when there is the full acceptance of the truth of the negative. The Overmind keeps still the sense of this underlying Unity; that is for it the secure base of the independent experience. In Mind the knowledge of the unity of all aspects is lost on the surface, the consciousness is plunged into engrossing, exclusive separate affirmations; but there too, even in the Mind's ignorance, the total reality still remains behind the exclusive absorption and can be recovered in the form of a profound mental intuition or else in the idea or sentiment of an underlying truth of integral oneness; in the spiritual mind this can develop into an ever-present experience.
  All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite's power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit's potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being - an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, - but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, allknowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.

2.01 - Mandala One, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  (6) And thou, O Soma, hast control to make us live, that we should not die,the lord of pleasure who has delight in the song of his affirmation.
  (7) Thou, O Soma, both for him who is already great in the Truth and for him who is young in the Truth, establishest Bhaga in joyaunce that has power for life.

2.01 - The Object of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  5:The thought, since it is not the highest or strongest part of Nature, not even the sole or deepest index to Truth, ought not to follow its own exclusive satisfaction or take that for the sign of its attainment to the supreme Knowledge. It is here as the guide, up to a certain point, of the heart, the life and the other members but it cannot be a substitute for them; it has to see not only what is its own ultimate satisfaction but whether there is not an ultimate satisfaction intended also for these other members. An exclusive path of abstract thought would be justified, only if the object of the Supreme Will in the universe has been nothing more than a descent into the activity of the ignorance operated by the mind as blinding instrument and jailor through false idea and sensation and an ascent into the quiescence of knowledge equally operated by the mind through correct thought as enlightening instrument and saviour. But the chances are that there is an aim in the world less absurd and aimless, an impulse towards the Absolute less dry and abstract, a truth of the world more large and complex, a more richly infinite height of the Infinite. Certainly, an abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant affirmation; for, abstract it moves towards an absolute abstraction and these are the only two abstractions that are absolutely absolute. But a concrete ever deepening wisdom waiting on more and more riches of infinite experience and not the confident abstract logic of the narrow and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine suprahuman knowledge. The heart, the will, the life and even the body, no less than the thought, are forms of a divine Conscious-Being and indices of great significance. These too have powers by which the soul can return to its complete self-awareness or means by which It can enjoy it. The object of the Supreme Will may well be a culmination in which the whole being is intended to receive its divine satisfaction, the heights enlightening the depths, the material Inconscient revealed to itself as the Divine by the touch of the supreme Superconscience.
  6:The traditional Way of Knowledge proceeds by elimination and rejects successively the body, the life, the senses, the heart, the very thought in order to merge into the quiescent Self or supreme Nihil or indefinite Absolute. The way of integral knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of the thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations; a greater faculty of Knowledge is behind that can open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe. An integral self-fulfilment, - an absolute, a culmination for the experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit of works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute, a culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its hunger after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge. Not something quite other than themselves from which they are all cast away is the end of these things in our nature, but something supreme in which they at once transcend themselves and find their own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure.

2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  THERE is then a supreme Reality eternal, absolute and infinite. Because it is absolute and infinite, it is in its essence indeterminable. It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining Mind; it is ineffable by a mind-created speech; it is describable neither by our negations, neti neti, for we cannot limit it by saying it is not this, it is not that, - nor by our affirmations, for we cannot fix it by saying it is this, it is that, iti iti. And yet, though in this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is selfevident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable; for that spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not other than this Supreme Existence.
  But although thus indeterminable to Mind, because of its absoluteness and infinity, we discover that this Supreme and Eternal Infinite determines itself to our consciousness in the universe by real and fundamental truths of its being which are beyond the universe and in it and are the very foundation of its existence. These truths present themselves to our conceptual cognition as the fundamental aspects in which we see and experience the omnipresent Reality. In themselves they are seized directly, not by intellectual understanding but by a spiritual intuition, a spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness; but they can also be caught at in conception by a large and plastic idea and can be expressed in some sort by a plastic speech which does not insist too much on rigid definition or limit the wideness and subtlety of the idea. In order to express this experience or this idea with any nearness a language has to be created which is at once intuitively metaphysical and revealingly poetic, admitting significant and living images as the vehicle of a close, suggestive and vivid indication, - a language such as we find hammered out into a subtle and pregnant massiveness in the Veda and the Upanishads. In the ordinary tongue of metaphysical thought we have to be content with a distant indication, an approximation by abstractions, which may still be of some service to our intellect, for it is this kind of speech which suits our method of logical and rational understanding; but if it is to be of real service, the intellect must consent to pass out of the bounds of a finite logic and accustom itself to the logic of the Infinite. On this condition alone, by this way of seeing and thinking, it ceases to be paradoxical or futile to speak of the Ineffable: but if we insist on applying a finite logic to the Infinite, the omnipresent Reality will escape us and we shall grasp instead an abstract shadow, a dead form petrified into speech or a hard incisive graph which speaks of the Reality but does not express it. Our way of knowing must be appropriate to that which is to be known; otherwise we achieve only a distant speculation, a figure of knowledge and not veritable knowledge.
  --
  If we look from this view-point of a larger more plastic reason, taking account of the logic of the Infinite, at the difficulties which meet our intelligence when it tries to conceive the absolute and omnipresent Reality, we shall see that the whole difficulty is verbal and conceptual and not real. Our intelligence looks at its concept of the Absolute and sees that it must be indeterminable and at the same time it sees a world of determinations which emanates from the Absolute and exists in it, - for it can emanate from nowhere else and can exist nowhere else; it is further baffled by the affirmation, also hardly disputable on the premisses, that all these determinates are nothing else than this very indeterminable Absolute. But the contradiction disappears when we understand that the indeterminability is not in its true sense negative, not an imposition of incapacity on the Infinite, but positive, a freedom within itself from limitation by its own determinations and necessarily a freedom from all external determination by anything not itself, since there is no real possibility of such a not-self coming into existence. The Infinite is illimitably free, free to determine itself infinitely, free from all restraining effect of its own creations. In fact the Infinite does not create, it manifests what is in itself, in its own essence of reality; it is itself that essence of all reality and all realities are powers of that one Reality. The Absolute neither creates nor is created, - in the current sense of making or being made; we can speak of creation only in the sense of the Being becoming in form and movement what it already is in substance and status. Yet we have to emphasise its indeterminability in that special and positive sense, not as a negation but as an indispensable condition of its free infinite self-determination, because without that the Reality would be a fixed eternal determinate or else an indeterminate fixed and bound to a sum of possibilities of determination inherent within it. Its freedom from all limitation, from any binding by its own creation cannot be itself turned into a limitation, an absolute incapacity, a denial of all freedom of self-determination; it is this that would be a contradiction, it would be an attempt to define and limit by negation the infinite and illimitable. Into the central fact of the two sides of the nature of the Absolute, the essential and the self-creative or dynamic, no real contradiction enters; it is only a pure infinite essence that can formulate itself in infinite ways. One statement is complementary to the other, there is no mutual cancellation, no incompatibility; it is only the dual statement of a single inescapable fact by human reason in human language.
  The same conciliation occurs everywhere, when we look with a straight and accurate look on the truth of the Reality. In our experience of it we become aware of an Infinite essentially free from all limitation by qualities, properties, features; on the other hand, we are aware of an Infinite teeming with innumerable qualities, properties, features. Here again the statement of illimitable freedom is positive, not negative; it does not negate what we see, but on the contrary provides the indispensable condition for it, it makes possible a free and infinite self-expression in quality and feature. A quality is the character of a power of conscious being; or we may say that the consciousness of being expressing what is in it makes the power it brings out recognisable by a native stamp on it which we call quality or character. Courage as a quality is such a power of being, it is a certain character of my consciousness expressing a formulated force of my being, bringing out or creating a definite kind of force of my nature in action. So too the power of a drug to cure is its property, a special force of being native to the herb or mineral from which it is produced, and this speciality is determined by the Real-Idea concealed in the involved consciousness which dwells in the plant or mineral; the idea brings out in it what was there at the root of its manifestation and has now come out thus empowered as the force of its being. All qualities, properties, features are such powers of conscious being thus put forth from itself by the Absolute; It has everything within It, It has the free power to put all forth;6 yet we cannot define the Absolute as a quality of courage or a power of healing, we cannot even say that these are a characteristic feature of the Absolute, nor can we make up a sum of qualities and say "that is the Absolute". But neither can we speak of the Absolute as a pure blank incapable of manifesting these things; on the contrary, all capacity is there, the powers of all qualities and characters are there inherent within it. The mind is in a difficulty because it has to say, "The Absolute or Infinite is none of these things, these things are not the Absolute or Infinite" and at the same time it has to say, "The Absolute is all these things, they are not something else than That, for That is the sole existence and the all-existence." Here it is evident that it is an undue finiteness of thought conception and verbal expression which creates the difficulty, but there is in reality none; for it would be evidently absurd to say that the Absolute is courage or curing-power, or to say that courage and curing-power are the Absolute, but it would be equally absurd to deny the capacity of the Absolute to put forth courage or curingpower as self-expressions in its manifestation. When the logic of the finite fails us, we have to see with a direct and unbound vision what is behind in the logic of the Infinite. We can then realise that the Infinite is infinite in quality, feature, power, but that no sum of qualities, features, powers can describe the Infinite.

2.02 - Habit 2 Begin with the End in Mind, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
  --- Visualization and affirmation
  Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It doesn't begin and end with the writing of a personal mission statement. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things. And in that effort, your powerful right-brain capacity can be a great help to you on a daily basis as you work to integrate your personal mission statement into your life. It's another application of "Begin with the End in Mind."
  --
  A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional. So I might write something like this: "It is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I
  (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdom, love, firmness, and self-control (positive) when my children misbehave."
  --
  Then I can see her do something very specific which normally makes my heart pound and my temper start to flare. But instead of seeing my normal response, I can see myself handle the situation with all the love, the power, the self-control I have captured in my affirmation. I can write the program, write the script, in harmony with my values, with my personal mission statement.
  And if I do this, day after day my behavior will change. Instead of living out of the scripts given to me by my own parents or by society or by genetics or my environment, I will be living out of the script I have written from my own self-selected value system.
  I have helped and encouraged my son, Sean, to use this affirmation process extensively throughout his football career. We started when he played quarterback in high school, and eventually, I taught him how to do it on his own.
  We would try to get him in a very relaxed state of mind through deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation technique so that he became very quiet inside. Then I would help him visualize himself right in the heat of the toughest situations imaginable.
  --
  There is an entire body of literature and audio and video tapes that deals with this process of visualization and affirmation. Some of the more recent developments in this field include such things as subliminal programming, neurolinguistic programming, and new forms of relaxation and self-talk processes. These all involve explanation, elaboration, and different packaging of the fundamental principles of the first creation.
  My review of the success literature brought me in contact with hundreds of books on this subject.
  --
  In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life.
  They are extremely powerful in rescripting and reprogramming, into writing deeply committed-to purposes and principles into one's heart and mind. I believe that central to all enduring religions in society are the same principles and practices clothed in different language -- meditation, prayer, covenants, ordinances, scripture study, empathy, compassion, and many different forms of the use of both conscience and imagination.

2.02 - THE DURGA PUJA FESTIVAL, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  They climb up, and they can also come down. They climb to the roof, and they can come down again by the stairs and move about on a lower floor. It is a case of negation and affirmation. There is, for instance, the seven-storey palace of a king. Strangers have access only to the lower apartments; but the prince, who knows the palace to be his own, can move up and down from floor to floor. There is a kind of rocket that throws out sparks in one pattern and then seems to go out. After a moment it makes another pattern, and then still another. There is no end to the patterns it can make. But there is another kind of rocket that, when it is lighted, makes only a dull sound, throws out a few sparks, and then goes out altogether. Like this second kind, an ordinary jiva, after much spiritual effort, can go to a higher plane; but he cannot come down to tell others his experiences. After much effort he may go into samdhi; but he cannot climb down from that state or tell others what he has seen there.
  Nature of the everperfect

2.03 - Indra and the Thought-Forces, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2. Lo, the hymn of your affirmation, O Maruts; it is fraught with my obeisance, it was framed by the heart, it was established by the mind, O ye gods. Approach these my words and embrace them with the mind; for of submission1 are you the increasers.
  U@vA' n, s t; koMyA vnA
  --
  For he would confirm again in himself these splendid energies, and it is a hymn of affirmation that he offers them, the stoma of the Vedic sages. In the system of the Mystics, which has partially survived in the schools of Indian Yoga, the Word is a power, the Word creates. For all creation is expression, everything exists already in the secret abode of the Infinite, guha hitam, and has only to be brought out here in apparent form by the active consciousness. Certain schools of Vedic thought even
  Indra and the Thought-Forces
  --
  Word to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life but upon the outer physical world. By expression we form, by affirmation we establish. As a power of expression the word is termed gh. or vacas; as a power of affirmation, stoma.
  In either aspect it is named manma or mantra, expression of thought in mind, and brahman, expression of the heart or the soul, - for this seems to have been the earlier sense of the word brahman,7 afterwards applied to the Supreme Soul or universal
  --
  The process of formation of the mantra is described in the second verse along with the conditions of its effectivity. Agastya presents the stoma, hymn at once of affirmation and of submission, to the Maruts. Fashioned by the heart, it receives its just place in the mentality through confirmation by the mind.
  The mantra, though it expresses thought in mind, is not in its essential part a creation of the intellect. To be the sacred and effective word, it must have come as an inspiration from the supra-mental plane, termed in Veda, Ritam, the Truth, and have been received into the superficial consciousness either through the heart or by the luminous intelligence, mans.a. The heart in

2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Absolute and the relative are irreconcilable opposites; in the relative there is nowhere anything absolute, in the Absolute there can be nothing relative. Anything which contradicts these first data of my thought, is intellectually false and practically impossible. These other statements also contradict my law of contradictions which is that two opposing and conflicting affirmations cannot both be true. It is impossible that there should be oneness with God and yet a relation with Him such as this of the enjoyment of the Divine. In oneness there is no one to enjoy except the One and nothing to be enjoyed except the One. God, the individual and the cosmos must be three different actualities, otherwise there could be no relations between them. Either they are eternally different or they are different in present time, although they may have originally been one undifferentiated existence and may eventually re-become one undifferentiated existence. Unity was perhaps and will be perhaps, but it is not now and cannot be so long as cosmos and the individual endure.
  The cosmic being can only know and possess the transcendent unity by ceasing to be cosmic; the individual can only know and possess the cosmic or the transcendental unity by ceasing from all individuality and individualisation. Or if unity is the one eternal fact, then cosmos and individual are non-existent; they are illusions imposed on itself by the Eternal. That may well involve a contradiction or an unreconciled paradox; but I am willing to admit a contradiction in the Eternal which I am not compelled to think out, rather than a contradiction here of my primary conceptions which I am compelled to think out logically and to practical ends. I am on this supposition able either to take the world as practically real and think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual or to be three things at a time seems to me to involve a logical confusion and a practical impossibility." Such might well be the attitude of the normal reason, and it is clear, lucid, positive in its distinctions; it involves no extraordinary gymnastics of the reason trying to exceed itself and losing itself in shadows and half-lights or any kind of mysticism, or at least there is only one original and comparatively simple mysticism free from all other difficult complexities. Therefore it is the reasoning which is the most satisfactory to the simply rational mind. Yet is there here a triple error, the error of making an unbridgeable gulf between the Absolute and the relative, the error of making too simple and rigid and extending too far the law of contradictions and the error of conceiving in terms of Time the genesis of things which have their origin and first habitat in the Eternal.

2.03 - The Supreme Divine, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is here at once a departure from the general contemporary mind of Indian thought, a less negating attitude, a greater affirmation. In place of its obsessing idea of a self-annulment of
  Nature we get the glimpse of an ampler solution, the principle of a self-fulfilment in divine Nature. There is, even, at least

2.04 - ADVICE TO ISHAN, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Only through affirmation, never negation, can you know Him, Neither through Veda nor through Tantra nor the six darsanas.
  It is in love's elixir only that He delights, O mind; He dwells in the body's inmost depths, in Everlasting Joy.

2.04 - Agni, the Illumined Will, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The solution of the problem depends on right realisation, and right realisation starts from the right illuminative Word, expression of the inspired Thought which is sent to the seer out of the Vast. Therefore the Rishi asks farther, "What word is uttered to Agni?" What word of affirmation, what word of realisation? Two conditions have to be satisfied. The Word must be accepted by other divine Powers, that is, it must bring out some potentiality in the nature or bring into it some light of realisation by which the divine Workers may be induced to manifest in the superficial consciousness of humanity and embrace openly their respective functions. And it must be illuminative of the double nature of Agni, this Lord of the lustrous flame. Bhama means both a light of knowledge and a flame of action. Agni is a Light as well as a Force.
  The Word arrives. Yo martyes.u amr.to r.tava. Agni is, preeminently, the Immortal in mortals. It is this Agni by whom the other bright sons of Infinity are able to work out the manifestation and self-extension of the Divine (devavti, devatati) which is at once aim and process of the cosmic and of the human sacrifice. For he is the divine Will which in all things is always present, is always destroying and constructing, always building and perfecting, supporting always the complex progression of the universe. It is this which persists through all death and change. It is eternally and inalienably possessed of the Truth. In the last obscuration of Nature, in the lowest unintelligence of

2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Sun which illumines all impartially and is not affected by the faults of our seeing. But this affirmation is not enough; it leaves the problem unsolved, why that which is in itself ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite, should not only tolerate but seem to maintain and encourage in its manifestation imperfection and limitation, impurity and suffering and falsehood and evil: it states the duality that constitutes the problem, but does not solve it.
  If we simply leave these two dissonant facts of existence standing in each other's presence, we are driven to conclude that there is no reconciliation possible; all we can do is to cling as much as we can to a deepening sense of the joy of the pure and essential Presence and do the best we may with the discordant externality, until we can impose in its place the law of its divine contrary. Or else we have to seek for an escape rather than a
  --
  A second affirmation which our mind naturally accepts as the consequence of the first postulate, is that by the supreme consciousness and the supreme power of this omnipresent Divinity in its perfect universal knowledge and divine wisdom all things are ordered and governed in their fundamental relations
  414
  --
  Divine Presence. There arises then a third affirmation of the
  Divine Reality and the world reality as different in essence or in order, so different that we have to draw away from one to reach the other; if we would find the Divine Inhabitant, we must reject the world he inhabits, governs, has created or manifested in his own existence. The first of these three propositions is inevitable; the second also must stand if the omnipresent Divine has anything at all to do with the world he inhabits and with its manifestation, building, maintenance and government: but the third seems also self-evident and yet it is incompatible with its precedents, and this dissonance confronts us with a problem which appears to be incapable of satisfactory solution.
  --
  Lila. But, apart from this choice of the individual Purusha, there is a deeper truth inherent in the original Existence which finds its expression in the plunge into Inconscience; its result is a new affirmation of Sachchidananda in its apparent opposite. If the
  Infinite's right of various self-manifestation is granted, this too as a possibility of its manifestation is intelligible and has its profound significance.

2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  LL HUMAN thought, all mental man's experience moves between a constant affirmation and negation; there is for his mind no truth of idea, no result of experience that cannot be affirmed, none that cannot be negated. It has negated the existence of the individual being, negated the existence of the cosmos, negated the existence of any immanent or underlying
  Reality, negated any Reality beyond the individual and the cosmos; but it is also constantly affirming these things - sometimes one of them solely or any two or all of them together. It has to do so because our thinking mind is in its very nature an ignorant dealer in possibilities, not possessing the truth behind any of them, but sounding and testing each in turn or many together if so perchance it may get at some settled belief or knowledge about them, some certitude; yet, living in a world of relativities and possibilities, it can arrive at no final certainty, no absolute and abiding conviction. Even the actual, the realised can present itself to our mentality as a "may be or may not be", syad va na syad va, or as an "is" under the shadow of the "might not have been" and wearing the aspect of that which will not be hereafter. Our life-being is also afflicted by the same incertitude; it can rest in no aim of living from which it can derive a sure or final satisfaction or to which it can assign an enduring value. Our nature starts from facts and actualities which it takes for real; it is pushed beyond them into a pursuit of uncertain possibilities and led eventually to question all that it took as real. For it proceeds from a fundamental ignorance and has no hold on assured truth; all the truths on which it relies for a time are found to be partial, incomplete and questionable.
  --
   mind that inquires into everything, questions everything, builds up affirmations and unbuilds them, erects systems of certitude but finally accepts none of them as certain, affirms and questions the evidence of the senses, follows out the conclusions of the reason but undoes them again to arrive at different or quite opposite conclusions, and continues indefinitely if not ad infinitum this process. This is the history of human thought and human endeavour, a constant breaking of bounds only to move always in the same spirals enlarged perhaps but following the same or constantly similar curves of direction. The mind of humanity, ever seeking, ever active, never arrives at a firmly settled reality of life's aims and objects or at a settled reality of its own certitudes and convictions, an established foundation or firm formation of its idea of existence.
  At a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the physical mind loses its conviction of objective certitude and enters into an agnosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge, doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real, is not futile; the vital mind, baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment, finds that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and is ready to reject life and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as an illusion, Maya; the thinking mind, unbuilding all its affirmations, discovers that all are mere mental constructions and there is no reality in them or else that the only reality is something beyond this existence, something that has not been made or constructed, something
  Absolute and Eternal, - all that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination of the mind or a vast delirium, an immense cosmic Illusion, a delusive figure of apparent existence.
  The principle of negation prevails over the principle of affirmation and becomes universal and absolute. Thence arise the great world-negating religions and philosophies; thence too a recoil of the life-motive from itself and a seeking after a life elsewhere flawless and eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile
  Reality or an original Non-Existence. In India the philosophy of world-negation has been given formulations of supreme power

2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Matter-energy in Matter, a secretion or vibration of the braincells, a physical reception of images and a brain response, a reflex action or a reaction of Matter to the contacts of Matter. Even if the rigidity of this affirmation is relaxed and consciousness otherwise accounted for, still it is no more than a temporary and derivative phenomenon, not the enduring Reality. The percipient individual is himself only a body and brain capable of the mechanical reactions we generalise under the name of
  Reality and the Cosmic Illusion
  --
   consciousness: the individual has only a relative value and a temporary reality. But if Matter turns out to be itself unreal or derivative and simply a phenomenon of Energy, as seems now to be the probability, then Energy remains as the sole Reality; the percipient, his perception, the perceived object are only phenomena of Energy. But an Energy without a Being or Existence possessing it or a Consciousness supplying it, an Energy working originally in the void, - for the material field in which we see it at work is itself a creation, - looks itself very much like a mental construction, an unreality: or it might be a temporary inexplicable outbreak of motion which might cease at any time to create phenomena; the Void of the Infinite alone would be enduring and real. The Buddhist theory of the percipient and the perception and the percept as a construction of Karma, the process of some cosmic fact of Action, gave room to such a conclusion; for it led logically to the affirmation of the NonBeing, Void or Nihil. It is possible indeed that what is at work is not an Energy, but a Consciousness; as Matter reduces itself to
  Energy seizable by us not in itself but in its results and workings, so Energy could be reduced to action of a Consciousness seizable by us not in itself but in its results and workings. But if this
  --
  There are, however, two possible replies to the difficulty, if we get rid of the idea of absolute unreality and admit a qualification or compromise. A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is fourfold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is is the
  Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure selfstatus neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be affirmed about Brahman; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence; this state of deep sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos; - this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the
  --
  Absolute. Is then this realisation of passing into a pure immobile self-existence or this Nirvana of the individual and the universe one among these penultimates, or is it itself the final and absolute realisation which is at the end of every journey and transcends and eliminates all lesser experience? It claims to stand behind and supersede, to sublate and to eliminate every other knowledge; if that is really so, then its finality must be accepted as conclusive. But, against this pretension, it has been claimed that it is possible to travel beyond by a greater negation or a greater affirmation, - to extinguish self in Non-Being or to pass through the double experience of cosmic consciousness and Nirvana of world-consciousness in the One Existence to a greater Divine Union and Unity which holds both these realisations in its vast integral Reality. It is said that beyond the duality and the non-duality there is That in which both are held together and find their truth in a Truth which is beyond them.
  A consummating experience which proceeds by the exceeding and elimination of all other possible but lesser experiences is, as a step towards the Absolute, admissible. A supreme experience which affirms and includes the truth of all spiritual experience, gives to each its own absolute, integralises all knowledge and experience in a supreme reality, might be the one step farther that is at once a largest illuminating and transforming Truth of all things and a highest infinite Transcendence. The Brahman, the supreme Reality, is That which being known all is known; but in the illusionist solution it is That, which being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery: in this other experience, the Reality being known, all assumes its true significance, its truth to the Eternal and Absolute.
  --
   widest reality which admits their truth and exceeds it. This is, we may say, a sign of the relativity of all truth and all experience, since both vary with the outlook and the inlook of the knowing and experiencing mind and being; each man is said to have his own religion according to his own nature, but so too each man may be said to have his own philosophy, his own way of seeing and experience of existence, though only a few can formulate it. But from another point of view this variety testifies rather to the infinity of aspects of the Infinite; each catches a partial glimpse or a whole glimpse of one or more aspects or contacts or enters into it in his mental or his spiritual experience. To the mind at a certain stage all these view-points begin to lose their definitiveness in a large catholicity or a complex tolerant incertitude, or all the rest may fall away from it and yield place to an ultimate truth or a single absorbing experience. It is then that it is liable to feel the unreality of all that it has seen and thought and taken as part of itself or its universe. This "all" becomes to it a universal unreality or a many-sided fragmental reality without a principle of unification; as it passes into the negativing purity of an absolute experience, all falls away from it and there remains only a silent and immobile Absolute. But the consciousness might be called to go farther and see again all it has left in the light of a new spiritual vision: it may recover the truth of all things in the truth of the Absolute; it may reconcile the negation of Nirvana and the affirmation of the cosmic consciousness in a single regard of That of which both are the self-expressions. In the passage from mental to overmind cognition this many-sided unity is the leading experience; the whole manifestation assumes the appearance of a singular and mighty harmony which reaches its greatest completeness when the soul stands on the border between Overmind and Supermind and looks back with a total view upon existence.
  This is at least a possibility that we have to explore and pursue this view of things to its ultimate consequence. A consideration of the possibility of a great cosmic Illusion as the explanation of the enigma of being had to be undertaken because this view and experience of things presents itself powerfully at
  --
  6 This position has been shaken by the theory of Relativity, but it must hold as a pragmatic basis for experiment and affirmation of the scientific fact.
  Reality and the Cosmic Illusion
  --
  Nihil. It can be approached through an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence, through an absolute of Light and Knowledge, through an absolute of Love or
  Beauty, through an absolute of Force, through an absolute of peace or silence. It can be approached through an inexpressible absolute of being or of consciousness, or of power of being, or of delight of being, or through a supreme experience in which these things become inexpressibly one; for we can enter into such an ineffable state and, plunged into it as if into a luminous abyss of existence, we can reach a superconscience which may be described as the gate of the Absolute. It is supposed that it is only through a negation of individual and cosmos that we can enter into the Absolute. But in fact the individual need only deny his own small separate ego-existence; he can approach the Absolute through a sublimation of his spiritual individuality taking up the cosmos into himself and transcending it; or he may negate himself altogether, but even so it is still the individual who by self-exceeding enters into the Absolute. He may enter also by a sublimation of his being into a supreme existence or super-existence, by a sublimation of his consciousness into a supreme consciousness or superconscience, by a sublimation of his and all delight of being into a super-delight or supreme ecstasy. He can make the approach through an ascension in which he enters into cosmic consciousness, assumes it into himself and raises himself and it into a state of being in which oneness and multiplicity are in perfect harmony and unison in a supreme status of manifestation where all are in each and each in all
  --
   and all in the one without any determining individuation - for the dynamic identity and mutuality have become complete; on the path of affirmation it is this status of the manifestation that is nearest to the Absolute. This paradox of an Absolute which can be realised through an absolute negation and through an absolute affirmation, in many ways, can only be accounted for to the reason if it is a supreme Existence which is so far above our notion and experience of existence that it can correspond to our negation of it, to our notion and experience of nonexistence; but also, since all that exists is That, whatever its degree of manifestation, it is itself the supreme of all things and can be approached through supreme affirmations as through supreme negations. The Absolute is the ineffable x overtopping and underlying and immanent and essential in all that we can call existence or non-existence.
  It is our first premiss that the Absolute is the supreme reality; but the issue is whether all else that we experience is real or unreal. A distinction is sometimes made between being and existence, and it is supposed that being is real but existence or what manifests as such is unreal. But this can stand only if there is a rigid distinction, a cut and separation between the uncreated Eternal and created existences; the uncreated Being can then be taken as alone real. This conclusion does not follow if what exists is form of Being and substance of Being; it would be unreal only if it were a form of Non-Being, asat, created out of the Void, sunya. The states of existence through which we approach and enter into the Absolute must have their truth, for the untrue and unreal cannot lead into the Real: but also what issues from the Absolute, what the Eternal supports and informs and manifests in itself, must have a reality. There is the unmanifest and there is the manifestation, but a manifestation of the Real must itself be real; there is the Timeless and there is the process of things in Time, but nothing can appear in Time unless it has a basis in the timeless Reality. If my self and spirit are real, my thoughts, feelings, powers of all kinds, which are its expressions, cannot be unreal; my body, which is the form it puts out in itself and which at the same time it inhabits, cannot be a

2.1.01 - God The One Reality, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Man claiming to be a divine soul and an all-discovering intellect is brought up short by Nature's rude proof of his ignorance and incompetence and exhibits constantly in his thoughts the proneness to self-confident error and in his feelings and acts the petty faultiness, meanness, and darkness or suddenly the abysses of falsehood or foulness or cruelty of his nature. In the management of his world the much that is undivine prevails easily over the little that is divine or they are inextricably mixed together. The ideal fails in practice, religion degenerates quickly into a settled sectarian fanaticism or formality, the triumphant good turns into an organised evil. The Christian doctrine of the fall, the Indian idea of the wandering of the Soul in a cosmic illusion or the sceptic affirmation of an inconscient material
  Nature producing the freak of consciousness seems often to be the kernel of the whole matter.
  --
  & an extra-cosmic. We may move towards any of these ultimate affirmations, but he who accepts them all & harmonises them, is the highest human expression of Parabrahman. He is the Avatar or the divine Unit.
  All being is the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine; there is nothing beyond the Eternal and Infinite, neither is there anything else

2.1.02 - Nature The World-Manifestation, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Substance of matter, life & mind are the material which Ego uses to develop its conscious existence; there are higher infinite affirmations in which it fulfils its conscious existence.
  198
  --
  There is a unity of essence & a unity of sum. The latter is only a synthetic formula & affirmation of multiplicity. The unity of essence is the true unity.
  Unity & multiplicity are necessary to each other & one reality. Multiplicity is unity extended in its possibility; unity is multiplicity self-gathered into its essence[.]

2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   and individual in the genus and species, which enables the formulation to be effective, each in its own kind, organised so as to express more and more definite and superior possibilities of matter, more and more definite and superior possibilities of life, more and more definite and superior possibilities of mind, - more than this cannot yet be positively asserted, but this much is asseverable. If we can add that in the mental formula, in the mentalised life and body of man, a spiritual emergence is in process which has not yet reached its full possibility and that possibility is the emergence of the spiritual man or supramental being, then the object of the physical evolution and its significance becomes clear. The evolution of bodies is only a means for the evolution of consciousness and the spiritual formulation will be that in which the cosmic Existence will find its own full affirmation, manifest through the original veil of Matter its selfawareness, self-knowledge, self-realisation. The Cosmic Spirit hidden in the Inconscience is then the Alpha, its manifestation in the consciousness of spiritualised man the Omega.
  The Stages of Evolution

2.13 - The Book, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  6:And yet there is no page of this Book on which this word is not written; but so long as it is immediately followed by a new affirmation, all is not lost; and as in this Book the word "failure" is thus made of little account, so also must the word "success" never be employed, for it is the last word that may be written therein, and it is followed by a full stop.
  7:This full stop may never be written anywhere else; for the writing of the Book goes on eternally; there is no way of closing the record until the goal of all has been attained. Let every page of this Book be filled with song-for it is a Book of incantation!

2.1.4 - The Lower Vital Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The difficulty in the lower vital being is that it is still wedded to its old self and in revolt against the Light; it has not only not surrendered either to a greater Truth or to myself and the Mother, but it has up to now no such will and hardly any idea even of what true surrender is. When the lower vital assumes this attitude, it takes its stand upon a constant affirmation of the old personality and the past forms of the lower nature. Every time they are discouraged, it supports and brings them back and asserts its right to freedom the freedom to affirm and follow its own crude and egoistic ideas, desires, fancies, impulses or convenience whenever it chooses. It claims, secretly or in so many words, the right to follow its nature,its average unregenerate human nature, the right to be itself,its natural, original, unchanged self with all the falsehood, ignorance and incoherence proper to this part of the being. And it claims or, if it does not claim in theory, it asserts in practice the right to express all this impure and inferior stuff in speech and act and behaviour. It defends, glosses over, paints in specious colours and tries to prolong indefinitely the past habitual ways of thinking, speaking and feeling and to eternise what is distorted and misformed in the character. This it does sometimes by open self-assertion and revolt, branding all that is done or said against it as error or oppression or injustice, sometimes behind a cover of self-deception or a mask of dissimulation, professing one thing and practising another. Often it tries to persuade itself and to convince others that these things are the only right reason and right way of acting for itself or for all or even that they are part of the true movement of the Yoga.
  When this lower vital being is allowed to influence the action, as happens when the sadhaka in any way endorses its suggestions, its attitude, whether masked to himself or coming to the surface, dictates a considerable part of his speech and action and against it he makes no serious resistance. If he is frank with himself and straightforward to the Mother, he will begin to recognise the source and nature of the obstacle and will soon be on the direct road to correct and change it. But this, when under the adverse influence, he persistently refuses to be; he prefers to hide up these movements under any kind of concealment, denial, justification or excuse or other shelter.

2.14 - The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is no doubt a fact that once truth or good manifests, the conception of falsehood and evil becomes a possibility; for whenever there is an affirmation, its negation becomes conceivable. As the manifestation of existence, consciousness and delight made the manifestation of non-existence, inconscience, insensibility conceivable and, because conceivable, therefore in a way inevitable, for all possibilities push towards actuality until they reach it, so is it with these contraries of the aspects of the Divine Existence. It may be said on this ground that these opposites, since they must be immediately perceivable by the manifesting Consciousness on the very threshold of manifestation, can take rank as implied absolutes and are inseparable from all cosmic existence. But it must first be noted that it is only in cosmic manifestation that they become possible; they cannot pre-exist in the timeless being, for they are incompatible with the unity and bliss that are its substance. In cosmos also they cannot come into being except by a limitation of truth and good into partial and relative forms and by a breaking up of the unity of existence and consciousness into separative consciousness and separative being. For where there is oneness and complete mutuality of consciousness-force even in multiplicity and diversity, there truth of self-knowledge and mutual knowledge is automatic and error of self-ignorance and mutual ignorance is impossible. So too where truth exists as a whole on a basis of self-aware oneness, falsehood cannot enter and evil is shut out by the exclusion of wrong consciousness and wrong will and their dynamisation of falsehood and error. As soon as separateness enters, these things also can enter; but even this simultaneity is not inevitable. If there is sufficient mutuality, even in the absence of an active sense of oneness, and if the separate beings do not transgress or deviate from their norms of limited knowledge, harmony and truth can still be sovereign and evil will have no gate of entry. There is, therefore, no au thentic inevitable cosmicity of falsehood and evil even as there is no absoluteness; they are circumstances or results that arise only at a certain stage when separativeness culminates in opposition and ignorance in a positive unconsciousness of knowledge and
  624
  --
   a resultant wrong consciousness and wrong knowledge with its content of wrong will, wrong feeling, wrong action and wrong reaction. The question is at what juncture of cosmic manifestation the opposites enter in; for it may be either at some stage of the increasing involution of consciousness in separative mind and life or only after the plunge into inconscience. This resolves itself into the question whether falsehood, error, wrong and evil exist originally in the mental and vital planes and are native to mind and life or are proper only to the material manifestation because inflicted on mind and life there by the obscurity arising from the Inconscience. It may be questioned too whether, if they do exist in supraphysical mind and life, they were original and inevitable there; for they may rather have entered in as a consequence or a supraphysical extension from the material manifestation. Or, if that is untenable, it may be that they arose as an enabling supraphysical affirmation in the universal Mind and Life, a precedent necessity for their appearance in that manifestation to which they more naturally belong as an inevitable outcome of the creative Inconscience.
  It was for a long time held by the human mind as a traditional knowledge that when we go beyond the material plane, these things are found to exist there also in worlds beyond us.
  --
  For the emergence of the life-ego is, as we have seen, a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life- affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective substitute for the true self in our surface experience:
  The Origin of Falsehood and Evil
  --
   often more powerful and insistent because it is a self-righteous and magnified ego. It helps still less if we do wrong to our soul, to our mind, life or body with the idea of subordinating our self to the self of others. To affirm our being rightly so that it may become one with all is the true principle, not to mutilate or immolate it. Self-immolation may be necessary at times, exceptionally, for a cause, in answer to some demand of the heart or for some right or high purpose but cannot be made the rule or nature of life; so exaggerated, it would only feed and exaggerate the ego of others or magnify some collective ego, not lead us or mankind to the discovery and affirmation of our or its true being.
  Sacrifice and self-giving are indeed a true principle and a spiritual necessity, for we cannot affirm our being rightly without sacrifice or without self-giving to something larger than our ego; but that too must be done with a right consciousness and will founded on a true knowledge. To develop the sattwic part of our nature, a nature of light, understanding, balance, harmony, sympathy, good-will, kindness, fellow-feeling, self-control, rightly ordered and harmonised action, is the best we can do in the limits of the mental formation, but it is a stage and not the goal of our growth of being. These are solutions by the way, palliatives, necessary means for a partial dealing with this root difficulty, provisional standards and devices given us as a temporary help and guidance because the true and total solution is beyond our present capacity and can only come when we have sufficiently evolved to see it and make it our main endeavour.
  The true solution can intervene only when by our spiritual growth we can become one self with all beings, know them as part of our self, deal with them as if they were our other selves; for then the division is healed, the law of separate self affirmation leading by itself to affirmation against or at the expense of others is enlarged and liberated by adding to it the law of our self- affirmation for others and our self-finding in their self-finding and self-realisation. It has been made a rule of religious ethics to act in a spirit of universal compassion, to love one's neighbour as oneself, to do to others as one would have them do to us, to feel the joy and grief of others as one's
  The Origin of Falsehood and Evil

2.15 - Reality and the Integral Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The absolutist view of reality, consciousness and knowledge is founded on one side of the earliest Vedantic thought, but it is not the whole of that thinking. In the Upanishads, in the inspired scripture of the most ancient Vedanta, we find the affirmation of the Absolute, the experience-concept of the utter and ineffable Transcendence; but we find also, not in contradiction to it but as its corollary, an affirmation of the cosmic Divinity, an experience-concept of the cosmic Self and the becoming of Brahman in the universe. Equally, we find the affirmation of the Divine Reality in the individual: this too is an experienceconcept; it is seized upon not as an appearance, but as an actual becoming. In place of a sole supreme exclusive affirmation negating all else than the transcendent Absolute we find a comprehensive affirmation carried to its farthest conclusion: this concept of Reality and of Knowledge enveloping in one view the cosmic and the Absolute coincides fundamentally with our own; for it implies that the Ignorance too is a half-veiled part of the Knowledge and world-knowledge a part of self-knowledge.
  The Isha Upanishad insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations of the Absolute; it refuses to confine truth to any one aspect. Brahman is the stable and the mobile, the internal and the external, all that is near and all that is far whether spiritually or in the extension of Time and Space; it is the Being and all becomings, the Pure and Silent who is without feature or action and the Seer and Thinker who organises the world and its objects; it is the One who becomes all that we are sensible of in the universe, the Immanent and that in which he takes up his dwelling. The Upanishad affirms the perfect and the liberating knowledge to be that which excludes neither the Self nor its creations: the liberated spirit sees all these as becomings of the Self-existent in an internal vision and by a consciousness which perceives the universe within itself instead of looking out on it, like the limited and egoistic mind, as a thing other than itself. To live in the cosmic Ignorance is a blindness, but to confine oneself in an exclusive absolutism of Knowledge is also a blindness: to know Brahman as at once and together the Knowledge and the Ignorance, to attain to the supreme status at once by the Becoming and the Non-Becoming, to relate together realisation of the transcendent and the cosmic self, to achieve foundation in the supramundane and a self-aware manifestation in the mundane, is the integral knowledge; that is the possession of Immortality. It is this whole consciousness with its complete knowledge that builds the foundation of the Life Divine and makes its attainment possible. It follows that the absolute reality of the Absolute must be, not a rigid indeterminable oneness, not an infinity vacant of all that is not a pure self-existence attainable only by the exclusion of the many and the finite, but something which is beyond these definitions, beyond indeed any description either positive or negative. All affirmations and negations are expressive of its aspects, and it is through both a supreme affirmation and a supreme negation that we can arrive at the Absolute.
  On the one side, then, presented to us as the Reality, we have an absolute Self-Existence, an eternal sole self-being, and through the experience of the silent and inactive Self or the detached immobile Purusha we can move towards this featureless and relationless Absolute, negate the actions of the creative Power, whether that be an illusory Maya or a formative Prakriti, pass from all circling in cosmic error into the eternal Peace and Silence, get rid of our personal existence and find or lose ourselves in that sole true Existence. On the other side, we have a Becoming which is a true movement of Being, and both the Being and the Becoming are truths of one absolute Reality.
  --
  But there are other conceptions of reality, other conceptions of the nature of knowledge which demand consideration. There is the view that all that exists is a subjective creation of Mind, a structure of Consciousness, and that the idea of an objective reality self-existent, independent of Consciousness, is an illusion, since we have and can have no evidence of any such independent self-existence of things. This way of seeing may lead to the affirmation of the creative Consciousness as the sole Reality or to the denial of all existence and the affirmation of Non-Existence or a nescient Zero as the sole Reality. For, in one view, the objects constructed by consciousness have no intrinsic reality, they are merely structures; even the consciousness that constructs them is itself only a flux of perceptions that assume an appearance of connection and continuity and create a sense of continuous time, but in reality these things have no stable basis as they are only an appearance of reality. This would mean that the reality is an eternal absence at once of all self-conscious existence and of all that constitutes movement of existence: Knowledge would mean a return to that from the appearance of the constructed universe. There would be a double and complete self-extinction, the disappearance of Purusha, the cessation or extinction of Prakriti; for the conscious Soul and Nature are the two terms of our being and comprehend all that we mean by existence, and the negation of both is the absolute Nirvana. What is real, then, must be either an Inconscience, in which this flux and these structures appear, or a Superconscience beyond all idea of self or existence. But this view of the universe is only true of the appearance of things when we regard our surface mind as the whole of consciousness; as a description of the working of that Mind it is valid: there, undoubtedly, all looks like a flux and a construction by an impermanent Consciousness. But this cannot prevail as a whole account of existence if there is a greater and deeper self-knowledge and world-knowledge, a knowledge by identity, a consciousness to which that knowledge is normal and a Being of which that consciousness is the eternal self-awareness; for then the subjective and the objective can be real and intimate to that consciousness and being, both can be something of itself, sides of its identity, au thentic to its existence.
  On the other hand, if the constructing Mind or Consciousness is real and the sole reality, then the universe of material beings and objects may have an existence, but it is purely subjective-structural, made by Consciousness out of itself, maintained by it, dissolving into it in their disappearance. For if there is nothing else, no essential Existence or Being supporting the creative Power, and there is not, either, a sustaining Void or Nihil, then this Consciousness which creates everything must itself have or be an existence or a substance; if it can make structures, they must be constructions out of its own substance or forms of its own existence. A consciousness which is not that of an Existence or is not itself an existence, must be an unreality, a perceptive Force of a Void or in a Void raising there unreal structures made of nothing, - a proposition which is not easily acceptable unless all others prove to be invalid. It then becomes apparent that what we see as consciousness must be a Being or an Existence out of whose substance of consciousness all is created.
  --
  In fact, subjectivity and objectivity are not independent realities, they depend upon each other; they are the Being, through consciousness, looking at itself as subject on the object and the same Being offering itself to its own consciousness as object to the subject. The more partial view concedes no substantive reality to anything which exists only in the consciousness, or, to put it more accurately, to anything to which the inner consciousness or sense bears testimony but which the outer physical senses do not provide with a ground or do not substantiate. But the outer senses can bear a reliable evidence only when they refer their version of the object to the consciousness and that consciousness gives a significance to their report, adds to its externality its own internal intuitive interpretation and justifies it by a reasoned adherence; for the evidence of the senses is always by itself imperfect, not altogether reliable and certainly not final, because it is incomplete and constantly subject to error. Indeed, we have no means of knowing the objective universe except by our subjective consciousness of which the physical senses themselves are instruments; as the world appears not only to that but in that, so it is to us. If we deny reality to the evidence of this universal witness for subjective or for supraphysical objectivities, there is no sufficient reason to concede reality to its evidence for physical objectivities; if the inner or the supraphysical objects of consciousness are unreal, the objective physical universe has also every chance of being unreal. In each case understanding, discrimination, verification are necessary; but the subjective and the supraphysical must have another method of verification than that which we apply successfully to the physical and external objective. Subjective experience cannot be referred to the evidence of the external senses; it has its own standards of seeing and its inner method of verification: so also supraphysical realities by their very nature cannot be referred to the judgment of the physical or sense mind except when they project themselves into the physical, and even then that judgment is often incompetent or subject to caution; they can only be verified by other senses and by a method of scrutiny and affirmation which is applicable to their own reality, their own nature.
  There are different orders of reality; the objective and physical is only one order. It is convincing to the physical or externalising mind because it is directly obvious to the senses, while of the subjective and the supraphysical that mind has no means of knowledge except from fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable to error. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings; but if the individual mind can know something of its own phenomena by direct experience, it is ignorant of what happens in the consciousness of others except by analogy with its own or such signs, data, inferences as its outward observation can give it.

2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The next affirmation which we put forward is that the fundamental reality of the Absolute is to our spiritual perception a Divine Existence, Consciousness and Delight of Being which is a supracosmic Reality, self-existent, but also the secret truth underlying the whole manifestation; for the fundamental truth of Being must necessarily be the fundamental truth of Becoming.
  All is a manifestation of That; for it dwells even in all that seem to be its opposites and its hidden compulsion on them to disclose it is the cause of evolution, on Inconscience to develop from itself its secret consciousness, on the apparent Non-Being to reveal in itself the occult spiritual existence, on the insensible neutrality of Matter to develop a various delight of being which must grow, setting itself free from its minor terms, its contrary dualities of pain and pleasure, into the essential delight of existence, the spiritual Ananda.

2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   inexplicably aware. But such an explanation may account, - if we admit this impossible magic of the conscious response of an inconscient to the inconscient, - for sense and reflex action [yet] becomes absurd if we try to explain by it thought and will, the imagination of the poet, the attention of the scientist, the reasoning of the philosopher. Call it mechanical cerebration, if you will, but no mere mechanism of grey stuff of brain can explain these things; a gland cannot write Hamlet or pulp of brain work out a system of metaphysics. There is no parity, kinship or visible equation between the alleged cause or agent on the one side and on the other the effect and its observable process. There is a gulf here that cannot be bridged by any stress of forcible affirmation or crossed by any stride of inference or violent leap of argumentative reason. Consciousness and an inconscient substance may be connected, may interpenetrate, may act on each other, but they are and remain things opposite, incommensurate with each other, fundamentally diverse. An observing and active consciousness emerging as a character of an eternal Inconscience is a self-contradictory affirmation, an unintelligible phenomenon, and the contradiction must be healed or explained before this affirmation can be accepted. But it cannot be healed unless either the Inconscient has a latent power for consciousness - and then its inconscience is phenomenal only, not fundamental, - or else is the veil of a Consciousness which emerges out of a state of involution which appears to us as an inconscience.
  There is no doubt a connection and interdependence between consciousness and the inconscient substance in which it resides and through which it seems to operate. Consciousness depends upon the body and its functionings, on the brain, nerves, gland-action, right physiological working, for its own firm state and action. It uses them as its instruments and, if they are injured or unable to act, the action of the consciousness may also be in part or whole impaired, impeded or suspended. But this does not prove that the action of consciousness is an action of the body and nothing else. There is an instrumentation and if the instrument is impaired, the user of the instrument can no longer manifest himself rightly through it; if it is destroyed, he

2.2.02 - Consciousness and the Inconscient, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is, obvious and undeniable, an Energy that creates and there is a creation; these are the only two affirmations we can make which are beyond doubt. Even if we take the creation to be illusory, still the illusory creation is there and there is a
  Force or Energy or Power that has created it, whether it be mere unconscious Energy, Prakriti, or an energy of deceptive consciousness, Maya.

2.20 - The Philosophy of Rebirth, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  BIRTH is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second which gives its double point of perplexity to the mystery of birth; for life, which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of existence, becomes itself a mystery by virtue of these two which seem to be its beginning and its end and yet in a thousand ways betray themselves as neither of these things, but rather intermediate stages in an occult processus of life. At first sight birth might seem to be a constant outburst of life in a general death, a persistent circumstance in the universal lifelessness of Matter. On a closer examination it begins to be more probable that life is something involved in Matter or even an inherent power of the Energy that creates Matter, but able to appear only when it gets the necessary conditions for the affirmation of its characteristic phenomena and for an appropriate self-organisation. But in the birth of life there is something more that participates in the emergence, - there is an element which is no longer material, a strong upsurging of some flame of soul, a first evident vibration of the spirit.
  All the known circumstances and results of birth presuppose an unknown before, and there is a suggestion of universality, a will of persistence of life, an inconclusiveness in death which seem to point to an unknown hereafter. What were we before birth and what are we after death, are the questions, the answer of the one depending upon that of the other, which the intellect of man has put to itself from the beginning without even now resting in any final solution. The intellect indeed can hardly give the final answer: for that must in its very nature lie beyond the data of the physical consciousness and memory, whether of the race or the individual, yet these are the sole data which the intellect is in the habit of consulting with something like confidence. In this poverty of materials and this incertitude it wheels from one hypothesis to another and calls each in turn a conclusion. Moreover, the solution depends upon the nature, source and object of the cosmic movement, and as we determine these, so we shall have to conclude about birth and life and death, the before and the hereafter.

2.21 - IN THE COMPANY OF DEVOTEES AT SYAMPUKUR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Paths of negation and affirmation
  MASTER: "Let me tell you the truth. He [meaning Dr. Sarkar] is now following the path of negation. Therefore he discriminates, following the process of 'Neti, neti', and reasons in this way: God is not the living beings; He is not the universe; He is outside the creation. But later he will follow the path of affirmation and accept everything as the manifestation of God.
  "By taking off, one by one, the sheaths of a banana tree, one obtains the pith. The sheaths are one thing, and the pith is another. The sheaths are not the pith, and the pith is not the sheaths. But in the end one realizes that the pith cannot exist apart from the sheaths, and the sheaths cannot exist apart from the pith; they are part and parcel of one and the same banana tree. Likewise, it is God who has become the twenty-four cosmic principles; it is He who has become man.

2.22 - THE STILLEST HOUR, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  man no longer nauseates Zarathustra. His affirmation now is
  boundless and without reservation: "For I love you, 0

2.23 - The Core of the Gita.s Meaning, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Gita in the development of its idea raises many issues, such as the determinism of Nature, the significance of the universal manifestation and the ultimate status of the liberated soul, questions that have been the subject of unending and inconclusive debate. It is not necessary in this series of essays of which the object is a scrutiny and positive affirmation of the substance of the Gita and a disengaging of its contri bution to the abiding spiritual thought of humanity and its kernel of living practice, to enter far into these discussions or to consider where we may differ from its standpoint or conclusions, make any reserves in our assent or even, strong in later experience, go beyond its metaphysical teaching or its Yoga. It will be sufficient to close with a formulation of the living message it still brings for man the eternal seeker and discoverer to guide him through the present circuits and the possible steeper ascent of his life up to the luminous heights of his spirit.

2.24 - The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But this is not the standpoint from which the true significance of the spiritual evolution in man or the value of spirituality can be judged or assessed; for its real work is not to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a universal love and compassion, the will to spend the energies for the good of all creatures,11 are central to the .
  (vasudhaiva kut.umbakam, the whole earth is my family), to be the highest principle of action, the Christian emphasis on love indicate this dynamic side of the spiritual being. dynamic outflowering of the spirit: he has turned therefore to help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis or the prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with something of the direct power of the Spirit, the results have been prodigious.
  --
  This transference has been responsible for much harm; it brings into thought narrowness, limitation, an intolerance of the necessary variation and multiplicity of view-points without which there can be no totality of truth-finding, and by the narrowness and limitation much obstinacy in error. It reduces philosophy to an endless maze of sterile disputes; religion has been invaded by this misprision and infected with credal dogmatism, bigotry and intolerance. The truth of the spirit is a truth of being and consciousness and not a truth of thought: mental ideas can only represent or formulate some facet, some mindtranslated principle or power of it or enumerate its aspects, but to know it one has to grow into it and be it; without that growing and being there can be no true spiritual knowledge. The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one, everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being; for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also there are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of experience and expression: the centralisation and harmonisation of these possibles, but also the intensive sole following out of any line of experience are both of them necessary movements of the emerging spiritual Conscious-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation of mind and life to the spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with the mentality of the seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such accommodation or such limiting expression. It is this mental and vital element which has created the oppositions that still divide spiritual seekers or enter into their differing affirmations of the truth that they experience. This difference and variation is needed for the freedom of spiritual search and spiritual growth: to overpass differences is quite possible, but that is most easily done in pure experience; in mental formulation the difference must remain until one can exceed mind altogether and in a highest consciousness integralise, unify and harmonise the many-sided truth of the Spirit.
  In the evolution of the spiritual man there must necessarily be many stages and in each stage a great variety of individual formations of the being, the consciousness, the life, the temperament, the ideas, the character. The nature of instrumental mind and the necessity of dealing with the life must of itself create an infinite variety according to the stage of development and the individuality of the seeker. But, apart from that, even the domain of pure spiritual self-realisation and self-expression need not be a single white monotone, there can be a great diversity in the fundamental unity; the supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many and, as is the soul's formation of nature, so will be its spiritual self-expression. A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and integration must harmonise these diversities, but to abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.

2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and feeling all as himself would act in that sense; he would act in a universal awareness and a harmony of his individual self with the total self, of his individual will with the total will, of his individual action with the total action. For what we most suffer from in our outer life and its reactions upon our inner life is the imperfection of our relations with the world, our ignorance of others, our disharmony with the whole of things, our inability to equate our demand on the world with the world's demand on us. There is a conflict - a conflict from which there seems to be no ultimate issue except an escape from both world and self - between our self- affirmation and a world on which we have to impose that affirmation, a world which seems to be too large for us and to pass indifferently over our soul, mind, life, body in the sweep of its course to its goal. The relation of our course and goal to the world's is unapparent to us, and to harmonise ourselves with it we have either to enforce ourselves upon it and make it subservient to us or suppress ourselves and become subservient to it or else to compass a difficult balance between these two necessities of the relation between the individual personal destiny and the cosmic whole and its hidden purpose. But for the supramental being living in a cosmic consciousness the difficulty would not exist, since he has no ego; his cosmic individuality would know the cosmic forces and their movement and their significance as part of himself, and the truth-consciousness in him would see the right relation at each step and find the dynamic right expression of that relation.
  For in fact both individual and universe are simultaneous and interrelated expressions of the same transcendent Being; even though in the Ignorance and under its law there is maladjustment and conflict, yet there must be a right relation, an equation to which all arrives but which is missed by our blindness of ego, our attempt to affirm the ego and not the Self one in all. The supramental consciousness has that truth of relation in itself as its natural right and privilege, since it is the supermind that determines the cosmic relations and the relations of the individual with the universe, determines them freely and sovereignly as a power of the Transcendence. In the mental being even the pressure of the cosmic consciousness overpowering the ego and an awareness of the transcendent Reality might not of themselves bring about a dynamic solution; for there might still be an incompatibility between its liberated spiritual mentality and the obscure life of the cosmic Ignorance which the mind would not have the power to solve or overcome. But in the supramental being, not only statically conscious but fully dynamic and acting in the creative light and power of the Transcendence, the supramental light, the truth light, r.tam jyotih., would have that power. For there would be a unity with the cosmic self, but not a bondage to the Ignorance of cosmic Nature in its lower formulation; there would on the contrary be a power to act in the light of the Truth on that Ignorance. A large universality of self-expression, a large harmonic universality of world-being would be the very sign of the supramental Person in his gnostic nature.
  --
  Delight of the manifestation of the Spirit in its truth of being would be the sense of the gnostic life. All its movements would be a formulation of the truth of the spirit, but also of the joy of The Gnostic Being the spirit, - an affirmation of spiritual existence, an affirmation of spiritual consciousness, an affirmation of spiritual delight of being. But this would not be what self- affirmation tends to be in us in spite of the underlying unity, something ego-centric, separative, opposed or indifferent or insufficiently alive to the self- affirmation of others or their demand on existence. One in self with all, the supramental being will seek the delight of selfmanifestation of the Spirit in himself but equally the delight of the Divine in all: he will have the cosmic joy and will be a power for bringing the bliss of the spirit, the joy of being to others; for their joy will be part of his own joy of existence. To be occupied with the good of all beings, to make the joy and grief of others one's own has been described as a sign of the liberated and fulfilled spiritual man. The supramental being will have no need, for that, of an altruistic self-effacement, since this occupation will be intimate to his self-fulfilment, the fulfilment of the One in all, and there will be no contradiction or strife between his own good and the good of others: nor will he have any need to acquire a universal sympathy by subjecting himself to the joys and griefs of creatures in the Ignorance; his cosmic sympathy will be part of his inborn truth of being and not dependent on a personal participation in the lesser joy and suffering; it will transcend what it embraces and in that transcendence will be its power. His feeling of universality, his action of universality will be always a spontaneous state and natural movement, an automatic expression of the Truth, an act of the joy of the spirit's self-existence. There could be in it no place for limited self or desire or for the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or the satisfaction or frustration of desire, no place for the relative and dependent happiness and grief that visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are things that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth of the Spirit.
  The gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge of what is to be willed and the power to effectuate its knowledge; it will not be led from ignorance to do what is not to be done. Moreover, its action is not the seeking for a fruit or result; its joy is in being and doing, in pure state of spirit, in pure act of spirit, in the pure bliss of the spirit. As its static consciousness will contain all in itself and must be, therefore, for ever self-fulfilled, so its dynamis of consciousness will find in each step and in each act a spiritual freedom and a self-fulfilment. All will be seen in its relation to the whole, so that each step will be luminous and joyous and satisfying in itself because each is in unison with a luminous totality. This consciousness, this living in the spiritual totality and acting from it, a satisfied totality in essence of being and a satisfied totality in the dynamic movement of being, the sense of the relations of that totality accompanying each step, is indeed the very mark of a supramental consciousness and distinguishes it from the disintegrated, ignorantly successive steps of our consciousness in the Ignorance. The gnostic existence and delight of existence is a universal and total being and delight, and there will be the presence of that totality and universality in each separate movement: in each there will be, not a partial experience of self or a fractional bit of its joy, but the sense of the whole movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and integral bliss of being, Ananda. The gnostic being's knowledge self-realised in action will be, not an ideative knowledge, but the Real-Idea of the supermind, the instrumentation of an essential light of Consciousness; it will be the self-light of all the reality of being and becoming pouring itself out continually and filling every particular act and activity with the pure and whole delight of its self-existence. For an infinite consciousness with its knowledge by identity there is in each differentiation the joy and experience of the Identical, in each finite is felt the Infinite.

2.28 - The Divine Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  30: In fact, this inward turning and movement is not an imprisonment in personal self, it is the first step towards a true universality; it brings to us the truth of our external as well as the truth of our internal existence. For this inner living can extend itself and embrace the universal life, it can contact, penetrate, englobe the life of all with a much greater reality and dynamic force than is in our surface consciousness at all possible. Our utmost universalisation on the surface is a poor and limping endeavour, - it is a construction, a make-believe and not the real thing: for in our surface consciousness we are bound to separation of consciousness from others and wear the fetters of the ego. There our very selflessness becomes more often than not a subtle form of selfishness or turns into a larger affirmation of our ego; content with our pose of altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the imposition of our individual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality, our need of ego-enlargement upon the others whom we take up into our expanded orbit.
  31: So far as we really succeed in living for others, it is done by an inner spiritual force of love and sympathy; but the power and field of effectuality of this force in us are small, the psychic movement that prompts it is incomplete, its action often ignorant because there is contact of mind and heart but our being does not embrace the being of others as ourselves. An external unity with others must always be an outward joining and association of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common external life remains the foundation, - the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure. The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realisation of spiritual unity, a dynamisation of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life.
  --
  68: As he moves towards spiritual freedom, he moves also towards spiritual oneness. The spiritually realised, the liberated man is preoccupied, says the Gita, with the good of all beings; Buddha discovering the way of Nirvana must turn back to open that way to those who are still under the delusion of their constructive instead of their real being - or non-being; Vivekananda, drawn by the Absolute, feels also the call of the disguised Godhead in humanity and most the call of the fallen and the suffering, the call of the self to the self in the obscure body of the universe. For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking, - first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature.
  69: Our nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect unity and fullness of its complexity. Its first evolutionary basis is the material life: Nature began with that and man also has to begin with it; he has first to affirm his material and vital existence. But if he stops there, there can be for him no evolution; his next and greater preoccupation must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life - both individual and social - as perfected as possible. This was the direction which the Hellenic idea gave to European civilisation, and the Roman reinforced - or weakened - it with the ideal of organised power: the cult of reason, the interpretation of life by an intellectual thought critical, utilitarian, organising and constructive, the government of life by Science are the last outcome of this inspiration. But in ancient times the higher creative and dynamic element was the pursuit of an ideal truth, good and beauty and the moulding of mind, life and body into perfection and harmony by this ideal. Beyond and above this preoccupation, as soon as mind is sufficiently developed, there awakes in man the spiritual preoccupation, the discovery of a self and inmost truth of being and the release of man's mind and life into the truth of the Spirit, its perfection by the power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of all beings in the Spirit. This was the Eastern ideal carried by Buddhism and other ancient disciplines to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe.
  --
  92: A gnostic Supernature transcends all the values of our normal ignorant Nature; our standards and values are created by ignorance and therefore cannot determine the life of Supernature. At the same time our present nature is a derivation from Supernature and is not a pure ignorance but a half-knowledge; it is therefore reasonable to suppose that whatever spiritual truth there is in or behind its standards and values will reappear in the higher life, not as standards, but as elements transformed, uplifted out of the ignorance and raised into the true harmony of a more luminous existence. As the universalised spiritual individual sheds the limited personality, the ego, as he rises beyond mind to a completer knowledge in Supernature, the conflicting ideals of the mind must fall away from him, but what is true behind them will remain in the life of Supernature. The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind's ideals and standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for humanity or for others or for the community or for the State; for he will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence. For the same reason there can be no conflict between self- affirmation and altruism in the gnostic life, for the self of the gnostic being is one with the self of all, - no conflict between the ideal of individualism and the collective ideal, for both are terms of a greater Reality and only in so far as either expresses the Reality or their fulfilment serves the will of the Reality, can they have a value for his spirit. But at the same time what is true in the mental ideals and dimly figured in them will be fulfilled in his existence; for while his consciousness exceeds the human values so that he cannot substitute mankind or the community or the State or others or himself for God, the affirmation of the Divine in himself and a sense of the Divine in others and the sense of oneness with humanity, with all other beings, with all the world because of the Divine in them and a lead towards a greater and better affirmation of the growing Reality in them will be part of his life action. But what he shall do will be decided by the Truth of the Knowledge and Will in him, a total and infinite Truth that is not bound by any single mental law or standard but acts with freedom in the whole reality, with respect for each truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and the intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic evolution and in each event and circumstance.
  93: All life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic consciousness must be the manifestation of the realised truth of spirit; only what can transform itself and find its own spiritual self in that greater Truth and fuse itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance. What will so survive the mind cannot determine, for the supramental gnosis will itself bring down its own truth and that truth will take up whatever of itself has been put forth in our ideals and realisations of mind and life and body. The forms it has taken there may not survive, for they are not likely to be suitable without change or replacement in the new existence; but what is real and abiding in them or even in their forms will undergo the transformation necessary for survival. Much that is normal to human life would disappear. In the light of gnosis the many mental idols, constructed principles and systems, conflicting ideals which man has created in all domains of his mind and life, could comm and no acceptance or reverence; only the truth, if any, which these specious images conceal, could have a chance of entry as elements of a harmony founded on a much wider basis. It is evident that in a life governed by the gnostic consciousness war with its spirit of antagonism and enmity, its brutality, destruction and ignorant violence, political strife with its perpetual conflict, frequent oppression, dishonesties, turpitudes, selfish interests, its ignorance, ineptitude and muddle could have no ground for existence. The arts and the crafts would exist, not for any inferior mental or vital amusement, entertainment of leisure and relieving excitement or pleasure, but as expressions and means of the truth of the spirit and the beauty and delight of existence. Life and the body would be no longer tyrannous masters demanding nine tenths of existence for their satisfaction, but means and powers for the expression of the spirit. At the same time, since matter and the body are accepted, the control and the right use of physical things would be a part of the realised life of the spirit in the manifestation in earth-nature.

23.11 - Observations III, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Any affirmation made by the mind and the senses as they are at present constituted must be suspected: it is bound to be altogether wrong or very partial and inadequate. Observe and wait for it to pass through the crucible of later experiences - invoking all the while the higher light to descend and intervene.
   It is much easier to counter the bad will of the enemy than to butt the good will of the friends.

2 - Other Hymns to Agni, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  the Son as if in an eternal birth. Accept my affirmation of
  thee, O Fire, perfectly born in thy body.

3.02 - The Psychology of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  207 Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the
  primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirma-
  tions are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that
  all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in
  the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not
  surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth
  can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There
  must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is
  the business of psychology to discuss without entering into all

3.07 - The Formula of the Holy Grail, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  soothing-syrup affirmations such as those of Christian Science, Spiritualism, and all
  the sham occult creeds, as well as the emasculated forms of so-called Christianity.

3.08 - The Mystery of Love, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   first in different limited affirmations of his divine qualities and nature; he presents himself to the seeker as an absolute of the things he can understand and to which his will and heart can respond; he discloses some name and aspect of his Godhead.
  This is what is called in Yoga the is.t.a-devata, the name and form elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ,

3.1.01 - The Problem of Suffering and Evil, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   consciousness and wisdom and absolute Delight which is behind all creation and non-creation and the affirmation and negation are both seen with the eyes of the ineffable Reality that delivers and reconciles them. But that knowledge is not expressible to the human mind; its language of light is too undecipherable, the light itself too bright for a consciousness accustomed to the stress and obscurity of the cosmic riddle and too entangled in it to follow the clue or to grasp the secret. In any case, it is only when we rise in the spirit beyond the zone of the darkness and the struggle that we enter into the full significance of it and there is a deliverance of the soul from its enigma. To rise to that height of liberation is the true way out and the only means of the indubitable knowledge.
  But that liberation and transcendence need not necessarily impose a disappearance, a sheer dissolving cut from the manifestation; it can prepare a liberation into action of the highest

3.16 - THE SEVEN SEALS OR THE YES AND AMEN SONG, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing
  lions."

3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I do not base my Yoga on the insufficient ground that the Self (not soul) is eternally free. That affirmation leads to nothing beyond itself, or, if used as a starting-point, it could equally well lead to the conclusion that action and creation have no significance or value. The question is not that but of the meaning of creation, whether there is a Supreme who is not merely a pure undifferentiated Consciousness and Being, but the source and support also of the dynamic energy of creation and whether the cosmic existence has for It a significance and a value. That is a question which cannot be settled by metaphysical logic which deals in words and ideas, but by a spiritual experience which goes beyond Mind and enters into spiritual realities. Each mind is satisfied with its own reasoning, but for spiritual purposes that satisfaction has no validity, except as an indication of how far and on what line each one is prepared to go in the field of spiritual experience. If your reasoning leads you towards the Shankara idea of the Supreme, that might be an indication that the Vedanta Adwaita (Mayavada) is your way of advance.
  This Yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine Supramental Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ananda. But for that, surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to that Higher Consciousness is indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a supramental consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this Yoga.

3.3.1 - Illness and Health, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is certainly better not to dwell on the difficulties or give them too much voice, because, our experience shows us, to do so helps to make them return like a recurring decimal. The Cou formula is too crude and simple to be entirely true in principle, but it has a great practical force, and behind it there is a very great truth in a world and a consciousness governed by the Overmind Maya: it is this, that what we affirm strongly gets power to persist in the consciousness and experience and calls circumstances to its support, what we deny and reject and refuse to support by the power of the Word, tends, after a time and some resistance, to lose force in the consciousness and the circumstances and movements that support it tend also to recur less often and finally disappear. It is fundamentally the principle of the mantra. On that ground I approve of your resolution not to give any more the avalambana of the written word to these things. A constant affirmation from within on the other sideof that which is to be realisedbrings always in the end a response from above.
  ***

3.4.01 - Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The theory of materialistic evolution led naturally to the idea of a slow and gradual progression in a straight line. It admits reversions, atavisms, loops and zigzags of reaction deflecting the straight line, but these must necessarily be subordinate, hardly visible if we calculate by ages rather than by shorter periods of time. Here too, fuller knowledge disturbs the received notions. In the history of man everything seems now to point to alternations of a serious character, ages of progression, ages of recoil, the whole constituting an evolution that is cyclic rather than in one straight line. A theory of cycles of human civilisation has been advanced, we may yet arrive at the theory of cycles of human evolution, the Kalpa and Manwantaras of the Hindu theory. If its affirmation of cycles of world-existence is farther off from affirmation, it is because they must be so vast in their periods as to escape not only all our means of observation, but all our means of deduction or definite inference.
  Instead of slow, steady, minute gradations it is now suggested that new steps in evolution are rather effected by rapid and sudden outbursts, outbreaks, as it were, of manifestation from the unmanifest. Shall we say that Nature preparing slowly behind the veil, working a little backwards, working a little forwards, one day arrives at the combination of outward things which makes it possible for her to throw her new idea into a realised formation, suddenly, with violence, with a glorious dawning, with a grandiose stride? And that would explain the economy of her relapses and her reappearances of things long dead. She aims at a certain immediate result and to arrive at it more quickly and entirely she sacrifices many of her manifestations and throws them back into the latent, the unmanifest, the subconscient. But she has not finished with them; she will need them at another stage for a farther result. Therefore she brings them forward again and they reappear in new forms and other combinations and act towards new ends. So evolution advances.

3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is possible that Heraclitus may so have thought, but it is not the logical conclusion of his theory; it contradicts the evident suggestion of his metaphor about the road which implies a starting-point and a point of return; and we have too the distinct statement of the Stoics that he believed in the theory of conflagration,-an assertion which they are hardly likely to have made if this were not generally accepted as his teaching. The modern arguments against enumerated by Mr. Ranade are founded upon misconceptions. Heraclitus' affirmation is not simply that the One is always Many, the Many always One, but in his own words, "out of all the One and out of One all." Plato's phrasing of the thought, "the reality is both many and one and in its division it is always being brought together," states the same idea in different language. It means a constant current and back-current of change, the upward and downward road, and we may suppose that as the One by downward change becomes completely the All in the descending process, yet remains eternally the one ever-living Fire, so the All by upward change may resort completely to the One and yet essentially exist, since it can again return into various being by the repetition of the downward movement. All difficulty disappears if we remember that what is implied is a process of evolution and involution,-so too the Indian word for creation, sṛṣṭi, means a release or bringing forth of what is held in, latent,-and that the conflagration destroys existing forms, but not the principle of multiplicity. There will be then no inconsistency at all in Heraclitus' theory of a periodic conflagration; it is rather, that being the highest expression of change, the complete logic of his system.
    Now again rejected, though that does not seem to be indubitable or final. ↩

3.7.1.05 - The Significance of Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The oppressing sense of a circle of mechanical recurrence and the passionate seeking for an outlet of absolute escape haunted the earlier statements of the truth of rebirth and have left upon them in spite of the depths they fathomed a certain stamp of unsatisfactory inadequacy,not illogical, for they are logical enough, once their premisses are admitted, but unsatisfying, because they do not justify to us our being. For, missing the divine utility of the cosmic workings, they fail to explain to us with a sufficiently large, patient, steadfast wholeness God and ourselves and existence, negate too much, miss the positive sense of our strain and leave sounding an immense note of spiritual futility and cosmic discord. No statement of the sense of our being or our non-being has laid a more insistent stress on rebirth than did the Buddhistic; but it affirms strongly only the more strongly to negate. It views the recurrence of birth as a prolonged mechanical chain; it sees, with a sense of suffering and distaste, the eternal revolving of an immense cosmic wheel of energy with no divine sense in its revolutions, its beginning an affirmation of ignorant desire, its end a nullifying bliss of escape. The wheel turns uselessly for ever disturbing the peace of Non-being and creating souls whose one difficult chance and whole ideal business is to cease. That conception of being is only an extension from our first matter-governed sense of the universe, of our creation in it and of our decisive cessation. It takes up at every point our first obvious view of the bodily life and restates all its circumstances in the terms of a more psychical and spiritual idea of our existence.
  What we see in the material universe is a stupendous system of mechanical recurrences. A huge mechanical recurrence rules that which is long-enduring and vast; a similar but frailer mechanical recurrence sways all that is ephemeral and small. The suns leap up into being, flame wheeling in space, squander force by motion and fade and are extinct, again perhaps to blaze into being and repeat their course, or else other suns take their place and fulfil their round. The seasons of Time repeat their unending and unchanging cycle. Always the tree of life puts forth its various flowers and sheds them and breaks into the same flowers in their recurring season. The body of man is born and grows and decays and perishes, but it gives birth to other bodies which maintain the one same futile cycle. What baffles the intelligence in all this intent and persistent process is that it seems to have in it no soul of meaning, no significance except the simple fact of causeless and purposeless existence dogged or relieved by the annulling or the compensating fact of individual cessation. And this is because we perceive the mechanism, but do not see the Power that uses the mechanism and the intention in its use. But the moment we know that there is a conscious Spirit self-wise and infinite brooding upon the universe and a secret slowly self-finding soul in things, we get to the necessity of an idea in its consciousness, a thing conceived, willed, set in motion and securely to be done, progressively to be fulfilled by these great deliberate workings.
  But the Buddhistic statement admits no self, spirit or eternal Being in its rigorously mechanical economy of existence. It takes only the phenomenon of a constant becoming and elevates that from the physical to the psychical level. As there is evident to our physical mind an Energy, action, motion, capable of creating by its material forces the forms and powers of the material universe, so there is for the Buddhistic vision of things an Energy, action, Karma, creating by its psychic powers of idea and association this embodied soul life with its continuity of recurrences. As the body is a dissoluble construction, a composite and combination, so the soul too is a dissoluble construction and combination; the soul life like the physical life sustains itself by a continuous flux and repetition of the same workings and movements. As this constant hereditary succession of lives is a prolongation of the one universal principle of life by a continued creation of similar bodies, a mechanical recurrence, so the system of soul rebirth too is a constant prolongation of the principle of the soul life by a continued creation through Karma of similar embodied associations and experiences, a mechanical recurrence. As the cause of all this physical birth and long hereditary continuation is an obscure will to life in Matter, so the cause of continued soul birth is an ignorant desire or will to be in the universal energy of Karma. As the constant wheelings of the universe and the motions of its forces generate individual existences who escape from or end in being by an individual dissolution, so there is this constant wheel of becoming and motion of Karma which forms into individualised soul-lives that must escape from their continuity by a dissolving cessation. An extinction of the embodied consciousness is our apparent material end; for soul too the end is extinction, the blank satisfaction of Nothingness or some ineffable bliss of a superconscientNon-Being. The affirmation of the mechanical occurrence or recurrence of birth is the essence of this view; but while the bodily life suffers an enforced end and dissolution, the soul life ceases by a willed self-extinction.
  The Buddhistic theory adds nothing to the first obvious significance of life except an indefinite prolongation by rebirth which is a burden, not a gain, and the spiritual greatness of the discipline of self-extinction,the latter, no doubt, a thing of great value. The illusionist solution adds something, but does not differ very greatly in its motive from the Buddhistic. It sets against the futile cosmic repetition an eternity of our own absolute being; from the ignorance which creates the illusory mechanism of a recurrence of rebirth, it escapes into the self-knowledge of our ineffable existence. That seems to bring in a positive strain and to give to our being an initial, a supporting and an eventual reality. But the hiatus here is the absence of all true and valid relation between this real being of ours and all our birth and becoming. The last event and end of our births is not represented as any absolute fulfilment of what we are,that would be a great, fruitful and magnificently positive philosophy, nor as the final affirmation of a progressive self-finding,that too would give a noble meaning to our existence; it is a turning away from the demand of the universal Spirit, a refusal of all these cosmic ideas, imaginations, aspirations, action and effectuation. The way to find our being given us is an absolute denial of all our becoming. We rise to self by a liberating negation of ourselves, and in the result the Idea in the universe pursues its monstrous and aimless road, but the individual ceases and is blest in the cessation. The motive of this way of thought is the same oppressive sense of an ignorant mechanical cosmic recurrence as in the Buddhistic and the same high impatient passion of escape. There is recognition of a divine source of life, but a non-recognition of any divine meaning in life. And as for rebirth it is reduced in its significance to a constant mechanism of self-deception, and the will not to live is shown us as the last acquisition, the highest good and the one desirable result of living. The satisfaction which Illusionism gives,for it does give a certain high austere kind of satisfaction to the intellectand to one turn of spiritual tendency,is the pressing to a last point of the obvious antinomy between this great burdensome and tyrannous mechanism, the universe, and the spirit which feels itself of another and a diviner nature, the great relief to a soul passioning for freedom, but compelled to labour on as a spring of the dull machine, of being able to cast away the cosmic burden, and finally the free and bare absoluteness of this spiritual conclusion. But it gives no real, because no fruitful answer to the problem of God and man and the significance of life; it only gets away from them by a skilful evasion and takes away from them all significance, so that any question of the sense and will in all this tremendous labour and throb and seeking loses meaning. But the challenge of Gods universe to the knowledge and strength of the human spirit cannot in the end be met by man with a refusal or solved by an evasion, even though an individual soul may take refuge from the demand, as a man may from the burden of action and pain in unconsciousness, in spiritual trance or sleep or escape through its blank doors into the Absolute. Something the Spirit of the universe means by our labour in existence, some sense it has in these grandiose rhythms, and it has not undertaken them in an eternally enduring error or made them in a jest.1 To know that and possess it, to find and fulfil consciously the universal beings hidden significances is the task given to the human spirit.
  There are other statements or colourings of the idea of rebirth which admit a more positive sense for existence and nourish a robuster confidence in the power and delight of being which are its secret fountains; but they all stumble in the end over the limitations of humanity and an inability to see any outlet from their bondage in the order of the universe, because they suppose this to be a thing fixed from of years sempiternalvatbhya sambhya, not an eternally developing and creative, but an immutable cycle. The Vaishnava idea of the play of God, striking as it does into the secret of the hidden deligh the core of things, is a luminous ray shot into the very heart of the mystery; but isolated it cannot solve all its enigma. There is more here in the world than a play of secret delight; there is knowledge, there is power, there is a will and a mighty labour. Rebirth so looked at becomes too much of a divine caprice with no object but its playing, and ours is too great and strenuous a world to be so accounted for. Such chequered delight as is given to our becoming, is a game of disguises and seekings with no promise here of any divine completeness; its circles seem in the end not worth following out and the soul turns gladly to its release from the games unsatisfying mazes. The Tantric solution shows us a supreme superconscient Energy which casts itself out ere into teeming worlds and multitudinous beings and in its order the soul rises from birth to birth and follows its million forms, till in a last human series it opens to the consciousness and powers of its own divinity and returns through them by a rapid illumination to the eternal superconscience. We find at last the commencement of a satisfying synthesis, some justification of existence, a meaningful consequence in rebirth, a use and a sufficient though only temporary significance for the great motion of the cosmos. On lines very like these the modern mind, when it is disposed to accept rebirth, is inclined to view it. But there is a too minor stress on the souls divine potentialities, a haste of insistence on the escape into superconscience; the supreme Energy constructs too long and stupendous a preparation for so brief and so insufficient a flowering. There is a lacuna here, some secret is still missing.

3.7.1.06 - The Ascending Unity, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   the metaphysical intellect and at the same time attract and overpower the ordinary mind by the grandiose eminence of the peak in which they end, some snow-white heaven-cutting Matterhorn of sovereign formula. What a magnificent exterminating sweep do we hear for instance in that old renowned sentence, brahma satyam jagan mithya, the Eternal alone is true, the universe is a lie, and how these four victorious words seem to settle the whole business of God and man and world and life at once and for ever in their uncompromising antithesis of affirmation and negation.
  But after all perhaps when we come to think more at large about the matter, we may find that Nature and Existence are not of the same mind as man in this respect, that there is here a great complexity which we must follow with patience and that those ways of thinking have most chance of a fruitful truth-yielding, which like the inspired thinking of the Upanishads take in many sides at once and reconcile many conflicting conclusions. One can hew material for a hundred philosophies out of the Upanishads as if from some bottomless Titans' quarry and yet no more exhaust it than one can exhaust the opulent bosom of our mother Earth or the riches of our father Ether.

3.7.1.07 - Involution and Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For evolution, as is the habit with the human reason's accounts and solutions of the deep and unfathomable way of the spirit in things, raises more questions than it solves; it does not do away with the problem of creation, for all its appearance of solid orderly fact, any more than the religious affirmation of an external omnipotent Creator could do it or the illusionist's mystic Maya, aghat.ana-ghat.ana-pat.yas, very skilful in bringing about the impossible, some strange existent non-existent Power with an idea in That which is beyond and without ideas, selfempowered to create an existent non-existent world, existent because it very evidently is, non-existent because it is a patched up consistency of dreamful unreal transiences. The problem is only prolonged, put farther back, given a subtle and orderly, but all the more challengingly complex appearance. But, even when our questioning is confined to the one issue of evolution alone, the difficulty still arises of the essential significance of the bare outward facts observed, what is meant by evolution, what is it that evolves, from what and by what force of necessity? The scientist is content to affirm an original matter or substance, atomic, electric, etheric or whatever it may finally turn out to be, which by the very nature of its own inherent energy or of an
  Involution and Evolution

3.7.1.08 - Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This Infinite is figured in both cases by the more insistent and positive type of mind as an Inconscience, - but material in the one, in the other a spiritual infinite zero, - but by the more prudent or flexible thinkers simply as an unknowable. The difference is that the unknown of Science is something mechanical to which mechanically we return by physical dissolution or laya, but the unknown of Buddhism is a Permanent beyond the Law to which we return spiritually by an effort of self-suppression, of self-renunciation and, at the latest end, of self-extinction, by a mental dissolution of the Idea which maintains the law of relations and a moral dissolution of the world-desire which keeps up the stream of successions of the universal action. This is a rare and an austere metaphysics; but to its discouraging grandeur we are by no means compelled to give assent, for it is neither self-evident nor inevitable. It is by no means so certain that a high spiritual negation of what I am is my only possible road to perfection; a high spiritual affirmation and absolute of what I am may be also a feasible way and gate. This nobly glacial or blissfully void idea of a Nirvana, because it is so overwhelmingly a negation, cannot finally satisfy the human spirit, which
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  --
   is drawn persistently to some highest positive and affirmation of itself and only uses negations by the way the better to rid itself of what comes in as an obstacle to its self-finding. To the everlasting No the living being may resign itself by an effort, a sorrowful or a superb turning upon itself and existence, but the everlasting Yes is its native attraction: our spiritual orientation, the magnetism that draws the soul, is to eternal Being and not to eternal Non-Being.
  Nevertheless certain essential and needed clues are there in the theory of Karma. And first, there is this assurance, this firm ground on which I can base a sure tread, that in the mental and moral world as in the physical universe there is no chaos, fortuitous rule of chance or mere probability, but an ordered

3.7.1.09 - Karma and Freedom, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But if this extinction may be called a liberation, it is yet not a status of freedom; for that can only repose upon an affirmation, a permanence, not upon a negative and extinction of all affirmations, and needs too, one would imagine, a someone or something that is free. The Buddha himself, it may be remarked, seems to have conceived of Nirvana as a status of absolute bliss of freedom, a negation of Karmic existence in some incognisable Absolute which he refused steadfastly to describe or define by any positive or any negative,as indeed definition by any exclusive positive or widest sum of positives or any negative or complete sum of negatives would seem by the very fact of its bringing in a definition and thereby a limitation to be inapplicable to the Absolute. The Illusionists Maya is a more mystic thing and more obscure to the intelligence; but we have at least here a Self, a positive Infinite which is capable therefore of an eternal freedom, but only in inaction, by cessation from Karma. For the self as the individual, the soul in action of Karma is bound always by ignorance, and only by rejection of individuality and of the cosmic illusion can we return to the liberty of the Absolute. What we see in both these systems is that spiritual freedom and the cosmic compulsion are equally admitted, but in a total separation and an exclusion from each others own proper field,still as absolute opposites and contraries. Compulsion of ignorance or Karma is absolute in the world of birth; freedom of the spirit is absolute in a withdrawal from birth and cosmos and Karma.
  But these trenchant systems, however satisfactory to the logical reason, are suspect to a synthetic intelligence; and at any rate, as we find that knowledge and ignorance are not in their essence absolute contraries but ignorance and inconscience itself the veil of a secret knowledge, so it may be at least possible that liberty and the compulsion of Karma are not such unbridgeable opposites, but that behind and even in Karma itself there is all the time a secret liberty of the indwelling Spirit. Buddhism and Illusionism too do not assert any external or internal predestination, but only a self-imposed bondage. And very insistently they demand of man a choice between the right and the wrong way, between the will to an impermanent existence and the will to Nirvana, between a will to cosmic existence and the will to an absolute spiritual being. Nor do they demand this choice of the Absolute or of the universal Being or Power, who indeed cares nothing for their claim and goes on very tranquilly and securely with his mighty eternal action, but they ask it of the individual, of the soul of man halting perplexed between the oppositions of his mentality. It would seem then that there is something in our individual being which has some real freedom of will, some power of choice of a great consequence and magnitude, and what is it then that thus chooses, and what are the limits, where the beginning or the end of its actual or its possible liberty?

3.7.1.12 - Karma and Justice, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This correspondence is, still, more essentially true in the inner field, in the spiritual, mental and emotional result and reaction of the good or the evil or of the effects of its outgoing action. But where is the firm link of correspondence between the ethical and the more vital and physical hedonistic powers of life? How does my ethical good turn into smiling fortune, crowned prosperity, sleek material good and happiness to myself and my ethical evil into frowning misfortune, rugged adversity, sordid material ill and suffering,for that is what the desire soul of man and the intelligence governed by it seem to demand, and how is the account squared or the transmutation made between these two very different energies of the affirmation and denial of good? We can see this much that the good or the evil in me translates itself into a good or an evil action which among other things brings about much mental and material happiness and suffering to others, and to this outgoing power and effect there ought to be an equal reaction of incoming power and effect, though it does not seem to work itself out immediately or with any discoverable exactness of correspondence. There does still appear to be a principle of rebound in Nature; our action has in some degree the motion of recoil of the boomerang and cycles back towards the will that has cast it on the world. The stone we hurl rashly against the universal Life is cast back at us and may crush, maim or injure our own mental and physical being. But this mechanical rebound is not the whole principle of Karma. Nor is Karma wholly a mixed ethical-hedonistic order in its total significance, for there are involved other powers of our consciousness and being. Nor is it again a pure mechanism which we set going by our will and have then helplessly to accept the result; for the will which produced the effect, can also intervene to modify it. And above all the initiating and receiving consciousness can change the values and utilities of the reactions and make another thing of life than this automatic mechanism of fateful return or retri bution to the half-blind embodied actor in a mute necessity of rigorous law of Nature.
  The relation of our consciousness and will to Karma is the thing upon which all the subtler lines of action and consequence must depend; that connexus must be the hinge of the whole significance. The dependence of the pursuit of ethical values on a sanction by the inferior hedonistic values, material, vital and lower mental pleasure, pain and suffering, appeals strongly to our normal consciousness and will; but it ceases to have more than a subordinate force and finally loses all force as we grow towards greater heights of our being. That dependence cannot then be the whole or the final power or guiding norm of Karma. The relation of will to action and consequence must be cast on more subtle and liberal lines. The universal Spirit in the law of Karma must deal with man in the lower scale of values only as a part of the transaction and as a concession to mans own present motives. Man himself puts these values, makes that demand for pleasure and prosperity and dreads their opposites, desires heaven more than he loves virtue, fears hell more than he abhors sin, and while he does so, the world-dispensation wears to him that meaning and colour. But the spirit of existence is not merely a legislator and judge concerned to maintain a standard of legal justice, to dole out deterrents and sanctions, rewards and penalties, ferocious pains of hell, indulgent joys of paradise. He is the Divine in the world, the Master of a spiritual evolution and the growing godhead in humanity. That godhead grows however slowly beyond the dependence on the sanctions of pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure govern our primary being and in that primary scale pain is Natures advertisement of things we should avoid, pleasure her lure to things she would tempt us to pursue. These devices are first empirical tests for limited objects; but as I grow, I pass beyond their narrower uses. I have continually to disregard Natures original warnings and lures in order to get to a higher nature. I have to develop a nobler spiritual law of Karma.

3.7.2.04 - The Higher Lines of Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  At the same time this also is a line of the world energy,for the world Shakti is a Shakti of consciousness and knowledge and not only a Power of force and action, and the output of the energy of knowledge brings its results as surely as the energy of the will seeking after success in action or after right ethical conduct. But the result that it brings on this higher plane of the seeking in mind is simply and purely the upward growth of the soul in light and truth; that and whatever happiness it brings is the one supreme reward demanded by the soul of knowledge and the darkening of the light within, the pain of the fall from truth, the pain of the imperfection of not living only by its law and wholly in the light is its one penalty of suffering. The outward rewards and the sufferings of life are small things to the higher soul of knowledge in man: even his high mind of knowledge will often face all that the world can do to afflict it, just as it is ready to make all manner of sacrifices in the pursuit and the affirmation of the truth it knows and lives for. Bruno burning in the Roman fire, the martyrs of all religions suffering and welcoming as witnesses to the light within them torture and persecution, Buddha leaving all to discover the dark cause of universal suffering in this world of the impermanence and the way of escape into the supreme Permanence, the ascetic casting away as an illusion life in the world and its activities, enjoyments, attractions with the one will to enter into the absolute truth and the supreme consciousness are witnesses to this imperative of knowledge, its extreme examples and exponents.
  The intention of Nature, the spiritual justification of her ways appears at last in this turn of her energies leading the conscious soul along the lines of truth and knowledge. At first she is physical Nature building her firm field according to a base of settled truth and law but determined by a subconscient knowledge she does not yet share with her creatures. Next she is Life growing slowly self-conscious, seeking out knowledge that she may move seeingly in them along her ways and increase at once the complexity and the efficacy of her movements, but developing slowly too the consciousness that knowledge must be pursued for a higher and purer end, for truth, for the satisfaction, as the life expression and as the spiritual self-finding of the soul of knowledge. But, last, it is that soul itself growing in the truth and light, growing into the absolute truth of itself which is its perfection, that becomes the law and high end of her energies. And at each stage she gives returns according to the development of the aim and consciousness of the being. At first there is the return of skill and effectual intelligence and her own need explains sufficiently why she gives the rewards of life not, as the ethical mind in us would have it, to the just, not chiefly to moral good, but to the skilful and to the strong, to will and force and intelligence, and then, more and more clearly disengaged, the return of enlightenment and the satisfaction of the mind and the soul in the conscious use and wise direction of its powers and capacities and, last of all, the one supreme return, the increase of the soul in light, the satisfaction of its perfection in knowledge, its birth into the highest consciousness and the pure fulfilment of its own innate imperative. It is that growth, a divine birth or spiritual self-exceeding its supreme reward, which for the Eastern mind has been always the highest gain,the growth out of human ignorance into divine self-knowledge.

3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  the general affirmation which we know as pure Atman, Self of
  itself, not yet of things, where nothing is yet differentiated and
  --
  for style) his perfect affirmation. The epithets are not chosen
  at random; because Agni is the most Angiras, has most power

4.11 - The Perfection of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality. In terms of devotion and adoration it is a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of the being of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire, -- for if there is not this likeness, this oneness of the law of the being, unity between that transcending and universal and this individual spirit is not possible. The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence. The pure Self is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse to them, -- aversion is not equality, nor, if that were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could the universe come at all into being or proceed upon its cycles, -- a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority to the reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent Infinite's purity and the condition of its impartial assent and support to the many-sided movement of the universe. But in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops these motions, the same equality is a basic condition.
  The Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject to them, not master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign will and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of what is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution -- to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction -- from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy-the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight in self and things which are the active universal outpourings from those infinite sources. In the strength of that light, power and joy a secret self and spirit within us accepts and transforms always into food of its perfect experience the dual letters of the mind's transcript of life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence even now within us, we could not bear the pressure of the universal force or subsist in this great and dangerous world. A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit's eternal kingdoms, rajyam samrddham, of greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.

4.1.3 - Imperfections and Periods of Arrest, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A difficulty comes or an arrest in some movement which you have begun or have been carrying on for some time. How is it to be dealt with?for such arrests are inevitably frequent enough, not only for you, but for everyone who is a seeker; one might almost say that every step forward is followed by an arrestat least, that is a very common, if not a universal experience. It is to be dealt with by becoming always more quiet, more firm in the will to go through, by opening oneself more and more so that any obstructing non-receptivity in the nature may diminish or disappear, by an affirmation of faith even in the midst of the obscurity, faith in the presence of a Power that is working behind the cloud and the veil, in the guidance of the Guru, by an observation of oneself to find any cause of the arrest, not in a spirit of depression or discouragement but with the will to find out and remove it. This is the only right attitude and, if one is persistent in taking it, the periods of arrest are not abolished,for that cannot be at this stage,but greatly shortened and lightened in their incidence. Sometimes these arrests are periods, long or short, of assimilation or unseen preparation, their appearance of sterile immobility is deceptive: in that case, with the right attitude, one can after a time, by opening, by observation, by accumulated experience, begin to feel, to get some inkling of what is being prepared or done. Sometimes it is a period of true obstruction in which the Power at work has to deal with the obstacles in the way, obstacles in oneself, obstacles of the opposing cosmic forces or any other or of all together, and this kind of arrest may be long or short according to the magnitude or obstinacy or complexity of the impediments that are met. But here too the right attitude can alleviate or shorten and, if persistently taken, help to a more radical removal of the difficulties and greatly diminish the necessity of complete arrests hereafter.
  On the contrary, an attitude of depression or unfaith in the help or the guidance or in the certitude of the victory of the guiding Power, a shutting up of yourself in the sense of the difficulties impedes the recovery, prolongs the difficulties, helps the obstructions to recur with force instead of progressively diminishing in their incidence. It is an attitude whose persistence or recurrence you must resolutely throw aside if you want to get over the obstruction which you feel so muchwhich the depressed attitude only makes, while it lasts, more acute.

4.2.3 - Vigilance, Resolution, Will and the Divine Help, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is no reason for despondency; when one has progressed as far as you did, that is, so far as to feel and maintain the calm and have so much of the psychic discrimination and the psychic feeling, one has no right to despair of ones spiritual future. You could not yet carry out the discrimination into an entire psychic change, because a large part of the outer physical consciousness still took some pleasure in old movements and therefore their roots remained alive in the subconscient. When you were off your guard the whole thing rose up and there was a temporary and violent lapse. But this does not mean that the nature is not changeable. Only the calm inner conscious poise, the psychic discrimination and above all a will to change, stronger and steadier than before, must be so established that no uprising or invasion will be able to cloud even partly the discrimination or suspend the will. You saw the truth but this part of the old nature which rose up did not want to acknowledgeit wanted its play and imposed that on you. This time you must insist on a complete truthfulness in the whole being which will refuse to accept any denial of what the psychic discrimination sees or any affirmation or consent anywhere to what it disapproves, spiritual humility and the removal of self-righteousness, self-justification and the wish to impose yourself, the tendency to judge others etc. All these defects you know are in you; to cast them out may take time, but if the will to be true to the inner self in all ways is strong and persistent and vigilant and always calls in the Mothers force, it can be done sooner than now seems possible.
  ***

4.3 - Bhakti, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  539. God's negations are as useful to us as His affirmations. It is He who as the Atheist denies His own existence for the better
  Bhakti

5.01 - EPILOGUE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  promising affirmation of a personal God : God as providence,
  directing the universe with loving, watchful care ; and God the
  --
  taken in this book its originality is the affirmation, at the outset,
  that the particular property possessed by terrestrial substances of
  --
  value of a ' threshold ' or a change of state. This affirmation is
  far from being an unwarranted assumption or based initially on

6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  mordial affirmation of mankind,
  116; psychic reality, 116

Aeneid, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  for his own later castings ahead, his affirmations of Utopia as nearer
  and perhaps here, in the same climate that allowed the absolute conviction of Trotsky's 1924 coda to Literature and Revolution: "The

Avatars of the Tortoise, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  the things about which the affirmation is made (and this is what the
  Platonists pretend), it is necessary that there be a third man. Man is a

Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  now for those who merit it. Careful testing rather than arrogant affirmations or logical
  reasoning teaches him what is right. Materialistic values derive naturally from this thema in

Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  stability and affirmation.102
  The self-sense of the Unitive stage is fluid, undulating, based on peoples trust in the

BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  evolved them -- and no more. While they deny, we affirm; and our affirmation is corroborated by
  almost all the sages of antiquity. Believing in Occultism and a host of invisible Potencies for good

BOOK VIII. - Some account of the Socratic and Platonic philosophy, and a refutation of the doctrine of Apuleius that the demons should be worshipped as mediators between gods and men, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all. By birth an Athenian of honourable parentage, he far surpassed his fellow-disciples in natural endowments, of which he was possessed in a wonderful degree. Yet, deeming himself and the Socratic discipline far from sufficient for bringing philosophy to perfection, he travelled as extensively as he was able, going to every place famed for the cultivation of any science of which he could make himself master. Thus he learned from the Egyptians whatever they held and taught as important; and from Egypt, passing into those parts of Italy which were filled with the fame of the Pythagoreans, he mastered, with the greatest facility, and under the most eminent teachers, all the Italic philosophy which was then in vogue. And, as he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and politeness of the Socratic style. And, as the study of wisdom consists in action and contemplation, so that one part of it may be called active, and the other contemplative,the active part having reference to the conduct of life, that is, to the regulation of morals, and the contemplative part to the investigation into the causes of nature and into pure truth,Socrates is said to have excelled in the active part of that study, while Pythagoras gave more attention to its contemplative part, on which he brought to bear all the force of his great intellect. To Plato is given the praise of having perfected philosophy by combining both parts into one. He[Pg 311] then divides it into three parts,the first moral, which is chiefly occupied with action; the second natural, of which the object is contemplation; and the third rational, which discriminates between the true and the false. And though this last is necessary both to action and contemplation, it is contemplation, nevertheless, which lays peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of truth. Thus this tripartite division is not contrary to that which made the study of wisdom to consist in action and contemplation. Now, as to what Plato thought with respect to each of these parts,that is, what he believed to be the end of all actions, the cause of all natures, and the light of all intelligences,it would be a question too long to discuss, and about which we ought not to make any rash affirmation. For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates. We must, nevertheless, insert into our work certain of those opinions which he expresses in his writings, whether he himself uttered them, or narrates them as expressed by others, and seems himself to approve of,opinions sometimes favourable to the true religion, which our faith takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it, as, for example, in the questions concerning the existence of one God or of many, as it relates to the truly blessed life which is to be after death. For those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles, and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness in understanding him, do perhaps entertain such an idea of God as to admit that in Him are to be found the cause of existence, the ultimate reason for the understanding, and the end in reference to which the whole life is to be regulated. Of which three things, the first is understood to pertain to the natural, the second to the rational, and the third to the moral part of philosophy. For if man has been so created as to attain, through that which is most excellent in him, to that which excels all things,that is, to the one true and absolutely good[Pg 312] God, without whom no nature exists, no doctrine instructs, no exercise profits,let Him be sought in whom all things are secure to us, let Him be discovered in whom all truth becomes certain to us, let Him be loved in whom all becomes right to us.
    5. That it is especially with the Platonists that we must carry on our disputations on matters of theology, their opinions being preferable to those of all other philosophers.

BOOK XII. - Of the creation of angels and men, and of the origin of evil, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  I do not presume to determine whether God does so, and whether these times which are called "ages of ages" are joined together in a continuous series, and succeed one another with a regulated diversity, and leave exempt from their vicissitudes only those who are freed from their misery, and abide without end in a blessed immortality; or whether these are called "ages of ages," that we may understand that the ages remain unchangeable in God's unwavering wisdom, and are the efficient causes, as it were, of those ages which are being spent in time.[Pg 509] Possibly "ages" is used for "age," so that nothing else is meant by "ages of ages" than by "age of age," as nothing else is meant by "heavens of heavens" than by "heaven of heaven." For God called the firmament, above which are the waters, "Heaven," and yet the psalm says, "Let the waters that are above the heavens praise the name of the Lord."[557] Which of these two meanings we are to attach to "ages of ages," or whether there is not some other and better meaning still, is a very profound question; and the subject we are at present handling presents no obstacle to our meanwhile deferring the discussion of it, whether we may be able to determine anything about it, or may only be made more cautious by its further treatment, so as to be deterred from making any rash affirmations in a matter of such obscurity. For at present we are disputing the opinion that affirms the existence of those periodic revolutions by which the same things are always recurring at intervals of time. Now, whichever of these suppositions regarding the "ages of ages" be the true one, it avails nothing for the substantiating of those cycles; for whether the ages of ages be not a repetition of the same world, but different worlds succeeding one another in a regulated connection, the ransomed souls abiding in well-assured bliss without any recurrence of misery, or whether the ages of ages be the eternal causes which rule what shall be and is in time, it equally follows, that those cycles which bring round the same things have no existence; and nothing more thoroughly explodes them than the fact of the eternal life of the saints.
    20. Of the impiety of those who assert that the souls which enjoy true and perfect blessedness, must yet again and again in these periodic revolutions return to labour and misery.

BOOK XVI. - The history of the city of God from Noah to the time of the kings of Israel, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
  The words, "Nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do,"[242] are assuredly not meant as an affirmation, but as an interrogation, such as is used by persons threatening, as, e.g., when Dido exclaims,
  "They will not take arms and pursue?"[243]

ENNEAD 06.03 - Plotinos Own Sense-Categories., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03, #Plotinus, #Christianity
  So non-whiteness, if it indicate some color other than white, is a quality; if it express merely a negation, or an enumeration, it is only a word, or a term which recalls the object; if it be a word, it constitutes a movement (so far as it is produced by the vocal organ); if it be a name or a term, it constitutes, so far as it is a significative, a relative. If things be classed not only by genera, if it be admitted that each assertion and expression proclaim a genus, our answer must be that some affirm things by their mere announcement, and that others deny them. It may perhaps be best not to include negations in the same genus as things themselves, since, to avoid mingling several genera, we often do not include affirmations.
  968 As to privations, it may be remarked that if the things of which there are privations are qualities, then the privations themselves are qualities, as "toothless," or "blind."411 But "naked" and (its contrary) "clothed" are neither of them qualities; they rather constitute habits, and thus belong among relatives.

Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
   and the most lively. It generates itself, whether by affirmation or
   negation, with an equal fanaticism, some obstinately affirming the god
  --
   invariable affirmation of a dogma preserved by an authorized hierarchy.
   It is necessary to have an efficacious cult, giving, with an absolute
  --
   any more than faith can decide in a matter of science. An affirmation
   of faith with which science is rash enough to meddle can then be
  --
   Faith does not consist of the affirmation of this symbol or that, but
   of a genuine and constant aspiration towards the truths which are
  --
   The word of universal reason is an affirmation and not a negation.
   How blind are they who do not see that physical light is nothing but
  --
   The affirmation of atheism is the dogma of eternal night: the
   affirmation of God is the dogma of light!
   We stop here at the number Nineteen, although the sacred alphabet has
  --
   that communion, every affirmation of the divinity of Jesus Christ is
   idolatrous, because Jesus Christ could not be an isolated God.
  --
   for you; for, if you understood them, my affirmations would be absorbed
   by your theorems; I should be you, and you would be me; or, to put it
  --
   "The affirmation of the absolute reign of force, and its eternal
   antagonism, from above to beneath, and from beneath to above.
  --
   the ternary, and the affirmation of the natural forces alone.
   The ancient hierophants, as our learned and witty friend Desbarolles is
  --
   affirmation of passion and diplomacy. It is the perverted and material
   translation of that great word of St. Augustine: "Love, and do what you
  --
   (matter), or in other words, good and evil, affirmation and negation."
   Thus begins the Mosaic account of creation.
  --
   affirmation and negation must, then, marry each other, and from their
   union will be born the practical truth, the real and progressive word.

r1914 03 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   1) A crow seated on iron support of balcony; pranic impulse seen to be flight downward in a given direction, resisted by tamasic hesitation of mind and body. Trikaldrishti that in spite of all delay & resistance the contemplated movement would be executed. Doubt due to perception of adverse influences & tendencies, movement of bird away from line, arrival of finch tending to alter thought & standing partly in the line marked; still persistent affirmation. Ultimately the movement foreseen effected. Subsequent movements of both birds correctly seen but with errors of exact line of flight; general directions & turns correctly pre-indicated. This, however, is now very common. It is exactitude & freedom from error due to false stress & overdefinition of subordinate or understatement of definitive force, intention or tendency that have to be secured.
   2) A shabby boy in a splendid & richly varnished Victoria push-push. Doubt whether he was not coachmans boy put up in carriage. Intuition, son of well-to-do Indian Christian (latter detail inferential from dressshort trousers& not intuitional) & carriage newly varnished; shabbiness due to carelessness in these matters. Revelatory intuition, child belonging to Indian Christian in the house just behind this, Venumani. Sceptical intellect challenged intuition. Went to verify. The carriage stopped opposite Vs house & the boy went in leaving the coachman to follow.

r1914 03 26, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Trikaldrishti is now being developed on the principle of affirmation, ie everything is accepted as a fact, only the precise incidence & value of the fact has to be disengaged from the rude & inaccurate impression on the sensational mind. The importance of the unfulfilled tendency, intention or impulse physical, vital, mental or supramental, conscious, subconscious or super-conscious, is being emphasised its indispensable importance both in determining the eventual action or result, in fixing its efficient value and chances of permanence or finality & in influencing future eventuality. It is now proved beyond doubt that the mental perception of these unfulfilled energies is not an error, proved by the constant unexpected fulfilment of those that had been put aside as errors; the vulgar test of reality, viz bodily fulfilment, is no longer needed by the mind for sraddha. The perfect trikaldrishti of eventuality will, it is supposed, emerge out of this mahadbhava of the telepathic mind, by the freer play of the higher vijnana in its fourfold quality. At present it is the telepathic trikaldrishti that is active and this, though it has been proved capable of sustained, detailed & complex accuracy, is not firm, but easily descends from the correct appraisement of event & tendency, to a mere mahat perception of tendencies open to false stress & false selection of the event.
   Images (In the Clouds).
  --
   In the same way as in the trikaldrishti, so in the rest of the siddhi & the lipi affirmation is being enforced. Every feeling & movement, even those that are apparently wrong or futile, has to be accepted temporarily as a factor in the eventual intention,so also every event, however hostile. The habit of right stress will evolve hereafter & produce the right harmony.
   In the afternoon return of yesterdays asiddhi, the ashanti less violent, though sufficiently acute, but the asiddhi more complete. The chaos lasted throughout the afternoon well into the evening. Contradiction in fact of the former lipis Joyful exhaustion of the intellectuality etc.

r1914 04 12, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Dream was less free & less firmly coherent. To the rupa & samadhi the obstruction is still great & prevents a rapid & firm result. In the vijnana the siddhi has returned to the method of affirmation & no longer seeks to reject, but to rectify error. The result is not yet the complete ritam, but a progressive liberation from the habit of dwelling on the telepathic perception of tendency & taking its demand & power of self-fulfilment for the eventual act. In a certain sense this is a recoil to a less advanced stage than had been reached a few days ago and has been necessitated by the fresh forces liberated by the dissolution of the Vayuputra.
   Kamananda continues to recover its former frequency & hold on the system, but is still held back by the pranic deficiencies which result in exhaustion & roga.

r1914 04 19, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Vani, acting now in the mind and dominated by mental personality, is proving its truth wherever its affirmations can be verified. The source of many errors is now perceived in the incapacity of mental devatas of a certain class to judge, except by the senses, the fulfilment in matter of results already obtained in the sukshma. These form a mental equivalent who give impulses to our bodies for immediate fulfilment which cannot be immediately fulfilled but have to be worked out afterwards. In both cases it is an error not of fact but of placement. On a trial of the play of fantasy according to lipi 4 it is found that the same truth of sukshma, of tendency, of intention, of actual possibility & past or future eventuality is behind the play of the imagination.
   The power is once more beginning to act at the values of 50 & 60; but its action is chequered by the old successful resistances.

r1914 06 10, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   3) The principle of affirmation to replace the principle of rejection & denial.
   4) Ritam to develop no longer only in isolated or combined details, but in the undivided brihat of the satyam with truth of detail & combination as a play of the ritam satyam brihat.
   The statement is not complete; [there]1 are three others & then two more to be added making in all nine affirmations, stomah, of the developing God.
   Lipi
  --
   The three other affirmations
   5) The Personality of the Ishwara, Krishna, to be present in the consciousness, governing all the activities

r1914 06 12, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There has been, as predicted in the lipi, a suspension of the effective activity, the activity in the sense of the sevenfold affirmations. The object is to develop the brihat of the mentality, the barhih, as a base for the activity of the gods. This leads to the remaining two affirmations not yet formulated
   8) Siddhi must be on the basis of the largeness in the five worlds & not a selective & limited siddhi.
  --
   These affirmations will take some time in working out, there will be resistance & temporarily successful resistance to their conquest of the field of action, whether the internal or the external field. Such delay or such episodes do not mean the triumph of the resistance or the falsity of the principles.
   The sense of the sortilege of the 11th is that the realised action internal or external can never be an equivalent of the Infinite, it can only be a selection, as a rhythm or formation chosen out of infinite sound or infinite substance. This must be recognised. Only a part of what is perceived can be made effectual in action, can be justified by the event. All the rest must be seen in being & force, swh & swadh.
  --
   The affirmation has recommenced, but only partially in the terms of the vijnana. The mental terms must steadily be replaced by ideal values.
   ***

r1914 06 13, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Seven affirmations have now to be entirely reaffirmed in the conscious experience. It is evident that aishwarya-vashita & ishita-vashita are growing in the satyam brihat. The pure ishita, aishwarya & vashita have to be equally asserted.
   The true hinge of the seven affirmations is not the principle of affirmation, but the personal relation with the Ishwara & its triple rule of pervasive presence (avas), dasya madhura relation and universal bhoga result.
   ***

r1914 06 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Law of submission, namas, to Krishna revealed in the gods, is now accepted by the Jiva in all parts of the system. The law of affirmation is also being accepted & this implies a perfect faith in the guidance, but not yet in the result. The passivity of the critical intelligence, its surrender in favour of the Viveka is equally accepted. These things are now sukha and have to be generally enforced by Agni & Soma in the terms of Ananda. It is at present being done in the interests of Indra, who is King of Swar, in the supreme heaven of the mind within the triple system.
   The siddhi of the Vijnana will now proceed regularly by self-action as the siddhi of the first & second chatusthayas have proceeded. It can do so because every motion, even the most adverse, is accepted as a step in the necessary process guided & imposed by the supreme Wisdom, Love & Power. This is the namas of the Prakriti to the Purusha. Till now it was only the submission of the Jiva to the Ishwara, & could not be perfectly effective because the exterior Prakriti was still rebellious. The next step must be the entire submission of the intelligence to the ideality.

r1914 06 15, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Already affirmation is the dominant note of the thought-perception, the ketu. The base of Ananda will soon also be normal, as indicated in the constant symbol-word, Ordinary read on the box. Tapas & Prakasha are being assured more & more of their freedom. Only the uncertainty in the faith holds them back, & this obstacle is now being removed by the removal of the Maheshwari restraint. Mahakali left to herself can now work out her own salvation.
   The Anandamaya Drishti, the constant sense of the Ishwara, the dasya-madhura & bhoga are also almost ready.

r1914 06 17, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There is persistent clouding of the knowledge in order to annul the affirmations, maintain the principle of relapse and destroy the faith established & the shanti. It is always the method of the Vritra that is used, except in the fourth & fifth chatusthayas.
   Script.
   The Ananda must be positively affirmed in all activities & experiences without regard to consequences. The governing Power will arrange the necessary affirmations & rejections.
   ***
  --
   The affirmations remain. They are resisted in their conscious & perfect application. They have yet to be finally disengaged from that resistance.
   ***

r1914 06 18, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmations are once more manifesting, but not in their entirety. They are pursued by a question that materialises in negation, partial or suspensive of the fullness of the affirmations. Especially, the affirmations of personal relation are still ineffective & without them the rest cannot keep their footing.
   ***
   The full affirmation of the satyam brihat is no longer resisted, but the complete affirmation of the ritam is constantly attacked & broken when it seems to be on the point of perfect fulfilment. There is always an element of deviation, potential or actualised, or of potency of relapse which is made effectual, usually immediately after any instance of effective or perfect play of the ritam. It is always in the intelligence luminous or unillumined that the ritam acts.
   ***

r1914 06 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Synthesis of Yoga takes its final form; the first Book of the Life Divine begun (the Vedantic affirmations).
   Lipi

r1914 06 28, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There is a need of increasing affirmation.
   The Vijnana has only to be made more swift & spontaneous in the discriminative ritam. Instead of the perceptions being admitted & afterwards put in their relation, they must be in their right relation even in the act of entrynot a confused troop that arranges itself in the reception chamber, but an orderly band each entering with the right precedence & grouping. So much is still defective
  --
   The affirmation of the Jnana Brahma is now sufficiently normal to provide a secure basis for the Ananda Brahman. Only it is the one Anandamaya in all who must be perceived constantly, not the Narayana imprisoned in the form. That must be only a subordinate movement in the One.
   ***
   The fullness of the first four affirmations depends upon the second triad. That must now be made habitual to the consciousness and part of its ordinary psychological workings. It is now being done.
   ***
  --
   The seven affirmations are now forming into their normal movement. Their deficiency is due to the lingering tendency of the consciousness towards formulation on the lower level of dividing mind.
   ***

r1914 06 30, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The one siddhi that seems to go on steadily is the perfection of the lipi. The rest progresses but with a hampered movement, flashes of affirmation in an exterior mass of denial. The effort is to throw back the movement into the old alternation of Dawn & Night.
   ***

r1914 07 01, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The lines of development suggested in the Vachansi and in the affirmations have reached a stage when they are all in movement & in progressive & victorious movement, but still denied, by force, by those interested in their defeat, the Arya & Dasa enemies, but more now by the outdistanced Aryas than the Dasas. The month of June has closed on this note of imperfect success.
   The renewal of the struggle between the Siddhi and the powers of limitation has assumed a new aspect; it is no longer, fundamentally, a question of the extent of the siddhi, still less of its entire denial. That is now recognised on all hands to be impossible. It is a question of the rapidity, of the continuance or cessation of the method of gradual development and of the habit of relapse & intermission by which the gradation was farther retarded. There may be devious hopes that the fullness of the physical siddhi can be sufficiently retarded to be practically denied or that by this retardation & other obstacles the necessary time may be denied to the karmasiddhi or even its fulfilment negatived by untoward events which will render it impossible; but these are failing powers of negation. Only in the last adverse tendency is there yet any serious strength for anything but retardation.

r1914 07 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The first seven affirmations will today be completed. Also the finalities of the second chatusthaya, with the exception of faith in the kriti & saundarya.
   ***
   A strong attack of asiddhi has failed to break the samata, but it has prevented the other finalities. Its assault is especially directed against the entirety of the principle of affirmation.
   Karma
  --
   The seven affirmations have been now well-founded. That they are not always prominently active is immaterial. The foundation once well-made, the rest comes of itself.
   As for the finalities of the second chatusthaya, they are in fact completed, with the one exception given. Only that exception prevents them from being steady & uninterrupted in their action.

r1914 07 06, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   StThe seven affirmations
   Script.
   To enforce the seven affirmations is the chief work for today. The second is to bring forward the vijnana chatusthaya to the same level as the samata & shakti chatusthayas.
   The apparent contradiction & refusal of the ritam is a relapse into brihat & marks, no longer an insufficient preparation in the mind, but the continued power of irresponsible Mind to continue in the persistence of old sanskaras after the cause of them has been removed.
  --
   Already the affirmations are being streng thened, but there is always an element which comes from the external Nature & seeks to stand between the Master of the Yoga & the Adhara, asserting a different statement of the universal Ego, seeking to replace the personal ahankara by another & more general ahankara. This has to be transformed, not eliminated. Elimination could be easily done and if this were the object, the perpetual insistence of the excentric ego would not be permitted. It persists & insists because, knowingly or unknowingly, it seeks transformation.
   ***
  --
   The satyam is being restored in the brihat by force of right affirmation.
   Tapas vacillates between a greater & a lesser, a more organised & a less organised efficacity.
  --
   The seven affirmations are now in principle entirely regnant and are being more & more enforced in the active consciousness. It remains to bring forward the second part of the programme, the vijnana.
   Ananda

r1914 07 07, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmation of vijnana is intermittent; it must be continuous and organised.
   Arogya
  --
   The two final affirmations are now being prepared in their initial steps.
   Love .. ecstasy .. God is the formula of fulfilment of the second group of affirmations.
   ***

r1914 07 10, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   2) belief in the affirmations.
   3) intensity of the delight
  --
   The difficulty that opposes this perfect development of the three affirmations will disappear like that which opposed the fullness of the first four.
   ***
  --
   Certainty & exactitude in a luminous ritam will henceforth develop & possess the knowledge, justifying the spirit of affirmation. But there is yet a residue of justifiable denial to be converted into right affirmation.
   Tapas will also proceed to overcome its difficulties.

r1914 07 11, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The threefold affirmation will be perfectly confirmed today. In fact, it has been immediately confirmed, only it has to be delivered from the asmarana.
   Samata & dasya are now secure; faith has to be similar[l]y secured. The great increase in the Tapas has to be changed into definite mastery & extended to the sharira & the kriti. With mastery assured, faith & shakti will be able to act instead of remaining hedged within limits. It would have been perfectly possible to proceed with a limited faith & hampered shakti, but that has not been the will of the Master.
  --
   The attempts to prevent the triple affirmation are only temporarily successful as the price of great effort; the siddhi always reasserts itself.
   The final double affirmation is visibly preparing behind the obstinate denial opposed to it.
   ***

r1914 07 15, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The result is that the seven affirmations seem to be denied & equally the progress towards the ninth.
   ***
  --
   The tapasic element of the external Ego is still sulky & dissatisfied,but the centre of the being is once more restored to the right activity, of affirmation, brihat, Ananda Brahman, prakashamaya tapas. Prema, kama, dasyalipsa, atmasamarpana are there perfect, so are the Brahmin & Vaishya qualities, but because the Kshatriya is not active, therefore they also are restrained. Nothing is wanting but that perfect faith over which the battle is now raging between siddhi & asiddhi. That is the nodus of finality in the first two chatusthayas.
   The Krishna drishti is really established, but there is a thin semi-transparent veil, the remnants of the old littleness, tucchyena abhwapihita, not now tad ekam, but sa ekah. The three affirmations have reemerged from the battle streng thened & intensified.
   It is less Krishna than Kali who is now manifest in all beings & things, but that is as it should be. Otherwise, the Krishnadarshana itself would be incomplete.

r1914 07 17, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   After the obscuration the triple affirmation has reemerged thrice as powerful as it was before the obscuration.
   It is true that the knowledge does not work steadily, but is constantly overpowered by the reemergence of the inferior mentality.

r1914 07 18, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Steady recovery of vijnanamaya activity in the sense of the seven affirmations.
   ***

r1914 07 19, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The seven affirmations completed will be the sign of the perfect siddhi of the foundation, after which the divine action can manifest.
   ***

r1914 07 21, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmation of the Ishwara means the affirmation of an omniscient & omnipotent Mind & Power. It includes, therefore, these three affirmations
   (1) The fulfilment of the Kriti involving the use of a divine power & knowledge divinely displayed in human affairs, is possible to the Master of the Yoga, Yogeshwara Hari.
  --
   Therefore these supplementary or explanatory affirmations have to be made. The nine are all now established, have swadha & are sure to fulfil themselves automatically by the law of their own nature. To deny them is the whole effort of the Powers of Limitation.
   ***

r1914 07 22, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   In the Darshana even there is a struggle between the full affirmation in fact & the inferior affirmation supported by the Nidah who base upon the alleged unreadiness of the general Swabhava. The Anandamaya Purusha is the lowest affirmation having still a tendency to stability; the lower intensities tend always to [ ]1 pass into the third & highest, the Jnanam & Ananda Brahman into the Anandamaya Purusha.
   The two affirmations which have now to be worked out perfectly are the development of the Ritam in the satyam brihat & the conquest of the obstruction of Time by the three supplementary affirmations.
   At present the Asiddhi possesses the field & strenuously denies their possibility.
  --
   The exterior nature is now progressively moulding itself to the perception of the Anandamaya Krishna & the triple affirmation & all the attempts of the Nidah to reverse the movement, only makes it more full & perfect. The Swarwatir Apah are pouring into it freely.
   Today the Anandatattwa & the Anandamaya Shakti of the old jail-experience manifested in the visvadrishti.

r1914 07 23, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There is as yet no apparent advance towards the effectual affirmation of the three supplementaries. It is their contradiction.
   It is notable that the contradictions of the two first chatusthayas & the sixth are now only possible by a physical touch imposed with a tremendous force & slight effectivity. Even half of the fifth, Krishna-Kali is accomplished.

r1914 07 31, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There is now a full affirmation of the Vijnana as a steadily advancing & entirely inevitable siddhi, but there is not the entire rapidity.
   In the body the sharira[siddhi] in all its members is now recognised by the Nidah to be inevitable, but its subjection to the gradual process is asserted & the extension of rapidity to it prevented.

r1914 08 01, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Ananda of struggle & defeat has been suspended & the activity of the affirmations. Therefore August begins with successful Asiddhi. This occurs always & shows that the struggle still continues. As usual it is the intention of the opposing forces [ ]1 to show that the statement of the completion of the subjectivity is a falsehood. But all that has been said is, It is assured & all but the final touches accomplished. It has not been said that the results cannot be clouded or suspended.
   There is still an excessive affirmation of result cast on the mind by the Tapasic powers of the intelligence.
   Vijnana is not active in its own light, but only the mind in the borrowed & often deflected light of vijnana. It is therefore the worst asiddhi possible at this stage. An outer shell has been placed over the siddhi, through which however it is still entirely visible.

r1914 08 02, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmations are once more being affirmed.
   There is nothing as yet definite in the nature of an advance beyond the point already reached.

r1914 08 16, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   From today dates the perfection of the first seven affirmations.
   ***

r1914 09 25, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The completeness of the first two siddhis revives with it, as also of the affirmations.
   ***

r1914 10 03, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   ie the sense of the obstruction is that it is only in conscious Yoga with the Master of the Yoga (by the three affirmations) that the siddhi should proceed.
   ***

r1914 11 18, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Nine affirmations have now again to be considered
   It is evident that IV-VII are being completed first. The tertiary dasya is perfect in the body and perfecting in the mind & prana and there is a firm though not always equable or well-distributed sense of the passive yantrabhava in the whole system. But the dasya is not yet the dasya of the Madhura except at times because the subjective Ananda of karma-siddhi asiddhi is not yet perfect in the chitta.
  --
   The principle of affirmation has been constantly growing, but has not yet entirely replaced the principle of rejection & denial.
   Ritam is developing on the lines of the brihat by the progressive rejection of the idea of the Dwayavins.
  --
   affirmations VIII & IX are only preparing. The basis of the five worlds has been laid down in the consciousness, but only the three are habitually active to its awareness & this without particular observation. But the Anandaloka is also frequently active in the manoloka.
   The main effort now is to subordinate Time so that it shall be instrument and not determinant.

r1914 11 19, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The energy depressed last night & this morning is now recovering itself(9. am)and will maintain itself during the day. The affirmations have to be given a farther extension.
   The attempt of the attack is (1)1 to restore the empty, indifferent shanta Mahasaraswati bhava & negate the combination of Ananda + Tapas, centred in the Mahakali-Mahasaraswati Bhava; (2) to assert the passive Devi in place of the Asuro-Rakshasic (Chandi) Devi governed by the Deva in Krishna.

r1914 11 23, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   affirmation
   The affirmations are preparing a larger completeness. The mind now accepts more integrally what the buddhi had already accepted, the truth of anritam, the kalyana of akalyana, the effectivity of ineffectivities. In this way positive samata is being rendered more secure in its basis, as well as the perfect passivity that is the basis of the perfect activity, the absolute nati that is the basis of the Dasya of Madhura and the absolute brihat of satyam which is the basis of complete ritam.
   The mind cannot always distinguish the particular truth, kalyana & effectivity, but it has the belief which begins to be an intuition. It sees the thing formlessly when it does not see it in form

r1914 11 25, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   3) The reactivity of the affirmations.
   ***

r1914 11 26, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Therefore the affirmations are taking their greater, deeper & fuller form.to begin with 5-7
   5) The Personality of the Ishwara Krishna present (no longer merely to be present) in the consciousness, governing all the activities
  --
   Among the first four affirmations, 3 & 4 are powerfully developing.
   3) The principle of affirmation replacing the principle of rejection and denial.
   4) Ritam developing no longer in isolated or combined details, but in the undivided brihat of the satyam with truth of detail and combination as a play of the ritam satyam brihat.
   Undivided means in practice free from the brihat & leads to the second affirmation and that again to the first.
   1) Ananda as the base, free & joyous Tapas & Prakasha as the special instrument.
  --
   The eighth & ninth affirmations are still being prepared for their effectivity, but are not yet fully realised in consciousness or dominant in fact; but only realised in perception and increasing in tendency.
   8) Siddhi must be on the basis of the largeness in the five worlds and not of a selecting and limited siddhi.

r1914 12 04, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmations also are clouded and defective
   ***

r1914 12 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   In Sharira Ananda is preparing its masses and combinations rather than insisting on detailed successes. Arogya-Shakti also prepares its mass & only presses by the mass upon details. Its two great defects still remain in the defective actuality. Utthapana similarly insists on the growth & complete affirmation of pure laghima & is negligent of external victories. Saundarya is yet in the sukshma & only throws its chhaya on the sthula. There are one or two definite, but not yet decided sthula movements.
   ***

r1914 12 21, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The great question now is the validation of the 9 affirmation, the mastery of Time & process in Time.
   The three Krishna affirmations are now finally founded.
   ***
   affirmations
   The affirmations can now be restated in other language.
   ***
  --
   It is the realisation of these nine affirmations which constitutes the active Siddhi. The rest is the condition of the active Siddhi.
   ***

r1915 01 05a, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   In the morning a strong obstruction to the Ishwaradarshana preventing the physical consciousness from enjoying the light of the affirmations even though aware of their actuality behind the denial.
   This obstruction contains in itself a more entire, ready & solid participation in the siddhi by the whole conscious existence. The subconscious is being rapidly trained by the force of its obstructed aspiration towards the light.

r1915 01 05b, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The obstruction now offered is to the conscious use of the affirmations. They are all present in act, but the physical consciousness is prevented from enjoying their light.
   This obstruction serves eventually the end of a more entire & solid participation in the siddhi by the whole conscious existence; for the subconscious is being trained through the aspiration towards the light. It is from the subconscious that the responses to the Asiddhi proceed, & the source of these responses is being fortified and purified. But the waking mind derives from the sense of obstruction a conclusion of unfaith in the rapidity of the Siddhi and the importance of the Karma.

r1915 01 17, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The vijnana is gradually reasserting the affirmations, but against a strong opposition.
   ***

r1915 01 24, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The affirmations of the Anandamaya Ishwara, the madhura dasya & the submission to all bhoga are now ready for their perfection.
   Those of the Anandamaya as continent & Ananda as base follow upon these, but the free & joyous Tapas & Prakasha as base depend upon the fullness of the Ritam & Satya Brihat affirmations.
   ***
   The two other affirmations are still held back.
   ***

r1915 05 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The siddhi has now to take a new turn. Basing itself on the complete Dasya, Sraddha & Ananda it has to acquire intensity in all that is possessed, sureness in the Vijnana, rapidity in the Sharira & Karma. The Seven affirmations have to be finally completed & then the two that remain.
   The state of these affirmations may again be stated:
   1) The universal sense of the Anandamaya Lilamaya Krishna in the Brahmadrishti has become the continent of the conscious activity in knowledge & is becoming the continent of the conscious activity in Will.
   2) affirmation has almost entirely replaced rejection & denial, but not entirely.
   3) Brihat of the satyam is affirmed as the basis of the development of the ritam, but is not yet free from attack

r1915 06 11, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There is now the attempt to fulfil the ninth affirmation by overcoming the condition of Time. This is closely connected with the affirmation of the eighth principle, action on all the five planes at once which also tends to manifest.
   ***

r1915 06 26, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Seven affirmations.
   The three Krishna affirmations are now unalterably established in the being, but are sometimes pale to the consciousness
   The four Brahma affirmations are fixed, but for their full action await the Ritam of the vijnana
   The two Prakriti affirmations, Time & the five worlds, are in course of being established.
   ***

r1915 07 04, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The five purah are being manifested even to the rupadrishti. The vijnana (surya) has yet to ascend into all. The completion of this movement will establish the eighth affirmation (of the nine, ebhih stomebhih), see May 20. The three Krishna affirmations are almost perfect. The four Satya-Ananda affirmations await for their perfection the free Tapas & Prakasha.
   ***

r1915 07 13, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Dasya is constantly increasing in an all-embracing intensity. Madhura which has often fluctuated since May 26, but has always been behind the veil when not present or insistent in front, will now be always in front. Bhoga of the slave & instrument is also now complete. The presence of the Ishwara has often been veiled by his manomaya personalities & ganas, but is now to occupy the directing centre in the Ananda tattwa. The triple Krishna affirmation is therefore perfected.
   Ch. Vsa = Chandra Vaa. The question mark is Sri Aurobindo's.Ed.

r1917 02 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Recoil of the siddhi, owing to perception of anrita in what professed to be the ritam; this comes by excessive and therefore wrong affirmation. Attempt henceforth neither to overstress affirmation nor to linger in negation. Right affirmation of the truth in or behind all thought and perception is the secret. But the difficulty must not be underrated, nor achievement too easily announced.
   ***

r1917 02 22, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Complete unification of all the anandas of darshana on their mental basis. Frequent affirmation of chidghana, intense or less intense. Its universalisation may now shortly be expected, since no images or objects, faces or figures can now be successfully free from it.
   ***

r1917 03 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Chidghana in the human figure is being constantly pulled back into the mentality and constantly reasserted. This is now the only serious defect, but the affirmation is stronger than the denial.
   ***

r1919 07 24, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The siddhi is now moving towards a system of complete affirmation; all thought and perception, no matter what the source or medium, is admitted as having some kind of justification in force and being and the exact nature of the justification is being immediately assigned and made as precise as possible. In this process intuitive mental thought is allowed, but idealised in the mentality, since so only can it get its proper proportions. This has always been the theory of the sadhana; it has been preparing and repeatedly insisted on for a long time, but only now by this removal of the too trenchant intellectual distinction between satyam and asatyam is it becoming entirely possible. This completion is necessary for the manifestation of the hermetic gnosis; the logistic is a limiting gnosis, the hermetic an entirely comprehensive ideality. T cannot be perfect, but only relatively perfect in the logistic gnosis.
   Gandha and rasa are now acting with a considerable freedom and variety and the former with a fundamental perfection. Rasa is still subject to its initial crudeness of incomplete massed tastes, though there are now definite and perfect rasas. Rasa is now insisting on perfection.

Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  STRANGER: affirmation.
  THEAETETUS: Yes, we know it.
  STRANGER: When the affirmation or denial takes Place in silence and in the mind only, have you any other name by which to call it but opinion?
  THEAETETUS: There can be no other name.

Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
  Praise and glory beseem the Lord of Names and the Creator of the heavens, He, the waves of Whose ocean of Revelation surge before the eyes of the peoples of the world. The Day-Star of His Cause shineth through every veil and His Word of affirmation standeth beyond the reach of negation. Neither the ascendancy of the oppressor nor the tyranny of the wicked hath been able to thwart His Purpose. How glorified is His sovereignty, how exalted His dominion! ["The Day-Star..."] The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 4 p. 172
  Great God! Although His signs have encompassed the world and His proofs and testimonies are shining forth and manifest as the light, yet the ignorant appear heedless, nay rather, rebellious. Would that they had been content with opposition. But at all times they are plotting to cut down the sacred Lote-Tree. Since the dawn of this Revelation the embodiments of selfishness have, by resorting to cruelty and oppression, striven to extinguish the Light of divine manifestation. But God, having stayed their hands, revealed this Light through His sovereign authority and protected it through the power of His might until earth and heaven were illumined by its radiance and brightness. Praise be unto Him under all conditions. The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 4 p. 168
  --
  Fear ye the All-Merciful, O people of the Bayán, and commit not that which the followers of the Qur'án have committed--they who in the daytime and in the night season professed belief in the Faith of God, yet when the Lord of all men did appear, turned aside from Him and pronounced so cruel a sentence against Him that, on the Day of Return, the Mother Book sorely bewailed His plight. Call ye to mind and ponder upon their deeds and words, their stations and merits and the things they brought to pass when He Who conversed on Sinai unloosed His tongue, when there was a blast on the Trumpet, whereupon all that are in heaven and on earth swooned away except such as are reckoned among the letters of affirmation.
  104
  --
  During Our sojourn in 'Iráq when We were at the house of one named Majíd, We set forth clearly for thee the mysteries of creation and the origin, the culmination and the cause thereof. However since Our departure We have limited Ourself to this affirmation: 'Verily, no God is there but Me, the Ever-Forgiving, the Bountiful.'
  Teach thou the Cause of God with an utterance which will cause the bushes to be enkindled, and the call 'Verily, there is no God but Me, the Almighty, the Unconstrained' to be raised therefrom. Say: Human utterance is an essence which aspireth to exert its influence and needeth moderation. As to its influence, this is conditional upon refinement which in turn is dependent upon hearts which are detached and pure. As to its moderation, this hath to be combined with tact and wisdom as prescribed in the Holy Scriptures and Tablets. Meditate upon that which hath streamed forth from the heaven of the Will of thy Lord, He Who is the Source of all grace, that thou mayest grasp the intended meaning which is enshrined in the sacred depths of the Holy Writings. The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 4 p. 49
  --
  We have no wish to mention anything further but We shall utter that which the Spirit hath instilled into My heart. In truth there is no God but Him, the Knowing, the Mighty, the Help in Peril, the Most Excellent, the All-Praised. By My life! In this Day the celestial Tree is loath to proclaim aught else to the world but this affirmation: 'Verily, there is none other God but Me, the Peerless, the All-Informed.'
  149
  --
  Say, O concourse of divines! Be fair in your judgment, I adjure you by God. Produce then whatever proofs and testimonies ye possess, if ye are to be reckoned among the inmates of this glorious habitation. Set your hearts towards the Dayspring of divine Revelation that We may disclose before your eyes the equivalent of all such verses, proofs, testimonies, affirmations and evidences as ye and other kindreds of the earth possess. Fear ye God and be not of them that well deserve the chastisement of God, the Lord of creation.
  This is the Day in which the Ocean of knowledge hath lifted up its Voice and hath brought forth its pearls. Would that ye knew it! The heaven of the Bayán hath been raised up in truth at the behest of God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. I swear by God! The Essence of knowledge exclaimeth and saith: Lo! He Who is the Object of all knowledge is come and through His advent the sacred Books of God, the Gracious, the Loving, have been embellished. Every revelation of grace, every evidence of goodly gifts emanateth from Him and unto Him doth it return.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
  He muddles the whole thing by bringing it into politics. As a prophet of nonviolence, he can practise it as a movement of ethical affirmation, a demand
  of the soul.

The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
  It is significant that this same text, with its indirect affirmation implied
  in a riddle, should have such an explosive effect not only in England,

The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
  tive, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason
  cannot do that, it must be regarded as ineffi
  --
  knowing affirmation. So we too have accep
  ted and affirmed an icon, but we have done

The Divine Names Text (Dionysis), #The Divine Names, #unset, #Zen
  But it is rather necessary, I suppose, to resume and to set forth the complete fashion of the Divine union and distinction, in order that the whole discourse may be seen at a glance to reject everything ambiguous and indistinct, and to define critically and distinctly the proper Names, as far as possible. For, as I said elsewhere, the sacred instructors of our theological tradition call the "Divine Unions" the hidden and unrevealed sublimities of the |17 super-unutterable and super-unknown Isolation; but the "distinctions," the goodly progressions and manifestations of the Godhead; and, following the sacred Oracles, they mention also properties of the aforesaid "Union; "and again of the distinction, that there are certain specific unions and distinctions. For example, with regard to the Divine Union, that is, the Superessentiality, there is kindred and common to the One-springing Triad, the superessential sustaining Source, the super-Divine Deity, the super-good Goodness, the supreme identity of the whole supreme Idiosyncrasy, the Oneness above source of one; the Unspeakable; the Much-speaking, the Agnosia, the Comprehended by all, the Placing of all, the Abstraction of all, that which is above all affirmation and abstraction, the abiding and steadfastness in each other, if I may so speak, wholly super-united and in no part commingled of the One-springing Persons, just as lights of lamps (to use sensible illustrations familiar to our capacity), when in one house, are both wholly distinct in each other throughout, and keep the distinction from each other specifically and perfectly maintained, being one in distinction and distinct in union; and then, indeed, we may see in a house, in which are many lamps, the lights of all united to form one certain light and lighting up one combined radiance; and, as I suppose, no one would be able to distinguish in the air containing all the lights the light of one or other lamp from the rest, |18 and to see one without the other, since whole in whole are mixed together without being mingled. But, if any one were to take out from the chamber one particular burner, the whole light belonging to it will depart with it; no particle of the other lights being drawn along with it, nor any of its own light left with the other. For there was, as I said, the complete union of all with all, unmingled throughout, and in no part confused, and this actually in a body, the air, the light even itself being dependent on the material fire. Whence we affirm that the superessential Union is fixed above not only the unions in bodies, but also above those in souls themselves, and in minds themselves, which, in a manner unmingled and supermundane, the Godlike and super-celestial Illuminations, whole through whole, possess, as beseems a participation analagous to those who participate in the Union elevated above all.
    SECTION V.

The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  But archemy has other methods, whose results bring the proof of philosophical affirmations.
  They allow us to achieve the decomposition of metallic bodies, long considered to be simple
  --
  movement, the affirmation of its reality. It is its true signature. Until the 12th century, no
  other mark was used to au thenticate old charters; from the 15th century on, the cross became
  --
  although it leads to the same end. But these affirmations, sincere as they appear, nevertheless
  cannot but mislead artists who, eager to follow the same Philale thes through the purification
  --
  spite of Flamels affirmations, this old manuscript had just been written one cannot think
  of everything when he acquired it. In fact, Abraham says he only want to reveal his secrets
  --
  Knights of the Order of the Thistle (1) , the affirmation of a secret meaning imposed on the
  work and countersigned by them?

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  21) The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur
  22) Bow down and adore where others bend the knee; for where so great a number of men pay the tri bute of their adoration, the Impersonal must needs manifest Himself, for He is all compassion. ~ Ramakrishna

The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
  self-assertiveness justified by the affirmation that one is thinking and
  acting as an instrument and under the inspiration of the Divine. Ideas
  --
  creation and non-creation and the affirmation and negation are both
  seen with the eyes of the ineffable Reality that delivers and reconciles

Thus Spoke Zarathustra text, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  he calls it the "highest formula of affirmation which is
  at all attainable." The eternal recurrence of his solitude

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun affirmation

The noun affirmation has 4 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
                  
1. (1) avowal, avouchment, affirmation ::: (a statement asserting the existence or the truth of something)
2. affirmation, assertion, statement ::: (the act of affirming or asserting or stating something)
3. affirmation ::: ((religion) a solemn declaration that serves the same purpose as an oath (if an oath is objectionable to the person on religious or ethical grounds))
4. affirmation ::: (a judgment by a higher court that the judgment of a lower court was correct and should stand)


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

4 senses of affirmation                        

Sense 1
avowal, avouchment, affirmation
   => assertion, averment, asseveration
     => declaration
       => statement
         => message, content, subject matter, substance
           => communication
             => abstraction, abstract entity
               => entity

Sense 2
affirmation, assertion, statement
   => speech act
     => act, deed, human action, human activity
       => event
         => psychological feature
           => abstraction, abstract entity
             => entity

Sense 3
affirmation
   => commitment, dedication
     => message, content, subject matter, substance
       => communication
         => abstraction, abstract entity
           => entity

Sense 4
affirmation
   => judgment, judgement, judicial decision
     => due process, due process of law
       => group action
         => act, deed, human action, human activity
           => event
             => psychological feature
               => abstraction, abstract entity
                 => entity
         => event
           => psychological feature
             => abstraction, abstract entity
               => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun affirmation

3 of 4 senses of affirmation                      

Sense 1
avowal, avouchment, affirmation
   => reassertion, reaffirmation
   => profession, professing
   => affirmative

Sense 2
affirmation, assertion, statement
   => say-so

Sense 3
affirmation
   => profession


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

4 senses of affirmation                        

Sense 1
avowal, avouchment, affirmation
   => assertion, averment, asseveration

Sense 2
affirmation, assertion, statement
   => speech act

Sense 3
affirmation
   => commitment, dedication

Sense 4
affirmation
   => judgment, judgement, judicial decision




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun affirmation

4 senses of affirmation                        

Sense 1
avowal, avouchment, affirmation
  -> assertion, averment, asseveration
   => claim
   => claim
   => accusation, charge
   => contention
   => ipse dixit, ipsedixitism
   => avowal, avouchment, affirmation
   => testimony
   => denial, disaffirmation

Sense 2
affirmation, assertion, statement
  -> speech act
   => congratulation, felicitation
   => slander
   => proposal, proposition
   => command, bid, bidding, dictation
   => agreement
   => citation
   => disagreement
   => offer, offering
   => request, asking
   => reply, response
   => description
   => affirmation, assertion, statement
   => denial
   => rejection
   => objection
   => informing, making known
   => disclosure, revelation, revealing
   => promise
   => boast, boasting, self-praise, jactitation
   => naming
   => challenge
   => explanation
   => denunciation, denouncement
   => address, speech
   => resignation

Sense 3
affirmation
  -> commitment, dedication
   => oath, swearing
   => affirmation
   => promise
   => assurance, pledge

Sense 4
affirmation
  -> judgment, judgement, judicial decision
   => reversal
   => affirmation
   => confession of judgment, confession of judgement, cognovit judgment, cognovit judgement
   => default judgment, default judgement, judgment by default, judgement by default
   => non prosequitur, non pros
   => final judgment, final decision
   => judgment in personam, judgement in personam, personal judgment, personal judgement
   => judgment in rem, judgement in rem
   => judgment of dismissal, judgement of dismissal, dismissal
   => judgment on the merits, judgement on the merits
   => summary judgment, summary judgement, judgment on the pleadings, judgement on the pleadings
   => arbitration, arbitrament, arbitrement
   => opinion, ruling
   => finding




--- Grep of noun affirmation
affirmation
disaffirmation
reaffirmation



IN WEBGEN [10000/49]

Wikipedia - Affirmation in law
Wikipedia - Affirmation of life
Wikipedia - Affirmation (Savage Garden song) -- 2000 single by Savage Garden
Wikipedia - Affirmations (New Age)
Wikipedia - Amen -- Declaration of affirmation found in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament
Wikipedia - Dream board -- Collage of images, pictures and affirmations of one's dreams and desires, designed to serve as a source of inspiration and motivation
Wikipedia - Durban Declaration -- Affirmation that HIV causes AIDS
Wikipedia - List of Reel Affirmations award winners -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Nietzschean affirmation -- A concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Wikipedia - Notary public -- Civil position that certifies documents and administers oral oaths and affirmations
Wikipedia - Oath -- Personal affirmation of a statement
Wikipedia - Perjury -- Act of swearing a false oath or falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth
Wikipedia - Self affirmation
Wikipedia - Self-affirmation
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selforum - piqm ontological affirmations
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Reaffirmation_Ceremony
Affirmation
Affirmation and negation
Affirmation (law)
Affirmation: LGBT Mormons, Families & Friends
Affirmations (Ferndale, Michigan)
Affirmation: The B-Sides
Auburn Affirmation
Day of Affirmation Address
Gun Lake Trust Land Reaffirmation Act
Movement of Socialist Affirmation
Nietzschean affirmation
Same-day affirmation
Self-affirmation
Taiwan Relations Act Affirmation and Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2014
Voter's oath or affirmation



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