TERMS STARTING WITH
elements ::: Elements Basically, the four qualities of the world. In Alchemy, the four elements are Air, Earth (see above), Fire and Water.
elements of Primal Man.” Scholem uses “archon”
elements of the sun. Mentioned in Enoch II,
elements ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” *Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
elements ::: “The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
Elements: Are simple constituents, in psychology, of sense perceptions such as sweet and green. Elementary complexes are things of experience. (Avenarius.) In logic: individual members of a class. Also refers to Euclid's 13 books. -- H.H.
Elements jor evoUilion ::: When there is a new birth one brings all that is necessary from past lives, but also one gathers what is necessary from the earth consciousness and so too brings in new elements as one develops.
Elements ::: The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 87-88
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Experiencing a desire or a pressing need for food. 2.* Fig. Extremely desirous; having a craving; avid. *3. Lacking needful or desirable elements.
2. In Logic and Mathematics, a collection, a manifold, a multiplicity, a set, an ensemble, an assemblage, a totality of elements (usually numbers or points) satisfying a given condition or subjected to definite operational laws. According to Cantor, an aggregate is any collection of separate objects of thought gathered into a whole; or again, any multiplicity which can be thought as one; or better, any totality of definite elements bound up into a whole by means of a law. Aggregates have several properties: for example, they have the "same power" when their respective elements can be brought into one-to-one correspondence; and they are "enumerable" when they have the same power as the aggregate of natural numbers. Aggregates may be finite or infinite; and the laws applying to each type are different and often incompatible, thus raising difficult philosophical problems. See One-One; Cardinal Number; Enumerable. Hence the practice to isolate the mathematical notion of the aggregate from its metaphysical implications and to consider such collections as symbols of a certain kind which are to facilitate mathematical calculations in much the same way as numbers do. In spite of the controversial nature of infinite sets great progress has been made in mathematics by the introduction of the Theory of Aggregates in arithmetic, geometry and the theory of functions. (German, Mannigfaltigkeit, Menge; French, Ensemble).
2. In psychology, the act or process of exercising the mind, the faculty of connecting judgments; the power and fact of using reason; the thought-processes of discussion, debate, argumentation or inference; the manifestation of the discursive property of the mind; the actual use of arguments with a view to convince or persuade; the art and method or proving or demonstrating; the orderly development of thought with a view to, or the attainment of a conclusion believed to be valid. -- The origin, nature and value of reasoning are debated questions, with their answers ranging from spiritualism (reasoning as the exercise of a faculty of the soul) to materialism (reasoning as an epiphenomenon depending on the brain), with all the modern schools of psychology ordering themselves between them. A few points of agreement might be mentioned here: reasoning follows judgment and apprehension, whichever of the last two thought-processes comes first in our psychological development; reasoning proceeds according to four main types, namely deductive, inductive, presumptive and deceptive; reasoning assumes a belief in its own validity undisturbed by doubt, and implies various logical habits and methods which may be organized into a logical doctrine; reasoning requires a reference to some ultimate principles to justify its progress 3. In logic, Reasoning is the process of inference, it is the process of passing from certain propositions already known or assumed to be true, to another truth distinct from them but following from them; it is a discourse or argument which infers one proposition from another, or from a group of others having some common elements between them. The inference is necessary in the case of deductive reasoning; and contingent, probable or wrong, in the case of inductive, presumptive or deceptive reasoning respectively. -- There are various types of reasoning, and proper methods for each type. The definition, discussion, development and evaluation of these types and methods form an important branch of logic and its subdivisions. The details of the application of reasoning to the various sciences, form the subject of methodology. All these types are reducible to one or the other of the two fundamental processes or reasoning, namely deduction and induction. It must be added that the logical study of reasoning is normative logic does not analyze it simply in its natural development, but with a view to guide it towards coherence, validity or truth. -- T.G.
4. In the philosophy of nature, aggregate has various meanings: it is a mass formed into clusters (anat.); a compound or an organized mass of individuals (zool.); an agglomerate (bot.) an agglomeration of distinct minerals separable by mechanical means (geol.); or, in general, a compound mass in which the elements retain their essential individuality. -- T.G.
9PAC "tool" 709 PACkage. A {report generator} for the {IBM 7090}, developed in 1959. [Sammet 1969, p.314. "IBM 7090 Prog Sys, SHARE 7090 9PAC Part I: Intro and Gen Princs", IBM J28-6166, White Plains, 1961]. (1995-02-07):-) {emoticon}; {semicolon}" {less than}"g" "chat" grin. An alternative to {smiley}. [{Jargon File}] (1998-01-18)"gr&d" "chat" Grinning, running and ducking. See {emoticon}. (1995-03-17)= {equals}" {greater than}? {question mark}?? "programming" A {Perl} quote-like {operator} used to delimit a {regular expression} (RE) like "?FOO?" that matches FOO at most once. The normal "/FOO/" form of regular expression will match FOO any number of times. The "??" operator will match again after a call to the "reset" operator. The operator is usually referred to as "??" but, taken literally, an empty RE like this (or "//") actually means to re-use the last successfully matched regular expression or, if there was none, empty string (which will always match). {Unix manual page}: perlop(1). (2009-05-28)@ {commercial at}@-party "event, history" /at'par-tee/ (Or "@-sign party") An antiquated term for a gathering of {hackers} at a science-fiction convention (especially the annual Worldcon) to which only people who had an {electronic mail address} were admitted. The term refers to the {commercial at} symbol, "@", in an e-mail address and dates back to the era when having an e-mail address was a distinguishing characteristic of the select few who worked with computers. Compare {boink}. [{Jargon File}] (2012-11-17)@Begin "text" The {Scribe} equivalent of {\begin}. [{Jargon File}] (2014-11-06)@stake "security, software" A computer security development group and consultancy dedicated to researching and documenting security flaws that exist in {operating systems}, {network} {protocols}, or software. @stake publishes information about security flaws through advisories, research reports, and tools. They release the information and tools to help system administrators, users, and software and hardware vendors better secure their systems. L0pht merged with @stake in January 2000. {@stake home (http://atstake.com/research/redirect.html)}. (2003-06-12)@XX "programming" 1. Part of the syntax of a {decorated name}, as used internally by {Microsoft}'s {Visual C} or {Visual C++} {compilers}. 2. The name of an example {instance variable} in the {Ruby} {programming language}. (2018-08-24)[incr Tcl] "language" An extension of {Tcl} that adds {classes} and {inheritence}. The name is a pun on {C++} - an {object-oriented} extension of {C} - [incr variable] is the Tcl {syntax} for adding one to a variable. [Origin? Availability?] (1998-11-27)\ {backslash}\begin "text, chat" The {LaTeX} command used with \end to delimit an environment within which the text is formatted in a certain way. E.g. \begin{table}...\end{table}. Used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For example: \begin{flame} Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, all computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. \end{flame} {Scribe} users at {CMU} and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On {Usenet}, this construct would more frequently be rendered as ""FLAME ON"" and ""FLAME OFF"" (a la {HTML}), or "
a b c ::: --> The first three letters of the alphabet, used for the whole alphabet.
A primer for teaching the alphabet and first elements of reading.
The simplest rudiments of any subject; as, the A B C of finance.
ablution ::: n. --> The act of washing or cleansing; specifically, the washing of the body, or some part of it, as a religious rite.
The water used in cleansing.
A small quantity of wine and water, which is used to wash the priest&
abscissa ::: n. --> One of the elements of reference by which a point, as of a curve, is referred to a system of fixed rectilineal coordinate axes.
According to a view which is widely held by mathematicians, it is characteristic of a mathematical discipline that it begins with a set of undefined elements, properties, functions, and relations, and a set of unproved propositions (called axioms or postulates) involving them; and that from these all other propositions (called theorems) of the discipline are to be derived by the methods of formal logic. On its face, as thus stated, this view would identify mathematics with applied logic. It is usually added, however, that the undefined terms, which appear in the role of names of undefined elements, etc., are not really names of particulars at all but are variables, and that the theorems are to be regarded as proved for any values of these variables which render the postulates true. If then each theorem is replaced by the proposition embodying the implication from the conjunction of the postulates to the theorem in question, we have a reduction of mathematics to pure logic. (For a particular example of a set of postulates for a mathematical discipline see the article Arithmetic, foundations of.)
According to the classical or Newtonian theory, space-time is separable in an absolute way into the two elements, space and time; on the other hand, according to either the special or the general theory of relativity, this separation is not possible in an absolute sense but is relative to a choice of a coordinate system.
"A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements — the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
“A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements—the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress—that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
ada (samata shanti sukha prasada) ::: a union of the four elements of the first catus.t.aya, with prasada (rather than hasya) as the last element. samata samat
adhibhuta. ::: the primal being; primal element; primordial being; pertaining to the elements; governing principle of the material manifestation
Agglutination: (Lat. ad + glutinare, to paste) Philologically, a method of formation in language whereby a modification of meaning or of relation is given to a word by adherence or incorporation of distinct parts or elements. -- H.H.
aggregate type "programming" A data {type} composed of multiple elements. An aggregate can be homogeneous (all elements have the same type) e.g. an {array}, a list in a {functional language}, a string of characters, a file; or it can be heterogeneous (elements can have different types) e.g. a {structure}. In most languages aggregates can contain elements which are themselves aggregates. e.g. a list of lists. See also {union}. (1996-03-23)
Albertus, Magnus: St., O.P. (1193-1280) Count of Bollstädt, Bishop of Ratisbon, Doctor Universalis, was born at Lauingen, Bavaria, studied at Padua and Bologna, entered the Dominican Order in 1223. He taught theology at the Univ. of Paris from 1245-48, when he was sent to Cologne to organize a new course of studies for his Order; St. Thomas Aquinas was his student and assistant at this time. Later his time was given over to administrative duties and he was made Bishop of Ratisbon in 1260. In 1262 he gave up his bishopric and returned to a life of writing, teaching and controversy. Of very broad interests in science, philosophy and theology, Albert popularized a great part of the corpus of Aristotelian and Arabic philosophic writings in the 13th century. His thought incorporates elements of Augustinism, Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Avicennism, Boethianism into a vast synthesis which is not without internal inconsistencies. Due to the lack of critical editions of his works, a true estimate of the value of his philosophy is impossible at present. However, he must have had some influence on St. Thomas, and there was a lively Albertinian school lasting into the Renaissance. Chief works: Summa de Creaturis, Comment, in IV Lib. Sent., Philos, Commentaries on nearly all works of Aristotle, De Causis, De intellectu et intellig., Summa Theologiae (Opera Omnia, ed. Borgnet, 38 vol., Paris, 1890-99). -- V.J.B.
algebraic data type "programming" (Or "sum of products type") In {functional programming}, new types can be defined, each of which has one or more {constructors}. Such a type is known as an algebraic data type. E.g. in {Haskell} we can define a new type, "Tree": data Tree = Empty | Leaf Int | Node Tree Tree with constructors "Empty", "Leaf" and "Node". The constructors can be used much like functions in that they can be (partially) applied to arguments of the appropriate type. For example, the Leaf constructor has the functional type Int -" Tree. A constructor application cannot be reduced (evaluated) like a function application though since it is already in {normal form}. Functions which operate on algebraic data types can be defined using {pattern matching}: depth :: Tree -" Int depth Empty = 0 depth (Leaf n) = 1 depth (Node l r) = 1 + max (depth l) (depth r) The most common algebraic data type is the list which has constructors Nil and Cons, written in Haskell using the special syntax "[]" for Nil and infix ":" for Cons. Special cases of algebraic types are {product types} (only one constructor) and {enumeration types} (many constructors with no arguments). Algebraic types are one kind of {constructed type} (i.e. a type formed by combining other types). An algebraic data type may also be an {abstract data type} (ADT) if it is exported from a {module} without its constructors. Objects of such a type can only be manipulated using functions defined in the same {module} as the type itself. In {set theory} the equivalent of an algebraic data type is a {discriminated union} - a set whose elements consist of a tag (equivalent to a constructor) and an object of a type corresponding to the tag (equivalent to the constructor arguments). (1994-11-23)
algebraic "theory" In {domain theory}, a {complete partial order} is algebraic if every element is the {least upper bound} of some {chain} of {compact} elements. If the set of compact elements is {countable} it is called {omega-algebraic}. [Significance?] (1995-04-25)
All Rajayoga depends on this perception and experience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be sepa- rated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and re- solved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes.
alphabet ::: n. --> The letters of a language arranged in the customary order; the series of letters or signs which form the elements of written language.
The simplest rudiments; elements. ::: v. t. --> To designate by the letters of the alphabet; to
AM 1. "communications" {Amplitude Modulation}. 2. "artificial intelligence" A program by {Doug Lenat} to discover concepts in elementary mathematics. AM was written in 1976 in {Interlisp}. From 100 fundamental concepts and about 250 {heuristics} it discovered several important mathematical concepts including subsets, disjoint sets, sets with the same number of elements, and numbers. It worked by filling slots in {frames} maintaining an agenda of resource-limited prioritised tasks. AM's successor was {Eurisko}. {(http://homepages.enterprise.net/hibou/aicourse/lenat.txt)}. (1999-04-19)
amalgamation ::: n. --> The act or operation of compounding mercury with another metal; -- applied particularly to the process of separating gold and silver from their ores by mixing them with mercury.
The mixing or blending of different elements, races, societies, etc.; also, the result of such combination or blending; a homogeneous union.
Amulet "processor" An implementation or the {Advanced RISC Machine} {microprocessor} architecture using the {micropipeline} design style. In April 1994 the Amulet group in the Computer Science department of {Manchester University} took delivery of the AMULET1 {microprocessor}. This was their first large scale asynchronous circuit and the world's first implementation of a commercial microprocessor architecture (ARM) in {asynchronous logic}. Work was begun at the end of 1990 and the design despatched for fabrication in February 1993. The primary intent was to demonstrate that an asynchronous microprocessor can consume less power than a synchronous design. The design incorporates a number of concurrent units which cooperate to give instruction level compatibility with the existing synchronous part. These include an Address unit, which autonomously generates instruction fetch requests and interleaves ({nondeterministic}ally) data requests from the Execution unit; a {Register} file which supplies operands, queues write destinations and handles data dependencies; an Execution unit which includes a multiplier, a shifter and an {ALU} with data-dependent delay; a Data interface which performs byte extraction and alignment and includes an {instruction prefetch} buffer, and a control path which performs {instruction decode}. These units only synchronise to exchange data. The design demonstrates that all the usual problems of processor design can be solved in this asynchronous framework: backward {instruction set} compatibility, {interrupts} and exact {exceptions} for {memory faults} are all covered. It also demonstrates some unusual behaviour, for instance {nondeterministic} prefetch depth beyond a branch instruction (though the instructions which actually get executed are, of course, deterministic). There are some unusual problems for {compiler} {optimisation}, as the metric which must be used to compare alternative code sequences is continuous rather than discrete, and the {nondeterminism} in external behaviour must also be taken into account. The chip was designed using a mixture of custom {datapath} and compiled control logic elements, as was the synchronous ARM. The fabrication technology is the same as that used for one version of the synchronous part, reducing the number of variables when comparing the two parts. Two silicon implementations have been received and preliminary measurements have been taken from these. The first is a 0.7um process and has achieved about 28 kDhrystones running the standard {benchmark} program. The other is a 1 um implementation and achieves about 20 kDhrystones. For the faster of the parts this is equivalent to a synchronous {ARM6} clocked at around 20MHz; in the case of AMULET1 it is likely that this speed is limited by the memory system cycle time (just over 50ns) rather than the processor chip itself. A fair comparison of devices at the same geometries gives the AMULET1 performance as about 70% of that of an {ARM6} running at 20MHz. Its power consumption is very similar to that of the ARM6; the AMULET1 therefore delivers about 80 MIPS/W (compared with around 120 from a 20MHz ARM6). Multiplication is several times faster on the AMULET1 owing to the inclusion of a specialised asynchronous multiplier. This performance is reasonable considering that the AMULET1 is a first generation part, whereas the synchronous ARM has undergone several design iterations. AMULET2 (under development in 1994) was expected to be three times faster than AMULET1 and use less power. The {macrocell} size (without {pad ring}) is 5.5 mm by 4.5 mm on a 1 micron {CMOS} process, which is about twice the area of the synchronous part. Some of the increase can be attributed to the more sophisticated organisation of the new part: it has a deeper {pipeline} than the clocked version and it supports multiple outstanding memory requests; there is also specialised circuitry to increase the multiplication speed. Although there is undoubtedly some overhead attributable to the asynchronous control logic, this is estimated to be closer to 20% than to the 100% suggested by the direct comparison. AMULET1 is code compatible with {ARM6} and is so is capable of running existing {binaries} without modification. The implementation also includes features such as interrupts and memory aborts. The work was part of a broad {ESPRIT} funded investigation into low-power technologies within the European {Open Microprocessor systems Initiative} (OMI) programme, where there is interest in low-power techniques both for portable equipment and (in the longer term) to alleviate the problems of the increasingly high dissipation of high-performance chips. This initial investigation into the role {asynchronous logic} might play has now demonstrated that asynchronous techniques can be applied to problems of the scale of a complete {microprocessor}. {(http://cs.man.ac.uk/amulet)}. (1994-12-08)
analyse ::: to examine carefully and in detail so as to identify causes, key factors, possible results; examine minutely and critically to determine the elements or essential features of. analysed.
Analysis: (Chemical) The identification and estimation of chemical individuals in a mixture; the identification and estimation of elements in a compound; the identification and estimation of types of substances in complex mixtures; the identification and estimation of isotopes In an "element". -- W.M.M.
analysis ::: n. --> A resolution of anything, whether an object of the senses or of the intellect, into its constituent or original elements; an examination of the component parts of a subject, each separately, as the words which compose a sentence, the tones of a tune, or the simple propositions which enter into an argument. It is opposed to synthesis.
The separation of a compound substance, by chemical processes, into its constituents, with a view to ascertain either (a) what elements it contains, or (b) how much of each element is present.
analytical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to analysis; resolving into elements or constituent parts; as, an analytical experiment; analytic reasoning; -- opposed to synthetic.
analyze ::: v. t. --> To subject to analysis; to resolve (anything complex) into its elements; to separate into the constituent parts, for the purpose of an examination of each separately; to examine in such a manner as to ascertain the elements or nature of the thing examined; as, to analyze a fossil substance; to analyze a sentence or a word; to analyze an action to ascertain its morality.
anandaṁ (brahma) ::: brahman as Knowledge and Bliss, the last two elements of the brahma catus.t.aya. j ñanamaya
anhydride ::: n. --> An oxide of a nonmetallic body or an organic radical, capable of forming an acid by uniting with the elements of water; -- so called because it may be formed from an acid by the abstraction of water.
::: "An incarnation is something more, something special and individual to the individual being. It is the substitution of the Person of a divine being for the human person and an infiltration of it into all the movements so that there is a dynamic personal change in all of them and in the whole nature; not merely a change of the character of the consciousness or general surrender into its hands, but a subtle intimate personal change. Even when there is an incarnation from the birth, the human elements have to be taken up, but when there is a descent, there is a total conscious substitution.” Letters on Yoga
“An incarnation is something more, something special and individual to the individual being. It is the substitution of the Person of a divine being for the human person and an infiltration of it into all the movements so that there is a dynamic personal change in all of them and in the whole nature; not merely a change of the character of the consciousness or general surrender into its hands, but a subtle intimate personal change. Even when there is an incarnation from the birth, the human elements have to be taken up, but when there is a descent, there is a total conscious substitution.” Letters on Yoga
antecommunion ::: n. --> A name given to that part of the Anglican liturgy for the communion, which precedes the consecration of the elements.
antichain "mathematics" A subset S of a {partially ordered set} P is an antichain if, for all x, y in S, x "= y =" x = y I.e. no two different elements are related. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\subseteq}). (1995-02-03)
antisymmetric "mathematics" A {relation} R is antisymmetric if, for all x and y, x R y and y R x =" x == y. I.e. no two different elements are mutually related. {Partial orders} and {total orders} are antisymmetric. If R is also {symmetric}, i.e. x R y =" y R x then x R y =" x == y I.e. different elements are not related. (1995-04-18)
Apart from technical innovations in logical theory (notably in the discussion of tautology and probability), Wittgenstein's main contribution to contemporary philosophy has been his demonstration of the importance of a study of language. The Tractatus is concerned chiefly to determine the conditions which any symbolism qua representation of fact, must necessarily satisfy. Such a "language" must consist of elements combined in such ways as to mirror in one-one correspondence the elements and structure of the "world". A crucial distinction is made between "saying" (aussagen) and "showing" (zeigen); a statement is able to assert a certain state of affairs by virtue of having the same structure as that which it represents. The common structure, however, cannot itself be asserted, can only be shown in the symbols. Much philosophy is held to consist of trying to say what can only be shown, a misguided proceeding provoked by failure to understand "the logic of our language". Certain mystical conclusions follow.
a process in which all elements behave in the same way at the same time; simultaneous or synchronous parallel action.
array 1. "programming" A collection of identically typed data items distinguished by their indices (or "subscripts"). The number of dimensions an array can have depends on the language but is usually unlimited. An array is a kind of {aggregate} data type. A single ordinary variable (a "{scalar}") could be considered as a zero-dimensional array. A one-dimensional array is also known as a "{vector}". A reference to an array element is written something like A[i,j,k] where A is the array name and i, j and k are the indices. The {C} language is peculiar in that each index is written in separate brackets, e.g. A[i][j][k]. This expresses the fact that, in C, an N-dimensional array is actually a vector, each of whose elements is an N-1 dimensional array. Elements of an array are usually stored contiguously. Languages differ as to whether the leftmost or rightmost index varies most rapidly, i.e. whether each row is stored contiguously or each column (for a 2D array). Arrays are appropriate for storing data which must be accessed in an unpredictable order, in contrast to {lists} which are best when accessed sequentially. Array indices are {integers}, usually {natural numbers}, whereas the elements of an {associative array} are identified by strings. 2. "architecture" A {processor array}, not to be confused with an {array processor}. (2007-10-12)
array processor "processor" (Or "vector processor") A {computer}, or extension to its {arithmetic unit}, that is capable of performing simultaneous computations on elements of an {array} or table of data in some number of dimensions. The {IBM AltiVec} (the "Velocity Engine" used in the {Apple G4} computers) is a vector processor. Common uses for array processors include analysis of fluid dynamics and rotation of {3d} objects, as well as data retrieval, in which elements of a {database} are scanned simultaneously. Array processors are very rare now (1998). {Array presentation (http://cs.njit.edu/leon/105/c5/index.htm)}. (2003-09-11)
arsenic ::: n. --> One of the elements, a solid substance resembling a metal in its physical properties, but in its chemical relations ranking with the nonmetals. It is of a steel-gray color and brilliant luster, though usually dull from tarnish. It is very brittle, and sublimes at 356¡ Fahrenheit. It is sometimes found native, but usually combined with silver, cobalt, nickel, iron, antimony, or sulphur. Orpiment and realgar are two of its sulphur compounds, the first of which is the true arsenicum of the ancients. The element and its compounds are
As an emergent materialist, he holds that everything happens by the blind combination of the elements of matter or energy, without any guidance, excluding the assumption of a non-material component. While he regards primary qualities as physical emergents, he yet considers secondary qualities, such as color, taste, and smell, as transphysical emergents. He favors the emergence of laws, qualities and classes. Psyche, physical in nature, combines with other material factors to make the life of the mind. Broad holds to a generative view of consciousness. Psyche persists after death for some time, floats about in cosmic space indefinitely, ready to combine with a material body under suitable conditions. He calls this theory the "compound theory of materialistic emergency." Sensa, he holds, are real, particular, short-lived existents. They are exclusively neither physical nor mental. He replaces the neo-realistic contrast between existents and subsistents, by a contrast between existents and substracta. Main works: Scientific Thought, 1923; The Mind and Its Place in Nature, 1925; Five Types of Ethical Theory, 1930. -- H.H.
a-santi-sukham (samata-shanti-sukham) ::: a union of the first three elements of the first catus.t.aya. samat samata a ssanti anti sukha pras prasada
aspect-oriented programming "programming" (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the {quality} of software. Mechanisms for defining and composing {abstractions} are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function. But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, {persistence}, communication, replication, coordination, {memory management}, or {real-time} constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components. While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current {component-oriented languages} tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The {source code} becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes. This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects of concern in a separate and natural form, and then automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. {Xerox AOP homepage (http://parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/)}. {AspectJ (http://AspectJ.org/)}. {ECOOPP'99 AOP workshop (http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/aop-ecoop99/)}. (1999-11-21)
asya (samata shanti sukh hasya) ::: a union of the four elements of the first catus.t.aya, with hasya (rather than prasada) as the last element. samat samata-santi-sukham
atomic "jargon" (From Greek "atomos", indivisible) Indivisible; cannot be split up. For example, an instruction may be said to do several things "atomically", i.e. all the things are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction being half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used especially to convey that an operation cannot be interrupted. An atomic {data type} has no internal structure visible to the program. It can be represented by a flat {domain} (all elements are equally defined). Machine {integers} and {Booleans} are two examples. An atomic {database transaction} is one which is guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all. If an error prevents a partially-performed transaction from proceeding to completion, it must be "backed out" to prevent the database being left in an inconsistent state. [{Jargon File}] (2000-04-03)
Atomism: As contrasted with synechism, the view that there are discrete irreducible elements of finite spatial or temporal span. E.g., the atomic doctrine of Democritus that the real world consists of qualitatively similar atoms of diverse shapes. Lucretius, De Natura Rerurn. See Epicurus. Cf. K. Lasswitz, Gesch. d. Atomismus. As contrasted with the view that certain elements are necessarily connected, or even related at all, the doctrine that some entities are only contingently related or are completely independent. In Russell (Scientific Method in Philosophy), Logical Atomism is the view that relations are external and that some true propositions are without simpler constituents in a given system, such propositions are "basic" with respect to that system. In political philosophy, atomism is syn. of particularism. As contrasted with the view that certain entities are analyzable, the doctrine that some entitles are ultimately simple. E.g., Russell's doctrine that there are certain simple, unanalyzable atomic propositions of which other propositions are constituted by compounding or generalization. -- C.A.B.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
A. V. Vasihev, Space, Time, Motion, translated by H. M. Lucas and C. P. Sanger, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, London. 1924, and New York, 1924. Religion, Philosophy of: The methodic or systematic investigation of the elements of religious consciousness, the theories it has evolved and their development and historic relationships in the cultural complex. It takes account of religious practices only as illustrations of the vitality of beliefs and the inseparableness of the psychological from thought reality in faith. It is distinct from theology in that it recognizes the priority of reason over faith and the acceptance of creed, subjecting the latter to a logical analysis. As such, the history of the Philosophy of Religion is coextensive with the free enquiry into religious reality, particularly the conceptions of God, soul, immortality, sin, salvaition, the sacred (Rudolf Otto), etc., and may be said to have its roots in any society above the pre-logical, mythological, or custom-controlled level, first observed in Egypt, China, India, and Greece. Its scientific treatment is a subsidiary philosophic discipline dates from about Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, while in the history of thought based on Indian and Greek speculation, sporadic sallies were made by all great philosophers, especially those professing an idealism, and by most theologians.
Axiom of Choice "logic" (AC, or "Choice") An {axiom} of {set theory}: If X is a set of sets, and S is the union of all the elements of X, then there exists a function f:X -" S such that for all non-empty x in X, f(x) is an element of x. In other words, we can always choose an element from each set in a set of sets, simultaneously. Function f is a "choice function" for X - for each x in X, it chooses an element of x. Most people's reaction to AC is: "But of course that's true! From each set, just take the element that's biggest, stupidest, closest to the North Pole, or whatever". Indeed, for any {finite} set of sets, we can simply consider each set in turn and pick an arbitrary element in some such way. We can also construct a choice function for most simple {infinite sets} of sets if they are generated in some regular way. However, there are some infinite sets for which the construction or specification of such a choice function would never end because we would have to consider an infinite number of separate cases. For example, if we express the {real number} line R as the union of many "copies" of the {rational numbers}, Q, namely Q, Q+a, Q+b, and infinitely (in fact uncountably) many more, where a, b, etc. are {irrational numbers} no two of which differ by a rational, and Q+a == {q+a : q in Q} we cannot pick an element of each of these "copies" without AC. An example of the use of AC is the theorem which states that the {countable} union of countable sets is countable. I.e. if X is countable and every element of X is countable (including the possibility that they're finite), then the sumset of X is countable. AC is required for this to be true in general. Even if one accepts the axiom, it doesn't tell you how to construct a choice function, only that one exists. Most mathematicians are quite happy to use AC if they need it, but those who are careful will, at least, draw attention to the fact that they have used it. There is something a little odd about Choice, and it has some alarming consequences, so results which actually "need" it are somehow a bit suspicious, e.g. the {Banach-Tarski paradox}. On the other side, consider {Russell's Attic}. AC is not a {theorem} of {Zermelo Fränkel set theory} (ZF). Gödel and Paul Cohen proved that AC is independent of ZF, i.e. if ZF is consistent, then so are ZFC (ZF with AC) and ZF(~C) (ZF with the negation of AC). This means that we cannot use ZF to prove or disprove AC. (2003-07-11)
babism ::: n. --> The doctrine of a modern religious sect, which originated in Persia in 1843, being a mixture of Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish and Parsee elements.
barium ::: n. --> One of the elements, belonging to the alkaline earth group; a metal having a silver-white color, and melting at a very high temperature. It is difficult to obtain the pure metal, from the facility with which it becomes oxidized in the air. Atomic weight, 137. Symbol, Ba. Its oxide called baryta.
bathe ::: 1. To become immersed in or as if in liquid, as a bath or in other substances or elements. 2. To wash or pour over; suffuse or envelope, like sunshine. bathed, bathing.
elements ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” *Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
elements ::: “The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
Besides the universal intelligible being of things, Aristotle was also primarily concerned with an investigation of the being of things from the standpoint of their generation and existence. But only individual things are generated and exist. Hence, for him, substance was primarily the individual: a "this" which, in contrast with the universal or secondary substance, is not communicable to many. The Aristotelian meaning of substance may be developed from four points of view: Grammar: The nature of substance as the ultimate subject of predication is expressed by common usage in its employment of the noun (or substantive) as the subject of a sentence to signify an individual thing which "is neither present in nor predicable of a subject." Thus substance is grammatically distinguished from its (adjectival) properties and modifications which "are present in and predicable of a subject." Secondary substance is expressed by the universal term, and by its definition which are "not present in a subject but predicable of it." See Categoriae,) ch. 5. Physics: Independence of being emerges as a fundamental characteristic of substance in the analysis of change. Thus we have: Substantial change: Socrates comes to be. (Change simply). Accidental change; in a certain respect only: Socrates comes to be 6 feet tall. (Quantitative). Socrates comes to be musical (Qualitative). Socrates comes to be in Corinth (Local). As substantial change is prior to the others and may occur independently of them, so the individual substance is prior in being to the accidents; i.e., the accidents cannot exist independently of their subject (Socrates), but can be only in him or in another primary substance, while the reverse is not necessarily the case. Logic: Out of this analysis of change there also emerges a division of being into the schema of categories, with the distinction between the category of substance and the several accidental categories, such as quantity, quality, place, relation, etc. In a corresponding manner, the category of substance is first; i.e., prior to the others in being, and independent of them. Metaphysics: The character of substance as that which is present in an individual as the cause of its being and unity is developed in Aristotle's metaphysical writings, see especiallv Bk. Z, ch. 17, 1041b. Primary substnnce is not the matter alone, nor the universal form common to many, but the individual unity of matter and form. For example, each thing is composed of parts or elements, as an organism is composed of cells, yet it is not merely its elements, but has a being and unity over and above the sum of its parts. This something more which causes the cells to be this organism rather than a malignant growth, is an example of what is meant by substance in its proper sense of first substance (substantia prima). Substance in its secondary sense (substantia secunda) is the universal form (idea or species) which is individuated in each thing.
bhur. ::: the gross or physical world; the earth and material realm of existence made up of the five elements
bhuta ::: 1. a becoming, an existence. ::: 2. an elemental power or spirit. ::: 3. an element; the five bhutas: elements, the five elemental states of substance: akasa, vayu, agni (tejas), apas (jala), prthivi. ::: bhutanam [genitive plural] ::: bhutani [nominative and accusative]
bhūta ::: creature; any of the pañcabhūta, the five "subtle conditions bhuta of material energy" which are "called by the names of the five concrete elements of ancient thought, ether, air, fire, water and earth"; all objects are said to be "created by the combination of these five subtle conditions or elements" which are "nowhere to be found in their purity in the gross material world".
Bhutatathata: (Skr.) "So-ness", the highest state conceivable by the Vijnana-vada (s.v.) in which there is a complete coincidentia oppositorum of beings and elements of knowledge; directly identified with the Adi-Buddha, or eternal Buddha, in Vajrayana Buddhism. -- K.F.L.
bismuth ::: n. --> One of the elements; a metal of a reddish white color, crystallizing in rhombohedrons. It is somewhat harder than lead, and rather brittle; masses show broad cleavage surfaces when broken across. It melts at 507¡ Fahr., being easily fused in the flame of a candle. It is found in a native state, and as a constituent of some minerals. Specific gravity 9.8. Atomic weight 207.5. Symbol Bi.
bleak ::: 1. Exposed to the elements; unsheltered and barren; desolate; cold and cutting; raw, windswept. 2. Offering little or no hope or encouragement.
blow up 1. "mathematics" A description of a function that, as its input changes over a finite interval, its output goes from stable (steadily increasing or decreasing) to {unstable} (oscilating wildly between extreme values). The term might also be used for successive elements in a discrete sequence or stepwise approximation of a continuous function. Rather than becoming unstable, the value may simply tend to positive or negative {infinity}. When calculating such a function or sequence, a computer will typically suffer {overflow}. 2. {blow out}. [{Jargon File}] (2019-12-27)
Body: Here taken in the sense of the material organized substance of man contrasted with the mind, soul or spirit, thus leading to the problem of the relation between body and mind, one of the most persistent problems of philosophy. Of course, any theory which identifies body and mind, or does not adequately distinguish the psychical from the physical, regarding both as aspects of the same reality, eludes some of the difficulties presented by the problem. Both materialism and idealism may be considered as forms of psycho-physical monism. Materialism by denying the real existence of spiritual beings and reducing mind to a function of matter, and spiritualism, or that species called idealism, which regards bodies simply as contents of consciousness, really evade the main issue. All those, however, who frankly acknowledge the empirically given duality of mind and organism, are obliged to struggle with the problem of the relation between them. The two most noted rival theories attempting an answer are interactionism and parallelism. The first considers both body and mind as substantial beings, influencing each other, hence causally related. The second holds that physical processes and mental processes accompany each other without any interaction or interference whatsoever, consequently they cannot be causally related. The Scholastics advance the doctrine of the human composite consisting of body and soul united into one substance and nature, constituting the human person or self, to whom all actions of which man is capable must be ascribed. There can be no interaction, since there is but one agent, formed of two component elements. This theory, like interactionism, makes provision for survival, even immortality, while parallelism definitely precludes it. No known theory can meet all objections and prove entirely satisfactory; the problem still persists. See Descartes, Spinoza, Mind. -- J.J.R.
Boolean algebra "logic" (After the logician {George Boole}) 1. Commonly, and especially in computer science and digital electronics, this term is used to mean {two-valued logic}. 2. This is in stark contrast with the definition used by pure mathematicians who in the 1960s introduced "Boolean-valued {models}" into logic precisely because a "Boolean-valued model" is an interpretation of a {theory} that allows more than two possible truth values! Strangely, a Boolean algebra (in the mathematical sense) is not strictly an {algebra}, but is in fact a {lattice}. A Boolean algebra is sometimes defined as a "complemented {distributive lattice}". Boole's work which inspired the mathematical definition concerned {algebras} of {sets}, involving the operations of intersection, union and complement on sets. Such algebras obey the following identities where the operators ^, V, - and constants 1 and 0 can be thought of either as set intersection, union, complement, universal, empty; or as two-valued logic AND, OR, NOT, TRUE, FALSE; or any other conforming system. a ^ b = b ^ a a V b = b V a (commutative laws) (a ^ b) ^ c = a ^ (b ^ c) (a V b) V c = a V (b V c) (associative laws) a ^ (b V c) = (a ^ b) V (a ^ c) a V (b ^ c) = (a V b) ^ (a V c) (distributive laws) a ^ a = a a V a = a (idempotence laws) --a = a -(a ^ b) = (-a) V (-b) -(a V b) = (-a) ^ (-b) (de Morgan's laws) a ^ -a = 0 a V -a = 1 a ^ 1 = a a V 0 = a a ^ 0 = 0 a V 1 = 1 -1 = 0 -0 = 1 There are several common alternative notations for the "-" or {logical complement} operator. If a and b are elements of a Boolean algebra, we define a "= b to mean that a ^ b = a, or equivalently a V b = b. Thus, for example, if ^, V and - denote set intersection, union and complement then "= is the inclusive subset relation. The relation "= is a {partial ordering}, though it is not necessarily a {linear ordering} since some Boolean algebras contain incomparable values. Note that these laws only refer explicitly to the two distinguished constants 1 and 0 (sometimes written as {LaTeX} \top and \bot), and in {two-valued logic} there are no others, but according to the more general mathematical definition, in some systems variables a, b and c may take on other values as well. (1997-02-27)
Bradley, Francis Herbert: (1846-1924) Dialectician extraordinary of British philosophy, Bradley sought to purge contemporary thought of the extremely sensationalistic and utilitarian elements embodied in the tradition of empiricism. Though owing much to Hegel, he early repudiated the Hegelian system as such, and his own variety of Absolute Idealism bases itself upon no scheme of categories. His brilliant attack upon the inadequate assumptions of hedonistic ethics (Ethical Studies, 1877) was followed in 1883 by The Principles of Logic in which his dialectic analysis was applied to the problems of inference and judgment. It was, however, his Appearance and Reality (1893) with its famous theory of "the degrees of truth" which first disturbed the somnambulism of modern metaphysics, and led Caird to remark upon "the greatest thing since Kant". In later years Bradley's growing realization of ultimate difficulties in his version of the coherence theory led him to modify his doctrines in the direction of a Platonic mysticism. See Essays on Truth and Reality, the second edition of the Logic Collected Essays, etc. -- W.S.W.
bromine ::: n. --> One of the elements, related in its chemical qualities to chlorine and iodine. Atomic weight 79.8. Symbol Br. It is a deep reddish brown liquid of a very disagreeable odor, emitting a brownish vapor at the ordinary temperature. In combination it is found in minute quantities in sea water, and in many saline springs. It occurs also in the mineral bromyrite.
B. The Probability-Relation. Considering the general grounds of probability, it is pertinent to analyze the proper characteristics of this concept and the valid conditions of its use in inferential processes. Probability presents itself as a special relation between the premisses and the conclusion of an argument, namely when the premisses are true but not completely sufficient to condition the truth of the conclusion. A probable inference must however be logical, even though its result is not certain, for its premisses must be a true sign of its conclusion. The probability-relation may take three aspects: it is inductive, probable or presumptive. In strict induction, there is an essential connection between the facts expressed in the premisses and in the conclusion, which almost forces a factual result from the circumstances of the predication. This type of probability-relation is prominent in induction proper and in statistics. In strict probability, there is a logical connection between the premisses and the conclusion which does not entail a definite factual value for the latter. This type of probability-relation is prominent in mathematical probability and circumstantial evidence. In strict presumption, there is a similarity of characteristics between the fact expressed in the conclusion and the real event if it does or did exist. This type of probability-relation is prominent in analogy and testimony. A presumptive conclusion should be accepted provisionally, and it should have definite consequences capable of being tested. The results of an inductive inference and of a probable inference may often be brought closer together when covering the same field, as the relations involved are fundamental enough for the purpose. This may be done by a qualitative analysis of their implications, or by a quantitative comparison of their elements, as it is done for example in the methods of correlation. But a presumptive inference cannot be reduced to either of the other two forms without losing its identity, because the connection between its elements is of an indefinite character. It may be said that inductive and probable inferences have an intrinsic reasonableness, while presumptive inferences have an extrinsic reasonableness. The former involve determinism within certain limits, while the latter display indeterminacy more prominently. That is why very poor, misleading or wrong conclusions are obtained when mathematical methods are applied to moral acts, judiciary decisions or indirect testimony The activity of the human will has an intricate complexity and variability not easily subjected to calculation. Hence the degree of probability of a presumptive inference can be estimated only by the character and circumstances of its suggested explanation. In moral cases, the discussion and application of the probability-relation leads to the consideration of the doctrines of Probabilism and Probabiliorism which are qualitative. The probability-relation as such has the following general implications which are compatible with its three different aspects, and which may serve as general inferential principle: Any generalization must be probable upon propositions entailing its exemplification in particular cases; Any generalization or system of generalizations forming a theory, must be probable upon propositions following from it by implication; The probability of a given proposition on the basis of other propositions constituting its evidence, is the degree of logical conclusiveness of this evidence with respect to the given proposition; The empirical probability (p = S/E) of a statement S increases as verifications accrue to the evidence E, provided the evidence is taken as a whole; and Numerical probabilities may be assigned to facts or statements only when the evidence includes statistical data or other numerical information which can be treated by the methods of mathematical probability. C. Mathematical Probability. The mathematical theory of probability, which is also called the theory of chances or the theory of relative possibilities, is concerned with the application of mathematical methods to the determination of the likelihood of any event, when there are not sufficient data to determine with certainty its occurrence or failure. As Laplace remarked, it is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. But its range goes far beyond that of common sense for it has not only conditioned the growth of various branches of mathematics, such as the theory of errors, the calculus of variations and mathematical statistics, but it has also made possible the establishment of a number of theories in the natural and social sciences, by its actual applications to concrete problems. A distinction is usually made between direct and inverse probability. The determination of a direct or a priori probability involves an inference from given situations or sets of possibilities numerically characterized, to future events related with them. By definition, the direct probability of the occurrence of any particular form of an event, is the ratio of the number of ways in which that form might occur, to the whole number of ways in which the event may occur, all these forms being equiprobable or equally likely. The basic principles referring to a priori probabilities are derived from the analysis of the various logical alternatives involved in any hypothetical questions such as the following: (a) To determine whether a cause, whose exact nature is or is not known, will prove operative or not in certain circumstances; (b) To determine how often an event happens or fails. The comparison of the number of occurrences with that of the failures of an event, considered in simple or complex circumstances, affords a baisis for several cases of probable inference. Thus, theorems may be established to deal with the probability of success and the probability of failure of an event, with the probability of the joint occurrence of several events, with the probability of the alternative occurrence of several events, with the different conditions of frequency of occurrence of an event; with mathematical expectation, and with similar questions. The determination of an a posteriori or inverse probability involves an inference from given situations or events, to past conditions or causes which rnay have contributed to their occurrence. By definition, an inverse probability is the numerical value assigned to each one of a number of possible causes of an actual event that has already occurred; or more generally, it is the numerical value assigned to hypotheses which attempt to explain actual events or circumstances. If an event has occurred as a result of any one of n several causes, the probability that C was the actual cause is Pp/E (Pnpn), when P is the probability that the event could be produced by C if present, and p the probability that C was present before the occurrence of that event. Inverse probability is based on general and special assumptions which cannot always be properly stated, and as there are many different sets of such assumptions, there cannot be a coercive reason for making a definite choice. In particular, the condition of the equiprobability of causes is seldom if ever fulfilled. The distinction between the two kinds of probability, which has led to some confusion in interpreting their grounds and their relations, can be technically ignored now as a result of the adoption of a statistical basis for measuring probabilities. In particular, it is the statistical treatment of correlation which led to the study of probabilities of concurrent phenomena irrespective of their direction in time. This distinction may be retained, howe\er, for the purpose of a general exposition of the subject. Thus, a number of probability theorems are obtained by using various cases of direct and inverse probability involving permutations and combinations, the binomial theorem, the theory of series, and the methods of integration. In turn, these theurems can be applied to concrete cases of the various sciences.
By 1770, the beginning of his "critical" period, Kant had an answer which he confidently expected would revolutionize philosophy. First dimly outlined in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), and elaborated in great detail in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), the answer consisted in the critical or transcendental method. The typical function of reason, on Kant's view, is relating or synthesizing the data of sense. In effecting any synthesis the mind relies on the validity of certain principles, such as causality, which, as Hume had shown, cannot be inductive generalizations from sense data, yet are indispensable in any account of "experience" viewed as a connected, significant whole. If the necessary, synthetic principles cannot be derived from sense data proper, then, Kant argued, they must be "a priori" -- logically prior to the materials which they relate. He also called these formal elements "transcendental", by which he meant that, while they are indubitably in experience viewed as a connected whole, they transcend or are distinct from the sensuous materials in source and status. In the Critique of Pure Reason -- his "theoretical philosophy" -- Kant undertakes a complete inventory and "deduction" of all synthetic, a priori, transcendental forms employed in the knowledge of Nature. The first part, the "Transcendental Aesthetic", exhibits the two forms or "intuitions" (Anschauungen) of the sensibility: space and time. Knowledge of Nature, however varied its sense content, is necessarily always of something in space and time; and just because these are necessary conditions of any experience of Nature, space and time cannot be objective properties of things-in-themselves, but must be formal demands of reason. Space and time are "empirically real", because they are present in actual experience; but they are "transcendentally ideal", since they are forms which the mind "imposes" on the data of sense.
calcium ::: n. --> An elementary substance; a metal which combined with oxygen forms lime. It is of a pale yellow color, tenacious, and malleable. It is a member of the alkaline earth group of elements. Atomic weight 40. Symbol Ca.
calm ::: n. --> Freedom from motion, agitation, or disturbance; a cessation or absence of that which causes motion or disturbance, as of winds or waves; tranquility; stillness; quiet; serenity.
To make calm; to render still or quiet, as elements; as, to calm the winds.
To deliver from agitation or excitement; to still or soothe, as the mind or passions.
Campanella, Tommaso: (1568-1639) A Dominican monk in revolt against Aristotelianism, and influenced by the naturalism of Telesio, he arrived at philosophic conclusions in some ways prophetic of Descartes. Distrusting both the reports of the senses and the results of reasoning as indications of the nature of Reality, he found nothing trustworthy except the fact of his own existence, and the inferences drawn from that fact. As certain as his awareness of his own existence was the awareness of an external world to which experience referred and by which it was caused. Again, since the nature of the part is representative of the nature of the whole to which it belongs, the Universe of which the self is part must, like the part, be possessed of knowledge, will, and power. Hence I may infer from my own existence the existence of a God. Again, I must infer other of the divine nature more or less perfect manifestations than myself descending from the hierarchy of angels above man to the form or structure of the world, the ultimate corporeal elements, and the sensible phenomena produced by these elements of the physical universe, below him in the scale of perfection.
cardinality "mathematics" The number of elements in a set. If two sets have the same number of elements (i.e. there is a {bijection} between them) then they have the same cardinality. A cardinality is thus an {isomorphism class} in the {category} of sets. {aleph 0} is defined as the cardinality of the first {infinite} {ordinal}, {omega} (the number of {natural numbers}). (1995-03-29)
Cartesian product "mathematics" (After Renee Descartes, French philosper and mathematician) The Cartesian product of two sets A and B is the set A x B = {(a, b) | a in A, b in B}. I.e. the product set contains all possible combinations of one element from each set. The idea can be extended to products of any number of sets. If we consider the elements in sets A and B as points along perpendicular axes in a two-dimensional space then the elements of the product are the "{Cartesian coordinates}" of points in that space. See also {tuple}. (1995-03-01)
Cascading Style Sheets "web" (CSS) An extension to {HTML} to allow styles, e.g. colour, {font}, size to be specified for certain elements of a {hypertext} document. Style information can be included in-line in the HTML file or in a separate CSS file (which can then be easily shared by multiple HTML files). Multiple levels of CSS can be used to allow selective overriding of styles. {(http://w3.org/Style/CSS/)}. (2000-07-26)
Categorial: A priori or non-empirical elements. (Alexander). -- H.H.
Cauchy sequence "mathematics" A sequence of elements from some {vector space} that converge and stay arbitrarily close to each other (using the {norm} definied for the space). (2000-03-10)
chain 1. "operating system" (From {BASIC}'s "CHAIN" statement) To pass control to a child or successor without going through the {operating system} {command interpreter} that invoked you. The state of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it. Though this facility used to be common on memory-limited {microcomputers} and is still widely supported for {backward compatibility}, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, {Unix} calls this {exec}. Compare with the more modern "{subshell}". 2. "programming" A series of linked data areas within an {operating system} or {application program}. "Chain rattling" is the process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one which is of interest. The implication is that there are many links in the chain. 3. "theory" A possibly infinite, non-decreasing sequence of elements of some {total ordering}, S x0 "= x1 "= x2 ... A chain satisfies: for all x,y in S, x "= y \/ y "= x. I.e. any two elements of a chain are related. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\sqsubseteq}). [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-03)
Charles Babbage "person" The British inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his {Analytical Engine}. His previous {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London. Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994]. Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths} since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton: "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'" "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart." "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose." [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34]. Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}. (1996-02-22)
chiaroscuro ::: 1. The arrangement of light and dark elements in a pictorial work of art. 2. *Poetic*: Contrasting sense as in, darkness and light, ‘joy and gloom", ‘praise and blame," etc.
Ch'i: Breath; the vital fluid. Force; spirit. The vital force, as expressed in the operation and succession of the active principle (yang) and the passive principle (yin) and the Five Agents or Elements (wu hsing). To Chou Lien-hsi (1017-1073), this material principle is identical with yin yang and the Five Elements. To Chang Heng-ch'u (1020-1077) it is the reality of the Ultimate Vacuity, having the two aspects of yin and yang. It is to the Ultimate Vacuity (Tai Hsu) as ice is to water. Ch'eng I-ch'uan (1033-1107) and Ch'eng Ming-tao (1032-1086) considered all that has physical form to be identical with the vital force. It is the principle of differentiation and individuation. When a thing disintegrates, the vital force is at an end, not to appear again in the creative process. A new entity is constituted of new vital force. Thus it is also the principle of novelty in creation. It is produced by Reason (li). But to the Neo-Confucians, especially Chi Hsi (1130-1200), Reason has no control over it. The two can never be separated; without it, Reason would having nothing to be embodied in. In aesthetics: Rhythmic vitality; vitalizing spirit; strength of expression or brush stioke.
Chin: Metal, one of the Five Agents or Elements. And fourth centuries B.C. where scholars (including Shen Tao, Tsou Yen) gathered under official patronage to write on and to freely discuss philosophy and politics. Seat of learning and freedom of thought at the time, which was called Ch'i Hsueh. -- W.T.C Chin: Metal, one of the Five Agents or Elements. See wu hsing. -- W.T.C.
Chiu: Duration, or "what reaches to different times," or "what unites past and present, morning and evening." (Neo-Mohism.) -- W.T.C Chiu ch'ou: The Nine Categories of the Grand Norm (hung fan) of ancient Confucian philosophy, consisting of the Five Elements (wu hsing), the reverent practice of the five functions (of personal appearance, speech, vision, hearing, and thought), the intensive application of the eight governmental measures, the harmonious use of the five regulations of time, the establishment of the royal standard, the orderly practice of the three virtues, the intelligent practice of divination, the thoughtful following of various indications, and the rewarding with five kinds of good and punishment with six forms of evil. -- W.T.C.
\cil of sleep — very largely indeed these two elements get mixed up together. For in fact a large part of our consciousness in sleep docs not sink into this subconscious slate ; it passes beyond the veil into other planes of being which arc connected with our own inner planes, planes of supraphj'sical existence, w'orlds of a larger life, mind or psychic which arc there behind and whose influences come to us without our knowledge. Occasionally we get a dream from these planes, something more than a dream, — a dream experience which is a record direct or symbolic of what happens to us or around us there. As the inner consciousness grows by sadhana, these dream experiences increase In number, dearness, coherence, accuracy and after some growth of experi- ence and consciousness, we can, if we observe, come to under- stand them and their significance to our loner life. Even we can by training become so coosetous as to follow our own passage, usually veiled to our arvarencss and memory, through many realms and the process of the return to the waking state. At a certain pitch of this inner wakefulness this kind of sleep, a sleep experience, can replace the ordinary subconscious slumber.
clemency ::: n. --> Disposition to forgive and spare, as offenders; mildness of temper; gentleness; tenderness; mercy.
Mildness or softness of the elements; as, the clemency of the season.
closure 1. "programming" In a {reduction system}, a closure is a data structure that holds an expression and an environment of variable bindings in which that expression is to be evaluated. The variables may be local or global. Closures are used to represent unevaluated expressions when implementing {functional programming languages} with {lazy evaluation}. In a real implementation, both expression and environment are represented by pointers. A {suspension} is a closure which includes a flag to say whether or not it has been evaluated. The term "{thunk}" has come to be synonymous with "closure" but originated outside {functional programming}. 2. "theory" In {domain theory}, given a {partially ordered set}, D and a subset, X of D, the upward closure of X in D is the union over all x in X of the sets of all d in D such that x "= d. Thus the upward closure of X in D contains the elements of X and any greater element of D. A set is "upward closed" if it is the same as its upward closure, i.e. any d greater than an element is also an element. The downward closure (or "left closure") is similar but with d "= x. A downward closed set is one for which any d less than an element is also an element. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\subseteq} and the upward closure of X in D is written \uparrow_\{D} X). (1994-12-16)
CLU "language" (CLUster) An {object-oriented} programming language developed at {MIT} by {Liskov} et al in 1974-1975. CLU is an {object-oriented} language of the {Pascal} family designed to support {data abstraction}, similar to {Alphard}. It introduced the {iterator}: a {coroutine} yielding the elements of a data object, to be used as the sequence of values in a {for loop}. A CLU program consists of separately compilable {procedures}, {clusters} and iterators, no nesting. A cluster is a module naming an {abstract type} and its operations, its internal representation and implementation. Clusters and iterators may be generic. Supplying actual constant values for the {parameters} instantiates the {module}. There are no {implicit type conversions}. In a cluster, the explicit type conversions 'up' and 'down' change between the abstract type and the representation. There is a universal type 'any', and a procedure force[] to check that an object is a certain type. Objects may be mutable or {immutable}. {Exceptions} are raised using 'signal' and handled with 'except'. {Assignment} is by sharing, similar to the sharing of data objects in {Lisp}. Arguments are passed by {call-by-sharing}, similar to {call-by-value}, except that the arguments are objects and can be changed only if they are mutable. CLU has {own variables} and multiple assignment. CLU was one of {Kamin's interpreters}. {clu2c} compiled CLU to {C}. {Concurrent CLU} was an extension designed to support parallel proceses. ["CLU Reference Manual", Barbara Liskov et al, LNCS 114, Springer 1981]. E-mail: Paul R. Johnson "prj@pm-prj.lcs.mit.edu". {Versions for Sun and VAX/VMS (ftp://pion.lcs.mit.edu/pub/clu/)}. {Portable version (ftp://mintaka.lcs.mit.edu/pub/dcurtis/)}. (1994-12-16)
clusters ::: a group of the same or similar elements gathered or occurring closely together.
C. More formally, explanation is a step towards generalization or the establishment of a theory. It is the process of linking a statement of fact to its logical implications and consequences;or the process of fitting a statement of fact into a coherent system of statements extending beyond the given fact, or the construction of a logically related body of statements including the statement of fact to be justified. In the most general terms, explanation is the search for generalizations whose variables are functionally related in such a way that the value of any one variable is calculable from the value of the others, whether or not causal relations are noticeable or ultimately involved in the elements of the generalization. -- T.C.
coalesced sum "theory" (Or "smash sum") In {domain theory}, the coalesced sum of {domains} A and B, A (+) B, contains all the non-{bottom} elements of both domains, tagged to show which part of the sum they come from, and a new {bottom} element. D (+) E = { bottom(D(+)E) } U { (0,d) | d in D, d /= bottom(D) } U { (1,e) | e in E, e /= bottom(E) } The bottoms of the constituent domains are coalesced into a single bottom in the sum. This may be generalised to any number of domains. The ordering is bottom(D(+)E) "= v For all v in D(+)E (i,v1) "= (j,v2) iff i = j & v1 "= v2 ""=" is usually written as {LaTeX} \sqsubseteq and "(+)" as {LaTeX} \oplus - a "+" in a circle. (1994-12-22)
Cohen, Hermann: (1842-1918) and Paul Natorp (1854-1924) were the chief leaders of the "Marburg School" which formed a definite branch of the Neo-Kantian movement. Whereas the original founders of this movement, O. Liebmann and Fr. A. Lange, had reacted to scientific empiricism by again calling attention to the a priori elements of cognition, the Marburg school contended that all cognition was exclusively a priori. They definitely rejected not only the notion of "things-in-themselves" but even that of anything immediately "given" in experience. There is no other reality than one posited by thought and this holds good equally for the object, the subject and God. Nor is thought in its effort to "determine the object = x" limited by any empirical data but solely by the laws of thought. Since in Ethics Kant himself had already endeavored to eliminate all empirical elements, the Marburg school was perhaps closer to him in this field than in epistemology. The sole goal of conduct is fulfillment of duty, i.e., the achievement of a society organized according to moral principles and satisfying the postulates of personal dignity. The Marburg school was probably the most influential philosophic trend in Germany in the last 25 years before the First World War. The most outstanding present-day champion of their tradition is Ernst Cassirer (born 1874). Cohen and Natorp tried to re-interpret Plato as well as Kant. Following up a suggestion first made by Lotze they contended that the Ideas ought to be understood as laws or methods of thought and that the current view ascribing any kind of existence to them was based on a misunderstanding of Aristotle's. -- H.G.
Common Management Information Protocol "protocol" (CMIP) Part of the {OSI} body of {standards} specifying {protocol} elements that may be used to provide the operation and notification services described in the related standard, CMIS ({Common Management Information Services}). Document: {ISO}/{IEC} 9596, or equivalent {ITU} X.711. (1997-12-07)
Complication: (Lat. com + plicatio, folded together) The union or act of combining more or less disparate elements into a single whole impression or idea. The term usually has reference to the synthesis of sense data in perceptions, or of perceptions in a unifying idea. -- O.F.K.
composed ::: to be made up, formed, compounded of (a material, or constituent elements); to be constituted; to consist of.
compose ::: to make or create by putting together parts or elements.
Composite idea: Any idea that consists of a fusion of sentient elements, which together are presumed to pass the threshold of consciousness. In logic, a compound of undefined ideas by way of definition. -- C.K.D.
composite ::: v. t. --> Made up of distinct parts or elements; compounded; as, a composite language.
Belonging to a certain order which is composed of the Ionic order grafted upon the Corinthian. It is called also the Roman or the Italic order, and is one of the five orders recognized by the Italian writers of the sixteenth century. See Capital.
Belonging to the order Compositae; bearing involucrate heads of many small florets, as the daisy, thistle, and
Compound: (Lat. con + ponere, to place) A complex whole formed by the union of a number of parts in contrast to an element which is a simple unanalyzable part. A mental compound is a state of mind formed by the combination (see Combination) of simple mental elements, either conscious or unconscious. -- L.W.
compound ::: n. --> In the East Indies, an inclosure containing a house, outbuildings, etc.
That which is compounded or formed by the union or mixture of elements ingredients, or parts; a combination of simples; a compound word; the result of composition.
A union of two or more ingredients in definite proportions by weight, so combined as to form a distinct substance; as, water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen.
Compound Theory of Mind: The conception of mind as a compound of psychological elements analogous to a chemical compound. See Psychological Atomism. -- L.W.
compound ::: to combine so as to form a whole; mix; mix (elements). mix with.
Compresence: (Lat. compraesentia from praesse, to be present) The togetherness of two or more items, for example, the coexistence of several elements in the unity of consciousness. In the terminology of S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity), an unique kind of togetherness which underlies cognition. -- F.W.
CONFESSION. ::: Helps to purge the consciousness of ham- pering elements and clears the inner air and makes for a closer and more intimate relation between the Guru and the disciple.
confines ::: 1. The limits of a space or area; the borders. 2. A bounded scope. 3. Restraining elements.
conflict ::: v. --> A striking or dashing together; violent collision; as, a conflict of elements or waves.
A strife for the mastery; hostile contest; battle; struggle; fighting. ::: v. i. --> To strike or dash together; to meet in violent
confound ::: v. t. --> To mingle and blend, so that different elements can not be distinguished; to confuse.
To mistake for another; to identify falsely.
To throw into confusion or disorder; to perplex; to strike with amazement; to dismay.
To destroy; to ruin; to waste.
Consciousness — two elements ::: Consciousness is made up of two elements, awareness of self and things and forces and conscious-power. Awareness is the first thing necessary, you have to be aware of things in the right consciousness, in the right way, seeing them in their truth ; but awareness by itself is not enough.
Constitutive: Of the essential nature; internal; component; inherent. Internal relations are constitutive because they are integral parts or elements of the natures which they relate, whereas external, non-constitutive relations may be altered without change in the essential natures of the related entities.
Contrast: In aesthetics: the term may refer either to the presence in the object contemplated of contrasting elements (colors, sounds, characters, etc.), or to the principle that the presence of such contrasting elements is a common feature of beautiful objects which, within limits, enhances their beauty. -- W.K.F.
Converse: See logic, formal, §§ 4, 8. Coordinates: (from Lat. co + ordinare, to regulate) Logical: Items of the same order and rank in a scheme of classification. Also, class characteristics serving as indices of order or distinction among the elements of a series or assemblage. -- O.F.W.
corporale ::: a. --> A fine linen cloth, on which the sacred elements are consecrated in the eucharist, or with which they are covered; a communion cloth.
Correspondence Theory of Truth: The theory that the truth of propositions is determined by the existence of some one-one correspondence between the terms of the propsition and the elements of some fact. Supporters of this view differ as to the nature of the determinate relation by which the alleged correspondence is constituted.
Cosmogony: (Gr. cosmos a. gonia, producing or creating the world) Is a pictorial treatment of the way in which the world or the universe came into being. In contrast to the most primitive civilizations, the great ethnic stocks of mankind have originated cosmogonies. The basal principles common to all mythological cosmogonies are: They deduce the creation of the world either from the fewest possible elements or from a single material principle such as water, ocean, earth, air, mud of river, slime, two halves of an egg, body of a giant, or from a spiritual or abstract principle such as an anthropomorphic god, deities, chaos, time, night, That. The genesis being a slow development characterized by an orderly sequence of periods, the creation process is variously divided into definite periods of specified units of years. The process of creation being self-originating, in its final stages the genealogy and origin of deities is a large admixture. There is no apparent ethical import attached to the cosmogonies. Few of them assume the idea of design as underlying the creation. They hold that the world had a beginning in time. The process of creation from less perfect to more perfect, from an original chaos to the final creation of man, the predominance of water in the original condition of the earth, the evolution of a spiritual or luminous principle reacting on the primeval water and the emphasis upon the godlike origin of man or his immediate relation to the deity, are all permeating threads of cosmogonic myths. In dualistic religions the world originates as a result of a hostile conflict of two opposing principles, or as a result of the parallel development of two opposing forces. The conception of creation ex nihilo was almost universally unknown in antiquity. -- H.H.
cosmology ::: n. --> The science of the world or universe; or a treatise relating to the structure and parts of the system of creation, the elements of bodies, the modifications of material things, the laws of motion, and the order and course of nature.
countable "mathematics" A term describing a {set} which is {isomorphic} to a subet of the {natural numbers}. A countable set has "countably many" elements. If the isomorphism is stated explicitly then the set is called "a counted set" or "an {enumeration}". Examples of countable sets are any {finite} set, the {natural numbers}, {integers}, and {rational numbers}. The {real numbers} and {complex numbers} are not [proof?]. (1999-08-29)
C Programmer's Disease "programming" The tendency of the undisciplined {C} programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvellous consequences of {fandango on core}. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user. [{Jargon File}] (2001-12-31)
darwinian ::: a. --> Pertaining to Darwin; as, the Darwinian theory, a theory of the manner and cause of the supposed development of living things from certain original forms or elements. ::: n. --> An advocate of Darwinism.
decomposable ::: a. --> Capable of being resolved into constituent elements.
decompose ::: v. t. --> To separate the constituent parts of; to resolve into original elements; to set free from previously existing forms of chemical combination; to bring to dissolution; to rot or decay. ::: v. i. --> To become resolved or returned from existing combinations; to undergo dissolution; to decay; to rot.
decomposition ::: n. --> The act or process of resolving the constituent parts of a compound body or substance into its elementary parts; separation into constituent part; analysis; the decay or dissolution consequent on the removal or alteration of some of the ingredients of a compound; disintegration; as, the decomposition of wood, rocks, etc.
The state of being reduced into original elements.
Repeated composition; a combination of compounds.
design pattern "programming" A description of an {object-oriented design} technique which names, abstracts and identifies aspects of a design structure that are useful for creating an object-oriented design. The design pattern identifies {classes} and {instances}, their roles, collaborations and responsibilities. Each design pattern focuses on a particular object-oriented design problem or issue. It describes when it applies, whether it can be applied in the presence of other design constraints, and the consequences and trade-offs of its use. {Home (http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/users/patterns/patterns.html)}. ["Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software", Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides]. (1997-07-21)
diapedesis ::: n. --> The passage of the corpuscular elements of the blood from the blood vessels into the surrounding tissues, without rupture of the walls of the blood vessels.
dichromic ::: a. --> Furnishing or giving two colors; -- said of defective vision, in which all the compound colors are resolvable into two elements instead of three.
difference equation "mathematics" A {relation} between consecutive elements of a {sequence}. The first difference is D u(n) = u(n+1) - u(n) where u(n) is the nth element of sequence u. The second difference is D2 u(n) = D (D u(n)) = (u(n+2) - u(n+1)) - (u(n+1) - u(n)) = u(n+2) - 2u(n+1) + u(n) And so on. A {recurrence relation} such as u(n+2) + a u(n+1) + b u(n) = 0 can be converted to a difference equation (in this case, a second order linear difference equation): D2 u(n) + p D u(n) + q u(n) = 0 and vice versa. a, b, p, q are constants. (1995-02-10)
digest ::: v. t. --> To distribute or arrange methodically; to work over and classify; to reduce to portions for ready use or application; as, to digest the laws, etc.
To separate (the food) in its passage through the alimentary canal into the nutritive and nonnutritive elements; to prepare, by the action of the digestive juices, for conversion into blood; to convert into chyme.
To think over and arrange methodically in the mind; to
Dilthey, Wilhelm: (1833-1911) A devoted student of biography, he constructed a new methodology and a new interpretation of the study of society and culture. He formulated the doctrine of Verstehungs-psychologie, which is basic to the study of social ends and values. He was the founder of Lebensphilosophie. Being the first humanistic philosopher historian of his age, he led in the comprehensive research in the history of intellectual development. Main works: Einlettung in die Geisteswessenschaften, 1883; Der Erlebnis und die Dtchtung, 1905; Das Wesen der Philosophie, 1907, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in der Geisteswissenschaften, 1910, Die Typen der Weltanschauung, 1911; Gesammelte Schriften, 9 vols., 1922-35. --H.H. Dimension: (scientific) 1. Any linear series or order of elements. 2. Any quantity of a given kind, capable of increase or decrease over a certain range, a variable. 3. In the physical system: mass, length and time. -- A.C.B.
DIM statement "programming" (From "dimension") A {keyword} in most versions of the {BASIC} programming language that declares the size of an {array}. E.g. DIM A(100) declares a one-dimensional array with 101 numeric elements (including A(0)). {Visual Basic} uses the DIM (or "Dim") statement for any variable declaration, even {scalars}, e.g. Dim DepartmentNumber As Integer which declares a single (scalar) variable of type Integer. (1999-03-26)
D. In mathematics, (1) it is a numerical or algebraical index showing the number of times the element it affects must be multiplied by itself; concurrently, it denotes the product arising from the continued mutiplication of a quantity by itself. (2) In the theory of aggregates, the power of a class is the number of its elements, its cardinal number (q.v.). -- T.G.
directed set "theory" A {set} X is directed under some {relation}, "= (less than or equal), if it is non-empty and if for any two elements x and y there exists an element z such that x "= z and y "= z. I.e. all pairs have an {upper bound}. (1994-11-11)
discrete preorder "mathematics" A {preorder} is said to be discrete if any two of its elements are {incomparable}. (1995-09-21)
Dissociation: (Lat. dis + socius, a companion) The operation of mind by which the elements of a complex are discriminated. Dissociative discrimination is facilitated when elements which are commonly conjoined are found in new combinations. James calls this the law of "dissociation by varying concomitants." (Principles of Psychology, I, 506.) -- I.W.
distributed data warehouse "database" (DDW) Data shared across multiple data repositories, for the purpose of {OLAP}. Each data warehouse may belong to one or many organisations. The sharing im;plies a common format or definition of data elements (e.g. using XML). (2008-03-15)
Divine Love is of two kinds — the divine love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself, and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved ; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal b free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.
"Divine Love is of two kinds — the divine Love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself, and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.” Letters on Yoga
“Divine Love is of two kinds—the divine Love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself, and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.” Letters on Yoga
::: "Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.” Letters on Yoga
“Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.” Letters on Yoga
DIVINISATION. ::: Taking up of the human elements, show- ing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purifi- cation and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole earthly life to its full power and Ananda.
This divinisation of the nature is a metamorphosis, a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God- nature.
doubly linked list "programming" A data structure in which each element contains pointers to the next and previous elements in the list, thus forming a bidirectional linear list. (1995-03-28)
Dreams from the subconscient ::: It is one of the most embar- rassing elements of yogic experience to find how obstinately the subconscient retains what has been settled and done with in the upper layers of the consciousness. But just for that reason these dreams are often a useful indication as they enable us to pursue things to their obscure roots in this underworld and excise them.
Dreams of physical mind and yogic dreams ; The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind-faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the bttddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the bram-memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received without intelligence or co-ordination, wildly distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, wnlh brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world. In the yogic dream-state, on the other hand, the mind is in clear pos- session of itself, though not of the physical world, works cohe- rently and is able to use either its ordinary will and intelligence with a concentrated power or else the higher will and intelli- gence of the more exalted planes of mind. It withdraws from experience of the outer world, it puts its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of communication with material things ; but everything that is proper to itself, thought, reasoning, reflec- tion, vision, it can continue to execute with an increased purity and power of sovereign concentration free from the distractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind. It can use too its will and produce upon itself or upon its environment mental, moral and even physical effects which may continue and have their after-consequences on the waking state subsequent to the cessa- tion of the trance.
dualism ::: n. --> State of being dual or twofold; a twofold division; any system which is founded on a double principle, or a twofold distinction
A view of man as constituted of two original and independent elements, as matter and spirit.
A system which accepts two gods, or two original principles, one good and the other evil.
The doctrine that all mankind are divided by the arbitrary decree of God, and in his eternal foreknowledge, into two classes, the
dyadic ::: a. --> Pertaining to the number two; of two parts or elements.
Eckhart, Meister: (1260-1327) Was born in Hochheim (Gotha), may have studied with St. Albert in Cologne, received his doctorate at Paris in 1302. He taught theology at various times, devoted much time to preaching in the vernacular, and filled various administrative posts in the Dominican Order. Mystical, difficult in terminology, his thought appears to contain elements of Aristotelianism, Augustinism, Neoplatonism and Avicennism. Accused of Pantheism and other theological errors, he was the subject of a famous trial in 1326; he abjured publicly any possible religious errors which he may have made. Chief works Opus Tripartitum, Quaestiones Parisienses, Deutsche Predigten. (Pfeiffer, F., Deutsche Mystiker des 14 Jahrh., Bd. II, Leipzig, 1857; tr. Evans, London, 1924.) B. J. Muller-Thym, University of Being in M. Eckhart (N. Y., 1939). -- V.J.B.
egoism ::: n. --> The doctrine of certain extreme adherents or disciples of Descartes and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which finds all the elements of knowledge in the ego and the relations which it implies or provides for.
Excessive love and thought of self; the habit of regarding one&
eigenvector "mathematics" A {vector} which, when acted on by a particular {linear transformation}, produces a scalar multiple of the original vector. The scalar in question is called the {eigenvalue} corresponding to this eigenvector. It should be noted that "vector" here means "element of a vector space" which can include many mathematical entities. Ordinary vectors are elements of a vector space, and multiplication by a matrix is a {linear transformation} on them; {smooth functions} "are vectors", and many partial differential operators are linear transformations on the space of such functions; quantum-mechanical states "are vectors", and {observables} are linear transformations on the state space. An important theorem says, roughly, that certain linear transformations have enough eigenvectors that they form a {basis} of the whole vector states. This is why {Fourier analysis} works, and why in quantum mechanics every state is a superposition of eigenstates of observables. An eigenvector is a (representative member of a) {fixed point} of the map on the {projective plane} induced by a {linear map}. (1996-09-27)
element ::: 1. A component or constituent of a whole. 2. One of the substances, usually earth, water, air, and fire, formerly regarded as constituting the material universe. 3. A natural habitat, sphere of activity, environment, etc. elements.
elemental ::: a. --> Pertaining to the elements, first principles, and primary ingredients, or to the four supposed elements of the material world; as, elemental air.
Pertaining to rudiments or first principles; rudimentary; elementary.
elementality ::: n. --> The condition of being composed of elements, or a thing so composed.
elementally ::: adv. --> According to elements; literally; as, the words, "Take, eat; this is my body," elementally understood.
elementary ::: a. --> Having only one principle or constituent part; consisting of a single element; simple; uncompounded; as, an elementary substance.
Pertaining to, or treating of, the elements, rudiments, or first principles of anything; initial; rudimental; introductory; as, an elementary treatise.
Pertaining to one of the four elements, air, water, earth, fire.
elementation ::: n. --> Instruction in the elements or first principles.
element ::: n. --> One of the simplest or essential parts or principles of which anything consists, or upon which the constitution or fundamental powers of anything are based.
One of the ultimate, undecomposable constituents of any kind of matter. Specifically: (Chem.) A substance which cannot be decomposed into different kinds of matter by any means at present employed; as, the elements of water are oxygen and hydrogen.
One of the ultimate parts which are variously combined in
Elements: Are simple constituents, in psychology, of sense perceptions such as sweet and green. Elementary complexes are things of experience. (Avenarius.) In logic: individual members of a class. Also refers to Euclid's 13 books. -- H.H.
Elements jor evoUilion ::: When there is a new birth one brings all that is necessary from past lives, but also one gathers what is necessary from the earth consciousness and so too brings in new elements as one develops.
Elements ::: The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 87-88
Empedocles: Of Agrigentum, about 490-430 B.C.; attempted to reconcile the teaching of the permanence of Being of the Eleatics with the experience of change and motion as emphasized by Heraclitus. He taught the doctrine of the four "elements", earth, water, air and fire, out of the mixture of which all individual things came to be; love and hate being the cause of motion and therefore of the mixings of these elements. He was thus led to introduce a theory of value into the explanation of Nature since love and hate accounted also for the good and evil in the world. -- M.F.
Entities, neutral: Qualityless elements, simples that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. -- H.H.
equivalence class "mathematics" An equivalence class is a subset whose elements are related to each other by an {equivalence relation}. The equivalence classes of a set under some relation form a {partition} of that set (i.e. any two are either equal or {disjoint} and every element of the set is in some class). (1996-05-13)
equivalence class partitioning "testing" A software testing technique that involves identifying a small set of representative input values that invoke as many different input conditions as possible. For example, for {binary search} the following partitions exist: inputs that do or do not conform to pre-conditions, Inputs where the key element is or is not a member of the array. One can combine these into finer partitions. One can also pick specific conditions of the array, e.g. a single value, even or odd number of elements. One should look at {boundary conditions}, e.g. inputs where the key element is the first or last element in the array. (2004-01-18)
equivalence relation "mathematics" A relation R on a set including elements a, b, c, which is reflexive (a R a), symmetric (a R b =" b R a) and transitive (a R b R c =" a R c). An equivalence relation defines an {equivalence} class. See also {partial equivalence relation}. (1996-05-13)
erbium ::: n. --> A rare metallic element associated with several other rare elements in the mineral gadolinite from Ytterby in Sweden. Symbol Er. Atomic weight 165.9. Its salts are rose-colored and give characteristic spectra. Its sesquioxide is called erbia.
Essence: (Lat. essentia, fr. essens, participle of esse, to be) The being or power of a thing; necessary internal relation or function. The Greek philosophers identified essence and substance in the term, ousia. In classic Latin essence was the idea or law of a thing. But in scholastic philosophy the distinction between essence and substance became important. Essence began to be identified, as in its root meaning, with being, or power. For Locke, the being whereby a thing is what it is. For Kant, the primary internal principle of all that belongs to the being of a thing. For Peirce, the intelligible element of the possibility of being. (a) In logic: definition or the elements of a thing; the genus and differentia. See Definition. (b) In epistemology: that intelligible character which defines what an indefinite predicate asserts. The universal possibility of a thing. Opposite of existence. Syn. with being, possibility. See Santayana's use of the term in Realm of Essence, as a hybrid of intuited datum and scholastic essence (q.v.). See Eternal object. -- J.K.F.
Esthesis: (Gr. aisthesis, sensation or feeling, from aisthanesthai, to perceive) A state of pure feeling -- sensuous, hedonic or affective -- characterized by the absence of conceptual and interpretational elements. Aesthesis at the sensory level consists of pure sense data. See Sense datum. Though the existence of pure esthesis is challenged by most psychologists and epistemologists (see C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, pp. 54-5); a state of mind approximates pure esthesis when the conceptual, interpretative and constructional elements are reduced to a minimum. -- L.W.
(e) The problem of the A PRIORI, though the especial concern of the rationalist, confronts the empiricist also since few epistemologists are prepared to exclude the a priori entirely from their accounts of knowledge. The problem is that of isolating the a priori or non-empirical elements in knowledge and accounting for them in terms of the human reason. Three principal theories of the a priori have been advanced: the theory of the intrinsic A PRIORI which asserts that the basic principles of logic, mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy are self-evident truths recognizable by such intrinsic traits as clarity and distinctness of ideas. The intrinsic theory received its definitive modern expression in the theory of "innate ideas" (q.v.) of Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, and 17th century rationalism. The presuppositional theory of the a priori which validates a priori truths by demonstrating that they are presupposed either by their attempted denial (Leibniz) or by the very possibility of experience (Kant). The postulational theory of the A PRIORI elaborated under the influence of recent postulational techniques in mathematics, interprets a priori principles as rules or postulates arbitrarily posited in the construction of formal deductive systems. See Postulate; Posit. (f) The problem of differentiating the principal kinds of knowledge is an essential task especially for an empirical epistemology. Perhaps the most elementary epistemological distinction is between non-inferential apprehension of objects by perception, memory, etc. (see Knowledge by Acquaintance), and inferential knowledge of things with which the knowing subject has no direct apprehension. See Knowledge by Description. Acquaintance in turn assumes two principal forms: perception or acquaintance with external objects (see Perception), and introspection or the subject's acquaintance with the "self" and its cognitive, volitional and affective states. See Introspection; Reflection. Inferential knowledge includes knowledge of other selves (this is not to deny that knowledge of other minds may at times be immediate and non-inferential), historical knowledge, including not only history in the narrower sense but also astronomical, biological, anthropological and archaeological and even cosmological reconstructions of the past and finally scientific knowledge in so far as it involves inference and construction from observational data.
Euclid of Megara identified the good and the One. The many are unreal. Not to be confused with the great geometer who lived at Alexandria (c. 300 B.C.), author of the Elements in 13 books. -- M.F.
E-values: Every descriptive value in as far as it is a statement of another individual. E-values divide into elements and characters. They are basic values independent of the System C whose function they are. (Avenarius.) -- H.H.
Even when there is an incarnation from the birth, the human elements have to be taken up, but where there is a descent, there is a total conscious substitution.
Every sadbaka Is faced with two elements in him, the inner being which wants the Divine and the sadhana and the outer mainly vital and physical being which does not want them but remains attached to the things of the ordinary life. The mind is sometimes led by one, someUoves by the other. One of the most important things he has to do, therefore, is to decide fundamentally the quarrel between these two parts and to persuade or compel by psychic aspiration, by steadiness of the mind’s thought and will, by the choice of the higher vital in his emotional being, the opposing elements to be first quiescent and then consenting. So long as he is not able to do that his progress must be either very slow or fluctuating and chequered as the aspiration within cannot have a continuous action or a continuous result. Besides so long as thb is so, there are likely to be periodical revolts of the vita! repining at the slow progress, des- pairing, desponding, declaring the Adhar unfit ; calls from old life will come ; circumstances will be attracted which seem to justify it, suggestions will come from men and unseen powers pressing the sadhaka away from the sadhana and pointing back- ward to the former life. And yet in that life he is not likely to get any real satisfaction.
evolutionary computation Computer-based problem solving systems that use computational models of evolutionary processes as the key elements in design and implementation. A number of evolutionary computational models have been proposed, including {evolutionary algorithms}, {genetic algorithms}, the {evolution strategy}, {evolutionary programming}, and {artificial life}. {The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (http://cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/comp/ai/genetic/top.html)}. {Bibliography (http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Ai/EC-ref.html)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.ai.genetic}. (1995-03-02)
excitability ::: n. --> The quality of being readily excited; proneness to be affected by exciting causes.
The property manifested by living organisms, and the elements and tissues of which they are constituted, of responding to the action of stimulants; irritability; as, nervous excitability.
Existential import: See Logic, formal, § 4. Existential Philosophy: Determines the worth of knowledge not in relation to truth but according to its biological value contained in the pure data of consciousness when unaffected by emotions, volitions, and social prejudices. Both the source and the elements of knowledge are sensations as they "exist" in our consciousness. There is no difference between the external and internal world, as there is no natural phenomenon which could not be examined psychologically, it all has its "existence" in states of the mind. See Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers.
Explanation: In general: the process, art, means or method of making a fact or a statement intelligible; the result and the expression of what is made intelligible; the meaning attributed to anything by one who makes it intelligible; a genetic description, causal development, systematic clarification, rational exposition, scientific interpretation, intelligible connection, ordered manifestation of the elements of a fact or a statement. A. More technically, the method of showing discursively that a phenomenon or a group of phenomena obeys a law, by means of causal relations or descriptive connections, or briefly, the methodical analysis of a phenomenon for the purpose of stating its cause. The process of explanation suggests the real preformation or potential presence of the consequent in the antecedent, so that the phenomenon considered may be evolved, developed, unrolled out of its conditioning antecedents. The process and the value of a scientific explanation involve the question of the relation between cause and law, as these two terms may be identified (Berkeley) or distinguished (Comte). Hence modern theories range between extreme idealism and logical positivism. Both these extremes seem to be unsatisfactory: the former would include too much into science, while the latter would embrace a part of it only, namely the knowledge of the scientific laws. Taking into account Hume's criticism of causality and Mill's reasons for accepting causality, Russell proposes what seems to be a middle course, namely that regular sequences suggest causal relations, that causal relations are one special class of scientific generalization, that is one-way sequences in time, and that causal relations as such should not be used in the advanced stages of scientific generalization, functional relations being sufficient in all cases. However satisfactory in methodology, this view may not cover all the implications of the problem. B. There are three specific types of causal explanation, and their results may be combined: genetic or in terms of the direct and immediate conditions or causes producing a phenomenon (formal and efficient cause); descriptive, or in terms of the material elements of the phenomenon (material cause); teleological, or in terms of the ultimate end to be attained (final cause), either in accordance with the nature of the event or with the intention of the agent. The real causes of a phenomenon cannot be identified always, because the natural process of change or becoming escapes complete rationalization. But the attempt to rationalize the real by causal explanation, need not be abandoned in favor of a limited genetic description (postulational or functional) of the laws which may account for the particular phenomenon.
Extensible HyperText Markup Language "hypertext, standard, web" (XHTML) A reformulation of {HTML} 4.01 in {XML}. Being XML means that XHTML can be viewed, edited, and validated with standard XML tools. At the same time, it operates as well as or better than HTML 4 in existing HTML 4 conforming user agents. The most important change is that all elements must be terminated, either with a closing tag or using the "tag.../" shorthand. So, instead of "input type=submit" you would write "input type="submit" /" The space before the "/" is required by some older browsers. Other differences are that tag and attribute names should be lower case and all attributes should be quoted. {XHTML Home (http://w3.org/TR/xhtml1/)}. {Quick Summary (http://technorealm.co.uk/design/html-to-xhtml-conversions.html)} (2006-01-19)
factor ::: n. --> One who transacts business for another; an agent; a substitute; especially, a mercantile agent who buys and sells goods and transacts business for others in commission; a commission merchant or consignee. He may be a home factor or a foreign factor. He may buy and sell in his own name, and he is intrusted with the possession and control of the goods; and in these respects he differs from a broker.
A steward or bailiff of an estate.
One of the elements or quantities which, when multiplied
F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist or humanist, is, if anything, more hostile to rationalism, intellectualism, absolute metaphysics and even systematic and rigorous thinking than James himself. In his Humanism (1903) and his most important book Studies in Humanism (1907), he attempts to resolve or deflate metaphysical issues and controversies by practical distinctions of terms and appeal to personal, human factors, supposedly forgotten by other philosophers. Schiller wrote about many of the topics which James treated: absolute metaphysics, religion, truth, freedom, psychic research, etc., and the outcome is similar. His spirited defense of Protagoras, "the humanist", against Socrates and his tireless bantering critique of all phases of formal logic are elements of novelty. So also is his extreme activism. He goes so far as to say that "In validating our claims to 'truth' . . . we really transform them [realities] by our cognitive efforts, thereby proving our desires and ideas to be real forces in the shaping of the world". (Studies tn Humanism, 1906, p. 425.) Schiller's apparent view that desires and ideas can transform both truth and reality, even without manipulation or experiment, could also be found in James, but is absent in Dewey and later pragmatists.
fibrilla ::: n. --> A minute thread of fiber, as one of the fibrous elements of a muscular fiber; a fibril.
field-programmable gate array "hardware" (FPGA) A {gate array} where the logic network can be programmed into the device after its manufacture. An FPGA consists of an array of logic elements, either gates or lookup table {RAMs}, {flip-flops} and programmable interconnect wiring. Most FPGAs are reprogrammable, since their logic functions and interconnect are defined by RAM cells. The {Xilinx} LCA, {Altera} FLEX and {AT&T} ORCA devices are examples. Others can only be programmed once, by closing "antifuses". These retain their programming permanently. The {Actel} FPGAs are the leading example of such devices. Atmel FPGAs are currently (July 1997) the only ones in which part of the array can be reprogrammed while other parts are active. As of 1994, FPGAs have logic capacity up to 10K to 20K 2-input-NAND-equivalent gates, up to about 200 I/O pins and can run at {clock rates} of 50 MHz or more. FPGA designs must be prepared using {CAD} software tools, usually provided by the chip vendor, to do technology mapping, partitioning and placement, routing, and binary output. The resulting binary can be programmed into a {ROM} connected to the FPGA or {downloaded} to the FPGA from a connected computer. In addition to ordinary logic applications, FPGAs have enabled the development of {logic emulators}. There is also research on using FPGAs as computing devices, taking direct advantage of their reconfigurability into problem-specific hardware processors. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.arch.fpga}. (1997-07-11)
filter 1. (Originally {Unix}, now also {MS-DOS}) A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a {pipeline} (see {plumbing}). Compare {sponge}. 2. ({functional programming}) A {higher-order function} which takes a {predicate} and a list and returns those elements of the list for which the predicate is true. In {Haskell}: filter p [] = [] filter p (x:xs) = if p x then x : rest else rest where rest = filter p xs See also {filter promotion}. [{Jargon File}]
first-order logic "language, logic" The language describing the truth of mathematical {formulas}. Formulas describe properties of terms and have a truth value. The following are atomic formulas: True False p(t1,..tn) where t1,..,tn are terms and p is a predicate. If F1, F2 and F3 are formulas and v is a variable then the following are compound formulas: F1 ^ F2 conjunction - true if both F1 and F2 are true, F1 V F2 disjunction - true if either or both are true, F1 =" F2 implication - true if F1 is false or F2 is true, F1 is the antecedent, F2 is the consequent (sometimes written with a thin arrow), F1 "= F2 true if F1 is true or F2 is false, F1 == F2 true if F1 and F2 are both true or both false (normally written with a three line equivalence symbol) ~F1 negation - true if f1 is false (normally written as a dash '-' with a shorter vertical line hanging from its right hand end). For all v . F universal quantification - true if F is true for all values of v (normally written with an inverted A). Exists v . F existential quantification - true if there exists some value of v for which F is true. (Normally written with a reversed E). The operators ^ V =" "= == ~ are called connectives. "For all" and "Exists" are {quantifiers} whose {scope} is F. A term is a mathematical expression involving numbers, operators, functions and variables. The "order" of a logic specifies what entities "For all" and "Exists" may quantify over. First-order logic can only quantify over sets of {atomic} {propositions}. (E.g. For all p . p =" p). Second-order logic can quantify over functions on propositions, and higher-order logic can quantify over any type of entity. The sets over which quantifiers operate are usually implicit but can be deduced from well-formedness constraints. In first-order logic quantifiers always range over ALL the elements of the domain of discourse. By contrast, second-order logic allows one to quantify over subsets. ["The Realm of First-Order Logic", Jon Barwise, Handbook of Mathematical Logic (Barwise, ed., North Holland, NYC, 1977)]. (2005-12-27)
fixation ::: n. --> The act of fixing, or the state of being fixed.
The act of uniting chemically with a solid substance or in a solid form; reduction to a non-volatile condition; -- said of gaseous elements.
The act or process of ceasing to be fluid and becoming firm.
A state of resistance to evaporation or volatilization by heat; -- said of metals.
flat 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That {bitty box} has only a flat file system, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is {flatten}. Usually used pejoratively (at least with respect to file systems). 2. Said of a memory architecture like that of the {VAX} or {Motorola} {680x0} that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique address). This is a {Good Thing}. The opposite is a "{segmented}" architecture like that of the {Intel 80x86} in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair. Segmented designs are generally considered cretinous. 3. A flat {domain} is one where all elements except {bottom} are incomparable (equally well defined). E.g. the integers. [{Jargon File}]
flip-flop "hardware" A digital logic circuit that can be in one of two states which it switches (or "{toggles}") between under control of its inputs. It can thus be considered as a one bit memory. Three types of flip-flop are common: the {SR flip-flop}, the {JK flip-flop} and the {D-type flip-flop} (or {latch}). Early literature refers to the "Eccles-Jordan circuit" and the "Eccles-Jordan binary counter", using two {vacuum tubes} as the active (amplifying) elements for each {bit} of information storage. Later implementations using {bipolar transistors} could operate at up to 20 million state transitions per second as early as 1963. (1995-11-11)
fluorine ::: n. --> A non-metallic, gaseous element, strongly acid or negative, or associated with chlorine, bromine, and iodine, in the halogen group of which it is the first member. It always occurs combined, is very active chemically, and possesses such an avidity for most elements, and silicon especially, that it can neither be prepared nor kept in glass vessels. If set free it immediately attacks the containing material, so that it was not isolated until 1886. It is a pungent, corrosive, colorless gas. Symbol F. Atomic weight 19.
Folk-Art: A fragmentary art in which the artistic elements are not bound together by an artistic personality. -- L.V.
formula ::: 1. A prescribed form; a rule or model; any fixed or conventional method for doing something. 2. An established form of words or symbols for use in a ceremony or procedure. 3. Math. A general relationship, principle, or rule stated, often as an equation, in the form of symbols. 4. A representation of a substance using symbols for its constituent elements. formulas.
::: "For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.” The Life Divine
“For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.” The Life Divine
"For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.” The Supramental Manifestation
“For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.” The Supramental Manifestation
Four Elements: The four primary kinds of body recognized by the Greek philosophers, viz. fire, air, water, and earth. -- G.R.M.
Four, the ::: same as the fourfold isvara; the four Vedic gods (Varun.a,Four Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga) who "build up the whole divine state into its perfection by the natural interaction of its four essential elements", the four gods representing respectively "the all-pervading purity" of sat (Varun.a), "the all-uniting light" of cit (Mitra), "the movement and all-discerning force" of tapas (Aryaman) and "the allembracing joy" of ananda (Bhaga), thus being "practically the later
full revelatory ideality ::: the highest scale of revelatory logistis, also called the full dras.t.a luminous reason, whose three forms are described as (1) "revelation with interpretation but the front representative",(2) "the front interpretative with intuition involved in the drishti", and (3) "the whole drishti with the two other powers taken into the drishti"; these three forms are also referred to as the representative, interpretative and imperative elements of representative vijñana in the higher sense (highest representative ideality or logos vijñana). future trik trikaladrsti
function 1. "mathematics" (Or "map", "mapping") If D and C are sets (the domain and codomain) then a function f from D to C, normally written "f : D -" C" is a subset of D x C such that: 1. For each d in D there exists some c in C such that (d,c) is an element of f. I.e. the function is defined for every element of D. 2. For each d in D, c1 and c2 in C, if both (d,c1) and (d,c2) are elements of f then c1 = c2. I.e. the function is uniquely defined for every element of D. See also {image}, {inverse}, {partial function}. 2. "programming" Computing usage derives from the mathematical term but is much less strict. In programming (except in {functional programming}), a function may return different values each time it is called with the same argument values and may have {side effects}. A {procedure} is a function which returns no value but has only {side-effects}. The {C} language, for example, has no procedures, only functions. {ANSI C} even defines a {type}, {void}, for the result of a function that has no result. (1996-09-01)
gamic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or resulting from, sexual connection; formed by the union of the male and female elements.
gamomorphism ::: n. --> That stage of growth or development in an organism, in which the reproductive elements are generated and matured in preparation for propagating the species.
general formula ::: either of two lists of four terms, each formula being related to one of the first two members of the sakti catus.t.aya and consisting of attributes that are to be common (samanya) to all elements of that member of the catus.t.aya. The first general formula, tejo balaṁ pravr.ttir mahattvam, is related to virya; the second general formula, adinata ks.iprata sthairyam isvarabhavah., is related to sakti.
Geometry: Originally abstracted from the measurement of, and the study of relations of position among, material objects, geometry received in Euclid's Elements (c. 300 B.C.) a treatment which (despite, of course, certain defects by modern standards) became the historical model for the abstract deductive development of a mathematical discipline. The general nature of the subject of geometry may be illustrated by reference to the synthetic geometry of Euclid, and the analytic geometry which resulted from the introduction of coordinates into Euclidean geometry by Descartes (1637) (q.v.). In the mathematical usage of today the name geometry is given to any abstract mathematical discipline of a certain general type, as thus illustrated, without any requirement of applicability to spatial relations among physical objects or the like.
Gestalt Psychology: (German, Gestalt, shape or form) A school of German psychology, founded about 1912 by M. Wertheimer, K. Koffka and W. Köhler. Gestalt psychology reacted against the psychic elements of analytic or associationist psychology (see Associationism) and substituted the concept of Gestalt or organized whole. The parts do not exist prior to the whole but derive their character from the structure of the whole. The Gestalt concept is applied at the physical and physiological as well as the psychological levels and in psychology both to the original sensory organization and to the higher intellectual and associative processes of mind. Configuration has been suggested as an English equivalent for Gestalt and the school is accordingly referred to as Configurationism. -- L.W.
gnostic T ::: (in January 1927) same as T (which is evidently possible only in the unitary consciousness of the gnosis), a fusion of the elements of T3 and T2 into a faculty which "when it acts . . . is of the nature of omniscience and omnipotence".
gods "the necessary static elements, ::: Space, the ordered movements of the worlds, the ascending levels, the highest goal"; in later Hinduism, the Preserver of the world, one of the "three Powers and Personalities . of the One Cosmic Godhead", of which the other two are Brahma, the Creator, and Śiva or Rudra2, the Destroyer; also regarded as the Lord himself (isvara) who incarnates in the avataras, and the one deva of whom all the gods are manifestations; in the Record of Yoga, usually a subordinate aspect of Kr.s.n.a, sometimes identified with Pradyumna as the personality of the fourfold isvara whose sakti is Mahalaks.mi.Vis Visnu-Narayana
Gray code "hardware" A {binary} sequence with the property that only one {bit} changes between any two consecutive elements (the two codes have a {Hamming distance} of one). The Gray code originated when {digital logic} circuits were built from {vacuum tubes} and electromechanical {relays}. Counters generated tremendous power demands and noise spikes when many bits changed at once. E.g. when incrementing a register containing 11111111, the {back-EMF} from the relays' collapsing magnetic fields required copious noise suppression. Using Gray code counters, any increment or decrement changed only one bit, regardless of the size of the number. Gray code can also be used to convert the angular position of a disk to digital form. A radial line of sensors reads the code off the surface of the disk and if the disk is half-way between two positions each sensor might read its bit from both positions at once but since only one bit differs between the two, the value read is guaranteed to be one of the two valid values rather than some third (invalid) combination (a {glitch}). One possible {algorithm} for generating a Gray code sequence is to toggle the lowest numbered bit that results in a new code each time. Here is a four bit Gray code sequence generated in this way: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 The codes were patented in 1953 by Frank Gray, a {Bell Labs} researcher. {(http://nist.gov/dads/HTML/graycode.html)}. (2002-08-29)
greatest lower bound "theory" (glb, meet, infimum) The greatest lower bound of two elements, a and b is an element c such that c "= a and c "= b and if there is any other lower bound c' then c' "= c. The greatest lower bound of a set S is the greatest element b such that for all s in S, b "= s. The glb of mutually comparable elements is their minimum but in the presence of incomparable elements, if the glb exists, it will be some other element less than all of them. glb is the dual to {least upper bound}. (In {LaTeX} ""=" is written as {\sqsubseteq}, the glb of two elements a and b is written as a {\sqcap} b and the glb of set S as \bigsqcap S). (1995-02-03)
Gunning Transceiver Logic "electronics, hardware, integrated circuit, standard" (GTL) A {standard} for electrical signals in {CMOS} circuits used to provide higher data transfer speeds with smaller voltage swings [compared with what?]. The GTL signal swings between 0.4 volts and 1.2 volts with a reference voltage of about 0.8 volts. Only a small deviation of 0.4 volts (or thereabouts) from the reference voltage is required to switch between on and off states. Therefore, a GTL signal is said to be a low voltage swing logic signal. Gunning Transceiver Logic has several advantages. The {resistive termination} of a GTL signal provides a clean signalling environment [what?]. Moreover, the low terminating voltage of 1.2 volts results in reduced voltage drops across the resistive elements. GTL has low power dissipation and can operate at high frequency and causes less {electromagnetic interference} (EMI). {GTL/BTL: A Low-Swing Solution for High-Speed Digital Logic (http://edtn.com/scribe/reference/appnotes/md003ecc.htm)}. (2000-01-16)
hacker humour A distinctive style of shared intellectual humour found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics: 1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humour having to do with confusion of metalevels (see {meta}). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time). 2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as specifications (see {write-only memory}), standards documents, language descriptions (see {INTERCAL}), and even entire scientific theories (see {quantum bogodynamics}, {computron}). 3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises. 4. Fascination with puns and wordplay. 5. A fondness for apparently mindless humour with subversive currents of intelligence in it - for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humour that combines this trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favoured. 6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See {has the X nature}, {Discordianism}, {zen}, {ha ha only serious}, {AI koan}. See also {filk} and {retrocomputing}. If you have an itchy feeling that all 6 of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout {science-fiction fandom}. (1995-12-18)
harmony ::: 1. A pleasing combination of elements in a whole. 2. Agreement in feeling or opinion; accord. 3. Combination of sounds considered pleasing to the ear. 4. A simultaneous combination of tones, esp. when blended into chords pleasing to the ear; chordal structure, as distinguished from melody and rhythm. harmony"s, harmonies, harmonious, harmoniously.
heap 1. "programming" An area of memory used for {dynamic memory allocation} where blocks of memory are allocated and freed in an arbitrary order and the pattern of allocation and size of blocks is not known until {run time}. Typically, a program has one heap which it may use for several different purposes. Heap is required by languages in which functions can return arbitrary data structures or functions with {free variables} (see {closure}). In {C} functions {malloc} and {free} provide access to the heap. Contrast {stack}. See also {dangling pointer}. 2. "programming" A data structure with its elements partially ordered (sorted) such that finding either the minimum or the maximum (but not both) of the elements is computationally inexpensive (independent of the number of elements), while both adding a new item and finding each subsequent smallest/largest element can be done in O(log n) time, where n is the number of elements. Formally, a heap is a {binary tree} with a key in each {node}, such that all the {leaves} of the tree are on two adjacent levels; all leaves on the lowest level occur to the left and all levels, except possibly the lowest, are filled; and the key in the {root} is at least as large as the keys in its children (if any), and the left and right subtrees (if they exist) are again heaps. Note that the last condition assumes that the goal is finding the minimum quickly. Heaps are often implemented as one-dimensional {arrays}. Still assuming that the goal is finding the minimum quickly the {invariant} is heap[i] "= heap[2*i] and heap[i] "= heap[2*i+1] for all i, where heap[i] denotes the i-th element, heap[1] being the first. Heaps can be used to implement {priority queues} or in {sort} algorithms. (1996-02-26)
hellenism ::: n. --> A phrase or form of speech in accordance with genius and construction or idioms of the Greek language; a Grecism.
The type of character of the ancient Greeks, who aimed at culture, grace, and amenity, as the chief elements in human well-being and perfection.
Hence in its widest sense Scholasticism embraces all the intellectual activities, artistic, philosophical and theological, carried on in the medieval schools. Any attempt to define its narrower meaning in the field of philosophy raises serious difficulties, for in this case, though the term's comprehension is lessened, it still has to cover many centuries of many-faced thought. However, it is still possible to list several characteristics sufficient to differentiate Scholastic from non-Scholastic philosophy. While ancient philosophy was the philosophy of a people and modern thought that of individuals, Scholasticism was the philosophy of a Christian society which transcended the characteristics of individuals, nations and peoples. It was the corporate product of social thought, and as such its reasoning respected authority in the forms of tradition and revealed religion. Tradition consisted primarily in the systems of Plato and Aristotle as sifted, adapted and absorbed through many centuries. It was natural that religion, which played a paramount role in the culture of the middle ages, should bring influence to bear on the medieval, rational view of life. Revelation was held to be at once a norm and an aid to reason. Since the philosophers of the period were primarily scientific theologians, their rational interests were dominated by religious preoccupations. Hence, while in general they preserved the formal distinctions between reason and faith, and maintained the relatively autonomous character of philosophy, the choice of problems and the resources of science were controlled by theology. The most constant characteristic of Scholasticism was its method. This was formed naturally by a series of historical circumstances, The need of a medium of communication, of a consistent body of technical language tooled to convey the recently revealed meanings of religion, God, man and the material universe led the early Christian thinkers to adopt the means most viable, most widely extant, and nearest at hand, viz. Greek scientific terminology. This, at first purely utilitarian, employment of Greek thought soon developed under Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origin, and St. Augustine into the "Egyptian-spoils" theory; Greek thought and secular learning were held to be propaedeutic to Christianity on the principle: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians." (Justin, Second Apology, ch. XIII). Thus was established the first characteristic of the Scholastic method: philosophy is directly and immediately subordinate to theology. Because of this subordinate position of philosophy and because of the sacred, exclusive and total nature of revealed wisdom, the interest of early Christian thinkers was focused much more on the form of Greek thought than on its content and, it might be added, much less of this content was absorbed by early Christian thought than is generally supposed. As practical consequences of this specialized interest there followed two important factors in the formation of Scholastic philosophy: Greek logic en bloc was taken over by Christians; from the beginning of the Christian era to the end of the XII century, no provision was made in Catholic centers of learning for the formal teaching of philosophy. There was a faculty to teach logic as part of the trivium and a faculty of theology. For these two reasons, what philosophy there was during this long period of twelve centuries, was dominated first, as has been seen, by theology and, second, by logic. In this latter point is found rooted the second characteristic of the Scholastic method: its preoccupation with logic, deduction, system, and its literary form of syllogistic argumentation. The third characteristic of the Scholastic method follows directly from the previous elements already indicated. It adds, however, a property of its own gained from the fact that philosophy during the medieval period became an important instrument of pedogogy. It existed in and for the schools. This new element coupled with the domination of logic, the tradition-mindedness and social-consciousness of the medieval Christians, produced opposition of authorities for or against a given problem and, finally, disputation, where a given doctrine is syllogistically defended against the adversaries' objections. This third element of the Scholastic method is its most original characteristic and accounts more than any other single factor for the forms of the works left us from this period. These are to be found as commentaries on single or collected texts; summae, where the method is dialectical or disputational in character. The main sources of Greek thought are relatively few in number: all that was known of Plato was the Timaeus in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius. Augustine, the pseudo-Areopagite, and the Liber de Causis were the principal fonts of Neoplatonic literature. Parts of Aristotle's logical works (Categoriae and de Interpre.) and the Isagoge of Porphyry were known through the translations of Boethius. Not until 1128 did the Scholastics come to know the rest of Aristotle's logical works. The golden age of Scholasticism was heralded in the late XIIth century by the translations of the rest of his works (Physics, Ethics, Metaphysics, De Anima, etc.) from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, John of Spain, Gundisalvi, Michael Scot, and Hermann the German, from the Greek by Robert Grosseteste, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant. At the same time the Judae-Arabian speculation of Alkindi, Alfarabi, Avencebrol, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides together with the Neoplatonic works of Proclus were made available in translation. At this same period the Scholastic attention to logic was turned to metaphysics, even psychological and ethical problems and the long-discussed question of the universals were approached from this new angle. Philosophy at last achieved a certain degree of autonomy and slowly forced the recently founded universities to accord it a separate faculty.
heptavalent ::: a. --> Having seven units of attractive force or affinity; -- said of heptad elements or radicals.
heterologous ::: a. --> Characterized by heterology; consisting of different elements, or of like elements in different proportions; different; -- opposed to homologous; as, heterologous organs.
heterology ::: n. --> The absence of correspondence, or relation, in type of structure; lack of analogy between parts, owing to their being composed of different elements, or of like elements in different proportions; variation in structure from the normal form; -- opposed to homology.
The connection or relation of bodies which have partial identity of composition, but different characteristics and properties; the relation existing between derivatives of the same substance, or of the analogous members of different series; as, ethane, ethyl alcohol,
heteroplasm ::: n. --> An abnormal formation foreign to the economy, and composed of elements different from those are found in it in its normal condition.
higher-order function "functional programming" (HOF) A {function} that can take one or more functions as {arguments} and/or return a function as its value. E.g. map in (map f l) which returns the list of results of applying function f to each of the elements of list l. A {curried function} is an example of a higher-order function. (2018-05-25)
highest representative ideality ::: in October 1920, equivalent to logos vijñana in the sense of full revelatory ideality; also called representative vijñana, which is said to have three elements: representative, interpretative and imperative. The meaning of "representative" earlier . 68 in 1920, when it referred to the highest intuitive revelatory logistis, was preserved at this time in the definition of logos reason as the "lower representative idea".
Hilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der mathematik, vol. 2, Berlin, 1939. 7. ALGEBRA OF CLASSES deals with classes (q. v.) whose members are from a fixed non-empty class called the universe of discourse, and with the operations of complementation, logical sum, and logical product upon such classes. (The classes are to be thought of as determined by propositional functions having the universe of discourse as the range of the independent variable.) The universal class ∨ comprises the entire universe of discourse. The null (or empty) class ∧ has no members. The complement −a of a class a has as members all those elements of the universe of discourse which are not members of a (and those only). In particular the null class and the universal class are each the complement of the other. The logical sum a ∪ b of two classes a and b has as members all those elements which are members either of a or of b, not excluding elements which are members of both a and b (and those only). The logical product a ∩ b of two classes a and b has as members all those elements which are members of both a and b (and those only) -- in other words the logical product of two classes is their common part. The expressions of the algebra of classes are built up out of class variables a, b, c, . . . and the symbols for the universal class and the null class by means of the notations for complementation, logical sum, and logical product (with parentheses). A formula of the algebra of classes consists of two expressions with one of the symbols = or ≠ between. (a = b means that a and b are the same class, a ≠ b that a and b are not the same class.)
Hocking, William Ernest: (1873) Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. Has endeavored to blend idealism vvith pragmatism while making some concessions to realism, even is in current theory he strives for a reconciliation between laissez faire liberalism and collectivism through a midground found in the worth of the individual in a "commotive union in the coagent state," a notion comparable to the "conjunct self" of George Herbert Palmer only with a more individualistic emphasis and a current flavor. Among his works are: The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Man and the State, Types of Philosophy, Lasting Elements of Individualism and Living Religions and a World Faith. -- L.E.D.
homoeomeria ::: n. --> The state or quality of being homogeneous in elements or first principles; likeness or identity of parts.
homoeomerical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or characterized by, sameness of parts; receiving or advocating the doctrine of homogeneity of elements or first principles.
homogeneous ::: a. --> Of the same kind of nature; consisting of similar parts, or of elements of the like nature; -- opposed to heterogeneous; as, homogeneous particles, elements, or principles; homogeneous bodies.
Possessing the same number of factors of a given kind; as, a homogeneous polynomial.
hybrid multiprocessing "parallel" (HMP) The kind of {multitasking} which {OS/2} supports. HMP provides some elements of {symmetric multiprocessing}, using add-on {IBM} software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993. (1995-03-19)
hydriodic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or derived from, hydrogen and iodine; -- said of an acid produced by the combination of these elements.
Hylons: This name (combining the Greek words hyle matter and on being) was given by Mitterer to the heterogeneous subatomic and subelemental particles of matter (electrons, neutrons, protons, positrons) which enter into the composition of the elements without being elements themselves. The natural elements represent distinct types or species of natural bodies, while the hylons do not. These matter-particles have an important role in the exposition of the cosmological doctrine of hylosystemism. -- T.G.
hyperplasia ::: n. --> An increase in, or excessive growth of, the normal elements of any part.
hypertext link "hypertext" (Or "{hyperlink}", "button", formerly "span", "region", "extent") A pointer from within the content of one {hypertext} {node} (e.g. a {web page}) to another node. In {HTML} (the language used to write web pages), the source and destination of a {link} are known as "anchors". A source anchor may be a word, phrase, image or the whole node. A destination anchor may be a whole node or some position within the node. A {hypertext browser} displays source anchors in some distinctive way. When the user activates the link (e.g. by clicking on it with the {mouse}), the browser displays the destination anchor to which the link refers. Anchors should be recognisable at all times, not, for example, only when the mouse is over them. Originally links were always underlined but the modern preference is to use {bold} text. In {HTML}, anchors are created with "a..".."/a" anchor elements. The opening "a" tag of a source anchor has an "href" (hypertext reference) {attribute} giving the destination in the form of a {URL} - usually a whole "page". E.g. "a href="http://foldoc.org/"" Free On-line Dictionary of Computing"/a" Destination anchors can be used in HTML to name a position within a page using a "name" attribute. E.g. "a name="chapter3"" The name or "fragment identifier" is appended to the URL of the page after a "
hypohyal ::: a. --> Pertaining to one or more small elements in the hyoidean arch of fishes, between the caratohyal and urohyal. ::: n. --> One of the hypohyal bones or cartilages.
Hypothesis: In general, an assumption, a supposition, a conjecture, a postulate, a condition, an antecedent, a contingency, a possibility, a probability, a principle, a premiss, a ground or foundation, a tentative explanation, a probable cause, a theoretical situation, an academic question, a specific consideration, a conceded statement, a theory or view for debate or action, a likely relation, the conditioning of one thing by another. In logic, the conditional clause or antecedent in a hypothetical proposition. Also a thesis subordinate to a more general one. In methodology, a principle offered as a conditional explanation of a fact or a group of facts; or again, a provisional assumption about the ground of certain phenomena, used as a guiding norm in making observations and experiments until verified or disproved by subsequent evidence. A hypothesis is conditional or provisional, because it is based on probable and insufficient arguments or elements; yet, it is not an arbitrary opinion, but a justifiable assumption with some foundation in fact, this accounts for the expectation of some measure of agreement between the logical conclusion or implications drawn from a hypothesis, and the phenomena which are known or which may be determined by further tests. A scientific hypothesis must be proposed after the observations it must explain (a posteriori), compatible with established theories, reasonable and relevant, fruitful in its applications and controllable, general in terms and more fundamental than the statements it has to explain. A hypothesis is descriptive (forecasting the external circumstances of the event) or explanatory (offering causal accounts of the event). There are two kinds of explanatory hypotheses the hypothesis of law (or genetic hypothesis) which attempts to determine the manner in which the causes or conditions of a phenomenon operate and the hypothesis of cause (or causal hypothesis) which attempt to determine the causes or conditions for the production of the phenomenon. A working hypothesis is a preliminary assumption based on few, uncertain or obscure elements, which is used provisionally as a guiding norm in the investigation of certain phenomena. Often, the difference between a working hypothesis and a scientific hypothesis is one of degree; and in any case, a hypothesis is seldom verified completely with all its detailed implications. The Socratic Method of Hypothesis, as developed by Plato in the Phaedo particularly, consists in positing an assumption without questioning its value, for the purpose of determining and analyzing its consequences only when these are clearly debated and judged, the assumption itself is considered for justification or rejection. Usually, a real condition is taken as a ground for inferences, as the aim of the method is to attain knowledge or to favor action. Plato used more specially the word "hypothesis" for the assumptions of geometry (postulates and nominal definitions) Anstotle extended this use to cover the immediate principles of mathematics. It may be observed that the modern hypothetico-deductive method in logical and mathematical theories, is a development of the Socratic method stripped of its ontological implications and purposes.
I: Change (often spelled yi), a fundamental principle of the universe, arising out of the interaction of the two cosmic forces of yin and yang, or passive and active principles, and manifested in natural phenomena, human affairs, and ideas. According to Confucian and Nco-Confucian cosmology, "In the system of Change, there is the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi) which engenders the Two Modes (i). The Two Modes engender the Four Secondary Modes (hsiang), which in turn give rise to the Eight Trigirams (pa kua). These Eight Trigrams (or Elements) determine all good and evil and the great complexity of life." Thus it involves in the first place, the meaning of i, or simplicity from which complexity is evolved, in the second place, the meaning of hsiang, that is, phenomenon, image, form, and in the third place, the idea of "production and reproduction." -- W.T.C.
ideal "theory" In {domain theory}, a non-empty, {downward closed} subset which is also closed under binary {least upper bounds}. I.e. anything less than an element is also an element and the least upper bound of any two elements is also an element. (1997-09-26)
image 1. "data, graphics" Data representing a two-dimensional scene. A digital image is composed of {pixels} arranged in a rectangular array with a certain height and width. Each pixel may consist of one or more {bits} of information, representing the brightness of the image at that point and possibly including colour information encoded as {RGB} triples. {Images} are usually taken from the real world via a {digital camera}, {frame grabber}, or {scanner}; or they may be generated by computer, e.g. by {ray tracing} software. See also {image formats}, {image processing}. (1994-10-21) 2. "mathematics" The image (or range) of a {function} is the set of values obtained by applying the function to all elements of its {domain}. So, if f : D -" C then the set f(D) = \{ f(d) | d in D \} is the image of D under f. The image is a subset of C, the {codomain}. (2000-01-19)
Immanence philosophy: In Germany an idealistic type of philosophy represented by Wilhelm Schuppe (1836-1913), which combines elements of British empiricism, Kant, and Fichte. It rejects any non-conscious thing-in-itself, and identifies the Real with consciousness considered as an inseparable union of the "I" and its objects. The categories are restricted to identity-difference and causality. To the extent that the content of finite consciousness is common to all or "trans-subjective" it is posited as the object of a World Consciousness or Bewusstsein Ueberhaupt. Consequently the World is "immanent" in each finite consciousness rather than essentially transcendent. -- W.L.
impanation ::: a. --> Embodiment in bread; the supposed real presence and union of Christ&
IMPERFECTIONS. ::: To sec them clearly and acknowledge them is the first step ; to have the firm will to reject them is the next ; to separate yourself from them entirely so that if they enter at all it will be as foreign elements, no longer parts of your normal nature but suggestions from outside, brings their Iasi state ; even, once seen and rejected, they may automatically fall away and disappear.
inchoate ::: a. --> Recently, or just, begun; beginning; partially but not fully in existence or operation; existing in its elements; incomplete. ::: v. t. --> To begin.
inclemency ::: n. --> The state or quality of being inclement; want of clemency; want of mildness of temper; unmercifulness; severity.
Physical severity or harshness (commonly in respect to the elements or weather); roughness; storminess; rigor; severe cold, wind, rain, or snow.
inclement ::: a. --> Not clement; destitute of a mild and kind temper; void of tenderness; unmerciful; severe; harsh.
Physically severe or harsh (generally restricted to the elements or weather); rough; boisterous; stormy; rigorously cold, etc.; as, inclement weather.
inclusive "theory" In {domain theory}, a {predicate} P : D -" Bool is inclusive iff For any {chain} C, a subset of D, and for all c in C, P(c) =" P(lub C) In other words, if the predicate holds for all elements of an increasing sequence then it holds for their {least upper bound}. ("lub is written in {LaTeX} as {\sqcup}). (1995-02-03)
incomparable "mathematics" Two elements a, b of a set are incomparable under some relation "= if neither a "= b, nor b "= a. (1995-09-21)
In contributing some elements of a "universal calculus" he may be said to have been the first serious student of symbolic logic. He devised a symbolism for such concepts and relations as "and", "or", implication between concepts, class inclusion, class and conceptual equivalence, etc. One of his sets of symbolic representations for the four standard propositions of traditional logic coincides with the usage of modern logic He anticipated in the principles of his calculus many of the important rules of modern symbolic systems. His treatment, since it was primarily intensional, neglected important extensional features of recent developments, but, on the other hand, called attention to certain intensional distinctions now commonly neglected.
indecomposable ::: a. --> Not decomposable; incapable or difficult of decomposition; not resolvable into its constituents or elements.
indriya (indriya; indriyam) ::: sense-organ, especially any of "the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects" (see vis.aya); the sense-faculty in general, "fundamentally not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of consciousness with its objects" (saṁjñana). Each of the physical senses has two elements, "the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it"; the mind (manas) is sometimes regarded as a "sixth sense", though "in fact it is the only true sense organ and the rest are no more than its outer conveniences and secondary instruments". indriyaindriya-ananda
infinite set "mathematics" A set with an infinite number of elements. There are several possible definitions, e.g. (i) ("Dedekind infinite") A set X is infinite if there exists a {bijection} (one-to-one mapping) between X and some proper subset of X. (ii) A set X is infinite if there exists an {injection} from N (the set of {natural numbers}) to X. In the presence of the {Axiom of Choice} all such definitions are equivalent. (1995-03-27)
Infinity, axiom of: See Logic, formal, §§ 6, 9. Ingression: According to A. N. Whitehead, participation of potentialities in the creation of complex actualities; "a concretion -- that is, a growing together -- of diverse elements." -- R.B.W.
ingredients ::: constituent elements of a mixture or whole; components.
injection 1. "mathematics" A {function}, f : A -" B, is injective or one-one, or is an injection, if and only if for all a, b in A, f(a) = f(b) =" a = b. I.e. no two different inputs give the same output (contrast many-to-one). This is sometimes called an embedding. Only injective functions have left inverses f' where f'(f(x)) = x, since if f were not an injection, there would be elements of B for which the value of f' was not unique. If an injective function is also a {surjection} then is it a {bijection}. 2. "reduction" An injection function is one which takes objects of type T and returns objects of type C(T) where C is some {type constructor}. An example is f x = (x, 0). The opposite of an injection function is a {projection} function which extracts a component of a constructed object, e.g. fst (x,y) = x. We say that f injects its argument into the data type and fst projects it out. (1995-03-14)
inline element "web" Any {HTML element} that is rendered in the same position as normal plain text, i.e. to the right of the preceding text (for left-to-right scripts). This contrasts with a {block-level elements} that is always placed below the preceding text line. Inline elements typically specify formatting, e.g. "B" ({bold}), "SMALL" or the kind of content, e.g. "CODE", "KBD", though they also include things like {inline images} ("IMG") and {text areas} ("TEXTAREA"). {(http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/inline.html)} (2011-01-04)
In logic and mathematics, a relation between two systems such that there exists a one-one correspondence between their elements, and an identity of some relation that holds between any of the elements in one system and the corresponding elements in the other system. -- J.K.F.
In logic: Given a relation R which is transitive, symmetric, and reflexive, we may introduce or postulate "new elements corresponding to the members of the field of R, in such a way that the same new element corresponds to two members x and y of the field of R if and only if xRy (see the article relation). These new elements are then said to be obtained by abstraction with respect to R. Peano calls this a method or kind of definition, and speaks, e.g., of cardinal numbers (q.v.) as obtained from classes by abstraction with respect to the relation of equivalence -- two classes having the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent.
Integral Yoga ::: a union (yoga) in all the parts of our being with the Divine and a consequent transmutation of all their now jarring elements into the harmony of a higher divine consciousness and existence; this yoga implies not only the realisation of God but the entire consecration and change of the inner and outer life till it is fit to manifest a divine consciousness and become part of a divine work.
INTEGRAL YOGA ::: This yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine Supramental Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ānanda. But for that, the surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to the Higher Consciousnessis indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a Supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this yoga.
Aim of the Integral Yoga ::: It is not merely to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.
Conditions of the Integral Yoga ::: This yoga can only be done to the end by those who are in total earnest about it and ready to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to find themselves in the Divine. It cannot be done in a spirit of levity or laxity; the work is too high and difficult, the adverse powers in the lower Nature too ready to take advantage of the least sanction or the smallest opening, the aspiration and tapasyā needed too constant and intense.
Method in the Integral Yoga ::: To concentrate, preferably in the heart and call the presence and power of the Mother to take up the being and by the workings of her force transform the consciousness. One can concentrate also in the head or between the eye-brows, but for many this is a too difficult opening. When the mind falls quiet and the concentration becomes strong and the aspiration intense, then there is the beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be. For the rest one must not depend on one’s own efforts only, but succeed in establishing a contact with the Divine and a receptivity to the Mother’s Power and Presence.
Integral method ::: The method we have to pursue is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform Our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sādhaka of the sādhana* as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sādhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, - the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for the weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It” makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a Succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga.
Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organised by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change. Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some elements or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefathers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and selfconscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
Key-methods ::: The way to devotion and surrender. It is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of the ego that makes it possible to surrender.
The way to knowledge. Meditation in the head by which there comes the opening above, the quietude or silence of the mind and the descent of peace etc. of the higher consciousness generally till it envelops the being and fills the body and begins to take up all the movements.
Yoga by works ::: Separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, the inner silent being from the outer active one, so that one has two consciousnesses or a double consciousness, one behind watching and observing and finally controlling and changing the other which is active in front. The other way of beginning the yoga of works is by doing them for the Divine, for the Mother, and not for oneself, consecrating and dedicating them till one concretely feels the Divine Force taking up the activities and doing them for one.
Object of the Integral Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine.
Principle of the Integral Yoga ::: The whole principle of Integral Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother all the transcendent light, power, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ānanda of the Supramental Divine.
Central purpose of the Integral Yoga ::: Transformation of our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of thinking, seeing, feeling and being into a deep and wide spiritual consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life.
Fundamental realisations of the Integral Yoga ::: The psychic change so that a complete devotion can be the main motive of the heart and the ruler of thought, life and action in constant union with the Mother and in her Presence. The descent of the Peace, Power, Light etc. of the Higher Consciousness through the head and heart into the whole being, occupying the very cells of the body. The perception of the One and Divine infinitely everywhere, the Mother everywhere and living in that infinite consciousness.
Results ::: First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sāyujya mukti, by which it becomes free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sālokya mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda ; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the divine, sādharmya mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. In integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ānanda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ānanda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Sādhanā of the Integral Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation, mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by a self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.
The yoga does not proceed by upadeśa but by inner influence.
Integral Yoga and Gita ::: The Gita’s Yoga consists in the offering of one’s work as a sacrifice to the Divine, the conquest of desire, egoless and desireless action, bhakti for the Divine, an entering into the cosmic consciousness, the sense of unity with all creatures, oneness with the Divine. This yoga adds the bringing down of the supramental Light and Force (its ultimate aim) and the transformation of the nature.
Our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. In our yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. If we do not do this double movement, we are in danger of making a tamasic and therefore unreal surrender, making no effort, no tapas and therefore no progress ; or else we make a rajasic surrender not to the Divine but to some self-made false idea or image of the Divine which masks our rajasic ego or something still worse.
Integral Yoga, Gita and Tantra ::: The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishvara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it.
The Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishvari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it.
This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the yoga.
Integral Yoga and Hatha-Raja Yogas ::: For an integral yoga the special methods of Rajayoga and Hathayoga may be useful at times in certain stages of the progress, but are not indispensable. Their principal aims must be included in the integrality of the yoga; but they can be brought about by other means. For the methods of the integral yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on physical methods or fixed psychic or psychophysical processes on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action. Integral Yoga and Kundalini Yoga: There is a feeling of waves surging up, mounting to the head, which brings an outer unconsciousness and an inner waking. It is the ascending of the lower consciousness in the ādhāra to meet the greater consciousness above. It is a movement analogous to that on which so much stress is laid in the Tantric process, the awakening of the Kundalini, the Energy coiled up and latent in the body and its mounting through the spinal cord and the centres (cakras) and the Brahmarandhra to meet the Divine above. In our yoga it is not a specialised process, but a spontaneous upnish of the whole lower consciousness sometimes in currents or waves, sometimes in a less concrete motion, and on the other side a descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force into the body.
Integral Yoga and other Yogas ::: The old yogas reach Sachchidananda through the spiritualised mind and depart into the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Non-exist- ence, absolute and eternal. Ours having realised Sachchidananda in the spiritualised mind plane proceeds to realise it in the Supramcntal plane.
The suprcfhe supra-cosmic Sachchidananda is above all. Supermind may be described as its power of self-awareness and W’orld- awareness, the world being known as within itself and not out- side. So to live consciously in the supreme Sachchidananda one must pass through the Supermind.
Distinction ::: The realisation of Self and of the Cosmic being (without which the realisation of the Self is incomplete) are essential steps in our yoga ; it is the end of other yogas, but it is, as it were, the beginning of outs, that is to say, the point where its own characteristic realisation can commence.
It is new as compared with the old yogas (1) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven and Nir- vana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object.
If there is a descent in other yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent — the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new coosdousness attain- ed by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life ; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.
(2) Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic acbievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
(3) Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods, but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive.
Integral Yoga and Patanjali Yoga ::: Cilia is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse etc.
It is these that in the Patanjali system have to be stilled altogether so that the consciousness may be immobile and go into Samadhi.
Our yoga has a different function. The movements of the ordinary consciousness have to be quieted and into the quietude there has to be brought down a higher consciousness and its powers which will transform the nature.
integrated circuit "electronics" (IC, or "chip") A microelectronic {semiconductor} device consisting of many interconnected transistors and other components. ICs are constructed ("fabricated") on a small rectangle (a "die") cut from a Silicon (or for special applications, Sapphire) wafer. This is known as the "substrate". Different areas of the substrate are "doped" with other elements to make them either "p-type" or "n-type" and polysilicon or aluminium tracks are etched in one to three layers deposited over the surface. The die is then connected into a package using gold wires which are welded to "pads", usually found around the edge of the die. Integrated circuits can be classified into analogue, digital and hybrid (both analogue and digital on the same chip). Digital integrated circuits can contain anything from one to millions of {logic gates} - {inverters}, {AND}, {OR}, {NAND} and {NOR} gates, {flip-flops}, {multiplexors} etc. on a few square millimeters. The small size of these circuits allows high speed, low power dissipation, and reduced manufacturing cost compared with board-level integration. The first integrated circuits contained only a few {transistors}. Small Scale Integration ({SSI}) brought circuits containing transistors numbered in the tens. Later, Medium Scale Integration ({MSI}) contained hundreds of transistors. Further development lead to Large Scale Integration ({LSI}) (thousands), and VLSI (hundreds of thousands and beyond). In 1986 the first one {megabyte} {RAM} was introduced which contained more than one million transistors. LSI circuits began to be produced in large quantities around 1970 for computer main memories and pocket calculators. For the first time it became possible to fabricate a {CPU} or even an entire {microprocesor} on a single integrated circuit. The most extreme technique is {wafer-scale integration} which uses whole uncut wafers as components. [Where and when was the term "chip" introduced?] (1997-07-03)
Integration: (Lat. integrare, to make whole) The act of making a whole out of parts. In mathematics, a limiting process which may be described in vague terms as summing up an infinite number of infinitesimals, part of the calculus. In psychology, the combination of psycho-physical elements into a complex unified organization. In cosmology, the synthetic philosophy of Spencer holds that the evolutionary process is marked by two movements: integration and differentiation. Integration consists in the development of more and more complex organizations. Inverse of: differentiation (q.v.). -- J.K.F.
intercentrum ::: n. --> The median of the three elements composing the centra of the vertebrae in some fossil batrachians.
interface analysis "testing" A software test which checks the interfaces between program elements for consistency and adherence to predefined rules or {axioms}. (1996-07-09)
Internet Foundation Classes "language, library, programming, standard" (IFC) A {library} of {classes} used in the creation of {Java} {applets} with {GUIs}. Created by {Netscape}, the Internet Foundation Classes provide GUI elements, as well as classes for {Applications Services}, {Security}, {Messaging}, and {Distributed Objects}. The IFC code, which is exclusively Java, is layered on top of the Java {Abstract Windowing Toolkit} (AWT), thus preserving {platform independence}. The AWT and IFC collectively form the {Java Foundation Classes}, which provide a standardised framework for developing powerful Java applications. {IFC download (http://wp.netscape.com/eng/ifc/download.html)}. (2003-08-17)
interpretative imperative ::: (c. 1920) a form of logos vijñana formed by a combination of its interpretative and imperative elements; (in early 1927) an intermediate form of "the imperative", evidently interpretative ideality taken up into imperative vijñana and that again elevated to one of the lower planes of what by the end of 1927 was called overmind. interpretative logistical vijñana
interval "mathematics" A {set} (of {numbers}) bounded by two elements - the endpoints or bounds. The interval may include or exclude either endpoint, leading to four possibilities: closed [a, b] a "= x "= b open (a, b) a " x " b left-open, right-closed (a, b] a " x "=b left-closed, right-open [a, b) a "= x " b Intervals are typically defined on {real numbers} but may also be defined on {integers} or any other type that has an {partial order}. (2019-08-31)
ion ::: n. --> One of the elements which appear at the respective poles when a body is subjected to electro-chemical decomposition. Cf. Anion, Cation.
isomeric ::: a. --> Having the same percentage composition; -- said of two or more different substances which contain the same ingredients in the same proportions by weight, often used with with. Specif.: (a) Polymeric; i. e., having the same elements united in the same proportion by weight, but with different molecular weights; as, acetylene and benzine are isomeric (polymeric) with each other in this sense. See Polymeric. (b) Metameric; i. e., having the same elements united in the same proportions by weight, and with the same molecular
i: The Great Unit. See t'ai i. T'ai Chi: The Great Ultimate or Terminus, which, in the beginning of time, "engenders the Two Primary Modes (i), which in turn engender the Four Secondary Modes or Forms (hsiang), which in their turn give rise to the Eight Elements (pa kua) and the Eight Elements determine all good and evil and the great complexity of life." (Ancient Chinese philosophy). The Great Ultimate which comes from, but is originally one with, the Non-Ultimate (wu chi). Its movement and tranquillity engender the active principle, yang, and the passive principle, yin, respectively (the Two Primary Modes), the transformation and the union of which give rise to the Five Agents (wu hsing) of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth, and thereby the determinate things (Chou Lien-hsi, 1017-1073). The Great Ultimate which is One and unmoved, and which, when moved, becomes the Omnipotent Creative Principle (shen) which engenders Number, then Form, and finally corporeality. Being such, the Great Ultimate is identical with the Mind, it is identical with the Moral Law (tao). (Shao K'ang-chieh, 1011-1077) The Great Ultimate which is identical with the One (1), or the Grand Harmony (T'ai Ho). (Chang Heng-ch'u, 1020-1077). The Great Ultimate which is identical with the Reason (li) of the universe, of the two (yin and yang) vital forces (ch'i), and of the Five Elements (wu hsing). It is the Reason of ultimate goodness. ''Collectively there is only one Great Ultimate, but there is a Great Ultimate in each thing" (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200).
It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our appa- rent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakrit!, of phenomenal Nature, crea- tions of Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right ideotiflcadon with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the supreme.
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
"It [the Cosmic Spirit] uses Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance and all the other dualities as elements in the manifestation and works out what has to be worked out till all is ready for a higher working.” Letters on Yoga*
“It [the Cosmic Spirit] uses Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance and all the other dualities as elements in the manifestation and works out what has to be worked out till all is ready for a higher working.” Letters on Yoga
Jainism: An Indian religion claiming great antiquity, the last of the great teachers (tirthankara) being Mahavira (6th cent. B.C.), embracing many philosophical elements of a pluralistic type of realism. It rejects Vedic (q.v.) authority and an absolute being, gods as well as men partaking of mortality, and holds the mythologically conceived world to be eternal and subject only to the fixed sequence of six ages, good and bad, but not periodic creation and destruction. There is an infinitude of indestructible individual souls or spiritual entities, each possessing by nature many properties inclusive of omniscience, unlimited energy and bliss which come to the fore upon attaining full independence. The non-spiritual substances are space and time, rest and motion, and matter composed of atoms and capable of being apprehended by the senses and combining to form the world of infinite variety. Matter also penetrates spiritual substance like a physician's pill, changing to karma and producing physical attachments. The good life consists in the acquisition of the three gems (triratna) of right faith (samyag-darsana), right knowledge (samyag-jnana), right conduct (samyag-caritra). Salvation, i.e., becoming a kevalin (cf. kevala), is an arduous task achieved in 14 stages of perfection, the last being bodiless existence in bliss and complete oblivion to the world and its ways. -- K.F.L.
J. L. Coolidge, The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry, Oxford. 1909. Non-Naturalistic ethics: Any ethical theory which holds that ethical properties or relations are non-natural. See Non-natural properties, Intuitionism. -- W.K.F.
Jnana Yoga ::: The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual
reflection, vicara, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme. But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 38-39
Johannes Müller, Elements of Physiology, 1834-40.
JOVIAL "language" (Jule's Own Version of IAL) A version of {IAL} produced by Jules I. Schwartz in 1959-1960. JOVIAL was based on {ALGOL 58}, with extensions for large scale {real-time} programming. It saw extensive use by the US Air Force. The data elements were items, entries ({records}) and tables. Versions include JOVIAL I ({IBM 709}, 1960), JOVIAL II ({IBM 7090}, 1961) and JOVIAL 3 (1965). Dialects: {J3}, {JOVIAL J73}, {JS}, {JTS}. Ada/Jovial Newsletter, Dale Lange +1 (513) 255-4472. [CACM 6(12):721, Dec 1960]. (1996-07-19)
Kames, Henry Home: (1696-1782) He was a well known Scotch lawyer of his day who later became one of the lords of justiciary and sat as a judge in the court of session. He became entangled in a free will controversy after the publication of his "Principles of Morality and Natural Religion." His "Elements of Criticism" is a widely known classic in the field of aesthetics. -- L.E-D.
lanthanum ::: n. --> A rare element of the group of the earth metals, allied to aluminium. It occurs in certain rare minerals, as cerite, gadolinite, orthite, etc., and was so named from the difficulty of separating it from cerium, didymium, and other rare elements with which it is usually associated. Atomic weight 138.5. Symbol La.
lead ::: n. --> One of the elements, a heavy, pliable, inelastic metal, having a bright, bluish color, but easily tarnished. It is both malleable and ductile, though with little tenacity, and is used for tubes, sheets, bullets, etc. Its specific gravity is 11.37. It is easily fusible, forms alloys with other metals, and is an ingredient of solder and type metal. Atomic weight, 206.4. Symbol Pb (L. Plumbum). It is chiefly obtained from the mineral galena, lead sulphide.
An article made of lead or an alloy of lead
least upper bound "theory" (lub or "join", "supremum") The least upper bound of two elements a and b is an upper bound c such that a "= c and b "= c and if there is any other upper bound c' then c "= c'. The least upper bound of a set S is the smallest b such that for all s in S, s "= b. The lub of mutually comparable elements is their maximum but in the presence of incomparable elements, if the lub exists, it will be some other element greater than all of them. Lub is the dual to {greatest lower bound}. (In {LaTeX}, ""=" is written as {\sqsubseteq}, the lub of two elements a and b is written a {\sqcup} b, and the lub of set S is written as \bigsqcup S). (1995-02-03)
Liana "language" A {C}-like, interpretive, {object-oriented programming} language, {class} library, and integrated development environment designed specifically for development of {application programs} for {Microsoft Windows} and {Windows NT}. Designed by Jack Krupansky "Jack@BaseTechnology.com" of {Base Technology}, Liana was first released as a commercial product in August 1991. The language is designed to be as easy to use as {BASIC}, as concise as {C}, and as flexible as {Smalltalk}. The {OOP} {syntax} of {C++} was chosen over the less familiar syntax of {Smalltalk} and {Objective-C} to appeal to {C} programmers and in recognition of C++ being the leading OOP language. The syntax is a simplified subset of {C/C++}. The {semantics} are also a simplified subset of C/C++, but extended to achieve the flexibility of Smalltalk. Liana is a typeless language (like {Lisp}, {Snobol} and {Smalltalk}), which means that the datatypes of variables, function parameters, and function return values are not needed since values carry the type information. Hence, variables are simply containers for values and function parameters are simply pipes through which any type of value can flow. {Single inheritance}, but not {multiple inheritance}, is supported. {Memory management} is automatic using {reference counting}. The library includes over 150 {classes}, for {dynamic arrays}, {associative lookup} tables, windows, menus, dialogs, controls, bitmaps, cursors, icons, mouse movement, keyboard input, fonts, text and graphics display, {DDE}, and {MDI}. Liana provides flexible OOP support for Windows programming. For example, a {list box} automatically fills itself from an associated {object}. That object is not some sort of special object, but is merely any object that "behaves like" an array (i.e., has a "size" member function that returns the number of elements, a "get" function that returns the ith element, and the text for each element is returned by calling the "text" member function for the element). A related product, C-odeScript, is an embeddable application scripting language. It is an implementation of Liana which can be called from C/C++ applications to dynamically evaluate expressions and statement sequences. This can be used to offer the end-user a macro/scripting capability or to allow the C/C++ application to be customized without changing the C/C++ source code. Here's a complete Liana program which illustrates the flexibility of the language semantics and the power of the class library: main { // Prompt user for a string. // No declaration needed for "x" (becomes a global variable.) x = ask ("Enter a String"); // Use "+" operator to concatenate strings. Memory // management for string temporaries is automatic. The // "message" function displays a Windows message box. message ("You entered: " + x); // Now x will take on a different type. The "ask_number" // function will return a "real" if the user's input // contains a decimal point or an "int" if no decimal // point. x = ask_number ("Enter a Number"); // The "+" operator with a string operand will // automatically convert the other operand to a string. message ("You entered: " + x); // Prompt user for a Liana expression. Store it in a // local variable (the type, string, is merely for // documentation.) string expr = ask ("Enter an Expression"); // Evaluate the expression. The return value of "eval" // could be any type. The "source_format" member function // converts any value to its source format (e.g., add // quotes for a string.) The "class_name" member function // return the name of the class of an object/value. // Empty parens can be left off for member function calls. x = eval (expr); message ("The value of " + expr + " is " + x.source_format + " its type is " + x.class_name); } The author explained that the "Li" of Liana stands for "Language interpreter" and liana are vines that grow up trees in tropical forests, which seemed quite appropriate for a tool to deal with the complexity of MS Windows! It is also a woman's name. ["Liana for Windows", Aitken, P., PC TECHNIQUES, Dec/Jan 1993]. ["Liana: A Language For Writing Windows Programs", Burk, R., Tech Specialist (R&D Publications), Sep 1991]. ["Liana v. 1.0." Hildebrand, J.D., Computer Language, Dec 1992]. ["Liana: A Windows Programming Language Based on C and C++", Krupansky, J., The C Users Journal, Jul 1992]. ["Writing a Multimedia App in Liana", Krupansky, J., Dr. Dobb's Journal, Winter Multimedia Sourcebook 1994]. ["The Liana Programming Language", R. Valdes, Dr Dobbs J Oct 1993, pp.50-52]. (1999-06-29)
linear space "mathematics" A {vector space} where all {linear combinations} of elements are also elements of the space. This is easy for spaces of numbers but not for a space of functions. Roughly, this is to say that multiplication by numbers, and addition of elements is defined in the space. (2000-03-10)
linked list "programming" A data structure in which each element contains a pointer to the next element, thus forming a linear list. A doubly linked list contains pointers to both the next and previous elements. (1995-03-28)
lipsa ::: wish, seeking; the will to have something; the urge to engage lipsa in or achieve something; "divine desireless reaching out of Brahman in personality to Brahman in the vishaya or object"; the tendency towards self-fulfilment of a particular kind, expressed in one attribute of each of the four elements of virya and of each of the four aspects of daivi prakr.ti.
list comprehension "functional programming" An expression in a {functional language} denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in {Haskell}: [ (x,y) | x "- [1 .. 6], y "- [1 .. x], x+y " 10] This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y "= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "{syntactic sugar}" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: filter p (concat (map (\ x -" map (\ y -" (x,y)) [1..x]) [1..6])) where p (x,y) = x+y " 10 According to a note by Rishiyur Nikhil "nikhil@crl.dec.com", (August 1992), the term itself seems to have been coined by Phil Wadler circa 1983-5, although the programming construct itself goes back much further (most likely Jack Schwartz and the SETL language). The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "{ZF expressions}", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]). ["The OL Manual" Philip Wadler, Quentin Miller and Martin Raskovsky, probably 1983-1985]. ["How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes" FPCA September 1985, Nancy, France, pp. 113-146]. (1995-02-22)
literator ::: n. --> One who teaches the letters or elements of knowledge; a petty schoolmaster.
A person devoted to the study of literary trifles, esp. trifles belonging to the literature of a former age.
A learned person; a literatus.
lower revelatory representative ::: pertaining to a form of intuitive revelatory logistis that combines lower revelatory and representative elements.
machine ::: n. --> In general, any combination of bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained, and by means of which force and motion may be transmitted and modified, as a screw and its nut, or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley about its pivot, etc.; especially, a construction, more or less complex, consisting of a combination of moving parts, or simple mechanical elements, as wheels, levers, cams, etc., with their supports and connecting framework, calculated to constitute a prime mover, or to receive force and motion
magnetograph ::: n. --> An automatic instrument for registering, by photography or otherwise, the states and variations of any of the terrestrial magnetic elements.
magnetometer ::: n. --> An instrument for measuring the intensity of magnetic forces; also, less frequently, an instrument for determining any of the terrestrial magnetic elements, as the dip and declination.
Mahabhuta: (Skr.) A physical element; in the Sarikhya (q.v.) one of the five gross elements contrasted with the tanmatras (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
mahabhutas. ::: the great or gross elements; the five primordial elements &
mahat tattva. ::: first transformation of primordial nature which contains all the other elements in their subtle, unmanifest forms; the physical universe
mahattvabodho, balaslagha, laghutvaṁ, dharan.asamarthyam (mahattwabodho, balaslagha, laghutwam, dharanasamarthyam) ::: the sense of a greatness of sustaining force, assertion of strength, lightness, the capacity to hold all workings of energy (the elements of dehasakti).
Main works: De corpore (On bodies); De homine (On Man), De cive (On the state) . The Elements of Law, 1640; Leviathan, 1650. -- B.A.G.F.
Main works: Le fondemcnt de l'induction, 187; Psychologie et metaphysique, 1885; Etudes sur le syllogisme, 1907; Note sur le pari de Pascal. --L.W. Lamaism: (from Tibetan b La-ma, honorable title of a monk) The religious beliefs and institutions of Tibet, derived from Mahayana Buddhism (q.v.) which was first introduced in the 7th century by the chieftain Sron-tsan-gampo, superimposed on the native Shamaistic Bon religion, resuscitated and mixed with Tantric (q.v.) elements by the mythic Hindu Padmasambhava, and reformed by the Bengalese Atisa in the 11th and Tsong-kha-pa at the turn of the 14th century. The strong admixture of elements of the exorcismal, highly magically charged and priest-ridden original Bon, has given Buddhism a turn away from its philosophic orientation and produced in Lamaism a form that places great emphasis on mantras (q.v.) -- the most famous one being om mani padme hum) -- elaborate ritual, and the worship of subsidiary tutelary deities, high dignitaries, and living incarnations of the Buddha. This worship is institutionalized, with a semblance of the papacy, in the double incarnation of the Bodhisattva (q.v.) in the Dalai-Lama who resides with political powers at the capital Lhasa, and the more spiritual head Tashi-Lama who rules at Tashi-Ihum-po. Contacts with Indian and Chinese traditions have been maintained for centuries and the two canons of Lamaism, the Kan-jur of 108 books and the Tan-jur of 225 books represent many translations as well as original works, some of great philosophical value. -- K.F.L.
Main works: Lettres philosophiques, 1734; Elements de la philos. de Newton, 1738; Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (Philosophie de Christoire), 1756; Traite de tolerance, 1763; Dict. philosophique, 1764.
Manichean ::: Manicheans or their doctrines; i.e. adherents of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil.
manichean ::: manicheans or their doctrines; i.e. adherents of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil.
manifold ::: having numerous different parts, elements, features, forms, etc.
Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being. The animal is Man disguised in a hairy skin and upon four legs; the worm is Man writhing and crawling towards the evolution of his Manhood. Even crude forms of Matter are Man in his inchoate body. All things are Man, the Purusha. For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 203
Materialism: A proposition about the existent or the real: that only matter (q.v.) is existent or real; that matter is the primordial or fundamental constituent of the universe; atomism; that only sensible entities, processes, or content are existent or real; that the universe is not governed by intelligence, purpose, or final causes; that everything is strictly caused by material (inanimate, non-mental, or having certain elementary physical powers) processes or entities (mechanism); that mental entities, processes, or events (though existent) are caused solely by material entities, processes, or events and themselves have no causal effect (epiphenomenalism); that nothing supernatural exists (naturalism); that nothing mental exists; a proposition about explanation of the existent or the real: that everything is explainable in terms of matter in motion or matter and energy or simply matter (depending upon conception of matter entertained); that all qualitative differences are reducible to quantitative differences; that the only objects science can investigate are the physical or material (that is, public, manipulable, non-mental, natural, or sensible); a proposition about values: that wealth, bodily satisfactions, sensuous pleasures, or the like are either the only or the greatest values man can seek or attain; a proposition about explanation of human history: that human actions and cultural change are determined solely or largely by economic factors (economic determinism or its approximation); an attitude, postulate, hypothesis, assertion, assumption, or tendency favoring any of the above propositions; a state of being limited by the physical environment or the material elements of culture and incapable of overcoming, transcending, or adjusting properly to them; preoccupation with or enslavement to lower or bodily (non-mental or non-spiritual) values. Confusion of epiphenomenalism or mechanism with other conceptions of materialism has caused considerable misunderstanding. -- M.T.K.
matter ::: n. --> That of which anything is composed; constituent substance; material; the material or substantial part of anything; the constituent elements of conception; that into which a notion may be analyzed; the essence; the pith; the embodiment.
That of which the sensible universe and all existent bodies are composed; anything which has extension, occupies space, or is perceptible by the senses; body; substance.
That with regard to, or about which, anything takes place
Mean: In general, that which in some way mediates or occupies a middle position among various things or between two extremes. Hence (especially in the plural) that through which an end is attained; in mathematics the word is used for any one of various notions of average; in ethics it represents moderation, temperance, prudence, the middle way. In mathematics: The arithmetic mean of two quantities is half their sum; the arithmetic mean of n quantities is the sum of the n quantities, divided by n. In the case of a function f(x) (say from real numbers to real numbers) the mean value of the function for the values x1, x2, . . . , xn of x is the arithmetic mean of f(x1), f(x2), . . . , f(xn). This notion is extended to the case of infinite sets of values of x by means of integration; thus the mean value of f(x) for values of x between a and b is ∫f(x)dx, with a and b as the limits of integration, divided by the difference between a and b. The geometric mean of or between, or the mean proportional between, two quantities is the (positive) square root of their product. Thus if b is the geometric mean between a and c, c is as many times greater (or less) than b as b is than a. The geometric mean of n quantities is the nth root of their product. The harmonic mean of two quantities is defined as the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of their reciprocals. Hence the harmonic mean of a and b is 2ab/(a + b). The weighted mean or weighted average of a set of n quantities, each of which is associated with a certain number as weight, is obtained by multiplying each quantity by the associated weight, adding these products together, and then dividing by the sum of the weights. As under A, this may be extended to the case of an infinite set of quantities by means of integration. (The weights have the role of estimates of relative importance of the various quantities, and if all the weights are equal the weighted mean reduces to the simple arithmetic mean.) In statistics, given a population (i.e., an aggregate of observed or observable quantities) and a variable x having the population as its range, we have: The mean value of x is the weighted mean of the values of x, with the probability (frequency ratio) of each value taken as its weight. In the case of a finite population this is the same as the simple arithmetic mean of the population, provided that, in calculating the arithmetic mean, each value of x is counted as many times over as it occurs in the set of observations constituting the population. In like manner, the mean value of a function f(x) of x is the weighted mean of the values of f(x), where the probability of each value of x is taken as the weight of the corresponding value of f(x). The mode of the population is the most probable (most frequent) value of x, provided there is one such. The median of the population is so chosen that the probability that x be less than the median (or the probability that x be greater than the median) is ½ (or as near ½ as possible). In the case of a finite population, if the values of x are arranged in order of magnitude --repeating any one value of x as many times over as it occurs in the set of observations constituting the population --then the middle term of this series, or the arithmetic mean of the two middle terms, is the median. --A.C. In cosmology, the fundamental means (arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic) were used by the Greeks in describing or actualizing the process of becoming in nature. The Pythagoreans and the Platonists in particular made considerable use of these means (see the Philebus and the Timaeus more especially). These ratios are among the basic elements used by Plato in his doctrine of the mixtures. With the appearance of the qualitative physics of Aristotle, the means lost their cosmological importance and were thereafter used chiefly in mathematics. The modern mathematical theories of the universe make use of the whole range of means analyzed by the calculus of probability, the theory of errors, the calculus of variations, and the statistical methods. In ethics, the 'Doctrine of the Mean' is the moral theory of moderation, the development of the virtues, the determination of the wise course in action, the practice of temperance and prudence, the choice of the middle way between extreme or conflicting decisions. It has been developed principally by the Chinese, the Indians and the Greeks; it was used with caution by the Christian moralists on account of their rigorous application of the moral law. In Chinese philosophy, the Doctrine of the Mean or of the Middle Way (the Chung Yung, literally 'Equilibrium and Harmony') involves the absence of immoderate pleasure, anger, sorrow or joy, and a conscious state in which those feelings have been stirred and act in their proper degree. This doctrine has been developed by Tzu Shu (V. C. B.C.), a grandson of Confucius who had already described the virtues of the 'superior man' according to his aphorism "Perfect is the virtue which is according to the mean". In matters of action, the superior man stands erect in the middle and strives to follow a course which does not incline on either side. In Buddhist philosophy, the System of the Middle Way or Madhyamaka is ascribed more particularly to Nagarjuna (II c. A.D.). The Buddha had given his revelation as a mean or middle way, because he repudiated the two extremes of an exaggerated ascetlsm and of an easy secular life. This principle is also applied to knowledge and action in general, with the purpose of striking a happy medium between contradictory judgments and motives. The final objective is the realization of the nirvana or the complete absence of desire by the gradual destruction of feelings and thoughts. But while orthodox Buddhism teaches the unreality of the individual (who is merely a mass of causes and effects following one another in unbroken succession), the Madhyamaka denies also the existence of these causes and effects in themselves. For this system, "Everything is void", with the legitimate conclusion that "Absolute truth is silence". Thus the perfect mean is realized. In Greek Ethics, the doctrine of the Right (Mean has been developed by Plato (Philebus) and Aristotle (Nic. Ethics II. 6-8) principally, on the Pythagorean analogy between the sound mind, the healthy body and the tuned string, which has inspired most of the Greek Moralists. Though it is known as the "Aristotelian Principle of the Mean", it is essentially a Platonic doctrine which is preformed in the Republic and the Statesman and expounded in the Philebus, where we are told that all good things in life belong to the class of the mixed (26 D). This doctrine states that in the application of intelligence to any kind of activity, the supreme wisdom is to know just where to stop, and to stop just there and nowhere else. Hence, the "right-mean" does not concern the quantitative measurement of magnitudes, but simply the qualitative comparison of values with respect to a standard which is the appropriate (prepon), the seasonable (kairos), the morally necessary (deon), or generally the moderate (metrion). The difference between these two kinds of metretics (metretike) is that the former is extrinsic and relative, while the latter is intrinsic and absolute. This explains the Platonic division of the sciences into two classes: those involving reference to relative quantities (mathematical or natural), and those requiring absolute values (ethics and aesthetics). The Aristotelian analysis of the "right mean" considers moral goodness as a fixed and habitual proportion in our appetitions and tempers, which can be reached by training them until they exhibit just the balance required by the right rule. This process of becoming good develops certain habits of virtues consisting in reasonable moderation where both excess and defect are avoided: the virtue of temperance (sophrosyne) is a typical example. In this sense, virtue occupies a middle position between extremes, and is said to be a mean; but it is not a static notion, as it leads to the development of a stable being, when man learns not to over-reach himself. This qualitative conception of the mean involves an adaptation of the agent, his conduct and his environment, similar to the harmony displayed in a work of art. Hence the aesthetic aspect of virtue, which is often overstressed by ancient and neo-pagan writers, at the expense of morality proper. The ethical idea of the mean, stripped of the qualifications added to it by its Christian interpreters, has influenced many positivistic systems of ethics, and especially pragmatism and behaviourism (e.g., A. Huxley's rule of Balanced Excesses). It is maintained that it is also involved in the dialectical systems, such as Hegelianism, where it would have an application in the whole dialectical process as such: thus, it would correspond to the synthetic phase which blends together the thesis and the antithesis by the meeting of the opposites. --T.G. Mean, Doctrine of the: In Aristotle's ethics, the doctrine that each of the moral virtues is an intermediate state between extremes of excess and defect. -- O.R.M.
Meinong, Alexius: (1853-1921) Was originally a disciple of Brentano, who however emphatically rejected many of Meinong's later contentions. He claimed to have discovered a new a priori science, the "theory of objects" (to be distinguished from metaphysics which is an empirical science concerning reality, but was never worked out by Meinong). Anything "intended" by thought is an "object". Objects may either "exist" (such as physical objects) or "subsist" (such as facts which Meinong unfortunately termed "objectives", or mathematical entities), they may either be possible or impossible and they may belong either to a lower or to a higher level (such as "relations" and "complexions", "founded" on their simple terms or elements). In the "theory of objects," the existence of objects is abstracted from (or as Husserl later said it may be "bracketed") and their essence alone has to be considered. Objects are apprehended either by self-evident judgments or by "assumptions", that is, by "imaginary judgments". In the field of emotions there is an analogous division since there are also "imaginary" emotions (such as those of the spectator in a tragedy). Much of Meinong's work was of a psychological rather than of a metaphysical or epistemological character. -- H.G.
meme "philosophy" /meem/ [By analogy with "gene"] Richard Dawkins's term for an idea considered as a {replicator}, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do. Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea. The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex" denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. However, "meme" is often misused to mean "meme complex". Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become more important than biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. See also {memetic algorithm}. [{Jargon File}] (1996-08-11)
Mental Chemistry: Psychological procedure, analogous to chemical analysis and synthesis, consisting in the attempted explanation of mental states as the products of the combination and fusion of psychic elements. See Associationism. -- L.W.
metadata "data, data processing" /me't*-day`t*/, or combinations of /may'-/ or (Commonwealth) /mee'-/; /-dah`t*/ (Or "meta-data") Data about {data}. In {data processing}, metadata is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment. For example, metadata would document data about {data elements} or {attributes}, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about {records} or {data structures} (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Metadata may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data. A collection of metadata, e.g. in a {database}, is called a {data dictionary}. Myers of {The Metadata Company} claims to have coined the term in 1969 though it appears in the book, "Extension of programming language concepts" published in 1968, by {Philip R. Bagley}. Bagley was a pioneer of computer document retrieval. "A survey of extensible programming languages" by Solntsseff and Yezerski (Annual Review in Automatic Programming, 1974, pp267-307) cites "the notion of 'metadata' introduced by Bagley". (2010-05-15)
META element "web" An {HTML} {element}, with tag name of "META", expressing {metadata} about a given {HTML} document. HTML standards do not require that documents have META elements but if META elements occur, they must be inside the document's HEAD element. The META element can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties, typically by specifying a NAME {attribute} (to name the property) and a CONTENT attribute (to assign a value for that property). The HTML 4 specification doesn't standardise particular NAME properties or CONTENT values; but it is conventional to use a "Description" property to convey a short summary of the document, and a "Keywords" property to provide a list of {keywords} relevant to the document, as in: "META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Information from around the world on kumquat farming techniques and current kumquat production and consumption data"" "META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="kumquat, Fortunella"" META elements with HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes can simulate the effect of {HTTP} header lines, as in: "META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 22 Mar 2000 16:18:35 GMT"" "META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="10; URL=http://foldoc.org/"" Other properties may be application-specific. For example, the {Robots Exclusion (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html)}. standard uses the "robots" property for asserting that the given document should not be indexed by robots, nor should links in it be followed: "META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"" (2001-02-07)
metal ::: n. --> An elementary substance, as sodium, calcium, or copper, whose oxide or hydroxide has basic rather than acid properties, as contrasted with the nonmetals, or metalloids. No sharp line can be drawn between the metals and nonmetals, and certain elements partake of both acid and basic qualities, as chromium, manganese, bismuth, etc.
Ore from which a metal is derived; -- so called by miners.
A mine from which ores are taken.
The substance of which anything is made; material; hence,
metalorganic ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or denoting, any one of a series of compounds of certain metallic elements with organic radicals; as, zinc methyl, sodium ethyl, etc.
metameric ::: a. --> Having the same elements united in the same proportion by weight, and with the same molecular weight, but possessing a different structure and different properties; as, methyl ether and ethyl alcohol are metameric compounds. See Isomeric.
Of or pertaining to a metamere or its formation; as, metameric segmentation.
metensomatosis ::: n. --> The assimilation by one body or organism of the elements of another.
microcrith ::: n. --> The weight of the half hydrogen molecule, or of the hydrogen atom, taken as the standard in comparing the atomic weights of the elements; thus, an atom of oxygen weighs sixteen microcriths. See Crith.
mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ‘Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind" and ‘mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer.” The Life Divine
"Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” The Life Divine
"The mind proper is divided into three parts — thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind — the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).” Letters on Yoga
"The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first, sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its own constructions.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"He [man] has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that necessitate the movements and forms of a creation. . . .” *The Life Divine
"The human mind is an instrument not of truth but of ignorance and error.” Letters on Yoga
"For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations, — as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
The Mother: "The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations — whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul — and simply formulating the plan of action — in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations — it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.*
Molecule: A complex of atoms, which may be of the same kind or different. Thus there may be molecules of elements and molecules which are compounds. So far no single molecule has been synthesized larger than the wave length of light so that it could be rendered visible. Molecular aggregates, however, exist, which may be looked upon in a sense as giant molecules visible under the microscope. -- W.M.M.
Monadology: (also Monadism) The doctrine of monads, the theory that the universe is a composite of elementary units. A monad may also be a metaphysical unit. The notion of monad can be found in Pythagoras, Ecphantus, Aristotle, Euclid, Augustine, et al. Plato refers to his ideas as monads. Nicolaus Cusanus regards individual things as units which mirror the world. Giordano Bruno seems to have been the first to have used the term in its modern connotation. God is called monas monadum; each monad, combining matter and form, is both corporeal and spiritual, a microcosm of the whole. But the real founder of monadology is Leibniz. To him, the monads are the real atoms of nature, the elements of things. The monad is a simple substance, completely different from a material atom. It has neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility. Nor is it perishable. Monads begin to exist or cease to exist by a decree of God. They are distinguished from one another in character, they "have no windows" through which anything can enter in or go out, that is, the substance of the monad must be conceived as force, as that which contains in itself the principle of its changes. The universe is the aggregate, the ideal bond of the monads, constituting a harmonious unity, pre-established by God who is the highest in the hierarchy of monads. This bond of all things to each, enables every simple substance to have relations which express all the others, every monad being a perpetual living mirror of the universe. The simple substance or monad, therefore, contains a plurality of modifications and relations even though it has no parts but is unity. The highest monad, God, appears to be hoth the creator and the unified totality and harmony of self-active and self-subsistent monnds. -- J.M.
mosaic ::: 1. A picture or decorative design made by setting small colored pieces, as of stone or tile, into a surface. 2. Something resembling such a picture or decoration in composition, esp. in being made up of diverse elements.
motley ::: having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.
myoepithelial ::: a. --> Derived from epithelial cells and destined to become a part of the muscular system; -- applied to structural elements in certain embryonic forms.
Having the characteristics of both muscle and epithelium; as, the myoepithelial cells of the hydra.
mystery ::: a. --> A profound secret; something wholly unknown, or something kept cautiously concealed, and therefore exciting curiosity or wonder; something which has not been or can not be explained; hence, specifically, that which is beyond human comprehension.
A kind of secret religious celebration, to which none were admitted except those who had been initiated by certain preparatory ceremonies; -- usually plural; as, the Eleusinian mysteries.
The consecrated elements in the eucharist.
mysticism ::: n. --> Obscurity of doctrine.
The doctrine of the Mystics, who professed a pure, sublime, and wholly disinterested devotion, and maintained that they had direct intercourse with the divine Spirit, and aquired a knowledge of God and of spiritual things unattainable by the natural intellect, and such as can not be analyzed or explained.
The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of knowledge or belief are gained by an act or process akin to feeling or
Na chia: The coordination and interlocking of the Ten Celestial Stems with the Eight Elements (pa kua), to the end that the first Stem, which is the embodiment of the active or male cosmic force, and the second Stem, which is the reservoir of the passive or female cosmic force, gather in the center and the highest point in the universe. Taoist religion. -- W.T.C.
nanocomputer "architecture" /nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ A computer with molecular-sized switching elements. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a {nanobot} would be a nanocomputer. Some nanocomputers can also be called {quantum computers} because quantum physics plays a major role in calculations. {Richard P. Feynman} is still cited today for his work in this area. ["Feynman Lectures on Computation", Richard P. Feynman (Editor, Author), Robin W. Allen (Editor), Tony Hey (Author)] [{Jargon File}] (2008-01-14)
Nativism: Theory that mind has elements of knowledge not derived from sensation. Similar to the common sense theory of T. Reid (1710-1796) and the Scotch School. Introduced as a term by Helmholtz (1821-1894) for the doctrine that there are inherited items in human knowledge which are, therefore, in each and every individual independently of his experience. The doctrine of innate ideas. Opposed to: radical empiricism. See Transcendentalism. -- J.K.F.
Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of the body must be among the ultimate elements of a supra- mental change.
Neo-Idealism: Primarily a name given unofficially to the Italian school of neo-Hegelianism headed by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, founded on a basic distinction that it proposes between two kinds of "concrete universals" (s.v.). In addition to the Hegelian concrete universal, conceived as a dialectical synthesis of two abstract opposltes, is posited a second type in which the component elements are "concretes" rather than dialectical abstracts, i.e. possess relative mutual independence and lack the characteristic of logical opposition. The living forms of Mind, both theoretical and practical, are universal in this latter sense. This implies that fine art, utility, and ethics do not comprise a dialectical series with philosophy at their head, i.e. they are not inferior forms of metaphysics. Thus neo-Idealism rejects Hegel's panlogism. It also repudiates his doctrine of the relative independence of Nature, the timeless transcendence of the Absolute with respect to the historical process, and the view that at any point of history a logically final embodiment of the Absolute Idea is achieved. -- W.L.
Neo-Pythagoreanism: A school of thought initiated in Alexandria, according to Cicero, by Nigidius Figulus, a Roman philosopher who died in 45 B.C. It was compounded of traditional Pythagorean teachings, various Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic doctrines, including some mystical and theosophical elements. -- J.J.R.
neurapophysis ::: n. --> One of the two lateral processes or elements which form the neural arch.
The dorsal process of the neural arch; neural spine; spinous process.
Nolini: Refers to the three elements or stages of mind.
nonmetal ::: n. --> Any one of the set of elements which, as contrasted with the metals, possess, produce, or receive, acid rather than basic properties; a metalloid; as, oxygen, sulphur, and chlorine are nonmetals.
normed space "mathematics" A {vector space} with a {function}, ||F||, such that ||F|| = 0 if and only if F=0 ||aF|| = abs(a) * ||F|| ||F+G|| "= ||F|| + ||G|| Roughly, a distance between two elements in the space is defined. (2000-03-10)
offertory ::: n. --> The act of offering, or the thing offered.
An anthem chanted, or a voluntary played on the organ, during the offering and first part of the Mass.
That part of the Mass which the priest reads before uncovering the chalice to offer up the elements for consecration.
The oblation of the elements.
The Scripture sentences said or sung during the collection of the offerings.
offset "programming" An index or position in an {array}, {string}, or block of memory usually a non-negative {integer}. E.g. the {Perl} function splice(ARRAY, OFFSET, LENGTH, LIST) replaces LENGTH elements starting at index OFFSET in array with LIST, where offset zero means the start of the array. For an {Intel x86} processor with a {segmented address space} the offset is the position of a {byte} relative to the start of the segment. (2004-02-27)
Omega-algebraic In domain theory, a complete partial order is algebraic if every element is the lub of some chain of compact elements. If the set of compact elements is countable it is omega-algebraic. Usually written with a Greek letter omega ({LaTeX} \omega). (1995-02-03)
one-dimensional array "types" An {array} with only one {dimension}; the simplest kind of array, consisting of a sequence of items ("elements"), all of the same type. An element is selected by an integer {index} that normally starts at zero for the first element and increases by one. The index of the last element is thus the length of the array minus one. A one-dimensional array is also known as a {vector}. It should not be confused with a {list}. In some languages, e.g. {Perl}, all arrays are one-dimensional and higher dimensions are represented as arrays of {pointers} to arrays (which can have different sizes and can themselves contain pointers to arrays and so on). A one-dimensional array maps simply to memory: the address of an element with index i is A(i) = A0 + i * s where A0 is the base address of the array and s is the size of storage used for each element, the "stride". Elements may be padded to certain {address boundaries}, e.g. {machine words}, to increase access speed, in which case the stride will be larger than the amount of data in an element. (2014-03-22)
on the satisfaction of cgo-dcsire or on the eating up of the fuel it embraces. It is a while flame, not a red one ; but white heat is not inferior to the red variety in its ardour. It is true that the psychic love does not usually get its full play in human rela- tions and human nature ; it finds the fullness of -its fire and ecstasy more easily when it is lifted towards the Divine. In the human relation the psychic love gets mixed up with other ele- ments which seek at once to use it and overshadow it. It gels an outlet for its o^vn full intensities only at rare moments. Other- wise it comes in only as an element, but even so it contributes all the higher things in a love fundamentally vital-— all the finer sweetness, tenderness, fidelity, self-giving, self-sacrifice, rcachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself, come from the psychic. If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, phj-sieal, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reflection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life.
opisthotic ::: n. --> The inferior and posterior of the three elements forming the periotic bone.
order ::: 1. A condition of methodical or prescribed arrangement among component parts such that proper functioning or appearance is achieved; methodical or harmonic arrangement. 2. A condition of logical or comprehensible arrangement among the separate elements of a group. 3. Conformity or obedience to law or established authority. 4. A sequence or arrangement of successive things. 5. An authoritative indication to be obeyed; a command or direction. order"s, orders.
Ordered pair – Any pair of elements (x,y) where the first element is x and the second element is y. These are used to identify or plot points on coordinate graphs.
organise ::: form (parts or elements of something) into a structured whole; coordinate. organised, organising.
organogen ::: n. --> A name given to any one of the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which are especially characteristic ingredients of organic compounds; also, by extension, to other elements sometimes found in the same connection; as sulphur, phosphorus, etc.
organule ::: n. --> One of the essential cells or elements of an organ. See Sense organule, under Sense.
OS/2 /O S too/ {IBM} and {Microsoft}'s successor to the {MS-DOS} {operating system} for {Intel 80286} and {Intel 80386}-based {microprocessors}. It is proof that they couldn't get it right the second time either. Often called "Half-an-OS". The design was so {baroque}, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major {application programs} shipping for it on the fingers of two hands, in {unary}. Later versions improved somewhat, and informed hackers now rate them superior to {Microsoft Windows}, which isn't saying much. See {second-system effect}. On an {Intel 80386} or better, OS/2 can {multitask} between existing {MS-DOS} {applications}. OS/2 is strong on connectivity and the provision of robust {virtual machines}. It can support {Microsoft Windows} programs in addition to its own {native} applications. It also supports the {Presentation Manager} {graphical user interface}. {OS/2} supports {hybrid multiprocessing} (HMP), which provides some elements of {symmetric multiprocessing} (SMP), using add-on IBM software called {MP/2}. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993. After OS/2 1.x the {IBM} and {Microsoft} partnership split. IBM continued to develop OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft developed what was originally intended to be OS/2 3.0 into {Windows NT}. In October 1994, IBM released version OS/2 3.0 (known as "Warp") but it is only distantly related to {Windows NT}. This version raised the limit on RAM from 16MB to 1GB (like Windows NT). IBM introduced networking with "OS/2 Warp Connect", the first multi-user version. OS/2 Warp 4.0 ("Merlin") is a {network operating system}. {(http://mit.edu:8001/activities/os2/os2world.html)}. [Dates?] [{Jargon File}] (1995-07-20)
OS/390 "operating system" An {IBM} {mainframe} {operating system}, featuring integrated {MVS}, {UNIX}, {LAN}, {distributed computing} and {application enablement services} through its base elements. These base services enable open, distributed processing and offer a foundation for object-ready application development. The OS/390 base includes a {Communication Server} that includes {VTAM}, the {VTAM AnyNet} feature, {TCP/IP} and {TIOC}. It provides {SNA} ({3270}), {APPC}, {High Performance Routing}, {ATM} support, {sockets} and {RPC}. OS/390 is basically rebranded, repackaged {MVS/OE}, {CMOS} processors, {RAMAC} disk arrays and {open systems} extension to networking in {VTAM}, the principle being that if you can't compete, rebrand what you have and tell everyone it's something new. {(http://204.146.133.206/os390/index.html)}. (1999-01-20)
Oversoul ::: We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance, luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery. We become aware, in a certain experience, of a range of being superconscient to all these three, aware too of something, a supreme highest Reality sustaining and exceeding them all, which humanity speaks of vaguely as Spirit, God, the Oversoul: from these superconscient ranges we have visitations and in our highest being we tend towards them and to that supreme Spirit. There is then in our total range of existence a superconscience as well as a subconscience and inconscience, overarching and perhaps enveloping our subliminal and our waking selves, but unknown to us, seemingly unattainable and incommunicable.
pañcabhauta (panchabhauta) ::: involving the five elements (pañcabhūta).
panca bhuta ::: "the five elements", the five elementary states of substance: ::: [akasa, vayu, agni (tejas), apas (jala), prthivi].
panchabhuta &
panzoism ::: n. --> A term used to denote all of the elements or factors which constitute vitality or vital energy.
Paralation PARALlel reLATION. Sabot, MIT 1987. A framework for parallel programming. A "field" is an array of objects, placed at different sites. A paralation is a group of fields, defining nearness between field elements. Operations can be performed in parallel on every site of a paralation. ["The Paralation Model: Architecture Independent Programming", G.W. Sabot "gary@think.com", MIT Press 1988].
parallel processing "parallel" (Or "multiprocessing") The simultaneous use of more than one computer to solve a problem. There are many different kinds of parallel computer (or "parallel processor"). They are distinguished by the kind of interconnection between processors (known as "processing elements" or PEs) and between processors and memory. {Flynn's taxonomy} also classifies parallel (and serial) computers according to whether all processors execute the same instructions at the same time ("{single instruction/multiple data}" - SIMD) or each processor executes different instructions ("{multiple instruction/multiple data}" - MIMD). The processors may either communicate in order to be able to cooperate in solving a problem or they may run completely independently, possibly under the control of another processor which distributes work to the others and collects results from them (a "{processor farm}"). The difficulty of cooperative problem solving is aptly demonstrated by the following dubious reasoning: If it takes one man one minute to dig a post-hole then sixty men can dig it in one second. {Amdahl's Law} states this more formally. Processors communicate via some kind of network or bus or a combination of both. Memory may be either {shared memory} (all processors have equal access to all memory) or private (each processor has its own memory - "{distributed memory}") or a combination of both. Many different software systems have been designed for programming parallel computers, both at the {operating system} and programming language level. These systems must provide mechanisms for partitioning the overall problem into separate tasks and allocating tasks to processors. Such mechanisms may provide either {implicit parallelism} - the system (the {compiler} or some other program) partitions the problem and allocates tasks to processors automatically or {explicit parallelism} where the programmer must annotate his program to show how it is to be partitioned. It is also usual to provide synchronisation primitives such as {semaphores} and {monitors} to allow processes to share resources without conflict. {Load balancing} attempts to keep all processors busy by allocating new tasks, or by moving existing tasks between processors, according to some {algorithm}. Communication between tasks may be either via {shared memory} or {message passing}. Either may be implemented in terms of the other and in fact, at the lowest level, shared memory uses message passing since the address and data signals which flow between processor and memory may be considered as messages. The terms "parallel processing" and "multiprocessing" imply multiple processors working on one task whereas "{concurrent processing}" and "{multitasking}" imply a single processor sharing its time between several tasks. See also {cellular automaton},{symmetric multi-processing}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.parallel}. {Institutions (http://ccsf.caltech.edu/other_sites.html)}, {research groups (http://cs.cmu.edu/~scandal/research-groups.html)}. (2004-11-07)
parametric polymorphism Polymorphism was first identified by {Christopher Strachey} in 1967 and developed by Hindley and Milner. For example we could specify that the argument of the "head" {function} was a list without specifying a type for the elements of the list. In {Haskell} we would write: head :: [a] -" a meaning head has type function from "list of a" to "a" where "a" is a {type variable}). This is known as parametric polymorphism. Polymorphic typing allows strong type checking as well as generic functions. {ML} in 1976 was the first language with polymorphic typing. See also {generic type variable}. (2014-01-05)
parse ::: n. --> To resolve into its elements, as a sentence, pointing out the several parts of speech, and their relation to each other by government or agreement; to analyze and describe grammatically.
partial equivalence relation (PER) A relation R on a set S where R is symmetric (x R y =" y R x) and transitive (x R y R z =" x R z) and where there may exist elements in S for which the relation is not defined. A PER is an equivalence relation on the subset for which it is defined, i.e. it is also reflexive (x R x).
partial order "mathematics" (Informally, "order", "ordering") A {binary relation} R that is a {pre-order} (i.e. it is {reflexive} (x R x) and {transitive} (x R y R z =" x R z)) and {antisymmetric} (x R y R x =" x = y). The order is partial, rather than total, because there may exist elements x and y for which neither x R y nor y R x. In {domain theory}, if D is a set of values including the undefined value ({bottom}) then we can define a partial ordering relation "= on D by x "= y if x = bottom or x = y. The constructed set D x D contains the very undefined element, (bottom, bottom) and the not so undefined elements, (x, bottom) and (bottom, x). The partial ordering on D x D is then (x1,y1) "= (x2,y2) if x1 "= x2 and y1 "= y2. The partial ordering on D -" D is defined by f "= g if f(x) "= g(x) for all x in D. (No f x is more defined than g x.) A {lattice} is a partial ordering where all finite subsets have a {least upper bound} and a {greatest lower bound}. (""=" is written in {LaTeX} as {\sqsubseteq}). (1995-02-03)
partition 1. "storage" A {logical} section of a {disk}. Each partition normally has its own {file system}. {Unix} tends to treat partitions as though they were separate physical entities. 2. "mathematics" A division of a set into subsets so that each of its elements is in exactly one subset. (1996-12-09)
pathname separator "file system" The character used to separate elements of a {path} or {pathname}. Under {Unix} and {POSIX.1} compliant systems the pathname separator is the (forward) {slash}, in {MS-DOS} {backslash} serves the same purpose. For obvious reasons the no directory or file name can contain this character. (1996-11-21)
permutation "mathematics" 1. An ordering of a certain number of elements of a given set. For instance, the permutations of (1,2,3) are (1,2,3) (2,3,1) (3,1,2) (3,2,1) (1,3,2) (2,1,3). Permutations form one of the canonical examples of a "{group}" - they can be composed and you can find an inverse permutation that reverses the action of any given permutation. The number of permutations of r things taken from a set of n is n P r = n! / (n-r)! where "n P r" is usually written with n and r as subscripts and n! is the {factorial} of n. What the football pools call a "permutation" is not a permutation but a {combination} - the order does not matter. 2. A {bijection} for which the {domain} and {range} are the same set and so f(f'(x)) = f'(f(x)) = x. (2001-05-10)
person ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The human birth in this world is on its spiritual side a complex of two elements, a spiritual Person and a soul of personality; the former is man"s eternal being, the latter is his cosmic and mutable being.” *The Life Divine
person ::: “The human birth in this world is on its spiritual side a complex of two elements, a spiritual Person and a soul of personality; the former is man’s eternal being, the latter is his cosmic and mutable being.” The Life Divine
Person (the) ::: the human birth in this world is on its spiritual side a complex of two elements, a spiritual Person and a soul of personality; the former is man's eternal being, the latter is his cosmic and mutable being.
persulphide ::: n. --> A sulphide containing more sulphur than some other compound of the same elements; as, iron pyrites is a persulphide; -- formerly called persulphuret.
Phantasm: (Gr. phantasma, appearance) Term used by Hobbes to designate an image or representation directly given to the percipient. See Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body, Part IV, ch XXV. -- L.W.
pharyngobranchial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the pharynx and the branchiae; -- applied especially to the dorsal elements in the branchial arches of fishes. See Pharyngeal. ::: n. --> A pharyngobranchial, or upper pharyngeal, bone or cartilage.
pitiless ::: a. --> Destitute of pity; hard-hearted; merciless; as, a pitilessmaster; pitiless elements.
Exciting no pity; as, a pitiless condition.
plan ::: n. 1. A systematic arrangement of elements or important parts; a configuration or outline. 2. A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective. plans, heart-plan, life-plan, time-plan, world-plan, vision-plans, world-plan. *v. 3. To formulate a scheme or program for the accomplishment, enactment, or attainment of. *plans, planned, planning.
pleurocentrum ::: n. --> One of the lateral elements in the centra of the vertebrae in some fossil batrachians.
polymeric ::: a. --> Having the same percentage composition (that is, having the same elements united in the same proportion by weight), but different molecular weights; -- often used with with; thus, cyanic acid (CNOH), fulminic acid (C2N2O2H2), and cyanuric acid (C3N3O3H3), are polymeric with each other.
polysynthesis ::: n. --> The act or process of combining many separate elements into a whole.
The formation of a word by the combination of several simple words, as in the aboriginal languages of America; agglutination.
poverty ::: n. --> The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.
Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.
pradhana. ::: the potential but unmanifest ingredients of the material world; prakriti; the chief; the root base of all elements; undifferentiated matter; the material cause of the world in the Sankhya philosophy, corresponding to maya in vedanta &
prakasho, vichitrabodho, jnanasamarthyam) ::: purity, clarity, variety of understanding, capacity for all knowledge (the elements of buddhisakti).
prana. ::: the subtle life-force; breath or vital force; inhalation; positive animating energy and vitality in life; the first of the five vital airs centred in the Heart &
prapancha. ::: the world; the five elements; the illusory world appearance &
premasamarthyam ::: rich. slagha, kalyanasraddha, ness of feeling, assertion of psychic force, faith in the universal good, capacity for unbounded love (the elements of cittasakti). snigdhata, tejah.s.lagha, kalyan.asraddha, premasamarthyam, iti snigdhata,
principia ::: n. pl. --> First principles; fundamental beginnings; elements; as. Newton&
priscillianist ::: n. --> A follower of Priscillian, bishop of Avila in Spain, in the fourth century, who mixed various elements of Gnosticism and Manicheism with Christianity.
Probability: In general Chance, possibility, contingency, likelihood, likehness, presumption. conjecture, prediction, forecast, credibility, relevance; the quality or state of being likely true or likely to happen; a fact or a statement which is likely true, real, operative or provable by future events; the conditioning of partial or approximate belief or assent; the motive of a presumption or prediction; the conjunction of reasonable grounds for presuming the truth of a statement or the occurrence of an event; the field of knowledge between complete ignorance and full certitude; an approximation to fact or truth; a qualitative or numerical value attached to a probable inference, and by extension, the systematic study of chances or relative possibilities as forming the subject of the theory of probability. A. The Foundation of Probability. We cannot know everything completely and with certainty. Yet we desire to think and to act as correctly as possible hence the necessity of considering methods leading to reasonable approximations, and of estimating their results in terms of the relative evidence available in each case. In D VI-VII (infra) only, is probability interpreted as a property of events or occurrences as such: whether necessary or contingent, facts are simply conditioned by other facts, and have neither an intelligence nor a will to realize their certainty or their probability. In other views, probability requires ultimately a mind to perceive it as such it arises from the combination of our partial ignorance of the extremely complex nature and conditions of the phenomena, with the inadequacy of our means of observation, experimentation and analysis, however searching and provisionally satisfactory. Thus it may be said that probability exists formally in the mind and materially in the phenomena as related between themselves. In stressing the one or the other of these two aspects, we obtain (1) subjectize probability, when the psychological conditions of the mind cause it to evaluate a fact or statement with fear of possible error; and (2) objective probability, when reference is made to that quality of facts and statements, which causes the mind to estimate them with a conscious possibility of error. Usually, methods can be devised to objectify technically the subjective aspect of probability, such as the rules for the elimination of the personal equation of the inquirer. Hence the methods established for the study and the interpretation of chances can be considered independently of the state of mind as such of the inquirer. These methods make use of rational or empirical elements. In the first case, we are dealing with a priori or theoretical probability, which considers the conditions or occurrences of an event hypothetically and independently of any direct experience. In the second case, we are dealing with inductive or empirical probability. And when these probabilities are represented with numerals or functions to denote measures of likelihood, we are concerned with quantitative or mathematical probability. Methods involving the former cannot be assimilated with methods involving the latter, but both can be logically correlated on the strength of the general principle of explanation, that similar conjunctions of moral or physical facts demand a general law governing and justifying them.
production system "programming" A production system consists of a collection of productions (rules), a {working memory} of {facts} and an {algorithm}, known as {forward chaining}, for producing new facts from old. A rule becomes eligible to "fire" when its conditions match some set of elements currently in working memory. A {conflict resolution strategy} determines which of several eligible rules (the {conflict set}) fires next. A condition is a list of symbols which represent constants, which must be matched exactly; variables which bind to the thing they match and """ symbol" which matches a field not equal to symbol. Example production systems are {OPS5}, {CLIPS}, {flex}. (2005-06-17)
project assurance The process of specifying the support system: techniques, internal standards, measurements, tools, and training for a project; counselling the project team in the application of these elements and monitoring the adherence to the standards.
projective plane "mathematics" The space of {equivalence classes} of {vectors} under non-zero {scalar} multiplication. Elements are sets of the form {kv: k != 0, k scalar, v != O, v a vector} where O is the origin. v is a representative member of this equivalence class. The projective plane of a {vector space} is the collection of its 1-dimensional {subspaces}. The properties of the vector space induce a {topology} and notions of {smoothness} on the projective plane. A projective plane is in no meaningful sense a plane and would therefore be (but isn't) better described as a "projective space". (1996-09-28)
protyle ::: n. --> The hypothetical homogeneous cosmic material of the original universe, supposed to have been differentiated into what are recognized as distinct chemical elements.
pseudosphere ::: n. --> The surface of constant negative curvature generated by the revolution of a tractrix. This surface corresponds in non-Euclidian space to the sphere in ordinary space. An important property of the surface is that any figure drawn upon it can be displaced in any way without tearing it or altering in size any of its elements.
Psychic Summation: See Psychic Fusion. Psycho-analysis: The psychological method and therapeutic technique developed by Freud (see Freud, Sigmund). This method consists in the use of such procedures as free association, automatic writing and especially dream-analysis to recover forgotten memories, suppressed desires and other subconscious items which exert a disturbing influence on the conscious life of an individual. The cure of the psychic disturbances is effected by bringing the suppressed items into the full of consciousness of the individual. Psycho-analytic theory has posited a subconscious mind as a repository for the suppressed elements. Freud exaggerated the sexual origin of the suppressed desires but other psycho-analysts, notably Jung and Adler, corrected this exaggeration. The psycho-analytical school has developed its terminology in which the following are characteristic. Free association is the method of encouraging the patient to recall in random fashion experiences, particularly of childhood. A "complex" is a more or less permanent emotional system or mechjnism responsible for the mental disturbances of the patient. Libido designates the underlying sexual drive or impulse, the suppression of which is responsible for the psychic disturbance. Suppression or repression is the rejection from consciousness of desires and urges which it finds intolerable. Sublimation is the transference of a suppressed desire to a new object. These terms are only a few samples of the elaborate and at times highly mythological terminology of psycho-analysis. -- L.W.
Psychic Transformation ::: In the psychic transformation there are three main elements:
pūrn.ata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam ::: fullness, clearpurnata, ness, equality, capacity for enjoyment (the elements of pran.asakti). pūrn.ata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam, iti pran.asaktih. purnata,
quadrivalent ::: a. --> Having a valence of four; capable of combining with, being replaced by, or compared with, four monad atoms; tetravalent; -- said of certain atoms and radicals; thus, carbon and silicon are quadrivalent elements.
quaternion ::: n. --> The number four.
A set of four parts, things, or person; four things taken collectively; a group of four words, phrases, circumstances, facts, or the like.
A word of four syllables; a quadrisyllable.
The quotient of two vectors, or of two directed right lines in space, considered as depending on four geometrical elements, and as expressible by an algebraic symbol of quadrinomial form.
Quicksort A sorting {algorithm} with O(n log n) average time {complexity}. One element, x of the list to be sorted is chosen and the other elements are split into those elements less than x and those greater than or equal to x. These two lists are then sorted {recursive}ly using the same algorithm until there is only one element in each list, at which point the sublists are recursively recombined in order yielding the sorted list. This can be written in {Haskell}: qsort :: Ord a =" [a] -" [a] qsort [] = [] qsort (x:xs) = qsort [ u | u"-xs, u"x ] ++ [ x ] ++ qsort [ u | u"-xs, u"=x ] [Mark Jones, Gofer prelude.]
Quintessence: (Lat. quinta essentia, the fifth essence) the purest, most highly concentrated form of a nature or essence; originally, in Aristotelianism, the fifth element, found in celestial bodies, distinguished from the four earthly elements. -- V.J.B.
real number "mathematics" One of the infinitely divisible range of values between positive and negative {infinity}, used to represent continuous physical quantities such as distance, time and temperature. Between any two real numbers there are infinitely many more real numbers. The {integers} ("counting numbers") are real numbers with no fractional part and real numbers ("measuring numbers") are {complex numbers} with no imaginary part. Real numbers can be divided into {rational numbers} and {irrational numbers}. Real numbers are usually represented (approximately) by computers as {floating point} numbers. Strictly, real numbers are the {equivalence classes} of the {Cauchy sequences} of {rationals} under the {equivalence relation} "~", where a ~ b if and only if a-b is {Cauchy} with limit 0. The real numbers are the minimal {topologically closed} {field} containing the rational field. A sequence, r, of rationals (i.e. a function, r, from the {natural numbers} to the rationals) is said to be Cauchy precisely if, for any tolerance delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n, m exceeding N, | r[n] - r[m] | " delta A Cauchy sequence, r, has limit x precisely if, for any tolerance delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n exceeding N, | r[n] - x | " delta (i.e. r would remain Cauchy if any of its elements, no matter how late, were replaced by x). It is possible to perform addition on the reals, because the equivalence class of a sum of two sequences can be shown to be the equivalence class of the sum of any two sequences equivalent to the given originals: ie, a~b and c~d implies a+c~b+d; likewise a.c~b.d so we can perform multiplication. Indeed, there is a natural {embedding} of the rationals in the reals (via, for any rational, the sequence which takes no other value than that rational) which suffices, when extended via continuity, to import most of the algebraic properties of the rationals to the reals. (1997-03-12)
Reason: (Lat. ratio, Ger. Vernunft) In Kant: The special mental faculty (distinct from sensibility and understanding) which in thinking Ideas of absolute completeness and unconditionedness transcends the conditions of possible experience. See Ideas of Pure Reason. All those mental functions and relations characterized by spontaneity rather than receptivity In this sense, reason includes both reason (1) and the understanding, but excludes the sensibility. The source of all a priori synthetic forms in experience. In this sense, reason includes elements of sensibility, understanding and reason (1). When Kant says, "reason is a law-giver to Nature," he employs the term in the third sense. See Kantianism, Understanding, Ratio.
recurrence relation "mathematics" An {equation} that defines each element of a {sequence} in terms of one or more earlier elements. E.g. The {Fibonacci sequence}, X[1] = 1 X[2] = 1 X[n] = X[n-1] + X[n-2] Some recurrence relations can be converted to "closed form" where X[n] is defined purely in terms of n, without reference to earlier elements. (2008-01-14)
Reflexive transitive closure Two elements, x and y, are related by the reflexive transitive closure, R+, of a relation, R, if they are related by the transitive closure, R*, or they are the same element.
religion ::: Sri Aurobindo: "There is no word so plastic and uncertain in its meaning as the word religion. The word is European and, therefore, it is as well to know first what the Europeans mean by it. In this matter we find them, — when they can be got to think clearly on the matter at all, which is itself unusual, — divided in opinion. Sometimes they use it as equivalent to a set of beliefs, sometimes as equivalent to morality coupled with a belief in God, sometimes as equivalent to a set of pietistic actions and emotions. Faith, works and pious observances, these are the three recognised elements of European religion . . . . ::: Religion in India is a still more plastic term and may mean anything from the heights of Yoga to strangling your fellowman and relieving him of the worldly goods he may happen to be carrying with him. It would therefore take too long to enumerate everything that can be included in Indian religion. Briefly, however, it is Dharma or living religiously, the whole life being governed by religion.” *From an unpublished essay
religion ::: “There is no word so plastic and uncertain in its meaning as the word religion. The word is European and, therefore, it is as well to know first what the Europeans mean by it. In this matter we find them,—when they can be got to think clearly on the matter at all, which is itself unusual,—divided in opinion. Sometimes they use it as equivalent to a set of beliefs, sometimes as equivalent to morality coupled with a belief in God, sometimes as equivalent to a set of pietistic actions and emotions. Faith, works and pious observances, these are the three recognised elements of European religion . . . .
representative imperative ::: (c. 1920) a form of logos vijñana formed by a combination of its representative and imperative elements; (in early 1927) the lowest form of "the imperative", evidently representative vijñana taken up into imperative vijñana and that again elevated to one of the lower planes of what by the end of 1927 was called overmind.
reproduction (‘s) ::: something reproduced, esp. in the faithfulness of its resemblance to the form and elements of the original.
resolution ::: n. --> The act, operation, or process of resolving. Specifically: (a) The act of separating a compound into its elements or component parts. (b) The act of analyzing a complex notion, or solving a vexed question or difficult problem.
The state of being relaxed; relaxation.
The state of being resolved, settled, or determined; firmness; steadiness; constancy; determination.
That which is resolved or determined; a settled
resolve ::: v. i. --> To separate the component parts of; to reduce to the constituent elements; -- said of compound substances; hence, sometimes, to melt, or dissolve.
To reduce to simple or intelligible notions; -- said of complex ideas or obscure questions; to make clear or certain; to free from doubt; to disentangle; to unravel; to explain; hence, to clear up, or dispel, as doubt; as, to resolve a riddle.
To cause to perceive or understand; to acquaint; to
rhythm ::: 1. Procedure marked by the regular recurrence of particular elements, phases, etc.; flow, pulse, cadence. 2. Regular recurrence of elements in a system of motion. 3. Music. The pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the occurrence of strong and weak melodic and harmonic beats. 4. Measured movement, as in dancing. 5. Physiol. The regular recurrence of an action of function, as of the beat of the heart. 6. The arrangement of words into a more or less regular sequence of stressed and unstressed or long and short syllables. 7. Pros. Metrical or rhythmical form; metre; a particular kind of metrical form or metrical movement. rhythms, rhythm-beats, fire-rhythm, jewel-rhythm, world-rhythms. (Sri Aurobindo also employs rhythms as a v., rhythmed as a v. and an adj., and rhythming as a v. and an adj.)
rich ::: 1. Abounding in desirable elements or qualities. 2. Having great worth or value. 3. Abundant. 4. Possessing great material wealth: Also fig. **5. Expensively elegant, elaborate, or fine; costly. 6. Magnificent; sumptuous. 7. Warm and strong in colour. 8. Of sounds: Pleasantly full and mellow. Also fig. richer, richest, richly, rich-coloured, rich-hearted, rich-plumaged.**
Russell's Paradox "mathematics" A {paradox} (logical contradiction) in {set theory} discovered by {Bertrand Russell}. If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself? If it does then it doesn't and vice versa. The paradox stems from the acceptance of the following {axiom}: If P(x) is a property then {x : P} is a set. This is the {Axiom of Comprehension} (actually an {axiom schema}). By applying it in the case where P is the property "x is not an element of x", we generate the paradox, i.e. something clearly false. Thus any theory built on this axiom must be inconsistent. In {lambda-calculus} Russell's Paradox can be formulated by representing each set by its {characteristic function} - the property which is true for members and false for non-members. The set R becomes a function r which is the negation of its argument applied to itself: r = \ x . not (x x) If we now apply r to itself, r r = (\ x . not (x x)) (\ x . not (x x)) = not ((\ x . not (x x))(\ x . not (x x))) = not (r r) So if (r r) is true then it is false and vice versa. An alternative formulation is: "if the barber of Seville is a man who shaves all men in Seville who don't shave themselves, and only those men, who shaves the barber?" This can be taken simply as a proof that no such barber can exist whereas seemingly obvious axioms of {set theory} suggest the existence of the paradoxical set R. {Zermelo Fränkel set theory} is one "solution" to this paradox. Another, {type theory}, restricts sets to contain only elements of a single type, (e.g. {integers} or sets of integers) and no type is allowed to refer to itself so no set can contain itself. A message from Russell induced {Frege} to put a note in his life's work, just before it went to press, to the effect that he now knew it was inconsistent but he hoped it would be useful anyway. (2000-11-01)
sacramental ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a sacrament or the sacraments; of the nature of a sacrament; sacredly or solemnly binding; as, sacramental rites or elements.
Bound by a sacrament. ::: n. --> That which relates to a sacrament.
sadanga ::: the six limbs or essential elements of painting: rupabheda, pramana, bhava, lavanya, sadrsya, varnikabhanga.
Samadhi and norma! sleep, between the dream*state of Yoga and the physical state of dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind ; in the former the mind proper and subtle is at work liberated from the immixture of the physical mentality. The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind*faculttes disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain>memory, partly of refieclions from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflec- tions which arc, ordinarily, received without intelligence or co- ordination, wildly distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world. In the Yogic dream-state, on the other hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though not of the physical world, works coherently and is able to use either its ordinary will and intelligence with a concentrated power or else the higher will and intelligence of the more exalted planes of mind. It withdraws from experience of the outer world, it puts its seals upon the physical senses and their doors of conununicatinn with maJerJal things ; but everything that is proper to itself, thought, reasoning, reflection, vision, it can continue to execute with an increased purity and power of sovereign concentration free from the dis- tractions and unsteadiness of the waking mind. It can use too its will and produce upon itself or upon its environment mental, moral and even physical effects which may continue and have
sankhya ::: n. --> A Hindoo system of philosophy which refers all things to soul and a rootless germ called prakriti, consisting of three elements, goodness, passion, and darkness.
sarcous ::: a. --> Fleshy; -- applied to the minute structural elements, called sarcous elements, or sarcous disks, of which striated muscular fiber is composed.
scalar 1. "mathematics" A single number, as opposed to a {vector} or {matrix} of numbers. Thus, for example, "scalar multiplication" refers to the operation of multiplying one number (one scalar) by another and is used to contrast this with "matrix multiplication" etc. 2. "architecture" In a {parallel processor} or {vector processor}, the "scalar processor" handles all the sequential operations - those which cannot be parallelised or vectorised. See also {superscalar}. 3. "programming" Any data type that stores a single value (e.g. a number or {Boolean}), as opposed to an {aggregate} data type that has many elements. A {string} is regarded as a scalar in some languages (e.g. {Perl}) and a vector of {characters} in others (e.g. {C}). (2002-06-12)
semiconductor "electronics" A material, typically crystaline, which allows {current} to flow under certain circumstances. Common semiconductors are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide. Semiconductors are used to make {diodes}, {transistors} and other basic "solid state" electronic components. As crystals of these materials are grown, they are "doped" with traces of other elements called {donors} or {acceptors} to make regions which are n- or p-type respectively for the {electron model} or p- or n-type under the {hole model}. Where n and p type regions adjoin, a junction is formed which will pass {current} in one direction (from p to n) but not the other, giving a {diode}. One {model} of semiconductor behaviour describes the doping elements as having either {free electrons} or {holes} dangling at the points in the crystal lattice where the doping elements replace one of the atoms of the foundation material. When external electrons are applied to n-type material (which already has free electrons present) the repulsive force of like charges causes the free electrons to migrate toward the junction, where they are attracted to the holes in the p-type material. Thus the junction conducts current. In contrast, when external electrons are applied to p-type material, the attraction of unlike charges causes the holes to migrate away from the junction and toward the source of external electrons. The junction thus becomes "depleted" of its charge carriers and is non-conducting. (1995-10-04)
Seneca: (4-65 A.D.) A Roman Stoic and instructor of Nero, who ernphasised the distinction between the soul and body and developed the ethical elements of Stoicism. -- R.B.W.
set A collection of objects, known as the elements of the set, specified in such a way that we can tell in principle whether or not a given object belongs to it. E.g. the set of all prime numbers, the set of zeros of the cosine function. For each set there is a {predicate} (or property) which is true for (possessed by) exactly those objects which are elements of the set. The predicate may be defined by the set or vice versa. Order and repetition of elements within the set are irrelevant so, for example, {1, 2, 3} = {3, 2, 1} = {1, 3, 1, 2, 2}. Some common set of numbers are given the following names: N = the {natural numbers} 0, 1, 2, ... Z = the {integers} ..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... Q = the {rational numbers} p/q where p, q are in Z and q /= 0. R = the {real numbers} C = the {complex numbers}. The empty set is the set with no elements. The intersection of two sets X and Y is the set containing all the elements x such that x is in X and x is in Y. The union of two sets is the set containing all the elements x such that x is in X or x is in Y. See also {set complement}. (1995-01-24)
set complement "theory" The complement of set A in set U is all elements of U which are not elements of A. (1995-01-24)
set theory "mathematics" A mathematical formalisation of the theory of "sets" (aggregates or collections) of objects ("elements" or "members"). Many mathematicians use set theory as the basis for all other mathematics. Mathematicians began to realise toward the end of the 19th century that just doing "the obvious thing" with sets led to embarrassing {paradox}es, the most famous being {Russell's Paradox}. As a result, they acknowledged the need for a suitable {axiomatisation} for talking about sets. Numerous such axiomatisations exist; the most popular among ordinary mathematicians is {Zermelo Fränkel set theory}. {The beginnings of set theory (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistoryTopics.html)}. (1995-05-10)
sheer ::: not mixed with extraneous elements. Also fig.
Shu: Number, which gives rise to form (hsiang) according to which things become. This philosophy was based on the I Ching (I. Book of Changes), developed in the medieval interpretation of it (chan wei), and culminated in Neo-Confucianism, especially in Shao K'ang-chieh (1011-1077). According to this philosophv, to Heaven belong the odd numbers which represent the active principle (yang) and are characterized by the tendency to increase, and to Earth the even numbers, which represent the passive principle (yin) and are characterized by the tendency to decrease, forming two series of five numbers. The numbers of Heaven add up to twenty-five and those of Earth to thirty, making a total of fifty-five. It is by these that the changes and transformations are effected and the heavenly and earthly spirits have their movements. The system of numbers begins with 1, which represent the Great Ultimate ('ai Chi) and is completed with 5, which corresponds to the Five Elements (wu hsing) out of the interplay of which all things are what they are. Thus, in the final analysis, everything's comes from number, by which it can be understood, evaluated, and adjusted to other things with a corresponding number. -- W.T.C.
Shu shu: (a) Divination and magic in ancient China, including astrology, almanacs, the art of coordinating human affairs by the active and passive principles of the universe (yin yang) and the Five Elements (wu hsing), fortune telling by the use of the stalks of the divination plant and the tortoise shell, and miscellaneous methods such as dream interpretation, the regulation of forms and shapes of buildings, etc.
siksa (Shiksha) ::: [the science of pronunciation], the elements [of pronunciation]. [Tait. 1.2]
silence ::: n. --> The state of being silent; entire absence of sound or noise; absolute stillness.
Forbearance from, or absence of, speech; taciturnity; muteness.
Secrecy; as, these things were transacted in silence.
The cessation of rage, agitation, or tumilt; calmness; quiest; as, the elements were reduced to silence.
Absence of mention; oblivion.
Single Instruction/Multiple Data (SIMD) (Or "data parallel") The classification under {Flynn's taxonomy} for a {parallel processor} where many processing elements ({functional units}) perform the same operations on different data. There is often a central controller which broadcasts the instruction stream to all the processing elements. Contrast {Multiple Instruction/Multiple Data}. (1994-11-04)
spanaemia ::: n. --> A condition of impoverishment of the blood; a morbid state in which the red corpuscles, or other important elements of the blood, are deficient.
sparse A sparse {matrix} (or {vector}, or {array}) is one in which most of the elements are zero. If storage space is more important than access speed, it may be preferable to store a sparse matrix as a list of (index, value) pairs or use some kind of {hash} scheme or {associative memory}. (1995-01-16)
spoiler 1. A remark which reveals important plot elements from books or movies, thus denying the reader (of the article) the proper suspense when reading the book or watching the movie. 2. Any remark which telegraphs the solution of a problem or puzzle, thus denying the reader the pleasure of working out the correct answer (see also {interesting}). Either sense readily forms compounds like "total spoiler", "quasi-spoiler" and even "pseudo-spoiler". By convention, {Usenet} news articles which are spoilers in either sense should contain the word "spoiler" in the Subject: line, or guarantee via various tricks that the answer appears only after several screens-full of warning, or conceal the sensitive information via {rot13}, or some combination of these techniques. [{Jargon File}] (1995-01-18)
Standard Generalized Markup Language "language, text" (SGML) A generic {markup} language for representing documents. SGML is an International Standard that describes the relationship between a document's content and its structure. SGML allows document-based information to be shared and re-used across applications and computer {platforms} in an open, vendor-neutral format. SGML is sometimes compared to {SQL}, in that it enables companies to structure information in documents in an open fashion, so that it can be accessed or re-used by any SGML-aware application across multiple platforms. SGML is defined in "ISO 8879:1986 Information processing -- Text and office systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)", an {ISO} standard produced by {JTC} 1/SC 18 and amended by "Amendment 1:1988". Unlike other common document file formats that represent both content and presentation, SGML represents a document's content {data} and structure (interrelationships among the data). Removing the presentation from content establishes a neutral format. SGML documents and the information in them can easily be re-used by publishing and non-publishing {applications}. SGML identifies document elements such as titles, paragraphs, tables, and chapters as distinct objects, allowing users to define the relationships between the objects for structuring data in documents. The relationships between document elements are defined in a {Document Type Definition} (DTD). This is roughly analogous to a collection of {field} definitions in a {database}. Once a document is converted into SGML and the information has been 'tagged', it becomes a database-like document. It can be searched, printed or even programmatically manipulated by SGML-aware applications. Companies are moving their documents into SGML for several reasons: Reuse - separation of content from presentation facilitates multiple delivery formats like {CD-ROM} and {electronic publishing}. Portability - SGML is an international, platform-independent, standard based on {ASCII} text, so companies can safely store their documents in SGML without being tied to any one vendor. Interchange - SGML is a core data standard that enables SGML-aware applications to inter-operate and share data seamlessly. A central SGML document store can feed multiple processes in a company, so managing and updating information is greatly simplified. For example, when an aeroplane is delivered to a customer, it comes with thousands of pages of documentation. Distributing these on paper is expensive, so companies are investigating publishing on CD-ROM. If a maintenance person needs a guide for adjusting a plane's flight surfaces, a viewing tool automatically assembles the relevant information from the document {repository} as a complete document. SGML can be used to define attributes to information stored in documents such as security levels. There are few clear leaders in the SGML industry which, in 1993, was estimated to be worth US $520 million and is projected to grow to over US $1.46 billion by 1998. A wide variety tools can be used to create SGML systems. The SGML industry can be separated into the following categories: Mainstream Authoring consists of the key {word processing} vendors like {Lotus}, {WordPerfect} and {Microsoft}. SGML Editing and Publishing includes traditional SGML authoring tools like {ArborText}, {Interleaf}, {FrameBuilder} and {SoftQuad Author}/Editor. SGML Conversions is one of the largest sectors in the market today because many companies are converting legacy data from mainframes, or documents created with mainstream word processors, into SGML. Electronic Delivery is widely regarded as the most compelling reason companies are moving to SGML. Electronic delivery enables users to retrieve information on-line using an intelligent document viewer. Document Management may one day drive a major part of the overall SGML industry. SGML Document Repositories is one of the cornerstone technologies that will affect the progress of SGML as a data standard. Since 1998, almost all development in SGML has been focussed on {XML} - a simple (and therefore easier to understand and implement) subset of SGML. {"ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN" (http://ucc.ie/info/net/isolat1.html)} defines some characters. [How are these related to {ISO 8859}-1?]. {ISO catalogue entry (http://iso.ch/cate/d16387.html)}. SGML parsers are available from {VU, NL (ftp://star.cs.vu.nl/Sgml)}, {FSU (ftp://mailer.cc.fsu.edu/pub/sgml)}, {UIO, Norway (ftp://ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/SGMLS)}. See also {sgmls}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.text.sgml}. ["The SGML Handbook", Charles F. Goldfarb, Clarendon Press, 1991, ISBN 0198537379. (Full text of the ISO standard plus extensive commentary and cross-referencing. Somewhat cheaper than the ISO document)]. ["SGML - The User's Guide to ISO 8879", J.M. Smith et al, Ellis Harwood, 1988]. [Example of some SGML?] (2000-05-31)
stemmer "information science, human language" A program or {algorithm} which determines the morphological root of a given inflected (or, sometimes, derived) word form -- generally a written word form. A stemmer for English, for example, should identify the {string} "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty" etc.) as based on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed" as based on "stem". English stemmers are fairly {trivial} (with only occasional problems, such as "dries" being the third-person singular present form of the verb "dry", "axes" being the plural of "ax" as well as "axis"); but stemmers become harder to design as the morphology, orthography, and {character encoding} of the target language becomes more complex. For example, an Italian stemmer is more complex than an English one (because of more possible verb inflections), a Russian one is more complex (more possible noun declensions), a Hebrew one is even more complex (a {hairy} writing system), and so on. Stemmers are common elements in {query} systems, since a user who runs a query on "daffodils" probably cares about documents that contain the word "daffodil" (without the s). ({This dictionary} has a rudimentary stemmer which currently (April 1997) handles only conversion of plurals to singulars). (1997-04-09)
stercoranist ::: n. --> A nickname formerly given to those who held, or were alleged to hold, that the consecrated elements in the eucharist undergo the process of digestion in the body of the recipient.
sthula deha. ::: the gross body; the physical body made up of the five essential elements; lowest state of consciousness
Still what is important is to develop the psychic within and bring down the higher consciousness from above. The psychic, as it grows and manifests, detects immediately all wrong move- ments or elements and at the same lime supplies almost auto- matically the true element or movement which will replace them ; this process is much easier and more effective than that of a severe tapasy& of purification. The higher consciousness In des-
stoichiology ::: n. --> That part of the science of physiology which treats of the elements, or principles, composing animal tissues.
The doctrine of the elementary requisites of mere thought.
The statement or discussion of the first principles of any science or art.
stoichiometry ::: n. --> The art or process of calculating the atomic proportions, combining weights, and other numerical relations of chemical elements and their compounds.
structure ::: n. **1. Mode of building, construction, or organization; arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents. 2. Something built or constructed, as a building, bridge, etc. Also fig. 3. Anything composed of parts arranged together in some way; an organization. structures. v. 4. To give an organization, form or arrangement to; construct a systematic framework for. structured.**
stuff ::: 1. The material out of which something is made or formed; substance. 2. The essential substance or elements of something; its essence. Also fig. earth-stuff, soul-stuff, world-stuff.
subconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organised reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. No, subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.” *The Synthesis of Yoga.
"The subconscient is a concealed and unexpressed inarticulate consciousness which works below all our conscious physical activities. Just as what we call the superconscient is really a higher consciousness above from which things descend into the being, so the subconscient is below the body-consciousness and things come up into the physical, the vital and the mind-nature from there.
Just as the higher consciousness is superconscient to us and supports all our spiritual possibilities and nature, so the subconscient is the basis of our material being and supports all that comes up in the physical nature.” Letters on Yoga
"That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.” *The Life Divine
"The subconscient is a thing of habits and memories and repeats persistently or whenever it can old suppressed reactions, reflexes, mental, vital or physical responses. It must be trained by a still more persistent insistence of the higher parts of the being to give up its old responses and take on the new and true ones.” Letters on Yoga
"About the subconscient — it is the sub-mental base of the being and is made up of impressions, instincts, habitual movements that are stored there. Whatever movement is impressed in it, it keeps. If one impresses the right movement in it, it will keep and send up that. That is why it has to be cleared of old movements before there can be a permanent and total change in the nature. When the higher consciousness is once established in the waking parts, it goes down into the subconscient and changes that also, makes a bedrock of itself there also.” Letters on Yoga
"The sub-conscious is the evolutionary basis in us, it is not the whole of our hidden nature, nor is it the whole origin of what we are. But things can rise from the subconscient and take shape in the conscious parts and much of our smaller vital and physical instincts, movements, habits, character-forms has this source.” Letters on Yoga
"The subconscient is the support of habitual action — it can support good habits as well as bad.” Letters on Yoga
"For the subconscient is the Inconscient in the process of becoming conscious; it is a support and even a root of our inferior parts of being and their movements.” The Life Divine *subconscient"s.
SUCCESS. ::: There arc always two elements in spiritual success — one’s own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of endeavour.
symphonies ::: 1. Harmonies, especially of sound or color. 2. Extended large-scale orchestral compositions, usually with several movements. 3. Anything characterized by a harmonious combination of elements.
Syncretism: (Gr. syn., with; and either kretidzein, or kerannynai, to mix incompatible elements) A movement to bring about a harmony of positions in philosophy or theology which are somewhat opposed or different. Earliest usage (Plutarch) in connection with the Neo-Platonic effort to unify various pagan religions in the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D. Next used in Renaissance (Bessarion) in reference to the proposed union of the Eastern and Western Citholic Churches, also denoted the contemporary movement to harmonize the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; again in 17th century used by Georg Calixt in regard to proposed union of the Lutheran with other Protestant bodies and also with Catholicism. -- V.J.B.
syntax ::: an orderly arrangement or system; a union of things or elements.
Synthesis: In logic, the general method of deduction or deductive reasoning, which proceeds from the simple to the complex, from the general to the particular, from the necessary to the contingent, from a principle to its application, from a general law to individual cases from cause to effect, from an antecedent to its consequent, from a condition to the conditioned, from the logical whole to the logical part. The logical composition or combination of separate elements of thought, and also the result of this process. A judgment is considered as a synthesis when its predicate is accidental or contingent with respect to the subject: as the ground of such a synthesis is experience, synthetic judgments are a posteriori. The Kantian doctrine of synthetic judgments a priori involves a synthesis between two terms, prior to experience and through the agency of the forms of our intuition or of our understanding. The logical process of adding some elements to the comprehension of a concept in oider to obtain its 'logical division' in contradistinction to the 'real division' which breaks up a composition by analysis. The third phase in the dialectical process, combining the thesis and the antithesis for the emergence of a new level of being. In natural philosophy, the process of combining various material elements into a new substance. The ait of making or building up a compound by simpler compounds or by its elements. Also, the complex substance so formed.
system ::: 1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. 2. An organized and coordinated method, scheme, or plan; a procedure.
T2 ::: a union of two of the three elements of T3; (in 1914) abbreviation of telepathy-trikaladr.s.t.i, a combination of the knowledge faculties of T3; (usually, from 1917 onwards) abbreviation of trikaladr.s.t.itapassiddhi, representing a united action of the higher faculties of knowledge and will, with telepathy included in or replaced by trikaladr.s.t.i; in the last entries of 1927, this is associated with a "passive-active attitude . . . in which the Ishwara determines and the Powers [of the Overmind] may for a time resist and even modify temporarily what he has determined, but must now or in the end help to carry out his will".
T3 ::: abbreviation of telepathy-trikaladr.s.t.i-tapassiddhi, these three elements "acting separately and not taken up into the union in duality" of T2; in the last entries of 1927, associated with a "passive attitude . . . in which the nature is the plaything of the powers of the Overmind".
tanmatras. ::: atoms; the pure, rudimentary elements; the subtle essence of the five elements
Tanmatra: (Skr.) One of the five "subtile elements" in the philosophy of the Sankhya (q.v.) and other systems, corresponding to the matter apprehended in the sensation of sound, touch, color, taste, and smell; generally, the manifold of sensory experience, perhaps also the "reals", or sensation-generals, equivalent to bhutamatra (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Taste: The faculty of judging art without rules, through sensation and experience. The ensemble of preferences shown by an artist in his choice of elements from nature and tradition, for his works of art.
. t.aya (sapta chatusthaya) ::: the seven catus.t.ayas or quater- naries, an enumeration of the elements of the yoga of self-perfection,Sri Aurobindo"s practice of which is documented in the Record of Yoga. sapta hotr hotrah
Taylor, Alfred Edward: Born in 1869, professor of philosophy at St. Andrews and Edinburgh, after teaching for many years at Oxford. Taylor's metaphysics were predominantly Hegelian and idealist (as in Elements of Metaphysics) during his early years, in later years (as in numerous essays in Mind, and his Gifford Lectures Faith of a Moralist) he has become something of a neo-scholastic, although he follows no school exclusively. In his Gifford Lectures he argues from moral experience to God; in other essays, he declares that grounds for belief are found in cosmology, in conscience and in religious experience. As an Anglo-Catholic, he has given (in volume two of his Giffords) a learned apologia for this position, on philosophical grounds. -- W.N.P.
tejas ::: fiery brilliance; mental light and energy; the energy of temperament that manifests itself in each element of the fourfold personality (brahmatejas, etc.); a term in the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya; "a strong and ardent force and intensity", an element of cittasakti; one of the seven kinds of akashic material; rūpa or lipi . composed of this material; fire, the principle of light and heat, one of "the five elements of ancient philosophy or rather elementary conditions of Nature, pañca bhūta, which constitute objects by their various combination", also called agni1; the virile energy carried to the head by udana.
tejo balam pravrittir mahattvam) ::: in all of these (elements of virya there must be) energy, strength, dynamism and greatness (the four terms of the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya). sarves.vetes.u ks.iprata, sthairyam, adinata cesvarabhavah. (sarveshvesarvesvetesu
tejo balaṁ pravr.ttir mahattvam (tejo balam pravrittir mahattwam) ::: energy (tejas), strength (bala1), dynamism (pravr.tti), greatness (mahattva): the first general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya, consisting of qualities needed for the perfection of all four elements of virya.
tenuis ::: n. --> One of the three surd mutes /, /, /; -- so called in relation to their respective middle letters, or medials, /, /, /, and their aspirates, /, /, /. The term is also applied to the corresponding letters and articulate elements in other languages.
ternary ::: a. --> Proceeding by threes; consisting of three; as, the ternary number was anciently esteemed a symbol of perfection, and held in great veneration.
Containing, or consisting of, three different parts, as elements, atoms, groups, or radicals, which are regarded as having different functions or relations in the molecule; thus, sodic hydroxide, NaOH, is a ternary compound.
teshu kshiprata, sthairyam, adinata cheshwarabhava) ::: in all of these (elements of sakti there must be) swiftness, steadiness, non-depression and mastery (the four terms of the second general formula of the sakti catus.t.aya).
That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us,which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 762
“That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.” The Life Divine
The differences begin when the questions of the mode of creation and mediators between God and the world are dealt with. In these matters there are to be noted three variations. Saadia rejected entirely the theory of the emanation of separate intelligences, and teaches God's creation from nothing of all beings in the sublunar and upper worlds. He posits that God created first a substratum or the first air which was composed of the hyle and form and out of this element all beings were created, not only the four elements, the components of bodies in the lower world, but also the angels, stars, and the spheres. Bahya's conception is similar to that of Saadia. The Aristotelians, Ibn Daud, Maimonides, and Gersonides accepted the theory of the separate intelligences which was current in Arabic philosophy. This theory teaches that out of the First Cause there emanated an intelligence, and out of this intelligence another one up to nine, corresponding to the number of spheres. Each of these intelligences acts as the object of the mind of a sphere and is the cause of its movement. The tenth intelligence is the universal intellect, an emanation of all intelligences which has in its care the sublunar world. This theory is a combination of Aristotelian and neo-PIatonic teachings; Ibn Daud posits, however, in addition to the intelligences also the existence of angels, created spiritual beings, while Maimonides seems to identify the angels with the intelligences, and also says that natural forces are also called angels in the Bible. As for creation, Ibn Daud asserts that God created the hyle or primal matter and endowed it with general form from which the specific forms later developed. Maimonides seems to believe that God first created a substance consisting of primal matter and primal form, and that He determined by His will that parts of it should form the matter of the spheres which is imperishable, while other parts should form the matter of the four elements. These views, however, are subject to various interpretations by historians. Gabirol and Gersonides posit the eternal existence of the hyle and limit creation to endowing it with form and organization -- a view close to the Platonic.
"The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.” The Life Divine*
“The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.” The Life Divine
The gunas affect every part of our natural being. They have indeed their strongest relative hold in the three different members of it, mind, life and body. Tamas, the principle of inertia, is strongest in material nature and in our physical being. The action of this principle is of two kinds, inertia of force and inertia of knowledge. Whatever is predominantly governed by Tamas, tends in its force to a sluggish inaction and immobility or else to a mechanical action which it does not possess, but is possessed by obscure forces which drive it in a mechanical round of energy; equally in its consciousness it turns to an inconscience or enveloped subconscience or to a reluctant, sluggish or in some way mechanical conscious action which does not possess the idea of its own energy, but is guided by an idea which seems external to it or at least concealed from its active awareness. Thus the principle of our body is in its nature inert, subconscient, incapable of anything but a mechanical and habitual self-guidance and action: though it has like everything else a principle of kinesis and a principle of equilibrium of its state and action, an inherent principle of response and a secret consciousness, the greatest portion of its rajasic motions are contributed by the lifepower and all the overt consciousness by the mental being. The principle of rajas has its strongest hold on the vital nature. It is the Life within us that is the strongest kinetic motor power, but the life-power in earthly beings is possessed by the force of desire, th
refore rajas turns always to action and desire; desire is the strongest human and animal initiator of most kinesis and action, predominant to such an extent that many consider it the father of all action and even the originator of our being. Moreover, rajas finding itself in a world of matter which starts from the principle of inconscience and a mechanical driven inertia, has to work against an immense contrary force; th
refore its whole action takes on the nature of an effort, a struggle, a besieged and an impeded conflict for possession which is distressed in its every step by a limiting incapacity, disappointment and suffering: even its gains are precarious and limited and marred by the reaction of the effort and an aftertaste of insufficiency and transience. The principle of sattwa has its strongest hold in the mind; not so much in the lower parts of the mind which are dominated by the rajasic life-power, but mostly in the intelligence and the will of the reason. Intelligence, reason, rational will are moved by the nature of their predominant principle towards a constant effort of assimilation, assimilation by knowledge, assimilation by a power of understanding will, a constant effort towards equilibrium, some stability, rule, harmony of the conflicting elements of natural happening and experience. This satisfaction it gets in various ways and in various degrees of acquisition. The attainment of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony brings with it always a relative but more or less intense and satisfying sense of ease, happiness, mastery, security, which is other than the troubled and vehement pleasures insecurely bestowed by the satisfaction of rajasic desire and passion. Light and happiness are the characteristics of the sattwic guna. The whole nature of the embodied living mental being is determined by these three gunas.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 684-685
The more intense the experiences that come, the higher the forces that descend, the greater become the possibilities of deviation and error. For the very intensity and the very height of the force excites and aggrandises the movements of the lower nature and raises up in it all opposing elements in their full force, but often in the dbguisc of truth, wearing a mask of plausible justification. There is needed a great patience, calm, sobriety, balance, an impersonal dciachmcnx and sincerity free from all taint of ego or personal human desire. There must be no attachment to any idea of one’s owm, to any experience, to any kind of imagination, mental building or vital demand ::: the light of discrimination must alx^i'ays play to detect those
The Mother: “The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations—whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul—and simply formulating the plan of action—in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations—it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.
The Mother: “Transformation. The change by which all the elements and all the movements of the being become ready to manifest the supramental Truth.”
The physical mind is that which is fixed on physical objects and happenings, sees and understands these only, and deals with them according to their own nature, but can with difficulty respond to the higher forces. Left to itself, it Is skeptical of the existence of supra-physical things of which it has no direct experience and to which it can find no due ; even when it has spiritual experi- ences, it forgets them easily, loses (he impression and result and finds it difficult to believe. To enlighten the physical mind by the consciousness of the higher spiritual and Supramental planes is one object of this yoga, just as to enlighten it by the power of the higher vital and higher mental elements of the being is the greatest part of human self-development, civilisation and culture.
The position taken is that investigation reveals basic, recurrent patterns of change, expressible as laws of materialist dialectics, which are seen as relevant to every level of existence, and, because validated by past evidence, as indispensable hypotheses in guiding further investigation. These are Law of interpenetration, unity and strife of opposites. (All existences, being complexes of opposing elements and forces, have the character of a changing unity. The unity is considered temporary, relative, while the process of change, expressed by interpenetration and strife, is continuous, absolute.) Law of transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. (The changes which take place in nature are not merely quantitative; their accumulation eventually precipitates new qualities in a transition which appears as a sudden leap in comparison to the gradualness of the quantitative changes up to that point. The new quality is considered as real as the original quality. It is not mechanically reducible to it it is not merely a larger amount of the former quality, but something into which that has developed.) Law of negation of negation. (The series of quantitative changes and emerging qualities is unending. Each state or phase of development is considered a synthesis which resolves the contradictions contained in the preceding synthesis and which generates its own contradictions on a different qualitative level.) These laws, connecting ontology with logic, are contrasted to the formalistic laws of identity, difference and excluded middle of which they are considered qualitatively enriched reconstructions. Against the ontology of the separateness and self-identity of each thing, the dialectical laws emphasize the interconnectedness of all things and self-development of each thing. An A all parts of which are always becoming non-A may thus be called non-A as well as A. The formula, A is A and cannot be non-A, becomes, A is A and also non-A, that is, at or during the same instant: there is no instant, it is held, during which nothing happens. The view taken is that these considerations apply as much to thought and concepts, as to things, that thought is a process, that ideas gain their logical content through interconnectedness with other ideas, out of and into which they develop.
The precipitates of the propaedeutical effort are to be found, for Spinoza, in the definitions, axioms, postulates, and within the structural plan expressed in the geometrical ordering. It is highly probable that Spinoza would have admitted the tentative character of at least some of the definitions, axioms, and postulates formulated by him. He doubtless saw the possibility that the process of inquiry, revising, augmenting, and re-coordinating the fund of knowledge, might demand alteration in the structural bases of systematic expression as well as in the knowledge to be ordered. Such changes, however, would occur within limits set by the propaedeutical disclosures and the general framework. Advance might require the abandonment of an older metaphysical element, and the substitution of a new one. But with equal likelihood, the advance of knowledge would make possible a richer and deeper apprehension of the content of fixed principles. To illustrate: The first definition of the Ethica, that of Causa sui, might well be for Spinoza a principle that awakened reason must accept, a truth whose priority and validity could not be undermined. He might regard it as a minimal definition of reality, of the nature of the ultimate object of inquiry. On the other hand, Spinoza, it may be conjectured, would not claim for every element of his system a similar finality. Just as he recognizes the role of hypothesis in science, in a similar way, he would recognize the tentative character of some metaphysical and theological elements.
The relation of God to the world includes, as we have seen, a number of problems. The general conception of the world with almost all Jewish philosophers is mainly Aristotelian. All, not excluding Saadia, who was to a considerable degree under the influence of the Mutazilites, all except Aristotle's theory of matter and form, i.e., that all bodies are composed of two elements, the substratum or the hyle and the particular form with which it is endewed. They all speak of primal matter which was the first creation, and all accept his view of the four elements, i.e., fire, air, water, and earth which are the components of all things in the lower world. They also accept his cosmogony, namely, the division of the universe of the upper world of the spheres and the lower or sublunar world, and also posit the influence of the spheres upon the course of events in this world. On the other hand, all oppose his view of the eternity of the world and champion creation de novo with slight variations.
The spiritual element is the need of the being for contact, merging, union wth its own highest and uhole sell and source of being and consciousness and bliss, the Ditinc. These two are two sides of the same thing. The mind, vital, physical can be the supports and recipients of this lose, but they can be fully that only when they become remoulded in harmony with the psychic and spiritual elements of the being and no longer bring in the lower insistences of the ego.
The study of society, societal relations. Originally called Social Physics, meaning that the methods of the natural sciences were to be applied to the study of society. Whereas the pattern originally was physics and the first sociologists thought that it was possible to find laws of nature in the social realm (Quetelet, Comte, Buckle), others turned to biological considerations. The "organic" conception of society (Lilienfeld, Schaeffle) treated society as a complex organism, the evolutionists, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, considered the struggle between different ethnic groups the basic factor in the evolution of social structures and institutions. Other sociologists accepted a psychological conception of society; to them psychological phenomena (imitation, according to Gabriel Tarde, consciousness of kind, according to F. H. Giddings) were the basic elements in social interrelations (see also W. McDougall, Alsworth Ross, etc.). These relations themselves were made the main object of sociological studies by G. Simmel, L. Wiese, Howard Becker. A kind of sociological realism was fostered by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and his school. They considered society a reality, the group-mind an actual fact, the social phenomena "choses sociales". The new "sociology of knowledge", inaugurated by these French sociologists, has been further developed by M. Scheler, K. Mannheim and W. Jerusalem. Recently other branches of social research have separated somewhat from sociology proper: Anthropogeography, dealing with the influences of the physical environment upon society, demography, social psychology, etc. Problems of the methodology of the social sciences have also become an important topic of recent studies. -- W.E.
thomsonianism ::: n. --> An empirical system which assumes that the human body is composed of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and that vegetable medicines alone should be used; -- from the founder, Dr. Samuel Thomson, of Massachusetts.
Though Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had propounded doctrines of virtues, they were concerned essentially with Good rather than with rightness of action as such. The Stoics were the first to develop and popularize the notion that man has a duty to live virtuously, reasonably and fittingly, regardless of considerations of human happiness. Certain elements in Rabbinical legalism and the Christian Gospel strained in the same direction, notably the concept of the supreme and absolute law of God. But it was Kant who pressed the logic of duty to its final conclusion. The supreme law of duty, the categorical imperative (q.v.), is revealed intuitively by the pure rational will and strives to determine the moral agent to obey only that law which can be willed universally without contradiction, regardless of consequences.
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
titano- ::: --> A combining form (also used adjectively) designating certain double compounds of titanium with some other elements; as, titano-cyanide, titano-fluoride, titano-silicate, etc.
Ti: The Confucian anthropomorphic Lord or Supreme Lord (Shang Ti), almost interchangeable with Heaven (T'ien) except that Ti refers to the Lord as the directing and governing power whereas Heaven refers to the Lord in the sense of omnipresence and all-inclusiveness. The world-honored deities (such as those of the four directions and the Five Elements). Mythological sovereigns whose virtues approximate those of Heaven and Earth.
T. L. Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, translated from the text of Heiberg, with introduction and commentary, 3 vols., Cambridge, England, 1908. Gerbert of Aurillac: (Pope Sylvester II, died 1003) Was one of the greatest scholars of the 10th century. He studied at Aurillac with Odo of Cluny, learned something of Arabian science during three years spent in Spain. He taught at the school of Rheims, became Abbot of Bobbio (982), Archbishop of Rheims (991), Archbishop of Ravenna (998), Pope in 999. A master of the seven liberal aits, he excelled in his knowledge of the quadrivium, i.e. logic, math., astron. and music. His works, the most important of which are on mathematics, are printed in PL 139, 57-338. -- V.J.B.
To Kao Tzu, contemporary of Mencius, human nature is capable of being good or evil; to Mencius (371-289 B.C.), good; to Hsi'm Tzu (c 355-c 238 B.C.), evil; to Tung Cchung-shu (177-104 B.C.), potentially good; to Yang Hsiung (d. 18 B.C.), both good and evil; to Han Yu (676-82+ A.D.), good in some people, mixed in some, and evil in others; to Li Ao (d. c 844), capable of being "reverted" to its original goodness. To the whole Neo-Confucian movement, what is inborn is good, but due to external influence, there is both goodness and evil. Chang Heng-ch'u (1020-1077) said that human nature is good in all men. The difference between them lies in their skill or lack of skill in returning to accord with their original nature. To Ch'eng I-ch'uan (1033-1107) and Ch'eng Ming-tao (1032-1193), man's nature is the same as his vital force (ch'i). They arc both the principle of life. In principle there are both good and evil in the vital force with which man is involved. Man is not born with these opposing elements in his nature. Due to the vital force man may become good or evil. Chu Hsi (1130-1200) regarded the nature as identical with Reason (li). Subjectively it is the nature; objectively it is Reason. It is the framework of the moral order (tao), with benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom (ssu tuan) inherent in it. Evil is due to man's failure to preserve a harmonious relation between his nature-principles. Wang Yang-ming (1473-1529) identified the nature with the mind, which is Reason and originally good. -- W.T.C.
tragi-comedy ::: an incident or situation having both comic and tragic elements.
Transcendental analytic: The first part of Kant's Logic; its function is "the dissection of the whole of our a priori knowledge into the elements of the pure cognition of the understanding," (Kritik d. reinen Vemunft, Part II, div. I, tr. M. Müller, 2nd ed., pp. 50-1), to be distinguished from (1) Transcendental Aesthetic, which studies the a priori forms of sensation, and (2) Transc. Dialectic, which attempts to criticize the illusory and falsifying arguments based on a priori principles. -- V.J.B.
transelementate ::: v. t. --> To change or transpose the elements of; to transubstantiate.
transformation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Transformation means that the higher consciousness or nature is brought down into the mind, vital and body and takes the place of the lower. There is a higher consciousness of the true self, which is spiritual, but it is above; if one rises above into it, then one is free as long as one remains there, but if one comes down into or uses mind, vital or body — and if one keeps any connection with life, one has to do so, either to come down and act from the ordinary consciousness or else to be in the self but use mind, life and body, then the imperfections of these instruments have to be faced and mended — they can only be mended by transformation.” *Letters on Yoga
"‘Transformation" is a word that I have brought in myself (like ‘supermind") to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them. Purification of the nature by the ‘influence" of the Spirit is not what I mean by transformation; purification is only part of a psychic change or a psycho-spiritual change — the word besides has many senses and is very often given a moral or ethical meaning which is foreign to my purpose.” *Letters on Yoga
"It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all. Into that truth we shall be freed and it will transform mind and life and body. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit. The obscurations of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit conquer. All may not open to the fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The Mother: "Transformation. The change by which all the elements and all the movements of the being become ready to manifest the supramental Truth.”
"One thing you must know and never forget: in the work of transformation all that is true and sincere will always be kept; only what is false and insincere will disappear.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.
transubstantiate ::: v. t. --> To change into another substance.
To change, as the sacramental elements, bread and wine, into the flesh and blood of Christ.
triangulation ::: n. --> The series or network of triangles into which the face of a country, or any portion of it, is divided in a trigonometrical survey; the operation of measuring the elements necessary to determine the triangles into which the country to be surveyed is supposed to be divided, and thus to fix the positions and distances of the several points connected by them.
triatomic ::: a. --> Having three atoms; -- said of certain elements or radicals.
Having a valence of three; trivalent; sometimes, in a specific sense, having three hydroxyl groups, whether acid or basic; thus, glycerin, glyceric acid, and tartronic acid are each triatomic.
tribasic ::: a. --> Capable of neutralizing three molecules of a monacid base, or their equivalent; having three hydrogen atoms capable of replacement by basic elements on radicals; -- said of certain acids; thus, citric acid is a tribasic acid.
T'u: Earth, one of the Five Agents or Elements. See wu hsing. -- W.T.C.
tumult ::: n. --> The commotion or agitation of a multitude, usually accompanied with great noise, uproar, and confusion of voices; hurly-burly; noisy confusion.
Violent commotion or agitation, with confusion of sounds; as, the tumult of the elements.
Irregular or confused motion; agitation; high excitement; as, the tumult of the spirits or passions.
unsaturated ::: a. --> Capable of absorbing or dissolving to a greater degree; as, an unsaturated solution.
Capable of taking up, or of uniting with, certain other elements or compounds, without the elimination of any side product; thus, aldehyde, ethylene, and ammonia are unsaturated.
urohyal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to one or more median and posterior elements in the hyoidean arch of fishes. ::: n. --> A urohyal bone or cartilage.
ūta (panchabhuta) ::: the five bhūtas or "elements, as it is rendered, but rather elemental or essential conditions of material being to which are given the concrete names of earth [pr.thivi1], water [jala],fire [tejas or agni1], air [vayu1] and ether [akasa]". pañcapr ñcaprana
vamamarga ::: the left-hand path (of the tantra) , "the way of ananda", nature in man liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities.
viveka (viveka; vivek) ::: intuitive discrimination, one of the two components of smr.ti, a faculty of jñana; its function is "to seize on our thoughts & intuitions, arrange them, separate their intellectual from their vijnanamaya elements, correct their false extensions, false limitations, misapplications & assign them their right application, right extension, right limitation".
Volkelt, Johannes: (1848-1930) Waa influenced by the traditions of German idealism since Kant. His most imported work consisted in the analysis of knowledge which, he contended, had a double source; for it requires, first of all, empirical data, insofar as there can be no real knowledge of the external world apart from consciousness, and also logical thinking, insofar as it elaborates the crude material of perception. Consequently, knowledge may be described as the product of rational operations on the material of pure experience. Thus he arrived at the conclusion that reality is "trans-subjective", that is to say, it consists neither of mere objects nor of mere data of consciousness, but is rather a synthesis of both elements of existence. -- R.B.W.
weathered ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Weather ::: a. --> Made sloping, so as to throw off water; as, a weathered cornice or window sill.
Having the surface altered in color, texture, or composition, or the edges rounded off by exposure to the elements.
weathering ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Weather ::: n. --> The action of the elements on a rock in altering its color, texture, or composition, or in rounding off its edges.
"We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery.” The Life Divine
“We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery.” The Life Divine
"We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.” The Life Divine
“We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.” The Life Divine
When both words in a hyphenated word are capitalised it is to stress both elements.”
While the term Personalism is modern it stands for an old way of thinking which grows out of the attempt to interpret the self as a part of phenomenological experience. Personalistic elements found expression in Heraclitus' (536-470 B.C.) statement "Man's own character is his daemon" (Fr. 119), and in his assertion of the Logos as an enduring principle of permanence in a world of change. These elements are traceable likewise in the cosmogony of Anaxagoras (500-430 B.C.), who gave philosophy an anthropocentric trend by affirming that mind "regulated all things, what they were to be, what they were and what they are", the force which arranges and guides (Fr. 12) Protagoras (cir. 480-410 B.C.) emphasized the personalistic character of knowledge in the famous dictum "Man is the measure of all things."
Will, there are many tangfed knots that have to be loosened and cannot be cut abruptly asunder. The Asura and Rakshasa hold this evolving earthly nature and have to be met and conquered on their own terms in their own long-conquered fief and pro- vince ; the human in us has to be led and prepared to transcend its limits and is too weak and obscure to be lifted up suddenly to a form far beyond it. The Divine Consciousness and Force are there and do at each moment the thing that is needed in the conditions of the labour, take always the step that fs decreed and shape In the midst of imperfection the perfection that is to come. But only when the supermiod has descended in you can she deal directly as the supramental Shakti with supramental natures. If you follow your mind, it will not recognise the hiother even when she is manifest before you. Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances ; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.
Wu chiao: The Five Teachings. See wu ch'ang. Wu hsing: The Five Agents, Elements or Powers of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal and Earth, the interaction of which gives rise to the multiplicity of things, and which have their correspondence in the five senses, tastes, colors, tones, the five virtues, the five atmospheric conditions, the five ancient emperors, etc. Also called wu te. (The Yin Yang School in the third and fourth centuries B. C. and the Han dynasty, especially Pan Ku, 32-92 A.D., and Tung Chung-shu, 177-104 B.C.) The Five Agents which are the five vital forces (ch'i) engendered by the transformation of yang, the active cosmic principle, and its union with yin, the passive cosmic principle, each with its specific nature. When the being of the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi) and the essence of yin and yang come into mysterious union, determinate being ensues, with the heavenly principle, yang, constituting the male element and the earthly principle, yin, constituting the female element, giving rise to the myriad things. (Chou Lien-hsi, 1017-1073). The Five Constant Virtues. See wu ch'ang.
Wu te: (a) The Five Powers, or the characteristics of the Five Agents or Elements (wu hsing) of the Yin Yang school.
Yi: Change. See: i. Yin yang: Passive and active principles, respectively, of the universe, or the female, negative force and the male, positive force, always contrasting but complimentary. Yang and yin are expressed in heaven and earth, man and woman, father and son, shine and rain, hardness and softness, good and evil, white and black, upper and lower, great and small, odd number and even number, joy and sorrow, reward and punishment, agreement and opposition, life and death, advance and retreat, love and hate, and all conceivable objects, qualities, situations, and relationships. The Two Modes (i -- --and --in trigram, or kua, symbols) of the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi), from the interplay of which all things are engendered. A system constituted by the Five Agents or Elements (wu hsing) of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth, which in turn constitute the Great Ultimate. (Chou Lien-hsi, 1017-1073). The two forces of ch'i, or the vital force which is the material principle of the universe. (Neo-Confucianism). Name of a school (400-200 B.C.) headed by Tsou Yen, which advocated that all events are manifestations of the passive or female force and the active or male force of the universe, and which was closely associated with popular geomancy, astrology, etc. --W.T.C. Yo: Music, or the social and cosmic principle of harmony. See: li (propriety). -- W.T.C.
yoga ::: union; "the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality"; any of various methods of seeking for such a union; especially the path of pūrn.a yoga, culminating in a "Yoga of self-perfection" by which the "liberated individual being, united with the Divine in self and spirit, becomes in his natural being a self-perfecting instrument for the perfect outflowering of the Divine in humanity". In Sri Aurobindo"s diary, "the Yoga" usually refers to his practice of this Yoga of self-. perfection, whose elements are enumerated in the sapta catus.t.aya; but the effective half of the karma catus.t.aya is for some purposes treated as part of "life" or the lila, as distinct from the yoga. yoga catustaya
ytterbium ::: n. --> A rare element of the boron group, sometimes associated with yttrium or other related elements, as in euxenite and gadolinite. Symbol Yb; provisional atomic weight 173.2. Cf. Yttrium.
yttriferous ::: a. --> Bearing or containing yttrium or the allied elements; as, gadolinite is one of the yttriferous minerals.
Yuan: The beginning. For the One Prime, see: i yuan. The beginning of number, one. The beginning of the material principle or the vital force (ch'i). The originating power of the Heavenly Element (chien) in the system of the Eight Elements (pa kua), "being attentive to the fundamentals --the first and the chief quality of goodness," one of the four virtues (ssu te). The great virtue of Heaven and Earth which expresses itself in production and reproduction .
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27 The Mother
25 Sri Aurobindo
5 Aleister Crowley
2 Vishnu Purana
2 Rene Guenon
2 Alfred Korzybski
2 Sri Ramakrishna
1 The Upanishad of the Universal Sacrifice
1 Tertullian of Carthage
1 Shabistari
1 Sam Van Schaik
1 Proclus
1 Peter J Carroll
1 Our Lady to priest Raymond Arnette (in May of 1994)
1 Mortimer J Adler
1 Marcus Tomlinson
1 Manly P Hall
1 Mahayana; the Book of the Faith
1 Ken Wilber
1 Josef Pieper
1 James George Frazer
1 Howard Gardner
1 Hermes
1 Hans Urs von Balthasar
1 Georges Van Vrekhem
1 Eric Maisel
1 Emil Cioran
1 Dr. John Dee
1 Chatral Rinpoche
1 Charles Sanders Peirce
1 Buddhist Maxims
1 Boethius
1 Albert Einstein
1 Plotinus
1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1 Paracelsus
1 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
1 A B Purani
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36 Anonymous
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12 Sri Aurobindo
10 Neil deGrasse Tyson
10 Marcus Aurelius
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8 Henry David Thoreau
8 Dmitri Mendeleev
7 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
7 Nhat Hanh
7 Donella H Meadows
6 Susan Sontag
6 Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 Frederick Lenz
4 Stephen King
4 Sam Kean
4 Marcel Proust
4 Leonardo da Vinci
4 John Milton
1:Descending to the earth, That strange intoxicating beauty of the Unseen world Lurks in the elements of Nature." ~ Shabistari, #KEYS
2:At the hour of danger a perfect quietness is required.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet,#KEYS
3:Pray without ceasing for light and love and self-surrender to the Divine Mother - these are the elements of Bhakti. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
4:Any advice?
Be steady and confident.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Confidence,#KEYS
5:To see things as parts, as incomplete elements is a lower analytic knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature, #KEYS
6:Purification and freedom are the indispensable antecedents of perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #KEYS
7:Will: power of consciousness turned towards effectuation.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Will and Perseverance, Will,#KEYS
8:The Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
9:The storm is only at the surface of the sea; in the depths all is quiet.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet, [T5],#KEYS
10:First of the elements, universal Being, Thou hast created all and preservest all and the universe is nothing but Thy form. ~ Vishnu Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
11:It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet, [T5],#KEYS
12:He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
13:The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing - or heart, mind, and hands - or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage." ~ Eric Maisel, #KEYS
14:Purification, liberation, perfection, delight of being are four constituent elements of the Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
15:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
16:We must see only through the Divine's eyes and act only through the Divine's will.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender,#KEYS
17:Surrender: to will what the Divine wills is the supreme wisdom.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, To Will What the Divine Wills,#KEYS
18:If man surrenders totally to the Divine, he identifies himself with the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T5],#KEYS
19:Our constant prayer is to understand the Divine's will and to live accordingly.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T5],#KEYS
20:Hail to Thee, to Thee, Spirit of the Supreme Spirit, Soul of souls, to Thee, the visible and invisible, who art one with Time and with the elements. ~ Vishnu Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
21:Whosoever comes to birth in God, is delivered from the physical sensations, recognises the different elements which compose it and enjoys a perfect happiness. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
22:In all life there are three elements, the fixed and permanent spirit, the developing yet constant soul and the brittle changeable body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, The Awakening Soul of India, #KEYS
23:Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
24:The space of being that is opened and illuminated in the subject makes available to the object an opportunity to be itself in a way that the inferior space of inanimate elements does not…. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, TheoLogic I, #KEYS
25:The only thing you have to do is to remain quiet, undisturbed, solely turned towards the Divine; the rest is in His hands.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet,#KEYS
26:A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #KEYS
27:Very few are those who can stand firm on the rock of their faith and trust in the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Trust in the Divine Grace and Help,#KEYS
28:The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratiṣṭhā, which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #KEYS
29:The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
30:Whenever there is any difficulty we must always remember that we are here exclusively to accomplish the Divine's will.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T1],#KEYS
31:It is rare that somebody can surrender entirely to the Divine's Will without having to face one or another of the difficulties.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender,#KEYS
32:Like the child who does not reason and has no care, trust thyself to the Divine that His will may be done.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Trust in the Divine Grace and Help,#KEYS
33:One will only speak about wars and revolutions. The elements of nature will be unchained and will cause anguish even among the best (the most courageous). The Church will bleed from all Her wounds." ~ Our Lady to priest Raymond Arnette (in May of 1994), #KEYS
34:We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532,#KEYS
35:The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #KEYS
36:No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt that cannot be repaid... To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift. ~ Josef Pieper, Happiness & Contemplation, #KEYS
37:Man's nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #KEYS
38:Everything proceeding from the profound nature of things shows the influence of the law of number... From this are derived the four elements, the succession of the seasons, the movement of the stars, and the course of the heavens. ~ Boethius, De arithmeticae artis libri duo, #KEYS
39:The object of our worship is the one God, who by the word of his command, by the reason of his plan, and by the strength of his power has brought forth from nothing this whole construction of elements, bodies, and spirits for the glory of his majesty. ~ Tertullian of Carthage, #KEYS
40:That which is present to all alike [through participation], that it may illuminate all, is not in any one, but is prior to them all... Inasmuch as it is both common to all that can participate and identical for all, it must be prior to all. ~ Proclus, Elements of Theology prop.23, #KEYS
41:A Divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo,#KEYS
42:At each moment may our attitude be such that the Divine's Will determines our choice so that the Divine may give the direction to all our life.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, To Will What the Divine Wills,#KEYS
43:The passion of pity with its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by the higher divine compassion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #KEYS
44:The thirst for affection and love is a human need, but it can be quenched only if it turns towards the Divine. As long as it seeks satisfaction in human beings, it will always be disappointed or wounded.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Divine Love and Human Love,#KEYS
45:A shadowy unity with a vanished past
Treasured in an old-world frame was lurking there,
Secret, unnoted by the illumined mind,
And in subconscious whispers and in dream
Still murmured at the mind's and spirit's choice.
Its treacherous elements sp ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The House of the Spirit and the New Creation,#KEYS
46:If you are truly surrendered to the Divine, in the right manner and totally, then at every moment you will be what you ought to be, you will do what you ought to do, you will know what you ought to know. But for that you should have transcended all the limitations of the ego.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender,#KEYS
47:But from time to time Thy sublime light shines in a being and radiates through him over the world, and then a little wisdom, a little knowledge, a little disinterested faith, heroism and compassion penetrates men's hearts, transforms their minds and sets free a few elements from that sorrowful and implacable wheel of existence to which their blind ignorance subjects them.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
48:In his book: 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us', Daniel Pink narrows motivation down to 3 key elements: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Without a genuine interest in what we do, we will never be proud of it, we will never master it, and we will never feel purposed for it. In short, if you are not interested, you are not motivated, and without motivation, you will not succeed.
~ Marcus Tomlinson, How to become an Expert Software Engineer,#KEYS
49:The High-Subtle Self ::: "...cognitive style- actual intuition and literal inspiration, archetypal Form, audible illumination, revelations of light and sound affective elements- rapture, bliss, ecstatic release into superconsciousness motivational/conative factors-karuna, compassion, overwhelming love and gratefulness temporal mode- transtemporal, moving into eternity mode of self- archetypal-divine, overself, overmind." ~ Ken Wilber, The Atman Project pg.80, #KEYS
50:Knowing the elements, knowing the worlds, knowing all the regions and the spaces, adoring the first-born Word, understanding heaven, earth and air to be only He, knowing that the worlds, discovering that Space and the solar orb are He alone, he sees this supreme Being, he becomes that Being, he is identified in union with Him and completes this vast and fertile web of solemn sacrifice. ~ The Upanishad of the Universal Sacrifice, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
51:The means of realisation is to be found in an integral Yoga, a union in all the parts of our being with the Divine and a consequent transmutation of all their now jarring elements into the harmony of a higher divine consciousness and existence; this yoga implies not only the realisation of God but the entire conseceration and change of the inner and outer life till it is fit to manifest a divine consciousness and become part of the divine work.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
52:When the disciple regarding his ideas sees appear in him bad and unwholesome thoughts, thoughts of covetousness, hatred, error, he should either turn his mind from them and concentrate on a healthy idea, or examine the fatal nature of the thought, or else he should analyse it and decompose it into its different elements, or calling up all his strength and applying the greatest energy suppress it from his mind: so bad and unwholesome thoughts withdraw and disappear, and the mind becomes firm, calm, unified, vigorous. ~ Buddhist Maxims, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
53:O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy Benediction may fill men's hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
54:When the disciple considering an idea sees rise in him bad or unhealthy thoughts, thoughts of covetousness, hatred or error, he should either turn his mind away from that idea or concentrate it upon a healthy thought, or else examine the fatal nature of the idea, or analyse it and decompose it into its different elements, or, making appeal to all his strength and applying the greatest energy, suppress it from his mind; thus are removed and disappear these bad and unhealthy ideas and the mind becomes firm, calm, unified, full of vigour. ~ Mahayana; the Book of the Faith, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
55:Einstein's breakthrough was classic in that it sought to unify the elements of a physical analysis, and it placed the older examples and principles within a broader framework. But it was revolutionary in that, ever afterward, we have thought differently about space and time, matter and energy. Space and time-no more absolute-have become forms of intuition that cannot be divorced from perspective or consciousness, anymore than can the colors of the world or the length of a shadow. As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer commented, in relativity, the conception of constancy and absoluteness of the elements is abandoned to give permanence and necessity to the laws instead. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
56:During this degenerate age in the outer world, there are many natural disasters due to the upsetting of the four elements. Also, demonic forces come with their many weapons to incite the fighting of wars. All of those forces have caused the world to come to ruin and led all to tremble - so terrified that their hair stands up on end. Still, the demonic forces find it necessary to come up with new types of weapons. If we were called on to confront them, there is no way we Dharma practitioners could defeat them. That is why we make supplication prayers to the three jewels, do the aspiration prayers, the offering prayers and the prayers of invocation. We are responsible for those activities. This is what I urge you to do. ~ Chatral Rinpoche, #KEYS
57:Although our fallen minds forget to climb,
Although our human stuff resists or breaks,
She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay;
Failure cannot repress, defeat o'erthrow;
Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue,
The ages have not made her passion less;
No victory she admits of Death or Fate.
Always she drives the soul to new attempt;
Always her magical infinitude
Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;
As one who has all infinity to waste,
She scatters the seed of the Eternal's strength
On a half-animate and crumbling mould,
Plants heaven's delight in the heart's passionate mire,
Pours godhead's seekings into a bare beast frame,
Hides immortality in a mask of death.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,#KEYS
58:203. God and Nature are like a boy and girl at play and in love. They hide and run from each other when glimpsed so that they may be sought after and chased and captured.
Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being.
The animal is Man disguised in a hairy skin and upon four legs; the worm is Man writhing and crawling towards the evolution of his Manhood. Even crude forms of Matter are Man in his inchoate body. All things are Man, the Purusha.
For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts And Aphorisms,#KEYS
59:The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence- like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc... Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may co-operate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe: all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly
~ Plotinus, 2 Ennead 3:16,#KEYS
60:I am the sort of man who has changed completely under the effect of suffering, even though this transformation may simply be the intensification of elements already there. Thus amplified, they gave an entirely new perspective on life. I believe frenetically and fanatically, in the virtues of suffering and of anxiety, and I believe in them especially since, though I've suffered greatly and despaired much, I nevertheless acquired through them a sense of my own destiny, a sort of weird enthusiasm for my mission. On the heights of the most terrifying despair, I experience the joy of having a destiny, of living a life of successive deaths and transfigurations, of turning every moment into a cross-road. And I am proud that my life begins with death, unlike the majority of people, who end with death. I feel as if my death were in the past, and the future looks to me like a sort of personal illumination.
~ Emil Cioran,#KEYS
61:Thou must teach us the path to be followed and Thou must give us the power to follow it to the very end. . . .
O Thou source of all love and all light, Thou whom we cannot know in Thyself but can manifest ever more completely and perfectly, Thou whom we cannot conceive but can approach in profound silence, to complete Thy incommensurable boons Thou must come to our help until we have gained Thy victory. . . .
Let that true love be born which soothes all suffering; establish that immutable peace wherein resides true power; give us the sovereign knowledge which dispels all darkness. . . .
From the infinite depths to this most external body, in its smallest elements, Thou dost move and live and vibrate and set all in motion, and the whole being is now only a single block, infinitely multiple yet absolutely coherent, animated by one tremendous vibration: Thou.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
62:This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical - since it does not correspond to an effective reality - it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them - at least in appearance - it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of 'mass psychology' might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystallizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely not that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present. ~ Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World, #KEYS
63:DISCIPLE: It is said that the psychic is a spark of the Divine.
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes.
DISCIPLE: Then it seems that the function of the psychic being is the same as that of Vedic Agni, who is the leader of the journey?
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Agni is the God of the Psychic and, among the other things it does, it leads the upward journey.
DISCIPLE: How does the psychic carry the personalities formed in this life into another life?
SRI AUROBINDO: After death, it gathers its elements and carries them onward to another birth. But it is not the same personality that is born. People easily misunderstand these things, specially when they are put in terms of the mind. The past personality is taken only as the basis but a new personality is put forward. If it was the same personality, then it would act exactly in the same manner and there would be no meaning in that. ~ Sri Aurobindo, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO, RECORDED BY A B PURANI (page no 665-666),#KEYS
64:There is but one remedy: that signpost must always be there, a mirror well placed in one's feelings, impulses, all one's sensations. One sees them in this mirror. There are some which are not very beautiful or pleasant to look at; there are others which are beautiful, pleasant, and must be kept. This one does a hundred times a day if necessary. And it is very interesting. One draws a kind of big circle around the psychic mirror and arranges all the elements around it. If there is something that is not all right, it casts a sort of grey shadow upon the mirror: this element must be shifted, organised. It must be spoken to, made to understand, one must come out of that darkness. If you do that, you never get bored. When people are not kind, when one has a cold in the head, when one doesn't know one's lessons, and so on, one begins to look into this mirror. It is very interesting, one sees the canker. "I thought I was sincere!" - not at all. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 10, #KEYS
65:Now, on the other hand, there is an entirely different type of angel; and here we must be especially careful to remember that we include gods and devils, for there are such beings who are not by any means dependent on one particular element for their existence. They are microcosms in exactly the same sense as men and women are. They are individuals who have picked up the elements of their composition as possibility and convenience dictates, exactly as we do ourselves... I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order. He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #KEYS
66:A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is 'humanism'. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence, and with them utilitarian considerations had at least never claimed the first place, as they were very soon to do with the moderns. Humanism was form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy. ~ Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World #KEYS
67:By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology; in the language of St. James, "faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone." In other words, no man is religious who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. ~ James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, #KEYS
68:SHYAM: "What is the distinction between the gross body and the subtle body?"
MASTER: "The body consisting of the five gross elements is called the gross body. The subtle body is made up of the mind, the ego, the discriminating faculty, and the mind-stuff. There is also a causal body, by means of which one enjoys the Bliss of God and holds communion with Him. The Tantra calls it the Bhagavati Tanu, the Divine Body. Beyond all these is the Mahakarana, the Great Cause. That cannot be expressed by words.
"What is the use of merely listening to words? Do something! What will you achieve by merely repeating the word 'siddhi'? Will that intoxicate you? You will not be intoxicated even if you make a paste of siddhi and rub it all over your body. You must eat some of it. How can a man recognize yarns of different counts, such as number forty and number forty-one, unless he is in the trade? Those who trade in yarn do not find it at all difficult to describe a thread of a particular count. Therefore I say, practise a little spiritual discipline; then you will know all these — the gross, the subtle, the causal, and the Great Cause. While praying to God, ask only for love for His Lotus Feet." ~ Sri Ramakrishna,#KEYS
69:In order to strengthen the higher knowledge-faculty in us we have to effect the same separation between the intuitive and intellectual elements of our thought as we have already effected between the understanding and the sense-mind; and this is no easy task, for not only do our intuitions come to us incrusted in the intellectual action, but there are a great number of mental workings which masquerade and ape the appearances of the higher faculty. The remedy is to train first the intellect to recognise the true intuilion, to distinguish it from the false and then to accustom it, when it arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine principle and wait in as complete a silence as it can command for the light from above. In this way it is possible to transmute a great part of our intellectual thinking into the luminous truth-conscious vision, -- the ideal would be a complete transition, -- or at least to increase greatly the frequency, purity and conscious force of the ideal knowledge working behind the intellect. The latter must learn to be subject and passive to the ideal faculty.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 316,#KEYS
70:the three successive elements :::
The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements, that which is already evolved, that which is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution and that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already displayed, if not constantly, then occasionally or with some regularity of recurrence, in primary formations or in others more developed and, it may well be, even in some, however rare, that are near to the highest possible realisation of our present humanity. For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond herself even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats. She has rushes; she has splendid and mighty outbursts; she has immense realisations. She storms sometimes passionately forward hoping to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. And these self-exceedings are the revelation of that in her which is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Three Steps of Nature,#KEYS
71:Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent."
"Perspective is an Art Mathematical which demonstrates the manner and properties of all radiations direct, broken and reflected."
"Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle. That which is affected at the periphery, however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central point."
"Therefore, the central point which we see in the centre of the hieroglyphic Monad produces the Earth , round which the Sun , the Moon , and the other planets follow their respective paths. The Sun has the supreme dignity , and we represent him by a circle having a visible centre."
There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart) which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences . Many arts there are which beautify the mind of man; but of all none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called mathematical , unto the knowledge of which no man can attain, without perfect knowledge and instruction of the principles, grounds, and Elements of Geometry." ~ Dr. John Dee, The Hieroglyphic Monad,#KEYS
72:If the spirit of divine love can enter, the hardness of the way diminishes, the tension is lightened, there is a sweetness and joy even in the core of difficulty and struggle. The indispensable surrender of all our will and works and activities to the Supreme is indeed only perfect and perfectly effective when it is a surrender of love. All life turned into this cult, all actions done in the love of the Divine and in the love of the world and its creatures seen and felt as the Divine manifested in many disguises become by that very fact part of an integral Yoga.
It is the inner offering of the heart's adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 165, [T2],#KEYS
73:In terms of energy - there are three characteristic ways in which the energy manifests - Dang, Rolpa, and rTsal (gDang, rol pa, and rTsal). Dang is the energy in which 'internal' and 'external' are not divided from that which manifests. It is symbolised by the crystal sphere which becomes the colour of whatever it is placed upon. Rolpa is the energy which manifests internally as vision. It is symbolised by the mirror. The image of the reflection always appears as if it is inside the mirror. rTsal is externally manifested energy which radiates. It is symbolised by the refractive capacity of the faceted crystal. For a realised being, this energy is inseparable in its manifestation from the dimension of manifest reality. Dang, Rolpa, and rTsal are not divided.
Dang, Rolpa and rTsal are not divided and neither are the ku-sum (sKu gSum - the trikaya) the three spheres of being. Cho-ku (chos sKu - Dharmakaya), the sphere of unconditioned potentiality, is the creative space from which the essence of the elements arises as long-ku (longs sKu - Sambhogakaya) the sphere of intangible appearances - light and rays, non material forms only perceivable by those with visionary clarity. Trülku (sPrul sKu - Nirmanakaya), the sphere of realised manifestation, is the level of matter in apparently solid material forms. The primordial base manifests these three distinct yet indivisible modes. ~ Sam Van Schaik, Approaching the Great Perfection: Simultaneous and Gradual Methods of Dzogchen Practice in the Longchen Nyingtig,#KEYS
74:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
75:Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happens to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also.So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that there's something altogether tightly closed in there - so tightly that one has tried in vain to move it - then one imagines one's will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all one's force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesn't take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the divine work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this.... All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
76:To analyse the classes of life we have to consider two very different kinds of phenomena: the one embraced under the collective name-Inorganic chemistry-the other under the collective nameOrganic chemistry, or the chemistry of hydro-carbons. These divisions are made because of the peculiar properties of the elements chiefly involved in the second class. The properties of matter are so distributed among the elements that three of them- Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon-possess an ensemble of unique characteristics. The number of reactions in inorganic chemistry are relatively few, but in organic chemistry-in the chemistry of these three elements the number of different compounds is practically unlimited. Up to 1910, we knew of more than 79 elements of which the whole number of reactions amounted to only a few hundreds, but among the remaining three elements-Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen-the reactions were known to be practically unlimited in number and possibilities; this fact must have very far reaching consequences. As far as energies are concerned, we have to take them as nature reveals them to us. Here more than ever, mathematical thinking is essential and will help enormously. The reactions in inorganic chemistry always involve the phenomenon of heat, sometimes light, and in some instances an unusual energy is produced called electricity. Until now, the radioactive elements represent a group too insufficiently known for an enlargement here upon this subject.
The organic compounds being unlimited in number and possibilities and with their unique characteristics, represent of course, a different class of phenomena, but being, at the same time, chemical they include the basic chemical phenomena involved in all chemical reactions, but being unique in many other respects, they also have an infinitely vast field of unique characteristics. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 53,#KEYS
77:principle of Yogic methods :::
Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific handling of the force of electricity or of steam to their normal operations in Nature. And they, too, like the operations of Science, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result. All Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and experience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and experience that the vital forces and function to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the raionale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a supernal ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a supernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, Life and Yoga,#KEYS
78:Disciple: If the Asuras represent the dark side of God on the vital plane - does this dark side exist on every plane? If so, are there beings on the mental plane which correspond to the dark side?
Sri Aurobindo: The Asura is really the dark side of God on the mental plane. Mind is the very field of the Asura. His characteristic is egoistic strength, which refuses the Higher Law. The Asura has got Self-control, Tapas, intelligence, only, all that is for his ego.
On the vital plane the corresponding forces we call the Rakshashas which represent violent passions and impulses. There are other beings on the vital plane which we call pramatta and piśacha and these; manifest, more or less, on the physico-vital plane.
Distiple: What is the corresponding being on the higher plane?
Sri Aurobindo: On the higher plane there are no Asuras - there the Truth prevails. There are "Asuras" there in the Vedic sense,- "beings with divine powers". The mental Asura is only a deviation of that power.
The work of the Asura has all the characteristics of mind in it. It is mind refusing to submit to the Higher Law; it is the mind in revolt. It works on the basis of ego and ignorance.
Disciple: What are the forces that correspond to the dark side of God on the physical plane?
Sri Aurobindo: They are what may be called the "elemental beings", or rather, obscure elemental forces - they are more "forces" than "beings". It is these that the Theosophists call the "Elementals". They are not individualised beings like the Asura and the Rakshasas, they are ignorant forces working oh the subtle physical plane.
Disciple: What is the word for them in Sanskrit;?
Sri Aurobindo: What are called bhūtas seem most nearly to correspond to them.
Disciple: The term "Elemental" means that these work through the elements.
Sri Aurobindo: There are two kinds of "elementals": one mischievous and the other innocent. What the Europeans call the gnomes come under this category. ~ A B Purani, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO, 15-06-1926,#KEYS
79:Jnana Yoga, the Path of Knowledge; :::
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual reflection, vicara ¯, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme. But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one's own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems Of Yoga, 38,#KEYS
80:This is the real sense and drive of what we see as evolution: the multiplication and variation of forms is only the means of its process. Each gradation contains the possibility and the certainty of the grades beyond it: the emergence of more and more developed forms and powers points to more perfected forms and greater powers beyond them, and each emergence of consciousness and the conscious beings proper to it enables the rise to a greater consciousness beyond and the greater order of beings up to the ultimate godheads of which Nature is striving and is destined to show herself capable. Matter developed its organised forms until it became capable of embodying living organisms; then life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal formations and through them to the thinking life of man. Mind founded in life developed intellect, developed its types of knowledge and ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truthconscious existence. In this inevitable ascent the mind of Light is a gradation, an inevitable stage. As an evolving principle it will mark a stage in the human ascent and evolve a new type of human being; this development must carry in it an ascending gradation of its own powers and types of an ascending humanity which will embody more and more the turn towards spirituality, capacity for Light, a climb towards a divinised manhood and the divine life.
In the birth of the mind of Light and its ascension into its own recognisable self and its true status and right province there must be, in the very nature of things as they are and very nature of the evolutionary process as it is at present, two stages. In the first, we can see the mind of Light gathering itself out of the Ignorance, assembling its constituent elements, building up its shapes and types, however imperfect at first, and pushing them towards perfection till it can cross the border of the Ignorance and appear in the Light, in its own Light. In the second stage we can see it developing itself in that greater natural light, taking its higher shapes and forms till it joins the supermind and lives as its subordinate portion or its delegate.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, Mind of Light, 587,#KEYS
81:Imperial Maheshwari is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mother's eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail in the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient, unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their Force and truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads them according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet she has more than any other the heart of the universal Mother. For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [39],#KEYS
82:Why do we forget things?
Ah! I suppose there are several reasons. First, because one makes use of the memory to remember. Memory is a mental instrument and depends on the formation of the brain. Your brain is constantly growing, unless it begins to degenerate, but still its growth can continue for a very, very long time, much longer than that of the body. And in this growth, necessarily some things will take the place of others. And as the mental instrument develops, things which have served their term or the transitory moment in the development may be wiped out to give place to the result. So the result of all that you knew is there, living in itself, but the road traversed to reach it may be completely blurred. That is, a good functioning of the memory means remembering only the results so as to be able to have the elements for moving forward and a new construction. That is more important than just retaining things rigidly in the mind.
Now, there is another aspect also. Apart from the mental memory, which is something defective, there are states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness in which one happens to be registers the phenomena of a particular moment, whatever they may be. If your consciousness remains limpid, wide and strong, you can at any moment whatsoever, by concentrating, call into the active consciousness what you did, thought, saw, observed at any time before; all this you can remember by bringing up in yourself the same state of consciousness. And that, that is never forgotten. You could live a thousand years and you would still remember it. Consequently, if you don't want to forget, it must be your consciousness which remembers and not your mental memory. Your mental memory will be wiped out inevitably, get blurred, and new things will take the place of the old ones. But things of which you are conscious you do not forget. You have only to bring up the same state of consciousness again. And thus one can remember circumstances one has lived thousands of years ago, if one knows how to bring up the same state of consciousness. It is in this way that one can remember one's past lives. This never gets blotted out, while you don't have any more the memory of what you have done physically when you were very young. You would be told many things you no longer remember. That gets wiped off immediately. For the brain is constantly changing and certain weaker cells are replaced by others which are much stronger, and by other combinations, other cerebral organisations. And so, what was there before is effaced or deformed.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
83:INVOCATION
The ultimate invocation, that of Kia, cannot be performed. The paradox is that as Kia has no dualized qualities, there are no attributes by which to invoke it. To give it one quality is merely to deny it another. As an observant dualistic being once said:
I am that I am not.
Nevertheless, the magician may need to make some rearrangements or additions to what he is. Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which one is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation. Alternatively, the process of invocation may be seen as adding to the magician's psyche any elements which are missing. It is true that the mind must be finally surrendered as one enters fully into Chaos, but a complete and balanced psychocosm is more easily surrendered.
The magical process of shuffling beliefs and desires attendant upon the process of invocation also demonstrates that one's dominant obsessions or personality are quite arbitrary, and hence more easily banished.
There are many maps of the mind (psychocosms), most of which are inconsistent, contradictory, and based on highly fanciful theories. Many use the symbology of god forms, for all mythology embodies a psychology. A complete mythic pantheon resumes all of man's mental characteristics. Magicians will often use a pagan pantheon of gods as the basis for invoking some particular insight or ability, as these myths provide the most explicit and developed formulation of the particular idea's extant. However it is possible to use almost anything from the archetypes of the collective unconscious to the elemental qualities of alchemy.
If the magician taps a deep enough level of power, these forms may manifest with sufficient force to convince the mind of the objective existence of the god. Yet the aim of invocation is temporary possession by the god, communication from the god, and manifestation of the god's magical powers, rather than the formation of religious cults.
The actual method of invocation may be described as a total immersion in the qualities pertaining to the desired form. One invokes in every conceivable way. The magician first programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature. In the most elaborate form of ritual he may surround himself with the sounds, smells, colors, instruments, memories, numbers, symbols, music, and poetry suggestive of the god or quality. Secondly he unites his life force to the god image with which he has united his mind. This is accomplished with techniques from the gnosis. Figure 5 shows some examples of maps of the mind. Following are some suggestions for practical ritual invocation.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
84:root of the falsification and withdrawl of divine love :::
At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,#KEYS
85:the process of unification, the perfecting our one's instrumental being, the help one needs to reach the goal :::
If we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavor.
As you pursue this labor of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection. ... It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us [the psychic being], to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perfection and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realize. This discovery and realization should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
~ The Mother, On Education, [T1],#KEYS
86:The Mother once described the characteristics of the unity-body, of the future supramental body, to a young Ashramite: 'You know, if there is something on that window-sill and if I [in a supramental body] want to take it, I stretch out my hand and it becomes - wow! - long, and I have the thing in my hand without even having to get up from my chair ... Physically, I shall be able to be here and there at the same time. I shall be able to communicate with many people at the same time. To have something in my hand, I'll just have to wish for it. I think about something and I want it and it is already in my hand. With this transformed body I shall be free of the fetters of ignorance, pain, of mortality and unconsciousness. I shall be able to do many things at the same time. The transparent, luminous, strong, light, elastic body won't need any material things to subsist on ... The body can even be lengthened if one wants it to become tall, or shrunk when one wants it to be small, in any circumstances ... There will be all kinds of changes and there will be powers without limit. And it won't be something funny. Of course, I am giving you somewhat childish examples to tease you and to show the difference. 'It will be a true being, perfect in proportion, very, very beautiful and strong, light, luminous or else transparent. It will have a supple and malleable body endowed with extraordinary capacities and able to do everything; a body without age, a creation of the New Consciousness or else a transformed body such as none has ever imagined ... All that is above man will be within its reach. It will be guided by the Truth alone and nothing less. That is what it is and more even than has ever been conceived.'895 This the Mother told in French to Mona Sarkar, who noted it down as faithfully as possible and read it out to her for verification. The supramental body will not only be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnipresent. And immortal. Not condemned to a never ending monotonous immortality - which, again, is one of our human interpretations of immortality - but for ever existing in an ecstasy of inexhaustible delight in 'the Joy that surpasses all understanding.' Moment after moment, eternity after eternity. For in that state each moment is an eternity and eternity an ever present moment. If gross matter is not capable of being used as a permanent coating of the soul in the present phase of its evolution, then it certainly is not capable of being the covering of the supramental consciousness, to form the body that has, to some extent, been described above. This means that the crux of the process of supramental transformation lies in matter; the supramental world has to become possible in matter, which at present still is gross matter. - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were supramentalized in their mental and vital, but their enormous problem was the supramentalization of the physical body, consisting of the gross matter of the Earth. As the Mother said: 'It is matter itself that must change so that the Supramental may manifest. A new kind of matter no longer corresponding with Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements? Is that possible?
~ Georges Van Vrekhem,#KEYS
87:Sweet Mother, here it is written: "It is part of the foundation of Yoga to become conscious of the great complexity of our nature, see the different forces that move it and get over it a control of directing knowledge." Are these forces different for each person?
Yes. The composition is completely different, otherwise everybody would be the same. There are not two beings with an identical combination; between the different parts of the being and the composition of these parts the proportion is different in each individual. There are people, primitive men, people like the yet undeveloped races or the degenerated ones whose combinations are fairly simple; they are still complicated, but comparatively simple. And there are people absolutely at the top of the human ladder, the e ́lite of humanity; their combinations become so complicated that a very special discernment is needed to find the relations between all these things.
There are beings who carry in themselves thousands of different personalities, and then each one has its own rhythm and alternation, and there is a kind of combination; sometimes there are inner conflicts, and there is a play of activities which are rhythmic and with alternations of certain parts which come to the front and then go back and again come to the front. But when one takes all that, it makes such complicated combinations that some people truly find it difficult to understand what is going on in themselves; and yet these are the ones most capable of a complete, coordinated, conscious, organised action; but their organisation is infinitely more complicated than that of primitive or undeveloped men who have two or three impulses and four or five ideas, and who can arrange all this very easily in themselves and seem to be very co-ordinated and logical because there is not very much to organise. But there are people truly like a multitude, and so that gives them a plasticity, a fluidity of action and an extraordinary complexity of perception, and these people are capable of understanding a considerable number of things, as though they had at their disposal a veritable army which they move according to circumstance and need; and all this is inside them. So when these people, with the help of yoga, the discipline of yoga, succeed in centralising all these beings around the central light of the divine Presence, they become powerful entities, precisely because of their complexity. So long as this is not organised they often give the impression of an incoherence, they are almost incomprehensible, one can't manage to understand why they are like that, they are so complex. But when they have organised all these beings, that is, put each one in its place around the divine centre, then truly they are terrific, for they have the capacity of understanding almost everything and doing almost everything because of the multitude of entities they contain, of which they are constituted. And the nearer one is to the top of the ladder, the more it is like that, and consequently the more difficult it is to organise one's being; because when you have about a dozen elements, you can quickly compass and organise them, but when you have thousands of them, it is difficult. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 215-216,#KEYS
88:(Novum Organum by Francis Bacon.)
34. "Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction's sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.
40. "The information of notions and axioms on the foundation of true induction is the only fitting remedy by which we can ward off and expel these idols. It is, however, of great service to point them out; for the doctrine of idols bears the same relation to the interpretation of nature as that of the confutation of sophisms does to common logic.
41. "The idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.
42. "The idols of the den are those of each individual; for everybody (in addition to the errors common to the race of man) has his own individual den or cavern, which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature, either from his own peculiar and singular disposition, or from his education and intercourse with others, or from his reading, and the authority acquired by those whom he reverences and admires, or from the different impressions produced on the mind, as it happens to be preoccupied and predisposed, or equable and tranquil, and the like; so that the spirit of man (according to its several dispositions), is variable, confused, and, as it were, actuated by chance; and Heraclitus said well that men search for knowledge in lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
43. "There are also idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man with man, which we call idols of the market, from the commerce and association of men with each other; for men converse by means of language, but words are formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. Nor can the definitions and explanations with which learned men are wont to guard and protect themselves in some instances afford a complete remedy-words still manifestly force the understanding, throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and innumerable controversies and fallacies.
44. "Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men's minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, and also from the perverted rules of demonstration, and these we denominate idols of the theatre: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds. Nor do we speak only of the present systems, or of the philosophy and sects of the ancients, since numerous other plays of a similar nature can be still composed and made to agree with each other, the causes of the most opposite errors being generally the same. Nor, again, do we allude merely to general systems, but also to many elements and axioms of sciences which have become inveterate by tradition, implicit credence, and neglect. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
89:DHARANA
NOW that we have learnt to observe the mind, so that we know how it works to some extent, and have begun to understand the elements of control, we may try the result of gathering together all the powers of the mind, and attempting to focus them on a single point.
We know that it is fairly easy for the ordinary educated mind to think without much distraction on a subject in which it is much interested. We have the popular phrase, "revolving a thing in the mind"; and as long as the subject is sufficiently complex, as long as thoughts pass freely, there is no great difficulty. So long as a gyroscope is in motion, it remains motionless relatively to its support, and even resists attempts to distract it; when it stops it falls from that position. If the earth ceased to spin round the sun, it would at once fall into the sun. The moment then that the student takes a simple subject - or rather a simple object - and imagines it or visualizes it, he will find that it is not so much his creature as he supposed. Other thoughts will invade the mind, so that the object is altogether forgotten, perhaps for whole minutes at a time; and at other times the object itself will begin to play all sorts of tricks.
Suppose you have chosen a white cross. It will move its bar up and down, elongate the bar, turn the bar oblique, get its arms unequal, turn upside down, grow branches, get a crack around it or a figure upon it, change its shape altogether like an Amoeba, change its size and distance as a whole, change the degree of its illumination, and at the same time change its colour. It will get splotchy and blotchy, grow patterns, rise, fall, twist and turn; clouds will pass over its face. There is no conceivable change of which it is incapable. Not to mention its total disappearance, and replacement by something altogether different!
Any one to whom this experience does not occur need not imagine that he is meditating. It shows merely that he is incapable of concentrating his mind in the very smallest degree. Perhaps a student may go for several days before discovering that he is not meditating. When he does, the obstinacy of the object will infuriate him; and it is only now that his real troubles will begin, only now that Will comes really into play, only now that his manhood is tested. If it were not for the Will-development which he got in the conquest of Asana, he would probably give up. As it is, the mere physical agony which he underwent is the veriest trifle compared with the horrible tedium of Dharana.
For the first week it may seem rather amusing, and you may even imagine you are progressing; but as the practice teaches you what you are doing, you will apparently get worse and worse. Please understand that in doing this practice you are supposed to be seated in Asana, and to have note-book and pencil by your side, and a watch in front of you. You are not to practise at first for more than ten minutes at a time, so as to avoid risk of overtiring the brain. In fact you will probably find that the whole of your willpower is not equal to keeping to a subject at all for so long as three minutes, or even apparently concentrating on it for so long as three seconds, or three-fifths of one second. By "keeping to it at all" is meant the mere attempt to keep to it. The mind becomes so fatigued, and the object so incredibly loathsome, that it is useless to continue for the time being. In Frater P.'s record we find that after daily practice for six months, meditations of four minutes and less are still being recorded.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
90:Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer - Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus - Tragedies
4. Sophocles - Tragedies
5. Herodotus - Histories
6. Euripides - Tragedies
7. Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates - Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes - Comedies
10. Plato - Dialogues
11. Aristotle - Works
12. Epicurus - Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid - Elements
14.Archimedes - Works
15. Apollonius of Perga - Conic Sections
16. Cicero - Works
17. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil - Works
19. Horace - Works
20. Livy - History of Rome
21. Ovid - Works
22. Plutarch - Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus - Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus - Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy - Almagest
27. Lucian - Works
28. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
29. Galen - On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus - The Enneads
32. St. Augustine - On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus - The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More - Utopia
44. Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne - Essays
48. William Gilbert - On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser - Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon - Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare - Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei - Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler - Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey - On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
57. René Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton - Works
59. Molière - Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza - Ethics
63. John Locke - Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine - Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67.Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve - The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope - Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu - Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire - Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson - The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
~ Mortimer J Adler,#KEYS
91:PRATYAHARA
PRATYAHARA is the first process in the mental part of our task. The previous practices, Asana, Pranayama, Yama, and Niyama, are all acts of the body, while mantra is connected with speech: Pratyahara is purely mental.
And what is Pratyahara? This word is used by different authors in different senses. The same word is employed to designate both the practice and the result. It means for our present purpose a process rather strategical than practical; it is introspection, a sort of general examination of the contents of the mind which we wish to control: Asana having been mastered, all immediate exciting causes have been removed, and we are free to think what we are thinking about.
A very similar experience to that of Asana is in store for us. At first we shall very likely flatter ourselves that our minds are pretty calm; this is a defect of observation. Just as the European standing for the first time on the edge of the desert will see nothing there, while his Arab can tell him the family history of each of the fifty persons in view, because he has learnt how to look, so with practice the thoughts will become more numerous and more insistent.
As soon as the body was accurately observed it was found to be terribly restless and painful; now that we observe the mind it is seen to be more restless and painful still. (See diagram opposite.)
A similar curve might be plotted for the real and apparent painfulness of Asana. Conscious of this fact, we begin to try to control it: "Not quite so many thoughts, please!" "Don't think quite so fast, please!" "No more of that kind of thought, please!" It is only then that we discover that what we thought was a school of playful porpoises is really the convolutions of the sea-serpent. The attempt to repress has the effect of exciting.
When the unsuspecting pupil first approaches his holy but wily Guru, and demands magical powers, that Wise One replies that he will confer them, points out with much caution and secrecy some particular spot on the pupil's body which has never previously attracted his attention, and says: "In order to obtain this magical power which you seek, all that is necessary is to wash seven times in the Ganges during seven days, being particularly careful to avoid thinking of that one spot." Of course the unhappy youth spends a disgusted week in thinking of little else.
It is positively amazing with what persistence a thought, even a whole train of thoughts, returns again and again to the charge. It becomes a positive nightmare. It is intensely annoying, too, to find that one does not become conscious that one has got on to the forbidden subject until one has gone right through with it. However, one continues day after day investigating thoughts and trying to check them; and sooner or later one proceeds to the next stage, Dharana, the attempt to restrain the mind to a single object.
Before we go on to this, however, we must consider what is meant by success in Pratyahara. This is a very extensive subject, and different authors take widely divergent views. One writer means an analysis so acute that every thought is resolved into a number of elements (see "The Psychology of Hashish," Section V, in Equinox II).
Others take the view that success in the practice is something like the experience which Sir Humphrey Davy had as a result of taking nitrous oxide, in which he exclaimed: "The universe is composed exclusively of ideas."
Others say that it gives Hamlet's feeling: "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so," interpreted as literally as was done by Mrs. Eddy.
However, the main point is to acquire some sort of inhibitory power over the thoughts. Fortunately there is an unfailing method of acquiring this power. It is given in Liber III. If Sections 1 and 2 are practised (if necessary with the assistance of another person to aid your vigilance) you will soon be able to master the final section. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
92:All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real religion, - and Yoga is something more than religion, - only begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act.
Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his selfrevelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine,1 a liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature.
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion, 571 [T1],#KEYS
93:Although a devout student of the Bible, Paracelsus instinctively adopted the broad patterns of essential learning, as these had been clarified by Pythagoras of Samos and Plato of Athens. Being by nature a mystic as well as a scientist, he also revealed a deep regard for the Neoplatonic philosophy as expounded by Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus. Neoplatonism is therefore an invaluable aid to the interpretation of the Paracelsian doctrine.
Paracelsus held that true knowledge is attained in two ways, or rather that the pursuit of knowledge is advanced by a two-fold method, the elements of which are completely interdependent. In our present terminology, we can say that these two parts of method are intuition and experience. To Paracelsus, these could never be divided from each other.
The purpose of intuition is to reveal certain basic ideas which must then be tested and proven by experience. Experience, in turn, not only justifies intuition, but contributes certain additional knowledge by which the impulse to further growth is strengthened and developed. Paracelsus regarded the separation of intuition and experience to be a disaster, leading inevitably to greater error and further disaster. Intuition without experience allows the mind to fall into an abyss of speculation without adequate censorship by practical means. Experience without intuition could never be fruitful because fruitfulness comes not merely from the doing of things, but from the overtones which stimulate creative thought. Further, experience is meaningless unless there is within man the power capable of evaluating happenings and occurrences. The absence of this evaluating factor allows the individual to pass through many kinds of experiences, either misinterpreting them or not inter preting them at all. So Paracelsus attempted to explain intuition and how man is able to apprehend that which is not obvious or apparent. Is it possible to prove beyond doubt that the human being is capable of an inward realization of truths or facts without the assistance of the so-called rational faculty?
According to Paracelsus, intuition was possible because of the existence in nature of a mysterious substance or essence-a universal life force. He gave this many names, but for our purposes, the simplest term will be appropriate. He compared it to light, further reasoning that there are two kinds of light: a visible radiance, which he called brightness, and an invisible radiance, which he called darkness. There is no essential difference between light and darkness. There is a dark light, which appears luminous to the soul but cannot be sensed by the body. There is a visible radiance which seems bright to the senses, but may appear dark to the soul. We must recognize that Paracelsus considered light as pertaining to the nature of being, the total existence from which all separate existences arise. Light not only contains the energy needed to support visible creatures, and the whole broad expanse of creation, but the invisible part of light supports the secret powers and functions of man, particularly intuition. Intuition, therefore, relates to the capacity of the individual to become attuned to the hidden side of life. By light, then, Paracelsus implies much more than the radiance that comes from the sun, a lantern, or a candle. To him, light is the perfect symbol, emblem, or figure of total well-being. Light is the cause of health. Invisible light, no less real if unseen, is the cause of wisdom. As the light of the body gives strength and energy, sustaining growth and development, so the light of the soul bestows understanding, the light of the mind makes wisdom possible, and the light of the spirit confers truth. Therefore, truth, wisdom, understanding, and health are all manifesta tions or revelations ot one virtue or power. What health is to the body, morality is to the emotions, virtue to the soul, wisdom to the mind, and reality to the spirit. This total content of living values is contained in every ray of visible light. This ray is only a manifestation upon one level or plane of the total mystery of life. Therefore, when we look at a thing, we either see its objective, physical form, or we apprehend its inner light Everything that lives, lives in light; everything that has an existence, radiates light. All things derive their life from light, and this light, in its root, is life itself. This, indeed, is the light that lighteth every man who cometh into the world. ~ Manly P Hall, Paracelsus,#KEYS
94:Chapter LXXXII: Epistola Penultima: The Two Ways to Reality
Cara Soror,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
How very sensible of you, though I admit somewhat exacting!
You write-Will you tell me exactly why I should devote so much of my valuable time to subjects like Magick and Yoga.
That is all very well. But you ask me to put it in syllogistic form. I have no doubt this can be done, though the task seems somewhat complicated. I think I will leave it to you to construct your series of syllogisms yourself from the arguments of this letter.
In your main question the operative word is "valuable. Why, I ask, in my turn, should you consider your time valuable? It certainly is not valuable unless the universe has a meaning, and what is more, unless you know what that meaning is-at least roughly-it is millions to one that you will find yourself barking up the wrong tree.
First of all let us consider this question of the meaning of the universe. It is its own evidence to design, and that design intelligent design. There is no question of any moral significance-"one man's meat is another man's poison" and so on. But there can be no possible doubt about the existence of some kind of intelligence, and that kind is far superior to anything of which we know as human.
How then are we to explore, and finally to interpret this intelligence?
It seems to me that there are two ways and only two. Imagine for a moment that you are an orphan in charge of a guardian, inconceivably learned from your point of view.
Suppose therefore that you are puzzled by some problem suitable to your childish nature, your obvious and most simple way is to approach your guardian and ask him to enlighten you. It is clearly part of his function as guardian to do his best to help you. Very good, that is the first method, and close parallel with what we understand by the word Magick.
We are bothered by some difficulty about one of the elements-say Fire-it is therefore natural to evoke a Salamander to instruct you on the difficult point. But you must remember that your Holy Guardian Angel is not only far more fully instructed than yourself on every point that you can conceive, but you may go so far as to say that it is definitely his work, or part of his work; remembering always that he inhabits a sphere or plane which is entirely different from anything of which you are normally aware.
To attain to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is consequently without doubt by far the simplest way by which you can yourself approach that higher order of being.
That, then, is a clearly intelligible method of procedure. We call it Magick.
It is of course possible to strengthen the link between him and yourself so that in course of time you became capable of moving and, generally speaking, operating on that plane which is his natural habitat.
There is however one other way, and one only, as far as I can see, of reaching this state.
It is at least theoretically possible to exalt the whole of your own consciousness until it becomes as free to move on that exalted plane as it is for him. You should note, by the way, that in this case the postulation of another being is not necessary. There is no way of refuting the solipsism if you feel like that. Personally I cannot accede to its axiom. The evidence for an external universe appears to me perfectly adequate.
Still there is no extra charge for thinking on those lines if you so wish.
I have paid a great deal of attention in the course of my life to the method of exalting the human consciousness in this way; and it is really quite legitimate to identify my teaching with that of the Yogis.
I must however point out that in the course of my instruction I have given continual warnings as to the dangers of this line of research. For one thing there is no means of checking your results in the ordinary scientific sense. It is always perfectly easy to find a subjective explanation of any phenomenon; and when one considers that the greatest of all the dangers in any line of research arise from egocentric vanity, I do not think I have exceeded my duty in anything that I have said to deter students from undertaking so dangerous a course as Yoga.
It is, of course, much safer if you are in a position to pursue in the Indian Jungles, provided that your health will stand the climate and also, I must say, unless you have a really sound teacher on whom you can safely rely. But then, if we once introduce a teacher, why not go to the Fountain-head and press towards the Knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel?
In any case your Indian teacher will ultimately direct you to seek guidance from that source, so it seems to me that you have gone to a great deal of extra trouble and incurred a great deal of unnecessary danger by not leaving yourself in the first place in the hands of the Holy Guardian Angel.
In any case there are the two methods which stand as alternatives. I do not know of any third one which can be of any use whatever. Logically, since you have asked me to be logical, there is certainly no third way; there is the external way of Magick, and the internal way of Yoga: there you have your alternatives, and there they cease.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
666 ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears,#KEYS
95:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study
Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.
The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.
Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.
Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.
Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.
Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.
The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.
The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.
Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.
The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.
The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.
The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.
Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.
The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.
The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.
The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.
The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.
The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.
The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.
Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.
The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.
The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.
The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.
The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.
Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.
Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.
The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.
The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.
The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.
The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.
Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.
Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.
The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.
Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.
Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.
Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.
Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.
The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.
The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.
The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants#KEYS
96:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Precious Stones, Elements, Time Management ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 2:Responsibility and commitment are key elements in meeting obligations. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 3:It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 4:That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 5:Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 6:The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 7:Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 8:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 9:Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 10:Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 11:We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 12:There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 13:I am not a Hindu, Nor a Muslim am II am this body, a playOf five elements a dramaOf the spirit dancing With joy and sorrow. ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove 14:Awareness is a mirror reflecting the four elements. Beauty is a heart that generates love and a mind that is open. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 15:Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 16:Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 17:Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements. ~ omar-khayyam, @wisdomtrove 18:I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 19:Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 20:Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 21:Farewell, my sister, fare thee well. The elements be kind to thee, and make Thy spirits all of comfort: fare thee well. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 22:Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 23:Still, nothing is possible without love. For love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 24:Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 25:The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements: fear and love. Love is of the soul. Fear is of the personality. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 26:The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 27:A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 28:Thought ceases in meditation; even the mind's elements are quite quiet. Blood circulation stops. His breath stops, but he is not dead. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 29:The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 30:Humor is one of the elements of genius& 31:The Elements of True Piety (1677). "The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations" edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 189, 2006. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 32:Never can a reforming sect survive if it is only reforming; the formative elements alone - the real impulse, that is, the principles - live on and on. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 33:They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove 34:Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 35:True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 36:I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 37:The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 38:Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. ~ henri-cartier-bresson, @wisdomtrove 39:It was interesting to have both very a conservative and very liberal parent, because we deal with both these elements in the world and we have both elements within ourselves. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 40:Throughout your life, your inner landscape presents its contents to you again and again. When you are aware of all its elements, you are in continual communication with your soul. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 41:The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 42:It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 43:It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 44:Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 45:Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 46:First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. If ever again we should be involved in war, we will fight it in all elements, with all services, as one single concentrated effort. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 47:The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love. ~ kahlil-gibran, @wisdomtrove 48:All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 49:There is a system and a flow and an organization to the structure of the universe. Just like there's a system and a flow and an organization to the human body, to atomic structures, to the elements. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 50:I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 51:In the universal womb that is boundless space, all forms of matter and energy occur as flux of the four elements, but all are empty forms, absent in reality: all phenomena, arising in pure mind, are like that. ~ longchenpa, @wisdomtrove 52:The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 53:There are always differences when you adapt a novel to a film. A novel is longer so you're automatically cutting out elements and introspection but this is actually a film that stays very close to the novel. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 54:A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 55:As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and you have to end the show strong. Those are the two key elements. You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em. ~ mitch-hedberg, @wisdomtrove 56:Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 57:Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 58:The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 59:The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 60:The vision of Hinduism is unity in diversity. First, Hinduism lovingly embraces all alien elements; second, it tries to assimilate them; third, it tries to expand itself as a whole, with a view to serving humanity and nature. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 61:Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 62:To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the & 63:But this mind isn't somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can't move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It's the mind that moves. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 64:If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 65:Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 66:One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 67:Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 68:The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 69:Meditation, you know, comes by a process imagination. You go through all these processes purification of the elements - making the one melt the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 70:The Christian's God does not merely consist of a God who is the Author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and consolation. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 71:One can often trace the sources of a brand personality - here it is the advertising, there the pack, somewhere else some physical element of the product. Of course, the personality is clearest and strongest when all the elements are consistent. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 72:Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 73:Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 74:This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements. ~ henri-cartier-bresson, @wisdomtrove 75:To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 76:We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right? ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 77:To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 78:As you grow, you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be - the place, the home, the partner, and the work. You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 79:Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew... without even thinking about it. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 80:Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 81:The five senses and the four functions of the mind - memory, thought, understanding and selfhood; the five elements - earth, water, fire, air and ether; the two aspects of creation - matter and spirit, all are contained in awareness. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 82:P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 83:The WPA was one of the most productive elements of FDR's alphabet soup of agencies because it put people to work building roads, bridges, and other projects... It gave men and women a chance to make some money along with the satisfaction of knowing they earned it. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 84:As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 85:A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements - sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 86:In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 87:I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 88:A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 89:The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 90:The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 91:When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 92:No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 93:When I first started doing my stand-up act, I played the banjo, did comedy, magic tricks, juggled, read poetry. I stuck it all in. I didn't know you were supposed to just stand up and tell jokes. Essentially, that's what my act became: those five elements - except I dropped the poetry. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 94:Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements. ~ omar-khayyam, @wisdomtrove 95:Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will. A person can make his own character by blending these elements with an intense desire to achieve excellence. Everyone is different in what I will call magnitude, but the capacity to achieve character is still the same. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 96:To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 97:The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 98:Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 99:For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 100:I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 101:If any man dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 102:Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word "Explosion" alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 103:The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 104:A photograph that is merely a superficial record of the subject fails as an aesthetic expression of that subject. The expression must be an emotional amplification, and this emotional amplification relates to point of view, organization, revelation of substance through textures, tonal relations, and the perfection of the technical expression of all these elements. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 105:What can you do to start listening to your body? The most basic elements are as follows: Feel what you feel. Don’t talk yourself into denial. Accept what you feel. Don’t judge what’s actually there. Be open to your body. It’s always speaking. Be willing to listen. Trust your body. Every cell is on your side, which means you have hundreds of billions of allies. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 106:The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 107:Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life - it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 108:There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 109:All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 110:As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite in friendship. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 111:There are 3 elements essential in the matters of the State, Food, Military equipment, and Confidence of the people in the ruler. Of these 3, Military Equipment is the least important, Food being the 2nd important, and Confidence of the people being the MOST important. All men rather die of starvation than in war, but nevertheless all men do die of old age. Lacking in Confidence from the people, a state cannot survive. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 112:To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World. To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 113:It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how many centuries?- in eliminating from life the elements which plague us perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion. (p.26) ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 114:We look at and perceive a photograph, as we do a painting, in its entirety and all in one glance. In a photograph, composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of elements seen by the eye. One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it.” ~ henri-cartier-bresson, @wisdomtrove 115:The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature -were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 116:When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good. . . . When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 117:Vaudeville could not vouch for the honesty, the integrity, or the mentality of the individuals who collectively made up the horde the medium embraced. All the human race demands of its members is that they be born. That is all vaudeville demanded. You just had to be born. You could be ignorant and be a star. You could be a moron and be wealthy. The elements that went to make up vaudeville were combed from the jungles, the four corners of the world, the intelligentsia and the subnormal. ~ fred-allen, @wisdomtrove 118:I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 119:There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 120:Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and "fashionable") the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified, the being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible. ~ giordano-bruno, @wisdomtrove 121:A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However the fish and the bird have never left their elements. Thus each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm... Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish... practice, enlightenment and people are like this. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 122:A party should not contain utterly incongruous elements, radically divided on the real issues, and acting together only on false and dead issues insincerely painted as real and vital. It should not in the several States as well as in the Nation be prostituted to the service of the baser type of political boss. It should be so composed that there should be a reasonable agreement in the actions taken by it both in the Nation and in the several States. Judged by these standards, both of the old parties break down. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 123:How we sit within the body is an extremely important part of the spiritual journey. The body itself is used either by the spirit within us, or by the fear-based mind. When it is used by the spirit, then it is a thing of holiness. How we dwell within it, how we treat it, and how we use it in relationship to other aspects of the planet is extremely important. When we use the body without reverence, we are destructive elements on the planet. We become destructive to ourselves, to other life forms, and to the earth. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 124:I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 125:We go into a relationship looking for love, not realizing that we must bring love with us. We must bring a strong sense of self and purpose into a relationship. We must bring a sense of value, of who we are. We must bring an excitement about ourselves, our lives, and the vision we have for these two essential elements. We must bring a respect for wealth and abundance. Having achieved it to some satisfactory degree on our own, we must move into relationships willing to share what we have, rather than being afraid of someone taking it. ~ lyania-vanzant, @wisdomtrove 126:We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living-a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 127:The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 128:Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute... All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road... and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 129:It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self- knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The Elements of Style. ~ The Paris Review, #NFDB
2:The noblest of the elements is water ~ Pindar, #NFDB
3:Moments are the elements of profit ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
4:A woman mixed of such fine elements ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
5:Then to the elements be free ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
6:Then to the elements be free... ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
7:The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses. ~ Neville Cardus, #NFDB
8:there are elements of truth in all great fiction ~ Teresa Medeiros, #NFDB
9:every great success story has elements of failure. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
10:In spite of all their kind some elements of worth ~ Hugh MacDiarmid, #NFDB
11:I love people in elements that they're not used to. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
12:In every war, there are always elements of blindness. ~ Shimon Peres, #NFDB
13:Recognition is one of the three big elements of comedy. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
14:Terri is the Queen of the Elements. Long live the Queen! ~ C L Exline, #NFDB
15:A human being is made up of only non-human elements. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
16:Life is good, even without all the elements in place. ~ Kristan Higgins, #NFDB
17:Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
18:responses to relations dominate over responses to elements. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
19:A magician is one who is capable of juggling the four elements of bodies, #NFDB
20:My painting occurs when I think of two disparate elements. ~ Alex Colville, #NFDB
21:Our torments also may in length of time Become our Elements. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
22:The Elements of Programming Style (with P. J. Plauger) ~ Brian W Kernighan, #NFDB
23:How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
24:We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
25:Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software ~ Erich Gamma, #NFDB
26:Our torments also may in length of time
Become our Elements. ~ John Milton,#NFDB
27:Money is becoming one of the most corrosive elements of politics. ~ Trent Lott, #NFDB
28:Anything would deserve a sequel if the right elements are there. ~ Rob Corddry, #NFDB
29:There is a value in unprogrammed elements in a programmed world, ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
30:To me a great sci-fi movie has elements of horror and suspense. ~ Moon Bloodgood, #NFDB
31:The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
32:Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
33:I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski, #NFDB
34:I want to put elements from movies into TV to raise the quality of TV. ~ Andrew Lau, #NFDB
35:Tempo is the glue that sticks all elements of the golf swing together. ~ Nick Faldo, #NFDB
36:At its core, 'Heroes' is an ensemble character drama with genre elements. ~ Masi Oka, #NFDB
37:Some extremists take elements of the sacred scriptures out of context. ~ Cat Stevens, #NFDB
38:The key elements of storytelling are love, mystery & conflict. ~ Mark Rubinstein, #NFDB
39:The elements of justice are identical with those of algebra. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
40:The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity. ~ Arthur Miller, #NFDB
41:The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements: ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
42:The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements-death. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
43:Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
44:Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
45:Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
46:Energy and patience in business are two indispensable elements of success. ~ P T Barnum, #NFDB
47:Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
48:synergistic relationship of these five elements exerts a force that’s ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
49:Jesus made the elements of worship extremely clear: spirit and truth. ~ Jefferson Bethke, #NFDB
50:Somewhere to take shelter from the elements but not the storms of life. ~ Lorraine Heath, #NFDB
51:Spotting talent is one of the essential elements of great leadership. ~ David McCullough, #NFDB
52:There's two elements to rap: having the thoughts, and then being a great rapper. ~ Drake, #NFDB
53:I. TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS. FIRST PART. TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
54:The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music. ~ Paul Signac, #NFDB
55:The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. ~ Harlan Ellison, #NFDB
56:The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. ~ Harlan Ellison, #NFDB
57:All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience. ~ Robert Holdstock, #NFDB
58:Music is the harmonization of opposites; the conciliation of warring elements ~ Pythagoras, #NFDB
59:There are a lot of unseen elements to having a successful singing career. ~ Lesley Garrett, #NFDB
60:Creativity is taking known elements and putting them together in unique ways ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
61:Perhaps elements like tenacity and humility combine to form a heroic compound. ~ Brad Herzog, #NFDB
62:felt the singular thrill of two seemingly unconnected elements coming together. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
63:The elements which are the most widely diffused have small atomic weights. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
64:Only text is allowed within the title element. Other HTML elements aren’t allowed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
65:Life was reduced to its four basic elements: air, food, drink, and a good friend. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
66:Mostly, the village seemed tired of arguing with the elements, and simply sagged. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
67:We all have so many different elements inside of us and we're not all one thing. ~ Jeremy Piven, #NFDB
68:The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
69:self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
70:All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become big masters. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
71:Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials. ~ Anna Journey, #NFDB
72:Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don't fit in. ~ Dov Seidman, #NFDB
73:In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target. ~ Stephen Hadley, #NFDB
74:Producing is nothing more than bringing all the elements together, konnecting people. ~ Brion James, #NFDB
75:There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man. ~ Jean Giraudoux, #NFDB
76:The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
77:Never mishandle hope or self-confidence - those are elements of life, not just a game. ~ John Kessel, #NFDB
78:part. These elements, though small and insignificant to passersby, made up my girlhood, ~ Janet Mock, #NFDB
79:is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place. ~ David Abram, #NFDB
80:It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. ~ Carl Rogers, #NFDB
81:Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements. ~ Claude Monet, #NFDB
82:When I was filming Ouija, there were some elements in that that really creeped me out. ~ Olivia Cooke, #NFDB
83:You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
84:Each Well was linked to one of the five elements: Aether, Earth, Water, Wind, or Fire. ~ Susan Dennard, #NFDB
85:It's taken me years to embrace the softer elements of who I am and let that shine some. ~ Shelby Lynne, #NFDB
86:It was one hell of a case, all right; one of those juicy ones with all the right elements. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
87:That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
88:His thoughts were too vague to be described, but they comprehended mysterious elements. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
89:Hold the thought of all elements of the body working together in perfect rhythm. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
90:If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
91:If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
92:It is not possible to foretell the reaction of certain elements in the Army and Navy. ~ Yoshijiro Umezu, #NFDB
93:My films have elements of genre in them, which prevents them from being purely art films. ~ Mary Harron, #NFDB
94:Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society. ~ Niccol Machiavelli, #NFDB
95:True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
96:Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli, #NFDB
97:The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
98:Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst's job. ~ Peter Lynch, #NFDB
99:Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It's a weird combination of elements. ~ Bruce Willis, #NFDB
100:Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
101:The 6 elements of life are to laugh, give, share, enjoy, care, and live a strong and full life. ~ Indrani, #NFDB
102:The elements of life are dynamic patterns of mass and energy, events rather than objects. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
103:The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
104:Throughout hip-hop people have been putting different elements with different types of music. ~ Girl Talk, #NFDB
105:It's so many different elements to a film. Just learning the ins and outs and how the machine works. ~ T I, #NFDB
106:So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
107:The One God fashioned women to expose the elements men are made of" said Queen Nefertiti. ~ Naguib Mahfouz, #NFDB
108:But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
109:Certain characteristic properties of elements can be foretold from their atomic weights. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
110:Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most terrible of the elements. ~ Harry Houdini, #NFDB
111:I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery. ~ Luis Barragan, #NFDB
112:The four elements of shame resilience: Name it. Talk about it. Own your story. Tell the story. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
113:Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
114:A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
115:I hardly exaggerate. Jewish life consists of two elements: Extracting money and protesting. ~ Nahum Goldmann, #NFDB
116:Philosophy is that which grasps its own era in thought. ~ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Rights; 1821., #NFDB
117:The U.S.-China relationship, of course, has elements of both cooperation and competition. ~ Thomas E Donilon, #NFDB
118:Gaiety is one of the most important elements I brought to fashion. I brought it through color. ~ Emilio Pucci, #NFDB
119:I think the central theme about black society is that it has got elements of a defeated society ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB
120:I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had. ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
121:What would happen if one of those elements malfunctioned or just stopped working altogether? ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
122:You must have, if socialism was to succeed, a socialism with lots of democratic elements in it. ~ Stefan Heym, #NFDB
123:The elements of instruction should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion. ~ Plato, #NFDB
124:The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. ~ Jan Tschichold, #NFDB
125:What is the point of celebrating diversity if one tries to make all the elements of it the same? ~ Diane Duane, #NFDB
126:these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference. Netscape vs. Google ~ Tim O Reilly, #NFDB
127:Two of the common elements in alien abduction scenarios are missing time and screen memories. ~ Trish MacGregor, #NFDB
128:Hatred, rancor and grudge, they are not humanity elements; but you need to have them to survive. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
129:There are many elements to a campaign. Leadership is number one. Everything else is number two. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
130:Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European. ~ Kingsley Amis, #NFDB
131:I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements. ~ Piers Anthony, #NFDB
132:Indeed, most of us realize that the requirements are the most volatile elements in the project. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
133:I was a big fan of Middle Eastern elements of music and experimental electronic and tribal sounds. ~ Adam Lambert, #NFDB
134:Now there are elements of our dynamic coming slowly into view, like a photograph in a darkroom. ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
135:The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it? ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
136:Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies. ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB
137:Contemplating the bowl, it is possible to see the interdependent elements which give rise to the bowl. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
138:My performances may have elements that some may find entertaining, but that's not my main purpose. ~ Vaginal Davis, #NFDB
139:or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. ~ Neil MacGregor, #NFDB
140:Some in the latter days will doubt the Second Coming—The elements will melt at the coming of the Lord. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
141:To destroy wonder and mystery, is to destroy the only elements that make existence tolerable. ~ Clark Ashton Smith, #NFDB
142:Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy's world. ~ Baden Powell de Aquino, #NFDB
143:How could I be so immature to think you could replace the missing elements in me. How extremely lazy of me. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
144:...There is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
145:Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
146:Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
147:Original thoughts can be understood only in virtue of the unoriginal elements which they contain. ~ Vittorio Alfieri, #NFDB
148:the heart is like a garden. If all the elements are right, it can breathe life into a wilting soul. ~ Melissa Foster, #NFDB
149:There are so many elements that make a good film. You need a great director who's driving it. ~ Aaron Taylor Johnson, #NFDB
150:The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
151:Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection. ~ Michael Dirda, #NFDB
152:A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
153:Completing a piece of art and using all of the elements of making a film, was satisfying, for sure. ~ Robert Stromberg, #NFDB
154:CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. ~ David Foster, #NFDB
155:Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
156:I like being outside and working with the elements. The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it. ~ Maggie Smith, #NFDB
157:The 3D, it changes the way you shoot in a way, especially when you're shooting live action 3D elements. ~ Bryan Singer, #NFDB
158:The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
159:The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it’s over. Those two elements always go together. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
160:There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. ~ Gustav Stickley, #NFDB
161:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
162:Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder. ~ Daniel Libeskind, #NFDB
163:identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
164:In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
165:Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
166:Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land. ~ Lou Gerstner, #NFDB
167:Precious moments are small elements of time, we show and share love and kindness, with those we care about. ~ Tom Baker, #NFDB
168:The thing that all sports have in common is that they have no fantasy elements, which is a little weird. ~ Jesse Schell, #NFDB
169:When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. ~ Alice Hoffman, #NFDB
170:no man’s actions can be judged in isolation from the external elements that shape and influence his life. ~ Gitta Sereny, #NFDB
171:Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system. ~ George Crumb, #NFDB
172:Some of the worst elements of Guyland rest on the twin pillars of men's silence and women's compliance. ~ Michael Kimmel, #NFDB
173:The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life, ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
174:The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. ~ Richard P Rumelt, #NFDB
175:A film must have two elements - it must deal with the real world and show how it could be made better. ~ Rouben Mamoulian, #NFDB
176:Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
177:A fine poem combines the elements of meaning, music, and a form like a living frame that holds it together. ~ Arnold Adoff, #NFDB
178:a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
179:There are elements that determine paths taken, and we can seldom find them or point to them accurately, ~ Elizabeth Strout, #NFDB
180:There are so many elements and nuances from the books that are very hard to tell in the length of a movie. ~ Jade Hassoune, #NFDB
181:Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
182:... because here I was having a life, even though it was a pastiche of elements of the life of someone else. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
183:Climbing is not a battle with the elements, nor against the law of gravity. It's a battle against oneself. ~ Walter Bonatti, #NFDB
184:I feel like a tree exposed to the elements, my roots clinging to the soil, my branches flirting with heaven. ~ Leylah Attar, #NFDB
185:Laughter, and the broader category of humor, are key elements in helping us go on with our life after a loss. ~ Allen Klein, #NFDB
186:Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
187:Mother, sister, wife, and daughter are the four natural elements in any relationship between men and women. ~ Erich Neumann, #NFDB
188:software architecture is a set of architectural (or, if you will, design) elements that have a particular form. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
189:Being with someone who is smart and gives good advice adds tremendously wonderful elements to your life. ~ Patricia Cornwell, #NFDB
190:n good decision making, frugality matters; take a complex problem and reduce it to its simplest elements. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
191:A change in activity, to something seemingly unrelated to the problem in question, is one of the elements that is ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
192:I think that a lot of exciting elements are finding a place where a film is happily, truly about something. ~ Kenneth Branagh, #NFDB
193:The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
194:These are all elements, but the main thing we can do in the Middle East is encourage the reformist elements. ~ Frank Carlucci, #NFDB
195:and graphic design elements and alterations are property of Bookbyte Digital and may be used as long as credit ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
196:Awareness is a mirror reflecting the four elements. Beauty is a heart that generates love and a mind that is open. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
197:Be conscious of the global elements in your dreams. When starting local, dream of taking it global sooner. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
198:I don't want to call the show [ "Mary and Jane" ] a satire because it is not, but there are satirical elements. ~ Harry Elfont, #NFDB
199:The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weights, exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
200:It set us on a path of trying to fake them by piggybacking on supposedly semantic elements, like lipstick on a div. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
201:Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
202:Maturity involves two elements: 1) immediate obedience in specific situations and 2) long-range character growth. ~ Larry Crabb, #NFDB
203:A balanced guest list of mixed elements is to a successful party what the seasoning is to a culinary triumph. ~ Letitia Baldrige, #NFDB
204:I think that those elements - light and sound - are beyond democratic. They're into the creative part of life. ~ Ornette Coleman, #NFDB
205:It isn't. The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over. These two elements always go together. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
206:Not all witches can control the elements, only a "high priestess" or as I like to think of them "uber-witches. ~ Jennifer Harlow, #NFDB
207:There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
208:You may include things you believe to be crucial in a design, but those elements are often only crucial to you. ~ Hillman Curtis, #NFDB
209:Your love for beauty has been perverted, repressed and savaged by hateful and controlling elements in the world. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
210:A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
211:In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
212:"Nothing is possible without love . . . for love puts one in a mood to risk everything and not to withhold elements." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
213:Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
214:I have a vision for living. It's about elements of style. It's about all the things that I love, that I believe in. ~ Ralph Lauren, #NFDB
215:We are, like our beloved garden greens, sturdy, strong, and best when tested by the elements and fully seasoned. ~ Celia Rivenbark, #NFDB
216:We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children. ~ Muhammad Yunus, #NFDB
217:I am not a Hindu, Nor a Muslim am II am this body, a playOf five elements a dramaOf the spirit dancing With joy and sorrow. ~ Kabir, #NFDB
218:I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
219:The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
220:the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible. ~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, #NFDB
221:the three elements of helpful evaluation are humility, forgiveness, and correction. None of these entail playing God. ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
222:Unless we abandon elements which resemble a police state, we can't meet the demands of being a modern society. ~ Ahmet Necdet Sezer, #NFDB
223:We are combining elements like tuxedos and workwear, for contrast; some looks also are based on 30s-era inspirations. ~ Renzo Rosso, #NFDB
224:All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
225:And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good. ~ Karlheinz Stockhausen, #NFDB
226:No one person can possibly combine all the elements supposed to make up what everyone means by friendship. ~ Francis Marion Crawford, #NFDB
227:What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ~ Linda Hogan, #NFDB
228:As an artist, my concern is toward the synthesizing of all the visual elements at my disposal - at the exclusion of none. ~ Ken Danby, #NFDB
229:Each spring, the schoolhouse was painted white as a bride, and every year the oceanic elements slowly undressed it. ~ Josiah Bancroft, #NFDB
230:In truth the social media elements of the Obama campaign, while extremely innovative, did not produce a lot of results. ~ Sean Parker, #NFDB
231:Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
232:Praxiteles borrowed the better elements of a hundred imperfect models in order to create a masterpiece. ~ Marc Charles Gabriel Gleyre, #NFDB
233:For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique. ~ Wolfgang Weingart, #NFDB
234:The character requires so many elements. The only one who could fulfill that was this one person: Elle Fanning. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn, #NFDB
235:Two distinct elements are included under the term "inheritance"— the transmission, and the development of characters; ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
236:Dreams are not without meaning wherever they may come from — from fantasy, from the elements, or from another inspiration. ~ Paracelsus, #NFDB
237:Matter's basic elements are solid,
Completely so, and that they fly through time
Invincible, indestructible for ever. ~ Lucretius,#NFDB
238:Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time that allows us to link the mind with the world. ~ Daniel Schacter, #NFDB
239:"Nothing is possible without love...for love puts one in a mood to risk everything, and not to withhold important elements" ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
240:Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
241:I am trying to counter the fixity of architectures, their stolidity, with elements that give an ineffable immaterial quality. ~ Toyo Ito, #NFDB
242:It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
243:Sometimes it is best to stand back from conflict and allow other elements in someone's life to do the hard work for you. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
244:There are three mutually reinforcing elements that define fair process: engagement, explanation, and clarity of expectation ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
245:Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
246:Algebras (jabbre and maqabeleh) are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements. ~ Omar Khayyam, #NFDB
247:I can't not find humor in elements of most parts of life, but at the same time nothing ever seems perpetually funny to me. ~ Greg Kinnear, #NFDB
248:I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
249:I'm open to all the elements, I'm definitely ready to take anything on. But I don't want to jump too far into the deep end. ~ Sam Claflin, #NFDB
250:On Writing Well by William Zinsser The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
251:The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness. ~ Elisabeth Elliot, #NFDB
252:There are bound to be differences in any artistic collaboration with landscape elements, or theater, of lighting elements. ~ Michael Arad, #NFDB
253:The spirit of karate practice and the elements of training are applicable to each and every aspect of our daily lives. ~ Gichin Funakoshi, #NFDB
254:To be more accurate, the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements. P. 86 ~ Carl Gustav Jung, #NFDB
255:...wage an ongoing war with the elements...we have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay. ~ Christina Baker Kline, #NFDB
256:We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next. ~ Max More, #NFDB
257:At the hour of danger a perfect quietness is required.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet,#NFDB
258:First of the elements, universal Being, Thou hast created all and preservest all and the universe is nothing but Thy form. ~ Vishnu Purana, #NFDB
259:In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past. ~ E V Lucas, #NFDB
260:I started out in theatre and I definitely have wanted to add extra musical elements to my music with both imagery and text. ~ Glenn Branca, #NFDB
261:Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure. ~ Graydon Carter, #NFDB
262:The elements of love, devotion, loyalty I have found in the words, never found in humans. That is why I never truly loved. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
263:There's always elements of danger in New York but people are always out on the street. I don't feel scared there at all. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB
264:To see things as parts, as incomplete elements is a lower analytic knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature, #NFDB
265:Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly. ~ Michelangelo, #NFDB
266:Building a computer out of any technology requires a large supply of only two kinds of elements: switches and connectors. ~ W Daniel Hillis, #NFDB
267:Diversification is a surrogate - and a damn poor surrogate - for knowledge, elements of control, and priceconsciousness. ~ Martin J Whitman, #NFDB
268:"In all these innumerable & manifold elements, I am the Will that moves, the Thought that acts, the Force that realises.." ~ The Mother, #NFDB
269:The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature. ~ Karl Jaspers, #NFDB
270:All is true, - so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps in his own heart. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
271:Any advice?
Be steady and confident.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Confidence,#NFDB
272:It's not fair to compare one artist to another because they all come with their own sort of elements to the picnic, you know. ~ Annie Lennox, #NFDB
273:Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
274:The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition. ~ Alexander Calder, #NFDB
275:We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
276:Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
277:Farewell, my sister, fare thee well. The elements be kind to thee, and make Thy spirits all of comfort: fare thee well. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
278:It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty. ~ Alfred Jarry, #NFDB
279:Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
280:Purification and freedom are the indispensable antecedents of perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #NFDB
281:The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance. ~ Linda Ronstadt, #NFDB
282:A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire, #NFDB
283:Casting a film, you can have the greatest actors in a film and it doesn't work. It's a combination of all of the elements. ~ Stellan Skarsgard, #NFDB
284:Drive, ego and cocksureness are all essential elements in terms of getting exactly what you want but losing everything you've got. ~ Dane Cook, #NFDB
285:Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
286:I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
287:Much of imagination is about making connections that are not entirely obvious, between elements that may appear disparate at first ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
288:The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
289:A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
290:Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow. ~ Toru Takemitsu, #NFDB
291:Evolution continually innovates, but at each level it conserves the elements that are recombined to yield the innovations. ~ John Henry Holland, #NFDB
292:I really like incorporating elements, and it's also difficult to do in stop motion, which means sometimes I run into problems. ~ Kirsten Lepore, #NFDB
293:multiverse elements are four-dimensional spacetimes, whereas “creation” is of course only a meaningful notion within a spacetime. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
294:Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. ~ Niccol Machiavelli, #NFDB
295:The elements of architecture are not visual units or gestalt; they are encounters, confrontations that interact with memory. ~ Juhani Pallasmaa, #NFDB
296:. . . We love fog because
it shifts old anomalies into the elements
surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing ~ Eavan Boland,#NFDB
297:Directing is creating a whole. You're able to combine different elements and create a film that is unique and true to your vision. ~ Tim Robbins, #NFDB
298:His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB
299:Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli, #NFDB
300:Persecution, like fire, burns up the weak elements (wood and hay) but actually purifies the strong ones (silver and gold). It ~ Jefferson Bethke, #NFDB
301:Take possession of the air, submit the elements, penetrate the last redoubts of nature, make space retreat, make death retreat. ~ Romain Rolland, #NFDB
302:The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
303:The minute anyone's getting anxious I say, You must eat and you must sleep. They're the two vital elements for a healthy life. ~ Francesca Annis, #NFDB
304:To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature. ~ Jacob Needleman, #NFDB
305:When you make art, those things change shape into something else. It's transformation into a body of different visual elements. ~ Chath Piersath, #NFDB
306:Will: power of consciousness turned towards effectuation.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Will and Perseverance, Will,#NFDB
307:A system consists of elements, interconnections, and a purpose. Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
308:Death is such as generation is, a mystery of nature; a composition out of the same elements, and a decomposition into the same; ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
309:His life was gentle; and the elements So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
310:I enjoy the preparatory elements of travel - packing my bags and choosing my outfits - but my favourite part is getting there. ~ Dominic Monaghan, #NFDB
311:I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
312:Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
313:Our love was a river, always changing under the mercy of nature’s elements, but we continued to flow, even when we trickled. ~ Shannon A Thompson, #NFDB
314:The propaganda of communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are simply hunger, envy, death. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
315:There is no other Royal path which leads to geometry. ~ Euclid to Ptolemy I. See Proclus' Commentaries on Euclid's Elements, Book II, Chapter IV., #NFDB
316:Beyond the mask she is witness to his glorious soul. Exposed to the elements, she warms her skin in his light and essence of being. ~ Truth Devour, #NFDB
317:Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
318:It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams. ~ John Knowles, #NFDB
319:…the association of two, or more, apparently alien elements on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry. ~ Comte de Lautr amont, #NFDB
320:The Obama administration has also conspired with foreign elements to reduce the constitutional liberties of the American people. ~ Andrew McCarthy, #NFDB
321:The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic. ~ William Godwin, #NFDB
322:The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
323:A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
324:If you and I are only shadows, or faulty conglomerations of the four elements, or a dance of atoms in the void, why is life so sweet? ~ Judith Tarr, #NFDB
325:See form, see line, see light, see shadow. See relationships of lines. The model is a collection of these elements, not a body. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
326:What I'm dealing with is sound. I don't pretend to be dealing with music. I'm just dealing with sound elements, textures and sounds. ~ Bill Laswell, #NFDB
327:Future is mobile computing - smartphones and tablets are just elements of it. The industry is on the verge of a whole new paradigm. ~ Thorsten Heins, #NFDB
328:I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
329:The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse. ~ John Wesley Powell, #NFDB
330:You can expand, repeat, even change keys and do other things electronically to give certain elements and phrases more cohesiveness. ~ Herbie Hancock, #NFDB
331:Attachments to older forms of worship may be comfortable, but they may contain elements of falsehood that make them unacceptable to God. ~ Max Anders, #NFDB
332:Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
333:I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
334:It is faith among men that holds the moral elements of society together, as it is faith in God that binds the world to his throne. ~ William M Evarts, #NFDB
335:The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
336:The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
337:They take them from the plants and animals or the elements. Still Waters, Gentle Breeze, pah. Why not Dead Deer, or Rutting Ehat? ~ Elizabeth Vaughan, #NFDB
338:A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
339:A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
340:Does not our lives consist of the four elements?"
"Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
341:He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#NFDB
342:If you see, in the spectrum of a planet host star, strange chemical elements, it can be a signal from a civilization which is there. ~ Garik Israelian, #NFDB
343:There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
344:the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
345:Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo.#SriAurobindo, #NFDB
346:An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature. ~ Herbert Spencer, #NFDB
347:His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN! ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
348:Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible. ~ Elizabeth Bishop, #NFDB
349:If we consider that the human body is a universe within itself, it is only natural to conclude that we carry within us all the elements. ~ Masaru Emoto, #NFDB
350:Over the years, I've learned that you can have fun with the fabrics and other elements, but if it's not tailored right, you'll blow it. ~ James Marsden, #NFDB
351:Strunk and White wrote in Elements of Style, “Do not overstate…a single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
352:the British would not permit a government ‘whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
353:The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain old-fashioned fear. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
354:The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing. ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
355:The Lake of Dreams grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel. ~ Kim Edwards, #NFDB
356:The Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #NFDB
357:Come in, my dearFrom that harsh worldThat has rained elements of stoneUpon your tender face.Every soulShould receive a toast from usFor bravery! ~ Hafez, #NFDB
358:Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can. ~ Walter Jon Williams, #NFDB
359:How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
360:My films have sort of amateur elements, a naive quality, yet they have some sophisticated quality, sometimes the rhythm is kinda elegant. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
361:Happiness, then, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
362:most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
363:They also work as half-hours. The stories are all different but include elements of revenge, or the supernatural, or some sort of surprise. ~ Bryan Brown, #NFDB
364:You dramatically accelerate a team by putting its attention directly on the elements, factors, and decisions that are central to progress. ~ Scott Berkun, #NFDB
365:It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
366:The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn't mere rain or the wind freezing wind - this was a conspiracy of the elements. ~ Georges Simenon, #NFDB
367:Thought ceases in meditation; even the mind's elements are quite quiet. Blood circulation stops. His breath stops, but he is not dead. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
368:weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
369:Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
370:America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
371:Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
372:If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
373:In a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power - including strong and principled diplomacy. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
374:I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
375:Magic came from life itself, from the interaction of nature and the elements, from the energy of all living beings, and especially of people. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
376:Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
377:Of course I love leather, and I love stingray. So combining the two and adding those gold elements - I always love a great gold accessory. ~ Olivia Palermo, #NFDB
378:There were certain elements of the healing process I could not capture. And even if I was right in the science, I could be wrong in the spirit. ~ Mehmet Oz, #NFDB
379:The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, #NFDB
380:This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz. ~ Asa Gray, #NFDB
381:To love, to be loved, and to be useful: these are the most important elements in a happy, meaningful life, and they can be achieved anywhere. ~ Syrie James, #NFDB
382:As in other departments of science, so in politics, the compound should always be resolved into the simple elements or least parts of the whole. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
383:Isn’t the universe full of gaseous elements?”
Andrew says, “Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter. ~ Michael Cunningham,#NFDB
384:Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
385:Our torments also may in length of time Become our elements, these piercing fires As soft as now severe, our temper changed Into their temper. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
386:Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. ~ Laurence Fishburne, #NFDB
387:we must each be what God and nature makes us. We can't change it much--only help to develop the good and control the bad elements in us. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
388:When we define the elements of a story as it relates to our brand, we create a map customers can follow to engage our products and services. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
389:Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe goodreads ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
390:The conjunction of many elements, all in just the right proportion and strength, all at just the right time. Of such a recipe is divinity made. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
391:the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary. ~ Angela Duckworth, #NFDB
392:Then, one by one, they went away, for night was falling on the storm, wrapping in shadows the raging ocean and all the battling elements. ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
393:There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
394:We have to make sure the music and the message and the words and all the elements come through in our songs and every time we appear in public. ~ Lauryn Hill, #NFDB
395:Humor is one of the elements of genius--admirable as an adjunct; but as soon as it becomes dominant, only a surrogate for genius. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
396:If you're doing a drama that has some comedic elements you can't forget that it's primarily a very serious film that has some light relief. ~ Robert Downey Jr, #NFDB
397:Innovation is a discipline not a lottery... It comes from the combination of two elements within my control: hard work and openmindedness. ~ Georges St Pierre, #NFDB
398:I saw you the morning after you met him. You were oozing with so much chemistry you could have recited the periodic table of elements backward. ~ Tawna Fenske, #NFDB
399:I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
400:The Six Core Competencies do not define or offer a formula. Rather, they define structure driven by criteria for the elements that comprise it. ~ Larry Brooks, #NFDB
401:All elements have a counterweight. Fire is the counterweight of water. Air is the counterweight of earth. The counterweight of chaos is the soul. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
402:I use the terms "sky" and "earth" because as a human I cannot imagine those elements not being there. It is a way to give substance to nothingness. ~ Mark Tufo, #NFDB
403:Of the four elements water is the second in weight and the second in respect of mobility. It is never at rest until it unites with the sea. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
404:The man in ecstasy and the man drowning - both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements. ~ Franz Kafka, #NFDB
405:The only difference between elements and compounds consists in the supposed impossibility of proving the so-called elements to be compounds. ~ Wolfgang Ostwald, #NFDB
406:We believe that the elements in the chemical formula of our creative work, problem, invention, and art, correspond to the challenges of our age. ~ El Lissitzky, #NFDB
407:When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
408:follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
409:I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights. The indispensable elements in a democratic society - and well worth fighting for. ~ Helen Suzman, #NFDB
410:One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality. ~ Kenneth Branagh, #NFDB
411:Sometimes a piece of music in the score isn't effective. When a score is too well finished with too many elements, sometimes it's too much. ~ Alejandro Amenabar, #NFDB
412:The energies represented by the four # elements are ulitimately the fundamental realities of life that are being analysed with # astrology ~ Stephen Arroyo, #NFDB
413:We were building a new state on virgin ground; it’s people believed it should encourage only the best elements to come to us, and discourage others. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
414:What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance. ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
415:B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it’s nothing less than evolution for elements. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
416:Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
417:Bringing about change in an abuser generally requires four elements: (1) consequences, (2) education, (3) confrontation, and (4) accountability. ~ Lundy Bancroft, #NFDB
418:Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
419:Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire, #NFDB
420:Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
421:Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision--the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths. ~ Josephine Hart, #NFDB
422:Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action. ~ Talcott Parsons, #NFDB
423:The evolutionary point of the ego is to provide a ground of relative stability on which the archetypal elements can become conscious of themselves. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
424:I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me. ~ Holt McCallany, #NFDB
425:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
426:The storm is only at the surface of the sea; in the depths all is quiet.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet, [T5],#NFDB
427:By combining elements such as hypnosis, magic, neurolinguistic programming and psychology, I can make it appear that I can hack into people's brains. ~ Keith Barry, #NFDB
428:I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye. ~ Andre Kertesz, #NFDB
429:Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
430:The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
431:There are elements of democracy in votes here and there in America. But in the actual structure of the government, we're a representative republic. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
432:What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
433:What is the atomic bomb?” queried Leslie, “But a mass of tortured Elements suffering complete nervous breakdown?”
I shuddered at the thought. ~ Richard Matheson,#NFDB
434:Hail to Thee, to Thee, Spirit of the Supreme Spirit, Soul of souls, to Thee, the visible and invisible, who art one with Time and with the elements. ~ Vishnu Purana, #NFDB
435:I like heist movies. I like action movies that set all the elements into one and a chance to do something that comes from a great stable of writing. ~ Jason Statham, #NFDB
436:True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In Sanskrit, these are, maitri, karuna, mudita, and upeksha. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
437:Well, if nothing else, you are that rock. You can look at it and know that even though the elements can change your shape, you’re still you at the core. ~ June Gray, #NFDB
438:You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language. ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
439:Chemistry begins in the stars. The stars are the source of the chemical elements, which are the building blocks of matter and the core of our subject. ~ Peter Atkins, #NFDB
440:I wish I could free myself from making music that has a dancefloor-function, or at least try to focus more on all the other elements in music. ~ Hans Peter Lindstrom, #NFDB
441:Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire! ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
442:Swift calls discretion low prudence; it is high prudence, and one of the most important elements entering into either social or political life. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
443:Theres nothing but spirit in music. Thats all it is. Yeah, theres a lot of intellectual elements to it, but no matter how you approach it, its all spirit. ~ Amos Lee, #NFDB
444:To know the real situation within yourself, you have to know your own territory, including the elements within you that are at war with each other. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
445:Be flexible - the order in which you introduce the elements of a painting should not be a rigid system. What worked last time may not work this time. ~ Richard Schmid, #NFDB
446:finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
447:First the stalk - then the roots. First the need - then the means to satisfy that need. First the nucleus -then the elements needed for its growth. ~ Robert Collier, #NFDB
448:I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor. ~ Danielle Trussoni, #NFDB
449:Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
450:I read Macbeth as a secondary student in Nigeria and it was like an African play to me. It had all the right elements - witches, kings and assassinations. ~ Sefi Atta, #NFDB
451:I think I'm predominantly known for my portraits. Obviously in my work there are landscape or stilllife elements, but mainly my work is people . . . ~ Ari Marcopoulos, #NFDB
452:Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form. ~ John Maeda, #NFDB
453:So to me it's very similar in terms of trying to distill within the image, those elements that are gonna form, hopefully, a compelling visual statement. ~ John Sexton, #NFDB
454:'Speed' and 'Point Break' were a lot of running and jumping, and then 'The Matrix Trilogy' had a lot of fights and wire work and green screen elements. ~ Keanu Reeves, #NFDB
455:The
struggle to grow makes the vine work harder, extending its
roots and absorbing elements that make it produce a
more interesting fruit. ~ Christie Ridgway,#NFDB
456:Any reader unable to distinguish between the historical and fictional elements of the plot is urged to seek professional help as quickly as possible. ~ Chet Williamson, #NFDB
457:deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. ~ Geoff Colvin, #NFDB
458:I despise the morning... I am a creature of darkness, whose elements is night and shadow.I belong in the dark with the other sinful creatures. ~ Charlotte Featherstone, #NFDB
459:Man has power and dominion over the elements. We should be able “to rebuke the wind and the waves.” We should be able to put an end to drought. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn, #NFDB
460:So we must presume that the worst, rather than the best, choice will be made. The sober and responsible elements will be defeated in the present clash. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
461:supernatural elements, including the schemes of one-eyed Odin, a ring of power, and the sword that was reforged, the tale was kept alive in oral tradition. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
462:The elements of good trading are: 1, cutting losses. 2, cutting losses. And 3, cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance. ~ Ed Seykota, #NFDB
463:The science of the modern school ... is in effect ... the acquisition of imperfectly analyzed misstatements about entrails, elements, and electricity. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
464:Whosoever comes to birth in God, is delivered from the physical sensations, recognises the different elements which compose it and enjoys a perfect happiness. ~ Hermes, #NFDB
465:Be Yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just Be. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
466:He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
467:He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced. ~ Michael Cunningham, #NFDB
468:If adolescent pregnancy prevention is to become a priority, then our strategy, as advocates, must contain two key elements: civic engagement and education. ~ Jane Fonda, #NFDB
469:I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three. ~ Robert D Kaplan, #NFDB
470:I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life. ~ Cory Doctorow, #NFDB
471:I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them. ~ Cillian Murphy, #NFDB
472:It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
473:I understand acting and I understand actors. I don't really understand the world of celebrity. That's just bizarre. Those sorts of elements I'm at sea with. ~ Sam Neill, #NFDB
474:Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
475:Light or luminosity is created by the way elements are juxtaposed. They become reflective and a radiance comes from putting different things together. ~ Merce Cunningham, #NFDB
476:Lying contains the same hostile elements as a practical joke in that the 'victim' ends up looking foolish in his own eyes and laughable in everyone else's. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
477:Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms. ~ Connie Willis, #NFDB
478:She didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
479:The only reality mathematical concepts have is as cultural elements or artifacts. ~ Raymond Louis Wilder, Evolution of mathematical concepts. An Elementary Study (1968)., #NFDB
480:What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements; for of these are all things created. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
481:What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
482:You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck, #NFDB
483:As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques. ~ Charles Lindbergh, #NFDB
484:Fashion takes its inspiration from society and everyday life, which is the same for everyone, and this is perhaps the reason why certain elements recur. ~ Stefano Gabbana, #NFDB
485:Never can a reforming sect survive if it is only reforming; the formative elements alone - the real impulse, that is, the principles - live on and on. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
486:The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large. ~ Wilhelm Wundt, #NFDB
487:The real secret to guacamole is that you use exactly the elements that you need, which is cilantro, onion, tomato, and jalapenos. And, of course, avocado. ~ Demian Bichir, #NFDB
488:In China the underworld and officialdom have interpenetrated and become one. Criminal elements have become officialized as officials have become criminalized. ~ Liu Xiaobo, #NFDB
489:It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
490:It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet, [T5],#NFDB
491:The church is challenging such negative cultural elements as superstition, rugged individualism, materialism, hedonism, permissiveness and utilitarianism. ~ Francis Arinze, #NFDB
492:The elements were "seeking" each other in rage and confusion, and in the fury of the conflict boastful man was utterly humiliated, sucked down, drowned. ~ Elizabeth Goudge, #NFDB
493:The natural elements in the forests, mountains, deserts and large bodies of water, help shield you from the thought forms and auras of other human beings. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
494:There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment. ~ John Lasseter, #NFDB
495:They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph. ~ Pierre Auguste Renoir, #NFDB
496:Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine. ~ Charles Yu, #NFDB
497:I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own. ~ Maria Mitchell, #NFDB
498:Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
499:Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
500:The most basic elements of our life—our birth and our death—are out of our control. People spend a lifetime trying to control these things but it’s impossible. ~ Darien Gee, #NFDB
501:For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics - I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I'm playing. ~ Neil Peart, #NFDB
502:If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb. ~ Emilio G Segre, #NFDB
503:If the image one holds of one's self contains elements that don't square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be. ~ Sidney Poitier, #NFDB
504:Part of fashion is newness. It's got to be a new combination of elements that's shocking-stunning-beautiful all at the same time. But it doesn't have any emotion. ~ Tom Ford, #NFDB
505:Purification, liberation, perfection, delight of being are four constituent elements of the Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #NFDB
506:The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements. ~ Bruce H Lipton, #NFDB
507:Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. Good ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
508:Be Yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just Be. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
509:Inside of us is a place that is all-knowing, all mighty, which is a fragment of God. Nourishing, healing elements with in us. There is a spark in each one of us. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
510:In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
511:I think opera music is very conservative, and Rock and Roll music is conservative as well, and that's why I'm trying to make a bridge between these two elements. ~ Klaus Nomi, #NFDB
512:Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble. ~ Michael J Fox, #NFDB
513:Like a dead branch falling from a tree, which them decomposes and nourishes the soil, your disappointments can transform into the elements of change and growth. ~ Ethan Hawke, #NFDB
514:My central focus is what are we doing to protect the American people and the American homeland? Afghanistan and Pakistan are critical elements in that process. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
515:Scott believes there are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimensions to succeed. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
516:The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
517:I gravitate towards places where humans have been and are no more, to the edge of man's influence, where the elements are taking over or covering man's traces. ~ Michael Kenna, #NFDB
518:In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
519:Scripture suggests that the elements in space were created for the benefit of earth, while evolution suggests that earth is an insignificant speck in vast space. ~ Walter Lang, #NFDB
520:supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
521:The fact is that a car used by Gerry Adams and myself during the course of the Mitchell review was bugged by elements within British military intelligence. ~ Martin McGuinness, #NFDB
522:The question is, what are we to do in order to consolidate peace on a universal and durable foundation, and what are the essential elements of such a peace? ~ Arthur Henderson, #NFDB
523:Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes. ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB
524:Your potentials contain local elements that can react with your passion to produce global compounds for the solution of the world’s problems. Go and do it. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
525:Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality. ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
526:Believe it or not, there are interesting elements in everyone. So, if I can't talk to everybody for at least 7 to 10 minutes, then I'm in the wrong profession. ~ Wendy Williams, #NFDB
527:Design is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. ~ Laszlo Moholy Nagy, #NFDB
528:Inside of us is a place that is all-knowing, all mighty, which is a fragment of God. Nourishing, healing elements with in us. There is a spark in each one of us. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
529:integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that “that was then, and this is now. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
530:Matter is, in its constituent elements, the same as spirit; existence is one, however manifold in its phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
531:The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. ~ T E Lawrence, #NFDB
532:The leader must pull the different elements within the team together to support one another, with all focused exclusively on how to best accomplish the mission. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
533:The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose. ~ Alex Lemon, #NFDB
534:The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change. ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
535:We needn't be saddened with the impossible weight of managing the entire biosphere, but we must meet the challenge of living in balance with the sacred elements. ~ David Suzuki, #NFDB
536:As Aristotle said, “What a society honors will be cultivated.” It is time for us to understand, honor, and cultivate the deepest relational elements in our nature. ~ Sue Johnson, #NFDB
537:As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
538:Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy — Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes — are parts of the plot. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
539:My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
540:The boarders have changed. My vocals explore different elements and you know it was really important for me to transfer the atmosphere of the songs with my voice. ~ Heather Nova, #NFDB
541:The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth, ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
542:The search for the point of temperate power between competing elements of life—the national government and the states, the states and the people—was far from over. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
543:Wherever we can multiply our forces and our civilizational efforts, absorbing other elements, no law can prohibit us from doing so, as such actions are our duty. ~ Roman Dmowski, #NFDB
544:If you were doing something in secret and didn’t want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
545:In any series of elements to be controlled, a selected small fraction, in terms of numbers of elements, always accounts for a large fraction in terms of effect. ~ Vilfredo Pareto, #NFDB
546:My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition. ~ Matthew Modine, #NFDB
547:I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail. ~ Michael Kenna, #NFDB
548:Of the cosmic Gods some make the world be, others animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does of different elements; the fourth class keep it when harmonized. ~ Sallust, #NFDB
549:Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element? ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
550:The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
551:Every action is seen to fall into one of three main categories, guarding, hitting, or moving. Here, then, are the elements of combat, whether in war or pugilism. ~ B H Liddell Hart, #NFDB
552:Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB
553:The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. ~ Anthony Bourdain, #NFDB
554:The myth for today is wholeness rather than perfection; our new challenge is about the integration of warring elements, and not about one archetype defeating another. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
555:We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it. ~ Arto Lindsay, #NFDB
556:Your local dreams contain global elements; think global. On no account should you settle with a crowd when God has called you for multitudes! Dare to dream big! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
557:A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths. ~ Charles de Lint, #NFDB
558:I can't say I can foresee the future and tell the stars, you know. But I do have an understanding for my own reality, just elements and things that I've learned from. ~ Jenna Elfman, #NFDB
559:If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out. ~ Serj Tankian, #NFDB
560:I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
561:The principle elements of a puzzle all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
562:We always wanted to make a comedy that was a little bit more than that, which had tragic elements to it... that people engaged with - an intelligent comedy essentially. ~ Alice Lowe, #NFDB
563:We must see only through the Divine's eyes and act only through the Divine's will.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender,#NFDB
564:Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
565:From Santi's earthly tomb with demon's hole, 'Cross Rome the mystic elements unfold. The path of light is laid, the sacred test, Let angels guide you on your lofty quest. ~ Dan Brown, #NFDB
566:Skiffle was blues featuring a washboard and acoustic instruments. It encompassed blues, with elements of folk, jazz, and, at times, American country-and-western music. ~ Van Morrison, #NFDB
567:Surrender: to will what the Divine wills is the supreme wisdom.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, To Will What the Divine Wills,#NFDB
568:The sun is getting warmer on my back, and I wish the air could stay the way it was moments before: the air of promise, the elements brewing but not quite cooked. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings, #NFDB
569:When two elements combine and form more than one compound, the masses of one element that react with a fixed mass of the other are in the ratio of small whole numbers. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
570:Animals are the messengers of the tree, and trees the gardens of animals. Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree. ~ Bill Mollison, #NFDB
571:As a writer, it's fun to free yourself enough to tap into some darker elements of your personality that sometimes I don't even know exist. It doesn't feel like work. ~ Richard Shepard, #NFDB
572:Coolidge told the veterans: “I recognize the full and complete necessity of 100 percent Americanism, but 100 percent Americanism may be made up of many various elements. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
573:Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn't even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead. ~ Rick Moody, #NFDB
574:GAL4.9 But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
575:I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff. ~ Sir Henry Wotton, Preface to the Elements of Architecture; in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 653-54., #NFDB
576:If all the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic weights, a periodic repetition of properties is obtained. This is expressed by the law of periodicity. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
577:It so happens that at times your desires tend to disagree with the reality and this is due to the fact that you have not let the two elements complement each other. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
578:My work at R.E.I. was incredibly fulfilling and rewarding, especially the stewardship elements of it, the ability to connect young people to public lands close to home. ~ Sally Jewell, #NFDB
579:Only one-fourth of the sorrow in each man's life is caused by outside uncontrollable elements, the rest is self-imposed by failing to analyze and act with calmness. ~ Holbrook Jackson, #NFDB
580:A government based on fear attracts the worst elements, who corrupt it from within. A shaky edifice, a government against its people, any of its people, must soon collapse. ~ Greg Bear, #NFDB
581:Air all around him, there was air in the water, all elements were one, fire and earth, air and water. All are but one thing, not four, not two, and not three, but one. He ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
582:Carbon may be a talented connector, but without a medium that allows it to collide randomly with other elements, those connective powers are likely to go to waste. All ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
583:Hans Castorp had found courage up here--if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
584:If man surrenders totally to the Divine, he identifies himself with the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T5],#NFDB
585:Our constant prayer is to understand the Divine's will and to live accordingly.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T5],#NFDB
586:there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown. Hot ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
587:They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth. ~ John Lewis Stempel, #NFDB
588:We must expect the discovery of many as yet unknown elements-for example, elements analogous to aluminum and silicon- whose atomic weight would be between 65 and 75. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
589:When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements. ~ Edward Thorndike, #NFDB
590:Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen. ~ Charles Forbes Rene de Montalembert, #NFDB
591:About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power. ~ Sidney Altman, #NFDB
592:All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose. Departments ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
593:Dont call me a rapper, I’m an artist. Update your minds. I ‘INCORPORATE’ hip hop elements because I am part MC, but I am all things musical. All things melodically beautiful. ~ Kid Cudi, #NFDB
594:Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work. ~ Jason Blum, #NFDB
595:It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc. All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole. ~ Alfred Korzybski, #NFDB
596:I've studied a lot of great people over the years - Pete Seeger, James Brown - and tried to incorporate elements that I've admired, though I can't say I dance like James. ~ John Fogerty, #NFDB
597:One of the great purposes of religion itself is being hindered by an exclusive-ism that doesn't take into account the common elements and values that we actually share. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
598:We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
599:Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
600:I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl. ~ Richard Laymon, #NFDB
601:If two irreconcilable elements are struggling with each other, the solution lies in force. There has never been any other solution in history, and there never will be. ~ Benito Mussolini, #NFDB
602:If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries. ~ George Crumb, #NFDB
603:I liked taking the elements of roadside advertising out of context because it removes the imperative and just goes to the essence of it - the pure heart of advertising. ~ Stanley Donwood, #NFDB
604:The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister's counsel and the mother's prayer. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
605:Then my first film was something called Cannibal Girls, which sounds like a horror movie but was actually kind of a goofy comedy with horror elements. Like a horror spoof. ~ Ivan Reitman, #NFDB
606:I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music. ~ Laura Bell Bundy, #NFDB
607:It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements. ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
608:Lutheran Reformation, from its inception in 1517 down to the Peasants' War of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed by, all the revolutionary elements of the time. ~ Ernest Belfort Bax, #NFDB
609:Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
610:Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems. ~ Talcott Parsons, #NFDB
611:Bodies which contain a greater proportion of water than is necessary to balance the other elements, are speedily corrupted, and lose their virtues and properties. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
612:For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
613:Get better at the things you care about most. This is the dark horse prescription for personalized success. It elegantly summarizes all four elements of the dark horse mindset. ~ Todd Rose, #NFDB
614:good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
615:Ikigai can be described as an intersection between 4 different elements: what you're passionate about, where your skills lie, how you can earn a living and what the world needs. ~ Blinkist, #NFDB
616:I wouldn't exactly describe 'Detention' as a horror movie. I mean, it does have horror elements in it, but it's got a lot more to it, and it's not a typical horror movie. ~ Shanley Caswell, #NFDB
617:Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
618:The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
619:the Empire assured Muslims and other minority ‘elements in India’s national life’ that Britain would never allow ‘their coercion into submission’ to a majority government ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
620:When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
621:A blog is neither a diary nor a journal. Many people think of blogging in relation to those two things, confessional or practical. It is neither but includes elements of both. ~ Lemn Sissay, #NFDB
622:But I paid particular attention to the french-fry operation. The brothers had indicated this was one of the key elements in their sales success, and they’d described the process. ~ Ray Kroc, #NFDB
623:I am a mixture of contradictory elements. Equal parts earth and fire, melancholy and choler, I fear. But it is more that warmth and blue skies stir the blood, do you not think? ~ S J Parris, #NFDB
624:I feel that my characters all have some part of my character. I feel that they're all me in some way, certainly not in individuality, but they all bear elements of what I feel. ~ Jack Kirby, #NFDB
625:I was really interested in how a health care center could also be a center for the arts and for music, and for bringing together sort of the isolated elements of the community. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
626:Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence. ~ Christoph Niemann, #NFDB
627:The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
628:The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you. ~ Thomas Harris, #NFDB
629:The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity. ~ Steve Lacy, #NFDB
630:We've lost touch and allowed technology to take precedence over organic nature. But let's not forget that those microchips in our computers came from elements of the earth. ~ Emilio Estevez, #NFDB
631:Humans will tend to adopt and retain those elements of culture that appear to produce “better” results, while those that appear to be less rewarding will tend to be discarded. ~ Rodney Stark, #NFDB
632:I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example. ~ Michael Stipe, #NFDB
633:I think the notion of success is fairly destructive. You can see elements of this surrounding any band becoming too popular. On the other hand, survival means you are doing fine. ~ Howe Gelb, #NFDB
634:I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB
635:Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality. ~ Pierre Bayard, #NFDB
636:Our torments also may in length of time
Become our Elements, these piercing Fires
As soft as now severe, our temper chang'd
Into their temper; which must needs remove. ~ John Milton,#NFDB
637:The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
638:Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story. ~ Sarah Moon, #NFDB
639:Art is the subjective, preferential treatment of certain elements of reality; it selects and resets, distributes light and shade, omits and underlines, softens and emphasises. ~ Egon Friedell, #NFDB
640:A typical quotient construction for an algebraic structure A will identify some substructure B and regard two elements of A as “equivalent if they “differ by an element of B. ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
641:Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy. ~ Thomas M Disch, #NFDB
642:In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations. ~ Evan Parker, #NFDB
643:In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
644:Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. ~ Henri Cartier Bresson, #NFDB
645:I think DOOM had just the right mix of elements that keep people coming back to it: great monsters, excellent weapons with great balance, a spooky environment and extreme speed. ~ John Romero, #NFDB
646:It is one thing to go on stage and be funny or be in a good place in your career, but for a woman, actually facing the elements in a physical way is a very powerful thing. ~ Pamela Stephenson, #NFDB
647:It was interesting to have both very a conservative and very liberal parent, because we deal with both these elements in the world and we have both elements within ourselves. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
648:Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. ~ Michael Haneke, #NFDB
649:The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history. ~ Thomas Campbell, #NFDB
650:This conviction—that whoever explores human experience simultaneously discovers divine reality—is one of the elements that marks gnosticism as a distinctly religious movement. ~ Elaine Pagels, #NFDB
651:Why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
652:Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice—elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
653:I think what will happen with Donald Trump is there are going to be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
654:It occurred to me all of a sudden, said Amalfitano, it’s a Duchamp idea, leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
655:nourishment I feel can only be maintained if I stay close to the elements—fire, air, water, earth. If I surround myself with them, I shall always feel the stirrings of my soul. ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
656:Nuclear fusion of light elements like hydrogen or helium would permit approaching the speed of light. It seems very attractive to refuel your space ships where the fuel is. ~ Wilson Greatbatch, #NFDB
657:Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both. One ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
658:Throughout your life, your inner landscape presents its contents to you again and again. When you are aware of all its elements, you are in continual communication with your soul. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
659:We shall find the abstract equivalent for all forms & elements in the universe, then we shall combine them in sculptural constructions according to the mood of our inspiration. ~ Giacomo Balla, #NFDB
660:When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
661:A man with a weak Masculine is especially prone to despise and fear these qualities and may attempt to suppress the more destructive elements of the Feminine force in his partner. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
662:Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity. ~ J Gresham Machen, #NFDB
663:If an artistic object represents the thing-itself perfectly, it is just another copy of that thing. The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others... ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
664:If you look at government policy generally, what government tries to do in all instances is to make sure that we take care of all elements that might relate to a particular issue. ~ Thabo Mbeki, #NFDB
665:In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race. ~ Ruth Benedict, #NFDB
666:In all life there are three elements, the fixed and permanent spirit, the developing yet constant soul and the brittle changeable body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, The Awakening Soul of India, #NFDB
667:People expect us to be a straight up dance band but there are many more elements to our sound that you really get to see during our live show and hear on our record 'See The Light.' ~ Nomi Ruiz, #NFDB
668:The problem is the following, black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements. ~ Boris Vian, #NFDB
669:These too are integral elements in personality and therefore in sanctity—because a saint is one whom God’s love has fully developed into a person in the likeness of his Creator. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
670:the unexamined life is not worth living. It has insisted on the power of rational reflection to winnow out bad elements in our practices, and to replace them with better ones. ~ Simon Blackburn, #NFDB
671:"Although the numerous elements composing this complex factor are, in themselves, everywhere the same, they are infinitely varied as regards clarity, emotional colouring, and scope." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
672:Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character. ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
673:Until a teacher learns to use elements like time, space, materials, groupings, and so forth flexibly, it's incredibly difficult to teach students as they need to be taught. ~ Carol Ann Tomlinson, #NFDB
674:But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions. ~ Antonio Tabucchi, #NFDB
675:Every bubble consists of a trend that can be observed in the real world and a misconception relating to that trend. The two elements interact with each other in a reflexive manner. ~ George Soros, #NFDB
676:Greece is not a country that can be humiliated. It is a matter of finding an intersection between the reasonable elements of both sides [EU and Greece] which has to be done. ~ Jean Claude Juncker, #NFDB
677:insulting of the German Flag’ in New York (when dock workers had torn down the swastika banner from the steamer Bremen, giving rise to an international incident) on ‘Jewish elements’. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
678:So the programs all start to all look the same. I watched one free skating competition, and I thought I was watching a short program. Everyone was doing exactly the same elements. ~ Brian Boitano, #NFDB
679:The elements of a suitable product-centric paradigm that works at scale have all emerged in the last 10 years, but they have not yet been connected and presented in a systematic way. ~ Jez Humble, #NFDB
680:The script is really always the main attraction, and then there's whether there is an interesting character and great people around you. Those are the key elements that I look for. ~ Rupert Grint, #NFDB
681:Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity. ~ John Gresham Machen, #NFDB
682:I am much more involved in the filmmaking experience on Mag Seven. I'm much more involved in story elements, casting decisions, the writing of the show, the blocking of the scenes. ~ Michael Biehn, #NFDB
683:Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality. ~ Naguib Mahfouz, #NFDB
684:Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her; though I must add that these two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
685:Many companies aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources and perseverance. Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance. ~ Satya Nadella, #NFDB
686:Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you’ll find them. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
687:The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you. ~ Thomas Harris,#NFDB
688:we try to describe the path from then to now, and in doing so select for our accounts the elements in a once indeterminate situation that appear to have led to the future outcome. ~ Bernard Bailyn, #NFDB
689:You know, times change and the elements change along with it. The elements of success. And my son's very successful. He's doing very well. And I have a younger daughter who sings. ~ Billy Eckstine, #NFDB
690:..Do we have not choice but to agree that in each of us are found the same elements and characteristics as are found in the city? After all, where else could the city have got them from? ~ Socrates, #NFDB
691:I'm a big fan of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who had that whole "decisive moment" approach to taking pictures, of having multiple elements line up within the frame. ~ Nick Zinner, #NFDB
692:Just as the DNA is a structure of double helical bonds, so your being is a structure of elements, not physical elements, but awarenesses that have come together in a ring of power. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
693:Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. ~ Paracelsus, #NFDB
694:Oh, hell." He landed beside me, soft-footed on the pine needles. "This is beginning to have all the elements of a farce, isn't it? Too many villains, and nothing to tie them up with. ~ Mary Stewart, #NFDB
695:The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
696:The ruling clique approaches its task with a "what to think" program; the vanguard elements have much more difficult job of promoting "how to think." ~ Huey P. Newton, Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 29, #NFDB
697:The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
698:Well, it's such an intricate, beautiful script about eight professional robbers pulling a heist, and it deals with elements of betrayal, trust, instinct, and need for relationships. ~ Harvey Keitel, #NFDB
699:What is the shortest word in the English language that contains the letters: abcdef? Answer: feedback. Don't forget that feedback is one of the essential elements of good communication. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
700:When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
701:All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. ~ Francine Prose, #NFDB
702:As an individual, I think you have to find your own path. I like the simplicity and purity of Hinduism and many elements of Buddhism. These are all means of accessing spiritual energy. ~ Dave Davies, #NFDB
703:It is necessary to develop a strategy that utilizes all the physical conditions and elements that are directly at hand. The best strategy relies upon an unlimited set of responses. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
704:Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis"
-Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#NFDB
705:Result-oriented, low-tech, low-cost, shamanic medicine, uses natural elements, spirit, and the healing power of a caring community, as practiced by indigenous societies for millennia. ~ Itzhak Beery, #NFDB
706:The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. ~ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, #NFDB
707:The most memorably photos are layered, in good light, and have something really ineresting going on in them. If you can get all three elements into a single frame, now you're talking. ~ Joel Sartore, #NFDB
708:The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing - or heart, mind, and hands - or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage. ~ Eric Maisel, #NFDB
709:With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration. ~ Robert Rauschenberg, #NFDB
710:Dreams are things that could potentially be treating you as a pupil to teach you things so when you wake up, you'll be able to handle certain elements from those dreams in a better way. ~ Tom DeLonge, #NFDB
711:It is this earth that, like a kind mother, receives us at our birth, and sustains us when born; it is this alone, of all the elements around us, that is never found an enemy of man. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
712:One of the strongest and most persistent elements in national development has been that inheritance of political traditions and usages which the new settlers brought with them. ~ Albert Bushnell Hart, #NFDB
713:The default movement on a software project should be in the direction of taking elements of the software away to make it simpler rather than adding elements to make it more complex. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
714:The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
715:The formula for a successful film is simple: good script, good direction, a dedicated cast and a fantastic crew. If you have all of these elements then the rest will fall into place. ~ Hrithik Roshan, #NFDB
716:The software architecture of a computing system is the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software elements, relations among them, and properties of both. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
717:To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive. ~ May Sarton, #NFDB
718:What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
719:when a particle and antiparticle touch
they both disappear in a burst
of gamma radiation
that generates huge amount of energy...
can this be Love?' Art of 4 Elements ~ Nata a Nuit Pantovi,#NFDB
720:All the things that human beings suffer from are how their environment treats them, and how the elements of their planet affects their mind and body--like radiation, cancer, and all. ~ Ornette Coleman, #NFDB
721:Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
722:Hear this!" he helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be nutcrackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" Then he let himself down again, and became silent. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
723:I have always been astonished by hate. Revenge and hate. That is such strange human elements. I have seen a lot of that in my life. I am just as surprised each time. By revenge and hate. ~ Odd Nerdrum, #NFDB
724:I knew there were, in myself, the souls of millions of people who lived centuries ago; not just people but animals, plants, the elements, things, even, matter. All of these exist in me. ~ Klaus Kinski, #NFDB
725:Maybe in some relationships there was so much history that fondness and guilt and curiosity and familiarity remained separate elements and could never be melted down into friendship. ~ Katherine Heiny, #NFDB
726:Remember, that of all the elements that comprise a human being, the most important, the most essential, the one that will sustain, transcend, overcome and vanquish obstacles is - Spirit. ~ Buddy Ebsen, #NFDB
727:...that she is beautiful, an impossible kind of beauty, composed of all the wrong elements: white hair, the flawless but deeply lined skin, the freckles of age dotting the hands and face. ~ Sue Miller, #NFDB
728:That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised. ~ John Landgraf, #NFDB
729:“The three elements of creativity are thus: loving, knowing, and doing – or heart, mind, and hands – or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it; great faith, great question, and great courage.” ~ Eric Maisel, #NFDB
730:Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That’s table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
731:A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements-as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
732:By working with the elements we enable ourselves to be balanced and remain centred, whilst at the same time promoting personal growth through realization of imbalances within ourselves. ~ Sorita d Este, #NFDB
733:Creative people are hubs of diverse interests, influences, behaviors, qualities, and ideas—and through their work, they find a way to bring these many disparate elements together. ~ Scott Barry Kaufman, #NFDB
734:It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. ~ Carl Rogers, #NFDB
735:radioactive Rubidium-87, containing 37 protons (and 50 neutrons), can change or decay to strontium, which has 38 protons. These two elements can be thought of as a radiochemical system. When ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
736:Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don't know that ~ Nick Saban, #NFDB
737:..we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
738:A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand. ~ Alexander Calder, #NFDB
739:Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story. ~ Malcolm Cowley, #NFDB
740:Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact ~ Henry Mayhew, #NFDB
741:I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone. There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He knew how much I hated words like love. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
742:I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can. ~ Tony Burgess, #NFDB
743:The Elements of Prayer|Its ground: God, by whose goodness it springeth in us. |Its use: to turn our will to His will. |Its end: to be made one with Him and like to Him in all things. ~ Julian of Norwich, #NFDB
744:Time and rhythm are the most important elements in music. If both aren't well conceived, organized, and executed, no amount of notes will make the piece a meaningful artistic experience. ~ Anthony Davis, #NFDB
745:For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
746:He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
747:In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion. ~ Edward Everett, #NFDB
748:I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important. ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB
749:No, the only things which do not bother me are the elements. I can overcome them without a fight. All one has to do to get the best of the elements is to stand pat and one will win. ~ William Howard Taft, #NFDB
750:Since doctors generally have nothing to offer us once we shift our focus from treating disease to causing wellness, it is important to familiarize yourself with the elements of health. ~ Douglas N Graham, #NFDB
751:When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
752:Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
753:... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world's ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise. ~ Carl Rakosi, #NFDB
754:Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
755:There are some universal elements when it comes to motherhood - especially for Black moms. Black women are selfless. Many women think of their children before they think about themselves. ~ Tichina Arnold, #NFDB
756:There were certain elements of the human world that where out of their control: war, inflation, American Idol…all things which could cause major irritation to a vampire’s daily life. ~ Mimi Jean Pamfiloff, #NFDB
757:Wewene, I say to myself: in a good time, in a good way. There are no shortcuts. It must unfold in the right way, when all the elements are present, mind and body harnessed in unison. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
758:Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
759:As we have seen before, cities are like mad scientists, creating their own crazy ecological concoctions by throwing all kinds of native and foreign elements into the urban melting pot. ~ Menno Schilthuizen, #NFDB
760:But Jehovah’s* day will come as a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar,* but the elements being intensely hot will be dissolved, and earth and the works in it will be exposed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
761:God’s call on our lives is often surprising and usually is based on God’s ability to see how our various elements in the past might fit together to accomplish God’s purposes in the present. ~ Adam Hamilton, #NFDB
762:Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
763:One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit -- now struggling to quit its material tenement -- flit when at length released? ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
764:Tension is an interesting quality - and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational. ~ Annabelle Selldorf, #NFDB
765:To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today. ~ Asger Jorn, #NFDB
766:We are trying to make up these other elements by gaining cost efficiencies through our reengineering process and through overt fund-raising activities to better support graduate education. ~ Charles M Vest, #NFDB
767:Wild is an interesting word. We imagine wild to be untamed and out of control but, of course, nature isn't like that; nature is controlled, ordered, extremely disciplined by all its elements. ~ Sally Green, #NFDB
768:Black people are the only segment in American society that is defined by its weakest elements. Every other segment is defined by its highest achievement. We have to turn that around. ~ Jewell Jackson McCabe, #NFDB
769:Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman's jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with. ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
770:Elements which are similar as regards their chemical properties have atomic weights which are either of nearly the same value (eg. Pt, Ir, Os) or which increase regularly (eg. K, Ru, Cs). ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
771:The only thing you have to do is to remain quiet, undisturbed, solely turned towards the Divine; the rest is in His hands.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Peace and Silence, Quiet,#NFDB
772:The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratiṣṭhā, which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #NFDB
773:The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. ~ Denise Levertov, #NFDB
774:This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a simple lesson but one that we often ignore: The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
775:A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Elements of Perfection, #NFDB
776:I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music. ~ Erykah Badu, #NFDB
777:I've practiced centering prayer. I've contemplatively prayed. I've prayed liturgically... I've benefited from each, and I still do. In ways you'll see, elements of each style are still with me. ~ Larry Crabb, #NFDB
778:Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
779:Similarly, gender-equality, supremacy of law, political participation, civil society, and transparency are among the indispensable elements that are the imperatives of democratization. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan, #NFDB
780:The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person’s existence. ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
781:The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It’s also wrong. There’s a fifth element, and generally it’s called Surprise. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
782:Vegetables are organized bodies that grow on the dry areas of the globe and within its waters. Their function is to combine immediately the four elements and to serve as food for animals. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
783:A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts. ~ Evan Parker, #NFDB
784:Death is such as generation is, a mystery of nature; a composition out of the same elements, and a decomposition into the same; and altogether not a thing of which any man should be ashamed, ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
785:I'm very much a stand-up comedian in my heart. That's really what I do. Now I'm trying to incorporate all of the different elements of my work as a performer, and use it as a stand-up comedian. ~ Margaret Cho, #NFDB
786:I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
787:It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
788:One makes advances. You do! You come to see what your story is like. That’s part of the fun: to see how you can get the other elements that are not your natural interests or concerns primarily. ~ Peter Taylor, #NFDB
789:The elements and majestic forces in nature, Lightning, Wind, Water, Fire, and Frost, were regarded with awe as spiritual powers, but always secondary and intermediate in character. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman, #NFDB
790:We are like two young lovers huddled beneath an umbrella in a rainstorm. We find shelter from the elements, warmth in each other’s arms, and solace in otherwise unforgiving circumstances. ~ Michelle Leighton, #NFDB
791:When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind. ~ Johannes Kepler, #NFDB
792:And the best films feel like a fist punching you in the solar plexus and all elements of the filmmaking process - the acting, the design, the cinematography, the music, is all working to one end. ~ Ethan Hawke, #NFDB
793:Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
794:One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true. ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
795:Part of my success with urban bachata is reinventing yourself as an artist and continuing to give people different kind of fusions, mixing up the elements and concepts without changing the beat. ~ Romeo Santos, #NFDB
796:Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
797:The air is the most mysterious, the most exciting, the most challenging of all the elements. We leave the planet, we leave the sea, we leave the earth. The air is no longer of this world . ~ Arthur David Beaty, #NFDB
798:What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
799:Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle. ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
800:Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
801:Holmes realizes both the necessity of getting into the mindset of the actors involved in the drama and the immediate difficulty of doing so, with all of the elements that could at any point go wrong ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
802:the person with neurotic anxiety endeavors to run away from some elements within herself or himself. This can be accomplished only by dissociating these elements, which sets up inner contradictions. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
803:The worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government. The Border Patrol knows this. Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
804:Ah, Mastery of the Five Elements!" "Is that the one we want?" I asked. "No, but a good one. How to tame the five essential elements of the universe - earth, air, water, fire, and cheese!" "Cheese? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
805:America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
806:Humans, even nomadic ones, need a sense of home. Home need not be one place or any place at all, but every home has two essential elements: a sense of community and, even more important, a history. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
807:The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles. ~ Alfred Stieglitz, #NFDB
808:The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country. ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
809:This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity. ~ Jack Vance, #NFDB
810:Very few are those who can stand firm on the rock of their faith and trust in the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Trust in the Divine Grace and Help,#NFDB
811:All existence is in conflict. We fight the elements, we fight our consciences, we fight the limitations and eventual mortality of our bodies. All things happen by conflict, of one sort or another. ~ Joel Shepherd, #NFDB
812:I am nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen of the ocean, queen also of the immortals… ~ Kristen Callihan, #NFDB
813:My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage. ~ John Edgar Wideman, #NFDB
814:The admitted right of a government to prevent the influx of elements hostile to its internal peace and security may not be questioned, even where there is not treaty stipulation on the subject. ~ Grover Cleveland, #NFDB
815:The ANC is very concerned (about shedding votes), hence they are pinning their hopes that those rogue elements will run the elections, so rigging will be on the high. There is no doubt about that ~ Bantu Holomisa, #NFDB
816:The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
817:The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
818:We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations. ~ Timothy Leary, #NFDB
819:When at the consecration the priest moves into the mode of first-person quotation, he is not speaking in his own person but in the person of Jesus—and that’s why those words change the elements. ~ Robert E Barron, #NFDB
820:At the U of U, we were inventing a new language. One of us would contribute a verb, another a noun, then a third person would figure out ways to string the elements together to actually say something. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
821:I don't know if I've ever played a character who's close to me. There have been some elements of myself in different roles. Sometimes, I show one side of myself and then completely conceal the other. ~ Karen Allen, #NFDB
822:John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
823:“the perdition ahead would demand this flight into the regions where all individuality is shed, where the stable elements of human activity disappear and there is no firm foothold anywhere to be found.” ~ Bataille, #NFDB
824:[2 Pet. 3:10] But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.10 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
825:A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more. ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
826:Earth is our mother. It’s as fertile and nurturing as farmland; as moist as soil and as dry as sand. In its physical manifestations (such as stones), earth represents the densest of the elements. ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
827:First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. If ever again we should be involved in war, we will fight it in all elements, with all services, as one single concentrated effort. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
828:If you're trying to be realistic and bring real life to the screen, you are going to have different elements. That's what I'm trying to do. As I make the movie, different elements come in naturally. ~ Takashi Miike, #NFDB
829:I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself. ~ William Butler Yeats, in Rosa Alchemica, #NFDB
830:(Rom 8:22)We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
831:The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out from the start, it came out of the process. ~ Said Sayrafiezadeh, #NFDB
832:All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
833:In almost every task involving form, there are dozens, often hundreds of contradictory elements, which need to be forced to work in harmony by man's will. This harmony can be acheived only through art. ~ Alvar Aalto, #NFDB
834:In the Cabala the higher powers do not descend into the lower elements to ensoul the mundane diffusion, but rather cast their shadows upon the Deep or the lower elements. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
835:People love westerns worldwide. There's something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It's a simpler time. There's no organized laws and stuff. ~ Clint Eastwood, #NFDB
836:There is a system and a flow and an organization to the structure of the universe. Just like there's a system and a flow and an organization to the human body, to atomic structures, to the elements. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
837:A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world. ~ Victor Burgin, #NFDB
838:Carl von Clausewitz warned that “it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance. ~ Dave Grossman, #NFDB
839:...everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess...the scattered moments of kinship we feel with others are, when reduced to their most basic elements, accidental discoveries of kinship with ourselves. ~ Joel Derfner, #NFDB
840:Herein lies one of the most tragic elements to emerge from my research: that every black parent of a teenage child I spoke to had factored in the possibility that this might happen to their kid. Indeed, ~ Gary Younge, #NFDB
841:I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
842:I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. ~ Edward Hopper, #NFDB
843:I'm so used to being behind the scenes. I didn't really want to be front and center. One of the elements of my relationships with the artists I work with is that I'm not front and center, and they are. ~ Arthur Fogel, #NFDB
844:The abstracting of visual elements in order to recognize their particularity has become automatic, but seeing, combining, and creating them as integrated 'wholes' will remain a lifelong challenge. ~ Freeman Patterson, #NFDB
845:There is no way that my mother hasn't influenced my career. She's my first critic. She's my best critic. She has the best instincts from writing to style to editing, to the visual elements of my career. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
846:The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing...What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. ~ Roland Allen, #NFDB
847:We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers. ~ Erwin Chargaff, #NFDB
848:And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
849:If God contains the fullness of all good things in Himself like an inexhaustible fountain, nothing beyond Him is to be sought by those who strike after the highest good and all the elements of happiness. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
850:If one does all these things to a human being, what is left is no longer precisely a human being. It is a man plus large elements of hardware.
The man has become a cybernetic organism: a cyborg. ~ Frederik Pohl,#NFDB
851:In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce. ~ Marcella Hazan, #NFDB
852:I've found that from my point of view, the Chen style contained many things that I knew on a fairly superficial level from Eagle Claw, and that had Chen elements of what seemed to me the soft in Eagle Claw. ~ Lou Reed, #NFDB
853:Leaders develop their styles as they interact with their constituencies. They move toward the style that seems most effective in dealing with the mixture of elements that make up their constituencies. ~ John W Gardner, #NFDB
854:My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski, #NFDB
855:The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
856:THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
857:Catholicism consistently celebrates the coming together of contraries, not in the manner of a bland compromise, but rather in such a way that the full energy of the opposing elements remains in place. ~ Robert E Barron, #NFDB
858:TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
859:King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear. ~ Paul Scofield, #NFDB
860:My Rainforests Project ... has three main elements. Firstly, to determine how much funding the rainforest countries need to re-orientate their economies so that the trees are worth more alive than dead. ~ Prince Charles, #NFDB
861:Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial. ~ John Ashcroft, #NFDB
862:The Kalachakra texts claim that, prior to its formation, any particular universe remains in the state of emptiness, where all its material elements exist in the form of potentiality as “space particles. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
863:To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
864:2PE3.10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
865:Above, below, all around are the movements of the elements. But the motion of virtue is in none of these: it is something more divine, and advancing by a way hardly observed it goes happily on its road. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
866:Ah, Mastery of the Five Elements!"
"Is that the one we want?" I asked.
"No, but a good one. How to tame the five essential elements of the universe - earth, air, water, fire, and cheese!"
"Cheese? ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
867:Connection, Communication, and Cooperation. These three elements, when interwoven with threads of understanding, respect, and love, are what combine to create the beautiful tapestry of a peaceful, happy home. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
868:It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.— It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
869:It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
870:There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with our personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. ~ Sloane Crosley, #NFDB
871:A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
872:A mind always hopeful, confident, courageous, and determined on its set purpose, and keeping itself to that purpose, attracts to itself out of the elements things and powers favourable to that purpose. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine, #NFDB
873:By using the model-based language pervasively and not being satisfied until it flows, we approach a model that is complete and comprehensible, made up of simple elements that combine to express complex ideas. ~ Eric Evans, #NFDB
874:...flaky, crisp, layered, and multi-textured. Which was me. Sweet and sour. Soft and crisp. I discovered that these varied elements, that for so long had seemed at odds, were actually complementary. ~ Kergan Edwards Stout, #NFDB
875:I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
876:Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
877:John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”44 ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
878:Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular (arming the Iranians) were quite legal. ~ David Frum, #NFDB
879:A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment—not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
880:Gentlemen," returned Mr. Micawber, "do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants- I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
881:He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful. ~ Niccol Machiavelli, #NFDB
882:Just as a flower is made only of non-flower elements, Buddhism is made only of non-Buddhist elements, including Christian ones, and Christianity is made of non-Christian elements, including Buddhist ones. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
883:My clothes are put together out of different basic elements so that a woman can express the way she wants to look, transform, metamorphosize herself not as the woman I decided but as she herself wants to be. ~ Sonia Rykiel, #NFDB
884:Often I forget that design is really about removing things: optimizing the flow of information, the display, so there are the fewest elements possible, but still they preserve the essence of the subject. ~ David Mccandless, #NFDB
885:[Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
886:I have been
Presumptuous against love, against the sky,
Against all elements, against the tie
Of mortals each to each, against the blooms
Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs
Of heroes gone. ~ John Keats,#NFDB
887:The good thing about playing this style that we play, you know, the progressive element of it, is that we can add in different elements of different styles. And that creates a more interesting overall sound. ~ John Petrucci, #NFDB
888:The reason I love comics is that they DON'T move, and there is NO sound. As a creator I have to evoke those elements in the drawings and writing, and the reader has to create those elements in their own minds. ~ Dave McKean, #NFDB
889:They shake hands—the solid, down-to-earth man and the restless, unpredictable lightning in the sky. I feel like a tree exposed to the elements, my roots clinging to the soil, my branches flirting with heaven. ~ Leylah Attar, #NFDB
890:Try not to take pictures which simply show what something looks like. By the way you put the elements of an image together in a frame show us something we have never seen before and will never see again. ~ Constantine Manos, #NFDB
891:Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses. ~ Patrick Modiano, #NFDB
892:Whenever there is any difficulty we must always remember that we are here exclusively to accomplish the Divine's will.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T1],#NFDB
893:...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson, #NFDB
894:A software architecture is defined by a configuration of architectural elements--components, connectors, and data--constrained in their relationships in order to achieve a desired set of architectural properties. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
895:In a word, removing control farther away from the ordinary citizen and taxpayer is tantamount to giving the intelligent, far-sighted and public spirited elements in society a longer lever to work with. ~ Edward Alsworth Ross, #NFDB
896:Introspection,” which took four takes to produce an acceptable version, was unlike anything that came before it. It embodied the most radical elements of Monk’s approach to composition and improvisation.36 ~ Robin D G Kelley, #NFDB
897:There appears to exist a general systems laws which apply to any system of a certain type, irrespective of the particular properties of the system and of the elements involved. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, #NFDB
898:When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
899:As I've gotten older, now I've really got to back that up with record sales. Anytime showed me that I could still have some of those elements I wanted, but you still have to come with hit after hit after hit. ~ Brian McKnight, #NFDB
900:Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
901:But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special. ~ Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, #NFDB
902:If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered and seemingly foreign to each other, and suddenly introduce order where the appearance of disorder reigned. ~ Wilfred Bion, #NFDB
903:I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements. ~ Sheryl Lee, #NFDB
904:People ask me what makes a great skier. It takes the gift; but besides the gift it takes all the availability of mind which permit total control of all the elements that lead to victory. - total composure. ~ Jean Claude Killy, #NFDB
905:That subject matter has never left me...The more you're in the material world, the more there is a tendency for a search for serenity and a need to not be distracted by physical elements that are around you. ~ Martin Scorsese, #NFDB
906:There are always differences when you adapt a novel to a film. A novel is longer so you're automatically cutting out elements and introspection but this is actually a film that stays very close to the novel. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
907:This is the Bond of the new millennium. Everything is updated, from the action sequences to the interaction between the characters. All the elements reflect changes that have occurred in the world in recent years. ~ Rick Yune, #NFDB
908:A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
909:Animated program was definitely a different process but it was fun though, it had elements of doing my podcast where we were all in a booth with microphones joking around and stuff. It was definitely a fun process. ~ Bill Burr, #NFDB
910:He is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him: he is indeed a horse; and all other jades you may call beasts, ~ Joseph Monninger, #NFDB
911:It is rare that somebody can surrender entirely to the Divine's Will without having to face one or another of the difficulties.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender,#NFDB
912:It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious. ~ Oliver Heaviside, #NFDB
913:Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist. ~ Johannes Stark, #NFDB
914:Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go. ~ Pharrell Williams, #NFDB
915:Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
916:When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table. ~ Elizabeth Neel, #NFDB
917:wild men in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes. ~ Zane Grey, #NFDB
918:A big part of the humor is in identifying with the tragic elements of the film. The New Zealand sense of humor is very dark. Our films are usually very dark and it's always someone being killed. Usually a child. ~ Taika Waititi, #NFDB
919:Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. ~ Janine Benyus, #NFDB
920:Lincoln's stature and strength, his intelligence and ambition - in short, all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem, rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village. ~ John George Nicolay, #NFDB
921:Man's nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint. ~ Al-Ghazali, #NFDB
922:Unstructured time, a heavy responsibility for self-direction, and high demands for excellence seem to be the common elements in these situations that are easy triggers for addictive behaviors. Procrastination ~ Patrick J Carnes, #NFDB
923:And it is because a series of elements in Spanish life which operate today the same way as they did in the times of Blanco White made obvious my relationship with him, based on a similarity in Spain's condition. ~ Juan Goytisolo, #NFDB
924:ISO 8601, data elements and interchange formats. It allows seamless intercourse between different bodies, governments, agencies, and corporations.” I couldn’t help myself as the words tumbled out. It was a sickness. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
925:Like the child who does not reason and has no care, trust thyself to the Divine that His will may be done.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Faith and the Divine Grace, Trust in the Divine Grace and Help,#NFDB
926:The black magic of the past, the darkness that sank Atlantis when man made slaves of the demons of the elements and chained them to do his bidding, still survives to this day. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #NFDB
927:Thus the radio elements formed strange and cruel families in which each member was created by spontaneous transformation of the mother substance: radium was a "descendant" of uranium, polonium a descendant of radium. ~ Eve Curie, #NFDB
928:• What will the display really show your audience? • How will it help them to see your point? • What is the essence of the point this particular chart helps to make? • Are any elements in this slide nonessential? ~ Garr Reynolds, #NFDB
929:You are water, you understand - electrified water. The elements and balance of ocean water match the blood in your human body. Humans were made from the ocean. This is one of the greatest secrets of creation. ~ Barbara Marciniak, #NFDB
930:As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and you have to end the show strong. Those are the two key elements. You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em. ~ Mitch Hedberg, #NFDB
931:But most days, I'm lost. I spend more time trying to keep myself in check and my elements under control that I forget about everyone around me. I let my emotions rule me, and more often than not, they get in my way. ~ M R Merrick, #NFDB
932:I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance: 1. Savageness; 2. Changefulness; 3. Naturalism; 4. Grotesqueness; 5. Rigidity; 6. Redundance. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
933:I happen to love a good run almost as much as sex. Like sex, there are often times I don't think I'm interested until I'm into it. Unlike sex, I do have to get out of bed and into the elements. I hate leaving bed. ~ Fran Lebowitz, #NFDB
934:I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I'd get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I'd love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn't taste of anything else. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
935:I think when you embrace celibacy other elements of the relationship have to come forth. There isn't an opportunity for you to be blinded by your sexual desires there is an opportunity to see things more clearly. ~ Edwina Findley, #NFDB
936:Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don't know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It's just accepting that we don't know everything and everything is possible. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
937:Love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
938:The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other. ~ Mark Hopkins, #NFDB
939:Then, the specialists themselves, probably believe that in the course of EU expansion, for example, some elements concerning the readiness of some economies to enter the Eurozone have not been taken into account. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
940:We love those beautiful, Latin American stories where there is an element that's more mysterious and wonderful. I think as a child a lot of us love the idea of the star and more of the supernatural elements. ~ Catherine Hardwicke, #NFDB
941:Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them. ~ Rudolf Arnheim, #NFDB
942:Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest. ~ Ronald Rolheiser, #NFDB
943:He always said his reputation is all of himself a man can leave behind when he goes back to the elements. Honesty and honor, he said, courage and grace. Those four are what make a man. That’s what he taught me, sire. ~ Dave Duncan, #NFDB
944:If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are. ~ Paul Banks, #NFDB
945:My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
946:Skiing in Whistler was great fun. It's an extreme environment that's very different to my own and I had never skied before, so I had to learn to take on the elements quite bravely. It was nice to try something new. ~ Hayley Atwell, #NFDB
947:You know that all things are composed of four elements. Tell me their qualities", he orders, his smile suddenly vanished. "Fire is hot a dry. Air is dry and moist. Water cold and moist. Earth cold and dry." [Gisa] ~ Karen Maitland, #NFDB
948:Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening-even ~ Maria Konnikova, #NFDB
949:Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even ~ Maria Konnikova, #NFDB
950:I’ve learned that we must first create a space of time, quiet, and isolation before we can truly see God. Three elements are necessary for this. We need to first believe, then learn to perceive, and finally receive. ~ Gary L Thomas, #NFDB
951:The key elements in the art of working together are how to deal with change, how to deal with conflict, and how to reach our potential...the needs of the team are best met when we meet the needs of individual persons. ~ Max De Pree, #NFDB
952:The villains are all parts of me. For years I've been wondering what it would be like if all those negative elements were forced onto the main character's side. I can understand a character with that kind of anger. ~ Hayao Miyazaki, #NFDB
953:We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from... Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
954:You have to have all these elements of a feature but with a third of the length. And also the development process - there are so many more steps in getting notes from the studio, getting notes from the network. ~ John Francis Daley, #NFDB
955:Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed. ~ Paul Rand, #NFDB
956:Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
957:I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
958:iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table—two cubic feet of it weighs as much as a Buick, which makes iridium one of the world’s best paperweights, able to defy all known office fans. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
959:It is only with burning anger that we can speak of this attack by counter-revolutionary reactionary elements against the capital of our country, against our people's democratic order and the power of the working class. ~ Janos Kadar, #NFDB
960:One of the first signs of mastery of the muladhara chakra is a healthy decrease in appetite; lesser quantities start to suffice you because you now process all the gross elements much better than you ever did before. With ~ Om Swami, #NFDB
961:The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements in a causal chain. ~ Chaim Potok, #NFDB
962:The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
963:We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532,#NFDB
964:Both the Hopi and Zuni Indians, who have used the venom in purification rituals, assert that it effectively reduces the human soul to its rarest elements, stripping away all that is false, illusory, or fearful. ~ Nicholas Christopher, #NFDB
965:But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
966:It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it's unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they'll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
967:I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place. ~ Stanley Crouch, #NFDB
968:Political leaders or governments owe their position partly to force and partly to popular election. They cannot be regarded as representative of best elements, morally or intellectually, in their respective nations. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
969:To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
970:To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
971:When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things. ~ Ken Burns, #NFDB
972:When you train to be an apothecary, you learn about composition and creation, construction and destruction. You learn to isolate elements and how to put them together, how to balance them to make the perfect cure. ~ Melinda Salisbury, #NFDB
973:Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
974:Friendship- my definition- is built on two things. Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don't have trust, the friendship will crumble. ~ Steig Larsson, #NFDB
975:Friendship- my definition- is built on two things. Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don't have trust, the friendship will crumble. ~ Stieg Larsson, #NFDB
976:If you are doing all five of the basic things, do you know what the next principle of God’s will is? Do whatever you want! If those five elements of God’s will are operating in your life, who is running your wants? God is! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
977:Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments. ~ John Seely Brown, #NFDB
978:People who are involved in self-discovery lead different types of lives. The lives they lead are not necessarily the lives of renunciation. Rather, it is a structuring of the elements in your life in a particular way. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
979:So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self,
by forming it well
to the great
intangibles about us. ~ David Whyte,#NFDB
980:The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
981:There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
982:There's editing, and scripts to read and edit, and casting, and all the elements of production that just sort of take up the normal downtime that you would have as an actor. So there's not a lot of that for me. ~ Richard Dean Anderson, #NFDB
983:We have to consciously build the elements of a world based on a culture of peace and disarmament. This is a task for everyone. It is multidimensional in scope, requiring meaningful participation of people at all levels. ~ Widad Akreyi, #NFDB
984:Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
985:Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
986:If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
987:I like adding little elements into the final mix. I'm more fond of the '70s glam than '80s. I have that style of vocals... there are a lot of pop artists who are using the glam vibe in their music. I'm part of that wave. ~ Adam Lambert, #NFDB
988:In particular, secular, democratic elements must distinguish between religion as philosophy, spiritual experience, guide to morality and psychological solace and religion as dogma, bigotry and a vehicle for communalism. ~ Bipan Chandra, #NFDB
989:Legislation to create a new 10 percent tax bracket, reduce the marriage penalty, cut the tax rate on dividends and capital gains, and increase the child tax credit have been essential elements in this economic expansion. ~ Roger Wicker, #NFDB
990:Our negative life situations are essential elements for us to fulfill our intended destiny. However, unless we possess the power of endurance to live through the dark of the night, we will not see the glory of daybreak. ~ Chin Ning Chu, #NFDB
991:The landscape affects the human psyche - the soul, the body and the innermost contemplations - like music. Every time you feel nature deeper you resonate better with her, finding new elements of balance and freedom. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #NFDB
992:The universal elements are integrity, vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Conscience has been educated through studying and pondering the universal, timeless principles of all six major world religions. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
993:But I must admit that my motives were no entirely noble; there were in me at least some elements of the anger and hurt vanity that characterize a spurned lover, and these unworthy sentiments helped me to keep my distance. ~ Mohsin Hamid, #NFDB
994:I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time. ~ Robert B Parker, #NFDB
995:The fundamental imperative about idolatry was that worship was not to be paid to any created thing such as a messenger, a planet, a star, one of the four elements, or to anything produced from them. ~ Maimonides, Mishneh Torah (c. 1180), #NFDB
996:The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
997:The tone of the picture and the atmosphere was in my head and in my blood in a way once I'd decided to make the picture. I had to find my way through that to choose, select, emphasise certain visual elements and sound. ~ Martin Scorsese, #NFDB
998:To arrive at the definition of the problem he must begin by finding the 'critical factor'. This is the element (or elements) in the situation that has to be changed before anything else can be changed, moved, acted upon. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
999:To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1000:We should remain students for lifetime. You should be ready and yearn to learn from every moment of life. The basic elements of life need to be associated with learning. The learning process should be a part of your DNA. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
1001:Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations. ~ Georges Seurat, #NFDB
1002:As far as politically how country music goes, it's true that it's regarded from a distance as a genre of music that at different times, the more right elements of the political spectrum have claimed for their own. ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter, #NFDB
1003:I have always enjoyed storytelling, especially narratives told through the voices of the African diaspora. Their influences are so diverse, so vast. I love incorporating elements of fiction and fantasy into their realities. ~ C P Patrick, #NFDB
1004:Life is a battle, Sasha. All existence is in conflict. We fight the elements, we fight our consciences, we fight the limitations and eventual mortality of our bodies. All things happen by conflict, of one sort or another. ~ Joel Shepherd, #NFDB
1005:Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it. ~ Jeffrey Tayler, #NFDB
1006:Sometimes the elements of our life present us with a challenge that is an initiation in disguise, a fire walk that burns your lower nature right out of you so that you are able to adapt to a higher level of consciousness. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
1007:The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1008:The soul of leisure, it can be said, lies in “celebration”. Celebration is the point at which the three elements of leisure come to a focus: relaxation, effortlessness, and superiority of “active leisure” to all functions. ~ Josef Pieper, #NFDB
1009:Whenever we have fifteen free minutes, an hour or two, we have the habit of using our computers or cell phones, music, or conversations to forget and to run away from the reality of the elements that make up our beings. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1010:If the love is true, then treat it the same way you would plant - feed it, protect it from the elements - you must do absolutely everything you can. But if it isn't true, then it's best to just let it wither on the vine. ~ Hiromi Kawakami, #NFDB
1011:I've always had a feeling that the image is 50% of the emotion that an audience feels and it's subliminal. Yet, how you arrange the elements in front of a camera has an impact on people's belief about that world in some way. ~ Scott Hicks, #NFDB
1012:Many people know how to work hard; many others know how to play well; but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
1013:Since art is the expression of beauty and beauty can be understood only in the form of the material elements of the true idea it contains, art has become almost uniquely feminine. Beauty is woman, and also art is woman. ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
1014:Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour. ~ Laura Esquivel, #NFDB
1015:Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. ~ H Rider Haggard, #NFDB
1016:For me, personally, skiing holds everything. I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it's a complete physical expression of freedom. ~ Robert Redford, #NFDB
1017:I don't think the Egyptian people want to see what is a very clear effort to obtain political and economic rights turn into any kind of new form of oppression or suppression or violence or letting loose criminal elements. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
1018:One of the great advantages of cremation - apart from all sanitary conditions - lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the material elements composing the physical and astral corpses, brought about by the burning. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
1019:There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things. ~ Empedocles, #NFDB
1020:The vision of Hinduism is unity in diversity. First, Hinduism lovingly embraces all alien elements; second, it tries to assimilate them; third, it tries to expand itself as a whole, with a view to serving humanity and nature. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
1021:To keep my forward thinking on the track, I’ve divided my job into four elements: customers, employees, merchandise, and promotion. All during the week I make notes and jot down ideas as to how I can improve my business. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
1022:I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites. ~ Tony Hillerman, #NFDB
1023:If indeed "elegance is frigid," it can as well be described as filthy. There is no denying, at any rate, that among the elements of the elegance in which we take such delight is a measure of the unclean, the unsanitary. ~ Jun ichir Tanizaki, #NFDB
1024:I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
1025:Is there something that may have caused the action other than my initial assessment (in the characterization phase)? Do I need to adjust my initial impressions in either direction, augmenting some elements or discounting others? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1026:Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1027:Therefore, as hath already been said, Establish thyself firmly in the equilibrium of forces, in the centre of the Cross of the Elements, that Cross from whose centre the Creative Word issued in the birth of the Dawning Universe. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1028:What if, parallel to the life we know, there is another life that does not die, which lacks the elements that destroy our life? Perhaps in another dimension there is a different force from that which generates our life. ~ Frank Belknap Long, #NFDB
1029:When we can see the non-rose elements when looking at a rose, it is safe for us to use the word "rose." When we look at A and see that A is not A, we know that A is truly A. Then A is no longer a dangerous obstacle for us. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1030:I like being New Orleans. Different aspects. You have the lake house. You have a huge, almost plantation-style house, so I like the different elements of the city and what the city has to offer and putting it on the screen. ~ Morris Chestnut, #NFDB
1031:I like to have a connection with the elements and the earth. Rock is the skin of the planet, and you can learn something from the rock, but you need to communicate with element. You have to be part of the element, not fight it. ~ Fred Nicole, #NFDB
1032:I think overall, making a movie is like putting a stamp on the world. Every time I make a movie, I feed in elements to make sure that it's my movie. I'm marking poles like a dog does. This is how I show my movies to the world. ~ Mamoru Oshii, #NFDB
1033:It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1034:One of the key elements of human behavior is, humans have a greater fear of loss than enjoyment of success. All the academic studies will show you that the fear of loss of capital is far greater than the enjoyment of gains. ~ Laurence D Fink, #NFDB
1035:Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline. ~ Peter De Vries, #NFDB
1036:The four elements: earth, water, fire and air; the qualities recognized by touch: cold, heat, dryness, and moisture; the temperaments: sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and saturnine; the faculties: natural, animal, and vital. ~ Noah Gordon, #NFDB
1037:The Lord's Prayer is an excellent model, but it was never intended to be a magical incantation to get God's attention. Jesus gave this prayer as a pattern to suggest the variety of elements that should be included when we pray. ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
1038:You always want to write the perfect song. But no one will ever write the perfect song, I guess. I would just like to write on that has all the elements of what I'm tring to do. And I'm working on it. I'm always working on it. ~ Mose Allison, #NFDB
1039:Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter, #NFDB
1040:For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation. ~ Sergei Eisenstein, #NFDB
1041:His eyes are blue, and blue eyes up close are a celestial phenomenon: nebulae as seen through telescopes, the light of unnamed stars diffused through dusts and elements and endlessness. Layers of light. Blue eyes are starlight. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1042:Life, we have just said, is in some way an extension of matter. With the elements, it retains some of the habits of matter. It can even, we shall see, copy it and mimic it by making itself mechanical. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
1043:Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning. ~ Barry Unsworth, #NFDB
1044:My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us. ~ Emma Thompson, #NFDB
1045:Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1046:Simplicity, clarity, complexity, and ambiguity are not mutually exclusive states in language; the sensitive typographer is one who can manifest these states in the right mix by controlling the elements at his or her disposal. ~ Timothy Samara, #NFDB
1047:Such proofs are collectively known as the sport of diagram chase, best executed by pointing several fingers at di"erent parts of a diagram on a blackboard, while enunciating the elements one is manipulating, and stating their fate ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1048:The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1049:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1050:You have to be careful, because, in the [Donald] Trump stimulus package, there were two elements. One is the infrastructure investment program, which at this moment doesn't have the financing spelled out in any effective form. ~ Judy Woodruff, #NFDB
1051:Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
1052:Because he was so, so wrong about hearts and buildings being different. They are the same. They are structures that keep us safe, that shield us from the elements. And the minute they start to falter, everything else is at risk. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
1053:Friendship—my definition—is built on two things,” he said. “Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don’t have trust, the friendship will crumble. ~ Stieg Larsson, #NFDB
1054:New elements, she thought, pleased with the challenge. Roarke had been fiddling, adding some elements and upgrades. When she engaged in hand-to-hand with the second thief, she knew he’d fiddled with the programming with her in mind. ~ J D Robb, #NFDB
1055:That which has died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of thyself. And these too change, and they murmur not". ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1056:The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick. ~ Florence Nightingale, #NFDB
1057:I like the way the word Witch connects us back through all the generations of those who went before us who harnessed the power of the elements and magick to improve their lives and deepen their connection with the natural world. ~ Deborah Blake, #NFDB
1058:In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms - square, cube, line and color - to produce logical systems. Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations. This kept them simple. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
1059:It has repeated elements that appear frequently. A pesky, mysterious three-hundred-base-pair sequence called Alu appears and reappears tens of thousands of times, although its origin, function, or significance is unknown. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1060:It really showed that you can do a major motion picture, from the folks at Marvel, that has multiple characters on an epic scale. On top of that, it also showed us that one of the most important elements is a certain kind of levity. ~ Jeph Loeb, #NFDB
1061:Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1062:There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes. ~ Joan Robinson, #NFDB
1063:But basically what I like are the possibilities, and the fantasy element of the show. Not science fantasy so much, but fantasy, the humanistic elements and how people relate when they’re in a dire situation or comedic situation. ~ Fisher Stevens, #NFDB
1064:I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound. ~ Gerry Beckley, #NFDB
1065:It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking under consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding. ~ Wallace Thurman, #NFDB
1066:The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1067:There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its hostile stance towards sexuality. ~ John Roberts, #NFDB
1068:The Trump plan is a different plan. It's a you're fired plan. And there's two key elements to it. First, Donald Trump said wages are too high. And both Donald Trump and Mike Pence think we ought to eliminate the federal minimum wage. ~ Tim Kaine, #NFDB
1069:Various Eastern fathers referred to the practice of married priests in their churches, offering each one of us elements for a further careful evaluation of the choice of the Latin church to connect celibacy to ordained priesthood. ~ Angelo Scola, #NFDB
1070:I focus on the elements of a movie that are meant to invisibly affect me as a viewer. The edges. As an author, Im aware of how the subconscious things can pluck at a readers emotions, and I love it when filmmakers do the same. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1071:"Like alchemy, erotic love contains within itself the possibility of uniting two elements. In love the sexual and the spiritual may be united." ~ Arlene Landau, Ph.D., Jungian analyst, Tragic Beauty, p. 63, on the next episode of Speaking of Jung, #NFDB
1072:My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
1073:People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care. ~ Dick Costolo, #NFDB
1074:Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. All ~ H Rider Haggard, #NFDB
1075:an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recomposethe very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose
into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in
his ears. It was first love. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,#NFDB
1076:Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to this liking. ~ Paul Bowles, #NFDB
1077:Because up to sixteen years old you feel gymnastics more. You can show your emotion, grace, like woman gymnastics, not kid's gymnastics. I feel I have good shape, and I can do it elements everything, but, it's not competition for me. ~ Olga Korbut, #NFDB
1078:But this mind isn't somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can't move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It's the mind that moves. ~ Bodhidharma, #NFDB
1079:Poor health tends to make narcissists of us, and narcissism makes us blind to compassion, empathy, anger management, and patience - all elements that, when mastered, will lead us higher up the evolutionary scale toward immortality. ~ Brian L Weiss, #NFDB
1080:There was certainly much to be said for being at the mercy of the primeval elements, to be swept along by circumstances one could not in any way control, but it was good to return, to feel one's identity expand again, unchecked. ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
1081:Troops must be fed with ammunition and so on but also with information, with images, with visual intelligence. Without these elements troops cannot perform their duties properly. This is what is meant by the logistics of perception. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
1082:We establish some stability and focus in our mind and see which elements in it lead to greater peace, which to greater suffering. All of it—both the peace and the suffering—happens lawfully. Freedom lies in the wisdom to choose. ~ Joseph Goldstein, #NFDB
1083:We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1084:You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story. ~ Danny Boyle, #NFDB
1085:An architectural style is a coordinated set of architectural constraints that restricts the roles/features of architectural elements and the allowed relationships among those elements within any architecture that conforms to that style. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1086:[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. ~ Paul Bowles, #NFDB
1087:devotion to God, for modern believers, involves learning to inhabit—rather than simply trumping with dogma or literal scripture—those elements of our existence that seem inimical to his: limitedness, contingency, suffering, death. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1088:HIP-HOP HAS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS DEALING WITH MUSIC, RAP, GRAFFITI ART, B-BOYS (WHAT YOU CALL BREAK BOYS)... AND ALSO DEALING WITH CULTURE, AND A WHOLE MOVEMENT DEALING WITH WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING, AS WELL AS PEACE UNITY AND FUN. ~ Afrika Bambaataa, #NFDB
1089:I do also think it eludes genre a bit - not in any groundbreaking way but you can't quite call it a comedy and you can't quite call it a romantic anything. It's not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things. ~ Colin Firth, #NFDB
1090:Once you've got a concept and a sense of themes and what it's about, then you can start to add your plot and sort of Tetris in all of the elements that you want to see, but also attach them to something that has cohesion, like a mold. ~ Shane Black, #NFDB
1091:The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1092:triggering happy memories of past positive moods and getting your conversation partner to identify those happy positive memories with your conversation, you pave the way for them identifying you with positive elements of their lives. ~ Patrick King, #NFDB
1093:Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.47 ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1094:Families are like snowflakes: they come in many shapes and sizes and no two are the same. And like a snowflake, they are very delicate and must be protected and guarded from elements that threaten to destroy their precarious balance. ~ Jaycee Dugard, #NFDB
1095:I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
1096:If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
1097:If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
1098:If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
1099:In my mind, there is no reason why Stoicism shouldn't become as popular as Buddhism, especially in the Western world, where the dominant culture, Christianity, itself absorbed a large number of elements from Greco-Roman Stoicism. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
1100:The earth should not be injured. The earth should not be destroyed. As often as the elements, the elements of the world are violated by ill treatment, so God will cleanse them thru the sufferings, thru the hardships of mankind. ~ Hildegard of Bingen, #NFDB
1101:"The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. What we know of the future is made up of purely abstract elements—it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
1102:Wahhabism goes and takes elements from the Islamic tradition that are most oppressive of women, and highlights and enlarges them and makes them the whole of Islam. In my view, that's a clear corruption of the Islamic tradition. ~ Khaled Abou El Fadl, #NFDB
1103:Water—the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1104:When we talk about stem cells, we are actually talking about a complicated series of things, including adult stem cells which are largely cells devoted to replacing individual tissues like blood elements or liver or even the brain. ~ David Baltimore, #NFDB
1105:Does your industry compete on functionality or emotional appeal? If you compete on emotional appeal, what elements can you strip out to make it functional? If you compete on functionality, what elements can be added to make it emotional? ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
1106:Eddie Murphy was my guy for a long time. My first exposure to “SNL” was his “Best Of” VHS, and I would watch it over and over again. He was one of the few people on the show to play with the live elements, and engage with the audience. ~ Taran Killam, #NFDB
1107:every artist is both male and female, and ... sometimes, the two great elements are in conjunction with him, so that all by himself he suddenly gets the melody and the burst of feeling of a great symphony without any external stimuli. ~ Ruth St Denis, #NFDB
1108:Horty relished the gnar. To him, true adventure should be steeped with elements of failure, risk, and even death, preferably all three. He was especially fond of the Shackleton quote "I love the fight and when things are easy I hate it. ~ Scott Jurek, #NFDB
1109:I'm always in the elements, it seems like it's pouring rain on me a lot and there's crowds of people pushing me around, and it feels very real. Which is great as a actor, you don't have to come up with too much of it. I'm always amazed. ~ Charlie Day, #NFDB
1110:John Berger once defined music by saying that it began as a howl, became a prayer, then a lament, and still contains the elements of all three. I think that's pretty wise. That's about the only way I know how to explain what music is. ~ John K Samson, #NFDB
1111:The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
1112:There’s something high and mighty about anger, when distilled to its basic elements. Anger goes wrong when you get godlike. Your desires become divine law. Poke your way into every example of bad anger, and you’ll find god-playing. ~ David A Powlison, #NFDB
1113:This is one of the things I don't like so much about French cinema - we have tendency to concentrate on actors and dialogue and we don't care so much about the visual aspect. I love when you use all the elements at your disposal. ~ Jean Pierre Jeunet, #NFDB
1114:Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, Ive kinda gotten over, I guess Im saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom. ~ Matthew Tobin Anderson, #NFDB
1115:Having photographed the landscape for a number of years and specifically working with trees and in the forest I found, without consciously thinking about it, that it was a great learning experience for me in terms of organizing elements. ~ John Sexton, #NFDB
1116:It's one thing to write the music, it's another thing to write it down, it's another thing to play it, and something else altogether again to learn how to play it. These are the elements that are fascinating, and, you know, move my world. ~ Gail Zappa, #NFDB
1117:Nor are the earth, water, and other elements, examined by ARISTOTLE, and HIPPOCRATES, more like to those, which at present lie under our observation, than the men, described by POLYBIUS and TACITUS, are to those, who now govern the world. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1118:One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1119:Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1120:The rare earth elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us mocking, mystifying and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities. ~ William Crookes, #NFDB
1121:Everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into not-being. If things are resolved into the elements from which they came, then there will be others: else how did they come into being at all? ~ Sallust, #NFDB
1122:From 'Periodic Table of Elements':
A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether | Thrown on fire--just | A little jump of flame, like grief, or | Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing | Off, it then is gone. ~ Lucie Brock Broido,#NFDB
1123:How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1124:If you look at Marriage of Figaro or Butterfly or Traviata, all of those elements are in there. I also have to have a very specific location in mind. The physical environment of where the opera takes place is very key - the "sound world." ~ Jake Heggie, #NFDB
1125:In the diagnosis of disease, Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: “Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1126:It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “truth” and “original form” of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy, #NFDB
1127:It's three disparate elements: the stop sign, the stage paintings, and the skeleton paintings. Those are three sharp ideas, although none of them are necessarily good ideas. Tons of artists have made whole careers out of those three ideas. ~ Josh Smith, #NFDB
1128:The things you learn from sports - setting goals, being part of a team, confidence - that's invaluable. It's not about trophies and ribbons. It's about being on time for practice, accepting challenges and being fearful of the elements. ~ Summer Sanders, #NFDB
1129:The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically. ~ Bruno Dumont, #NFDB
1130:This goal has five elements to it: purification of mind, overcoming sorrow and lamentation, overcoming pain and grief, treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace, and attaining happiness by following that path. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
1131:Water- the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1132:You can discover the sacred and the divine inside or outside a church or other spiritual organization. You may be inspired by spiritual pioneers to discover your own sacred elements in life and the world and thus shape your own religion. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
1133:After I quit my band, I definitely was so full, like I'm so full I could never eat again. I had that kind of feeling where the elements, like the touring stuff, were harder for me and I definitely felt fine not experiencing it again. ~ Jason Schwartzman, #NFDB
1134:For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool? ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
1135:From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1136:In the two years of preparing material for shows, I realized there are elements that are definitely going to work live, but might not be the most exciting thing to put on a record. And there's stuff that I really love but it falls flat live. ~ Girl Talk, #NFDB
1137:Out of ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1138:Taphonomy—the arrangement or relative position of the human remains, artifacts, and natural elements like earth, leaves, and insect casings—is one of the most crucial sources of information to a forensic anthropologist at a crime scene. ~ William M Bass, #NFDB
1139:the body and blood should not be treated as one. There are two elements because there is a two-fold application in the Communion. The wine, which is His blood, is for our forgiveness. And the bread, which is His body, is for our healing. ~ Joseph Prince, #NFDB
1140:The 'magic' is the known and unknown quiet, spiritual, invisible thread which links and reveals harmonic elements to a universe of high vibrational sensory. And our beloved Bro. Maurice David knew it's undeniable creative power, from within. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
1141:The weather, the plants, the animals, and our human survival are all inextricably linked. The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
1142:It had rained on some vivid green ferns in Maine and it was quite beautiful. I was moving the camera slightly and studying the ground glass. Looking at those 20 square inches, trying to find out just what were the right elements to include. ~ John Sexton, #NFDB
1143:The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over. ~ Carl Rogers, #NFDB
1144:The old people, they struggled, they fought the elements, they fought everything was against them here. The river, the summers and the heat. So finally when they settled Hurricane there and got the water on that bench, most of them left. ~ Calvin Johnson, #NFDB
1145:The strategic objective is to help Iraq government succeed.That's the strategic and not only to help the government the reformers in Iraq succeed, but to help the reformers across the region succeed to fight off the elements of extremism. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
1146:A Divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo,#NFDB
1147:The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). ~ David Frum, #NFDB
1148:The greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment. ~ Robert O Becker, #NFDB
1149:The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it. ~ David Weinberger, #NFDB
1150:When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist. ~ Andrea Mitchell, #NFDB
1151:Zen jogging. I wasn't wearing that many clothes because --that's part of the process. You're meant to commune with the elements. Normally I wouldn't have worn my jeans, but I put them on because I know the English are a modest people. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan, #NFDB
1152:An Infodeck isn’t meant to be displayed as a slide show; rather, it is meant to be consumed by a single person—either at a computer, on a printout, or on an alternate display like a tablet computer—as a series of discrete narrative elements. An ~ Neal Ford, #NFDB
1153:I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1154:IF YOU HAVEE EXPERIENCED HUNGER, YOU KNOW THAT HAVING FOOD IS A MIRACLE. IF YOU HAVE SUFFERED FROM THE COLD, YOU KNOW THE PRECIOUSNESS OF WARMTH. WHEN YOU HAVE SUFFERED, YOU KNOW HOW TO APPRECIATE THE ELEMENTS OF PARADISE THAT ARE PRESENT ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1155:In my work, there's mechanism that is "real," which is formed from the historical concepts of the images that I'm working with. That doesn't fall completely into a cliché. There are elements about it that carry historical context and edges. ~ Lorna Simpson, #NFDB
1156:Meditation, you know, comes by a process imagination. You go through all these processes purification of the elements - making the one melt the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1157:She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
1158:the human heart uses the tools of reality to create elements of story, and the human heart responds to climax in the structure of story, this means that climax, or point of decision, could very well be something that exists in the universe. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
1159:The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements…But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner, not in spurts. ~ Taiichi Ohno, #NFDB
1160:All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
1161:Band members have a special bond. A great band is more than just some people working together. It's like a highly specialized army unit, or a winning sports team. A unique combination of elements that becomes stronger together than apart. ~ Steven Van Zandt, #NFDB
1162:If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1163:If you're directing and acting, I feel like they both suffer, to some extent. There are so many elements to it. If you do acting and directing, at the same time, it's not going to be as good, I believe, as if you focus on one or the other. ~ Josh Hutcherson, #NFDB
1164:Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three. ~ Asa Gray, #NFDB
1165:Memeticists have to give empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate. ~ Dan Sperber, #NFDB
1166:Memmi believes racism has four elements—an insistence on difference, a negative valuation of that difference, the generalization of that difference to an entire group, and finally the use of that difference to justify hostility and aggression. ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
1167:Our sexuality is body, culture, age, learning, habit, fantasies, worries, passions, and the relationships in which all these elements combine. That’s why sexuality can change with age, partner, experience, emotions, and sense of perspective. ~ Cordelia Fine, #NFDB
1168:Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
1169:The Christian's God does not merely consist of a God who is the Author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and consolation. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1170:When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1171:A Value Proposition creates value for a Customer Segment through a distinct mix of elements catering to that segment’s needs. Values may be quantitative (e.g. price, speed of service) or qualitative (e.g. design, customer experience). ~ Alexander Osterwalder, #NFDB
1172:In every negotiation in which you’re involved—in every negotiation in which I’m involved—in fact, in every negotiation in the world (from a diplomatic geopolitical negotiation to the purchase of a home)—three crucial elements are always present: ~ Herb Cohen, #NFDB
1173:No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion ~ Christopher Dawson, #NFDB
1174:Everyone is a theologian, either conscious or unconscious, in the sense that everyone has some conception of the nature of reality, of the demands of reality, and of those elements in reality that support or threaten meaningful existence. ~ James Luther Adams, #NFDB
1175:It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist ~ Paul Mason, #NFDB
1176:One can often trace the sources of a brand personality - here it is the advertising, there the pack, somewhere else some physical element of the product. Of course, the personality is clearest and strongest when all the elements are consistent. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1177:The word “experience” is one of the most deceitful in philosophy. Its adequate discussion would be the topic for a treatise. I can only indicate those elements in my analysis of it which are relevant to the present train of thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
1178:Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1179:Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic. ~ Bill Viola, #NFDB
1180:Fall 2013 was inspired by the 1970s equestrian lifestyle. I wanted to incorporate the moody and romantic - intricate baroque detailing and classic menswear elements - with something tougher and edgier in a nod to London's rock n' roll underground. ~ Rachel Zoe, #NFDB
1181:I am not suggesting that elements of the Personality Ethic—personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking—are not beneficial, in fact sometimes essential for success. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
1182:I do a variety of activities like Pilates, bike riding, physical therapy, and running. I also train on the ice five to six days a week. On the ice, I work on my programs as a whole and the individual technical elements that comprise the programs. ~ Sasha Cohen, #NFDB
1183:If the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of treatment would be association: integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that “that was then, and this is now. ~ Bessel van der Kolk, #NFDB
1184:If there's any elements that you see or don't see in the series it will only be because of some legal thing. Not all of the companies like each other. Some are like, "Don't use this, don't use that." We don't have control over the whole thing. ~ Bruce Campbell, #NFDB
1185:If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see. ~ Archibald MacLeish, #NFDB
1186:I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas. ~ Caio Fonseca, #NFDB
1187:It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young. ~ Frederick William Faber, #NFDB
1188:It is our lot, if we are honest, to live in duality and paradox. The dialogue of those paradoxical elements is the stuff of life. Surprisingly it is also the surest path toward unity. Our dreams are its stage, its workshop and battleground. ~ Robert A. Johnson, #NFDB
1189:Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table—thallium, lead, and polonium—the nucleus of poisoner’s corridor. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1190:As the Dalai Lama reminds us, “Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
1191:beliefs create or constrain possibilities, desires lead to preferences among them, and intentions represent commitments to specific courses of action. Each of the primitive elements can evolve in time, which is why mental models have momentum. ~ Venkatesh G Rao, #NFDB
1192:Education, work, and access to health care for all are key elements for development and the just distribution of goods, for the attainment of social justice, for membership in society, and for free and responsible participation in political life. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1193:Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific truths. The poet's job is to combine new elements. Explore their melting, seeping into one another. ~ Diane Glancy, #NFDB
1194:The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions. ~ Amin Maalouf, #NFDB
1195:Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us. ~ Umberto Boccioni, #NFDB
1196:At each moment may our attitude be such that the Divine's Will determines our choice so that the Divine may give the direction to all our life.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, To Will What the Divine Wills,#NFDB
1197:By now, cooking has become so thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly, seemed like a good way to take hold of it again. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1198:[Donald] Trump is the only Republican candidate in the last seven cycles to understand all three legs of the foreign policy stool - the three crucial elements of our foreign policy, what they need to be - and they are trade, war, and immigration. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1199:Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1200:If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity. ~ Ian Mortimer, #NFDB
1201:There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1202:Trust is the glue that holds everything together. It creates the environment in which all of the other elements win-win stewardship agreements, self-directing individuals and teams, aligned structures and systems, and accountability can flourish. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
1203:What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
1204:Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1205:Greek myths offer the Westerner access to stories that embody elements analogous to many of our most basic psychological predispositions. If we can "build a personal connection to the myth" then we may come to see the sources of meaning they reflect. ~ Polkinhorn, #NFDB
1206:Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
1207:Once they have attained their definite form at the end of each verticillate ray, the elements of a phylum tend to come together and form societies just as surely as the atoms of a solid body tend to crystallise. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1208:Some say romance novels are pure fantasy because of that happy ending, but the truth is that romantic love is everyday magic and happy endings happen every minute. Falling in love is one of the core elements of the human condition; it touches us all. ~ Sylvia Day, #NFDB
1209:Within the bowels of these elements, where we are tortured and remain for ever, The Labyrinth hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place; for where we are is the Labyrinth, and where the Labyrinth is, there must we ever be. Hoo. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
1210:As professor in the Polytechnic School in Zürich I found myself for the first time obliged to lecture upon the elements of the differential calculus and felt more keenly than ever before the lack of a really scientific foundation for arithmetic. ~ Richard Dedekind, #NFDB
1211:But God, who is the beginning of all things, is not to be regarded as a composite being, lest perchance there should be found to exist elements prior to the beginning itself, out of which everything is composed, whatever that be which is called composite. ~ Origen, #NFDB
1212:Fermi turned to Bohr with weary eyes and a slanted smile, and shrugged. “So we thought we had discovered new elements. We even named them—hesperium, ausonium. Wrong! Mythical! They were ordinary old barium and iodine. We were careful—too careful. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
1213:Figure out the logic of the problem by identifying its elements. In other words, systematically think through the questions: What exactly is the problem? How can I put it into the form of a question. How does it relate to my goals, purposes, and needs? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1214:My forever mission is to take the best elements of both commercial and independent films and bring them together. I learned so much about the art of independent films and I have so much fun in commercial ones. I think that a mix of both is good. ~ Michael B Jordan, #NFDB
1215:The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1216:This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements. ~ Henri Cartier Bresson, #NFDB
1217:To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1218:You can't get votes that way. So [the Republicans] have been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1219:Analysis is simplifying, breaking down things into parts, picking out strands and elements. Analysis is comparing unknown things with things that are known. Analysis also involves picking out relationships and putting them back together as a whole. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
1220:Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on? ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
1221:If men make war in slavish observance of rules, they will fail. No rules will apply to conditions of war as different as those which exist in Europe and America...War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive. ~ Ulysses S Grant, #NFDB
1222:If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1223:Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1224:These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be. ~ Joel Bakan, #NFDB
1225:The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed. ~ Edward Bernays, #NFDB
1226:The trader had told me that Mare Nostrum meant “Our Sea” in Latin, and I had marveled at the arrogance of Rome, which would dare to lay claim to the very elements of the earth. The goddess must have laughed at them, I’d thought. I certainly had. ~ Lesley Livingston, #NFDB
1227:A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost. ~ Mary Antin, #NFDB
1228:Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1229:There is no royal road to geometry. (μή εἶναι βασιλικήν ἀτραπόν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν, Non est regia [inquit Euclides] ad Geometriam via) ~ Euclid, alleged reply when Ptolemy I Soter asked him if there was a shorter road to learning geometry than through Euclid's Elements., #NFDB
1230:When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
,#NFDB
1231:You go from movies where you are wearing nice clothes and you're trying to smell good to a movie where you are in water and you are wet all day, and you are dealing with that elements, it gets rough, but it was definitely something I wanted to try. ~ Morris Chestnut, #NFDB
1232:In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war. ~ Arthur Henderson, #NFDB
1233:It is not only the unit vote for the Presidency we are talking about, but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1234:Lyons’s views on America were generally in keeping with those of the Foreign Office: he was well disposed to its people, but he thought that democracy made the government weak and handed too much power to the violent and ignorant elements of society. ~ Amanda Foreman, #NFDB
1235:Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1236:One of man's basic concerns is a house - a place to find protection from the rain and elements. But a house can be much more than a building. It is the social context of his family life -\-\ the place where he loves and shares with this closest to him. ~ Pedro Arrupe, #NFDB
1237:One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs. ~ Richard Holloway, #NFDB
1238:One volcano in Hawaii, one volcano in Indonesia, produces enough gases in the atmosphere, which include those natural elements that are in the Earth's crust, that, uh, kind of make all the, you know, the science that we have about what we produce, moot. ~ Jim Gibbons, #NFDB
1239:There's so many things that can go wrong in the execution of a project like a television show or a movie, so many little elements, any number of things, all the way to marketing - like they could market it poorly and nobody finds it and down it goes. ~ Bryan Cranston, #NFDB
1240:You know, [congressmen] can talk about sequester, they can talk about all of the different things that they've - they're doing. But this isn't like we have a choice. This is something where - and we're gonna be cutting elements of government certainly. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
1241:A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1242:Essentially all religions include decisive truths and mediators and miracles, but the disposition of these elements, the play of their proportions, can vary according to the conditions of the revelation and of the human receptacles of the revelation. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
1243:I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there's always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student's poem is terrible or quite wonderful. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
1244:I'm making sure to cover all the bases. Like, I've always wanted a leather jacket like Michael Jackson's in "Thriller" since I was a kid. I'm trying to incorporate a lot of elements of pop culture that I've always revered or was really into when I was young. ~ Karen O, #NFDB
1245:The depression we find ourselves in here, and which is causing havoc in America, is allowing people to give weight to that which divides them, rather than to the shared experiences and elements of connection they see mirrored in their fellow man. ~ Jacqueline Winspear, #NFDB
1246:The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1247:The passion of pity with its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by the higher divine compassion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #NFDB
1248:To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves - these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1249:Africa does not have an uncle abroad who will come to bail it out of its political and economic woes. It is important that African countries wake up and pool whatever resources they have and jointly deal elements pulling our continent down a death blow. ~ Bernard Membe, #NFDB
1250:All that we know about the interaction between leaders and constituents or followers tells us that communication and influence flow in both directions; and in that two-way communication, nonrational, nonverbal, and unconscious elements play their part. ~ John W Gardner, #NFDB
1251:Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end. There, death was but one of many elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said, 'Don't worry, it's only death. Don't let it bother you. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1252:Even though the neighborhood I grew up in had some unhealthy elements, there was a caring there where you knew that you didn't want to get caught doing something wrong. There were bright spots in the neighborhood where I felt nurtured on a community level. ~ Sonja Sohn, #NFDB
1253:I find that, when I'm working, if I start the day with a run - outside, not in a gym, but just me out there in the elements, with only my own legs to propel me forward... It's something to do with just being in the world and getting out of my own head. ~ Tom Hiddleston, #NFDB
1254:The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1255:the masculine and the feminine? What is one without the other, for how else would the world exist? But each one contains elements of the other too. So use your power, but when others are too strong, be soft; when softness loses vigour, be strong. ~ David Clement Davies, #NFDB
1256:Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork--a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyreal choreography. ~ Steven Millhauser, #NFDB
1257:Well not really to get attention, but to entertain, but you know to show some elements of rural life as well, it kind of blended all in, its kind of like a mockery in a sense, kind of stab back at people that have those stereotypical ideas of the south. ~ Bubba Sparxxx, #NFDB
1258:We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right? ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
1259:When life came out it did not bring with it any new materials into existence. Its elements are the same which are the materials for the rocks and minerals. Only it evolved a value in them which cannot be measured and analysed. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, #NFDB
1260:A-not-complete-unit, or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of "thought." It is not "thought" which needs showing. ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
1261:Democracy is made up of three elements. One is whether the laws support pluralistic principles. The second is whether the people take advantage of these laws. The third element is whether the peoples' wallets are thick enough to benefit from this democracy. ~ Lech Walesa, #NFDB
1262:Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, #NFDB
1263:Science sees the process of evolution from the outside, as one might a train of cars going by, and resolves it into the physical and mechanical elements, without getting any nearer the reason of its going by, or the point of its departure or destination. ~ John Burroughs, #NFDB
1264:So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
1265:That which had grown from the earth, to the earth, But that which has sprung from heavenly seed, Back to the heavenly realms returns. This is either a dissolution of the mutual involution of the atoms, or a similar dispersion of the unsentient elements. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1266:We have had good and bad Presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American Nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad Presidents cannot destroy it, and have been able to do no more than slightly to retard the public's advancement. ~ Henry Clay, #NFDB
1267:When your brain spins negative scenarios, remind yourself that you may not be getting an accurate perception of reality. Your brain might be following its negativity bias, playing up some elements more than others, or omitting some positives entirely. ~ Olivia Fox Cabane, #NFDB
1268:Authentic Christianity is not just about keeping and protecting the faith and keeping the rules. It is even more than living to deepen your relationship with Jesus. Authentic Christianity, the real deal, is about embracing all of these important elements. ~ Joseph Stowell, #NFDB
1269:Genre, then, as a means of study is a way we can examine and discuss the elements and functions of a type of practice. This work of identifying the features and characteristics is theoretical in one sense and critical in being able to understand how it works. ~ David Bate, #NFDB
1270:I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it. ~ Jack Kirby, #NFDB
1271:One of the reasons I continue to speak out is that the solutions to the counterterrorism problem involve other parts of the national security community - especially other elements of the Department of Defense, State, FBI, Homeland Security and the staff. ~ John Poindexter, #NFDB
1272:People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent "the past" and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will. ~ Johan Huizinga, #NFDB
1273:The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed. ~ Kate Braverman, #NFDB
1274:We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like? ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1275:When faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem... your only option is to act swiftly, some might even say irrationally. Removing the most dangerous elements first... and methodically attacking each subsequent challenge in a separate, but deliberate manner. ~ Jeph Loeb, #NFDB
1276:When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot. ~ Jamie Wyeth, #NFDB
1277:While all bodies are composed of the four elements, that is, of heat, moisture, the earthy, and air, yet there are mixtures according to natural temperament which make up the natures of all the different animals of the world, each after its kind. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
1278:Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
1279:for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1280:How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension? ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1281:In our highly mediated, technologically driven world, we're all looking for meaningful ways to connect. This has constantly inspired me to create environments full of lively, immersive, experiential elements specifically crafted to foster human connection. ~ David Rockwell, #NFDB
1282:Senator Bill Bradley defines a movement as having three elements: 1. A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build 2. A connection between and among the leader and the tribe 3. Something to do—the fewer limits, the better ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
1283:To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1284:True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1285:All trembling, I reached the Falls of Niagara, and oh, what a scene! My blood shudders still, although I am not a coward, at the grandeur of the Creators power; and I gazed motionless on this new display of the irresistible force of one of His elements. ~ John James Audubon, #NFDB
1286:However, he was happy. He felt he was conquering nature. He laughed aloud. He felt he was stronger than the elements. In this type of weather animals hid in their holes and did not come out. He was out, fighting the elements. He was a man, master of the world. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
1287:I try to bring elements of my own personality to every character I've played, but I think I'm pretty similar to the character I'm playing now. The biggest departure would have to have been Freaks' and Geeks Sara, who was this sort of subordinate and shy girl. ~ Lizzy Caplan, #NFDB
1288:The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure - or, at least, of the structure of the surface. ~ Johannes Stark, #NFDB
1289:We’re all products of our past,” Devon said. “What we choose to do with it is our decision, no one else’s. You can choose to be damaged, fragile. Or you can choose to be more than the broken elements of your psyche. Fire tempers steel. Pain tempers character. ~ Tiffany Snow, #NFDB
1290:Flaws reveal a lot about a character and who people are. The flawed elements of a character are where I find their humanity. Those are the things I tend to identify with - the weaknesses. I don't know why, but I identify with struggle more than with success. ~ Liev Schreiber, #NFDB
1291:[N]othing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1292:Significant officials at publicly traded companies are casually and cavalierly engaged in insider trading. Because insider trading has as one of its elements communication, it doesn't take rocket science to realize it's nice to have the communication on tape. ~ Preet Bharara, #NFDB
1293:The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, with the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
1294:The method had originated in the legendary cloning of Dolly, the Scottish sheep. Later came the avalanche of cloned species: fish, birds, goats, cattle, even dogs and cats. The process had become so formulated that elements were taught as early as high school. ~ Scott Sigler, #NFDB
1295:Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes. ~ Daniel Levitin, #NFDB
1296:Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1297:Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
1298:Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
1299:Exceptional physical conditions, private interest, religion, in that it puts a brake on the inordinate taste for material wealth—these are, from the first weeks of the American journey, the three elements that profoundly marked Tocqueville’s arguments. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1300:I think there's a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There's something transcendent about it. It's sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate. ~ Maynard James Keenan, #NFDB
1301:Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops - that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
1302:The lower mind is the instrument of habit, appetite, emotion, sensation, and self-preservation. The higher mind accepts to itself philosophy, religion, and the arts, and contemplates the more refined elements of material existence. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
1303:The sign of the new Covenant is humility, hiddenness—the sign of the mustard-seed. The Son of God comes in lowliness. Both these elements belong together: the profound continuity in the history of God’s action and the radical newness of the hidden mustard-seed. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1304:You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1305:An object is great in proportion to its power of resistance to time and the elements. That is why we think the pyramids are great. But see, the desert is greater than the pyramids, and the sea is greater than the desert, and the heavens are greater than the sea. ~ Ameen Rihani, #NFDB
1306:In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time. ~ George Clooney, #NFDB
1307:I seem to respond most to places that are more cosmopolitan because of my Manhattan upbringing. Some of the major international cities I've visited, like Madrid, Rome and London, have a lot of similarities and "New York" elements while ... having their own flavor. ~ Bobby Flay, #NFDB
1308:The president made it clear that he expected Congress, while they take action to repeal the most corrosive elements of Obamacare, the taxes, the mandates, things that are suppressing job creation and driving up the premiums for working families across the country. ~ Mike Pence, #NFDB
1309:There are six elements of gravitas critical to leadership: grace under fire, decisiveness, emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room, integrity and authenticity (people don't like fakes), a vision that inspires others, and a stellar reputation. ~ Sylvia Ann Hewlett, #NFDB
1310:The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble. It's the same humility that causes people at a certain time every day to get on their knees and put their foreheads on the ground in honor of something or someone. ~ Michael J Fox, #NFDB
1311:Those stars with more than about ten times the mass of the Sun achieve sufficient pressure and temperature in their cores to manufacture dozens of elements heavier than hydrogen, including those that compose planets and whatever life may thrive upon them. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1312:Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements. ~ Mary Gaitskill, #NFDB
1313:When friends enter a home, they sense its personality and character, the family's style of living - these elements make a house come alive with a sense of identity, a sense of energy, enthusiasm, and warmth , declaring: "This is how we are; this is how we live." ~ Ralph Lauren, #NFDB
1314:All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
1315:Compassion, understandings and respects are the key elements of humanity. To grow means, to embrace all - there is no space for hatred, exclusion and discrimination.
To grow means more respect, more collaboration, more humanity, more integration and more support. ~ Amit Ray,#NFDB
1316:Every one who understands the subject will agree that even the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests is intelligible only to those who have learned at least the elements of the differential and integral calculus, as well as analytical geometry. ~ Felix Klein, #NFDB
1317:Having collected an army and concentrated his forces, he must blend and harmonize the different elements thereof before pitching his camp. [“Chang Yu says: “the establishment of harmony and confidence between the higher and lower ranks before venturing into the field; ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
1318:Once you start listing the elements of a system, there is almost no end to the process. You can divide elements into sub-elements and then sub-sub-elements. Pretty soon you lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
1319:The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each. ~ Roger Martin, #NFDB
1320:The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct. ~ Dean Radin, #NFDB
1321:The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
1322:There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes. ~ Max Wertheimer, #NFDB
1323:We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid.... We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1324:In the history of the West men have been suspicious of the feminine and have often demonised it. The feminine has been associated with the body, feeling, emotion, sexuality, nature, creation. These are precisely the elements that are crying out for attention today. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
1325:It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
1326:It is a myth to believe that we will find our authentic self after we have left behind or forgotten one thing or another . . . To make our selves, to shape a form from various elements – that is the task! The task of a sculptor! Of a productive human being! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1327:No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift. ~ Josef Pieper, #NFDB
1328:Perhaps Calder's secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate. ~ Blue Balliett, #NFDB
1329:Still deep I burrow, waiting for tomorrow. Closed off, I bear. The open elements don't care. Laid here in this nest, dormant now I rest. Aching to live and roam, though still burrowed in my tomb. When time brings my spring, maybe I'll rise like a king.
-Anonymous ~ Linda Kage,#NFDB
1330:The concepts underpinning feng shui are the dual forces of yin and yang and the five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth). The basic belief is that everything has its own energy and that each thing should be treated in a way that suits its characteristics. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1331:The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. ~ Toyotomi Hideyoshi, #NFDB
1332:These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1333:The solution to the novel's legal problem is a satisfyingly intricate one, and nobody will want his money back on the plot. But the echoes that will remain in your mind after you've finished Reversible Errors will mainly have to do with the novel's other elements. ~ Wendy Lesser, #NFDB
1334:Angela believed that the Nephilistic immune system reacted negatively to human-made chemicals and pollutants. She believed that these unnatural elements worked to break down the cellular structures inherited from the Watchers, creating a form of deadly cancer. ~ Danielle Trussoni, #NFDB
1335:It is commonly said that Marx divided society into two elements, the ‘economic base’ and the ‘superstructure’, and maintained that the base governs the superstructure. A closer reading of the passage just quoted reveals a threefold, rather than a twofold, distinction. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1336:religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy, seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1337:The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life... three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty all belonging to the oldest festal joys. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1338:The WPA was one of the most productive elements of FDR's alphabet soup of agencies because it put people to work building roads, bridges, and other projects... It gave men and women a chance to make some money along with the satisfaction of knowing they earned it. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
1339:A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements - sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1340:After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life. ~ John Polkinghorne, #NFDB
1341:Don’t dismiss the elements. Water soothes and heals. Air refreshes and revives. Earth grounds and holds. Fire is a burning reminder of our own will and creative power. Swallow their spells. There’s a certain sweet comfort in knowing that you belong to them all. ~ Victoria Erickson, #NFDB
1342:I don't go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you're willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money. ~ Francis Ford Coppola, #NFDB
1343:If one's life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
1344:I knew that however bad the Republican party was, the Democratic party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican party was composed gave better ground for the ultimate hope of the success of the colored mans cause than those of the Democratic party. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
1345:It is through this cultural life rather than through experimental encounter in a laboratory that we really come to know the elements individually, and it is a cause for sadness that most chemistry teaching does so little to acknowledge this rich existence. ~ Hugh Aldersey Williams, #NFDB
1346:Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1347:Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1348:Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text. ~ Yuri Lotman, #NFDB
1349:Recruiting is the lifeblood of any program, so you can't put anything above that, ... But it wouldn't matter who you had here if you didn't have the right mental attitude and work ethic. You need all those elements to come together to do something like we are doing. ~ Pete Carroll, #NFDB
1350:Remember that the idea of success contains all the essential elements of success. As a man repeats the word success to himself with faith and conviction, his subconscious mind will accept it as true of himself, and he will be under subjective compulsion to succeed. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1351:"The elements of self-hatred turn many women into treating their bodies like stone or with the desire to transcend them altogether. As a result, the natural body urges, instincts and feelings become repressed and fall into the unconscious." ~ Susan Schwartz, Ph.D., Jungian analyst, #NFDB
1352:The motif of hostile twin brothers belongs to the symbolism of the Great Mother. It appears when the male attains to self-consciousness by dividing himself into two opposing elements, one destructive and the other creative. ~ Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, #NFDB
1353:These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1354:Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
1355:...if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines […], a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1356:In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does. ~ Russell L Ackoff, #NFDB
1357:It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1358:One of the things I've learned over the years is that you only do what you can do as an actor. You do the best job you can, but you have no control over so many elements that are going to determine the outcome of that film. I never pay attention to what happens after. ~ Matt Dillon, #NFDB
1359:The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities. ~ Joseph Stiglitz, #NFDB
1360:theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1361:The standard "foundation" for mathematics starts with sets and their elements. It is possible to start differently, by axiomatising not elements of sets but functions between sets. This can be done by using the language of categories and universal constructions. ~ Saunders Mac Lane, #NFDB
1362:What I do is interpret, not create. I may add elements and do something different. That is what is so incredible about theatre. Why do we love it that there are nine Hamletsor six King Lears over two years? We love to watch a different actor attack the same material. ~ Kevin Spacey, #NFDB
1363:If a painting contains no abstraction nor impressionistic elements, it is a kite that will never fly. But if the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed, the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken. ~ Wu Guanzhong, #NFDB
1364:I find myself more interested in producing. Not because I'm interested in the financial side of it, but just getting together the right elements to make a film, that side of production. I would not be good on the financial side. It would be a disaster from the beginning. ~ John Hurt, #NFDB
1365:It all adds up to this: one of the most important elements of effective praying is a deepening relationship with the Father. This means worshiping the Father, knowing him better through his Word, fellowshiping with him, obeying his will, and seeking to please him. ~ Warren W Wiersbe, #NFDB
1366:Many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it...was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest. ~ Hans Wegner, #NFDB
1367:one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1368:The LSCPA model is a process with five elements: Listen Share Clarify Problem-Solve Ask for Action LSCPA is an effective approach that is recommended by business people, mental health professionals, and others for dealing with conflict in business and personal situations ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1369:There's only three major elements. Air, land, which is your flesh and water, which is your blood. You're walking on a third of yourself. She's called Mother Earth. She gave birth to your ass. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, your maggot food ass going right back to her! ~ Eddie Griffin, #NFDB
1370:Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
1371:Abusiveness can be thought of as a recipe that involves a consistent set of ingredients: control, entitlement, disrespect, excuses, and justifications (including victim blaming)—elements that are always present, often accompanied by physical intimidation or violence. ~ Lundy Bancroft, #NFDB
1372:A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1373:A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1374:She usually survived the Christmas season by ignoring it as best as possible but there were certain elements that reminded her of a pleasant time in her childhood, what she called the prefire days. Music of the season was one of those things that she took heart in. Maggie ~ Alex Kava, #NFDB
1375:When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1376:I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time. ~ Peter Maxwell Davies, #NFDB
1377:In order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one’s behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame for such behavior. Without these elements, self-forgiveness is irrelevant and pseudo self-forgiveness becomes likely. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
1378:Mayeroff lists a number of elements necessary to be a good caregiver, attributes that are just as necessary to be a good employee or manager. His roster includes knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope. ~ Anne Marie Slaughter, #NFDB
1379:The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of 3 dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a 2 dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the photograph. ~ Laszlo Moholy Nagy, #NFDB
1380:Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible. ~ Thomas Browne, #NFDB
1381:When the elements are arranged in vertical columns according to increasing atomic weight, so that the horizontal lines contain analogous elements again according to increasing atomic weight, an arrangement results from which several general conclusions may be drawn. ~ Dmitri Mendeleev, #NFDB
1382:You can’t atone for taking one life by saving another. What good does that do the dead?”
“The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements. ~ Laini Taylor,#NFDB
1383:And the element distinguished as divisible form produces internal and external realms of earth—and with form comes space. According to those who cling to mistaken truths, it is the four elements and their elemental forms that give rise to the assemblage of the five skandhas. ~ Red Pine, #NFDB
1384:As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1385:Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life - children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships - and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
1386:I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power. ~ Tom Tomorrow, #NFDB
1387:Prayer, Communion, fellowship, and Bible reading don’t attract large crowds. So we start adding elements that will attract people. We accomplish a goal, but it is the wrong goal. There comes a point when so many additions are made that you can no longer call it a church. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
1388:The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world. ~ William Barrett, #NFDB
1389:There are those times when a woman fears she is on the brink of extinction or that the dreams and wants she had for her life are endangered. It is then she must declare herself a refuge and take whatever measures to preserve her natural elements."--Portion of the Sea ~ Christine Lemmon, #NFDB
1390:Authority: The power the Bible possesses, having been issued from God, for which it “ought to be believed and obeyed” (Westminster Confession 1:4). Because of its divine author, the Bible is “the source and norm for such elements as belief, conduct, and the experience of God ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1391:In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity. ~ Salvador Minuchin, #NFDB
1392:In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware ~ Paul Tillich, #NFDB
1393:I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot, #NFDB
1394:I've come to realize that, with social media today, people consume fashion very differently than they ever have before - they post it, tweet it, "like" it, retweet it. Today, people define themselves by a collection of various elements in their lives that they connect to. ~ Kenneth Cole, #NFDB
1395:There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle. ~ Mitchell Hurwitz, #NFDB
1396:The shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society) has therefore been marked under neoliberalism.11 In this respect the practices of the neoliberal and developmental state broadly converge. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
1397:The soldiers feel that the Police are not serious with the criminal elements and that they are corrupt. The army had to come in and insist that criminals must be punished. It happens in all countries, there is a time when the army assumes the duty of internal security. ~ Yoweri Museveni, #NFDB
1398:We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together. ~ Herbert Spencer, #NFDB
1399:Well, there were definitely elements of my rise in radio that had to do with my being black. But going back as far as Walter Winchell, Army Archerd and Hedda Hopper, legendary wags would grab a radio microphone and talk about what Errol Flynn and other stars were up to. ~ Wendy Williams, #NFDB
1400:At this moment, the mother grants her daughter the wisdom of her experiences—either pleasures or disappointments—drop by drop. And at the same time, the daughter is nourished by her mother’s life, drop by drop, and she stores away the most valuable elements from it. ~ Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, #NFDB
1401:But after learning about all the different ways in which the mind can affect the body, I can see that even if their treatments don’t work in the way that they claim, therapists like McRoberts may still deliver a powerful blend of the healing elements described in this book. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
1402:In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
1403:[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1404:Scan your subject for things that are clearly impossible. After all, paint isn't magic! If you see that certain elements in the subject are beyond the limits of your pigments, try to form an idea beforehand of how you are going to handle those areas when you get to them. ~ Richard Schmid, #NFDB
1405:The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do. ~ Daniel Quinn, #NFDB
1406:There's no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And there's been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state. I've always believed in the separation of church and state. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
1407:Cinema is a composite art into which you can include all conceivable art or entertainment forms. In film, I can work with novelistic elements, comedy, drama, music, and other forms of entertainment. Film is a versatile expression, combining all elements into one art form. ~ Takeshi Kitano, #NFDB
1408:The campaign against the SARS “rogue unit” was driven by elements in the SSA ... Suffice it to say for now that the stories in the Sunday Times were bullshit, but they were integral to the destruction of the most effective law enforcement organisation in the country. ~ Jacques Pauw, #NFDB
1409:The thirst for affection and love is a human need, but it can be quenched only if it turns towards the Divine. As long as it seeks satisfaction in human beings, it will always be disappointed or wounded.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Divine Love and Human Love,#NFDB
1410:If we desire to do what will please God, and what will help men, we presently find ourselves taken out of our narrow habits of thought and action; we find new elements of our nature called into activity; we are no longer running along a narrow track of selfish habit. ~ James Freeman Clarke, #NFDB
1411:I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
1412:I'm so aware when you make a film, there are so many elements to get right. So many people with such important jobs. You know, it's terrible. I walk away from a film going, "The cinematography was great, wasn't it? But the music wasn't so good. The casting wasn't great." ~ Stuart A Staples, #NFDB
1413:It was frustrating, the way this siblings worshipped their parents. What part of their worlds would crumble if they took a good look at their parents' flaws? If there was no trauma, why not talk about the everyday, human elements of their upbringing? Call a spade a spade. ~ Angela Flournoy, #NFDB
1414:Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless. ~ Ben Marcus, #NFDB
1415:That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd, #NFDB
1416:The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
1417:A character like Wonder Woman is so iconic and yet, over the course of her history, there have been lots of subtle changes. We couldn't stray too far from the comic book look, but you do have a certain amount of leeway in terms of how you interpret those elements for animation. ~ Bruce Timm, #NFDB
1418:As we begin to plan for a new human society, we need to foster common values about clean air, water, and other elements of self-sustenance. These, along with a complete inventory of Earth's resources, will form the basis for a holistic approach to cybernated decision-making. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
1419:Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor.
Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something.
But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant. ~ Vera Nazarian,#NFDB
1420:I’ve started to question if the flaws on the finished photograph aren’t an integral part of the portrait: soft focus, underexposure, poorly applied emulsion, mysterious lines and distortions … all of these elements can change the character of the photograph and its subject. ~ Elizabeth Ross, #NFDB
1421:I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1422:The Story Core Every compelling story has the following five elements: 1) A character 2) The character wants something 3) But something prevents him from getting what he wants easily 4) So he struggles against that force 5) And either succeeds or fails ~ Libbie Hawker, #NFDB
1423:Within just about every serial predator, there are two warring elements: A feeling of grandiosity, specialness, and entitlement, together with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness and a sense that they have not gotten the breaks in life that they should ~ John Edward Douglas, #NFDB
1424:You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1425:Archimedes taught that of all the five elements, quintessence is the most rare, the most valuable, the one that transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary. We are quintessence. It's a divine gift, and like all gifts, we must use it for the Library's greater glory. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
1426:Dr. Montessori believes in liberty for the pupil because she thinks of life "as a superb goddess, ever advancing to new conquests." Submission, loyalty, self-sacrifice seem to her, apparently, only incidental necessities of life, not essential elements of its eternal form. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
1427:I want to change things with everything I do, not for the sake of changing things, but for the sake of taking greater and greater risks, or how minimalist I might be able to be, or how I can involve elements or ingredients in music videos that are not musical, for instance. ~ Jonathan Glazer, #NFDB
1428:Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter. ~ Rex Stout, #NFDB
1429:Every person and everything is an extension of your consciousness. This includes humans, animals, elements of nature, inanimate objects and everything down to a subatomic level. You have manifested them and they have manifested you through the collective consciousness. ~ Russell Anthony Gibbs, #NFDB
1430:First, lest we pass too quickly over the mundane and obvious, we should appreciate that the stuff of the Lord’s Supper—the “elements” as they’re sometimes called—are rather ho-hum stuff: bread and wine, staples of any daily diet in many parts of the world and across history. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1431:I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’ movement, at least under that definition. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1432:I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We’re elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future. ~ John Brunner, #NFDB
1433:One cannot use with impunity the different categories of beings-animals, plants, the natural elements-simply as one wishes, according to economic needs. One must take into account the nature of each being and its mutual connection in an ordered system, which is the cosmos. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
1434:She is oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can't help thinking that she's more than that and she's got other elements going on that no one's ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everyone else. ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
1435:Stalin’s power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication – with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub – and total control of a secret police staffed by men who themselves lived in fear. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1436:The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
1437:The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. ~ Margaret Sanger, #NFDB
1438:The wildflower’s reward for trusting what it senses but doesn’t yet know is to become what is was born to be—a flower whose inevitable place is realized in a small moment of Oneness, as it joins with elements that were here before it came alive and which will live on once it dies. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
1439:Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful! ~ Gabriele d Annunzio, #NFDB
1440:A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery, #NFDB
1441:All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1442:By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
1443:I like to be as diverse as possible. I think the humorous side and the serious side are both elements of my personality. It's what makes me who I am and if I was to neglect either one of those sides and just focus on one of them, it wouldn't be the full spectrum of my personality. ~ Macklemore, #NFDB
1444:It was a place where water brought together all elements. Water glittered with fire, water touched the banks of earth, water rippled with the touch of air. As for the fifth element, the Spirit that created all, it was as if the shape of the pool itself was a mark of Its Presence. ~ Joey W Hill, #NFDB
1445:Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
1446:This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark. And it's something that we do - we bring out elements that we want to emphasise. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
1447:With some reservation, it can be said that certain democratic elements are present in Georgia as well; but it is very clear that the government has to pronounce its explicit wish to resign before something is going to happen. On the western front, only Belarus is an exception. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
1448:[Economic restrictions] is one of the elements that is destabilising the world economic order that was at one time created largely by the United States itself at the dawn of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that was later transformed into the World Trade Organisation. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
1449:European Identity is a western European continental sense of belonging to a European community. It is post-national identity combined with national elements whose evolution requires a constitution to serve as a social contract which will make Europeans loyal to the constitution. ~ Endri Shqerra, #NFDB
1450:Five Containers of the Body These five containers create three realities: sensory reality that depends on the flesh (indriyas), emotional reality that depends on the heart (chitta) and conceptual reality that depends on imagination (manas) and intelligence (buddhi). Elements ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
1451:He wasn’t sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
1452:In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1453:On June 28 Cominform (the post-war successor to Comintern) expelled the Yugoslavs and appealed to "healthy elements" in the Party to overthrow the leadership.
Tito's flattering secret codename OREL ("Eagle") was hurridly downgraded to STERVYATNIK ("Carrion Crow"). ~ Christopher M Andrew,#NFDB
1454:The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1455:The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1456:The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative. ~ Deborah Eisenberg, #NFDB
1457:Hip-hop is the streets. Hip-hop is a couple of elements that it comes from back in the days... that feel of music with urgency that speaks to you. It speaks to your livelihood and it's not compromised. It's blunt. It's raw, straight off the street - from the beat to the voice to the words. ~ Nas, #NFDB
1458:Simon Gathercole argues that both Paul and the Gospel writers considered the good news to have three basic elements: the identity of Jesus as Son of God and Messiah, the death of Jesus for sin and justification, and the establishment of the reign of God and the new creation.12 ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1459:Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
1460:He's of the colour of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger.... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1461:This was, however, no straightforward stone circle of the Cumbrian sort, but a collection of trilithons, chambers, altars and monoliths intended to represent the elements and the signs of the zodiac; as if Stonehenge had mated with a Neolithic passage grave and produced offspring. ~ Ronald Hutton, #NFDB
1462:While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1463:You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1464:Did we do our best to meet our priorities for that day, based on the given circumstances and unexpected life events?” Today agility and fluidity are truly the key elements required—along with patience, compassion, forgiveness, and gentle discipline. Maryrose Solis, founder, March 4ward ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1465:I was getting really influenced by some darker, heavier electro stuff, like Crystal Castles. And I was listening to some dub-step elements, so I thought this was going to be the natural progression, taking my soft melodies and my soft voice and marrying it with something a little heavier. ~ Lights, #NFDB
1466:Pages with a clear visual hierarchy have three traits: The more important something is, the more prominent it is. The most important elements are either larger, bolder, in a distinctive color, set off by more white space, or nearer the top of the page—or some combination of the above. ~ Steve Krug, #NFDB
1467:The ‘I’ that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction—a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public history share the same dynamic principle: both are fables agreed upon. – John Lahr ~ Robert W Fuller, #NFDB
1468:Understanding a business model requires not only knowing the compositional elements, but also grasping the interdependencies between elements. This is easier to express visually than through words. This is even more true when several elements and relationships are involved. ~ Alexander Osterwalder, #NFDB
1469:Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multitude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1470:The Church's foundation is unshakable and firm against the assaults of the raging sea. Waves lash at the Church but do not shatter it. Although the elements of this world constantly batter and crash against her, she offers the safest harbor of salvation for all in distress. ~ Saint Ambrose of Milan, #NFDB
1471:The music gave her an odd, wrenching kind of feeling. There was no pain or unpleasantness involved, just a sensation that all the elements of her body were being physically wrung out. Aomame had no idea what was going on. Could Sinfonietta actually be giving me this weird feeling? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1472:We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1473:When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used. ~ Dogen, #NFDB
1474:Do we love God—all of God, including the “tough” parts of His nature—or do we refuse to bow before those elements that cause us “problems”? If we love Him and worship Him as He deserves, we will not dare to “edit” Him to fit our desires. Instead, we will seek to worship Him in truth. ~ James R White, #NFDB
1475:.....it seems to me plain that all the elements for the urban implosion were present and that the city, in one form or another, performed its special function-that of complex receptacle for maximizing the possibilities of human intercourse and passing on the contents of civilization. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1476:Science has grounds for recognising another phenomenon of a reflective nature co-extensive with the whole of mankind. Here as elsewhere in the universe, the whole shows itself to be greater than the simple sum of the elements of which it is formed. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1477:She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can't help thinking she's more that that and she's got other elements going on that on one's ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everybody else. ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
1478:We’re made out of the water, the earth, the air of the places that fed our ancestors, quenched their thirst, the basic elements of the places that gave them life. Is it really so strange if we feel the heave and pitch of those places, even centuries later, in the vibrations of our atoms? ~ Erin Hart, #NFDB
1479:Certain supplementary restrictions imposed on the text compel us to perceive it as poetry. As soon as one assigns a given text to the category of poetry, the number of meaningful elements in it acquires the capacity to grow and the system of their combinations also becomes more complex. ~ Yuri Lotman, #NFDB
1480:In particular, I’d realized that although I possessed all the elements of a happy life, too often I took my circumstances for granted and allowed myself to become overly vexed by petty annoyances or fleeting worries. I’d wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
1481:I think he [Vaclav Havel] is one of the great figures of the 20th century. He is one of the people that was able to be a part of overthrowing a dictatorial system by talking to people and understanding what the elements of democracy really are and respect for each other and elevating. ~ Judy Woodruff, #NFDB
1482:It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
1483:No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1484:The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman. The Reformation rejected the Roman elements, softened the Greek elements, and greatly strengthened the Judaic elements. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1485:The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity. ~ Harold Innis, #NFDB
1486:The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's a centralising cog. You've got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
1487:Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded. ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
1488:When I first started doing my stand-up act, I played the banjo, did comedy, magic tricks, juggled, read poetry. I stuck it all in. I didn't know you were supposed to just stand up and tell jokes. Essentially, that's what my act became: those five elements - except I dropped the poetry. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
1489:A great reformation and revival-it will happen the same way the early Christians conquered Rome. Their program of conquest consisted largely of two elements: gospel preaching and being eaten by lions, a strategy that has not yet captured the imagination of the the contemporary church. ~ Douglas Wilson, #NFDB
1490:I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1491:I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
1492:Stalker, Blackbeard. Team in two elements. Half at the package on the cargo deck amidships. Half-split between port and starboard below the deck rails. Taking sniper fire from the bridge tower, and heavy contact from the aft cargo deck. Everyone aft of our lights is a shithead.” “Copy, ~ Brian Andrews, #NFDB
1493:The essential elements of a person come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible. ~ Thomas Bernhard, #NFDB
1494:The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1495:The most essential elements of success in life are a purpose, increasing industry, temperate habits, scrupulous regard for one's word... courteous manners, a generous regard for the rights of others, and above all, integrity which admits of no qualification or variation.
-W.A. Clark ~ Bill Dedman,#NFDB
1496:The soul secure in her existence smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age and nature sink in years, but thou shall flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amid the war of elements, the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds. ~ Nick Sagan, #NFDB
1497:Well the real concept of basic needs if you cut it right down are simply the physical needs that are unavoidable for all of us. So to have enough calories to keep our bodies going. Have shelter from extreme elements. To have water that is safe to drink, So I think that's the core of it. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
1498:And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1499:Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look. ~ Chath Piersath, #NFDB
1500:The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the text. ~ Louise Rosenblatt, #NFDB
495 Integral Yoga
128 Occultism
107 Christianity
82 Poetry
80 Philosophy
57 Psychology
37 Yoga
37 Fiction
25 Science
15 Hinduism
13 Integral Theory
7 Cybernetics
6 Education
4 Sufism
4 Mythology
3 Theosophy
3 Philsophy
2 Buddhism
2 Baha i Faith
1 Thelema
1 Mysticism
1 Kabbalah
1 Alchemy
288 Sri Aurobindo
228 The Mother
124 Nolini Kanta Gupta
86 Satprem
55 Aleister Crowley
53 Carl Jung
43 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
38 Plotinus
27 Franz Bardon
22 H P Lovecraft
21 Saint Augustine of Hippo
20 A B Purani
19 William Wordsworth
18 Sri Ramakrishna
15 Percy Bysshe Shelley
14 Lucretius
12 Vyasa
11 Swami Krishnananda
10 James George Frazer
9 Plato
8 Swami Vivekananda
8 Paul Richard
8 Aldous Huxley
7 Norbert Wiener
7 Jordan Peterson
6 Rudolf Steiner
6 George Van Vrekhem
6 Aristotle
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Robert Browning
4 Jorge Luis Borges
4 John Keats
4 Al-Ghazali
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 Patanjali
3 Joseph Campbell
3 Henry David Thoreau
3 Friedrich Nietzsche
3 Anonymous
2 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 Jean Gebser
2 Jalaluddin Rumi
2 Friedrich Schiller
2 Baha u llah
71 The Synthesis Of Yoga
52 Record of Yoga
33 The Life Divine
33 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
30 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
29 Liber ABA
26 Questions And Answers 1954
25 Prayers And Meditations
25 Mysterium Coniunctionis
25 Magick Without Tears
25 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
22 Lovecraft - Poems
20 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
20 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
20 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
19 Wordsworth - Poems
19 City of God
18 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
17 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
16 Initiation Into Hermetics
15 Shelley - Poems
15 Questions And Answers 1956
14 The Human Cycle
14 The Future of Man
14 Questions And Answers 1953
14 Of The Nature Of Things
14 Letters On Yoga II
13 The Phenomenon of Man
13 Letters On Yoga IV
13 Agenda Vol 04
12 Vishnu Purana
12 The Practice of Psycho therapy
12 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
12 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
11 The Study and Practice of Yoga
11 The Practice of Magical Evocation
11 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
11 Let Me Explain
10 The Golden Bough
10 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
10 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
10 Essays On The Gita
10 Agenda Vol 02
10 Agenda Vol 01
9 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
9 Agenda Vol 08
8 The Perennial Philosophy
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
8 Letters On Yoga I
8 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
7 Savitri
7 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
7 Maps of Meaning
7 Cybernetics
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
6 Words Of Long Ago
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 Talks
6 Questions And Answers 1955
6 Preparing for the Miraculous
6 Poetics
6 Letters On Yoga III
6 Kena and Other Upanishads
6 Aion
6 Agenda Vol 06
6 Agenda Vol 05
5 The Bible
5 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
5 On Education
5 Isha Upanishad
5 Hymn of the Universe
5 Browning - Poems
5 Agenda Vol 11
5 Agenda Vol 09
4 The Alchemy of Happiness
4 Some Answers From The Mother
4 Keats - Poems
4 Essays Divine And Human
4 Agenda Vol 10
3 Walden
3 Twilight of the Idols
3 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3 Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice
3 Raja-Yoga
3 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
3 Labyrinths
3 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
3 Emerson - Poems
3 Agenda Vol 13
3 Agenda Vol 07
3 Agenda Vol 03
2 Words Of The Mother II
2 Vedic and Philological Studies
2 The Secret Of The Veda
2 Theosophy
2 The Integral Yoga
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
2 Schiller - Poems
2 Rumi - Poems
2 Liber Null
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
2 God Exists
2 Faust
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
2 Bhakti-Yoga
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From the psychological standpoint, the four oblations are movements or reactions of consciousness in its urge towards the utterance and expression of Divine Truth. Like some other elements in the cosmic play, these also form a quartetcaturvyha and work together for a common purpose in view of a perfect and all-round result.
Svh is the offering and invocation. One must dedicate everything to the Divine, cast all one has or does into the Fire of Aspiration that blazes up towards the Most High, and through the tongue of that one-pointed flame call on the Divinity.
--
V. The Five Great elements
The five elements of the ancientsearth, water, fire, air and ether or spaceare symbols taken from the physical world to represent other worlds that are in it and behind it. Each one is a principle that constitutes the fundamental nature of a particular plane of existence.
Earth represents the material world itself, Matter or existence in its most concrete, its grossest form. It is the basis of existence, the world that supports other worlds (dhar, dharitri),the first or the lowest of the several ranges of creation. In man it is his body. The principle here is that of stability, substantiality, firmness, consistency.
--
The Science of the Five Agnis (Fires), as propounded by Pravahan, explains and illustrates the process of the birth of the body, the passage of the soul into earth existence. It describes the advent of the child, the building of the physical form of the human being. The process is conceived of as a sacrifice, the usual symbol with the Vedic Rishis for the expression of their vision and perception of universal processes of Nature, physical and psychological. Here, the child IS said to be the final fruit of the sacrifice, the different stages in the process being: (i) Soma, (ii) Rain, (iii) Food, (iv) Semen, (v) Child. Soma means Rasaphysically the principle of water, psychologically the 'principle of delightand symbolises and constitutes the very soul and substance of life. Now it is said that these five principles the fundamental and constituent elementsare born out of the sacrifice, through the oblation or offering to the five Agnis. The first Agni is Heaven or the Sky-God, and by offering to it one's faith and one's ardent desire, one calls into manifestation Soma or Rasa or Water, the basic principle of life. This water is next offered to the second Agni, the Rain-God, who sends down Rain. Rain, again, is offered to the third Agni, the Earth, who brings forth Food. Food is, in its turn, offered to the fourth Agni, the Father or Male, who elaborates in himself the generating fluid.
Finally, this fluid is offered to the fifth Agni, the Mother or the Female, who delivers the Child.
--
We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which otherwise, if they are repressed, exert an unhealthy influence on the mind and nature. The Upanishadic view runs on the same lines, but, with the unveiling and the natural and not merely naturalisticdelineation of these under-worlds (concerning sex and food), it endows them with a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The sexual function, for example, is easily equated to the double movement of ascent and descent that is secreted in nature, or to the combined action of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic Play, or again to the hidden fount of Delight that holds and moves the universe. In this view there is nothing merely secular and profane, but all is woven into the cosmic spiritual whole; and man is taught to consider and to mould all his movementsof soul and mind and bodyin the light and rhythm of that integral Reality.11
The central secret of the transfigured consciousness lies, as we have already indicated, in the mystic rite or law of Sacrifice. It is the one basic, fundamental, universal Law that upholds and explains the cosmic movement, conformity to which brings to the thrice-bound human being release and freedom. Sacrifice consists essentially of two elements or processes: (i) The offering or self giving of the lower reality to the higher, and, as a consequence, an answering movement of (ii) the descent of the higher into the lower. The lower offered to the higher means the lower sublimated and integrated into the higher; and the descent of the higher into the lower means the incarnation of the former and the fulfilment of the latter. The Gita elaborates the same idea when it says that by Sacrifice men increase the gods and the gods increase men and by so increasing each other they attain the supreme Good. Nothing is, nothing is done, for its own sake, for an egocentric satisfaction; all, even movements relating to food and to sex should be dedicated to the Cosmic BeingVisva Purusha and that alone received which comes from Him.
VII. The Cosmic and the Transcendental
--
Now, this is the All, the Universal. One has to realise it and possess in one's consciousness. And that can be done only in one way: one has to identify oneself with it, be one with it, become it. Thus by losing one's individuality one lives the life universal; the small lean separate life is enlarged and moulded in the rhythm of the Rich and the Vast. It is thus that man shares in the consciousness and energy that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarvamanveti jyok jvati.
Still the Upanishad says this is not the final end. There is yet a higher status of reality and consciousness to which one has to rise. For beyond the Cosmos lies the Transcendent. The Upanishad expresses this truth and experience in various symbols. The cosmic reality, we have seen, is often conceived as a septenary, a unity of seven elements, principles and worlds. Further to give it its full complex value, it is considered not as a simple septet, but a threefold heptad the whole gamut, as it were, consisting of 21 notes or syllables. The Upanishad says, this number does not exhaust the entire range; I for there is yet a 22nd place. This is the world beyond the Sun, griefless and deathless, the supreme Selfhood. The Veda I also sometimes speaks of the integral reality as being represented by the number 100 which is 99 + I; in other words, 99 represents the cosmic or universal, the unity being the reality beyond, the Transcendent.
Elsewhere the Upanishad describes more graphically this truth and the experience of it. It is said there that the sun has fivewe note the familiar fivemovements of rising and setting: (i) from East to West, (ii) from South to North, (iii) from West to East, (iv) from North to South and (v) from abovefrom the Zenithdownward. These are the five normal and apparent movements. But there is a sixth one; rather it is not a movement, but a status, where the sun neither rises nor sets, but is always visible fixed in the same position.
--
The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortalfor, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world, the Heaven of the immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and experiences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Immanent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the human being as the immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jtaveds, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.
The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The Qabalah is a trustworthy guide, leading to a comprehension both of the Universe and one's own Self. Sages have long taught that Man is a miniature of the Universe, containing within himself the diverse elements of that macrocosm of which he is the microcosm. Within the Qabalah is a glyph called the Tree of Life which is at once a symbolic map of the Universe in its major aspects, and also of its smaller counterpart, Man.
Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, deplores the failure of modern science to "sense the profundity of these philosophical deductions of the ancients." Were they to do so, he says, they "would realize those who fabricated the structure of the Qabalah possessed a knowledge of the celestial plan comparable in every respect with that of the modern savant."
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Over and over their findings have been confirmed, proving the Qabalah contains within it not only the elements of the science itself but the method with which to pursue it.
When planning to visit a foreign country, the wise traveler will first familiarize himself with its language. In studying music, chemistry or calculus, a specific terminology is essential to the understanding of each subject. So a new set of symbols is necessary when undertaking a study of the Universe, whether within or without. The Qabalah provides such a set in unexcelled fashion.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
posed of more or less disconnected elements. I refer
to THE BOOK OF LIES. In this there are 93 chapters:
--
elements, and therefore of the name Tetragrammaton.
Jacobus Burgundus Molensis suffered martyrdom
--
satisfactory hieroglyph of the elements.
The best attribution of Elohim is Aleph, Air; Lamed, Earth;
--
The elements are taken rather as in Nature; N is easily Fire,
since Mars is the ruler of Scorpio: the virginity of I suits Air
and Water, elements which in Magick are closely interwoven:
H, the letter of of breath, is suitable for Spirit; Abrahadabra is
--
for another analysis of the elements; but after a different manner.
Alpha ({Alpha}) is Air; Rho ({Rho}) the Sun; these are the Spirit and the
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the bewildering multitude of material or living elements involved
in the slightest change in the universe ;
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HERE are two necessities of Nature's workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Secondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
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Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and experience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and experience that the vital forces and functions to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the rationale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a supernal ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a supernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.
But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to develop a victorious artificiality which overwhelms our natural human life under a load of machinery and to purchase certain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements. There is that which is already evolved; there is that which, still imperfect, still partly fluid, is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution; and there is that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already
The Conditions of the Synthesis
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That which Nature has evolved for us and has firmly founded is the bodily life. She has effected a certain combination and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth, -
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
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Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
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we are the terrestrial summit may be considered, in a sense, as an inverse manifestation, by which these supreme Powers in their unity and their diversity use, develop and perfect the imperfect substance and activities of Matter, of Life and of Mind so that they, the inferior modes, may express in mutable relativity an increasing harmony of the divine and eternal states from which they are born. If this be the truth of the universe, then the goal of evolution is also its cause, it is that which is immanent in its elements and out of them is liberated. But the liberation is surely imperfect if it is only an escape and there is no return upon the containing substance and activities to exalt and transform them.
The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being sufficiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence, sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.
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The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman,1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual reflection, vicara, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of
Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
mind, which is still very uncultivated, and to learn the elements
of knowledge which are indispensable to a man if he does not
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga, which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Vama Marga, started from a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, - Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities. But in both paths there was in the end an obscuration of principles, a deformation of symbols and a fall.
If, however, we leave aside, here also, the actual methods and practices and seek for the central principle, we find, first, that Tantra expressly differentiates itself from the Vedic methods of Yoga. In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their method is knowledge, though it is not always discernment by the intellect, but may be, instead, the knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out through action. In all of them the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the
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Prakriti and turn them towards the Divine. But the normal action of Nature in us is an integral movement in which the full complexity of all our elements is affected by and affects all our environments. The whole of life is the Yoga of Nature. The
Yoga that we seek must also be an integral action of Nature, and the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity. If indeed our aim be only an escape from the world to God, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time; for then our sole practical aim must be to find out one path out of the thousand that lead to God, one shortest possible of short cuts, and not to linger exploring different paths that end in the same goal. But if our aim be a transformation of our integral being into the terms of God-existence, it is then that a synthesis becomes necessary.
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
here; you would be in the world. These are certain elements in
the being which remain attached to their old activities and refuse
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It must become aware of the immortality of the elements constituting it (which is a scientifically recognised fact), then it must
submit itself to the influence and the will of the psychic being
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the very recent descent of the first elements of the Supermind
into the earth's atmosphere (not yet quite four years ago) cannot
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This process of a developing consciousness in Nature is precisely what is known as Evolution. It is the bringing out and fixing of a higher and higher principle of consciousness, hitherto involved and concealed behind the veil, in the earth consciousness as a dynamic factor in Nature's manifest working. Thus, the first stage of evolution is the status of inconscient Matter, of the lifeless physical elements; the second stage is that of the semi-conscious life in the plant, the third that of the conscious life in the animal, and finally the fourth stage, where we stand at present, is that of the embodied self-conscious life in man.
The course of evolution has not come to a stop with man and the next stage, Sri Aurobindo says, which Nature envisages and is labouring to bring out and establish is the life now superconscious to us, embodied in a still higher type of created being, that of the superman or god-man. The principle of consciousness which will determine the nature and build of this new, being is a spiritual principle beyond the mental principle which man now incarnates: it may be called the Supermind or Gnosis.
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It is not easy, however, nor is it necessary for the moment to envisage in detail what this divinised man would be like, externallyhis mode of outward being and living, kimsita vrajeta kim, as Arjuna queriedor how the collective life of the new humanity would function or what would be the composition of its social fabric. For what is happening is a living process, an organic growth; it is being elaborated through the actions and reactions of multitudinous forces and conditions, known and unknown; the precise configuration of the final outcome cannot be predicted with exactitude. But the Power that is at work is omniscient; it is selecting, rejecting, correcting, fashioning, creating, co-ordinating elements in accordance with and by the drive of the inviolable law of Truth and Harmony that reigns in Light's own homeswe dame the Supermind.
It is also to be noted that as mind is not the last limit of the march of evolution, even so the progress of evolution will not stop with the manifestation and embodiment of the Supermind. There are other still higher principles beyond and they too presumably await manifestation and embodiment on earth. Creation has no beginning in time (andi) nor has it an end (ananta). It is an eternal process of the unravelling of the mysteries of the Infinite. Only, it may be said that with the Supermind the creation here enters into a different order of existence. Before it there was the domain of Ignorance, after it will come the reign of Light and Knowledge. Mortality has been the governing principle of life on earth till now; it will be replaced by the consciousness of immortality. Evolution has proceeded through struggle and pain; hereafter it will be a spontaneous, harmonious and happy flowering.
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Assailing her divinest elements,
He made her heart kin to the striving human heart
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense-perceptions and a certain mode of working upon them. It has three component elements that have been defined as observation, classification and deduction. Now, the very composition of Reason shows that it cannot be a perfect instrument of knowledge; the limitations are the inherent limitations of the component elements. As regards observation there is a two-fold limitation. First, observation is a relative term and variable quantity. One observes through the prism of one's own observing faculty, through the bias of one's own personality and no two persons can have absolutely the same manner of observation. So Science has recognised the necessity of personal equation and has created an imaginary observer, a "mean man" as the standard of reference. And this already takes us far away from the truth, from the reality. Secondly, observation is limited by its scope. All the facts of the world, all sense-perceptions possible and actual cannot be included within any observation however large, however collective it may be. We have to go always upon a limited amount of data, we are able to construct only a partial and sketchy view of the surface of existence. And then it is these few and doubtful facts that Reason seeks to arrange and classify. That classification may hold good for certain immediate ends, for a temporary understanding of the world and its forces, either in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain some practical utility. For when we want to consider the world only in its immediate relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts are sufficient the more immediate the relation, the more immaterial the doubtfulness and insufficiency of facts. We may quite confidently go a step in darkness, but to walk a mile we do require light and certainty. Our scientific classification has a background of uncertainty, if not, of falsity; and our deduction also, even while correct within a very narrow range of space and time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of observation and classification upon which it is based.
It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the present nature of man, with its threefold nexus of mind and life and body, that stands there to be fought and conquered. This is the inferior nature, of which the ancients spoke, that holds man down inexorably to a lower dharma, imperfect mode of life the life that is and has been the human order till today. No amount of ceaseless action, however selflessly done, can move this wheel of Nature even by a hair's breadth away from the path that it has carved out from of old. Human nature and human society have been built up and are run by the forces of this inferior nature, and whatever shuffling and reshuffling we may make in its apparent factors and elements, the general scheme and fundamental form of life will never change. To displace earth (and to conquer nature means nothing less than that) and give it another orbit, one must find a fulcrum outside earth.
Sri Aurobindo does not preach flight from life and a retreat into the silent and passive Infinite; the goal of life is not, in his view, the extinction of life. Neither is he satisfied on that account to hold that life is best lived in the ordinary round of its unregenerate dharma. If the first is a blind alley, the second is a vicious circle,both lead nowhere.
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is not helpful to abandon the ordinary life before the being is ready for the full spiritual life. To do so means to precipitate a struggle between the different elements and exasperate it to a point of intensity which the nature is not ready to bear. The vital elements in you have partly to be met by the discipline and experience of life, while keeping the spiritual aim in view and trying to govern life by it progressively in the spirit of Karmayoga.
The best way to prepare oneself for the spiritual life when one has to live in the ordinary occupations and surroundings is to cultivate an entire equality and detachment and the samata of the Gita with the faith that the Divine is there and the Divine Will at work in all things even though at present under the conditions of a world of Ignorance. Beyond this are the Light and Ananda towards which life is working, but the best way for their advent and foundation in the individual being and nature is to grow in this spiritual equality. That would also solve your difficulty about things unpleasant and disagreeable. All unpleasantness should be faced with this spirit of samata.
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and cannot embrace life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral realisation. The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure. Reason is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature and outlook. And as practical dealing requires that things should be stable and separate entities, therefore Reason cannot but see things in solid and in the fragments of a solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts and diverse elements; and these again it seeks to relate and aggregate, in accordance with what it calls "laws". Such a process has been necessary for man in conducting life and action successfully. Originally a bye-product of active life, Reason gradually separated itself and came finally to have an independent status and function, became or sought to become the instrument of knowledge, of Truth.
But although Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and progresses with discoveries and inventionsdevices for artfully manipulating naturehas been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less-endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.
So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self-consciousillumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
This then is the mantra of the new ageLife with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Superman. The right mantra has been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (1) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has, it may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that he may best gratify them but who has not purified them. Purification does not necessarily mean, annihilation but it does mean sublimation and transformation. So if you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also. For a conscious egoism is the very characteristic of man and by increasing your sense of egoism you do not supersede man but simply aggrandise your humanity, fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And then the will to power is not the only will that requires fulfilment, there is also the will to knowledge and the will to love. In man these three fundamental constitutive elements coexist, although they do it, more often than not, at the expense of each other and in a state of continual disharmony. The superman, if he is to be the man "who has surmounted himself", must embody a poise of being in which all the three find a fusion and harmonya perfect synthesis. Again, to live dangerously may be heroic, but it is not divine. To live dangerously means to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to live ever on the same level with the forces you want to dominate. To have the sense that one has to fight and control means that one is not as yet the sovereign lord, for one has to strive and strain and attain. The supreme lord is he who is perfectly equanimous with himself and with the world. He has not to batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves"God said 'let there be light' and there was light."
As a matter of fact, the superman is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches of humanity seem capable. For that is after all humanity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally human modes of existence. It does not carry far enough the process of surmounting. In reality it is not a surmounting but a new channelling. Instead of the ethical and intellectual man, we get the vital and aesthetic man. It may be a change but not a transfiguration.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
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Ifso long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon earth something of her charm and wizardry. The fullness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould.
"The Last Voyage" by Charles Williams-A Little Book of Modern Verse, (Faber and Faber).
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.
01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are some primary desires that seek satisfaction in man. They are the vital urges of life, the most prominent among them being the instinct of self-preservation and that of self-reproduction or the desire to preserve one's body by defensive as well as by offensive means and the desire to multiply oneself by mating. These are the two biological necessities that are inevitable to man's existence as a physical being. They give the minimum conditions required to be fulfilled by man in order that he may live and hence they are the strongest and the most fundamental elements that enter into his structure and composition.
It would have been an easy matter if these vital urges could flow on unhindered in their way. There would have been no problem at all, if they met satisfaction easily and smoothly, without having to look to other factors and forces. As a matter of fact, man does not and cannot gratify his instincts whenever and wherever he chooses and in an open and direct manner. Even in his most primitive and barbarous condition, he has often to check himself and throw a veil, in so many ways, over his sheer animality. In the civilised society the check is manifold and is frankly recognised. We do not go straight as our sexual impulsion leads, but seek to hide and camouflage it under the institution of marriage; we do not pounce upon the food directly we happen to meet it and snatch and appropriate whatever portion we get but we secure it through an elaborate process, which is known as the economic system. The machinery of the state, the cult of the kshatriya are roundabout ways to meet our fighting instincts.
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Viewed in this light, Blake's memorable mantra attains a deeper and more momentous significance. For it is not merely Earth the senses and life and Matter that are to be uplifted and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness, the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or transmuted as demanded by the law of that Supreme Will. That is the Hell that has to be recognised, not rejected and thrown away, but taken up purified and transubstantiated into the body of Heaven itself. The hand of the Highest Heaven must extend and touch the Lowest of the lowest elements, transmute it and set it in its rightful place of honour. A mortal body reconstituted into an immemorial fossil, a lump of coal revivified into a flashing carat of diamond-that shows something of the process underlying the nuptials of which we are speaking.
The Life Divine
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
cannot judge, I do not have the elements needed for a true
judgment; therefore I will not judge, I will keep quiet."
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elementsSakas and Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic materialenter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign identity and become part and parcel of the common whole. Even so,a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting materialsnot in the political, but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable basis the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erectwas the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already risen a voice of dissidence and discord that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the Avataras: the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
--
History abounds in instances of racial and cultural immixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitiveaboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples and European culture illustrate the point.
Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unitysince, at bottom, it means identityit is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West. His external make-up had all the characteristic elements of the Western culture, but his mind and temperament, his inner soul was oriental. And yet it was not the calm luminous staticancientsoul that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating with the unspoilt green sap of life something in the manner of Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land.
Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns, but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the earth, pins us down to the normal and ordinary life and consciousness: it" leads into the Night, into Nihil, pralaya. It is the light of the morning sun that man looks up to in his forward march, the sun that rises in the East whom the Vedic Rishi invoked in these magnificent lines:
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But as I said, bit by bit things changed. However, this had one advantage: we were too much outside of life. So there were a number of problems which had never arisen but which would have suddenly surged up the moment we wanted a complete manifestation. We took on all these problems a little prematurely, but it gave us the opportunity to solve them. In this way we learned many things and surmounted many difficulties, only it complicated things considerably. And in the present situation, given such a large number of elements who havent even the slightest idea why theyre here (!) well, it demands a far greater effort on the disciples part than before.
Before, when there were we started with 35 or 36 people but even when it got up to 150, even with 150it was as if they were all nestled in a cocoon in my consciousness: they were so near to me that I could constantly guide ALL their inner or outer movements. Day and night, at each moment, everything was totally under my control. And naturally, I think they made a great deal of progress at that time: it is a fact that I was CONSTANTLY doing the sadhana2 for them. But then, with this baby boom The sadhana cant be done for little sprouts who are 3 or 4 or 5 years old! Its out of the question. The only thing I can do is wrap them in the Consciousness and try to see that they grow up in the best of all possible conditions. However, the one advantage to all this is that instead of there being such a COMPLETE and PASSIVE dependence on the disciples part, each one has to make his own little effort. Truly, thats excellent.
0 1956-10-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In this state, I am ceaselessly thinking of my forest in Guiana or of my travels through Africa and the ardor that filled me with life in those days. I seem to need to have my goal before me and to walk towards it. Outer difficulties also seem to help me resolve my inner problems: there is a kind of need in me for the elements the sea, the forest, the desert for a milieu with which I can wrestle and through which I can grow. Here, I seem to lack a dynamic point of leverage. Here, in the everyday routine, everything seems to be falling apart in me. Should I not return to my forest in Guiana?
Mother, I implore you, in the name of whatever led me to you in the first place, give me the strength to do WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. You who see and who can, decide for me. You are my Mother. Whatever my shortcomings, my difficulties, I feel I am so deeply your child.
0 1958-05-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As a matter of fact, my tendency is more and more towards something in which the role of these hostile forces will be reduced to that of an examinerwhich means that they are there to test the sincerity of your spiritual quest. These elements have a reality in their action and for the workthis is their great reality but when you go beyond a certain region, it all grows dim to such a degree that it is no longer so well defined, so distinct. In the occult world, or rather if you look at the world from the occult point of view, these hostile forces are very real, their action is very real, quite concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realization is positively hostile; but as soon as you go beyond this region and enter into the spiritual world where there is no longer anything but the Divine in all things, and where there is nothing undivine, then these hostile forces become part of the total play and can no longer be called hostile forces: it is only an attitude that they have adoptedor more precisely, it is only an attitude adopted by the Divine in his play.
This again belongs to the dualities that Sri Aurobindo speaks of in (The Synthesis of Yoga, these dualities that are being reabsorbed. I dont know if he spoke of this particular one; I dont think so, but its the same thing. Its again a certain way of seeing. He has written of the Personal-Impersonal duality, Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti but there is still one more: Divine and anti-divine.
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Only, one must be careful to keep the sense of the Unmanifest sufficiently present so that the various things the elements, the cells and all thathave time to adapt. The sense of the Unmanifest, or in other words, to step back into the Unmanifest.6 This is what all those who have had experiences have done; they always believed that there was no possibility of adaptation, so they left their bodies and went off.
***
0 1959-06-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As of yesterday evening I am a man delivered. It took only a very little word from X, and suddenly a weight seemed to have been lifted from me, and I knew at last that I would be fulfilled. All this is still so new, so improbable that I can scarcely believe it, and I wonder if by chance some evil blow is not still lurking in wait for me behind this promise of happiness; thus I shall be reassured only when I have told you everything, recounted all. But X has asked, me to wait a few more days before telling you this story, for he wants to give me certain additional details so that you may have all the elements, as accurately as possible.
But I did not want to wait any longer to express my gratitude. I am still not so sure how all this will turn out nor how this destiny that he predicts for me can be realized, but I want to repeat to you, with all my confidence: I am your child, may your will be done now and forever.
0 1959-06-13a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
X has decided that he wants to speak to you himself about my former existences and about what he has seen for the immediate future. He has therefore asked me to say nothing to you. Perhaps there are also elements he did not want to speak of to me. (X told me that now he feels capable of speaking in English with you.)
Another thing: we happened to talk of Sri Aurobindo and Lele.1 Concerning Lele, X told me, He was a devotee of the Bhaskaraya School; this is why there is close connection I do not know if this is so, but X seemed to know.
0 1959-06-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
X told me to tell you what he has seen of my previous lives (but my impression is that he did not tell me everything and that there are elements about which he wants to speak to you personally).
To begin with, I must tell you a dream that I had here in Rameswaram a few days after my arrival. I was being pursued and I fled like an assassinit is a dream I have had hundreds of times for years, but in this dream, there was a new element: while being pursued, I climbed a kind of stairway to try to escape when suddenly, in a flash, I saw a feminine form hurtling into a void. I saw only the lower half of her body (with a kind of mauve-colored saree), because she was already falling. And I had the horrible sensation of having pushed this woman into the void, and I fled. I climbed, I climbed these stairs with my pursuers close at my heels, and the image of this falling woman gave me a horrible feeling. When I reached the top of the stairs, I tried to close a door behind me to stop my pursuers, but there they were, it was too late and I woke up.
0 1959-11-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There is one element that remains fixed: for each type of atom, the inner organization of the elements is different, which is what creates the difference in their substance. So perhaps similarly, each individual has a different, particular way of organizing the cells of his body, and it is this particular way that persists through all the outer changes. All the rest is undone and redone, but undone in a forward thrust towards the new instead of collapsing backwards into death, and redone in a constant aspiration to follow the progressive movement of the divine Truth.
But for that, the body the body-consciousness must first learn to widen itself. It is indispensable, for otherwise all the cells become a kind of boiling porridge under the pressure of the supramental light.
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The idea is that the earth as a whole must be prepared in all its forms, including even those least ready for the transformation. There must be a symbolic representation of all the elements on earth upon which we can work to establish the link.1 The earth is a symbolic representation of the universe, and the group is a symbolic representation of the earth.
Sri Aurobindo and I had discussed the matter in 1914 (quite a long time ago), for we had seen two possibilities: what we are now doing, or to withdraw into solitude and isolation until we had not only attained the Supermind, but begun the material transformation as well. And Sri Aurobindo rightfully said that we could not isolate ourselves, for as you progress, you become more and more universalized, and consequently you take the burden upon yourself2 in any case.
0 1960-12-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
A sort of unification is taking place [in you], as if you had become a more uniform whole within-without. I dont know how to explain thisit feels more unified, more organizeduniform. Not some parts more developed and others less so, some more luminous and others less so; its much more uniform, and uniform even in the vibration, a kind of really a uniformity in all its movements, responses, vibrations, light. And this kind of powdering of the new light which I see is much more widespread. Its as if everything, everything what is happening is really a work of unifyingstabilizing, unifying. And this powdering of golden light has completely enveloped you, with this same blue light in your japa, with different intensities of powerboth are there. Like a unifying of the consciousness, as if all the less receptive elements were starting to open, thereby creating a much more homogeneous whole. I dont know how your nights are, but
Not very conscious.
0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Later, Mother specified: 'These are elements in the material substance entirely possessed by adverse forces and opposed to the transformation.'
On the previous day, January 21, Saraswati Puja, Mother had given a message and photos to each disciple.
0 1961-03-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a recollection of this life, for I relived it when I first became conscious of the life of the entire earth; but I cant say how long it lasted or what area it covered I dont know. I only remember the conditions at that time, the state of material Nature and the human form and human consciousness, and this state of harmony with all the other elements of the earth: harmony with animal life and a great harmony with plant lifethere was a kind of spontaneous knowledge of how to use the things of Nature, the qualities of plants, fruits and all that vegetal nature could offer. There was no aggressiveness, no fear, no contradictions or frictions, and no perversion the mind was pure, simple, luminous, uncomplicated.
It was certainly with the progress of evolution, the march of evolution, when the mind began to develop for and in itself, that ALL the complications, all the deformations began. Indeed, this story of Genesis that seems so childish does contain a truth. The old traditions like Genesis resembled the Vedas in that each letter6 was the symbol of a knowledge; it was the pictorial rsum of a traditional knowledge, just as the Veda contains a pictoral rsum of the knowledge of its time. But whats more, even the symbol had a reality in the sense that there was truly a period when life upon earth (the first manifestation of mentalized Matter in human forms) was still in complete harmony with all that preceded it. It was only later that.
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As for him, even now his way of working consists in eliminating all obstaclesjust the opposite of what Sri Aurobindo was doing. Sri Aurobindo used to envelop them, like this (Mother opens her arms to embrace everything), and then act upon them so that they would no longer be obstacles. But the first thing X said when he first came to the Ashram was, Oh, there are a lot of elements which shouldnt be here! And he would talk about a purge: eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. But if you eliminate everything from life which is unresponsive to the Divine, what will be left?
He certainly hasnt understood Sri Aurobindos yoga. And its useless to try to explain anything to him.
0 1961-05-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When Sri Aurobindo was here, the work was done in another way; there was such an impression of hovering above difficulties, of acting on them from above. It was so strong that even rebellious elements, even things which were not going well, even they were dominated from above and they could not manifest they stayed like that. And as they could not manifest, they faded quietly away.
I have seen people (people from outside) who were enemiesall their enmity was pacified, pacified, pacified. They were unable to do any harm, even when they wanted to. Everything was made innocuous in that way. And it was the same thing here in the Ashram; as always, people had wrong movements and wrong thoughts, but all this, too, was dominatedit was pacified, pacified.
0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like asking if certain elements will disappear from the universe. What can it mean, the destruction of a universe? Once we are out of our stupidity, what can we call destruction? Only the form is destroyed, the appearance (that, yesall appearances are destroyed, one after the other). It is also said (its written everywhere) that the adverse forces will either be converted that is, become aware of their own divinity and become divineor be destroyed. But what does destroyed mean? Their form? Their form of consciousness can be dissolved, but what about the something which brings itand everything elseinto existence? How can that something be destroyed? This, mon petit, is difficult to comprehend. The universe is a conscious objectification of That which exists from all eternity. Well, how can the All cease to be? The infinite and eternal All, without limits of any kindhow can anything be thrown out of it? There is nowhere to go! (You can rack your brains over it, you know!) Go where? There is only THAT.
And even when we say there is only that we are situating it somewherewhich is perfectly idiotic. It is everywhereso how can anything be thrown out of it?
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For example, as I was saying at the beginning, the bodys formation has a very minimal, a quite subordinate importance for a saint or a sage. But for this supramental work, the way the body is formed has an almost crucial importance, and not at all in relation to spiritual elements nor even to mental power: these aspects have no importance AT ALL. The capacity to endure, to last is the important thing.
Well, in that respect, it is absolutely undeniable that my body has an infinitely greater capacity than Sri Aurobindos had.
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In my experience, it is; and it has come to the point where the more concentrated the Force, the more things turn up at the very moment they ought to, people come just when they should and do just what they ought to be doing, the things around me fall into place naturally and this goes for the LEAST little detail. And simultaneously it brings with it a sense of harmony and rhythm, a joya very smiling joy in organization, as if everything were joyously participating in this restructuring. For example, you want to tell someone something and he comes to you; you need someone to do a particular work and he appears; something has to be organizedall the required elements are at hand. All with a kind of miraculous harmony, but nothing miraculous about it! Essentially its simply the inner force meeting with a minimum of obstacles, and so things get molded by its action. This happens to me very often, VERY often; and sometimes it goes on for hours.
But its rather delicate, like a very, very delicate clockwork, like a precision machine, and the least little thing throws everything out of gear. When someone has a bad reaction, for instance, or a bad thought, or an agitated vibration, or an anxietyanything of this nature is enough to dissolve all the harmony. For me, its translated straight-away into a malaise in my body, a very particular type of malaise; then disorder sets in, and the ordinary routine returns. So again I have to gather up, as it were, the Presence of the Lord and begin to infuse it everywhere. Sometimes it goes quickly, sometimes it takes longer; when the disorganization is a little more radical, it takes a little longer.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, we are the first possible instruments for making the world progress. For example (this is one way of putting it), the transformation of the Inconscient into the Subconscient is probably far more rapid and complete now than it was before man appeared upon earth; man is one of the first transformative elements. Animals are obviously more conscious than plants, but WILLED (and thus more rapid) progress belongs to humanity. Likewise, what one hopes (more than hopes!), what one expects is that when the new supramental race comes upon earth, the work will go much more swiftly; and man will necessarily benefit from this. And since things will be done in true order instead of in mental disorder, animals and everything else will probably benefit from it also. In other words, the whole earth, taken as one entity, will progress more and more rapidly. The Inconscient (oh, all this comes to me in English, thats the difficulty!) is meant to go and necessarily the Subconscient will go too.
Broadly speaking, does this mean that physical Matter will become conscious?
0 1961-08-08, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
X's astonishment raises an extremely important point, drawing the exact dividing line between all the traditional yogas and the new yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. To a tantric, for example, it seems unthinkable that Mother, with a consciousness so powerful as to scoff at the laws of nature and comm and the elements (if she wishes), could be subjected to absurd head colds or an eye hemorrhage or even more serious disorders. For him, it is enough to simply lift a finger and emit a vibration which instantly muzzles the disorderyes, of course, but for Mother it is not a question of 'curing' a head cold by imposing a higher POWER on Matter, but of getting down to the cellular root and curing or transforming the source of the evil (which causes death as easily as head colds, for it is the same root of disorder). It is not a question of imposing oneself on Matter through a 'power,' but of transforming Matter. Such is the yoga of the cells.
***
0 1961-12-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because there comes a time when one perceives the entire universe in such a total and comprehensive way that, in truth, it is impossible to remove anything from it without disturbing everything. And going a couple of steps further, one knows for certain that things which shock us as contradictions of the Divine are simply things out of place. Each thing must be exactly in its place, and whats more, be supple enough, plastic enough, to admit into a harmonious, progressive organization all the new elements constantly being added to the manifest universe. The universe is in a perpetual movement of internal reorganization, and at the same time its growing: its becoming more and more complex, more and more complete, more and more integralindefinitely. And as the new elements manifest, the whole reorganization must be built on a new basis, and thus there isnt a second when ALL is not in perpetual movement. And when the movement is in accord with the divine order, its harmonious, so perfectly harmonious that its almost imperceptible. Now, if you descend from this consciousness towards a more external consciousness, you begin naturally to have a very precise feeling of what helps you attain the true consciousness and what bars the way or pulls you backwards or even fights against your progress. And so the perspective changes and you are obliged to say: this is divine or a help towards the Divine; and that goes against the Divine, its the Divines enemy. But this is a pragmatic standpoint, geared to action, to movement in material lifebecause you havent yet attained the consciousness surpassing all that; because you havent reached that inner perfection where you no longer have to fight, since you have gone beyond the field or the time or the utility of struggle. But before reaching that state in your consciousness and action, there is necessarily struggle; and if there is struggle, there is choice; and to choose, you need discrimination.
(Mother remains silent)
0 1962-01-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the degradation of a higher and true movement. It is this or something like it that is attempted crudely and improperly with a rudimentary and insufficient knowledge in the system of psycho-analysis. The process of raising up the lower movements into the full light of consciousness in order to know and deal with them is inevitable; for there can be no complete change without it. But it can truly succeed only when a higher light and force are sufficiently at work to overcome, sooner or later, the force of the tendency that is held up for change. Many, under the pretext of anubhava, not only raise up the adverse movement, but support it with their consent instead of rejecting it, find justifications for continuing or repeating it and so go on playing with it, indulging its return, eternising it; afterwards when they want to get rid of it, it has got such a hold that they find themselves helpless in its clutch and only a terrible struggle or an intervention of divine grace can liberate them.Some do this out of a vital twist or perversity, others out of sheer ignorance; but in yoga, as in life, ignorance is not accepted by Nature as a justifying excuse. This danger is there in all improper dealings with the ignorant parts of the nature; but none is more ignorant, more perilous, more unreasoning and obstinate in recurrence than the lower vital subconscious and its movements. To raise it up prematurely or improperly for anubhava is to risk suffusing the conscious parts also with its dark and dirty stuff and thus poisoning the whole vital and even the mental nature. Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and eliminate them by the strength of the divine calm, light, force and knowledge. Even so, there will be enough of the lower stuff rising up of itself to give you as much of the anubhava as you will need for getting rid of the obstacles; but then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance.
***
0 1962-01-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is one advantage: without those beings, without the worlds distortion, many things would be lacking. Those beings potentially embodied certain absolutely unique elementsunderstandably so, since they were the first wave. And precisely because they still WERE the Supreme to such a great extent, each one felt he was the Supreme, and that was that. Only it wasnt quite sufficient, for the simple reason that they were already divided into four, and one single division is enough to make everything go wrong. Its readily understandable: its not something essentially evil, but a question of wrong FUNCTIONING; its not the substance, not the essence. The essence isnt evil, but the functioning is faulty.
But if you understand.
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats it. And then illnesses related to colloidal disorders (blood, for example, is a colloidal fluid): when the component elements cease to combine in the normal and natural way. Both are newly recognized causes of illness. And they usually (I dont say in every case) result from what is called an inner discrepancy; that is, when the different parts of the being have not reached the same level of development, things of that nature may crop up.
With very few exceptions, these illnesses are not found to originate from germs, microbes or bacteria. They are frequently classified as mental illnesses, nervous disorders, etc., and they result from that inner discrepancy.
0 1963-01-12, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Which means it took twelve days for all his elements to form again. You see, they burned his body. (He was Christian, but his familyhis wife is alive and his brother toofound it less costly to let us handle it than to bury him as a Christian! So they had him cremated.) We cremated him, but I demanded a certain interval of time,4 although in his case it was really a gradual exhaustion and nothing much remained in his body; nonetheless, even then the consciousness is flung out of the cells violentlyit took twelve days to form again. It wasnt his soul (it had already left) but the spirit of his body that came to me, the body consciousness gathered in a well-dressed, neat Benjamin with his hair neatly brushed. He was quite trim when he came to me, just as he would have been in life: he always wanted to be well-groomed and impeccable to see me, that was his way. It took twelve days to gather together because I didnt see to it (I can do it in a few hours but only if I see to it), but in his case, his soul having been at rest for a long time, it didnt matter much. So over twelve days it took form again and when he was ready (laughing), he came to reoccupy his room! And there was no furniture left, nothing!
I found that very funny.
0 1963-03-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My own experience is like this: in the worlds present state, a direct miracle (vital or material, that is) must necessarily involve a number of fallacious elements which we cannot acceptthose miracles are necessarily fallacious miracles. And we cannot accept that. At least I always refused to do so. Ive seen what people call miracles. I saw many with Madame Thon, for instance, but it allowed a host of things to exist that to me are inadmissible.
I dont know if thats the true reason, I am not sure if the reason isnt just that we were not supposed to do miracles.
0 1963-03-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a sort of review going on of all the elements of the body consciousness, with a sample of the circumstances of their various manifestations or expressions. All this is passed before me as if to show me all the points in the bodys cells that were contrary to or unprepared for the reception of the divine Forces. All that comes up in the form of lived memoriesthings I had more than forgotten (I could have sworn they no longer existed), but which come back. Un-be-liev-able. And its not an egos or a persons memory, but the memory of a force in motion in the general vibrations. So I see fantastic things!
But its erased immediately; as soon as I wake up, my first movement (gesture of offering) is to present it all to the Lord: the cause, the effect, the image, the sensationeverything. When its all seen, I tell Him, Now its Yours. And then I forgetfortunately, thank God!
0 1963-05-29, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It isnt role! The role is a fact, a sort of ineluctable fact, absolutely independent of the individual will and consciousness I am more and more convinced of it, fantastically so. The Work is done through a certain number of elementswhe ther they are aware of it or not, whether they collaborate or not makes little difference. It has been decided that way, it has been chosen that way and it is done that way. Whether you like it or not, whether you are aware of it or not, whether you collaborate or notvery little difference. Its more a question of personal satisfaction!
And in as much as the very cells of the body no longer feel their separateness (that is almost entirely gone, even in the sensation), then something is done (or takes place), but without any self-observation. Somewhere (gesture above), something knows, wills and acts; somewhere else, there is a certain number of things in a state of happy receptivity, and absolutely, extraordinarily passive, not interfering. And the less it observes, the better. It remains in an inner contemplation, or rather turned to the Heights (a Height that is everywhere, of course, not just above), a Height perfectly luminous, perfectly conscious, perfectly effective. And thats all that is needed.
0 1963-07-27, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not advisable to discuss too much what it [the supermind] will do and how it will do it, because these are things the supermind itself will fix, acting out of the Divine Truth in it, and the mind must not try to fix for it grooves in which it will run. Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of the body must be among the ULTIMATE (Mother repeats) elements of a supramental change; but the details of these things must be left for the supramental Energy to work out according to the Truth of its own nature.
(XXII.8)
0 1963-07-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The work consists, I could say, in either removing or transforming (I am not sure which of the two) all the bodys cells that are or have been under the influence of Falsehood (not lie but falsehood), of the state contrary to the Divine. But since probably a radical purge or transformation would have resulted in nothing but the bodys dissolution, the work goes on in stages, progressively (I am going very far back in time, to my first attacks). So the sequence is the following: first, a series of activities or visions (but those visions are always activities at the same time: both activities and visions) in the subconscious domain, showing in a very living and objective way the Falsehood that has to be removed (transformed or removed). At first, I took them as adverse attacks, but now I see they are states of falsehood to which certain elements in the physical being are linked (at the time, I thought, I am brought into contact with that because of the correspondence in me, and I worked on that level but its another way of seeing the same thing). And it produces certainly there is a dissolution there is a transformation, but a dissolution tooand that dissolution naturally brings about an extreme fatigue or a sort of exhaustion in the body; so between two of those stages of transformation, the body is given time to recover strength and energy.1 And I had noticed that those attacks always come after the observation (an observation I made these last few days) of a great increase in power, energy and force; when the body grows more and more solid, there always follows the next day or the day after, first, a series of nights I could call unpleasant (they are not, for theyre instructive), and then a terrible battle in the body. This time I was consciousnaturally, I am conscious every time, but (smiling) more so every time.
I had observed lately that the body was getting much stronger, much more solid, that it was even putting on weight (!), which is almost abnormal. Then, I had a first vision (not vision: an activity, but very clear), then another, and then a third. Last night, I was fed a subtle food, as if to tell me that I would need it because I wouldnt take any physical food2 (not that I thought about it, I simply noticed I had been fed, given certain foods). And with the visions I had the two preceding nights, I knew that at issue were certain elements forming part of the bodys construction (psychological construction), and that they had to be eliminated. So I worked hard for their elimination. And today, the battle was waged.
But then, as I had worked hard for the elimination, the battle was quite formidablewhen it exceeds a certain measure, the heart has trouble, and then I need to rest. Thats how it happened. But it was so clear, so obvious! And the entire process was SEEN from the beginning, every single step of it, its a marvel! A marvel of consciousness, of measure, of dosage, to allow the purification and transformation to take place without disrupting the balance, so that dissolution does not occur. Its based on the capacity to endure and withstand (naturally, if the body were unable to endure, that work couldnt be done).
0 1963-08-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The side of reason (of a gradual and harmonious progress as conceived by the mind) wants peace and quiet, order and harmony among nations. The mortar and pestle method, which mixes everything together to bring out something more potent, a richer combination of the elements, demands destruction. Both are there in the atmosphere, like this (Mother looks). And it would seemit would seem that the decision hasnt been made yet, as Sri Aurobindo says [it is still hanging].
Yet at present, it would seem that my work is more a work of pacification (I mean the universal work).
--
There is the whole gamut, you see, right from the most material. In the most material, its really like that: elements that are perpetually clashing and clashing and clashing everything is clashing, as though it were the only way to exist. In the vital realm, its violence. And in the mental realm, its mainly that crookedness. Thats why I said to myself, Truly, we are poor things!
There is clearly in us the Remembrance that gives birth to the aspiration for something divineif that werent there, latent, we could never we could not even imagine! That aspiration couldnt exist, it would be meaningless. But still, what a long path this is.
0 1963-08-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The last experience (which Ive had these last few days), in which apparently there was a hitch (it wasnt really one) was a sort of demonstration. I told you what it was, you remember: its like a purge of all the vibrations that are false vibrations, that arent the pure and simple response to the supreme Influence (all that in the cells still responds to the vibrations of falsehood, either from habit or from the people around or the food takenfifty thousand things). Then, with an aspiration or a decision, almost a prayer for purification coming from the body, something happens which, naturally, upsets the balance; the imbalance in turn brings about a general discomfort. The form discomfort takes is habitually the same: first, pains and all kinds of sensations I need not describe; if that state goes on developing, if it is allowed to assume its full proportions, it results in the past it resulted in a faint. But this time, I followed the process for about two hours from the moment I got up: the struggle between the new balance, the new Influence that was getting established, and the resistance of all the existing elements forced to go away. That created a sort of conflict. The consciousness remained very clear the consciousness of the BODY remained very clear, very quiet, perfectly trusting. So for two hours I was able to follow the process (while going on with all my usual activities, without changing anything), until I felt, or rather was told sufficiently clearly that the Lord wanted my body to be completely immobile for a while so that He might complete His work. But I am not all alone: there are other people here to help me and watch over everything (but I dont say or explain anything to them, those are things I dont talk about I dont say what goes on, I dont say anything), so I sat there wondering, Is it really and truly indispensable? (Mother laughs) Then I felt the Lord exert a little more pressure, which heightened the intensity of the conflict, so that I had all the signs of fainting I understood (!) I stood up, let my body moan a little to make it plain it didnt feel too well (!) and I stretched out. Then I was immobile, and in that immobility, I saw the work that was being donea work that cannot be done if you go on moving about. I saw the work. It took nearly half an hour; in half an hour it was over. Which means there is really there is a fact I cannot doubt, even if all the surrounding thoughts and forces contradict it: I cannot doubt that the consciousness is increasing more and more the consciousness in the body. It is growing more and more precise, luminous, exactQUIETvery peaceful. Yet very conscious of a TREMENDOUS battle against millennial habits. Do you follow?
When it was over, I saw that even physically, bodily, there is a strength: the result is an increased strength. A very clearly increased strength.
0 1963-09-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The experience lasted a long time for all details, to all problems, thats what I answered. And when I came to the end, I said to myself, But thats a wonderful argument! Because all the elements of doubt, ignorance, incomprehension, bad will, negation, with that argument they were all muzzledannulled, they had no effect.
That work, I think, must have had worldwide repercussions. I was in it, in that state (with the sense of a very great power and a wonderful freedom) for certainly at least six or eight hours. (The work had started long before, but it became rather acutely present these last few days.)
0 1963-10-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If divine Love were to descend first, before divine Truth, certain beings with a special power or receptivity might draw it into themselves, personally, and then all those wrong impulses might occur.1 But if this divine Love descends only in the Truth, in the Truth-Consciousness, it will enter someone only if that person is ready to receive it. Without a preparation of Truth, there might occur a very powerful attraction of elements unable to keep that Love in its purity; whereas if the preparation of Truth has been done, with that preparation, It will CHOOSE, in order to manifest, the persons, the individualities, who are ready.
***
0 1963-10-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every time a new truth has attempted to manifest upon earth, it has been immediately attacked, corrupted and diverted by pseudo-spiritual forceswhich did represent a certain spirituality at a given time, but precisely the one that the new truth wants to go beyond. To give but one example of those sad spiritual diversions which clutter History, Buddhism was largely corrupted in a sizable part of Asia by a whole Tantric and magic Buddhism. The falsity lies not in the old spirituality which the new truth seeks to go beyond, but in the eternal fact that the Past clings to its powers, its means and its rule. As Mother said in her simple language, Whats wrong is to remain stuck there. And Sri Aurobindo with his ever-present humor: The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past. We could expect the phenomenon to recur today. In India, Tantrism represents a powerful discipline from the Past and it was inevitable that Mother should experience the better and the worse of that system in her attempt to transform all the means and elements of the old earththis Agenda has made abundant mention of a certain X, symbol of Tantrism. Now, as it happens, we are witnessing the same phenomenon of diversion, and today this same Tantrism is seeking to divert the new truth by convincing as many adepts as possible not to say Mothers Mantra, which is too advanced for ordinary mortals, and to say Tantric mantras in its stead. This is purely and simply an attempt to take Mothers place. One has to be quite ignorant of the mechanism of forces not to understand that saying a mantra of the old gods puts you under the influence and into the orbit of precisely that which resists the new truth. Mother had foreseen the phenomenon and forewarned me in the following conversation. Unfortunately, until recently, I always wanted to believe that Tantrism would be converted. Nothing of the sort. It is attempting to take Mothers place and lead astray those who are not sincere enough to want ONE SINGLE THING: the new world.
***
0 1963-11-04, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am insisting on this, because it eliminates all moral elements. It eliminates the derogatory notion of desire. The vision increasingly eliminates all those notions of good and evil, good and bad, inferior and superior, and so forth. There is only what I might almost call a difference of vibratory qualityquality still evokes the idea of superiority and inferiority, it isnt quality, not intensity either, I dont know the scientific term they use to distinguish one vibration from another, but thats it.
But then, the remarkable thing is that the Vibration (what we could call the quality of the vibration that comes from the Lord) is constructive: it constructs, it is peaceful and luminous; while that other vibration, of desire and such like, complicates, destroys and confuses, it twists thingsconfuses and distorts them, twists them. And it takes away the light: it makes for a dullness, which can be intensified with violent movements to the point of very dark shadows. But even where there is no passion, where passion doesnt interfere, thats how it is. You see, the physical reality has become nothing but a field of vibrations mingling together and, unfortunately, clashing together too, in conflict with one another. And the clash, the conflict, is the climax of that kind of turmoil, of disorder and confusion created by certain vibrations, which are ultimately vibrations of ignorance (they come because people dont know, they are vibrations of ignorance), and are too small, too narrow, too limitedtoo short. The problem isnt seen from a psychological standpoint at all: its nothing but vibrations.
If we look at it from a psychological standpoint On the mental plane, its very easy; on the vital plane, its not too difficult; on the physical plane, its a little heavier, because desires are passed off as needs. But there too, there has been a field of experience these last few days: the study of medical and scientific conceptions on the bodys makeup, its needs, and whats good or bad for it. And all this, in its essence, again boils down to the same question of vibrations. It was quite interesting: there was an appearance (because all things as the ordinary consciousness sees them are nothing but appearances), there was an appearance of food poisoning (mushrooms that are thought to have been bad). It was the object of a particular study to find out whether there was something absolute about the poisoning, or whether it was relative, that is, based on ignorance, a wrong reaction and the absence of the true Vibration. And the conclusion was as follows: its a question of proportion between the amount, the sum of the vibrations that belong to the Supreme, and the sum of the vibrations that still belong to darkness. Depending on the proportion, the poisoning appears as something concrete, real, or else as something that can be eliminated, in other words, that doesnt resist the influence of the Vibration of Truth. And it was very interesting, because, immediately, as soon as the consciousness became aware of the cause of the trouble in the bodys functioning (the consciousness perceived where it came from and what it was), immediately the observation began, with the idea: Lets see what happens. First set the body perfectly at rest with the certainty (which is always there) that nothing happens except by the Lords Will and that the effect too is the Lords Will, all the consequences are the Lords Will, and consequently one should be very still. So the body is very still: untroubled, not agitated, it doesnt vibrate, nothingvery still. Once this is achieved, to what extent are the effects unavoidable? Because a certain quantity of matter that contained an element unfavorable to the bodys elements and life was absorbed, what is the proportion between the favorable and the unfavorable elements, or between the favorable and the unfavorable vibrations? And I saw very clearly: the proportion varies according to the amount of cells in the body that are under the direct Influence, that respond to the supreme Vibration alone, and the amount of other cells that still belong to the ordinary way of vibrating. It was very clear, because I could see all the possibilities, from the ordinary mass [of cells], which is completely upset by that intrusion and where you have to fight with all the ordinary methods to get rid of the undesirable element, to the totality of the cellular response to the supreme Force, which renders the intrusion perfectly innocuous. But this is still a dream for tomorrowwere on the way. But the proportion has become rather favorable (I cant say all-powerful, far from it, but rather favorable), so that the consequences of the ill-being didnt last very long and the damage was, so to say, minimal.
But all the experiences nowadays, one after the otherall the PHYSICAL experiences, of the bodypoint to the same conclusion: everything depends on the proportion between the elements that respond exclusively to the Supremes Influence, the half-and-half elements, on the road to transformation, and the elements that still follow Matters old vibratory process. The latter appear to be decreasing in number, to a great extent, but there are still enough of them to bring about unpleasant effects or unpleasant reactionsthings that are untransformed, that still belong to ordinary life. But all problems, whether psychological or purely material or chemical, all problems boil down to this: they are nothing but questions of vibrations. And there is the perception of that totality of vibrations and of what we could call (in a very rough and approximative way) the difference between the constructive and the destructive vibrations. We can say (to put it very simply) that all the vibrations that come from the One and express Oneness are constructive, while all the complications of the ordinary, separative consciousness lead to destruction.
(long silence)
0 1963-12-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The way the world is now physically organized, with the difference and specialization in the forms, in sexes, encourages a kind of opposition between the two poles, the union of which results in creation. So, naturally, each pole has enormous difficulty understanding the other (although it thinks and believes it does), especially understanding the pole I place underneath (gesture signifying the basis of the world), which is the effectively creative pole, that is to say, what is expressed by woman. She feels very well that without this (gesture above) the full understanding isnt there; but this, which is above, doesnt AT ALL understand the creative power of that which is belowit knows it in principle, but doesnt understand it. And there is a lack of adaptation, a sort of conflict, which shouldnt exist. It never existedneverbetween Sri Aurobindo and me, but I could see it didnt exist because he had adopted the attitude of complete surrender to the eternal Mother (the stage, in the creation, of complete surrender). I would see it, and it embarrassed me! It embarrassed me, I thought, But why does he think he has to do that (laughing), as if I couldnt understand! On the contrary, I thirst for the other attitude for identifying myself this way instead of that way (Mother presses her fist upward against her hand above): for identifying myself from below upward instead of from above downward. It was an aspiration, which has been there almost for eternities for the universal creative Force to identify itself with the Creator. And to identify itself not through the descent of the Creator, but through the ascent of the Force the conscious ascent. But Sri Aurobindo willed it that way, so it was that way and then I was very busy with my work. For the thirty years we lived together, it went on that way, perfectly smoothly; and I kept my aspiration quiet because I knew that it was his will. But since he left and I was obliged to do his work, so to speak, things have changed. But I didnt in the least want the Creator, because of my taking up the work, to be obliged to adapt himself to the creative Force (that wont do at all!), and my whole aspiration has been for the creative Force to consciously BECOME the Creator. Its becoming increasingly that way. And at the last meeting [with Sri Aurobindo], for a time (not the whole time, but some time), it was that way. Then I understood; it made me understand the play of all the forces in the two elements the two polesand how they could be joined, through what process that opposition could disappear so that the total Being might exist.
Were on the way. And its growing clearer and clearer. It will be tremendously interesting. But thats for later on.
0 1964-01-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Imperial MAHESHWARI is seated in the wideness above the thinking mind and will and sublimates and greatens them into wisdom and largeness or floods with a splendour beyond them. For she is the mighty and wise One who opens us to the supramental infinities and the cosmic vastness, to the grandeur of the supreme Light, to a treasure-house of miraculous knowledge, to the measureless movement of the Mothers eternal forces. Tranquil is she and wonderful, great and calm for ever. Nothing can move her because all wisdom is in her; nothing is hidden from her that she chooses to know; she comprehends all things and all beings and their nature and what moves them and the law of the world and its times and how all was and is and must be. A strength is in her that meets everything and masters and none can prevail in the end against her vast intangible wisdom and high tranquil power. Equal, patient and unalterable in her will she deals with men according to their nature and with things and happenings according to their Force and the truth that is in them. Partiality she has none, but she follows the decrees of the Supreme and some she raises up and some she casts down or puts away from her into the darkness. To the wise she gives a greater and more luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished liberty to prosper in the ways of the Ignorance or to perish. For she is above all, bound by nothing, attached to nothing in the universe. Yet has she more than any other the heart of the universal Mother. For her compassion is endless and inexhaustible; all are to her eyes her children and portions of the One, even the Asura and Rakshasa and Pisacha6 and those that are revolted and hostile. Even her rejections are only a postponement, even her punishments are a grace. But her compassion does not blind her wisdom or turn her action from the course decreed; for the Truth of things is her one concern, knowledge her centre of power and to build our soul and our nature into the divine Truth her mission and her labour.
Ganapati, or Ganesh: the son of the supreme Mother, god of material knowledge and wealth. He is represented with an elephant's head.
0 1964-03-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Today the doctor is leaving for America for a brain operation.6 Its far from being a safe affair, its too new, there are still too many unknown elements.
There have been a number of really very interesting things with him, but its a sort of microscopic work, so it cant be told. For instance, the way the auras, the vibrations, are mingledits very interesting.
0 1964-08-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think you have in a corner of your being what I could call a grumbler. I became aware of thatnot particularly for you, but as one of the manifestations of that onion skin I mentioned just a moment ago (!) Some people in that way are grumblers, for them everything is an occasion to grumble and complain. Its very interesting, you know, because owing to the work I am doing, all those ways of being or reacting are taking place WITHIN me, and I catch myself being like this, being like that, doing this, doing that, being thereall the things one shouldnt be! Everything comes to me in that form: as if it took place within me. Ill catch myself being like that and Ill say, What! Some time ago, I was haunted by this for a long while: something which always sees the bad side of things, the difficulty, which even foresees the difficulty, which is in contact with all that protests, complains and grumbles I saw that very strongly. Then I started to work and work on it; and when I set to work, there is a sort of awareness that comes to me of the different places or elements where the same thing is: it shows itself very clearly, so then I can do something. But you know, its an incalculable work of every minute, and for a considerable number of people! Quite a lot. The larger part of the work is impersonal, in the sense that I dont know to whom its going or what, but it is often as an illustration (you know, like when you tell a story to make an idea better understood; they are illustrations to make me understand the work better), then I see in everyone the different ways of being and reacting. But its so incalculable in the perception, so constant, that its very hard to express I would have to say lots of things at the same time, which is impossible.
No, but theres obviously a link missing between something I sense in the background and something I am here.
0 1964-09-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother is led to carry out all kinds of experiments in her body for the work of Transformation. One of them consists in receiving or taking upon oneself every possible disorder for several hours, several days or several minutes, in one's body, in order to act on them, and, consequently, to act on disorders of the same nature in the worldor on THE Disorder. Mother is thus constantly led to work on the meeting point between the subtle forces behind and the bodily or material mechanisms. In her body it is an uncommon chemistry that takes place, the subtle elements of which she knows better than the gross ones.
***
0 1964-11-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is another thing. Recently, one day, I suddenly I am extremely sensitive to the composition of the air, from my earliest childhood: airs, if I may say so, they each had their own taste, their own color and quality, and I would recognize them to such a point that sometimes I would say, Oh, the air of (I was a child, of course), the air of this country or the air of that place has come here. It was like that. I was extremely sensitive to the quality of pure air, that is, without the elements that come from the decomposition of life and especially from the places where people are crowded together. It was like that to an extremely sharp degree: for instance, if I was moved from one place to another, I could be suddenly cured of an illness from the change of air. When I met Thon, it became conscious, an object of study, and it still goes on. Perhaps a few days ago (I cant say, time has no meaning), but not very long ago, I said, Theres something new in the air. And something very unpleasant, extremely pernicious; I felt that that something (I didnt say anything to anyone, naturally) had a peculiar, extremely subtle odor, not a physical one, and had the power to separate vital vibrations from physical vibrations that is to say, an extremely noxious element.
Immediately I set to work (it lasted for hours), and the night was spent counteracting it: I tried to find which higher vibration could counteract it, until I succeeded in clarifying the atmosphere. But the memory remained very precise. And very recently (maybe a day or two ago), they told me that the Chinese had chosen an Indian territory, in the North, to test a certain kind of atomic bomb, and that they had exploded a certain bomb there. When they told me this, the memory of my odor abruptly came back.1
0 1964-11-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not to speak of the cases when it makes things worse. For instance, for those very tooth troubles, the doctor wanted to give me those penicillin pills that you let melt in your mouth to prevent an inflammation; when I take one of those pills (laughing), theres a furious rage in all my teeth! As if all the elements attacked were furious: Why are you disturbing us? We were nice and quiet, we werent troubling you! And everything starts swelling furiously.
Its amusing to follow it consciously, very amusing! And you see: diseases, medicines, all that is part of the old drama.
0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are all the Christian, Buddhist theories, Shankara, all those who declare that the world is an unreal Falsehood and that it must disappear and give place to a heaven (a new world and a heaven). And this is among the most aspiring elements of mankind, those who arent content with the world as it is, who dont say, Oh, as long as I am here and alive, things are fine; afterwards, I dont careenjoy the short life. Afterwards, well, its over, and thats that; let me make the most of the moment Ive been given. What a queer conception! Thats the other extreme.
But in fact, if we go back to the source, there was an Evangelist (I think it was St. John) who announced a new heaven and a new EARTH.
0 1965-03-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
After perfect stillness, there is the movement of inner aspiration (I am always referring to the aspiration of the cells I am using words to describe something wordless, but there is no other way to express oneself), the surrender, that is to say, the SPONTANEOUS AND TOTAL acceptance of the supreme Will (which is unknown to us). Does the total Will want things to go this way or that way, that is, towards the disintegration of certain elements or towards? And then again, there are endless nuances: there is the passage from one height to another (I am speaking of cellular realizations, of course, dont forget that), I mean that you have a certain inner equilibrium, an equilibrium of movement, of life, and its understood that in order to go from one movement to a higher movement, there is almost always a descent, then a new ascent there is a transition. So does the shock received impel you to go down in order to climb up again, or does it impel you do go down in order to abandon old movements? Because there are cellular ways of being that have to disappear in order to give way to others; there are others that climb down in order to climb up again with a higher harmony and organization. This is the second point. And you should wait and see WITHOUT POSTULATING IN ADVANCE what has to be. There is especially, of course, the desire: the desire to be comfortable, the desire to be in peace and all that that must cease absolutely and disappear. You must be absolutely without any reaction, like this (gesture of immobile offering Upward, palms open). And then, when you are like that (you, meaning the cells), after a while the perception comes of the category the movement belongs to, and you just have to follow the perception, whether it is that something must disappear and be replaced by something else (which one doesnt know yet), or whether it is that something must be transformed.
And so forth. And its like that all the time.
0 1965-04-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Exactly, I suddenly remembered in this connection a quotation from Sri Aurobindo that seemed to me interesting. Its in The Human Cycle, at the end of The Human Cycle. Heres what he says: It may well be that, once started, it [the supramental endeavour] may not advance rapidly even to its first decisive stage; it may be that it will take long centuries of effort to come into some kind of permanent birth. But that is not altogether inevitable, for the principle of such changes in Nature seems to be a long obscure preparation followed by a swift gathering up and precipitation of the elements into the new birth, a rapid conversion, a transformation that in its luminous moment figures like a miracle.1
This is very interesting. Yes (laughing), he said this to me a few days ago!
0 1965-05-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For the whole, its always, every instant, the most favorable to the divine evolution. And for the elements consciously attuned to the Divine, its the best for the perfection of their union.
But it shouldnt be forgotten that its constantly changing, it isnt a static best; its a best that, if retained, wouldnt be the best of the next moment. And its because the human consciousness always tends to want to retain statically what it finds or considers to be good that it finds this best always eludes it. That effort to retain is what warps things.
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conscious perception of the two elements (the body is becoming a representative object; not just symbolic: representative), the perception of the state of consciousness of those elements that belong to the past, to the past evolutionary movement, and of those that are open to the new method, if I may say so, is clearer and clearer; its perceptible as clearly as, more clearly than external physical things, than the external form (this distinction is physical, but it belongs to the inner construction). Outwardly, it results in fever. Its a battle. And not a battle of ill wills, its not that: its a sort of incapacity. And its not with violence that we will succeed. You know, the only thing that can triumph is this supreme Vibration of Love, but there is an incapacity to receive, and then (its a strange phenomenon), this incapacity to receive causes a sort of sifting, and its only elements that are as if watered down that can pass through the Thing in itself in its true essence cannot. If you look at it from below, you feel as if That refuses to give itself, but its not true, because when you ARE That (laughing), there is no sense of being watered down: That manifests in its plenitude. And see what happens [the sifting]!
And its clear (you can see it in very small details) that if there were direct contact, something would be as if shatteredit would cause something to be shattered. Yes, too abrupt, too sudden a change, like something thats shattered.
--
And that was an experience lived every second, for about six hours nonstop. Six hours nonstop and in stillness (not stillness, but the possibility of physical immobility on the bed), then the continuation for more than an hour after getting up, with the activities (limited, but ordinary activities), but then it became terrible! And I say: all, all the elements, whatever they are, whether they belong to the old movement or to the other one, all the elements had the same sense of adoration. Therefore it isnt a moral attitude: the same sense of adoration. Only, some, in their adoration, accepted annulment, while others wanted the Victory, the transformationits not that they wanted: they FELT the victory: and the others accepted the dissolution. And both together Very likely, if I had expressed that (I wasnt in a fit state to do so!), if I had expressed it at the time, I would have been accused of acute delirium I was perfectly conscious. And there, I mean, THERE, above the body, the most wonderful Peace one can imagine, a smiling Peace and
And the fever is going on. Which is to say that I am very, very conscious that this is the maximum of what can be done to advance swiftly towards transformation.
0 1965-10-13, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then you can only smile. Instead of being affected because this one is in a bad mood and that one got angry and things go wrong and people fight each other and the elements cause hurricanes, instead of being saddened, you can only smile. You can only smile, because everything, but everything is the same the good and the bad, the luminous and the darkeverything is the same and everything grates in comparison with that. And you see, the experience you have when you climb up there to find Him isnt the same thing, because you feel, Yes, up there everything is like that, its very fine, but when you come down here, its horrible. But thats not what I am referring to: its the experience RIGHT HEREright herein other words, what the world MUST be. What it must be, what obviously it will be when men permit it.
They are very attached to their grating, very attached, they cling to it. They dont feel alive when it doesnt grate.
0 1966-01-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Recently (for some time), there was that same difficulty of the body, which isnt limited and shut inside a shell as is generally the case, and which freely receives not even with the feeling of receivingwhich HAS the vibrations of everything around it; and then, when everything around it is, mentally or morally, closed, unwilling to understand, its a bit difficult, which means that the elements that come have to be transformed. Its a sort of totalitya very manifold and unsteady totalityrepresenting your field of consciousness and action and on which you must work constantly to reestablish a harmony (a minimum of harmony), and when something around you goes wrong according to the ordinary idea, it makes the work a bit difficult. Its subtle, persistent, and obstinate at the same time. I remember, last night when I stretched out on my bed, there was in the body an aspiration for Harmony, for Light, for a sort of smiling peace; the body aspired above all for harmony because of all those things that grate and scrape. And the experience was probably the result of that aspiration: I went there and met a pink and light-blue Purani (!)what a blue! The pretty, very pretty light blue of Sri Aurobindo.
Only, I have noticed that in this bodys life, Ive never had the same experience twice I may have the same type of experience to a higher degree or to a much vaster degree, but never identically the same. And I dont retain the experience: I am constantly, constantly (gesture forward), constantly forging ahead; you know, the work of transformation of the consciousness is so rapid, it must be done so fast that you dont have time to enjoy or dwell upon an experience or draw long-lasting satisfaction from it, its impossible. It comes powerfully, very powerfully, it changes everything, then something else comes. Its the same thing with the transformation of the cells: all kinds of little disorders come, but to the consciousness they are clearly disorders related to the transformation, so you see to that particular point, you want order to be restored; at the same time, something knows full well that the disorder came to make the transition from the ordinary automatic functioning to the conscious functioning under the direct Direction and the direct Influence of the Supreme. And the body itself knows this (still, its no fun to have a pain here or a pain there, or this or that being disorganized, but it KNOWS). And when that point has reached a certain stage of transformation, you move on to another point, then on to another, and on to another again. So nothing is done, no work is definitively done until everything is ready. So you have to do the same work again, but on a higher or a vaster level, or with more intensity or in greater detail (it depends on the case), until EVERYTHING has been brought to a homogeneous point and is ready in the same way.
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The same elements could be there, but endowed with suppleness. elements whose firmness doesnt stem from hardness but from the force of light, no?
Yes, thats possible. Only, what I mean is that it may again take place through a large number of new creations. Will the transition from man to this being, for instance, perhaps take place through all kinds of other intermediaries? You understand, what I find formidable is the switch from one to the other.
--
Is there anything this Light cant do with the elements it has?? The materials remain the same, the elements remain the same, but transfigured.
But vegetal things arent immortal.
0 1966-11-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its generally fragmentsfragments of life that were individualized, and when in the present life you follow a normal development with the [various beings] gathering around the central consciousness, all those elements come back to gather together. They come back, each with its own memories. For instance, I had a memory like that (I tell you, Ive had hundreds of them) when I was very young (I must have been twenty or so). It wasnt at night, but I was lying down, resting: suddenly I felt myself riding a horse, with tremendous warlike power and the sense a will for victory and the POWER of victory. And I felt as if I was riding a horse: I saw a white horse, I saw my legs, with riding breeches, you understand, and a red velvet costume. And there I was, at a gallop. I couldnt tell what the head was like or anything, naturally! And also, the crowd, the armies, and the rising sun. It was so strong, the sense that it was the sense of the will for victory and the POWER of victory. It came just like that. Then, sometime later, I read somewhere the story of Murat (I forget I think his victory was Magenta3 I no longer remember all that), and I immediately understood that my vision was at the moment of launching the battle: he had an inner call to a Power, so there was an identification [with Mothers power], and thats what I remembered and what came back. If I said (as the Theosophists tell you), I was Murat, it would be stupid. But it was a consciousness coming back. It was so strong! The impression lasted long enough, with the sense of the battle but above all the sense of that POWER making you invincible. It was interesting, because at the time (it was just in the beginning, I was beginning to take interest in these things and I had just come across the Cosmic teaching), I was convinced that a womans psychic being was always reincarnated in a woman and a mans psychic being was always reincarnated in a man (many schools teach that; Thon too believed so, he insisted on it). So it came as a surprise, because it wasnt in conformity with what I thought (!). Afterwards (long afterwards), I realized that naturally all those dogmas were nonsense, but
It fits with what I told you last time: the STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS are what reincarnate, evolving, developing, growing more perfect. Thats rather how it was, thats how that memory came. Its like that with many memories. And I know that to say states of consciousness are what reincarnate, to adopt that as the sole explanation would be incorrectits absolutely incorrect but its one way of looking at the question beyond the sense of the little personality. It broadens the consciousness: one has in oneself things far more universal and far less limited than personal experiences. Just as in life some people have an exceptional life, in the same way they also have exceptional moments in their life, when they no longer are one single little person: they are a force in action. Thats how it is.
0 1967-01-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are billions of elements in the body, so its a mixture of receptivity and non-receptivity. Its still mixed. And that mixture is why the appearance2 remains what it is. Well then, to make everything receptive in every element is a work, you understand, a formidable work. If it had to be done in detail, it would be impossible, but through the pressure of the Force it can be done. So then, the trance would be made necessary precisely so that its done quickly (relatively quickly). This work is BEING DONE (I am conscious of it), you understand (laughing), only it may stretch over hundreds of years! Thats what Sri Aurobindo said: a state of consciousness has to be established in which the collective life of the cells can be preserved for as long as desired; that means the Lords Will must be sufficiently active to keep the balance between all those elements for as long as necessary for all of them to change. And always, it has always been said that the most external form would be the last to change; that the whole internal, organic functioning would be changed before the external form, the appearance (its only an appearance, of course); that the appearance would be the last to change.
It seems to me to be the legacy of primordial habits the habits of Matter. This Matter, of course, comes from total unconsciousness, and throughout the ages and all the ways of being, it returns to total consciousness it goes from one extreme to the other; well, its these habits of static immobility that give this need for trance. It shouldnt be necessary. Only (how can I explain?), logically, as things are, it depends on the balance between the bodys capacity of receptivity and its external activity: its obviously far more receptive when it is immobile, because its energies are occupied with the transformation.
0 1967-02-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Recently, the illness of Mother's attendant: the only somewhat positive element among those immediately near Mother. She will have to leave Mother's service in August, 1970. After that there will be no positive elements left near Mother. Hence the following sentence.
Mother's attendant, who sleeps in Mother's room and had a sudden bout of fever that night.
0 1967-02-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And finally, what was the occult influence of this Judaism on human evolution? The more I think about it, the more the threads of it all appear to me so tied up and entangled together that only a knowledge in overview seems capable of helping to bring out the essential. Well, Mother, I leave it all to you. I hope you will be able to tell me the way in which we here should approach the question and to give me the few major elements on which I will be able to build my exposition.
November, 1960
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So what should be done there (and what I am trying to do) is the same work of receptive silence and to let inspiration, the inspirational consciousness, gather the necessary elements. For that we must be very tranquil. We must be very supple, in the sense of surrendered; I mean, allow as little habitual activity as possible to mix inbe almost like an automaton. But with the full perception of the consciousness trying to be expressed, so that nothing gets mixed in with it. Thats the most important thing: to receive this consciousness and hold it like really like something sacred, without anything getting mixed in with it, like that. So then, there is a problem of attraction, we could say, and of concretization in the formula.4 I always tell myself that if I knew many languages, it would make use of all that; unfortunately I know only two (I know only two thoroughly) and I have only very superficial and minimal glimpses of two or three others thats not enough. Only, I have been in contact with very different methods: the method of the Far East and the Sanskrit method, and of course the methods of the West. It does give a sort of base, but its not sufficient I am at the opposite extreme from erudition. I have always felt that erudition shrivels up thoughtit parches the brain. (But I have great respect for scholars, oh! indeed, and I seek their advice, but for myself it wont do!)
Once, very long ago, when Sri Aurobindo was telling me about himself, that is, of his childhood, his education, I put the question to him, I asked him, Why am I, as an individual being, so mediocre? I can do anything; all that I have tried to do I have done, but never in a superior way: always like this (gesture to an average level). Then he answered me (at the time I took it as a kindness or commiseration), Thats because it gives great supplenessa great suppleness and a vast scope; because those who have perfection are concentrated and specialized. As I said, I took it simply like a caress to comfort a child. But now I realize that the most important thing is not to have any fixity: nothing should be set, definitive, like the sense of a perfection in the realization that puts a total stop to the forward march. The sense of incapacity (with the meaning I said of mediocrity, of something by no means exceptional) leaves you in a sort of expectation (gesture of aspiration upward) of something better. And then, the most important thing is supplenesssuppleness, suppleness. Suppleness and breadth: reject nothing as useless or bad or inferiornothing; set nothing up as really superior and beautifulnothing. Remain ever open, ever open.
0 1967-03-07, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But its clear, precise and EVIDENT only with this new vision, because (how can I explain?) I knew this I knew it before, I knew it but I saw it again with the new consciousness, the new way of seeing, and then the understanding was total, the perception was total, absolutely concrete, with elements that were completely missingconvincing elements that were completely missing in the first perception, which was a vital-mental knowledge. While this is a knowledge of the consciousness of the cells.
But all this would only be interesting with all the facts (which cant be given). So Id like to have a more complete and impersonal experience, you might say, I mean not illustrated by facts but an overall vision of the process. Then I will be able to talk about it.
0 1967-05-10, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At one time, I was very interested in knowing about it. I tried to recall the memory of the elements that lived at that time, but
Yes, you say, I wondered how they restored the names of the pharaohs and gods. Then you ask, Is the Egyptians language contemporary with the most ancient Sanskrit, or still more ancient? Or is there another human language older than the oldest Sanskrit? You also ask, Is this Egyptian hieroglyphic language akin to the Chaldean tradition or the Aryan tradition?
0 1967-06-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If, for this wear and tear, this deterioration (which comes from the Inconscient and is the result of the RESISTANCE of the Inconscient), if for this we can substitute the aspiration for progress and transformation (not with words the vibration) That experience has been given to me several times. For example, suppose there is something which goes wrong, there is a pain somewhere, something disorganized that no longer works properly; if there is the vision and conception in the faith (faith and consecration to the Supreme) that its deliberate, that the Supreme has allowed it to be (how can I express it? All words are meaningless), has allowed or willed it, or wanted it to be, because to Him it seems the best way to transform the thing, to have it make the necessary progress, if the cells that are somewhat disorganized and sick, as they say, are able to feel this then straight away it takes a marvellous turn for the betterimmediately, in five minutes, ten minutes. I could give concrete, precise examples, with all the details. So that means bringing the two extremes into contact, we could say. And if that can become the normal life of the elements which make up this outer form, then there is no reason why No, there is no need to die, no need whatsoever. There comes a point when death loses all meaning.
And one learns in the smallest detail, in the little cell or the faint sensation (and when it comes down to feelings, there is something which is the embryo of thoughtoh, then), the taste for drama. Ah, then everything is explained.
0 1967-10-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the wake of the events of February 11, 1965, during which the Ashram was besieged, several disciples hurt and a few buildings burnt down, Mother issued a declaration in which she implicated the various elements responsible for that outburst of hatred. Among the very first to blame, she cited Pondicherry's Catholics: "... First, the militant Catholics, becausein spite of what the Pope declared after his visit to Indiathey are convinced that whoever is not a Catholic must be an instrument of the devil ..."
In France.
0 1967-11-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But since its taking place in one body, it can take place in all bodies! I am not made of anything different from others. The difference is the consciousness, thats all. Its made of exactly the same thing, with the same elements, I eat the same things, and it was made in just the same way.
And it was as stupid, as obscure, as unconscious, as stubborn as all the other bodies in the world.
0 1968-02-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo said it several times: as soon as the being is annulled, the essence, the essential purpose of individualization immediately reappears WITHOUT the egos limits. But what you are speaking of, that sort of anguish that makes one stop,4 is a necessary movement till the whole being is ready, because if that annulment of the personality, of the individual, took place before all the elements of the body, or even of the vital or the mind, were ready you understand, it would be dissolved, and then theres no knowing what would happen. So this need to get a grip on oneself occurs until one is entirely readywhen one is ready, one can let oneself go. And as soon as the fusion is done (what can I call it?) not the law but what we might call the raison dtre [of individualization] comes back, and without the egos limitations.
I had that experience in the vital and in the mind; now I see that its the same in the body, that there is still a recall because this or that part, this or that element isnt yet ready and one has to wait until its ready. But in fact, in this mornings experience, all that remained was like pieces of bark floating about.
--
But when the body is ready, it will be able to let itself go like that WITHOUT BEING DISSOLVED. And thats the work of preparation. The movement, yes, is to let oneself melt entirely. But the result is the egos abolition, that is to say, an UNKNOWN state, you understand, which we may call physically unrealized, because all those who sought Nirvana did so by giving up their body, whereas our work is to make the body, the material substance, capable of melting; but then, the principle of individualization remains, and all the egos drawbacks disappear. Thats the present attempt. How to keep the form without the egos presence?thats the problem. Well, thats how it takes place, little by little, little by little. Thats why it takes time: each element is taken up again, transformed. Thats the marvel, that is it (for the ordinary consciousness, its a miracle): its keeping the form while entirely losing the ego. For the vital and the mind, its easier to understand (for most people its very difficult, but still for those who are ready, its easy to understand, and then the action can be much more rapid), but HERE, this (Mother points to her body), for it not to be dissolved by this movement of fusion? Well, thats precisely the experience, thats it. And there is a slight movement of patience, a movement of its really the deep essence of compassion: the minimum wastage for the maximum effect. That is, one goes as fast as one can, but delays arise from the need to prepare the various elements.
Thats precisely the so interesting curve at present unfolding. At times, you feel as if everything, everything is dissolving, getting disorganized; and I have observed closely: at first the physical consciousness wasnt sufficiently enlightened, and when those inner preparations took place, it would feel, Ah, this must be what heralds death; then, little by little, came the knowledge that it wasnt that at all, it was only the inner preparation to be capable, capable of identification. And then, on the contrary, the very clear vision of this plasticity so particular, this suppleness so extraordinary that if it were realized once its realized, it obviously means the abolition of the necessity of death.
--
Every time the rule or domination of Natures ordinary laws is, on one point or another, replaced (or must be or is going to be replaced on any point) by the authority of the Divine Consciousness, that creates a state of transition with all the appearances of a tremendous disorder and a very great danger. And as long as the body doesnt know, as long as its in its state of ignorance, it gets panic-stricken (which is what happens in almost everyone), panic-stricken, it thinks its a serious illness, and sometimes, with the help of imagination, it may even result in an illness. But originally its not that: its a withdrawal, the withdrawal of Natures ordinary law with its adjunct of personal vital and mental law (but Natures law in the body is generally much stronger than the minds and the vitals law); well, its the withdrawal of that law and its replacement by the other. So there is a moment when its neither this nor that, and that moment is critical. But if the body begins to know, it remains still and has faithtrust and faith; it remains still, then all goes well. The difficulty soon passes and all goes well. So long as the body doesnt know its reactions are disastrous. But for it to know automatically and spontaneously, it means that a large part of its elements must already be conscious and transformed. Now, its all right. Not so long ago it was still necessary to stop, to fall silent, concentrate, to call the Presence, call on its faith, then everything was back in order. Now the movement is spontaneous.
And the surface, the very part that gives the sense of bark, is what will change lastwhats going to happen? I dont know I dont know. But it will change last.
0 1968-03-02, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because, really, if there had only been these elements left to themselves, well, there was nothing but confusion. One can see that its working it works making use of anything!
No, it turns even the worst things to advantage! Thats what is interesting.
0 1968-03-16, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So in order to give form to those elements, it all began with Separation, and it was Separation that gave birth to this division between what we call good and evil; but from the point of view of sensationsensation in the most material partwe may say its suffering and Ananda. And the movement is to put a stop to all separation and to realize the total consciousness in every part (which mentally speaking is absurd, but its like that).
Thats far too philosophical for my taste, not concrete enough. But this mornings experience was concrete, and concrete because it stemmed from extremely concrete sensations in the body, from the presence of this constant duality which looks like an opposition (not only opposition, but mutual negation) between we may take the symbol of suffering and Ananda. And the true state (which for the moment appears impossible to formulate in words, but which was lived and felt) is an all-containing totality; but instead of containing everything as clashing elements, its a harmony of everything, an equilibrium of everything. And once this equilibrium is realized in the creation, the creation will be able (if you put it into words, its no longer that) we might say, able to go on progressing without break.
But thats not it.
0 1968-06-15, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Like this fact that I am increasingly stooped (although its neither the result of fatigue nor the result of a lack of equilibrium, nor it has no material cause), my impression is that the present part of the body (or rather the part belonging to the past) is shrinking, while I myself, my consciousness, I am so vast and on the contrary so large and so powerful, but at a distance, you understand! I dont know how to explain, its a strange sensation. Its as if you were still dragging some old baggage along.2 But its not that it isnt willing. Its more or less difficult, you understand, so it takes more or less time. Its like elements lagging behind.
But the new way of being would only be visible to someone who himself or herself had the supramental vision. I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which arent visible to others (Mother looks around Satprem). But its materially.
0 1968-07-20, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It began yesterday with the notion of the infinitely small and all those worlds organized like that.1 And the impression of a larger personality (I mean, taking up more space, if I may say so), in which men, all men were only tiny constituent elements. That was yesterday. And today, it was the opposite, but complementary experience. And so the outcome is this vision of the All and of all things the All which, because of our infirmity, we always see with limits.
(Mother goes into a long contemplation, then suddenly smiles)
0 1969-01-18, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"It would seem that the most compelling, evident aspect, which probably will be the first to manifestprobablywill be the aspect of Power more than the aspect of Joy and the aspect of Truth. For a new race to be established on earth, it would necessarily have to be protected from the other terrestrial elements so as to survive, and the protection is in the power (not an artificial power external and false, but the true Power, the victorious Will). We may therefore think that the supramental action, even before it becomes an action of harmonization and illumination, of joy, of beauty, will be an action of power, so as to give protection. Naturally, for this action of power to be truly effective, it would have to be founded on Knowledge and Truth and Love and Harmony; but those things could manifestvisibly, little by littleonce the ground, so to speak, had been prepared by the action of a sovereign will and power."
Questions and Answers, December 18, 1957.
0 1969-07-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A split within the Congress Committee between "rightist" and "leftist" elements. Finally, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, took away the finance portfolio from Morarji Desai, the deputy prime minister, and declared her intention to nationalize banks (which she did two days later). This will lead to a scission in the Congress, and this same faction will overthrow Indira in 1977.
Including Tantrics experts in black magic.
0 1969-11-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And for us as we are, each point of this Consciousness has the possibility of being conscious of itself AND conscious of the original Unity And thats the work now being accomplished, that is to say, each infinitesimal element of this Consciousness, while retaining this state of consciousness, is now recapturing the total original state of consciousness the result is the original Consciousness conscious of its Unity AND conscious of the whole play: all the innumerable elements of this Unity So for us, it gets expressed as the sense of time: going from the Inconscient to this state of consciousness. And the Inconscient is the projection of the primeval Unity (if we may say soall those words are completely stupid), of the essential unity unconscious of its own Unity thats the Inconscient. And this Inconscient is growing increasingly conscious in beings who are conscious of their infinitesimal existence and AT THE SAME TIMEthrough what we call progress or evolution or transformationwho manage to be conscious of the original Unity.
And that, as it was seen, explained everything.
0 1969-12-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How to express that? What I lived was that there was NOTHING but this Consciousness; now its not a memory, it has stayed onit has stayed on, but its veiled, so it expresses itself THROUGH the usual consciousness which is there (gesture above the head). The usual consciousness is there. And this Consciousness really has an interesting effect on the body, because in this body, with the elements that were there, it has built a vital and a mind. Now Ive found that the body feels as it used to feel before, that is to say in full possession of its faculty But the mind and vital are no longer independent in the sense that they do as they likethey are under the complete control of the Consciousness. Then the body still has spots of timidity, but its beginning to recapture the state it was in before . Its a very slow and long work, but I dont know how long it will take, but once it reaches a certain perfection, the body will once again be capable of many things it had lost because of that [the departure of the mind and vital]. It wasnt a physical deterioration, thats what deprived it, and its beginning to slowly, slowly come back.
Well see.
0 1970-01-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(To understand which Auroville and above all which AuroviliansMo ther is referring to here, it must be said that almost all the first newcomers, with a few remarkable exceptions, made up a rather heterogeneous group seeking holidays of sorts on an exotic Riviera and dragging behind themselves a number of unsatisfactory habits. That is what Aurovilles enemies later based themselves on to spread all kinds of mischief. It took a few years for the situation to settle and change completely, and for most of the undesirable elements to go away on their own, while fresh newcomers brought a truer aspiration.)
What else do you have?
--
Can the elements in Auroville do the work?
I am working and working (gesture of kneading) to gather the energies that can do the work. And there has to be some sifting there.
--
As a matter of fact, most of those lazy elements came back from Auroville to join those at the Ashram.
A. R.: a healer, thirteenth child in a family of peasants, who came to see Mother in 1969, and who was badly shaken by Satprem.
0 1970-03-13, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem had written Mother a rather cross letter because she had been told some malicious gossip about him, just as she had been toldto what end we do not know that his friend, the Marquis B., was a "spy." Satprem understood nothing of those jealousies and was surprised that Mother could even listen to such tattle. In fact, Mother did not actually "listen" but worked on all the elements that came to her. That was her "sordid battlefield," as she called it. Those sad incidents are only the sign that the atmosphere around Mother was becoming... strange.)
Satprem, my dear child,
0 1970-04-04, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My health problem [serious heart attacks] has led me to reveal many hidden elements in the body, like Mothers love, grace, and Mother herself with me. My body seems no more at the mercy of old beliefs. Thus, my confidence in the body is increasing more and more day by day, and I feel and see clearly that the body can throw away any kind of difficulty in it by coming in the contact with Mothers love and grace. One day, I asked Mother from within not to allow more such attacks which bring me almost to a condition of collapse every now and then and, Mother, it never came afterwards since about ten days!2
(Mother remains silent)
0 1970-10-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(After Satprems departure, Sujata tells Mother about young women of her generation, who do not have the advantage of being close to Mother or in the circle of important persons, and who suffer from never seeing Mother. This was in factwhich is why we record ita very central problem at the Ashram: a sort of dichotomy between the simple elements who washed the dishes, stitched clothes or greased cars, and who were there simply with their love for Mother, and the leading elements, who increasingly revealed their ambitious and therefore warped nature. Yet it was with that thick circle that Mother had to work almost daily, and that is what made her difficulty, if not suffocation. With Sujata, Mother agreed to receive in rotation a number of those young and simple elementsunfortunately, that new opening will soon be blocked by circumstances: a new serious turning point in Mothers yoga, then other impossibilities.)
On the Way to Supermanhood.
0 1970-10-07, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The earth? I dont know. But in humanity, yes, some elements are touched. There are unexpected responses. And then (laughing, but that shouldnt be said), theres a sharp increase in the people regarded as mad; and they are certainly those who have received the first waves. I have seen one or two regarded by others as madthey were touched, but the amount of transformation isnt sufficient for them to keep their balance.
Thats better left unsaid!
0 1972-04-04, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Auroville is burdened by a small group of people who are contaminating its life and spirit and jeopardizing its progress. They thwart any effort to implement safety and hygiene measures, working decisions, and they behave in contradiction to Aurovilles ideal. One solution would be to send some of these people back home and, for a certain period, to limit newcomers to those elements directly useful to the building of Auroville.
We see that, in practice, this possibility has not been endorsed by you. Is the presence of these elementswhich according to us are undesirablenecessary to Auroville for reasons known to the Divine Consciousness? Are we supposed to build Auroville amidst the difficulties they represent? And are they useful to Aurovilles development?
(Mother speaks in French)
--
Some persons have been driven out of the Ashram into Auroville. Those, I admit, are difficult elements who make things difficult. I wish they would be naturally driven out of Auroville to somewhere else. This wouldnt be very nice for the rest of the world but never mind! Although in a free environment, they may be tolerable. Practically, one would have to speak to each one individually.
Now go on, tell me what you wanted to say.
--
For instance, certain elements seem absolutely undesirable to us from the start. And yet these people are sometimes accepted Is there a reason for this?
On trial. Only on a trial basis, never otherwise.
0 1972-07-22, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As a matter of fact, I didnt want to come and see you this morning. I came because Sujata persuaded me to come. She said that if I leave, the worst elements will remain and they they wont help you. I came here out of a sense of duty.
Are you that angry?
0 1973-01-31, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Personally, I have a strange impression. In the past, years ago, I used to feel that a part of my consciousness was vast, was this or that; but now I understand fully well what you mean by an old piece of bark (you know, Theres only an old piece of bark left), I feel I am only a mass of flaws, of imperfections, of dark elements and so on, but the other part of myself completely eludes me. There is only this sort of facade full of unpleasant and clashing and false things. While the other part, the other me I dont know, it eludes me completely. I know its there, but I am mainly conscious of all this thats in front of me.
(Mother plunges in)
02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Those that have stood against this Dark Force and its over-shadowing menaceeven though perhaps not wholly by choice or free-will, but mostly compelled by circumstancesyet, because of the stand they have taken, now bear the fate of the world on their shoulders, carry the whole future of humanity in their march. It is of course agreed that to have stood against the Asura does not mean that one has become sura, divine or godlike; but to be able to remain human, human instruments of the Divine, however frail, is sufficient for the purpose, that ensures safety from the great calamity. The rule of life of the Asura implies the end of progress, the arrest of all evolution; it means even a reversal for man. The Asura is a fixed type of being. He does not change, his is a hardened mould, a settled immutable form of a particular consciousness, a definite pattern of qualities and activitiesgunakarma. Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and impulsion. The domain of enjoyment, on the other hand, is where we reap the fruits of our past Karma; it is the result of an accumulated drive of all that we have done, of all the movements we have initiated and carried out. It is a status of being where there is only enjoyment, not of becoming where there can be development and new creation. It is a condition of gestation, as it were; there is no new Karma, no initiative or change in the stuff of the consciousness. The Asuras are bhogamaya purusha, beings of enjoyment; their domain is a cumulus of enjoyings. They cannot strike out a fresh line of activity, put forth a new mode of energy that can work out a growth or transformation of nature. Their consciousness is an immutable entity. The Asuras do not mend, they can only end. Man can certainly acquire or imbibe Asuric force or Asura-like qualities and impulsions; externally he can often act very much like the Asura; and yet there is a difference. Along with the dross that soils and obscures human nature, there is something more, a clarity that opens to a higher light, an inner core of noble metal which does not submit to any inferior influence. There is this something More in man which always inspires and enables him to break away from the Asuric nature. Moreover, though there may be an outer resemblance between the Asuric qualities of man and the Asuric qualities of the Asura, there is an intrinsic different, a difference in tone and temper, in rhythm and vibration, proceeding as they do, from different sources. However cruel, hard, selfish, egocentric man may be, he knows, he admitsat times, if hot always, at heart, if not openly, subconsciously, if not wholly consciously that such is not the ideal way, that these qualities are not qualifications, they are unworthy elements and have to be discarded. But the Asura is ruthless, because he regards ruthlessness as the right thing, as the perfect thing, it is an integral part of his swabhava and swadharma, his law of being and his highest good. Violence is the ornament of his character.
The outrages committed by Spain in America, the oppression of the Christians by Imperial Rome, the brutal treatment of Christians by Christians themselves (the inquisition, that is to say) or the misdeeds of Imperialists generally were wrong and, in many cases, even inhuman and unpardonable. But when we compare with what Nazi Germany has done in Poland or wants to do throughout the world, we find that there is a difference between the two not only in degree, but in kind.One is an instance of the weakness of man, of his flesh being frail; the other illustrates the might of the Asura, his very spirit is unwilling. One is undivine; the other antidivine, positively hostile. They who cannot discern this difference are colour-blind: there are eyes to which all deeper shades of colour are black and all lighter shades white.
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of consciousness as a movement of ascension, consisting of a double process of sublimation and integration. But ascension itself is only one line of a yet another larger double process. For along with the visible movement of ascent, there is a hidden movement of descent. The ascent represents the pressure from below, the force of buoyancy exerted by the involved and secreted consciousness. But the mere drive from below is not sufficient all by itself to bring out or establish the higher status. The higher status itself has to descend in order to be manifest. The urge from below is an aspiration, a yearning to move ever upward and forward; but the precise goal, the status to be arrived at is not given there. The more or less vague and groping surge from below is canalised, if assumes a definite figure and shape, assumes a local habitation and a name when the higher descends at the crucial moment, takes the lower at its peak-tide and fixes upon it its own norm and form. We have said that all the levels of consciousness have been createdloosened outby a first Descent; but in the line of the first Descent the only level that stands in front at the outset is Matter all the other levels are created no doubt but remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life was already there on the plane of Life even when it did not manifest itself in Matter, when mere Matter, dead Matter was the only apparent reality on the material plane. When Matter was stirred and churned sufficiently so as to reach a certain tension and saturation, when it was raised to a certain degree of maturity, as it were, then Life appeared: Life appeared, not because that was the inevitable and unavoidable result of the churning, but because Life descended from its own level to the level of Matter and took Matter up in its embrace. The churning, the development in Matter was only the occasion, the condition precedent. For, however much one may shake or churn Matter, whatever change one may create in it by a shuffling and reshuffling of its elements, one can never produce Life by that alone. A new and unforeseen factor makes its appearance, precisely because it comes from elsewhere. It is true all the planes are imbedded, submerged, involved in the complex of Matter; but, in point of fact, all planes are involved in every other plane. The appearance or manifestation of a new plane is certainly prepared, made ready to the last the last but onedegree by the urge of the inner, the latent mode of consciousness that is to be; still the actualisation, the bursting forth happens only when the thing that has to manifest itself descends, the actual form and pattern can be imprinted and established by that alone. Thus, again, when Life attains a certain level of growth and maturity, a certain tension and orientationa definite vector, so to say, in the mathematical languagewhen it has, for example, sufficiently organised itself as a vehicle of the psychic element of consciousness, then it buds forth into Mind, but only when the Mind has descended upon it and into it. As in the previous stage, here also Life cannot produce Mind, cannot develop into Mind by any amount of mechanical or chemical operations within itself, by any amount of permutation and combination or commutation and culture of its constituent elements, unless it is seized on by Mind itself. After the Mind, the next higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz. first by an uplifting of the mental consciousnessa certain widening and deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness and then by a descent, gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it.
This, then, is the nature of creation and its process. First, there is an Involution, a gradual foreshorteninga disintegration and concretisation, an exclusive concentration and self-oblivion of consciousness by which the various levels of diminishing consciousness are brought forth from the plenary light of the one supreme Spirit, all the levels down to the complete eclipse in the unconsciousness of the multiple and disintegrate Matter. Next, there is an Evolution, that is to say, embodiment in Matter of all these successive states, appearing one by one from the down most to the topmost; Matter incarnates, all other states contri bute to the incarnation and uphold it, the higher always transforming the lower in a new degree of consciousness.
02.03 - An Aspect of Emergent Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At the very outset of the evolutionary march, when material Nature meant only a mass or masses of incandescent gaseous elements, the first miracle that happened was the formation, the advent of water. There was Hydrogen and there was Oxygen existing and moving side by side, for millions of years perhaps, but only at a given moment did an electric current happen to pass through a certain mixture of the two elements somewhere, and behold, a liquid drop was the product, an absolutely new, unforeseen, unpredictable and wonderful object! Examples can be multiplied.
The fact is admitted, on the whole, unless one is a Fundamentalist and prefers still to live in the consciousness of a bygone century. Difference comes in when the question of explanations and of viewpoints regarding them is raised. A materialist like Professor Broad would consider Mind and Life as fundamentally formations of Matter, however different they might seem from each other and from the latter. Water, the so-called miracle product of Oxygen and Hydrogen, according to him, is as material as these two; even so Life and Mind, however miraculously produced, being born of Matter, are nothing but the same single reality, only in different forms. Others, who are more or less idealists, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, for example (some of them call themselves neo-realists, however), would not view the phenomenon in the same way. Alexander says that Matter and Life and Mind are very different from each other; they are truly emergents, that is to say, novelties; but how the thing has been possible, one need not inquire; one should accept the fact with natural piety.
02.06 - Boris Pasternak, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet pain is pain and evil evil. There are tears in mortal things that touch us to the core. In mankind the drive for evolution brings in revolution. Not only strife and suffering but uglier elements take birth; cruelty, inhumanity, yes, and also perversity, falsehood, all moral turpitudes, a general inner deterioration and bankruptcy of values. In the human scheme of things nothing can remain on a lofty status, there comes inevitably a general decline and degradation. As Zhivago says "A thing which has been conceived in a lofty ideal manner becomes coarse and material."
An element of the human tragedy the very central core perhapsis the calvary of the individual. Pasternak's third article of faith is human freedom, the freedom of the individual. Indeed if evolution is to mean progress and growth it must base itself upon that one needful thing. And here is the gist of the problem that faces Pasternak (as Zhivago) in his own inner consciousness and in his outer social life. The problemMan versus Society, the individual and the collective-the private and the public sector in modern jargonis not of today. It is as old as Sophocles, as old as Valmiki. Antigone upheld the honour of the individual against the law of the State and sacrificed herself for that ideal. Sri Rama on the contrary sacrificed his personal individual claims to the demand of his people, the collective godhead.
02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have never said that my Yoga was something brand new in all its elements. I have called it the integral Yoga and that means that it takes up the essence and many processes of the old Yogas - its newness is in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method. In the earlier stages which is all I deal with in books like the Riddle or the Lights1 there is nothing in it that distinguishes it from the old Yogas except the aim underlying its comprehensiveness, the spirit in its movements and the ultimate significance it keeps before it - also the scheme of its psychology and its working, but as that was not and could not be developed systematically or schematically in these letters, it has not been grasped by those who are not already acquainted with it by mental familiarity or some amount of practice. The detail or method of the later stages of the Yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.
I know very well also that there have been seemingly allied ideals and anticipations - the perfectibility of the race, certain
02.06 - Vansittartism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The more democratic and liberal elements among the Allies do not also consider that Germany as a whole is smitten with an original sin and is beyond redemption. They say Germany too has men and groups of men who are totally against Hitler and Hitlerism; they may have fallen on evil days, but yet they can be made the nucleus of a new and regenerated Germany.Furthermore, they say if Germany has come to be what she is, considerable portion of the responsibility must be shared by the unprogressive and old-world elements among the Allies themselves who helped or pitied or feared the dark Germany.
Hence it is suggested that for the postwar reconstruction of Germany what is required is the re-education of its people. For, only a psychological change can bring about a durable and radical change. But certain proposals towards this end raise serious misgivings, since they mean iron regimentation under foreign control. Even if such a thing were possible and feasible, it is doubtful if the purpose could be best served in this way. Measures have to be taken, no doubt, to uproot Prussianism and Junkerism and prevent their revival, no false mercy or sympathy should be extended to the enemies of God and man. But this is only a negative step, and cannot be sufficient by itself. A more positive and more important work lies ahead. The re-education of Germany must come from within, if it is to be permanent and effective. What others can do is to help her in this new orientation. As we have said, there are the progressive elements in Germany too, although submerged for the moment. The task of reconstruction will precisely consist in calling up and organising and marshalling these forces that are for the Light. The Allied organisation, it may be noted, itself has grown up in this way. When one remembers how Britain stood alone at one time against the all-sweeping victorious march of the Titan, how slowly and gradually America was persuaded to join hands, at first in a lukewarm way, finally with all its heart and soul and might and main, how a new France is being built up out of a mass of ruins, we can hope that the same process will be adopted in the work that lies ahead even after victory, with regard to Italy and with regard to Germany. In the second case the task is difficult but it has got to be done.
***
02.07 - India One and Indivisable, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is no use laying stress on distinctions and differences: we must, on the contrary, put all emphasis upon the fundamental unity, upon the demand and necessity for a dynamic unity. Naturally there are diverse and even contradictory elements in the make-up of a modern nation. France, for example, was not one, but many to start with and for long. We know of the mortal feud between the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs and the struggle among the Barons generally, some even siding with foreigners against their own countrymen (an Indian parallel we have in the story of Prithwiraj and Jayachand), poor Jeanne d'Arc lamenting over the 'much pity' that was in sweet France. There were several rival languagesBreton, Gascon, Provenal, besides the French of Isle de France. Apart from these provincial or regional rivalries there were schisms on religious groundsHuguenots and Catholics, Jansenists and Arians were flying at each other's throat and made of France a veritable bedlam of confusion and chaos. Well, all that was beaten down and smoothed under the steam-roller of a strong centralised invincible spirit of France, one and indivisible and inexorable, that worked itself out through Jeanne d'Arc and Francis the First and Henry the Great and Richelieu and Napoleon. But all nations have the same story. And it is too late now in the day to start explaining the nature and origin of nationhood; it was done long ago by Mazzini and by Renan and once for all.
Indeed, what we see rampant in India today is the mediaeval spirit. This reversion to an olderan extinct, we ought to have been able to saytype of mentality is certainly a fall, a lowering of the collective consciousness. It bas got to be remedied and set right. Whatever the motive forces that lie at the back of the movement, motives of fear or despair or class interest or parochial loyalty, motives of idealism, misguided and obscurantist, they have to be taken by the horns and dominated and eliminated. A breath of modernism, some pure air of clear perception and knowledge and wider consciousness must blow through the congested hectic atmosphere of the Indian body politic.
02.08 - The Basic Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is one unity which cannot be denied to India, because Nature has given it and man cannot withdraw or annul it. It is the geographical, the physical unity. It is so clearly and indelibly marked that it has always been looked upon as a definite unit by all outside its boundaries; one may call in question the cultural unity, if one chooses, one may be sceptic about the spiritual unity, but the unity of the body leaps to the eyes, even as the clear contour of a living organism. As we know, however, an individual human frame may contain many personalities, many Jekylls and Hydes may lodge in the same physical tenement, even so, the physical unity that is India may harbour many and diverse independent elements. Admitting even that, the problem does not end there, it is only the beginning. The problem that is set in such a case is, as has been pointed out by the psychologists, the problem of the integration of personality.
A firm physical unity presupposes, at least posits the possibility of an integral unity. Otherwise the body itself would tend to break up and disintegrate. Such physical cataclysms are not unknown in Nature. However, a geographical unity cannot remain exclusively limited to itself; it brings about other unities by the very pressure, by the capillary action, as it were, of the boundary. The first unity that is called into being is the economic. A Zollverein (Customs Union) has almost always been the starting-point of a national union. Next or along with it comes the political unity. India's political and economic unity has been the great work of the British rule, however that rule might be distasteful to us. It is an illustration of Nature's method of compulsion and violence, when man's voluntary effort fails. India possesses a resounding roll of great names who endeavoured to give her this solid political and economic unity; Bharata, Yudhishthira, Asoka, Chandragupta, Akbar, Shivaji have all contri buted to the evergrowing unification of Indian polity. But still what they realised was not a stable and permanent thing, it was yet fluent and uncertain; it was only the hammerblow, the plastering, as one would say today, from an outside agency that welded, soldered and fixed that unity.
02.09 - The Way to Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Common love, common labour and, above all, as the great French thinker, Ernest Renan,1 pointed out, common suffering that is the cement which welds together the disparate elements of a nationa nation is not formed otherwise. A nation means peoples differing in race and religion, caste and creed and even language, fused together into a composite but indivisible unit. Not pact nor balancing of interests nor sharing of power and profit can permanently combine and unify conflicting groups and collectivities. Hindus and Muslims, the two major sections that are at loggerheads today in India, must be given a field, indeed more than one field, where they can, work together; they must be made to come in contact with each other, to coalesce and dovetail into each other in as many ways and directions as possible. Instead of keeping them separate in water-tight compartments, in barred cages, as it were, lest they pounce upon each other like wild beasts, it would be wiser to throw them together; let them brea the the same air, live the same life, share the same troubles, the same difficulties, solve the same problems. That is how they will best understand, appreciate and even love each other, become comrades and companions, not rivals and opponents.
Ernest Renan: "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"
--
To have union, one must unitedivision can never lead to unity. Also this unity is established automatically and irrevocably, not by any abstract sense of justice and equality, nor by any romantic or imaginative feeling of fraternity, but by a dynamic living together. A common political and civic and economic life creates a field of force that can draw together into a harmonious working the most contrary and refractory elements.
We have said, however, time and again, that the present war is a great opportunity offered by Nature and Providence, opportunity that comes only once in a way; it is precisely the field of which we speak, the field par excellence, which can compel all centrifugal elements to come together, labour together, enjoy and suffer together and turn and transmute them into the very strongest centripetal components.
"Dans le pass, un hritage de gloire et de regrets partager, dans l'avenir un mme programme raliser; avoir souffert, joui, espr ensemble, voil ce qui vaut mieux que des douanes communes et des frontires conformes aux ides stratgiques: voil ce que l'on comprend malgr leg diversits de race et de langue. Je disais tout l'heure: "avoir souffert ensemble"; oui, la souffrance en commun unit plus que la joie. En fait de souvenirs nationaux, les deuils valent mieux que leg triomphes.. . "
02.10 - Independence and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We naturally consider the British as our enemy and in order to combat and compel them we have been trying to bring together all the differing elements in our midst. Close up the ranks to fight a common enemy that is our grand strategy. It is an effort that has not succeeded till now and is not likely to succeed soon. We should have looked a little farther ahead: with a longer view we would have spotted the greater enemy, a vastly greater immediate danger. Against that common enemy a larger and effective unification would have been quite feasible and even easy. Indeed, if we had taken the other way round, had first united with the British against the greater common enemy, our union with ourselvesour own peoples and partieswould have been automatically accomplished.
That is how we read the situation. When it looked as though there was no way left at our disposal to compose the acute and bitter differences among the multifarious Indian collectivities and also between the Indians and the British or foreigners, precisely at that critical hour appeared the war bringing a unique opportunity, a call and a message, as it were. There is certainly clash in Nature, but always there is an effort also in her to turn that clash into concord. India had too long been the field par excellence of discord and it was time that a movement for real harmony should come. Yes, we say, the war was providential to us, a God-send, offering the chance of centuries. But blinded and perverted our human intelligence refused to take it at its worth.
02.10 - Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The body, the body-consciousness, our poet says here, is to be a confluence, where all the streams of consciousness, all the movements of the being, flow in: movements of life-force, movements of the mind, secret urges of the subliminal physical consciousness pure and impure, things foreign to its nature, things that are its own, elements friendly and unfriendly, all assemble in a market-place, as it were, the result being a huge horrid discordant music, a groaning, a bellowing of a queer orchestra the bass, the lowest note of the system that the human vehicle is.
There is a call for all the parts of the being to precipitate to the very foundation of the being, coalesce and evoke a wild and weird, doleful and discordant symphonya painful cry. Unrealised dreams, that had faded into oblivion, are now like possessed beings and hang like bats on darkling branches:they are about to begin their phantom dance. Even so, the body, the material precipitate into which they gather, gives them a basic unity. These elements with their ardour and zeal kindle a common Fire. There is a divine Flame, Agni, burning within the flesh, burning brighter and brighter, making the bones whiter and whiter, as it were the purificatory Flame,Pvaka, of which the Vedic Rishis spoke, Master of the House, ghapati, dwelling in the inner heart of the human being, impelling it to rise to purer and larger Truth. But here our modern poet replaces the Heart by the Liver and makes of this organ the central altar of human aspiration and inspiration. We may remember in this connection that the French poet Baudelaire gave a similar high position and functionto the other collateral organ, the spleen. The modern Bengali poet considers that man's consciousness, even his poetic inspiration, is soaked in the secretion of that bilious organ. For man's destiny here upon earth is not delight but grief, not sweetness but gall and bitterness; there is no consolation, no satisfaction here; there is only thirst, no generosity but narrowness, no consideration for others, but a huge sinister egoism.
The cry of our poet is a cry literally deprifundis, a deep cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed underground abysses.
02.12 - The Ideals of Human Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Various other regional and parochial units also developed: baronies, kingdoms and princedoms, city states, all seeking to further extend and enrich the denotation of the social unit. A critical stage was reached when, out of the welter of all these various types of social unities, yet another type, of momentous consequences, emerged, called the nation. The nation absorbed all other lesser unities and soon grew into an extremely composite and yet living unity: its strong cohesiveness, in spite of a diversity of the component elements, no less than its ardent aggressiveness, is a remarkable characteristic attending the phenomenon. It looks as thoughat least it looked so till the other dayall the other previous attempts at a larger unity, since the formation of the original family unit, had one purpose in view, viz., the bringing forth of the national unit. Next to the family, the nation seems to be the stable unit, the other intervening ones were unstable comparatively and had only a temporary and contri butory function.
Nationhood, however, developed into such a firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels for its fulfilment. On three different lines a greater and larger unification of mankind has been attempted that goes beyond the unification brought about by the ideal of the country or people or nation. First, the political, that leads to the formation of Empires. But the faults and errors in this type of larger unit have been made very evident. It acts as a steam-roller, no doubt, crushing out and levelling parochial differences and local narrownesses; but it also means the overgrowth of a central organismcalled the metropolisat the expense of other member organisms forming part of the larger collectivity, viz., colonies and dependencies and subject races, which must in the end bring about a collapse and disruption of the whole structure. The Roman Empire was the typical example of this experiment. Next, there was what can be called the racial line. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but nothing very successful has taken shape. Pan-Slavism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Jewry are some of the expressions of this movement. It has the fatal fault of a basis that is uncertain and doubtful: for a pure race is a myth and in modern conditions the cry must necessarily be a cry in the wilderness. Many races and peoples have in the course of human history been thrown together, they have to live together, are compelled to lead a common social, political, economic and cultural life. That indeed was the genesis of nationhood. The hegemony of a so-called Nordic race over the world was one of the monsters produced by this attempt, a reductio ad absurdum of the principle.
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As we have said, a normally healthy society is a harmonious welding of these four elements. A society becomes diseased when only one member gets inflated and all-powerful at the expense of others or whenever there is an unholy alliance of some against the rest. Priest-craft, the Church militant, Fanaticism (religious or ideological), Inquisition are corruptions that show themselves when the first principle, the principle of Brahminhood, becomes exclusive and brings in arrogance and ignorance. Similarly colonisation and imperialism of the type only too familiar to us are aberrations of the spirit that the second principle embodies the spirit of the Kshattriya. Likewise financial cartels, the industrial magnates, the profiteer, the arriviste are diseased growths in the economic body of a modern society which has forgotten the true Vaishya spirit that seeks to produce wealth in order to share and distribute fairly and equitably. The remedy of these ills society has suffered from is not the introduction of a fourth evil, the tyranny of the Fourth Estate of the proletariate. The Fourth was reduced, it is true, to a state of slavery and serfdom, of untouchability, at its reductio ad absurdum. The cure, we say, is not in blind revolt and an inauguration of the same evil under a new name and form, which means its perpetuation, but in the creation of a new life and soul, that can happen only with the creation of a new head and front Zeus-like that would give birth to the goddess of light and knowledge, inspirer of a true Brahminhood.
We repeat a fair and sure economic basis has to be found for the down-trodden, proletarian or other. For the proletariate is not the only unfortunate in the human society. There are whole groups of the unfortunate in the three other Estates also. Or perhaps if we like we can extend the meaning of the term "proletariate" and include in it all the less favoured sections of all the Four Orders.
As already stated, the remedy is to be sought in the salvage of the individual. The present trend of social forces is towards movements in the mass. That was necessary perhaps; for larger, wider, indeed world-wide unities have to be found and established for the unification of the whole of humanity. But in the drive towards that-goal Nature seems to have overlooked for the moment the case of the individual, and naturally, man has been blind and one-sided in his attempts to reform and rebuild society and the world. This neglected thread has to be taken up again and put back into the web of social life. The value of the individual, the worth and speciality of each person has to be found and recognised; indeed it is round that centre that society can best be reformed and remade. And this can only be done by a spiritual outlook. For, the true individual is founded in the spirit, the spiritual consciousness; so long as man is limited to his body, life and mind, and his functions are solely determined by his earthly nature, so long he must needs be taken as a mere element in the mass, the cosmic mass. The true individual or person emerges only when something of man's spiritual being finds expression in these lower elements of his nature. And when man totally transcends his inferior sphere of existence and rises into his divine status where things are marshalled and organised through each individual truth-centre, then only there is the chance of a perfect social system descending upon earthly life.
Perhaps this is a far cry from the level of our normal humanity. But things have to be regarded and moulded from the highest heights; otherwise there will be no real solution, there can be only a temporary make-believe and a final frustration.
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet internationalism is not the one thing needful either. If it means the obliteration of all national values, of all cultural diversity, it will not certainly conduce to the greater enrichment and perfection of humanity. Taken by itself and in its absolute sense, it cannot be a practical success. The fact is being proved every moment these days. Internationalism in the economic sphere, however, seems to have a greater probability and utility than in the merely political sphere. Economics is forcing peoples and nations to live together and move together: it has become the soldering agent in modern times of all the elements the groups and types of the human family that were so long separate from each other, unknown to each other or clashing with each other. But that is good so far as it goes. Powerful as economic forces are, they are not the only deciding or directing agents in human affairs. That is the great flaw in the "International", the Marxian type of internationalism which has been made familiar to us. Man is not a political animal, in spite of Aristotle, nor is he an economic animal, in spite of Marx and Engels. Mere economics, even when working for a greater unity of mankind, tends to work more for uniformity: it reduces man to the position of a machine and a physical or material machine at that. By an irony of fate the human value for which the international proletariate raised its banner of revolt is precisely what suffers in the end. The Beveridge Plan, so much talked of nowadays, made such an appeal, no doubt because of the economic advantages it ensures, but also, by far and large, because it views man as a human being in and against the machine to which he belongs, because it is psychologically a scheme to salvage the manhood of man, so far as is possible, out of a rigidly mechanistic industrial organization.
Humanism
03.03 - Modernism - An Oriental Interpretation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Life undefiled, without any admixture or influence whatsoever from other elements and domains that is the one thing that we envisage and create. Life as it is in its own substance and truth, as it lives and moves in its own rhythm, life in its stark naturalness, albeit raw and crude, the living ore found in the earth's vein, unpolished but utterly au thentic: this is the supreme secret of which we of the modern age are worshippers.
Thus life has come to mean today the life exclusively of the senses, the life that is instinctive, reflexive, automatical in its elan, which is beyond the control of the conscious will and intelligence, the life that is interwoven and unified with body and matter. For it was this life which could never come to its ownnot even in man's primitive stage which was more or less a rigid system of taboos, religious and social, in spite of contrary appearances; it was this life which could not express freely and fully its own truth and reality in its own way, under the domination of what are known as the higher movements of the human consciousness. Life in another sense, as part of this higher and aristocratic movement, had had some autonomy and a field and scope of its own even under the old regime. The life-force that inspires noble ambitions, high enterprises, large creations, vast enjoyments, and proud renunciations, and violent and sweeping passions, has always been to us a familiar element.
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains
Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall,
03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The perfection of the anatomical and morphological structure in man consists precisely in its wonderful elasticity the 'infinite faculty' or multiple functioning referred to by Shakespeare. This is the very characteristic character of man both with regard to his physical and psychological make-up. The other species are, everyone of them, more or less, a specialised formation; we have there a closed system, a fixed and definite physical mould and pattern of life. A cat or a crow of a million years ago, like 'the immemorial elm' was not very different from its descendant of today; not so with man. I mean, the human frame, in its general build, might have remained the: same from the beginning of time, but the uses to which it has been put, the works that have been demanded of it are multifarious, indeed of infinite variety. Although it is sometimes stated that the human body too has undergone a change (and is still undergoing) from what was once heavy and muscular, tall and stalwart, with a thicker skeletal system, towards something lighter and more delicate. Also an animal, like the plant, because of its rigidity of pattern, remains unchanged, keeping to its own geographical habitat. Change of climate meant for the animal a considerable change, a sea-change, a change of species, practically. But man can easilymuch more easily than an animal or a plantacclimatise himself to all sorts of variable climates. There seems to be a greater resilience in his physical system, even as a physical object. Perhaps it contains a greater variety of component elements and centres of energy which support its versatile action. The human frame, one may say, is like the solar spectrum that contains all the colour vibrations and all the lines characteristic of the different elements. The solar sphere is the high symbol for man.
The story runs (Aitareya Upanishad) that once the gods wished to come down and inhabit an earthly frame. Several animal forms (the cow, the horse) were presented to them one after another, but they were not satisfied, none was considered adequate for their habitation. At last the human frame (with its conscious personality) was offered to them and immediately they declared that that was indeed the perfect form they neededsuktam bateti and they entered into it.
The human frame is the abode of the gods; it is a temple of God, as we all know. But the most significant thing about it is that the gods alone do not dwell there: all being, all creatures crowd there, even the ungodly and the undivine. The Pashu (the animal), the Pishacha (the demon), the Asura (the Titan), and the Deva (the god), all find comfortable lodging in itthere are many chambers indeed in this mansion of the Lord. Man was made after the image of God and yet Lucifer had access into that tabernacle and all his entire host with him. This duality of the divine and the undivine, the characteristic mark of human nature as it is, presents a field and a labour through which man's progress has to be worked out. The soul, the divine flame, has, been placed in Ignorance, that is to say, what is apparent Ignorance, the frame of Matter, just because this Matter in Ignorance is to be smelted, purified, given its original and intrinsic substance, shape and character. The human person in its actual form is not obviously something absolutely perfect and divine. The type, the norm it represents is divine, but it has been overlaid with all obscure and base elementsit has to be washed and cleaned thoroughly, smelted and reconditioned. The dark ungodly elements mar and vitiate; they must be removed on the one hand, but on the other, they point out and test the salvaging work that has to be done and is being done. Man is always at the crossroads. This is his especial difficulty and this is also his unique opportunity. His consciousness has a double valency, in contradistinction to the animal's which is, it can be said, monovalent, in that it is amoral, has not the sense of divided loyalty and hence the merit of choice. The movements of the animal follow a fixed stereotyped pattern; it has not got to deviate from the beaten track of its instincts. But man with his sense of the moral, of the good, of the progressive is at every step of his life faced with a dilemma, has to pause at a parting of the ways, always looks before and after and is puzzled at a cas de conscience. That, we have said, has been made for him the condition of growth, of a conscious and willed change with an ever-increasing tempo towards perfect perfection. That furnishes the occasion and circumstance by which he rises to divinity itself, becomes the Divine. He becomes the Divine thus not merely in the own home of the Divine, but on all the levels of the manifestation: all the planes of consciousness with all the hierarchy of beingspowers and personalitiesfind a new play of harmony, a supreme and global fulfilment in the transfigured human vehicle. The frame itself that encases the human consciousness acts as a living condenser: the very contour in its definiteness seems to exert a pressure towards an ever larger and higher synthesis, it may be compared to a kind of field office (Einsteinian, for example) that controls, regulates, moves and configurates all elements within its range. The human frame even as a frame possesses a magic virtue.
Vaishnavism sees the Divine as a human person, the human person par excellence. Krishna's body is a radiant form of consciousness (cinmaya), no doubt, but it is as definite, determinate, and concrete as the physical body, it is the physical itself but in its true substance. And its exquisiteness consists in its being human in form. The Vedantin's Maya does not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For they say Goloka stands above Brahmaloka.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In other words, when we speak of the spirituality of the Indian people, it is to the disposition of their psychic elements that we refer, to the tone and temper of the soul they possess and to a constant nearness of latent spiritual possibilities, that may at any time materialise, and the consequent possibilities of a spiritual impulse, that may at any time awaken.
Other peoples have other and more concrete virtues to be proud of; but the Indian has his soul as his most characteristic possession.
03.06 - The Pact and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The difficulty comes from the middle region, from the second element of the tripartite sanction. It is the "middle class", not quite in the economic but in the ideological sense. In other words, in every society there are people who have risen or are attempting to rise above the mass level. They look around and above: they are not satisfied with their lot, they aspire towards higher and wider ideals. They are the material out of which what we call reformers and revolutionaries are made. In the general mass who are more or less contented, they are the discontented: they form the leaven of cells that move and stir and work for change. Now all depends on what kind of leaven it is, what is the quality of the force that is called up, the nature of the ideal or idea that is invoked. For it can be either way, for good or for evil. There are elements that belong to the light, and there are elements that belong to darkness. There are mixtures in men no doubt, but on the whole there are these two types: one helps humanity's progress, the other retards and sometimes blocks completely. If the mass of mankind is tamasinertia there is a kind of rajasdynamism that drives towards greater tamas, as the Upanishad says, towards disintegration, under the garb of reformation it brings about disruption.
So we have to see the type of cells that grow and become consciously active in the body politic. It is sattwalight that brings in knowledge and harmony. And the movement for reformation and growth among the mass has to be inspired by that quality or mode of consciousness. A sound and healthy structure can be raised effectively upon that basis alone. The man in the mass, as I have said and as is well known, is a good-natured malleable material, but it is ignorant and inert: it can easily be worked upon by any kind of strong force, worked up to any kind of mischief. Shakespeare has made us very graphically familiar with the reaction of a mob and that remains true even today. Even if right direction is there at the top, at the higher governmental level, reflecting the mind of the true intelligentsia, a well-meaning plan is doomed to failure if it does not touch and move the middle strata that are the real executive agents.
The government in modern times represents indeed the executive power of the nation, itself is composed of the three social elements we speak of. First of all, the high or top-ranking officials, as they are called, who can think out and initiate a policy; next, the intermediate services who form the dynamic limb of the organism; lastly, there is the rung of the subordinate services. Here too the difficulty is with the intermediate grade. It is there that the "disaffected" are born and breddisaffected not because of grievances or injustices done, but because of the urge of ideals and purposes, ideas and designs. The subordinate manpostman, railwayman, clerk, school master, daily labourerhas no ambitions, is not tortured by nostalgic notions: left to themselves, these people accommodate themselves to circumstances and take things as they come without worrying too much. But the point is that they are never left to themselves. It is told to themnot without reason, though that they do not live, they vegetate: they are dead, otherwise they would be living and kicking. The rousing of the masses has always been the sacred mission of all reformers and saviours of humanity. For they form the bulk of humanity and its future is bound up with their destiny.
The whole difficulty centres upon the question: who rouses whom, and what is the principle that is meant to rouse. There is a slogan that incited the Red Terror of the French Revolution; there is the other one which inspired the Nazis; there is still another one rampant that had the seal and sanction of Stalin and his politburo. These have spread their dark wings and covered the saviour light. On the other hand, the voice of the Vedic Rishi that hymned the community of faith and speech and act, the kindly light that Buddha carried to suffering humanity, the love and sacrifice of Christ showing and embleming the way of redemption, the saints and sages in our own epoch who have visioned the ideal of human unity in a divine humanity, even secular leaders who labour for "one world", "a brave new world"all point to the other line of growth and development that man can follow and must and shall follow. The choice has to be made and the right direction given. In India today, there are these two voices put against each other and clear in their call: one asks for unity and harmony, wideness and truth, the other its contrary working for separativeness, disintegration, narrowness, and make-believe and falsehood. One must have the courage and the sagacity to fix one's loyalty and adhesion.
A true covenant there can be only between parties that work for the light, are inspired by the same divine purpose. Otherwise if there is a fundamental difference in the motive, in the soul-impulse, then it is no longer a pact between comrades, but a patchwork of irreconcilable elements. I have spoken of the threefold sanction of the covenant. The sanction from the top initiates, plans and supports, the sanction from the bottom establishes and furnishes the field, but it is the sanction from the mid-region that inspires, executes, makes a living reality of what is no more than an idea, a possibility. On one side are the Elders, the seasoned statesmen, the wise ones; on the other, the general body of mankind waiting to be moved and guided; in between is the army of young enthusiasts, enlightened or illumined (not necessarily young in age) who form the pra, the vital sheath of the body politic. Allby far the largest part of itdepends upon the dreams that the Prana has been initiated and trained to dream.
This life principle of a body politic seems in Pakistan to be represented by the Ansars. The question then to be determined is whether they have accepted the Pact or not. If they have, is it merely a political expedient or do they find in it a real moral value? We have to weigh and judge the ideal and motive that inspire this organisation which seeks to be the steel frame supporting or supported by the Government. We ask: is this a nucleus, a seed bed for the new life to take birth and grow, the new life that would go to the making of the new world and humanity? And we have to ask India too, has she found her nucleus or nuclei, on her side, that would generate and foster the power of her soul and spirit? The high policy of a government remains a dead law or is misconstrued and misapplied through local agents: they are in fact the local growths that feed the national life and are fed by it and they need careful nurture and education, for upon them depends ultimately the weal or the woe of the race.
03.07 - Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Undivine means the obscure separativeness of the Ignorance, the darkness of Inferior Nature. The Divine, from his superior status, has cast himself down and is scattered and concretised as the ignorant creation, he has consented to be degraded and imbedded into Matter, in order to quicken Matter gradually, to illumine and transform it and invest it with the Divine's own glory. The whole dynamics of creation consists in the interaction of these two forces, one apparent and pragmatic and patent, the other behind and involved and latent. The elements and forces of the Ignorance, while they appear to move in the cycles of their inexorable Law, are gradually led by the stress of the involved Spirit, to evolve and change, and finally express and incarnate that which it now negates, that which is the Spirit unveiled in its pristine au thenticity.
A day will come when it is the Divine that will reign upon earth, the Divine in his transcendent Delight and Knowledge and Power and Purity, and human life shall embody the Law of the Truth.
03.08 - The Democracy of Tomorrow, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening line of his famous book,The Social Contract, almost the Bible of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. It was really an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of democracy in politics and romanticism in art. The century that followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence, democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, in the end, social disintegration. A strong centralised power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group. Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on the move the other way round. Thus a never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.1
In this connection we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes it, (almost exactly as we have experienced it in our own days). But the most interesting point to which we can look with profit is Plato's view that the types are as men are, that is to say, the character and nature of man in a given period determines the kind of government or social system he is going to have. There has been this cyclic rotation of types, because men themselves were rotating types, because, in other words, the individuals composing human society had not found their true reality, their abiding status. Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to give our answer.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Hinduism, one may even say, Indianism, has cast Buddhism out of India, the mother country, to the wonder of many. Buddhism came to rub out the dead deposits and accretions on the parent body and in doing so it often rubbed on the raw and against the grain. Hinduism had to accept the corrections; in the process it had to absorb, however, many elements contrary to its nature, even antipathic to its soul. Buddha was accepted as an Avatar; he was given a divine status in the Hindu Pantheon. Divested, apparently, of all heterodoxical and controversial appendages, he was anointed with the sole sufficing aspect of supreme kindness, universal compassion. Even so, in and through this Assumption, not a little of the peculiarly Buddhist inspiration entered the original organism. The most drastic and of far-reaching consequence was the inauguration and idolisation of monastic life, which has become since then in Indian conception, the summum bonum, the supreme goal of human existence. It was not without reason that India's older and truer tradition cried out against Shankara being a crypto-Buddhist (pracchanna bauddha), who was yet one of the most consistent and violent critics of Buddhism.
Life is an expression of the Divine Presence, earth is the field of labour for the godssuch was the original old-world Vedic view. It was the Buddhist dispensation that made life an inferior truth, a complex of unreality and decreed that the highest aim of man is to disappear from life after life's fitful fever to sleep well that seems to have been the motto given.
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The Buddha says, take off the elements that compose the creation one by one, nothing would remain in the end. Creation is only an agglomeration of discrete elements; there is nothing behind them or within them that is permanent and holding them together. When names and forms go, at the end there is only dissolution, pure and simple, Nothing, Nihil.
(III) This metaphysical position is faithfully translated, one may point out here, in their respective logical positions of the two.
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Hamlet is the third stage; it is a vision of sattva-guna and a creation attempted by that vision. The human consciousness that was imprisoned in the vital mind, is released here into the higher or pure mind. The soul escapes from its sheath of sheer hunger and desire and egoism and self-aggrandisementyearns for light, more light. Lear is a dark mass of unconsciousness, crude and violent, even like the naked and raging elements into whose arms he is thrown; Macbeth is the beginning of consciousness in which one is conscious of one's own self alone, and keenly and deliberately attached to it,here light has dawned, but a lurid light. Hamlet is consciousness that is seeking to transcend the barrier of the little self and its narrow and vulgar appetites and impulses. Man here comes into touch with something that is impersonal, other-regarding, afar; he has grown interests that are not merely mundane, utilitarian, pragmatic, self-centred, but abstract, metaphysical, beyond the individual's own and immediate concern: he has now ideals and aspirationshe is a seeker of the true, the good, the beautiful. He has been initiated into the divinedaivanature. Culture, refinement, sensibility, understandingall the graces of a truly rational being make Hamlet the very flower of an evolving humanity.
Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere biological man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise the bourgeoisinto the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.
03.10 - Sincerity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This central sincerity, however, has to be worked out in actual life. For, one may be true in the spirit, but falseweak, that is to sayin the flesh. The light of the central being usually finds its way first into the mind. One becomes then mentally sincere: in other words, one has the idea, the thought that the Divine is the goal and nothing else can or shall satisfy. With the light in the mind, one sees also in oneself more and more the dark spots, the weaknesses, the obstaclesone becomes conscious of one's feelings, discovers elements that have to be corrected or purged. But this mental sincerity, this recognition in the understanding is not enough: it remains mostly ineffective and barren with regard to life and character. One appears at this stage to lead a double life: one knows and understands, to some extent at least, but one is unable to act up even to that much knowledge and understanding. It is only when the power of sincerity descends still further and assumes a concreter form, when the vital becomes sincere and' is converted, then the urge is there not only to see and understand, but to do and achieve. Without the vital's sincerity, its will to be transformed, one remains at best a witness, one has an inner perception of consciousness of the Divine, but in actual living one lets the old ordinary nature to go its own way. It is the sincerity in the vital,-its win to possess the Divine and the Divine alone, its ardour to collaborate with the Divine the conscious that brings about the crucial, the most dynamic change. Sadhana instead of being a mere mental occupation, an intellectual pursuit, acquires the urgency of living and doing and achieving. Finally, the vital sincerity, when it reaches its climax, calls for the ultimate sinceritysincerity in the body. When the body consciousness becomes sincere then we cannot but be and act as decided and guided by the divine consciousness; we live and move and have our being wholly in the divine manner. Then what the inmost being, the psychic, envisages in the divine light, the body inevitably and automatically executes. There is no gap between the two. The spirit and the fleshsoul and bodyare soldered, fused together in one single compact entity. One starts with the central sincerity in the psychic being and progress of sadhana means the extension of this sincerity gradually to all the outlying parts and levels of the being till, when the body is reached, the whole consciousness becomes, as it were, a massive pyramid of loyalty.
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03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We say then that it was a necessity: it was a necessity that the rational, logical, ratiocinative, analytic mentality should be brought out and given its play and place. It is perhaps an inferior power of the mind or consciousness, but it is a strong power and has its use and utility. It is the power that gives the form and pattern for the display of consciousness and intelligence in outward expression and external living; it is a firm weapon that gives control over these inferior ranges of consciousness. The leap from the sense-consciousness or the elements of consciousness, from a mental growth just adequate and not too specialised, straight into the supra-sensuous and the transcendent had been an inevitable necessity, so that the human consciousness might get the first taste of its supreme status and value: a similar necessity brought to the fore this element of the mind, the mind's own powerof judgement and willso that there might be a greater and wider integration of human nature and also that the higher realities may be captured in our normal consciousness. Even for the withdrawal of the mind from the outer objects to the inner sources, the mind itself can be used with much effect. And Buddha showed it magnificently. And of course, Shankara too who followed in his footsteps.
To abrogate the matter of fact, rational view of life in order to view it spiritually, to regard it wholly as an expression or embodiment or vibration of consciousness-delight was possible to the Vedic discipline which saw and adored the Immanent Godhead. It was not possible to Buddha and Buddhistic consciousness; for the Immanent Divine was ignored in the Buddhistic scheme. Philosophically, in regard to ultimate principles, Buddhism was another name for nihilism, creation being merely an assemblage of particles of consciousness that is desire; the particles scattered and dissolved, remains only the supreme incomparable Nirvana. But pragmatically Buddhism was supremely humanistic.
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the raceits soul of lyric fervour and grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner heart that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagores art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world of gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.
I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tagore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.
03.14 - From the Known to the Unknown?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For the fact is that man, the being that knows, is composed not merely of known elements, known to himself and to others, but possesses a hidden, an unknown side which is nonetheless part of himself. And even though unknown, it is not inactive,it always exerts its influence, imposes its presence. Man has a submerged consciousness which is in contact and communion with similarly submerged worlds of consciousness. Man's consciousness possesses aerials that catch vibrations from unknown regions. He has a secret sensitiveness that receives intimations from other where than his physical senses and his logical reason. His external mind does not always recognise such unorthodox or abnormal movements; he only expresses his surprise or amazement at the luminosity, the au thenticity of solutions that come so simply, suddenly, inevitably, the unknown revealing itself miraculously.
In the spiritual field the unknown is a fact of primary importance and has to be given the first place, the foremost consideration. For the call is towards the Beyond and no amount of trafficking with the actual the near and the knowncan lead you out of it. There must be a sudden leap at one time or another. That is what is meant by saying that the deep calls unto the deep. For man has the power, the privilege to contact directly the thing that is unknown and beyond. There is an opening in him, a kind of backdoor, as it were, through which he can pass straight into another dimension.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Forces to aspire the inert brute elements;
As one who has all infinity to waste,
04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The individual or personal Divine leaves his home of all blissVaikunthaforgets himself and enters into this world of all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity. This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation, its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience.
The Divine descends as an individual person fundamentally to hasten the evolutionary process and to complete it; he takes the human form to raise humanity to divinity. The fact and the nature of the process have been well exemplified in Sri Ramakrishna who, it is said, took up successively different lines of spiritual discipline and by a supreme and sovereign force of concentration achieved realisation in each line in the course of a few days what might take in normal circumstances years or even lives to do. The Divine gathers and concentrates in himself the world-force, the Nature-Energyeven like adynamo and focuses and canalises it to give it its full, integral and absolute effectivity. And mortal pain he accepts, and swallows the poison of ignorant lifeeven like Nilakantha Shivato transmute it into ecstasy and immortality. The Divine Mother sank into the earth-nature of a human body:
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Thus then the embodied human person who has the embodied Divine Person before his eyes must know how to instal and incorporate the Divine Person in him, in his body and physical existence. That was perhaps the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in representare or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living bodyorganic elements eliminated and replaced by the inorganic in the very atomic structure and constitutioneven so, the living human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure.
The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiationalthough that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought by them was to be enjoyed in Heaven in company of the Father and not on this earth and in this human body: it was more a sublimation than a transformation that was their goal. The flesh for them was always too weak.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This super consciousness is based upon a double movement of sublimation and integration which are precisely the two things basically aimed at by present-day psychology to meet the demands of new facts of consciousness. The rationalisation, specialisation or foreshortening of consciousness, mentioned above, is really an attempt at sublimation of the consciousness, its purification and ascension from baseranimal and vegetalconfines: only, ascension does not mean alienation, it must mean a gathering up of the lower elements also into their higher modes. Integration thus involves a descent, but it has to be pointed out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and recognise the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements imbedded in our nature and consciousness, the roots and foundations that lie buried under the super-structure that Evolution has erected. But that recognition must be accompanied by an upward look and sense: indeed it is healthy and fruitful only on condition that it occurs in a consciousness open to an infiltration of light coming from summits not only of the mind but above the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead of us; that is the sense of evolution.
A slumber did my spirit seal, Miscellaneous Poems
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is this spiritual or Yogic Energy? Ordinary people, people with a modern mind, would concede at the most that there are two kinds of activity: (1) real activityphysical action, work, labour with muscle and nerve, and (2) passive activityactivity of mind and thought. According to the pragmatic standard especial, if not entire, importance is given the first category; the other category, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, is held at a discount. The thoughtful people are philosophers at the most, they are ineffectual angels in this workaday world of ours. We need upon earth people of sterner stuff, dynamic people who are not thought-bound, but know how to apply and execute their ideas, whatever they may be. Lenin was great, not because he had revolutionary ideas, but because he gave a muscular frame to them. Such people alone are the pragmatic, dynamic, useful category of humanity. The others are, according to the more radical leftist view, merely parasitic, and according to a more generous liberal view, chiefly decorative elements in human society. Mind-energy can draw dream pictures, beautiful perhaps, but inane; it is only muscular energy that gives a living and material bodya local habitation and a nameto what otherwise would be airy nothing.
Energy, however, is not merely either muscular (physical) or cerebral. There are energies subtler than thought and yet more dynamic than the muscle (or the electric pile). One such, for example, is vital energy, although orthodox bio-chemists do not believe in any kind of vitalism that is something more than mere physico-chemical reaction. Indeed, this is the energy that counts in life; for it is this that brings about what we call success in the world. A man with push and go, as it is termed, is nothing but a person with abundant vital energy. But even of this energy there are gradations. It can be deep, controlled, organised or it can be hectic, effusive, confused: the latter kind expresses and spends itself often in mere external, nervous and muscular movements. Those, however, who are known as great men of action are precisely they who are endowed with life energy of the first kind.
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Consciousness has a fourfold potential. The first is the normal consciousness, which is predominantly mental; it is the sphere comprising movements of which man is usually and habitually aware. It is what the Upanishad names Jgrat or jgaritasthna and characterises as bahipraja: it is the waking state and has cognition only of external things. In other words, the consciousness here is wholly objectivised, externalisedextrovert: it is also a strongly individualised formation, the consciousness is hedged in, isolated and contoured by a protective ring, as it were, of a characteristically separative personality; it is a surface formation, a web made out of day-to-day sensations and thoughts, perceptions and memories, impressions and associations. It is a system of outward actions and reactions against or in the midst of one's actual environment. The second potential is that of the Inner Consciousness: its characteristic is that the consciousness here is no longer trenchantly separative and individual, narrowly and rigidly egoistic. It feels and sees itself as part of or one with the world consciousness. It looks upon its individuality as only a wave of the universal movement. It is also sometimes called the subliminal consciousness; for it plays below or behind the normal surface range of consciousness. It is made up of the residuary powers of the normal consciousness, the abiding vibrations and stresses that settle down and remain in the background and are not immediately required or utilised for life purposes: also it contacts directly energies and movements that well out of the universal life. The phenomena of clairvoyance and clairaudience, the knowledge of the past and the future and of other worlds and persons and beings, certain more dynamic movements such as distant influence and guidance and controlling without any external means, well known in all yogic disciplines, are various manifestations of the power of this Inner Consciousness. But there is not only an outward and an inner consciousness; there is also a deeper or nether consciousness. This is the great field that has been and is being explored by modern psychologists. It is called the subconscious, sometimes also the unconscious: but really it should be named the inconscient, for it is not altogether devoid of consciousness, but is conscious in its own way the consciousness is involved or lost within itself or lies buried. It comprises those movements and impulsions, inclinations and dispositions that have no rational basis, on the contrary, have an irrational basis; they are not acquired or developed by the individual in his normal course of life experience, they are ingrained, lie imbedded in man's nature and are native to his original biological and physical make-up. As the human embryo recapitulates in the womb the whole history of man's animal evolution, even so the normal man, even the most civilised and apparently the farthest from his ancient moorings and sources, enshrines in his cells, in a miraculously living manner, the memory of vast geological epochs, the great struggles and convulsions through which earth and its inhabitants have passed, the basic urges of the crude life force, its hopes, fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant worldeven perhaps to the mineral worldout of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the original consciousness. It was a collectivea racial and an aboriginal consciousness. The same lies chromosomic, one can almost say, in the constitution of the individual man of today. This region of the unconscious (or the inconscient) is a veritable field of force: it lies at the root of all surface dynamisms. The surface consciousness, jgrat, is a very small portion of the whole, it is only the tip of the pyramid or an iceberg, the major portion lies submerged beyond our normal view. In reflex movements, in sudden unthinking outbursts, in dreams and day-dreams, this undercurrent is silhouetted and made visible and recognisable. Even otherwise, they exercise a profound influence upon all our conscious movements. This underground consciousness is the repository of the most dark and unenlightened elements that grew and flourished in the slime of man's original habitat. They are small, ugly, violent, anti-social, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest applicationHunger that is Death.
But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he is also a child of the White Mother (ka and vet). Or again, if Earth is our mother, the Heaven is our fatherdyaur me pit mat pthiv iyam. In other words, consciousness extends not in depth alone, but in height alsoit is vertically extended, infinite both ways. As there is a sub-consciousness or unconsciousness, so also there is at the other end super-consciousness.
Now this superconsciousness is the true origin of creation, although the apparent and objective creation starts with and is based upon Unconsciousness. All norms and archetypes belong to the superconsciousness; for the sake of material creation they are thrown down or cast as seed into the Unconscious and in this process they undergo a change, a deformation and aberration. All the major themes of dream myths and prehistoric legends which the psychologists claim to have found imbedded in man's subconscient consciousness are in fact echoes and mirages of great spiritualsuperconscientrealities reflected here below. The theme of the Hero of the Dual Mother (Dark and Fair), of Creation and Sacrifice, these are, according to Jung, dramatisations of some fundamental movements and urges in the dark subconscient nature. Jung, however, throws a luminous suggestion in characterising the nature of this vast complex. The general sense, Jung says; is that of a movement forward, of a difficult journey, of a pull backward and downward, of yawning abysses that call, of a light that beckons. It is an effort, a travail of what lies imbedded and suppressed to come out into the open, into the normal consciousness and thus release an unhealthy tension, restore a balance in the individual's system. Modern psychology lays great stress upon the integration of personality. Most of the ills that human nature suffers from, they say, are due to this division or schism in it, a suppressed subconsciousness and an expressed consciousness seeking to express a negation of that subconsciousness. Modern psychology teaches that one should dive into the nether regions and face squarely whatever elements are there, help these to follow their natural bent to come up and see the light of the day. Only thus there can be established a unitary movement, an even consistency and an equilibrium throughout the entire consciousness and being.
So far so good. But two things are to be taken note of. First of all, the resolution of the normal conflict in man's consciousness, the integration of his personality, is not wholly practicable within the scope of the present nature and the field of the actual forces at play. That can give only a shadow of the true resolution and integration. A conscious envisaging of the conflicting forces, a calm survey of the submerged or side-tracked libidos in their true nature, a voluntary acceptance, of these dark elements as a part of normal human nature, does not automatically make for their sublimation and purification or transformation. The thing is possible only through another force and on another level, by the intervention and interfusion precisely of the superconsciousness. And here comes the second point to note. For it is this superconsciousness towards which all the strife and struggle of the under-consciousness are turned and directed. The yearning and urge in the subconsciousness to move forward, to escape outside into the light does not refer merely to the march towards normal awareness and consciousness: it has a deeper direction and a higher aimit seeks that of which it is an aberration and a deformation, the very origin and source, the height from which it fell.
This superconsciousness has a special mode of its quintessential energy which is omnipotent in action, immediate in effectivity. It is pure as the purest incandescent solar light and embodies the concentrated force of consciousness. It is the original creative vibration of the absolute or supreme Being. Sri Aurobindo calls this supreme form of superconscient consciousness-energy, the Supermind. There are of course other layers and strata of superconsciousness leading up to the super-mind which are of various potentials and embody different degrees of spiritual power and consciousness.
We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Superconsciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhhitam gahvaretham,is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purifies and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Superconscient and the Subsconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality. Indeed, that is the mystic alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.
We can picture the whole phenomenon in another way and say in the devotional language of the Mystics that the Inmost Consciousness is the Divine Child, the Superconscient is the Divine Father and the Inferior Consciousness is the Great Mother (Magna Mater): the Inner and the Outer Consciousness are the field of play and the instrument of action as well of this Divine Trinity.
Man, we thus see, is an infinitely composite being. We have referred to the four or five major chords in him, but each one has again innumerable gradations of vibration. Man is a bundle or dynamo of energy and this energy is nothing but the force of consciousness. To different modes or potentials of this energy different names are given. And what makes the thing still more complex is that all these elements exist simultaneously and act simultaneously, although in various degrees and stresses. They act upon each other, and severally and collectively impress upon the nature and character of the individual being and mould and direct his physical status and pragmatic life. A man can, however, take consciously a definite position and status, identify himself with a particular form and force of consciousness and build his being and life in the truth and rhythm of that consciousness. Naturally the limits and the limitation of that consciousness mark also the limits and limitation of the disposition he can effect in his life. When it is said that the spiritual force is not effective on the physical plane in mundane affairsBuddha, it is said, for example, has not been able to rid the earth or age, disease and death (although it was not Buddha's intention to do so, his purpose was to show a way of escape, of bypassing the ills of life, and in that he wholly succeeded)it only means that the right mode or potential of spiritual energy has not been found; for that matter even the mightiest mundane forces are not sovereignly effective in mundane affairs, otherwise the Nazi-Force would have been ruling the world today.
Still it must be remembered that all these apparently diverse layers and degrees of being or consciousness or energy form essentially one indivisible unity and identity. What is called the highest and what is called the lowest are not in reality absolutely disparate and incommensurable entities: everywhere it is the highest that lies secreted and reigns supreme. The lowest is the highest itself seen from the reverse side, as it were: the norms and typal truths that obtain in the superconsciousness are also the very guiding formulas and principles in the secret heart of the Inconscience too, only they appear externally as deformations and caricatures of their true reality. But even here we can tap and release the full force of a superconscient energy. A particle of dead matter, we know today, is a mass of stilled energy, electrical and radiant in nature; even so an apparently inconscient entity is a packet of Superconsciousness in its highest potential of energy. The secret of releasing this atomic energy of the Spirit is found in the Science of Yoga.
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man, individually and collectively, has passed and is passing through these steps of evolution. The last one is his goal at the present stage. To be a saint, seer or sage is not enough for man. He must be a god. Indeed when he has succeeded to be a god then only would it be possible for him to become what a saint or a seer or sage has to be in order to fulfil himself totally and integrally. The human race as a whole is progressing along the same line towards the same consummation. That is the secret purpose and end of Nature, to evolve a growing developing material form housing, embodying higher and wider ranges of consciousness, integrating all elements into a more and more intimate and inviolable unity and harmony.
This progress towards ever higher and wider consciousness means also in man's social or collective life the formation of larger and larger aggregates, unification of mankind in ever widening groups. From man the solitary animal, through the family, the clan, the tribe to the nation the race has been increasing the circle of its sympathy and kinship. The birth of the modern nation out of regional and local groupings is a triumph of the emerging consciousness in humanity pointing to another signal and supreme triumph, the emergence of the global sense hi man that is to bind humanity as a single indissoluble indivisible unity in actual life.
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Humanity is evolving and developing the various groupings to manifest fundamental aspects of its cosmic person. Ancient Egypt, for example, brought us in contact with an occult world and a subliminal consciousness. We know also of the nature of the Hebraic genius, the moral fervour, the serious, almost grim spirit of Righteousness that formed and even now forms a major strain in the European or Christian culture and civilisation. The famous "sweetness and light" of the Hellenic mind supplied the other strain. The Roman genius for law and government is a well-known commonplace of history. Well-known also India's spirituality. All these modes of consciousness are elementsforces, energies and personalities that build up the godhead of humanity. Peoples and races in the past were the scattered limbs of the godhead-scattered and isolated from one another, because of the original unconsciousness and sharp egocentricity out of which Nature started its course of evolution. The disjecta membra are being collected together by a growing consciousness.
Such then is the destiny of man and mankindman to rise to higher heights of consciousness beyond mental reason that are not governed by the principle of division, separation, antithesis but by the principle of unity, identity, mutuality and totality. In other words, he will take his seat in the status of his soul, his inner and inmost being, his divine personality where he is one with all beings and with the world. This is a rare and difficult realisation for man as he is today, but tomorrow it will be his normal nature. The individual will live in his total being and therefore in and through other individuals; as a consequence the nature too in each will undergo a divine transmutation, a marvellous sea-change.
Humanity as a race will then present the figure of a homogeneous unitit will be a unity of many diversified elements, not simply, however, a composition of discrete individuals, but of varied aggregations of individualseven as the body is not merely composed of cells, but also these cells are collected in aggregates forming various limbs and systems, each again with its own identity and function. Indeed, the cosmic or global humanity is very likely to be pyramidal in structurenot a flat and level construction. There will be an overall harmony and integration containing a rich variety of gradationsgradations of consciousness, as even now there are: only the whole will be more luminous, that is to say, more conscious and more concordant; for at the top, on the higher levels, new lights will show themselves and men embodying those lights. They will radiate and spread out, infiltrate into the lower ranges something of their enlightenment and harmony and happiness which will bring about a global purification and a new dispensation; even the material world, the vegetable and mineral domains too may be taken up into this luminous consummation and earth become the Garden of Eden that it once was, suffused with a new glory.
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04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As, however, mortality bears ill the eternal's touch, the eternal too is intolerant of the mortal natureonly it is intolerant not in the ignorant blind squeamish weak human way, but in a divine way, for it is armed with weapons of light and knowledge, it assaults with its luminous force, the energy of ether and fire, the higher and nobler elements as against the dense dark dumb earth, the lowest element that clothes the human consciousness. Indeed, mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the unalloyed sheer delight in Eternity. It is out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra firma, the mud and slime. The human consciousness has been fleeing the Hound of Heaven down the corridors of Time, and yet it will be caught in the end and wholly transmuted in the divine embrace into the substance of the Divine Himself. All the unwillingness and protestation and revolt are meant to forge and hammer the final union into something perfect, faultless, absolute.
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04.08 - An Evolutionary Problem, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The whole articulation of the external organism is, as we know, contained in a secret disposition of elements within the cellnot in the way, as was once supposed, viz., that a whole full-grown tree lies in a miniature form within the seed andgrowth simply means a gradual enlargement of that form but that there is a pattern of ultimate particlesvital quantaa rhythm and vibration of life energy, that is the origin, the formal and efficient cause, of the material form. Deeper still, behind the blind instinctive urge of life, the unconsciousness that is the inertia of matter, there is a consciousness, a vision, a supernal self-conscious energy that inspires, guides, fashions the whole evolutionary scheme in the large as well as in all details.
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05.01 - Of Love and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Be aware of these triple elements, house their triple movements;
Find your one and total self in the dynamic union of the Three :-
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The usual idea of God (as the theists hold, for example) is that he is an infinite eternal impassible being, aloof from human toils and earthly turmoils, himself untouched by these and yet, in and through them, directing the world for an inscrutable purpose, unless it is for leaning towards it and stretching out the hand of Grace to those of the mortals who wish to come out of the nightmare of life, sever the coils of earthly existence. But the Divine in order to be and remain divine need not hold to his seat above and outside the creation, severely separated from his creatures. He can, on the contrary, become truly the ordinary man and labour as all others, yet maintaining his divinity and being conscious of it. After all, is not man, every human being, built in the same pattern, a composite of the earthly human element supported and infused by a secret divine element? However, God, the individual Divine, does become man, one of them and one with them. Only, his labour thereby increases manifold, hard and heavy, although for that very reason full of a bright rich multiple promise. The Divine's self-hurilanisation has for it a double purpose: (I) to show man by example how he can become what he truly is, how he can divinise himself: the Divine as man lives out the life of a sadhakawholly and completely; (2) to help concretely by his own force of consciousness the world and man in their endeavour for progress and evolution, to give the help wholly and completely from the innermost status of the self down to the most external physical body and the material field. This help again is a twofold function. The first is to make available, gather within easy reach, the high realisations, the spiritual treasures that are normally stored in a heaven somewhere else. The Divine Man brings down the divine attributes close to our earth, turns them from mere far possibilities into near probabilities, even imminent realities. They are made part and parcel, constituent elements of the earthly atmosphere, so that one has only to open one's mouth to brea the in, extend one's arms to seize and possess them: even to this opening and this gesture man is helped by the concrete touch and presence of the Divine. Further, the help and succour come in another way which is more intimate, more living and appealing to man.
A great mystery of existence, its central rub is the presence of Evil. All spiritual, generally all human endeavour has to face and answer this Sphinx. As he answers, so will be his fate. He cannot rise up even if he wishes, earth cannot progress even when there is the occasion, because of this besetting obstacle. It has many names and many forms. It is Sin or Satan in Christianity; Buddhism calls it Mara. In India it is generally known as Maya. Grief and sorrow, weakness and want, disease and death are its external and ubiquitous forms. It is a force of gravitation, as graphically named by a modern Christian mystic, that pulls man down, fixes him upon earth with its iron law of mortality, never allowing him to mount high and soar in the spiritual heavens. It has also been called the Wheel of Karma or the cycle of Ignorance. And the aim of all spiritual seekers has been to rise out of itsome-how, by force of tapasy, energy of concentrated will or divine Gracego through or by-pass and escape into the Beyond. This is the path of ascent I referred to at the outset. In this view it is taken for granted that this creation is transient and empty of happinessanityam asukham (Gita)it is anatta, empty of self or consciousness (Buddha) and it will be always so. The only way to deal with it, the way of the wise, is to discard it and pass over.
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A popular conundrum. Are the souls finite or infinite in number? Supposing they are finite, then a time is sure to come when there will be no more souls upon earth; for, as it is said, all souls are evolving and in the end will pass out of earthly life and get merged in their source, the Brahman, the absolute Reality. On the other hand, if they are infinite, then, since all of them cannot appear on earth at the same time, the number of human bodies that house the souls being limited (at the most, a few thousand millions, according to statisticians), what happens to those that are not embodied, where do they wait or what do they do in that period? Do all come down or embody in course of time? Will all have the chance, will it be needed for all to take a body and sojourn on earth? No doubt, there is a continual increase of population upon earth, does that mean that new souls are slowly coming away from the waiting list? Even then, the list cannot be exhausted, since it is infinite; so there is bound to be a very large number who would not get the chance of visiting the earth. For, however much the population increases, it cannot increase to infinity. It can do so only if the world continues to exist eternally and humanity too. But both science and religion say that the world will come to an end sometime. There is a pralayaan extinctionalthough it may be followed by a new creation and a new cycle of growth and evolution, but of a different kind and constituting quite other elements.
I have put the popular case in figures of popular mentality;almost foolish and childish on the face of it, as it would appear; but if one "tries to answer, one finds it is not easy, children's questions are always so. Let us then try to be wise and face the problem squarely. The whole difficulty comes from the popular, perhaps normal human conception of the soul; it is considered almost something like the physical body (even as Virochana of old did in the Upanishadic days), namely, it has a definite form and figure, even perhaps a definite mass: each is an isolated entity shut out from everyone else by a fixed contour within which each one is housed. In fact, however, it is not so. The soul is an individual, no doubt, it has even a kind of recognisable form, but nothing of the kind by which matter or a material body is characterised. It is an essential form, form of the form, swarpa; it is a basic or typal individuality, the individual seated within the 'individual. The characteristic of material individuality is, as I have said, exclusiveness, where -as the soul individuality is characterised by a comprehensiveness which does not diminish but gives a special mode and movement to that individuality. In the growth of life-forms, we know how a single unit, a cell, divides and subdivides itself and each division grows into a whole, a complete life-form. But the process is not reversible. Developed forms, coming out of a single parent cannot be resolved back into the original unit. Organisms do not combine to form a single unitary organism, although one or more may be taken up and assimilated into another: for this is not combination, but practically the annihilation of one into another. The second law of thermodynamics seems to hold good even in the biological field. On a still higher or deeper level, in the psychological and spiritual realm, such combinations or resolutions are however possible and form a characteristic movement of the occult world.
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Reverting to the original question with which we started, we can say now that the birth of a soul is not like the birth of a living being or organism, that is to say, it does not happen at a given point of time. A soul is truly aja, unborn; it was always there imbedded as the element of secret consciousness in the bosom of the inconscient material Nature. Only it grew out, manifested itself, attaining gradually an individuality and an integrated personality. Neither can it be said that all souls originally, that is to say, at the very beginning of their evolutionary course, were of the same magnitude, equal in all respects. As we know the ultimate material particles the atoms of the different elements or their constituents, protons, etc.have not all the same mass or charge, even so the spiritual elements too have not the same potency or vibration: they are of varying sizes and strengths. The stress of the evolutionary urge in life expressed itself in multiple and varied figures and dispositions, variation being an inherent virtue of the stress. And the development too follows a chequered line: the direction, the tempo, the degree, the manner of the march all differ according to the case, each spark is or tends to be unique and sui generisand even erratic perhapsin its behaviour, like its physical counterpart, the indeterminate and indeterminable material particle. And yet all move towards a heightening, enlarging, deepening of the consciousness rivers flowing and broadening out in their meandering course to the sea: what was unformed, rudimentary, scarcely distinguishable from out of a homogeneous mass, detaches itself gradually, shapes itself into an organised individual entity and finally the fully conscious personality. But, as I have said, the growth does not follow a single one-track straight line: there can be a fusion of souls, the descent and integration of a being or soul from another level of consciousness into a developing soul or psychic element from out of Nature. In this sense then there can be a birth of souls too. The astronomers speak of novae, new stars that suddenly flare out in the sky, as if from nowhereeven though they or their elements were existent before the phenomenon happened. Souls too can come to birth in an analogous way. That is to say, it is due to a special descent of a formed being or consciousness into the human vehicle. The conception of the "twice-born caste" may be remembered in this connection. There is a physical birth and there is a spiritual birth: the latter takes place when the being on the physical plane, yet wholly belonging to evolving Nature, suddenly (it usually happens suddenly) opens and receives into itself a higher principle and becomes a conscious personality.
The soul in Nature grows along a definite line and the descent also of higher principles overarching that soul happens also in the same line connecting it with its archetype in the supreme status. This we may call the major line of development through various avataras one after another: but apart from this there may also be subsidiary formations that are its emanations or are added to it from elsewhere either temporarily or even permanently. The soul can put out derivative or ancillary emanations, parts of its being and consciousness, a mental or vital or even a subtle physical movement or formation which can take a body creating a temporary, a transient personality or enter into another's body and another personality in order to go through a necessary experience and gather an element needed for the growth of its being and consciousness. One can recall here the famous story of Shankaracharya Who entered into the body of a king (just dead, made him alive and lead the life of the king) in order to experience love and enjoyment, things of which, being a Sannyasi, he was innocent. Similarly one can take into one-self such parts and elements from others which he wishes to utilise for his growth and evolution. It is said that a man with low carnal instincts and impulses becomes an animal of that type in his next life. But perhaps it is truer to say that a part only the vital part of animal appetiteenters into or takes shape in an animal: the soul itself, the true or the whole being of the person, once become human, does not revert to animalhood. The animal portion in man that refuses to be taken up and integrated, sublimated into the higher human consciousness has to be satisfied and exhausted, as much as possible, in the animal way.
There is also the other question asked very often whether men and women always follow different lines of growth or whether there may be intermixture of the lines. Although the soul is sexless, still it may be said that on the whole there are these two lines, masculine and feminine; and generally a soul follows the same line in its incarnations. The soul difference is not in the sex as we know it; but there is a disposition and character that mark the difference and each type, masculine or feminine, is that because of some special role to fulfil, a particular kind of work to be done in a particular way. The difference is difficult to define exactly; but one may say, in the language of the mystics, that it "is the difference between the left hand and the right hand. The mystics refer to the two sides of consciousness, that of light and that of force (chit-tapas), that is to say, knowledge and power. It is not that the two are quite separate entities, they are together and grow together; but in actuality one aspect is more in front than the other. The masculine aspect is often termed as the right hand and the feminine as the left hand of the conscious being. And in a general way man represents the knowledge aspect the conceptual dynamism and woman represents the executive dynamism. This definition however should not be taken absolutely or rigidly. So it can be said that a woman generally remains a woman in all her births and man like-wise remains a man. Here too, although there may not be a central metamorphosis, there may be a partial change: that is to say a part of a mantoo womanish, so to saymay enter a woman and live and fulfil itself or exhaust there; and the masculine part of a woman also can identify itself with its type and pattern in a man. The difference, however, between Purusha and Prakriti, philosophically, seems to be very definite and clear; but in actuality, when they take form and embodiment, it is not easy to define the principles or qualities that mark out the two. At the source when the difference starts, it is a matter of stress and temper and not any so-called division of labour as human mind ordinarily understands it.
05.03 - The Body Natural, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
With regard to the food that man takes, there are two factors that determine or prescribe it. First of all, the real need of the body, that is to say, what the body actually requires for its maintenance, the elements to meet the chemical changes occurring there, something quite material and very definite, viz, the kind of food and the quantity. But usually this real need of the body is obscured and sumberged under the demands of another kind of agency, almost altogether foreign to it, (I) vital desire and (2) mental notions. Indeed, the menu of our table, at least 90% of it, is arranged so as to satisfy the demands of the second category, the consideration that should come first comes last in fact. The body is at present a slave of the mind and the vital; it is hardly given the freedom of choosing its own requirements in the right quantity and quality. That is why the body is seen to suffer everywhere and it normally sick for the greater part of its earthly existence. It has been compelled to occupy an anomalous position in the human organism between these two tyrants. The vital goes by its greed, its attraction and repulsion, its impulse to excess (sometimes to its opposite of deprivation); what it has been accustomed to, what it has taken a fancy for, to that it clings, and if the body has not what it prescribes, it throws the suggestion into the body that it will fall ill. The physical mind has its own notions and schemes, pet ideas and plans (perhaps from what has been read in books or heard from persons) in respect of the body's needs; it thinks that if a certain prescription is not followed, the body will suffer. The mind and the vital are thus close friends and accomplices in regimenting the body. They impose their own demands and prejudices upon the body which helplessly gets entangled in them and loses its native instinct. The body left to itself is marvellously self-conscious; it knows spontaneously and unfailingly what is good for its health and strength. The animals usually, especially those of the forest, preserve still the unspoilt body instinct; for they have no mind to tyrannise over the body nor is their vital of a kind to go against the normal demands of the body. The body, segregated from the mind and the vital, can very easily choose the right kind of food and the right quantity and even vary them according to the varying conditions of the body. Common sense is an inherent attribute of the body consciousness; it never errs on the side of excess and immoderation or perversity. The vital is dramatic, the mind is imaginative, but the body is sanity itself. And that is not a sign of its inconscience and inertia. The dull and dumb immobility of which it is sometimes accused is after all perhaps a mode of its self-defence against the wild vagaries of the mind and the vital to which it is so often called upon to lend its support. Indeed, it may very well be that the accusation against the flesh that it is weak is only an opinion or suggestion imposed on the body by the mentalvital who throw the whole blame upon the body just to escape from the blame due to themselves. The vital is impatient and clamorous, and if it is all push and drive-towards physical execution and fulfilmentit is normally clouded and troubled and obscured and doubly twisted when counselled and supported by a mind, narrow and superficial, not seeing beyond its nose, bound within a frame of incorrect and borrowed notions.
The body, precisely because of its negative natureits dumb inertia, as it is calledprecisely because it has no axe of its own to grind, that is to say, as it has no fancies and impulsions, plans and schemes upon which it can pride itself, precisely because of this childlike innocence, it has a wonderful plasticity and a calm stability, when it is not troubled by the mind or vital. Indeed, the divine qualities that are secreted in the body, which the body seeks to conserve and express are a stable harmony, a balance and equilibrium, capable of supporting the whole weight of all the levels of consciousness from the highest peak to the lowest abysses even as physically it bears the weight of the entire depth of the atmosphere so lightly as it were, without feeling the burden in the least.
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An ordinary man is a most disorganised entity and possesses no individual character. His mind is a conglomeration of thoughts and ideas which do not particularly belong to him, but to everybody, being elements of the world-mind in general. His vital being too is a medley of desires, impulses, energies that are not personal in any sense, but pass through him or take a long or short-term asylum in him from the universal vital force. The body, being a definitely delimited object, is perhaps the only thing that appears to be personal the chief, if not the only source and sign of personal identity; and with the loss of the body, the whole personality seems to crumble down and disappear in the world-existence the body particles get mixed into the world of matter, the life elements disperse in the vital world, the mental components disintegrate into the world of mind. In fact, this is what happens to the human person after death or would happen normally.
Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no personality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every momentas the poet says:
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And yet the building up of an abiding individual is the secret urge of Nature's evolution: it is the hidden spring of human aspiration and the purpose of God's creation. Not mere disparate particlesof substance or energy or consciousness breaking up constantly and scattering and finally dissolving into the void (the great law of Running Downor as the Veda figures it, tucchyena abwapihitamabsorbed by the infinitesimal)but a gathering of elements, integrating them into organic wholes, moulding definite forces into definite formssuch is the secret plan behind. Indeed, ego is the first formation, the original instrument which Nature fashioned to carry out this object of hers.
Ego means a hardened core that is not easily broken by the impact of forces. It delimits, ,cuts out, endeavours to maintain its formation by a strong violent self-assertion. Ego is a helper, but also it is a bar. It assists the first formation but delays and obstructs the true and final formation. For the ego is a formation, an individual formation, but on the level of universal Nature: it is of a piece with the normal cosmic movement, only bounded by a peripheral line. In the general expanse it puts up enclosures and preserves and fencings; the constituting elements remaining the same in substance and quality. Even the delimitation is illusory in reality, it is something like the membrane in the body separating the different functional organs, rigid yet allowing interaction and interpenetration. That is why, when death removes the outward fencing, the individuality also cannot long maintain itself and merges into the general. We may look upon egoism as a kind of artificial or experimental individuality, a laboratory formation, as it were, tried and developed under given conditions. In fact, however, egoism is a shadow or an echo upon this side of our nature of the true individuality which lies and comes from elsewhere.
And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the particle of divinity in each, the developing consciousness the spark of Fire, the ray of Light the immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of earthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.
So the individualisation and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the surface, only when they obey and subserve the culture of the soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment of the true personality.
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Finally, it is the turn of the body to become individualised, personalised, that is to say, when it takes up the disposition and configurationof the psychic person and individual. The first stage is that of a subtle body individualised, a radiant form of etherealised elements consisting of the concentrated light particles of the divine consciousness of the Psyche. This too is an immortalisation of the personal identity which can be achieved and is achieved by the gnostic man who is to come, who will wholly psychicise and divinise his personality. The second stage is the reorganisation and individualisation of the material sheath itself. The very cells of the body are impregnated with the radiant substance of the supreme spiritual consciousness; they live the life of the spiritual individual, the personal divine embodied in the individual. When the whole process is gone through and the work clone, the individual body, physically too, shares in and attains the immortality of the soul. The body is firm enough to maintain its physical identity and yet plastic enough to change in the manner and to the degree demanded of it at any time.
In the process of making the body personal and divine and immortal, death or what appears as such may be a needed operation. It is no longer an ineluctable destiny forced upon you, but an instrument which you use consciously for a definite purpose. It is a mystic or occult work (kriy:) which we can try to understand by an analogy. The evolution of the ideal or divine man, the assumption of the mortal by the immortal involves a twofold operation: rejection and integration. Rejection means throwing out the elements that belong exclusively to the lower grade and cannot be taken up and incorporated into the higher; while integration means taking up and absorbing utilisable elements of the lower into the higher. This double process goes on on all the levels, on the mental, on the vital, on the subtle physical and even on the physical level. At a certain stage or in a concentrated process of alchemy the process of rejection may demand a mode of reshuffling and redisposition which physically appears like death, but it is inevitably followed or accompanied by the process of integration or recreation.
Perhaps this supreme and dangerous gesture only the Master can makeas the pioneer and pathfinder and he has made it.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
for, we all are come into a world of light and we ourselves, the' elements of our physical frame are made of the very texture of light.
So far so good. But it is evidently not far enough, for one can answer that all this falls within the dominion of Matter and the material. The conception of Matter has changed, to be sure: Matter and energy are identified, as we have said, and the energy in its essential and significant form is light (which, we may say, is electricity at its highest potential). But this does not make any fundamental change in the metaphysical view of the reality. We have to declare in the famous French phrase plus a change, plus a reste Ie mme(the more it changes the more it remains the same). The reality remains material: for light, physical light is not something spiritual or even immaterial.
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Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws purporting to govern the physical bases of life claim recognition, but they stand on precarious grounds. The laws of natural selection, of heredity or genetics are applicable within a very restricted frame of facts. The variety of material substances revolves upon the gamut of 92 elements based upon 4 or 5 ultimate types of electric unitand that is sufficient to make us wonder. But the variety in life-play is simply incalculablefrom the amoeba or virus cell to man, what a bewildering kaleidoscope and each individual in each group is unique in its way! The few chromosomes that seem to be the basis of all diversity do not explain the mystery the mystery becomes doubly mysterious: how does a tiny seed contain the thing that is to become a banyan tree, how does a speck of plasma bring forth from within an object of Hamletian dimensions! What then is this energy or substance of life welling out irrepressively into multitudinous forms and modes? The chemical elements composing an organic body do not wholly exhaust its composition; there is something else besides. At least in one field, the life element has received recognition and been given an independent name and existence. I am obviously referring to the life element in food-stuff which has been called vitamin.
Life looks out of matter as a green sprout in the midst of a desert expanse. But is matter really so very different and distinct from life? Does Matter mean no Life? Certain facts and experiments have thrown great doubt upon that assumption. An Indian, a scientist of the first order in the European and modern sense, has adduced proofs that obliterate the hard and fast line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. He has demonstrated -the parallelism, if not the identity, of the responses of those two domains: we use the term fatigue in respect of living organisms only, but Jagadish Chandra Bose says and shows, that matter too, a piece of metal for instance, undergoes fatigue. Not only so, the graph, the periodicity of the reactions as shown by a living body under a heightened or diminished stimulus or the influence of poison or drug is repeated very closely by the so-called dead matter under the same treatment.
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Now, let us advance another step forward. Beyond matter there lies life and beyond life-consciousness. Is consciousness too a mere epiphenomenon as life was once thought to be in the empire of matter? Or can it not be that consciousness is an extensionan evoluteof life, even as life is an extension, an evolute of matter? In other words consciousness is not a freak, even as life was not; it is inherent in life, life itself is a rudimentary movement of consciousness. The amoeba feeling or pre-sensing its way towards its food, the twig bending towards the direction in which it has the chance of getting more light, the sudden appearance of organs or elements in an organism that will be useful only in the future are indisputable examples of a purposiveness, a forward reference in the scheme of Nature. In the domain of life-play teleologyis a fact which only the grossest brand of obfuscation can deny. And teleology meansdoes it not ?the stress of an idea, the pattern of a consciousness.
Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards thought and consciousness is linked with the nervous system (of which the brain is an extension). Now the same Indian wizard who first, scientifically speaking, linked up the non-living with the living, has also demonstrated, if not absolutely, at least to a high degree of plausibility, that the plant also possesses a kind of rudimentary nervous system (although we accept more easily a respiratory system there). All this, however, one has to admit, is still a far cry from any intimation of consciousness in Matter. Yet if life is admitted to be involved in matter and consciousness is found to be involved in life, then the unavoidable conclusion is that Matter too must contain involved in it a form of consciousness. The real difficulty in the way of attri buting consciousness to Matter is our conception of consciousness which we usually identify with articulate thought, intelligence or reason. But these are various formations of consciousness, which in itself is something else and can exist in many other forms and formulations.
05.08 - An Age of Revolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The search for a universal principle of Nature is a meta-physical as well as a scientific preoccupation. In ancient days, fo example, we had the Water of Thales or the Fire of Heraclitus as the one original unifying principle of this kind. With the coming of the Renascence and the New Illumination we laughed them out and installed instead the mysterious Ether. For a long time this universalreigned supreme and now that too has gone the way of its predecessors. We thought for a time that we had found in Electric Energy the one sovereign principle in Nature. At a time when we had a few elementsdiscrete, different, fundamental units that in their varying combinations built up the composite structure of Nature, apart from the fact that they reposed finally on the ultimate unifying principle of Ether, it was found also that they all behaved in a uniform and identical and therefore predictable manner. The time and the place (and the mass) being given, everything went according to a pattern and a formula, definite, fixed, mathematically rigid. Even the discovery of one element after another till the number reached the famous figure 92 (itself following a line of mathematically precise and inevitable development) did not materially alter the situation and caused no tribulation. For on further scrutiny a closer unity revealed itself: the supposed disparity in the substance of the various elements was found to be an illusion, for they all appeared now as different organisations or dispositions of the same electric energy (although the identity of electric energy with radiant energy was not always very clear). Thus we could conclude that as the substance was the same, its mode of working also would be' uniform and patterned. In other words, the mechanistic conception still ruled our view' of Nature. That means, the ultimate units, the particles (of energy) that compose Nature are like sea-sands or water-drops, each one is fundamentally similar to any other and all behave similarly, reacting uniformly to the same forces that act upon them.
Well, it is now found that they do not do so. However same or similar constitutionally, each unit is sui generisand its movement cannot be predicted. That movement does not depend upon its mass or store of energy or its position in a pattern, as a wholly mechanistic conception would demand: it is something incalculable, one should say even, erratic. In a radioactive substance, the particle that is shot out, becomes active, cannot be predetermined by any calculation, even if that is due to a definitely and precisely arranged bombardment. So we have come to posit a principle of uncertainty, as a very fundamental law of Nature. It practically declares that the ultimate particle is an autonomou unit, it is an' individual, almost a personality, and seems to have a will of its own. A material unit acts very much like a biological unit: it does not obey mechanically, answer mechanically as an automaton, but seems to possess a capacity for choice, for assent or refusal, for a free determination. The mechanistic view presented is due to an average functioning. The phenomenon has been explained by a very apt image. It is like an army. A group of soldiers, when they are on parade, look all similar and geometrically patterned: each is just like another and all move and march in the same identical manner. But that' is when you look at the whole, the collectivity, but looked individually, each one regains his separate distinct personality, each having his own nature and character, his own unique history: there no two are alike, each is non pareil and behaves differently, incalculably.
05.11 - The Soul of a Nation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When however the soul withdraws, when a nation in a particular cycle of its soul manifestation has fulfilled its role and mission, the body of the nation falls gradually into decadence. The elements that composed the organic reality, the living consistency of national life disintegrate, lose their energy and cohesive capacity; they die out and are dispersed or persist for a time as a confused mixture of disconnected and mechanically moving cells. But it may happen too that in an apparently dying or dead nation, the soul that retired comes back' again, not in its old form and mode of life for that cannot beEgypt, if it lives again today cannot repeat the ages of the Pharaohs and the Pyramids-but in a new personality, with a fresh life purpose, In such a case what happens is truly a national resurrectiona Lazarus coming back to life at the touch of the Divine.
We do not believe that India was ever completely dead or hopelessly moribund: her soul, although not always in front, was ever present as a living force, presiding over and guiding her destiny. That is why there is a perennial capacity for renewal in her and the capacity to go through dire ordeals. And to live up to her genius, she too must know how to march with the time, that is to say, not to cling to old and past formsto be faithful to the ancient soul does not mean eternising the external frames and formulas that expressed that soul one time or another. Indeed the soul becomes alive and vigorous when it finds a new disposition of the life plan which can embody and translate a fresh creative activity, a new fulfilment emanating from the depths of the soul.
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When a man dies, his soul or psychic being, after a time goes to the psychic world and takes rest there till the hour comes to take birth again in another body upon earth. There are then these two periods in the life after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory the brain mindwith one's death. One does not carryover with the psychic being the other parts that constitute the terrestrial life. They are dispersed and dissolved in their respective cosmic spheres. The subtle body gives up its elements to the subtle physical plane, the vital elements are taken up into the vital world and the mental elements go into the mental world,unless the psychic being is highly developed and has organised around itself as its instrument of self-expression any of these elements. In that case, as much of the terrestrial partsnamely, of the subtle body and life and mindas have come into direct contact with the psychic and have allowed themselves to be moved and moulded by its consciousness, will alone persist and share in the immortality of the soul. Normally, the elements of the human vehicle form a loose and unorganised aggregate massed round the psychic centre. When the centre withdraws, they too fall off automatically and are scattered into the universal storehouse of Nature. Only when they have been organised and when they have attained a definite form and character expressing something of the psychic nature, can they maintain their identity, for this identity is part and parcel of the psychic identity.
I have said that the memory of past lives is effaced because of the effacement of the instrument. But there is a higher memory which is the attribute of the psychic consciousness. The psychic being is made of light and knowledge: it knows, rather it sees and can survey the whole curve of its past growth and development. Of course, it may not see or remembervery often it does notall the physical details of things and happenings of an earthly life, the hundred incidents, accidents and contingencies that are not directly linked to its consciousness. But all things that have had its touch and have contri buted to its growth and development and have in their turn received its influenceobjects, persons, happenings or movementsfind themselves harboured in the psychic memory. And thus the only sure way of remembering the past, remembering, that is to say, what is worth remembering, is to go into the psychic being, possess the psychic consciousness. There one has the whole panorama of the soul's odyssey revealed. Any other way leads only to imagination, conjecture and delusion.
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Once in its place of rest the soul enjoys profound peace and delight and is in a kind of luminous sleep. There it assimilates all the experiences of its last life, that is to say, imbibes out of them all the substance that goes to increase and streng then its consciousness, the sap that lends itself to the growth of the build and stature of the being. These experiences are meant to bring the soul nearereach life being one step nearerto the fullness of its union with the Divine Consciousness out of which it came originally upon earth as a mere spark, a parcel yet apart. This process may be short or long according to the nature of assimilation undertaken. Here also the being prepares for the impending birth, that is to say, gathers all the elements that will be required for the play of the consciousness in that life. A broad planning too is made here, a scheme in outline of the kind of experiences that one will need for the particular growth of consciousness envisaged. Some forces of consciousness, out of the stock developed and assembled by the being, are kept back, in reserve, others are brought forward for immediate use in the life to be lived next. All this, however, is not the deliberate rational process of the mind, it is something spontaneous, involved, a luminous brooding and incubation, something like the trance of Brahman within which the seed of creation is about to germinate.
The psychic being is a packet of gathered power, a charged battery, as it were; when it comes down upon earth, it calls round itself elements of mind and vital and even subtle physical needed for the purpose of the particular life experience, and even those that would go to constitute the physical body. The psychic being usually picks up these elements of mind and life and body out of the universal store-house of earth's atmosphere as it needs them, in the same way as it returns them there on the journey back after death. But as I have already said, there are beings who have developed well-formed personalities of mind and life and even of the physical consciousness. These formations are not mere loose accretions, temporary arrangements for a life experience, but are welded, organised, given a more or less permanent shape, as the proper instrument of the psychic being, as its own expression. In such cases, the outer personality too continues to exist as an essential mode or vibration in and with the psychic consciousness itself and when the soul descends upon earth, is in contact with the earth's atmosphere, it projects out of I itself the external personality and formation. This does not I mean certainly that the personality remains something fixed and rigid, but that it has attained an essential fullness of form and yet retains the capacity for further change and growth through further growth of the psychic being in other life experiences.
Now the time and occasion for a particular birth of the soul depends naturally on the inner need of that being. But it must be notedas it is a fact in the occult world that the souls are not so many absolutely separate unrelated autonomous self-sufficient entities, each one coming and going as and when it chooses and likes: on the contrary, the souls form groups or families according to some secret affinity. And when they come down, they do so not unoften in company. A call goes, a bell is rung as it were intimating that the hour is come and they rush down. And it may even happen that in rushing down a psychic being is not too careful or fastidious about the instrument, the vehicle he chooses to inhabit; whatever is handy and nearest and on the whole suitable to his purpose he takes up and goes forward. He takes it all as an adventure and has the joy of battle and the warrior spirit that can taste of victory only when hard fought and won. That is how we meet not unoften a considerable discrepancy between the inner being of a man and his earthly tenement, his soul and his external character and physical nature. There is a meaning in the choice, a significance in the utilisation of unfavourable conditions: there is a method in the madness.
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For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
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06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
O loss, if death into its elements
Of which his gracious envelope was built,
06.02 - Darkness to Light, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Hurdles and obstacles are put there in the way: not merely to test your strength, but to train it, to increase it, to discipline it. Difficulties abound precisely because by overcoming them you attain to the fullness of your perfection. You have been built with elements and forces that are exactly in keeping with what you are expected to do with them: you are placed in the midst of conditions and circumstances that are absolutely in proportion to what you have to realise. Indeed you carry within yourself all the difficulties that are necessary to make your realisation perfection itself.
When you receive a blow, do not draw back or blink and sink down: hold up your head with courage and fortitude and say to yourself, here is another opportunity given to take another step forward. The blow is a finger of light pointed towards a dark spot to be illumined, a weak link that has to be forged anew. In meeting and surmounting a difficulty you add another degree to your ascension, another sinew as it were to your muscle. Remember a difficulty is never out of proportion to your strength: it comes in the exact measure of your power to face it. It is your mind, your notion that makes the contrary suggestion, a kind of illusion possesses you that you are beyond your depth and must go adrift.
06.03 - Types of Meditation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first is to think on one subject in a continuous logical order. When, for example, you have to find the solution of a problem, you go step by step from one operation to another in a chain till you finally arrive at the conclusion. The thought is withdrawn from all other objects and is canalised along a single line. This is a kind of meditation, although it may not be usually known by that name. It marks a progress in the make-up of the human consciousness. For normally the mind moves at random, thoughts run about on many subjects, various, contrary and contradictory, from moment to moment. There is neither direction, consistency nor organisation: it is a confused mass of incomplete, inchoate thoughts. The control and organisation of this mass, to start with, in a limited sphere and in a definite direction, the rejection of the unnecessary and the irrelevant and the marshalling and ordering of the required elements form the first exercise towards mental growth. All high intelligence, all effective wielding of thought power needs this discipline. Under the present circumstances of the world the school-life gives the best opportunity for this development. This is a meditation that should be obligatory and universal.
The next type we may call concentration, instead of meditation. Here we do not pursue a thought-line, but fix the thought upon one object unmoved. It means a further process of withdrawing the consciousness from its habitual outgoing and dispersive movement. The thought is held at a point and attention is focussed upon it: it is continuous and unbroken attention, for example, upon an idea, a phrase (mantra) or an image. One can concentrate also upon a physical point, say, fixing the gaze upon the tip of one's nose, or on a luminous point outside etc. In this discipline the whole mind is gathered together and focussed: or, everything else is shut out leaving only one thing upon which all the light of the consciousness is directed. It is a standstill consciousness, like a flame erect and immobile in a windless place.
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The last process gives us the clue to the fourth type of meditation the type, in fact, which is recommended for us, both because it is the easiestfollowing as it does the line of least resistance, also because it gives the fullness of the result demanded. Instead of trying to manipulate the mental force with one's personal will and effort, instead of seeking to control and comm and the consciousness, the best thing to do would be to remain quiet as far as it is normally possible for one without struggle and then turn the gaze to the other side, deep inward or high upward, become more conscious of the light, the Will that brought you to this Path, to be alive with the secret delight, the flaming aspiration that is there within you behind all the turbid turmoil of the surface life and consciousness. This Presence and Guidance will of itself place before you the elements and movements that are to be rejected and those that are to be accepted and given your sincere assent those that help you in doing the necessary gesture. Indeed, if you do not resist too much, it will throw out what is to be thrown out and bring in what is to be brought in. That is how the instrument will be cleansed and refined. Silence will be put in, for that is the basis; but not silence alone, for it will be unified with a new dynamism expressing the Divine's Willpersonal choice there will be none, neither for absolute quietude nor for mere activity.
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06.10 - Fatigue and Work, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The question is not about your scope and capacity. All depends upon your attitude, the consciousness with which you approach a work, especially when you are a sadhak. When a work comes to you or when you have to do a work, you must take it up as a thing worth doing. Whatever the value given to it normally or you often put upon it, you should not neglect or merely tolerate it, but welcome it and set about it with the utmost conscientiousness possible. Even if it were a trifling insignificant thing, a menial affair, for example, do not consider it as mean or beneath your dignity. Directly you begin to do a thing in the right spirit, you will find it becoming miraculously interesting. Try to bring perfection even in that bit of insignificance. Do it with a goodwill, even if it is scrubbing the floor, telling yourself: I must do it as best I can, that is to say, this too I shall do even better than a servant, I shall make the floor look really neat and clean and beautiful. That is the crux of the matter. You should try to bring out the best in you and put it into your work. In other words, the work becomes an instrument of progress. The goodwill, attention, concentration, self-forgetfulness and the control over yourself, over your organs and nerves the smaller the work the more detailed is the control gainedall which are involved in doing a work perfectly, with as much perfection as it is possible for you to command, are elements called forth in you and help to make you a better man. Indeed a work for which you have no preferential bias, to which you are not emotionally attached, even indifferent normally, may be of especial help, for you will be able to do it with less nervous disturbance, with a large amount of detachment and disinterestedness.
Man usually chooses his work or is made to choose a work because of a vital preference, a prejudice or notion that it is the kind in which he can shine or succeed. This egoistic vanity or opportunism may be necessary or unavoidable in ordinary life; but when one wishes to go beyond the ordinary life and aspires for the true life, this attachment or personal choice is more an impediment than a help to progress, towards finding the way to the true life. The Yogic attitude to work therefore is that of absolute detachment, not to have any choice, but to accept and do whatever is given to you, whatever comes to you in your normal course of life and do it with the utmost perfection possible. It is in that way and that way alone that all work becomes supremely interesting, and all life a miracle of delight.
06.11 - The Steps of the Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The human individual is a very complex being: he is com-posed of innumerable elements, each one of which is an independent entity and has almost a personality. Not only so, the most contradictory elements are housed together. If there is a particular quality or capacity present, the very opposite of it, annulling it, as it were, will be also found along with it and embracing it.. I have seen a man brave, courageous, heroic to the extreme, flinching from no danger, facing unperturbed the utmost peril, the bravest of the brave, truly; and yet I have seen the same man cowering in abject terror, like the last of poltroons, in the presence of certain circumstances. I have seen a most generous man, giving away largely, freely, not counting any expenditure or sacrifice, without the least care or reservation; the same person I have also found to be the vilest of misers in respect of certain other considerations. I have seen again the most intelligent person, with a clear mind, full of light and understanding, easily comprehending the logic and implication of a topic and yet I have seen him betraying the utmost stupidity of which even an ordinary man without education or intelligence would be incapable. These are not theoretical examples, but I have come across such persons actually in life.
The complexity arises not only in extension, but also in depth. Man does not live on a single plane but on many planes at the same time. There is a scale of gradation in human consciousness: the higher one rises in the scale the greater the number of elements or personalities that one possesses. Whether one lives mostly or mainly on the physical or vital or mental plane or on any particular section of these planes or on planes above and beyond, there will be accordingly differences in the constitution or psycho-physical make-up of the individual personality. The higher one stands the richer the personality, because it lives not only on its own normal level, but also on all that are below and which it has transcended. The complete or integral man, some occultists say, possesses 365 personalities; indeed it may be much more. (The Vedas speak of the three and thirty-three and thirty-three hundred and thirty-three thousand gods that may be housed in the human vehicle the basic three being evidently the triple status or world of Body, Life and Mind).
What is the meaning of this self-contradiction, this division in man? To understand that we must know and remember that each person represents a certain quality or capacity, a particular achievement to be embodied. How best can it be done? What is the way by which one can acquire a quality at its purest, and highest and most perfect? It is by setting an opposition to it. That is how a power is increased and streng thenedby fighting against and overcoming all that weakens and contradicts it. The deficiencies in respect of a particular quality show you where you are to mend and reinforce and in what way to improve in order to make it perfectly perfect. It is the hammer that beats the weak and soft iron to transform it into hard steel. The preliminary discord is useful and necessary to be utilised for a higher harmony. This is the secret of self-conflict in man. You are weakest precisely in that element which is destined to be your greatest asset.
Each man has then a mission to fulfil, a role to play in the universe; a part he has been given to learn and take up in the cosmic Purpose which he alone is capable of executing and none other. This he has to learn and acquire through life-experiences, that is to say, not in one life, but in life after life. In fact, that is the meaning of the chain of lives that the individual has to pass through, namely, to acquire experiences and to gather out of them the thread the skein of qualities and attributes, powers and capacities for the pattern of life he has to weave. Now, the inmost being, the true personality, the central consciousness of the evolving individual is his psychic being. It is, as it were, a very tiny speck of light lying far behind the experiences in normal people. In grown up souls this psychic consciousness has an increased lightincreased in intensity, volume and richness. Thus there are souls, old and new. Old and ancient are those that have reached or are about to reach the fullness of perfection; they have passed through a long past of innumerable lives and developed the most complex and yet the most integrated personality. New souls are those that are just emerged or emerging out of the mere physico-vital existence; these are like simple organisms, made of fewer constituents, referring mostly to the bodily life, with just a modicum of the mental. It is the soul, however, that grows with experiences and it is the soul that builds and enriches the personality. Whatever portion of the outer life, whatever element in the mind or vital or body succeeds in corning in contact with the psychic consciousness, that is to say, is able to come under its influence, is taken up and lodged there: it remains in the psychic 'being as its living memory and permanent possession. It is such elements that form the basis, the groundwork upon which the structure of the integral and true personality is raised.
The first thing then to do is to find out what it is that you are meant to realise, what is the role you have to play, your particular mission and the capacity or quality you have to express. You have to discover that and also the thing or things that oppose and do not allow it to flower or come to full manifestation. In other words, you have to know yourself, recognize your soul or psychic being.
06.14 - The Integral Realisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The problem for him is not to reject or minimise any experience or stick to some only as valuable but embrace all and to put them together, make a synthesis out of them. This synthesis is the very character of the Integral Yoga. And it can be reached only by rising beyond the experiences given for synthesis. A higher poise of consciousness only can find the point of union among different elements and the function and role of each one in a composite harmony. The supramental status is the highest synthetic centre; here all experiences and realisations rise into their original and true reality and find their perfect expression.
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06.16 - A Page of Occult History, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Into the heart of this Darkness and Falsehood and Pain and Death, a seed was sown, a grain that is to be the epitome and symbol of material creation and in and through which the Divine will claim back all the elements gone astray, the prodigal ones who will return to recognise and fulfil the Divine. That was Earth. And the earth, in her turn, in her labour towards the Divine Fulfilment, out of her bosom, threw up a being who would again symbolise and epitomise the earth and material creation. That is Man. For, man came with the soul in him, the Psychic Being, the Divine Flame, the spark of consciousness in the midst of universal unconsciousness, a miniature of the original Divine Light-Truth-Love-Life. In the meantime, to help the evolution, to join hands with the aspiring soul in the human being, there was created, on the defection of the First Lords the Asuric Quaternitya second hierarchy of luminous beingsDevas, gods. (Some-thing of this inner history of the world is reflected in the Greek legend of struggle between the Titans and the Olympians.) These gods, however, being a latter creation, perhaps because they were young and inexperienced, could not cope immediately with their strong Elders. It is why we see in the mythological legends the gods very often worsted at the hands of the Asuras: Indra hiding under the sea, Zeus threatened often with defeat and disaster. It is only an intervention from the Supreme (the Greeks called it Fate) that saved them in the end and restored the balance.
However, the Asuras came to think better of the game and consented to use their freedom on the side of the Divine, for the fulfilment of the Divine; that is to say, they agreed to conversion. Thus they took birth as or in human beings, so that they may be in contact with the human soulPsychewhich is the only door or passage to the Divine in this material world. But the matter was not easy; the process was not straight. For, even agreeing to be converted, even basking in the sunshine of the human psyche, these incorrigible Elders could not forget or wholly give up their old habit and nature. They now wanted to work for the Divine Fulfilment in order to magnify themselves thereby; they consented to serve the Divine in order to make the Divine serve them, utilise the Divine End for their own purposes. They wished to see the new creation after their own heart's desire.
06.29 - Towards Redemption, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The origin of creation is an individualisation the manifestation or emanation of many, as units, out of the undivided and indivisible Single. It meant freedom for each unit to choose: the individual became, so to say, a unit of freedom. The immediate result, however, was not very successful, apparently, that is to say. For the individual unit chose to follow a path exactly opposite to its origin: the individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even now ages for the one Being who could do the thing to prepare slowly, mount the steps gradually along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long, winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums; it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace.
The original individual was a hard concentrated point of ego, concerned wholly and absolutely with itself. So a situation of give and take was brought about so that even to exist meant to exist through others. Human society began in this way. The solitary human animal for its own sake had to come out of its solitariness, take to a mate and thus gradually bring up a family. The wall of egoism was broken to that extent, its scope extended. The enlargement of the ego continuedstill continuesincreasing the content of the unity. From the family the human ego enlarged into the tribe, and the tribal ego has now enlarged into the nation. Larger and larger aggregates are being formed in place of the original individual unities. The nations too are now approaching and interpenetrating each other and in many ways the whole of humanity has been moving as an aggregate. The individual has thus learnt to find himself in the life of humanity as a whole. He has to look upor will soon have to look upto the whole creation as one existence in and through which he has to exist. Thus the universe is recovering its original indivisible unity, but having gained something in the process; for it is now no longer the featureless unity at the source but an enriched and multiple unity in expression. Furthermore the individual can proceed yet beyond. He has to and now is able to, not only in his individual but in his collective consciousness turn back and move straight to its original unity: he can establish direct contact, commune and unite with the Divine Himself from whom it I came and drifted away. The ranges of ascent are within him I and are in line with those outside which the universe is traversing in the path of evolution. Such is the process the Divine I Grace has undertaken to fulfil the Divine's purpose in creation.
06.33 - The Constants of the Spirit, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine exists in three modes: (I) Existence, (2) Consciousness and (3) Bliss. Pure existence, pure consciousness and pure blissSat-Chit-Ananda these are the three fundamental elements out of which the world is made; they are everywhere in all things, in all beings, in all domains and levels of being. Sachchidananda is the supreme reality that is behind all, even here below, behind the mind, behind the life and behind the body too and behind each form in each of these domains. It is that which upholds and sustains everything. Therefore in order to realise it, it is not necessary to mount up, leaving behind the mental, the vital and physical existence and go beyond. Usually when one seeks Sachchidananda one looks for it outside the universe, above and beyond the creation, in the transcendent. In reality, however, one can meet it from any place where one happens to be, either in the mind or in the vital or even in the physical; one has only to withdraw and sink down, or get behind: it is there always. To meet Sachchidananda in and through the physical existence is not very much more difficult or rare a thing than the other ways; it is more difficult and rare to maintain it there constantly and consciously, to make of it a dynamic physical possession. That is the work to be done and for which Sri Aurobindo came.
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06.36 - The Mother on Herself, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
And yet there is a compulsion. It is the secret pressure of one's own nature that drives it forward through all vicissitudes back again to its original source. When it is said that the Divine Grace can and should do all, it means nothing more and nothing less than that: the Divine Grace only accelerates the process of return and recognition. But on the side of the journeying element, the soul, there must be awakened a conscious collaboration, an initial consent and a constantly renewed adhesion. It is this that brings out, at least helps to establish outside on the physical level, the force that is already and has always been at work within and on the subtler and higher levels. That is the pattern of the play, the system of conditions under which the game is carried out. The Grace works and incarnates in and through a body of willing and conscious collaborators; these become themselves part and parcel of the Force that works.
07.02 - The Parable of the Search for the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Infernal elements, demon powers are there.
Man's lower nature hides these awful guests.
07.02 - The Spiral Universe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Evolution does not proceed in a straight line, but in a spiral. That is to say, it is not a constant progress in one direction, but consists of progression, regression and an ultimate progression. The spiral movement means that all things must enter into the phenomenon of evolution, so that it is not one thing only that progresses and others lag behind but that all move forwardall move forward but at different speeds and also from different starting-points. And they move not straight as the crow flies, but in a circle like the soaring eagle. When you concentrate upon one point of the circle, you will see relatively to it many others not advancing at all but receding and the point itself will seem at times to be going back towards a position already left behind. One goes back to pick up certain elements that have not been included in the progress, not properly dealt with. It happens usually that when you progress in one thing, you forget another; so you have to turn back and take up the neglected element. Thus you have to go round and round, as it were, until you include the totality of your being, even embrace the totality of the universe. When you have, however, gathered the by-passed factor and come back to the original position from where you seemed to have regressed, you find that you are not exactly at the same point but at a corresponding point on a higher plane. That forms a spiral, not merely a circle.
There are, in the universe, an infinite number of points moving, each forming a spiral; so there are an infinite number of spirals. And these spirals do not lie only side by side, but cross each other and thus give an aspect of contrariness and contradictoriness. So if you wish to take a total view of the movement of universal progress, you will be somewhat puzzled. There are so many lines that advance and there are so many which recede at the same time. Some come into the light, others go into the background and none independent or self-sufficient. There is a sort of intermingling, even coordination.
07.03 - This Expanding Universe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Furthermore, this expansion is not merely accretion but a growth, that is to say, it is directed and has a sense and purpose and end in view. In fact all the possibles that find play, the elements that enter here below are necessary inasmuch as they contri bute to the meaning of the Play, to the working out of the denouement. We can take again the analogy of the cinema film and say that the unrolling film is interesting because it has a continuous and developing story to tell, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Likewise, the manifestation too tells a connected storyit is not a drivel, but has a goal; it is a process elaborated by a final cause. Even like an individual being it is an organism, ever growing and bringing out its latent possibilities, moving towards a high fruition of its aspiration and destiny.
In this sense manifestation is a more complete and more and more completereality than the non-manifest Supreme. The non-manifest, the transcendent is an integral reality, the manifestation a complete reality, since it adds to it its own reality, the actuality of concrete expression.
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have pored on her infinitesimal elements
And her invisible atoms have unmasked:
07.07 - Freedom and Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The universe is a huge mass of innumerable elements forming a certain composition and in accordance with this composition all are organised within itself. But such an arrangement is not the end or the culmination; it is not static, but moving forward; it is in the process of development. For at any moment, through the action of a different kind, one or more new elements can be introduced into the total mass that forms the universe at a given time and that will necessarily change the whole inner composition. The universe, the material universe, I mean, is a concretisation of a certain aspect or emanation of the Supreme. This concretisation is progressive, not necessarily in a constant and regular way, but in answer to a law, with a subtle kind or degree of liberty. Thus, in the composition of the universe at each moment new elements are penetrating and altering the organisation. The organisation that was perfect in itself and moved and un-rolled itself according to a definite plan and pattern, suddenly finds itself changed and the inner relations too are modified and attain a different poise. That may give the impression of something incoherent or imprecise or miraculous, according to the manner in which one looks at the problem. So there are these two simultaneous facts or factors: there is a determinism which is absolute in its way with a complementary movement of liberty, the unforeseen addition into a fixed existing sum.
This addition comes from the aspiration for the supreme consciousness. There is nothing to wonder at the phenomenon. There is an aspiration acting in the world, moving with a certain end in view; the purpose is to bring back the fallen and obscured consciousness to its original and normal state of the divine consciousness. Each time that this aspiring consciousness meets an obstacle in its working, a new resistance to conquer or to transform, it calls for a new Force. And this new Force is a kind of new creation. In the human being, too, there are different domains in obedience to a law of correspondence; in each there is for him a different destiny and each is absolute in its line. But there is also in him, through his aspiration, a capacity to enter into relation with a domain higher than where he happens to be and bring down an action of this higher domain into the lower determinism. So we can say that there is a horizontal determinism in each domain, absolute in its normal working; but there is also a vertical intervention from other higher domains or even from the highest and then the lower determinism is changed completely. Thus every human being is at once a sum of various determinisms, absolute in their way, and there is also an absolute liberty that can intervene by bringing down other forces into the apparently rigid frame of destiny of the lower worlds and alter it. That is how things in the world give the impression of the unforeseen, the incalculable, the miraculous.
07.10 - Diseases and Accidents, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Not necessarily, to be sure. Illnesses are, as I have told you, generally a dislocation among the different parts of the being, a kind of disharmony. It may well be that the body has not followed the movement of progress, it might have lagged behind while the other parts have, on the contrary, made progress. In that case there is an unbalance, a breaking of harmony and that produces an illness, I mean, in the body, for the mind and the vital also might remain all right. There are many people who have been ill for years, suffering from terrible and incurable diseases, and still maintained their mental power marvellously clear and active and continuing to make progress in that domain. There was a French poet, a very good poet, named Sully Prudhomme; he was mortally ill and it was during that time that he wrote his most beautiful poems. He was always in a very good humour, charming, smiling, pleasant to everyone even while his body was going to bits. You may remember how the great Louis XIV used to joke and laugh, while, in his last days, his body was being lacerated and given over to leeches by his doctors and surgeons. It depends upon individual and individual. For there are people of the other type who get thoroughly disturbed from head to foot if there is the slightest bodily indisposition. Each one has his own combination of the elements.
There is of course a relation between the mind and the body, quite a close relation. In most cases it is the mind that makes the body ill, at least it is the most important factor in the illness. I have said, there are people who keep their mind clear although their body suffers. But it is very rare and very difficult to keep the body healthy when the mind suffers or is un-balanced. It is not impossible, but very, very exceptional. For I explained to you that it is the mind which is the master of the body, the body is an obedient and obliging servant. Unfortunately, one does not usually know how to make use of one's mind, not only so, one makes bad use of it and as bad as possible. The mind possesses a considerable power of formation and of direct action on the body. It is precisely this power which is used by people to make their body ill. As soon as there is something which does not go well, the mind begins to worry about it, makes formations of coming catastrophes, indulges in all kinds of imaginary dangers ahead. Now, instead of thus letting the mind run amuck and play havoc, if the same energy were used for a better purpose, if good formations were made, namely, giving self-confidence to the body, telling it that there is nothing to be anxious about, it is only a passing unease and so on, in that case, the body would be put in a right condition of receptivity and the illness pass away quietly even as it came. That is how the mind is to be taught to give good suggestions to the body and not to throw mud into it. Marvellous results follow if you do it properly.
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You may say again that it is the Divine Grace that saves. But would you explain to me how it works? It would be interesting, indeed, to find out who had precisely the awakened consciousness, had the faith and the inner trust, had called for the help and had in him that which answered automatically and even in a way unconsciouslyto something that came in. Human intelligence is a relative thing and has varying degrees of power. Usually it understands by contrasts and contraries. It does not understand a truth in its absoluteness. For example, I have received hundreds of letters thanking me because they were saved from dangers. But I do not remember to have received a letter thanking me because things were normal and nothing had happened. Men perceive the action of Grace only when there is the atmosphere of the pessimist and there is a danger and they had escaped from it, that is to say, when there is already the beginning of the accident, when the accident has come to pass. When they come out of the danger safely only then they take note of the force that saved. Otherwise they would not have even thought of it. If the voyage they undertook came off without any accident they would not think of any action of Grace present there. They would take it as a matter of course. But precisely because it is so, there may be acting here a Grace of a higher order and there may be existing already a deeper pre-existent harmony between the consciousness of the person and the higher force to which it responds. The chance of an accident is already the beginning of the dislocation I spoke of. But the situation becomes complicated if it is a case of collective accident. The result here depends upon the atmosphere of the persons involved. It is the proportion of these two elements in the personnel of a collective accident that determines the character and magnitude of the accident.
I will tell you a story, I mean a true story, in this connection. There was a pilot who was considered what is called an ace among his fellowmen in the first Great War. He was an extraordinary aviator and the hero of many victories. Nothing had happened to him at any time. But towards the end of his life, an event occurredsome private tragedy and all at once he had the feeling that something was going to happen to him; an accident perhaps, and it was all finished with him. He had come out of the war but was still in the army. He wanted to make a flight to South Africa, from France right up to the south of Africa. He started from France and made for Madagascar, so far as I remember, and then wanted to fly back to France. Now, my brother was at that time the Governor of Congo and needed to join his post as soon as possible. He asked for a place in the aeroplane of the pilot I am speaking about. It was not a regular service plane, but one of those used for trial to show what the machines were capable of and the skills of the airmen. Many tried to dissuade my brother from making the journey, saying that these adventurous trips were, always dangerous. My brother however did not mind the risk. Nothing serious happened, but for a slight breakdown in the middle of the Sahara which was easily got over, and the plane made safe journey and dropped him at his place in Congo. The plane continued further down, to Madagascar, as I said. Now the pilot started back, he did half the journey, his plane crashed and he was killed forthwith. I shall explain to you what really the matter was. What happened had to happen, it was a foregone conclusion. My brother had an absolute faith in his destiny, a certainty that nothing would touch him. The consciousness of the other was on the contrary full of doubt and apprehension. So the mixture of the two atmospheres brought about this that in the first instance the accident could not be prevented, but it stopped short of a catastrophe. But once the destiny of my brother was not there with the machine,like Caesar's destiny that made the boatman row safely across the river through a storm the protection was also withdrawn and the pilot had to go down under the full blast of his bad fate. I can narrate another analogous story, it is with regard to a ship. There were two persons, husb and and wife. They went by air to Indo-China. They had an accident, a very serious accident. All were killed except only these two. Now they had to return to France. They did not want to travel by air, they had had an experience of it. So they took a boat, I mean a ship, which they thought would be quite safe. Now what happened was absolutely unexpected, quite extraordinary. In the middle of the Red Sea, in broad daylight, the ship struck against a reef and sanka thing that does not happen even once perhaps in a million cases. All the passengers were drowned except, miraculous again to say, the couple. There are people like thatthey carry misfortune with them, but the misfortune is for others, they themselves escape some-how.
07.15 - Divine Disgust, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the case of the physical occurrence, the knowledge I speak of is the inner knowledge of the body cells, their existence, composition, distribution and the knowledge of the consequences of the blow, its natural and expected effects. Also at the same time there should be the knowledge of what the cells should be like, how they ought to react to the blow. And the procedure adopted too is quite different from that of physical Nature which takes hours, days, months to repair a damage; the inner knowledge can do the thing immediately. This inner knowledge can be brought down from its highest source. Instead of the mere psychological knowledge, one can call down the supramental knowledge and focus it upon the part of the body endangered. If the elements of the body, the cells come under the influence of the force of truth and receive it, then there can be an immediate new ordering of the elements according to the higher law. That will bring about not only the cure from the blow received, the mending of the accident, but initiate a big progress in the general consciousness. This power to comm and the consciousness has no limit. If you have committed an error, even a grave error, and if you can yet call upon the consciousness of truth, this power of the supramental and allow it to work, it will give you an occasion to make a formidable progress. In other words, never be discouraged if you have blundered, blundered even more than once. Only you must keep your will firm, and take sometimes the unshakable resolution not to repeat. Rest assured you will in the end triumph over your difficulty.
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07.17 - Why Do We Forget Things?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are many reasons, of course. First and the most important is that we use the faculty of memory in order to remember. Memory is a mental instrument depending upon the formation and growth of the brain. Your brain is developing constantly unless, of course, it is already degenerating; the development can continue for a long time, longer than that of the body. In the process there are necessarily things replaced by others; and as the instrument grows, elements that were useful in one state are no longer so in a subsequent state and have to give place to others more suitable. The net result of our acquisitions remains there in essence, but all that had led to it, the intermediary steps are suppressed. Indeed, a good memory means nothing more than that that is to say, to remember the results only, so that the fundamentals are sifted and stored, namely, those alone that are useful for further construction. This is more important than just trying to retain some particular items in a rigid manner.
There is another thing. Apart from the fact that memory by itself in its very nature is a defective organ, there is the other fact that I there are different states of consciousness one following another. Each state faithfully records the phenomena of that moment, whatever they may be. Now, if your mind is calm and clear, wide and strong, you can by concentrating your consciousness on that moment bring out of it and recall in your present active state what is recorded there of your movements then; you can, that is to say, go back to the particular state of consciousness at a given moment and live it again. What is registered in your consciousness is never obliterated and hence not really forgotten. You can live a thousand years and you will not have forgotten that. Therefore, if you do not want to forget a thing, you must retain it through your consciousness, and not through your mental memory. As I have said, the mental memory fades away, new things, things of today replace old things, things of yesterday. But that of which you are conscious in your conscious-ness, you can never forget. It lies somewhere in the background, returns to you at your bidding. You have only to withdraw to that state of the consciousness where it lies imbedded. In this way you can recall things that you knew perhaps centuries ago. It is how you remember your past lives. For, a movement of consciousness never dies out, it is only the impressions on the surface brain-mind that are fugitive. What you have learnt with this superficial instrument laboriouslyonly read, heard, noted, underlinedleaves no lasting mark, but what is imbibed, breathed in into the stuff of consciousness remains. The brain is being constantly renewed and reformed. Old cells, cells that have become weak and atrophied are replaced by younger and stronger ones or the old cells combine differently or enter into other organisations. Thus the old impressions or memories they carried are obliterated.
07.30 - Sincerity is Victory, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sincerity is a most difficult thing to have, but it is also the most effective of things. If you have sincerity, you are sure of victory. But it must be true sincerity. Sincerity means that all the elements of your being, all its movements, each and every one, from the most spiritual to the most physical, from the inmost to the outermost, from the top-most to the bottom-most, all parts, severally and wholly and equally are turned to the Divine,' they ask for nothing else than the Divine, they live for and by the Divine.
And it is not an easy thing. To be sincere in a part, to be sincere on the whole, to be sincere at moments is easy enough; everybody can have or achieve that much. It is within the capacity of any human being with normal good will, to be sincere in his psychic movements, even if these are rare. But to be sincere in every cell of your physical body is a still rarer and arduous achievement. To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and through the Divine. That is true sincerity and that is what you must have.
07.33 - The Inner and the Outer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The external part of the being is turned to the Divine: you are conscious of your ideal and as much as possible you conform your behaviour to it. You appear what you want to be. But just behind the line, on the other side of your consciousness in the subconscious, as it is called the picture is different. The light has not touched there: the movements go the other way. Thingsthoughts, impulses, feelingshide which you would not like to own. Not that you consciously and deliberately hide them: but they are there as inevitable part and parcel of the original ordinary nature. They form the backyard of the consciousness; there are all kinds of nooks and corners, if not quite open spaces, which have accumulated darkness and dirt. This two-sidedness is common, in fact, universal; you have to be one-sided, that is, of one piece, wholly turned to the light. You must be conscious of these hidden elements and bring them out, expose them to the light calmly, candidly, fearlessly, so that the luminous force may act on them. They have to be pulled out and rejected, or if possible, to be purified and changed. Some are capable of change and become right movements; others are wholly wrong, they belong to the inferior consciousness and have to be cast away without pity.
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07.38 - Past Lives and the Psychic Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Most people are not at all conscious of what is happening in them. Their consciousness or being is a mixture of mental, vital and physical elements, a kind of hotchpotch. There are a few, very few indeed, who are consciousconscious of what is beyond the three, viz, their psychic being. For it is only that element which endures, persists through successive lives. Certain people have known or learnt some rudiments of the matterwho believe in rebirth, but conceive it in the most childish manner. Their idea is as if the person changed his body like a robe. There are persons even who have written books describing seriously all the lives they had passed through since the time they were monkeys! As I have said, it is the psychic element alone that persists after death, all the rest gets dissolved. And in 999 cases out of 1,000, the psychic is a very small formation lying behind and taking little part in the actual life of the person. I speak of the average man, not of the Yogi, that is to say, one who has a developed psychic being to the extent that it is capable of controlling and guiding the outer life. How often does an ordinary man get in contact with his psychic being? Years and years pass for many or most to have just a passing taste of this movement. It is this moment that abides and is carried over to the next life, all other things are simply effaced. At a given point of our life, there comes a special circumstance, there is a call within, an absolute inner necessity that brings forward the psychic and the contact is made perhaps for an instant. That experience is preserved in the psychic memory. More than the outer circumstances and the physical events, however, what is cherished in the consciousness is the intimate emotion, the vibration that accompanied the perception at the time. At the most, a word said, a phrase heard, just a passing scene is all that is stored, net and clear, engraved as it were. But above all it is the soul's state that is the most important thing. I t is these scattered elements that serve as stepping-stones or sign-posts on the soul's forward journey. They are the constants that build up the personality of a man. On rare occasions there is a larger clearing, the circumstances preserved are sufficiently definite to point to a date and a historical person. Usually, however, one cannot say, I was such a person, I lived in such a country or did such things. These psychic flashes, more in some cases, less in others, are the only genuine and au thentic records of the story of a person's lives.
It is a being who is completely identified with his psychic, who has organised his whole person, in all its parts, around this centre, in fact, a being of one piece, entirely and solely turned to the Divine that can alone remember or hold in his consciousness something like a totality of his personal history. For in his case even when the body drops, the other parts being integrated and taken up into the soul substance maintain their individual existence; the personality formed around the psychic continues to exist with its memory intact: even it can pass from one life to another without losing the consciousness.
07.39 - The Homogeneous Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have to find out in you a seat of consciousness, a signpost firmly planted, deep inside, which is at the same time a mirror. All things, all happenings must pass in front of the mirror; they will be reflected there in their true nature, exactly as they are in their truth and not as they appear or pretend to be. And according to their nature and quality you are to give them places around; the signpost will show where each has to go for its place. The Mirror will judge and test each sentiment, each impulse, each sensation that comes up. If it is pleasant, if it is luminous, if it is what it should be, give it a place near the centre. If on the other hand, it is grey, obscure, doubtful, put it away, farther off. If, by chance, any of the unpleasant elements has forced its way up and occupied a near seat, you must warn it sternly and remove it and give it its appropriate seat; when it has recognised itself, changed itself, then only can it be allowed a place within a nearer ring. It is in this way that you should arrange and group all the elements of your being, according to the value and quality of each one around the central consciousness. That is how you organise your being. You build up a pattern of concentric rings, the nearer the ring to the centre, the purer must be the elements that compose it and therefore of greater value and significance. If you can arrange in this way all the parts and parcels of your being around the psychic centre, each in its own place according to its role and function and all turned towards the central consciousness and inspired and moved by it and there is no element which strikes a discordant note, then you have the perfect homogeneity of your nature.
It is a very interesting exercise in which you can engage yourself. If you take it up and follow it regularly and assiduously, you will amuse yourself immensely and with profit. Time will never hang heavy, it will bear golden fruits. At the end, say of two or three years, you will see, if you look back, how much you have changed; you wonder how you could have thought or acted as you did. You find yourself a considerably changed personality. You can start the experiment from today itself and see how life becomes more and more amusing, interesting and significant.
07.40 - Service Human and Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You will make a remarkable discovery as you proceed to know what you are and who you are. That is how you should begin. I want to serve humanity. How can I serve? Who is this 'I' that wants to serve? You say, I am such a person, this form and this name. But the form you have now was not there when you were a baby: it has been changing constantly All the elements of your body are being renewed totally. Neither are your sensations and feelings those you had a few years ago. Your thoughts and ideas have undergone revolutions. The I covers a sum of ever-changing factors. There is nothing particularly to be called I : it is only a ring of changes. An empty name seems to be the only constant thing. One element at a time comes forwardan idea, a feeling, an Impulse and that is your I for the moment. At another moment another element comes up and becomes your I. You are not one I but a crowd of many Is. So what is the value of the declaration of one of the 1's that it has found the goal, the truth, the duty you have to follow? Thus if you proceed further, questioning and analysing yourself thoroughly and sincerely, you will stumble upon the reality. You will find that I does not exist at all. What exists is something else: it is the one indivisible reality, the Divine alone.
It is this self-discovery that will give you the basic knowledge, the foundation of your life, the discovery that your self as yourself does not exist, you are indeed nothing. This sense of nothingness must pervade your being, fill all the elements of your being before the truth can dawn upon you and the Divine Presence can be felt. And what you have been doing all along is the very contrary thing, asserting your egoism, your vanitypretending that you were somebody, you could do something, that the world needed your help and you could give that help. Nothing of the kind. When you discover this truth and accept it, when you are humbled and in true humility you approach life and reality, you will find your real career and vocation.
In a deeper sense it is indeed by serving yourself that you serve others best. When you discover a dark spot in you, a grain of egoism, ambition, selfishness, when you do not yield to its impulsion but surmount it, when you thus conquer in yourself a movement that leads you astray, in the same gesture you make the conquest for the sake of others too, you create the same possibility in others. There can be nothing more dynamic than this setting of personal example. It is not that others observe you and imitate you; the influence is more subtle and more powerful. You create the opportunity, make an opening, bring into active play the force of your realisation, even without the knowledge of others; the others are only benefited by the invisible help that is lent to them. But you must be on your guard here too. You must not say, 1 will help others, so let me improve myself. There should not be any such spirit of barter or bargain. Confine yourself to your own business; how others are affected or not affected is not your concern. If you entertain that kind of idea, you invite the same vanity and egoism, by the back door. Yours should be like the blooming of a flower; it blooms out of its own joy and delight of self-fulfilment; in the process, by its very existence it spreads its perfume all around, fills the surroundings with its glad vibration, but that simply happens, it does not do all that purposely or intentionally. Even so the soul that perfects himself: the victory he wins for himself is contagious and extends automatically.
08.02 - Order and Discipline, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You must become conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time comes, when the work of individualisation is complete, then the Divine permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should have done the whole preliminary work first, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. When your ego has served its purpose in forming a complete individual out of you, when that work has been perfectly, fully achieved, then you can say to the Divine, "Here, I am ready now; do you want me?" The Divine generally says, "Yes". Then everything is worked out, everything accomplished. You become a true instrument for the Divine's work. But the instrument must be built up first.
You are sent to school, you are asked to do exercises (both mental and physical); do you think it is just to put you to trouble? No, it is because a surrounding is absolutely necessary where you can learn to form yourself. If you tried by yourself this work of individualisation, integral formation, all alone in one corner, you would be asked nothing till you have done it; but you are not likely to do it, not a single child would do it, he would not even know how to do it or where to begin. If a child is not taught how to live, he would not be able to live, he would not know how to do anything. The most elementary movements it is not able to do unless it is taught. Therefore if every one were to go through the whole experience, unaided, in the matter of forming his individuality, he would be dead long before he could begin to exist even. That is the utility of the experiences of others, accumulated through centuries, of those who have had the experience and who tell you, "If you want to go quick, and learn in a few years what needed centuries to learnwell, do this, do that, this way, that way, read, study, attend to your lessons at school, in the playground." Once you are on the way, you can find your own method if you are a genius. But in the beginning you must know from others how to stand on your legs and walk. It is not easy to go all by oneself. That is why one needs education.
08.04 - Doing for Her Sake, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But you must understand. If you wish to see yourself truly capable of profiting by the opportunity, doing what you wanted to do, what you aspired to do long long ago, you must little by little turn to the Light, the Consciousness, the Truth and bring them into these obscure elements of your external robe. It is only then that you will understand fully why you are here, not only understand but become capable of doing what you are here for.
Through centuries it has been preparing itself in you, not naturally in this body, which is the most recent, but in your true being: for centuries it has been waiting for this occasion. You see how wonderful it all is! You see the things that one has hoped for since long ago, for which one has prayed so much, laboured so much, find now the hour when they are being realised. It is the hour when great things are being done. One must not miss the occasion.
08.09 - Spirits in Trees, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Yes, but that was in the story. It was a Christian legend and put in that way to illustrate a lesson. It was to show that if you are wicked you suffer even after death, that it is a virtuous life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment, it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the body and goes out; but it finds itself in unfamiliar and inhospitable surroundings, especially if there is no one, none among his friends and relatives upon earth, to help him in the proper way, to guide or protect him in the new country where there are hostile beings to harm. In such a situation a tree is often a very ready shelter, a big old tree with friendly branches spread out, possessing a strong vitality. It is the sap, the elements of water coursing in the substance of the tree, that is to say, the support of its life-power, to which the vital being of the dead man is drawn as its physical support and shelter. There is no question of forced imprisonment and a desire to be freed.
Are they not harmful, these spirits?
08.17 - Psychological Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have till now, then, four elements. The fifth one I wish to add is Endurance. For, if you are not capable of facing your difficulties without getting disheartened, without abandoning your effort because it is too difficult, and if you are not able to bear blows, pocket them and go on never minding for the blows come because of your faults and mistakesyou cannot go very far: at the first turning where you lose sight of your petty habitual life, you despair and give up the game.
Endurance in its physical expression is perseverance. That is to say, you must be prepared to do a thousand times, if necessary, the same thing over and over again. You take a step forward, you think you are firmly placed; but there will always crop up something or other which brings back the old difficulty. You think you have solved the problem, you will have to solve it again: it will come in a slightly different form, but it is the same problem. You must be ready to face the problem, go through the same difficulties a million times. That is how you are sure to arrive at the goal.
08.22 - Regarding the Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
With regard to their physical being, men live in a formidable ignorance. How many of you know the exact quantity of food and the kind of food the body requires? Yes, simply this, how much to take and when to take? You do not know. You are taught all kinds of things. You learn why and how this earth moves or the sun does not, why or how the triangle consists of two right angles: your faculties of imagination and discrimination are set to the task and get sharpened. But this little bit of exact knowledge you do not have the quantity of food you must take and the hour when the body needs it. It may be you are not unaware at times of this exact need. But to know properly demands a discipline, continuous labour for years perhaps. Years indeed you require when it is a matter of control over your mind, of attaining a consciousness subtle enough to enable you to come in contact with the elements of transformation and progress, to know how to regulate for your body the exact amount of physical effort, material activity, expenditure and reception of energy, how to secure the proportion between what is received and what is given out, how to utilise energy to re-establish the equilibrium that was broken in order to push forward new cells that were lagging behind and then how to build up conditions for a further step in upward progress to be possible etc., etc. The task is formidable. And yet that is the thing to be done if you want the body to be transformed. First of all, you must bring the body into complete harmony with the inner consciousness. That means a work in each cell of the body, in each small activity, in each movement of the organs. Only that and nothing more can keep you busy day and night with no other thing to look to. It is not easy to maintain the effort, the concentration, the inner vision in a continuous manner.
You have to enter into the disposition of the cells, your inner physical organisation, if the body is to answer to the force that descends. First of all, you must be conscious of your physical cells, you must know their different functions, the degree of receptivity in each, which of them are in good condition and which are not. Even the simple thing you do not know whether you are tired or not, not to speak of why you are tired. You do not know if you have a pain somewhere, and why it is there. It is exactly for this reason that you run to the doctor. For you have the illusion that the doctor would know better how to look into what is there inside your body and what is happening there. That does not seem to be quite rational, but there is the habit. Who can look into oneself so precisely, accurately, positively, as to know exactly what is out of order, why it is out of order, how it has come to be so? All that is a matter of pure observation. And then only arises the problem of doing the thing that will bring about a new order which is a much more difficult affair. And yet this is only the ABC of body-transformation.
08.23 - Sadhana Must be Done in the Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Every human being here upon earth, whoever he is and whatever he is, has within him a psychic Being, only in various degrees of evolution. An embodied person possesses many other things e.g. states and forms of consciousness. His task upon earth is to transform these elements which form, as it were, the part of the universe given to him for his work of transformation. And even if he has a vaster mission beyond his own person, he cannot do that unless he has done the personal work first. You cannot change the outside world unless you have begun changing your own self. It is the first and indispensable condition and it is true for all, young or old, small or big. It is for this reason that life has been given to the psychic being: it is man's opportunity for progress. The span of earthly life is the time for progress. Outside earthly life there is no progress. The possibility and the means for the progress are only there in earthly life. So one must begin with oneself. When the work has been done with regard to oneself then only one can begin elsewhere. But first, work at home.
You go to kill yourself when you are a coward. The psychic comes with a definite aim to gather a certain sum of experiences, to learn, to make progress. If you go away before the work is done, you have to come back and do it over again but in circumstances much more difficult than before. Whatever you avoided in one life, you will find reappearing in a more difficult form. Without going very far, take for example this small difficulty in your life, the examination you have to pass. If you do not go through it, if you turn your back, you will have to pass it, another time and that time it will be more difficult.
08.24 - On Food, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This training of taste, this education of the senses is a very good, a necessary means to prepare the consciousness for a higher development. There are persons who are very crude and very simple in nature. They can have a strong inspiration and arrive at a certain spiritual growth but the foundation will always remain of a somewhat inferior quality: and when they come back to their ordinary consciousness they find there great obstacles: for the stuff is missing there; there are not, in the vital and physical consciousness, elements enough to enable it to support a descent of the higher force.
How does fasting bring about a state of receptivity?
08.35 - Love Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: elements of Yoga.
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09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It all began by a separation in the consciousness and it ended by a separation in respect of the worlds and their elements, by a division that we witness down to the material nature. The separation in consciousness has produced the separation of forms and the separation of forms has induced pain and suffering. Now, therefore, there are these countless objects that lie about divided and separated from one another. Since, however, the universe had to be a progressive thing, the bliss of identity, the full consciousness of this identity had necessarily to be veiled, otherwise nothing would have moved.
Evidently, if the sense of unity were re-established, the miseries would disappear. But if you realised the perfect identity and the whole universe in its totality realised this absolute unity in which there is no possibility of any distinction, then there would be no universe at all, it would be the return to Pralaya. The solution then is to find Ananda in the play of mutual exchange and union.
09.11 - The Supramental Manifestation and World Change, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I believe you have done sufficient mathematics to know the complexity of combinations that arises when you take as your basis some elements out of a sum total. To make it clearer I shall give you an example but without using the terms you have been taught at schoolfrom the letters of the alphabet. There are a certain number of letters. Now, if you want to calculate or know the number of combinations possible with these letters, taking all the letters together and organising them in as many ways as you can, as you have been taught, you will find that it runs into a fantastic figure.
Similarly, take the material world and come down to the most minute particleyou know scientists have arrived at things that are absolutely invisible and incalculable and take this particle as your basis and the material world as the total and, further, imagine a Consciousness or a Will playing with these particles, making all sorts of possible combinations, never repeating the same combination. Of course, mathematically they say that the number of particles is finite and therefore the number of combinations also is finite, but this is purely theoretical, and theory does not interest us. Coming to the practical, even if you suppose that these combinations follow each other in such a manner and at such a speed that the change from one to another is hardly perceptible, it is clear that the time needed for the working out of all these combinations would be, apparently, infinite. That is to say, the number of combinations would be so immense that practically no end could be assigned to it.
--
For, the problem is much more complicated than you imagine. It is not merely on one plane, in one domain, that is to say, what may be called the surface of things, that there is this almost infinite quantity of elements allowing combinations eternally new. There is more than that, there is what may be termed depth, that is to say, other dimensions.
Creation is the result not only of combinations on the surface but also of combinations in the depths of this surface: in other words, there are psychological factors. But I am looking at it from the purely mathematical standpoint; although I do not speak the mathematical language, it is still a mathematical conception. Here is then the problem.
--
This change, this sudden mutation in the universal elements will very certainly bring a kind of chaos in our perceptions, but out of it a new knowledge will arise. That, in a most general way, will be the result of the New Manifestation.
From a more restricted, external and limited point of view I shall speak now of things which are not within my own experience, but which I have heard being spoken about. It is said, for example, that one finds now a larger number of what they call child prodigies. Personally, I have met none, so I cannot say what exactly is "prodigious" in these children. However, as the stories go, there is a new type or types of consciousness which appear surprising to the ordinary human consciousness. It is such examples, I suppose, that you would like to have in order to understand what is happening.
--
Then there would be no limit to the possibilities, the unexpected and the wonderful. And one could hope for the most splendid, the most delightful things from this Will, sovereignly free, playing eternally with the elements, ceaselessly bringing forth a new world that would have logically nothing to do with the world that went before. Don't you think it would be the happiest of things? We have had enough of the world as it is.
All this I am telling you so that each one of you may put as few barriers as possible against future possibilities. And that is my conclusion.
100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
which starts with parts and elements, adding them together locally without really
understanding the whole.
--
of lower-order elements __ and nothing is lost. Entity has become invisible. The
switch is precessional.
--
selfregenerative physical Universe elements are a priori to human mind
formulation and invention and are only discoverable by mind's intuitive
10.01 - Cycles of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The present cycle, the great cycle that is to say, has, as I have said, for its ultimate motive and purpose the advent and reign of the Supermind. But this proceeds through stages, each stage forming a minor or lesser cycle. The stages of these cycles are the different degrees of what is called evolution. The evolution starts upon the basis of an apparently simple substance and goes on unfolding gradually an inherent complexity. As we know, the different cycles of evolution in the past were at the outset a purely material universe of inorganic elements, then came the cycle of organic combinations, then the manifestation of life and next the mind and at present the mind at its peak capacity, which means the advent of the strange creature that has a miraculous destiny to accomplish. And that is to bring forth out of him the achievement and fulfilment of the next cycle. For the mind is there to bring forth, to usher in the Supermind and man is there as the laboratory and the vanguard as well of the Supermind.
At the present time the human consciousness in general has been so prepared and its dwelling and playfield the earth consciousness made ready to such a degree that it has been possible for the still secreted higher perfection to enter into the arena. The evolution, the growth has been a gradual expression and revelation of the light, the consciousness in a higher and higher degree of purity and potency through an encasement hard and resistant at first but gradually yielding to the impact of the higher status and even transforming itself so as to become its instrument and embodiment. We speak of the present situation, we are concerned with man and what he is to grow into or bring out of himself. Here also there seem to be stages or cycles of creation leading to the final achievement. The whole burden of the present endeavour is how to transcend, transform or modify the animalhood which is the basis of humanity even now and in and through which man is growing and seeking to manifest and incarnate his superior potencies. Man's supramental destiny means that he totally outgrows the animal, outgrows even his manhood in so far as it is merely human; for he has to incorporate the principle of the supramental which wholly transcends the mental.
--
The embodiment of the supramental, the supramental consciousness in its supramental body is indeed even now rather a far-off event. But the beginning of a supramentalised humanity, a section of it as the spearhead is quite a possibility in a comparatively near future. A race of elite in whom the grosser elements of humanhood, its physical animality and mentality have been purified of their dross, refined into something of the pure luminous reflection of the higher consciousness that is the immediate end for which the new force seems to be labouring. And the consequence too of this achievement is expected to be also very considerable. The whole human race or even a majority of it is not likely to be transfigured into the elite, the race of the pioneers just referred to. The advent or the preparation of such a body will in its turn naturally influence the rest of mankind and act so effectively and largely that the human race in general will put on a different aspect, the aspect of a humanity not of the Kaliyuga but of the Satyayuga. That is what the general human mind has been aspiring for and calling "Ramarajya". A humanity with a radiant mind, a purified, generous, unegoistic, yet creative vital and a physical consciousness enjoying, revealing, building forms of true beauty seems to be a nearer and intermediary probability and animal-born humanity retaining its normal animal structure, still outgrowing its grosser movements and instincts, controlling and guiding, modifying and utilising them to higher purposes (Pashupati) may well be a happy stage towards the final appearance of the supramental race wholly transcending the frame of animality, born and existing in the purely supramental way.
A supramentalised material universe or rather physical earth may itself put on a different, a radiant appearance and also the beings and creatures of the other levels of life and physical existence may also undergo a sea change, but of that nothing need be or can be previewed at present.
10.03 - Life in and Through Death, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The injunction is: you must die to the world if you want the life Eternal. Even so you must die to yourself if you want the Divine. The existing life which your ego has built up is a life of ignorance, misery and decadence. Death is indeed the natural and inevitable consequence; but this is a death in ignorance and bondage, it does not lead you to liberation and freedom. The dying that liberates is a conscious, deliberate movement of intelligence and will; dying to the world means withdrawing yourself from the world and turning within. Dying to yourself means withdrawing from your egohood and turning to the self, the being that is beyond. This withdrawal is to be done constantly and consistently in all the parts of the being. The mind is to move away from its thoughts, the vital from its desires and impulses and the body from its hunger and thirst. The first result of this withdrawal is a division of the being, an inner passive part and an outer active part. The inner part becomes gradually a mere witness and the outer part a mere mechanical functioning. When the withdrawal is so complete that the outer being or the world has no effect upon the inner, does not raise any ripple in it by its touch or contiguity then is accomplished the real death. Then it is said the outer existence, the material life does not continue long, it comes sooner or later to a dead stop. Thus the inner being is liberated completely and is freed into the life beyond, the Divine Existence, the Brahman. It is said that when each and every seed of the various elements that compose the being, that sprouts into the luxuriant tree of material life, when each and every seed is burnt up by the heat of mounting 'tapas', the force of aspiring consciousness, then there is no more chance or possibility of an ignorant earthly life, one is then naturally born into the Life of the Eternal. That is the final, the supreme death which is laya or pralaya.
To live away from life and consequently away from death is one thing, comparatively easy; but to live in life and consequently in death is another thing, somewhat more difficult. To withdraw oneself from the field of death and retire in the immutability beyond or some form of it is what was attempted in the ancient days. But there has been side by side always a growing tendency in man to stay here in this vale of tears under the shadow of death, to live dangerously and face the Evil and conquer it here itself; for death is not a mere negation an annihilation of the reality, it is only a mask put over the reality or is its obverse. Tear off or remove the disguise, you will see the smiling radiant Godhead behind.
10.07 - The World is One, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The material world is a factual unity. For it is one matter that exists everywhere; the same fundamental elements constitute, although in different degrees, the earth, the sun, the stars, the distant galaxies and the extragalactic rays. It is in the last analysis charges of electricityinfinitesimal and infinite charges of electric force, points of energy that form the entire creationpullulating particles that fill the universe; but they are not isolated, disconnected, disunited, they are a continuum. This continuum was called 'ether' at one time, it is now called 'field'. This material unity consists in the one extension that turns and swirls into creases and eddies giving the impression of separativeness and disunity. The task of the scientist is to know how to recondition the swirling dispersing expanse so as to as similarise, polarise the disparate elements. That is the meaning of what the scientists are now handling as the 'laser' or 'maser' beams.1
Likewise, the vital world is also one. It is one life that pulsates in and through all living formationsone sea as it were, swaying and heaving and breaking into innumerable waves and ripples. In spite of infinite variations there is one overall pattern that persists through the living creation. Anatomy and more clearly physiology links in a strange way even the plant and the animal and man. And in humanity if there is a great vital upsurge somewhere, it spreads its vibration far and wide like a seismic motion. And it is because of this vital unity that there arises the phenomenon known as contagion or pest and pestilence that is to say, mass-movements are occasioned by one indivisible life-urge. A common suffering or a common elation is normal to human life.
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I fear your "Christianity" is like that of most other folk. You pick out one or two of the figures from which the Alexandrines concocted "Jesus" (too many cooks, again, with a vengeance!) and neglect the others. The Zionist Christ of Matthew can have no value for you; nor can the Asiatic "Dying-God" compiled from Melcarth, Mithras, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Attis, Krishna, and others who supplied the miraculous and ritualistic elements of the fable.
Rightly you ask: "What can I contri bute?" Answer: One Book. That is the idea of the weekly letter: 52 of yours and 52 of mine, competently edited, would make a most useful volume. This would be your property: so that you get full material value, perhaps much more, for your outlay. I thought of the plan because one such arrangement has recently come to an end, with amazingly happy results: they should lie open to your admiring gaze in a few months from now. Incidentally, I personally get nothing out of it; secretarial work costs money these days. But there is another great advantage; it keeps both of us up to the mark. Also, in such letters a great deal of odds and ends of knowledge turn up automatically; valuable stuff, frequent enough; yes, but one doesn't want to lose the thread, once one starts. Possibly ten days might be best.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest.
Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Many of the readers will know, of course, that the word tarot does not mean a game of cards, serving mantical purposes, but a symbolic book of initiation which contains the greatest secrets in a symbolic form. The first tablet of this book introduces the magician representing him as the master of the elements and offering the key to the first Arcanum, the secret of the ineffable name of Tetragrammaton*, the quabbalistic
Yod-He-Vau-He. Here we will, therefore, find the gate to the magicians initiation.
--
Above the hermaphrodite there is a globe as a sign of the earth sphere, above which the magician is illustrated with the four elements.
Above the male, there are the active elements, that of the fire in red and the air element in blue colour. Above the female there are the passive elements, the water element in green and the element of the earth in yellow colour.
The middle along the magician up to the globe is dark purple, representing the sign of the akasa principle
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The Mahadeva aspect or the first Logos (who embodies cosmic will) is controlled by the Law of Synthesis, the cosmic law governing the tendency to unification; only in this case, it is not the unification of matter and Spirit, but the unification of the seven into the three, and into the one. These three figures primarily stand for Spirit, [148] for quality, for principle, and not so primarily for matter, although matter, being inspired by spirit, conforms. The Law of Synthesis has a direct connection with One Who is still higher than our Logos, and is the law of control exercised by Him upon the Logos of our system. This is a spiritual relationship that tends to abstraction or to that synthesis of the spiritual elements that will result in their conscious return (the whole point lying in that word "conscious") to their cosmic point of synthesis, or of unification with their source. Their source is the ONE ABOUT WHOM NAUGHT MAY BE SAID, as we have earlier seen.
Therefore, in connection with the first Logos, we can sum up as we did with the other Logoi:
1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
The world as forum for action is composed, essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to
manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory the
1.00 - PRELUDE AT THE THEATRE, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
The elements of Life how conquers he?
Is't not his heart's accord, urged outward far and dim,
1.013 - Defence Mechanisms of the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All of these are inside the body not in the sense of pebbles in a bottle, but inseparably permeating everything that is in the body, or that is the body. We cannot separate the intellect, the mind, the senses, the prana, the body, etc. One is involved in the other, so it looks like a compound that has been created by these elements. For some purposes they look like different functions, but for other purposes they look as if they are a single force, acting in different ways. So, self-control would mean a judicious control exercised over every function inside, including the physical functions, the function of the prana, the senses, the mind and the intellect. All of these have to be harnessed in a given direction.
According to ancient systems of spiritual practice, self-control is effected by three main methods: the control of the prana, the control of the mind, and concentration of consciousness. These are the three standard methods of atma vinigrah or self-control. This is a triple method prescribed in the Yoga Vasishtha, for instance. It does not mean that each method is mutually exclusive of the other; they are connected with one another. Also, it is not possible here to say which should precede and which should succeed. Are we to control the prana first and the mind afterwards, or the mind first and the prana afterwards, or are we to practise concentration first? We cannot do all of these things in a linear fashion. They all have to be worked at simultaneously in some acceptable degree.
10.13 - Go Through, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In fact it is to the Divine that the dedication has to be made. Dedication means offering. All works, says the Gita, have to be offered to the Supreme, that is the meaning of sacrifice, the sacrifice of works (Karmayajna), all works come from the Divine and they are to go back to Him, that is how they are purified and through them thus purified and elevated, man attains his goal, union with the Supreme. However, not works alone but each and every element of the human beingeven love and passion and all the grosser urgesdo come from the only one Source, the Divine. They become impure and distorted, muddy and poisonous when man seeks to appropriate, that is to say, misappropriate them as his own personal belongings. To give up the sense of ownership is the core of dedication. You are not the possessor, the Divine is the only possessor. In fact, you also do not belong to yourself, you belong to the Divine. That is the ceremony of sacrifice you have to undertakeinstall the Divinity in all your parts and functions. That is how you purify and divinise your human elements. That is how you go through ignorance and mortality and arrive at knowledge and immortality.
***
10.14 - Night and Day, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are occasions when the dream experience comes to you with a clear au thenticity as if you were taking part in a real drama. Everything is happening truly and undisputably exactly like a happening in the normal life. Indeed when it is happening you feel it is happening in your waking life. You find the difference only when you wake up. As a matter of fact it is a region very near to the material world running parallel to it. And at times we are lifted bodily as it were into it and the experiences and adventures we go through are very analogous to those in normal life. Still when we are awake and compare the two, we notice there is a difference in pattern and movement. Yet there are other experiences of quite a different nature. You feel and see, you are transported to a region made, it would appear, of elements of a different kind. The atmosphere gives a different feel from the earthly atmosphere, there is a light which seems to have a different vibration, even the earth there, for the earth still exists, is made of different density and solidity. These are the worlds perhaps, which Sri Aurobindo refers to when he speaks of "the other earths." Beings and things have a happy, a pure beauty in their form and movement. This does not come to you merely as a thought or an imagination but a very concrete reality in which you live your being.
Your sleep-world is full of many worlds, rising tier upon tier like hills in a mountain range. Quite at the bottom is an almost physical, a subtle physical world and at the top is the world of the spiritual or psychic being or consciousness. You range through all of them in some way or other but you remember only partially and in snippets and you do not know which is which. It is by focussing your attention upon them and trying to distinguish the different modes of each in regard to your feeling and perception that you gradually begin to unravel them, untie the knots and spread out the threads separately.
1.01 - About the Elements, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
object:1.01 - About the elements
class:chapter
--
1.About the elements ~
Everything that has been created, the macrocosm as well as the microcosm, consequently the big and the small world have been achieved by the effect of the elements. For this reason, right from the beginning of the initiation, I shall attend to these powers and underline their deep and manifold significance in particular. In the occult literature very little has been said about the powers of the elements up to now so that I made it my business to treat this field of knowledge still unknown and to lift the veil covering these rules. It is absolutely not very easy to enlighten the uninitiated so that they are not only fully informed about the existence and the activity of the elements, but will be able to work with these powers in the future practically.
The whole universe is similar to a clockwork with all its wheels in mesh and interdependent from each other. Even the idea of the Godhead as the highest comprehensible entity may be divided in aspects analogous to the elements. Details about it are found in the chapter concerning the God-idea.
In the oldest oriental scriptures, the elements are designated as tattwas. In our European literature, they are only considered on the ground of their good effects and in so far as we are warned against their unfavourable influence, which means that certain actions can be undertaken under the influence of the tattwas, or else must be omitted. The accuracy of this fact is not to be doubted, but all that has been published up to date points to a slight aspect of the effects of the elements only. How to find out about the effects of elements respecting the tattwas for any personal use, may be sufficiently learned from astrological books.
I am penetrating far deeper into the secret of the elements and therefore I have chosen a different key, which, although being analogous to the astrological key, has, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with it. The reader, to whom this key is completely unknown, shall be taught to use it in various ways. As for the single tasks, analogies and effects of the elements, I shall deal with tem by turns and in detail in the following chapters, which will not only unveil the theoretical part of it, but point directly to the practical use, because it is here that the greatest Arcanum is to be found.
In the oldest book of wisdom, the Tarot, something has already been written about this great mystery of the elements. The first card of this work represents the magicia n pointing to the knowledge and mastery of the elements. On this first card the symbols are: the sword as the fiery element, the rod as the element of the air, the goblet as that of the water and the coins as the element of the earth. This proves without any doubt that already in the mysteries of yore, the magician was destined for the first Tarot card, mastery of the elements having been chosen as the first act of initiation. In honour of this tradition I shall give my principal attention to the elements for, as you will see, the key to the elements is the panacea, with the help of which all the occurring problems may be solved.
According to the Indian succession of the tattwas, it runs as follows:
--
The analysis of the elements will also be discussed and the great practical value of them underlined, so that every scientist, whether he be a chemist, a physician, a magnetizer, an occultist, a magician, a mystic, a quabbalist or a yogi, etc., can derive his practical benefit from it. Should I succeed in teaching the reader so far that he is able to deal with the subject in the proper way and to find the practical key to the branch of knowledge most suitable for him, I will be glad to see that the purpose of my book has been fulfiled.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
or Bliss as the main elements of the manifestation. But,
relates the tradition, a crucial mistake happened which2
--
diate from him and gradually penetrate in all the elements
of the Inconscient. Without this direct divine permeation
--
through all the elements. At dead of night I saw the sun
gleaming with bright brilliance. I stood in the presence of
--
it has inherited undeniable elements of oriental thought,
especially Indian. It should once more be remembered that
--
Some of the main elements of Sri Aurobindos integral
synthesis evidently stem from Vedic and Vedantic roots,
--
well as of the spiritual elements of evolution was. When he
wrote the Arya, from 1914 till 1921, and when later he re-
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Whole, of which we are the elements. We have found the world in
our own souls.
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
The black horse and the black magician are half-evil elements
whose relativity with respect to good is hinted at in the exchange
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet,if a hero ever has a valet,bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes,his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to _do with_, but something to _do_, or rather something to _be_. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of _his own earning_, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
ideas proper to their times. These two elements they would then
mix up intimately in their hymns and this would account at least
--
and this was one of the chief elements of the sacrificial rite; but
ghr.ta could also mean light, from the root ghr. to shine, and
--
may build the way of our ascent to the goal. The elements of
the outer sacrifice in the Veda are used as symbols of the inner
--
descend into our life and become the elements of our inner birth
into the Truth, - a right thinking, a right understanding, a right
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
It is our belief that the essential traits of a new age and a new reality are discernible in nearly all forms of contemporary expression, whether in the creations of modern art, or in the recent findings of the natural sciences, or in the results of the humanities and sciences of the mind. Moreover we are in a position to define this new reality in such a way as to emphasize one of its most significant elements. Our definition is a natural corollary of the recognition that mans coming to awareness is inseparably bound to his consciousness of space and time.
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.
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Midrashic thought with the admixture of extraneous ele- ments picked up, as was inevitable, by the stream's course through many lands - elements the commingling of which must have, in many ways, transformed the original colour and nature of the stream."
Be that as it may, and ignoring the sterile aspects of con- troversy, the public appearance of the Zohar was the great landmark in the development of the Qabalah, and we to-day are able to divide its history into two main periods, pre- and post-Zoharic. While it is undeniable that there were
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Maitreya said, Master! I have been instructed by you in the whole of the Vedas, and in the institutes of law and of sacred science: through your favour, other men, even though they be my foes, cannot accuse me of having been remiss in the acquirement of knowledge. I am now desirous, oh thou who art profound in piety! to hear from thee, how this world was, and how in future it will be? what is its substance, oh Brahman, and whence proceeded animate and inanimate things? into what has it been resolved, and into what will its dissolution again occur? how were the elements manifested? whence proceeded the gods and other beings? what are the situation and extent of the oceans and the mountains, the earth, the sun, and the planets? what are the families of the gods and others, the Menus, the periods called Manvantaras, those termed Kalpas, and their subdivisions, and the four ages: the events that happen at the close of a Kalpa, and the terminations of the several ages[11]: the histories, oh great Muni, of the gods, the sages, and kings; and how the Vedas were divided into branches (or schools), after they had been arranged by Vyāsa: the duties of the Brahmans, and the other tribes, as well as of those who pass through the different orders of life? All these things I wish to hear from you, grandson of Vaśiṣṭha. Incline thy thoughts benevolently towards me, that I may, through thy favour, be informed of all I desire to know. Parāśara replied, Well inquired, pious Maitreya. You recall to my recollection that which was of old narrated by my father's father, Vaśiṣṭha. I had heard that my father had been devoured by a Rākṣas employed by Visvāmitra: violent anger seized me, and I commenced a sacrifice for the destruction of the Rākṣasas: hundreds of them were reduced to ashes by the rite, when, as they were about to be entirely extirpated, my grandfather Vaśiṣṭha thus spake to me: Enough, my child; let thy wrath be appeased: the Rākṣasas are not culpable: thy father's death was the work of destiny. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains by arduous exertions, of fame, and of devout austerities; and prevents the attainment of heaven or of emancipation. The chief sages always shun wrath: he not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of these unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed. Mercy is the might of the righteous[12].
Being thus admonished by my venerable grandsire, I immediately desisted from the rite, in obedience to his injunctions, and Vaśiṣṭha, the most excellent of sages, was content with me. Then arrived Pulastya, the son of Brahmā[13], who was received by my grandfather with the customary marks of respect. The illustrious brother of Pulaha said to me; Since, in the violence of animosity, you have listened to the words of your progenitor, and have exercised clemency, therefore you shall become learned in every science: since you have forborne, even though incensed, to destroy my posterity, I will bestow upon you another boon, and, you shall become the author of a summary of the Purāṇas[14]; you shall know the true nature of the deities, as it really is; and, whether engaged in religious rites, or abstaining from their performance[15], your understanding, through my favour, shall be perfect, and exempt from). doubts. Then my grandsire Vaśiṣṭha added; Whatever has been said to thee by Pulastya, shall assuredly come to pass.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Figure 1: The Domain and Constituent elements of the Known.
Our answers to these three fundamental questions modified and constructed in the course of our social
1.01 - Meeting the Master - Authors first meeting, December 1918, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
All the energies of the leaders were taken up by the freedom movement. Only a few among them attempted to see beyond the horizon of political freedom some ideal of human perfection; for, after all, freedom is not the ultimate goal but a condition for the expression of the cultural Spirit of India. In Swami Shraddhananda, Pandit Madanmohan Malavia, Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi to name some leaders we see the double aspect of the inspiration. Among all the visions of perfection of the human spirit on earth, I found the synthetic and integral vision of Sri Aurobindo the most rational and the most satisfying. It meets the need of the individual and collective life of man today. It is the international form of the fundamental elements of Indian culture. It is, Dr. S. K. Maitra says, the message which holds out hope in a world of despair.
This aspect of Sri Aurobindo's vision attracted me as much as the natural affinity which I had felt on seeing him. I found on making a serious study of the Arya that it led me to very rational conclusions with regard to the solutions of the deepest problems of life. I opened correspondence with him and in 1916, with his permission, began to translate the Arya into Gujarati.
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"Because I have done the work and I know its difficulties. Young men come forward to join the movement, driven by idealism and enthusiasm. But these elements do not last long. It becomes very difficult to observe and extract discipline. Small groups begin to form within the organisation, rivalries grow between groups and even between individuals. There is competition for leadership. The agents of the Government generally manage to join these organisations from the very beginning. And so the organisations are unable to act effectively. Sometimes they sink so low as to quarrel even for money," he said calmly.
"But even supposing that I grant sadhana to be of greater importance, and even intellectually understand that I should concentrate upon it, my difficulty is that I feel intensely that I must do something for the freedom of India. I have been unable to sleep soundly for the last two years and a half. I can remain quiet if I make a very strong effort. But the concentration of my whole being turns towards India's freedom. It is difficult for me to sleep till that is secured."
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
First, he replaces the pair of corresponding elements, mind and
matter, by a continuum of corresponding elements: the monads.
While these are conceived after the pattern of the soul, they
--
level. We are beginning to see that such important elements as
the neurons, the atoms of the nervous complex of our body, do
--
tor stands an intermediate set of elements, whose function is to
recombine the incoming impressions into such form as to pro-
1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
The works of God are apprehended by the senses, which are five, hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch. For such an arrangement of the senses, there was also need of a body. The body itself is composed of four diverse elements, water, earth, air and fire. Being, therefore, liable to decay, it is in continual danger of perishing from the external and internal enemies that perpetually assail it. Its external enemies, are such as wild beasts, drowning and conflagrations; its internal enemies, such as hunger and thirst. For the purpose of resisting these, it was in want of various internal and external forces, such as the hand and foot, sight and hearing, food and drink. And in this connection, for eating and drinking, it is in want of internal and external instruments like the hand, the mouth, the stomach, the powers of appetite and digestion. In addition to these instruments, there was need of means to guide in their occasional use, that is, for the internal senses. These are five, the faculties of perception, reflection, memory, recollection and imagination. Their home is in the brain, and each has a specific function, as is well known to the learned. If to any one of all these faculties and instruments an injury occurs, the actions of man are defective. Now all these are the agents of the heart and subject to its rule. If, for example, the heart gives permission to the ear, hearing results; if it gives permission to the eye, there follows sight; if it gives permission to the foot, there is movement. All the other members are obedient in the same manner to the commands of the heart. The divine plan in all this arrangement is, that while the members preserve [19] the body for a few days from harm, the heart, in its vehicle the body, should pursue its business of cultivating the seeds of happiness for eternity and prepare for its journey to its native country. So long as the various forces of the body are obedient to the dictates of the heart, in like manner as the angels obey in the presence of God, no contrariety of action can arise among them.
Know, O student of wisdom! that the body, which is the kingdom of the heart, resembles a great city. The hand, the foot, the mouth and the other members resemble the people of the various trades. Desire is a standard bearer; anger is a superintendent of the city, the heart is its sovereign, and reason is the vizier. The sovereign needs the service of all the inhabitants. But desire, the standard bearer, is a liar, vain and ambitious. He is always ready to do the contrary of what reason, the vizier, commands. He strives to appropriate to himself whatever he sees in the city, which is the body. Anger, the superintendent, is rebellious and corrupt, quick and passionate. He is always ready to be enraged, to spill blood, and to blast one's reputation. If the sovereign, the heart, should invariably consult with reason, his vizier, and, when desire was transgressing, should give to wrath to have power over him (yet, without giving him full liberty, should make him angry in subjection to reason, the vizier, so that passing all bounds he should not stretch out his hand upon the kingdom), there would then be an equilibrium in the condition of the kingdom, and all the members would perform the functions for which they were created, their service would be accepted at the mercy seat, and they would obtain eternal felicity....
1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scripture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate precisely the spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we think we may derive from it that is of value to humanity and its future. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternal which we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by the light of which all other truth finds its right place, explanation and relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for that reason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it is not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearings in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and for ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar. Nor has it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitates the intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems; for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannot appreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one and eternal, expresses itself in Time and through the mind of man; therefore every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, in the statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the system and arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, the precise expression used must be largely subject to the mutations of Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellect modifies itself always; continually dividing and putting together it is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrange its syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol for new or, if it uses the old, it so changes its connotation or at least
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
the PuruSa. When the mind thinks of the elements of nature
by thinking of their beginning and their end, this is one sort of
--
where the external gross elements are the objects is called
Savitarka. Tarka means question, Savitarka with-question.
Questioning the elements, as it were, that they may give up
their truths and their powers to the man who meditates upon
--
to take the elements out of time and space, and think of them
as they are, it is called Nirvitarka , without-question. When
--
without-discrimination. The next step is when the elements
are given up, either as gross or as fine, and the object of
--
The gross objects are only the elements, and everything
manufactured out of them. The fine objects begin with the
1.01 - Seeing, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the bewildering multitude of material or living elements
involved in the slightest transformation of the universe;
1.01 - Soul and God, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
The child is such a symbol. It anticipates the self which is produced through the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements of the personality The typical fates that befall the child indicate the kind of psychic events accompanying the genesis of the self. The wonderful birth of the child indicates that this happens psychically as opposed to physically.
In 1940, Jung wrote: an essential aspect of the child motif is its futural character. The child is potential future (On the psychology of the child archetype, cw 9, I, 278).
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Crude formulations of some of the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy are to be found in the thought-systems of the uncivilized and so-called primitive peoples of the world. Among the Maoris, for example, every human being is regarded as a compound of four elementsa divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. Among the Oglala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and niya, or vital soul. After death the sican is reunited with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.
In regard to no twentieth-century primitive society can we rule out the possibility of influence by, or borrowing from, some higher culture. Consequently, we have no right to argue from the present to the past. Because many contemporary savages have an esoteric philosophy that is monotheistic with a monotheism that is sometimes of the That art thou variety, we are not entitled to infer offh and that neolithic or palaeolithic men held similar views.
1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
veloped factors, laws, and elements of existence. Those are the
pearls of the fabled submarine palaces of the nixies, tritons, and
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. This kind of science would explain history and social development as much as possible by economic necessity or motive,by economy understood in its widest sense. There are even historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working of the idea and the influence of the thinker in the development of human institutions. The French Revolution, it is thought, would have happened just as it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even if Rousseau and Voltaire had never written and the eighteenth-century philosophic movement in the world of thought had never worked out its bold and radical speculations.
Recently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a first psychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an original intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classified and organised phenomena much more successfully than it explained them. Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth while following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience.
The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving. But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the Western thinkers own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if we examine their intrinsic sense and value, may yet throw some light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be most useful to investigate.
Undoubtedly, wherever we can seize human society in what to us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages,no matter whether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically advanced or backward,we do find a strongly symbolic mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and institutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together. When man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age of symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are losing their virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities,the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the least intervene in its movements.
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From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contri bution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin which resides in purity, in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more cease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a convention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips than a reality of the life.
1.01 - The Ego, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
though the numerous elements composing this complex factor
are, in themselves, everywhere the same, they are infinitely
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:But still, in the practical development, each of the three stages has its necessity and utility and must be given its time or its place. It will not do, it cannot be safe or effective to begin with the last and highest alone. It would not be the right course, either, to leap prematurely from one to another. For even if from the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there are elements of the nature which long prevent the recognition from becoming realisation. But without realisation our mental belief cannot become a dynamic reality; it is still only a figure of knowledge, not a living truth, an idea, not yet a power. And even if realisation has begun, it may be dangerous to imagine or to assume too soon that we are altogether in the hands of the Supreme or are acting as his instrument. That assumption may introduce a calamitous falsity; it may produce a helpless inertia or, magnifying the movements of the ego with the Divine Name, it may disastrously distort and ruin the whole course of the Yoga. There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
17:The personal will of the Sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf of distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the progress, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working.
1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
4:We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties. As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
5:Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place.
1.01 - The Lord of hosts, #Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice, #Anonymous, #Various
Yah, 1 the Lord of hosts, the living God, King of the Universe, Omnipotent, All-Kind and Merciful, Supreme and Extolled, who is Eternal, Sublime and Most-Holy, ordained (formed) and created the Universe in thirty-two 2 mysterious paths 3 of wisdom by three 4 Sepharim, namely: 1) S'for ; 2) Sippur ; and 3) Sapher which are in Him one and the same. They consist of a decade out of nothing 5 and of twenty-two fundamental letters. He divided the twenty-two consonants into three divisions: 1) three mothers, fundamental letters or first elements; 2) seven double; and 3) twelve simple consonants.
SECTION 2.
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4) Fire or ether emanated from the water. He established by it the throne of glory, the Seraphim and Ophanim, the holy living creatures and the angels, and of these three He formed His habitation, as it reads: "Who made His angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire." (Psalm 104, 4.) He selected three consonants from the simple ones which are in the hidden secret of three mothers or first elements: , air, water and ether or fire. He sealed them with spirit and fastened them to His great name and sealed with it six dimensions. 15
5) He sealed 16 the height and turned towards above, and sealed it with
1.01 - The Offering, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
disparate elements, with affinities of the heart, of
scientific research and of thought And again one
1.01 - THE OPPOSITES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[1] The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.1 To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / siccum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire) / aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine), Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons,2 thus producing the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world.3 This fourfold Physis, the cross, also appears in the signs for earth
, Venus
1.01 - The Rape of the Lock, #The Rape of the Lock, #unset, #Zen
To their first elements their souls retire:
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
1.01 - The Science of Living, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of
unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
it to its simplest elements. Traced as far as possible in the direction
of their origins, the last fibres of the human aggregate are lost to
--
unity reveals itself in the astonishing similarity of the elements
met with. Molecules, atoms, electrons whatever the name,
--
building up by growing complication of the various elements
recognised by physical chemistry. To begin with, at the very
--
First of all, must all the elements mount each successive rung
of the ladder from the most simple to the most complicated by a
--
stars. From having considered the infinitely small elements we
are abruptly compelled to raise our eyes to infinitely great
1.020 - The World and Our World, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Consciousness of an object implies a basic connectedness between the subject and the object. It is this connection that pulls the object towards the subject, and vice versa. We have an undercurrent of unity among ourselves, on account of which we sometimes feel a necessity to sit together and work in a unanimous manner. We have the urge of unity from one side, and the urge of diversity on the other side. The diversity aspect is emphasised by the senses, and the unity aspect is emphasised by the nature of our consciousness. The essence of our consciousness is unity par excellence. It is the basic existence of a unity of consciousness behind all perceptions that is responsible for the perception itself, and is also the reason for loves and hates. But the emphasis given by the senses is the other way round. They assert diversity of things and make externalised perception possible. So in the attraction that the subject feels towards the object, two elements work vigorously the diversity aspect and the unity aspect. The attraction is possible basically on account of the structural similarity between the subject and the object. But the need for being pulled by the object, or getting attracted towards the object, arises on account of the perception of diversity, or the duality of subject and object.
If unity is the whole truth there would be no need of perception, and the question of attraction would not arise, because the subject has basically become one with the object, and is one with it. Where there is an utter unity of the subject and the object, neither perception would be there, nor any kind of love or hatred. If there is utter isolation, even then there would be no perception. If we are really disconnected from all things, we can neither see anything, nor can we have love and hatred towards things.
1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
We are habitually aware of three elements in our being,
Mind, Life and Body. These constitute for us a divided and
1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
out of existence, but that its elements should be enlightened,
united, that which they strive to express delivered, fulfilled and
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I have pored on her infinitesimal elements
And her invisible atoms have unmasked. .||124.49||
10.28 - Love and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Science in a practical way through material means tries to prolong life as far as possible, as for us, we are not limited to that necessity. What we have to do is to clean the energy which is now obscure in the material cell, make it luminous. The way is the way of consciousness. Every human being has in him the possibility, the capacity of making his own consciousness come forth, pure, transparent, luminous and then in and through that pure light charge the body too with a transfiguring force or energy. This material body of man has the marvellous advantage of being united, of being able to unite itself with the Supreme Consciousness. Indeed as through his consciousness man has the privilege of ascending to the supreme consciousness, even so in and through the same consciousness, the physical cell also has the privilege of establishing a contact with the Supreme Substance. What is true of man's mind and life is true also of the material cell. Even as life impulses and mental knowings can be uplifted and transfigured, these physical cells too may achieve the same transfiguration because in man all these elements share equally in the Divine Substance lodged there. Of the animal, the lower creation, we cannot say the same thing for it does not possess overtly the Divine element that dwells in man. This Divine Element is what we call the psychic consciousness, the Divine himself formed secretly or framed in matter. It is that which comes in contact with the human mental and the human vital and the human body, and succeeds in remoulding them in the Supreme Nature.
Of course, there was always in the ancient days also, in some disciplines or others, an aspiration, an urge to immortalise the body, but the means they adopted, the instruments they chose for the operation were indirect and secondary. It was either through the force of a luminous mind influencing the body or through the pressure of concentrated vital force making the body an obedient and docile instrument. The former was the process followed by the Vaishnavas who envisaged a luminous body, the second was the aim of the Tantriks who sought to rejuvenate the body, possess it youthful and vigorous indefinitely. The Hatha yogis also in their turn through physico-vital exercises attempted to acquire a new body changing the modalities of the old. The ancient alchemists tried more material means, the use of alchemic substances for cleansing the body making it free from disease and, if possible, death. But the secret power lies in the body itself, that is, in the very self of the body, not anywhere else. The hidden consciousness lodged in the cell, the material cell, that is the key to the problem, that secret consciousness and its energy asleep in the cell, has to be awakened and brought into play. When the physical cell itself awakes and declares its purpose, the thing is done.
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
symbols and origins, some of the principal elements of Vedic
thought and psychology begin to be omitted or to lose their
1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
The first are the so-called linear invariants. Let the elements
transformed by an Abelian group be the terms which we rep-
--
f(x) of the elements x of E. In all cases, f(x) is taken to be mea-
surable in x, and if we are concerned with a continuous group
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
If, restoring to the Hebrew characters their numerical value and hidden sense, we analyse the text, then we must thus read the first word of Genesis, The primary duality was in the beginning. For the sign B which corresponds to the second figure in our numerical system, represents a double original principle which the succeeding letter Resh characterises as the very head and supreme Cause of formation. And by a remarkable, though fortuitous coincidence, we find that the sacred book of Islam, like the sacred book of Judaism commences, in the initial of its first word, with the sign of duality. The first word B-Sem-Lillah (Bismillah) placed at the head of the Koran can, when its elements are decomposed, be interpreted, Two is the name of Allah.
And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
permanent constituent elements of human experience even of the human environment. Regardless of
culture, place and time, human individuals are forced to adapt to the fact of culture (the domain of the
--
portray the dynamic interrelationship between all three constituent elements of human experience. The
eternal unknown nature, metaphorically speaking, creative and destructive, source and destination of all
--
Description of these three elements current state, future state, and means of mediation constitute the
necessary and sufficient preconditions for the weaving of the most simple narrative, which is a means for
--
memory, and whose physical substrates constitute universal elements of the human nervous system. The
most rapidly activated82 of these two systems governs inhibition of ongoing behavior, cessation of currently
--
interesting elements of the human experiential field. This interest and meaning signifies the presence of
new information, and constitutes a prepotent stimulus for human (and animal) action.89 It is where the
--
waveform with a characteristic time-course and shape. Most attention has been paid to elements of this
waveform that occur within the first half-second (500 milliseconds) post-stimulus occurrence. As the first
--
component elements of every sound.122 The subject is lead to expect or predict one sort of sound, and
gets another. The unexpected other has indeterminate significance, in that particular context, and is
--
terms of their constituent elements.154 The left hemisphere particularly its frontal or motor (sub)unit
also governs approach behavior,155 in the presence of cues of satisfaction, is integrally involved in the
--
The central features of our (socially-determined) behavior thus become key elements characters in
our stories (just like the procedural elements of the emergent games of interacting children become explicit
rules later in development). The generation and constant refinement of these stories, told and retold over
--
drama likewise ritualizes play, abstracting its key elements one level more, and further distills the vitally
interesting aspects of behavior which are representative (by no mere chance) of that active heroic/social
--
as distinct, to the state where we see them as isomorphic elements, given distinct status only on a
provisional basis. Subdiagram (1) is familiar, and represents the normal story, composed of present state,
--
above and below. This means that all the elements of a good story might be expected to mirror, in
some profound manner, all the other elements: that a story, like the world itself, might be read (and read
correctly) at multiple and multiply informative levels of analysis. This gives good stories their
--
level of analysis. elements of probability and predictability must play a role. It is, after all, increasingly
useless to speculate over increasingly large spatial-temporal areas, as the number of variables that must be
--
2.3. Mythological Representation: The Constituent elements of Experience
Myth represents the world as forum for action. The world as forum for action is comprised of three
eternally extant constituent elements of experience, and a fourth that precedes them. The unknown,
the knower, and the known make up the world as place of drama; the indeterminate precosmogonic
--
constituent elements of experience).
The precosmogonic chaos tends to take metaphorical form as the uroboros, the self-consuming serpent,
--
elements of consciousness), and constitute a more thorough representation of the constituent elements of
the patriarchal known; Marduk greatest of the secondary deities represents the process that
--
The three constituent elements of experience and the fourth who proceeds them can be viewed, at a
higher level of resolution, as seven universal characters (who may take on any of a variety of culturespecific identities). Myth describes the interactions of these characters. The great dragon of chaos the
--
Our capacity for abstraction allows us to derive the constituent elements of successful adaptation
itself, from observation of behavioral patterns that are constantly played out in the world as it actually
--
one of the constituent elements of the collective unconscious: a group of phenomena, linked together
because of shared significance [which is (essentially) implication for action, or emotional equivalence].
--
to describe or portray or embody the three permanent constituent elements of human experience: the
unknown, or unexplored territory; the known, or explored territory; and the process the knower which
mediates between them. These three elements constitute the cosmos that is, the world of experience
from the narrative or mythological perspective.
--
composed of three constituent elements, and a fourth that precedes, follows and surrounds those three.
These elements, in what is perhaps their most fundamental pattern of inter-relationship, are portrayed in
Figure 17: The Constituent elements of Experience. This figure might be conceptualized as three disks,
stacked one on top of another, resting on an amorphous background. That background chaos, the
--
Figure 17: The Constituent elements of Experience
Figure 18: The Positive Constituent elements of Experience, Personified 217 portrays the Vierge
Ouvrante, a fifteenth century French sculpture, which represents the constituent elements of the world in
personified, and solely positive form. Personification of this sort is the rule; categorical exclusion or
inclusion in accordance with valence (all bad elements; all good elements) is almost equally common.
All positive things are, after all, reasonably apprehended as similar, or identical likewise, all negative
--
Figure 18: The Positive Constituent elements of Experience, Personified
The world of experience, in total, is composed of the known explored territory in paradoxical
--
This tale contains within it a complex and sophisticated notion of causality. None of its elements exist
in contradiction with one another, even though they lay stress on different aspects of the same process.
--
everything. The particular, discriminable, familiar elements of human experience exist as they do,
however, because the conscious subject can detect, construct and transform them. The son-heros role in
--
territory, signified by Tiamat into its distinguishable elements; weaves a net of determinate meaning,
capable of encompassing the vast unknown; embodies the divine masculine essence, which has as its
--
imbalance in the powers of the constituent elements of experience. Eliade continues, describing the
rediscovery or reemergence of Marduk:
--
the story of Re, and describes the interactions between the constituent elements of experience in
exceedingly compressed form. Osiris was a primeval king, a legendary ancestral figure, who ruled Egypt
--
three constituent elements. This state might be regarded as the true source of all things, subjects and objects
as the single ancestor and final destination of all. The complete mythological world of experience is
portrayed schematically as personality, territory and process in Figure 28: The Constituent elements
of Experience as Personality, Territory and Process. Our discussion turns first to the diverse nature of
--
Figure 28: The Constituent elements of Experience as Personality, Territory and Process
2.3.3. The Dragon of Primordial Chaos
--
masculinity, night and day remain compounded, prior to their discrimination into the separable elements of
experience. In this state, all conceivable pairs of opposites and contradictory forces exist together
--
them (Hillebrandt). Certainly, naturalistic elements are present, since the myth is multivalent; Indras
victory is equivalent, among other things, to the truimph of life over the sterility and death resulting
--
representative of two antithetical primordial elements. As a snake, the uroboros is a creature of the ground,
of matter; as a bird (a winged animal), it is a creature of the air, of the sky, of spirit. The uroboros
--
The uroboric initial state is the place where all opposite things were (will be) united; the great selfdevouring dragon whose division into constituent elements constitutes the precondition for experience
itself. This initial state is a place free of problems, and has a paradisal aspect, in consequence; however,
--
emergence of experience is portrayed in Figure 31: The Constituent elements of the World, in
Dynamic Relationship. The knower is simultaneously child of nature and culture, creator of culture (as a
--
Figure 31: The Constituent elements of the World, in Dynamic Relationship
It is almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which the world parent schema of categorization
--
classification of unpredictable events. Attention and concentration naturally gravitate to those elements in
the experiential field that contain the highest concentration of novelty, or that are the least expected, prior
--
The threatening aspects of the Great Mother gather metaphoric representation as chimeras of anxietyproducing places, animals, gestures, expressions and things. These elements diverse from the objective
perspective (from the standpoint of the proper set) nonetheless unite to produce an image of the everpresent potential danger inherent in anything unpredictable. The Great Mother unexplored territory is
--
comprised a preconscious attempt to embody the heroic essence, to fortify the constituent elements of the
community against paralyzing fear of death and darkness to fortify the individual and the social group
--
Dragon.330 All of the elements of the meta-myth are portrayed in this drawing: the threatened
community, represented by the walled city or castle; the winged dragon, who has emerged from the
--
this myth, and not only in its Hurrian/Hittite version (in which, besides, there are a number of SumeroAkkadian elements). The Enuma elish 337 likewise presents (1) a series of divine generations, (2) the
battle of the young gods against the old gods, and (3) the victory of Marduk, who thus assumes the
--
The gods are transpersonal forces instinctive and socially-modified comprising universal elements
of human experience. The organization of these gods, as a consequence of combat, is an abstracted and
--
borrowed some cultural elements from outside; none that, as the result of these borrowings, has not
changed at least some aspects of its institutions; none that, in short, has had no history. But, in contrast
--
made to acquire them. Nor is this all. These elements were adopted because it was believed that the
Ancestors had received the first cultural revelations from Supernatural Beings. And since traditional
1.02 - Meeting the Master - Authors second meeting, March 1921, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The second time I met Sri Aurobindo was in March 1921, when there was a greater familiarity. Having come for a short stay, I remained eleven days on Sri Aurobindo's asking me to prolong my stay. During my journey from Madras to Pondicherry I was enchanted by the natural scenery the vast stretches of green paddy fields. But Pondicherry as a city was lethargic, with a colonial atmosphere an exhibition of the worst elements of European and Indian culture. The market was dirty and stinking and the people had no idea of sanitation. The sea-beach was made filthy by them. Smuggling was the main business.
But the greatest surprise of my visit in 1921 was the 'darshan' of Sri Aurobindo. During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali rather dark though there was a lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. This time on going upstairs to see him (in the same house) I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming: "What has happened to you?"
1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
When the health of a person undergoes a change, and he becomes the prey of melancholy and suspicion, and the pleasures of the world become distasteful, so that from disgust with it, he withdraws from all society, his physician says, "this person is diseased with melancholy; he must take an infusion of dodder, of thyme and bark of endive as a medicine." The naturalist says: "As this person's malady is of a dry nature, it arises from a predominance of dryness, which has settled on the brain. The occasion of his having a dry temperament is the season of winter. Until spring comes, and dry weather predominates, there is no possibility of a cure." The astrologer says, "this person being under the influence of melancholy, which arises from a hurtful conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, there will be no favorable change in his health until the conjunction of Jupiter with Venus shall have reached the Trine." Now know, beloved, that the language of all these persons is correct, for they all speak and believe according to the degree and reach of their reason and understanding. However, the real and essential cause of the malady may be stated thus. When fortune is favorable to any person, and the Deity desires to guide him into the [53] possession of it, he deputes two powerful ministers to that effect, Jupiter and Mars. These in turn, control the light footed ministers, the elements, and command dryness, for example, to fasten its bridle to the neck of the person, and cause dryness to attack his head and brain. He is thus made to become weary of the world by means of the scourge of melancholy and suspicion, and so with the bridle of the will may be impelled towards the Deity. These circumstances can never be understood in this sense, either by medicine, or by nature, or by the stars. One may, however, learn to understand them by knowledge and the prophetic power combined. For they embrace the whole kingdom of the universe with its deputies and servants, and possess the knowledge of the end for which everything was created: they know to whose command all things are subjected, to what men are invited and what they are forbidden to do.
The Lord invites the servants whom he loves to the contemplation of his glory, at one time by sending misfortune and affliction, and at another by melancholy and sickness: and he says to them, "my servants, what you regard as misfortune and affliction, is but the bridle of my love, by which I draw those whom I love to a spirit of holy submission, and to my Paradise." It is also found in a tradition that "misfortune is first of all the lot of the prophets, then of the saints and then of those who are like them in successive lower degrees. Look not then upon these things as maladies, for they are my favored servants."
1.02 - Prayer of Parashara to Vishnu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
kāra; Tanmātras; elements; objects of sense; senses; of the mundane egg. Viṣṇu the same as Brahmā the creator; Viṣṇu the preserver; Rudra the destroyer.
PARĀŚARA said, Glory to the unchangeable, holy, eternal, supreme Viṣṇu, of one universal nature, the mighty over all: to him who is Hiranygarbha, Hari, and Śa
--
That chief principle (Pradhāna), which is the indiscrete cause, is called by the sages also Prakriti (nature): it is subtile, uniform, and comprehends what is and what is not (or both causes and effects); is durable, self-sustained, illimitable, undecaying, and stable; devoid of sound or touch, and possessing neither colour nor form; endowed with the three qualities (in equilibrium); the mother of the world; without beginning; and that into which all that is produced is resolved[14]. By that principle all things were invested in the period subsequent to the last dissolution of the universe, and prior to creation[15]. For Brahmans learned in the Vedas, and teaching truly their doctrines, explain such passages as the following as intending the production of the chief principle (Pradhāna). "There was neither day nor night, nor sky nor earth, nor darkness nor light, nor any other thing, save only One, unapprehensible by intellect, or That which is Brahma and Pumān (spirit) and Pradhāna (matter)[16]." The two forms which are other than the essence of unmodified Viṣṇu, are Pradhāna (matter) and Puruṣa (spirit); and his other form, by which those two are connected or separated, is called Kāla (time)[17]. When discrete substance is aggregated in crude nature, as in a foregone dissolution, that dissolution is termed elemental (Prākrita). The deity as Time is without beginning, and his end is not known; and from him the revolutions of creation, continuance, and dissolution unintermittingly succeed: for when, in the latter season, the equilibrium of the qualities (Pradhāna) exists, and spirit (Pumān) is detached from matter, then the form of Viṣṇu which is Time abides[18]. Then the supreme Brahma, the supreme soul, the substance of the world, the lord of all creatures, the universal soul, the supreme ruler, Hari, of his own will having entered into matter and spirit, agitated the mutable and immutable principles, the season of creation being arrived, in the same manner as fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself: so the Supreme influenced the elements of creation[19]. Puruṣottama is both the agitator and the thing to be agitated; being present in the essence of matter, both when it is contracted and expanded[20]. Viṣṇu, supreme over the supreme, is of the nature of discrete forms in the atomic productions, Brahmā and the rest (gods, men, &c.)
Then from that equilibrium of the qualities (Pradhāna), presided over by soul[21], proceeds the unequal developement of those qualities (constituting the principle Mahat or Intellect) at the time of creation[22]. The Chief principle then invests that Great principle, Intellect, and it becomes threefold, as affected by the quality of goodness, foulness, or darkness, and invested by the Chief principle (matter) as seed is by its skin. From the Great principle (Mahat) Intellect, threefold Egotism, (Aha
kāra)[23], denominated Vaikarīka, 'pure;' Taijasa, 'passionate;' and Bhūtādi, 'rudimental,'[24] is produced; the origin of the (subtile) elements, and of the organs of sense; invested, in consequence of its three qualities, by Intellect, as Intellect is by the Chief principle. Elementary Egotism then becoming productive, as the rudiment of sound, produced from it Ether, of which sound is the characteristic, investing it with its rudiment of sound. Ether becoming productive, engendered the rudiment of touch; whence originated strong wind, the property of which is touch; and Ether, with the rudiment of sound, enveloped the rudiment of touch. Then wind becoming productive, produced the rudiment of form (colour); whence light (or fire) proceeded, of which, form (colour) is the attribute; and the rudiment of touch enveloped the wind with the rudiment of colour. Light becoming productive, produced the rudiment of taste; whence proceed all juices in which flavour resides; and the rudiment of colour invested the juices with the rudiment of taste. The waters becoming productive, engendered the rudiment of smell; whence an aggregate (earth) originates, of which smell is the property[25]. In each several element resides its peculiar rudiment; thence the property of tanmātratā,[26] (type or rudiment) is ascribed to these elements. Rudimental elements are not endowed with qualities, and therefore they are neither soothing, nor terrific, nor stupifying[27]. This is the elemental creation, proceeding from the principle of egotism affected by the property of darkness. The organs of sense are said to be the passionate products of the same principle, affected by foulness; and the ten divinities[28] proceed from egotism affected by the principle of goodness; as does Mind, which is the eleventh. The organs of sense are ten: of the ten, five are the skin, eye, nose, tongue, and ear; the object of which, combined with Intellect, is the apprehension of sound and the rest: the organs of excretion and procreation, the hands, the feet, and the voice, form the other five; of which excretion, generation, manipulation, motion, and speaking, are the several acts.
Then, ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable according to their qualities, as soothing, terrific, or stupifying; but possessing various energies, and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. Having combined, therefore, with one another, they assumed, through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and from the direction of spirit, with the acquiescence of the indiscrete Principle[29], Intellect and the rest, to the gross elements inclusive, formed an egg[30], which gradually expanded like a bubble of water. This vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements, and resting on the waters, was the excellent natural abode of Viṣṇu in the form of Brahmā; and there Viṣṇu, the lord of the universe, whose essence is inscrutable, assumed a perceptible form, and even he himself abided in it in the character of Brahmā[31]. Its womb, vast as the mountain Meru, was composed of the mountains; and the mighty oceans were the waters that filled its cavity. In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons, and mankind. And this egg was externally invested by seven natural envelopes, or by water, air, fire, ether, and Aha
kāra the origin of the elements, each tenfold the extent of that which it invested; next came the principle of Intelligence; and, finally, the whole was surrounded by the indiscrete Principle: resembling thus the cocoa-nut, filled interiorly with pulp, and exteriorly covered by husk and rind.
Affecting then the quality of activity, Hari, the lord of all, himself becoming Brahmā, engaged in the creation of the universe. Viṣṇu with the quality of goodness, and of immeasurable power, preserves created things through successive ages, until the close of the period termed a Kalpa; when the same mighty deity, Janārddana[32], invested with the quality of darkness, assumes the awful form of Rudra, and swallows up the universe. Having thus devoured all things, and converted the world into one vast ocean, the Supreme reposes upon his mighty serpent couch amidst the deep: he awakes after a season, and again, as Brahmā, becomes the author of creation.
--
Viṣṇu as creator, creates himself; as preserver, preserves himself; as destroyer, destroys himself at the end of all things. This world of earth, air, fire, water, ether, the senses, and the mind; all that is termed spirit[34], that also is the lord of all elements, the universal form, and imperishable: hence he is the cause of creation, preservation, and destruction; and the subject of the vicissitudes inherent in elementary nature[35]. He is the object and author of creation: he preserves, destroys, and is preserved. He, Viṣṇu, as Brahmā, and as all other beings, is infinite form: he is the supreme, the giver of all good, the fountain of all happiness[36].
Footnotes and references:
--
[17]: Or it might be rendered, 'Those two other forms (which proceed) from his supreme nature;' that is, from the nature of Viṣṇu, when he is Nirupādhi, or without adventitious attributes: ### 'other' (###); the commentator states they are other or separate from Viṣṇu only through Māyā, illusion,' but here implying false notion;' the elements of creation being in essence one with Viṣṇu, though in existence detached and different.
[18]: Pradhāna, when unmodified, is, according to the Sā
--
kāra is that which is endowed with Tejas, heat' or energy,' in consequence of its having the property of Rajas, 'passion' or 'activity;' and the third kind, Bhūtādi, or 'elementary,' is the Tāmasa, or has the property of darkness. From the first kind proceed the senses; from the last, the rudimental unconscious elements; both kinds, which are equally of themselves inert, being rendered productive by the cooperation of the second, the energetic or active modification of Aha
kāra, which is therefore said to be the origin of both the senses and the elements.
[25]: The successive series of rudiments and elements, and their respectively engendering the rudiments and elements next in order, occur in most of the Purāṇas, in nearly the same words. The Vrihannāradiya P. observes, 'They (the elements) in successive order acquire the property of causality one to the other.' The order is also the same; or, ether (ākās), wind or air (vāyu), fire or light (tejas), water and earth; except in one passage of the Mahābhārata (Mokṣa Dherma, C. 9), where it is ether, water, fire, air, earth. The order of Empedocles was ether, fire, earth, water, air. Cudworth, I. 97. The investment (āvaraṇa) of each element by its own rudiment, and of each rudiment by its preceding gross and rudimental elements, is also met with in most of the chief Purāṇas, as the Vāyu, Padma, Li
ga, and Bhāgavata; and traces p. 17 of it are found amongst the ancient cosmogonists; for Anaximander supposed, that when the world was made, a certain sphere or flame of fire, separated from matter (the Infinite), encompassed the air, which invested the earth as the bark does a tree:' Κατὰ τὴν γένεσιν τοῦδε τοῦ κόσμο
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ga, Bhāgavata, and Mārkaṇḍeya, add a description of a participation of properties amongst the elements, which is rather Vedānta than Sā
khya. According to this notion, the elements add to their characteristic properties those of the elements which precede them. Ākas has the single property of sound: air has those of touch and sound: fire has colour, touch, and sound: water has taste, colour, touch, and sound: and earth has smell and the rest, thus having five properties: or, as the Li
ga P. describes the series, ###.
[26]: Tanmātra, 'rudiment' or 'type,' from Tad, 'that,' for Tasmin, 'in that' gross element, and mātrā, 'subtile or rudimental form'. The rudiments are also the characteristic properties of the elements: as the Bhāgavata; 'The rudiment of it (ether) is also its quality, sound; as a common designation may denote both a person who sees an object, and the object which is to be seen: that is, according to the commentator, suppose a person behind a wall called aloud, "An elephant! an elephant!" the term would equally indicate that an elephant was visible, and that somebody saw it. Bhag. II. 5.
[27]: The properties here alluded to are not those of goodness &c., but other properties assigned to perceptible objects by the Sā
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[28]: The Bhāgavata, which gives a similar statement of the origin of the elements, senses, and divinities, specifies the last to be Diś (space), air, the sun, Pracetas, the Aswins, fire, Indra, Upendra, Mitra, and Ka or Prajāpati, presiding over the senses, according to the comment, or severally over the ear, skin, eye, tongue, nose, speech, hands, feet, and excretory and generative organs. Bhag. II. 5. 31.
[29]: Avyaktānugraheṇa. The expression is something equivocal, as Avyakta may here apply either to the First Cause or to matter. In either case the notion is the same, and the aggregation of the elements is the effect of the presidence of spirit, without any active interference of the indiscrete principle. The Avyakta is passive in the evolution and combination of Mahat and the rest. Pradhāna is, no doubt, intended, but its identification with the Supreme is also implied. The term Anugraha may also refer to a classification of the order of creation, which will be again adverted to.
[30]: It is impossible not to refer this notion to the same origin as the widely diffused opinion of antiquity, of the first manifestation of the world in the form of an egg. "It seems to have been a favourite symbol, and very ancient, and we find it adopted among many nations." Bryant, III. 165. Traces of it occur amongst the Syrians, Persians, and Egyptians; and besides the Orphic egg amongst the Greeks, and that described by Aristophanes, Τέκτεν πρώτιστον ὑπηνέμιον νὺξ ἡ μελανόπτερος ὠόν part of the ceremony in the Dionysiaca and other mysteries consisted of the consecration of an egg; by which, according to Porphyry, was signified the world: Ἑρμηνεὺει δὲ τὸ ὠὸν τὸν κόσμον. Whether this egg typified the ark, as Bryant and Faber suppose, is not material to the proof of the antiquity and wide diffusion of the belief that the world in the beginning existed in such a figure. A similar account of the first aggregation of the elements in the form of an egg is given in all the Purāṇas, with the usual epithet Haima or Hiranya, 'golden,' as it occurs in Manu, I. 9.
[31]: Here is another analogy to the doctrines of antiquity relating to the mundane egg: and as the first visible male being, who, as we shall hereafter see, united in himself the nature of either sex, abode in the egg, and issued from it; so "this firstborn of the world, whom they represented under two shapes and characters, and who sprung from the mundane egg, was the person from whom the mortals and immortals were derived. He was the same as Dionusus, whom they styled, πρωτόγονον διφνῆ τρίγονον Βακχεῖον Ἄνακτα Ἄγριον ἀρρητὸν κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμοφον:" or, with the omission of one epithet, , ###.
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[35]: Viṣṇu is both Bhūteśa, 'lord of the elements,' or of created things, and Viśvarūpa, 'universal substance:' he is therefore, as one with sensible things, subject to his own control.
[36]: Vareṇya, 'most excellent;' being the same, according to the commentator, with supreme felicity.
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The experienced is composed of elements and organs,
is of the nature of illumination, action and intertia,
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The experienced, that is nature, is composed of elements and
organs the elements gross and fine which compose the
whole of nature, and the organs of the senses, mind, etc., and
1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
been gained, yet it would seem that none of the elements in the
chain, taken separately, has actively contributed to this gain. Al-
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ment embracing myriads of elements strewn throughout the immensity of time,
there is a single mechanism education.
1.02 - Substance Is Eternal, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are,
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
Ordinarily, one speaks of religious relationships today in the sense of a consciously developed adult religion. Relevant to this is the fact that, in religious life, the spirit and soul elements of the adult rise into the spiritual element in the universe and surrender to it. The religious relationship is a self-surrendering to the uni- verse, a prayer for divine grace in the surrender of the self. In the adult, its completely immersed in a spiritual element. The soul and spirit are yielded to the surroundings.
To speak of the childs body being absorbed by the environ- ment in terms of a religious experience thus seems like we are turning things around the wrong way. Nevertheless, its a truly religious experiencetransposed into the realm of nature. The child surrenders to the environment and lives in the external world in reverent, prayerful devotion, just as the eye detaches itself from the rest of the organism and surrenders to the environment. Its a religious relationship transferred to the natural realm.
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Few things have a more wonderful effect on the human heart than seeing inner spirit and soul elements released day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, during the first period of childhood. We see how, beginning with chaotic limb movements, the glance filled with rapture by outer experiences, the play of expressions that dont yet seem to belong to the child, something develops and impresses itself on the surface of the human form that arises from the center of the human constitution, where the divine spiritual being is unfolding in its descent from pre-earthly life. If we can make this divine office of education a concern of the heart, we understand these things in such a way that we say: Here the Godhead Who has guided a human being until birth is revealed again in the impression of the human organism; the living Godhead is there to see; God is gazing into us. This will lead, out of the teachers own individuality, not to something learned by rote, but to a living method of education and instruction, a method that springs from our souls and spirits.
This must be our attitude toward the developing child; its essential to any educational method. Without this fundamental attitude, without this priestly element in the teacher (and I mean this, of course, in a cosmic sense), education cant progress. Therefore, any attempt to reform the methods of education requires a return from the intellectual element, which has become dominant since the fourteenth century, to the domain of soul and feelings, to what springs forth from human nature as a whole, and not just from the head. If we look at children without preconceptions, the childs own nature will teach us to read these things.
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People no longer could feel or perceive in a way that was possible before the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In those days, people viewed matters of the spirit in an imbalanced way, just as people now have a one-sided view of nature. But the human race had to pass through a stage in which it could add the observation of purely natural elements to an earlier human devotion to the world of spirit and soul that excluded nature. This materializing process, this change in course, was necessary; but we have to realize that, in order that civilized humanity not be turned into a wastel and in our time, there has to be a new turn, a turning toward spirit and soul. The awareness of this fact is the essence of all endeavors such as that of Waldorf education, which is rooted in what a deeper observation of human evolution reveals as necessary for our time. We need to find our way back to the spirit and soul; in order for that to happen, we need to understand how we became divorced26 from spirit and soul in the first place. There are many today who have no such understanding and, therefore, view anything that attempts to lead us back to the spirit as, well, not very clever, shall we say.
We can find remarkable illustrations of this attitude. Id like to mention one, but only parenthetically. Theres a chapter (incidentally, a very interesting chapter in some ways) in Mau- rice Maeterlincks new book The Great Riddle. 4 Its subject is the anthroposophical method of viewing the world. He discusses anthroposophy, and he also discusses me (if youll forgive a per- sonal reference). He has read many of my books and makes a very interesting comment. He says that, at the beginning of my books, I seem to have a levelheaded, logical, and shrewd mind. In the later chapters, however, it seems as if I had lost my mind. It may very well appear this way to Maeterlinck; subjectively he has every right to his opinion. Why shouldnt I seem levelheaded, logical and scientific to him in the first chapters, and insane in later ones?
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Many people are completely unaware that their judgments dont spring from the primal source of human nature but from elements implanted in our outer culture since the fourteenth cen- tury as a result of the materialistic paradigm. The duty of teach- ers, of educatorsreally the duty of all human beings that have anything to do with childrenis to look more deeply into what it means to be human. In other words, we need to become more aware of how anything acting as a stimulus in the environment continues to resonate within the child. We have to be very clear that, in this sense, were dealing with imponderables.
Children are aware, whenever we do something in their environment, of the thoughts behind a hand-gesture or facial expression. Children intuit them: they dont, obviously, interpret facial features, since what operates instead is a much more powerful inner connection between the child and adult than will exist later between adults. Consequently, we must never allow ourselves to feel or think anything around children that shouldnt be allowed to reverberate within the child. The rule of thumb for all relationships in early education has to be this: Whether in perception, feeling, or thought, whatever we do around children needs to be done in such a way that it can be allowed to continue resonate within their souls.
1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
born and universally present formal elements, it seems to me
that a normally functioning intelligence can discover in this
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with a historical occurrence imprinted firmly on the memory of the race. We know too that Krishna and Arjuna were the object of religious worship in the pre-Christian centuries; and there is some reason to suppose that they were so in connection with a religious and philosophical tradition from which the Gita may have gathered many of its elements and even the foundation of its synthesis of knowledge, devotion and works, and perhaps also that the human Krishna was the founder, restorer or at the least one of the early teachers of this school. The Gita may well in spite of its later form represent the outcome in Indian thought of the teaching of Krishna and the connection of that teaching with the historical Krishna, with Arjuna and with the war of
Kurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. In the Mahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historical character and the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood must therefore have been well established by the time - apparently from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. - when the old story and poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its present form. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legend of the Avatar's early life in Vrindavan which, as developed by the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of
1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
If we leave aside the Scriptures for the human mind is so skillful that it can easily dream up sheep grazing on the Empire State building and if we look at the practical disciplines of India, the contradiction becomes even more striking. Indian psychology is based on the very intelligent observation that all things in the universe, from mineral to man, are made up of three elements or qualities (gunas), which may be called by different names depending on the order of reality one considers: tamas, inertia, obscurity, unconsciousness; rajas,
movement, struggle, effort, passion, action; sattva, light, harmony,
joy. Nowhere does any of these three elements exist in a pure state; we are always a mixture of inertia, passion, and light; we may be sattvotamasic, good but a bit dull, well-meaning but a little unconscious; or sattvo-rajasic, impassioned upwardly; or tamaso-rajasic, impassioned downwardly; most often we are an excellent mixture of the three. In the darkest tamas the light also shines, but unfortunately the opposite is equally true. In other words, we are always in a state of unstable equilibrium; the warrior, the ascetic, and the brute happily share our dwelling-place in varying proportions. The various Indian disciplines seeks therefore to restore the equilibrium, to help us emerge from the 17
Shankara (788-820 A.D.), mystic and poet, theorist of Mayavada or the doctrine of illusionism, which supplanted Buddhism in India.
1.02 - The Magic Circle, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
The effect of such a circle on the mental or astral plane, indirectly also on this material world, depends, in this case, on the grade and strenght of such an imagination. The binding force of the circle is generally known in magnetic magic. Moreover, a magic circle may be produced by the accumulation of elements or the condensation of light. When practising evocations or invocation of beings, it is desirable to draw within the centre of the circle in which one is to stand another smaller circle or a pentagram with one of its points upwards, the symbol representing man. This is then the symbolization of the small world, of man as genuine magician.
The books dealing with the construction of the magic circle clearly state that during the act of invocation the magician must not leave the circle, which, in its magic sense, means nothing else but that the consciousness of, or contact with, the Absolute, (i. e. the macrocosm), must not be interrupted. Needless to say that the magician, during his magic operation with the help of a magic circle and with the being standing in front of him, must not step out of the circle with his physical body, unless he has finished his experiment and dismissed the relevant being.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
"The way is more difficult for those whose mind is attached to the Absolute!" Bhakti has to float on smoothly with the current of our nature. True it is that we cannot have; any idea of the Brahman which is not anthropomorphic, but is it not equally true of everything we know? The greatest psychologist the world has ever known, Bhagavan Kapila, demonstrated ages ago that human consciousness is one of the elements in the make-up of all the objects of our perception and conception, internal as well as external. Beginning with our bodies and going up to Ishvara, we may see that every object of our perception is this consciousness plus something else, whatever that may be; and this unavoidable mixture is what we ordinarily think of as reality. Indeed it is, and ever will be, all of the reality that is possible for the human mind to know. Therefore to say that Ishvara is unreal, because He is anthropomorphic, is sheer nonsense. It sounds very much like the occidentals squabble on idealism and realism, which fearful-looking quarrel has for its foundation a mere play on the word "real". The idea of Ishvara covers all the ground ever denoted and connoted by the word real, and Ishvara is as real as anything else in the universe; and after all, the word real means nothing more than what has now been pointed out. Such is our philosophical conception of Ishvara.
(Bhagavata) "Unto them appeared Krishna with a smile on His lotus face, clad in yellow robes and having garlands on, the embodied conqueror (in beauty) of the god of love."
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Bergson: "Our thought in its purely logical form is incapable of presenting the true nature of life" and the intellectual faculty is characterized by a" natural inability to comprehend life." Prof. Arthur S. Eddington has also observed that "the ultimate elements ill a theory of the world must be of a nature impossible to define in terms recognizable to the mind."
A more recent statement by one who is considered an excellent exponent of modern scientific opinion is found in
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It might, of course, be supplemented by Hindu or other terminology, but to do so would immediately introduce more numerous elements of controversy. 'We should at once be lost in endless discussion as to whether Nibbana was Nirvana, and as to whether extinction or something else was implied; and so on for ever.
The system of the Qabalah, whose terms as we shall see are largely symbolic, is of course superficially open to this last objection. But because it is very largely symbolic, it has the best sanction of those who are considered eminent authorities in the sciences, for the whole of modern science occupies itself with various symbols by which it endeavours to comprehend the physical world-symbols beyond which, however, it frankly confesses itself unable to pass. An illuminating remark occurs in Prof. Eddington's 1928
1.02 - The Principle of Fire, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
As it has been said before, akasa or the etheric principle is the cause of the origin of the elements. According to the oriental scriptures, the first element born from akasa is believed to be Tejas, the principle of fire. This element as well as all the others manifest their influence not only in our roughly material plane but also in everything created. The basic qualities of the fiery principle are heat and expansion. In the beginning of all things created therefore must have been fire and light, and in the
Bible we read: Fiat Lux There shall be light. The origin of the light, of course, is to be sought in the fire. Each element and therefore that of fire, too, has two polarities, i.e., the active and the passive one, which means positive (+) and negative (-). Plus will always signify the constructive, the creative, the productive sources whereas minus stands for all that is destructive or dissecting. There are always two basic qualities, which must be clearly distinguished in each element. Religions have always imputed the good to the active and the evil to the passive side. But fundamentally spoken, there are no such things as good or bad; they are nothing but human conceptions. In the Universe there is neither good nor evil, because everything has been created according to immutable rules, wherein the Divine Principle is reflected and only by knowing these rules, shall we be able to come near to the Divinity.
1.02 - THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[5] The arrangement of the opposites in a quaternity is shown in an interesting illustration in Stolcenbergs Viridarium chymicum (Fig. XLII), which can also be found in the Philosophia reformata of Mylius (1622, p. 117). The goddesses represent the four seasons of the sun in the circle of the Zodiac (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) and at the same time the four degrees of heating,22 as well as the four elements combined around the circular table.23 The synthesis of the elements is effected by means of the circular movement in time (circulatio, rota) of the sun through the houses of the Zodiac. As I have shown elsewhere,24 the aim of the circulatio is the production (or rather, reproduction) of the Original Man, who was a sphere. Perhaps I may mention in this connection a remarkable quotation from Ostanes in Abul-Qasim, describing the intermediate position between two pairs of opposites constituting a quaternio:
Ostanes said, Save me, O my God, for I stand between two exalted brilliancies known for their wickedness, and between two dim lights; each of them has reached me and I know not how to save myself from them. And it was said to me, Go up to Agathodaimon the Great and ask aid of him, and know that there is in thee somewhat of his nature, which will never be corrupted. . . . And when I ascended into the air he said to me, Take the child of the bird which is mixed with redness and spread for the gold its bed which comes forth from the glass, and place it in its vessel whence it has no power to come out except when thou desirest, and leave it until its moistness has departed.25
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[7] In the Consilium coniugii there is a similar quaternio with the four qualities arranged as combinations of two contraries, cold and moist, which are not friendly to heat and dryness.33 Other quaternions are: The stone is first an old man, in the end a youth, because the albedo comes at the beginning and the rubedo at the end.34 Similarly the elements are arranged as two manifesta (water and earth), and two occulta (air and fire).35 A further quaternio is suggested by the saying of Bernardus Trevisanus: The upper has the nature of the lower, and the ascending has the nature of the descending.36 The following combination is from the Tractatus Micreris: In it [the Indian Ocean]37 are images of heaven and earth, of summer, autumn, winter, and spring, male and female. If thou callest this spiritual, what thou doest is probable; if corporeal, thou sayest the truth; if heavenly, thou liest not; if earthly, thou hast well spoken.38 Here we are dealing with a double quaternio having the structure shown in the diagram on page 10.
[8] The double quaternio or ogdoad stands for a totality, for something that is at once heavenly and earthly, spiritual or corporeal, and is found in the Indian Ocean, that is to say in the unconscious. It is without doubt the Microcosm, the mystical Adam and bisexual Original Man in his prenatal state, as it were, when he is identical with the unconscious. Hence in Gnosticism the Father of All is described not only as masculine and feminine (or neither), but as Bythos, the abyss. In the scholia to the Tractatus aureus Hermetis39 there is a quaternio consisting of superius / inferius, exterius / interius. They are united into one thing by means of the circular distillation, named the Pelican:40 Let all be one in one circle or vessel. For this vessel is the true philosophical Pelican, nor is any other to be sought after in all the world. The text gives the following diagram:
[9] B C D E represent the outside, A is the inside, as it were the origin and source from which the other letters flow, and likewise the final goal to which they flow back,41 F G stands for Above and Below. Together the letters A B C D E F G clearly signify the hidden magical Septenary. The central point A, the origin and goal, the Ocean or great sea, is also called a circulus exiguus, very small circle, and a mediator making peace between the enemies or elements, that they may love one another in a meet embrace.42 This little inner circle corresponds to the Mercurial Fountain in the Rosarium, which I have described in my Psychology of the Transference. The text calls it the more spiritual, perfect, and nobler Mercurius,43 the true arcane substance, a spirit, and goes on:
For the spirit alone penetrates all things, even the most solid bodies.44 Thus the catholicity of religion, or of the true Church, consists not in a visible and bodily gathering together of men, but in the invisible, spiritual concord and harmony of those who believe devoutly and truly in the one Jesus Christ. Whoever attaches himself to a particular church outside this King of Kings, who alone is the shepherd of the true spiritual church, is a sectarian, a schismatic, and a heretic. For the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation, but is within us, as our Saviour himself says in the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke.45
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[10] From this remarkable excursus we learn, first of all, that the centre unites the four and the seven into one.48 The unifying agent is the spirit Mercurius, and this singular spirit then causes the author to confess himself a member of the Ecclesia spiritualis, for the spirit is God. This religious background is already apparent in the choice of the term Pelican for the circular process, since this bird is a well-known allegory of Christ.49 The idea of Mercurius as a peacemaker, the mediator between the warring elements and producer of unity, probably goes back to Ephesians 2 : 13ff.:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of two, so making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. [RSV]50
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
As we shall see, these designations are valid not only with respect to art history, but also to aesthetics, cultural history, and the history of the psyche and the mind. The achievement of perspective indicates man's discovery and consequent coming to awareness of space, whereas the unrealized perspective indicates that space is dormant in man and that he is not yet awakened to it. Moreover, the unperspectival world suggests a state in which man lacks self-identity: he belongs to a unit, such as a tribe or communal group, where the emphasis is not yet on the person but on the impersonal, not an the "I" but on the communal group, the qualitative mode of the collective. The illuminated manuscripts and gilt ground of early Romanesque painting depict theunperspectival world that retained the prevailing constitutive elements of Mediterranean antiquity. Not until the Gothic, the forerunner of the Renaissance was there a shift in emphasis. Before that space is not yet our depth-space, rather a cavern (and vault), or simply an in-between space; in both instances it is undifferentiated space. This situation bespeaks for us a hardly conceivable enclosure in the world, an intimate bond between outer and inner suggestive of a correspondence only faintly discernible between soul and nature. This condition was gradually destroyed by the expansion and growing strength of Christianity whose teaching of detachment from nature transforms this destruction into an act of liberation.
Man's lack of spatial awareness is attended by a lack of ego-consciousness, since in order to objectify and qualify space, a self-conscious "I" is required that is able to stand opposite or confront space, as well as to depict or represent it by projecting it out of his soul or psyche. In this light, Worringer's statements regarding the lack of all space consciousness in Egyptian art are perfectly valid: "Only in the rudimentary form of prehistorical space and cave magic does space have a role in Egyptian architecture . . . . The Egyptians were neutral and indifferent toward space . . . . They were not even potentially aware of spatiality. Their experience was not trans-spatial but pre-spatial; . . . their culture of oasis cultivation was spaceless . . . . Their culture knew only spatial limitations and enclosures in architecture but no inwardness or interiority as such. Just as their engraved reliefs lacked shadow depth, so too was their architecture devoid of special depth. The third dimension, that is the actual dimension of life's tension and polarity, was experience not as a quality but as a mere quantity. How then was space, the moment of depth-seeking extent, to enter their awareness as an independent quality apart from all corporality? . . . The Egyptians lacked utterly any spatial consciousness."
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This has been indirectly confirmed by von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, who has documented two opposing yet complementary structural elements of ancient art as it emerged from the Megalithic (stone) age. The first, Dolmen architecture, entered the Mediterranean region primarily from Northern and Western Europe and was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature and survives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Par thenon. Space is visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whose structure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels and corresponds to Euclidean cubic space.
The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinbergs view is the uterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterranean area from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman dome architecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely a vault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmological conception of the Oriental matriarchal religions for, which the world itself is nothing but a vast cavern. It is of interest that Plato, in his famous allegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.
We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity as undifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of the maternal womb;. expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual, exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements, the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave the forces to which unperspectival man was subject reflects his inextricable relationship to his parental world and, consequently, his complete dependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modern sense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" where outer objective space is still non-existent.
The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of the ancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christian ecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements does not, as we will see later emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychical and mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to the Son of Man; the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome of Christian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinity represented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.
Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christ the world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. The boldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examine the Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporates stylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, of course, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space found in the murals of Pompeii.
Besides their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges. It was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three-dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.
2. The Perspectival World
1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
plicated elements, successively created by the working of
chemistry and of Life. At the present time I can see no more
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
mass of bodies. Among ' normal ' chemical elements, stability
and longevity appear to be the rule : but that illusion has been
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elements of consciousness, exacdy as the elements of matter
which they subtend, complicate and differentiate their nature,
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number of very simple material elements (that is to say, with a
very poor within), to State B defined by a smaller number of
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the same time more highly individualised elements gradually
escape from the slavery of large numbers. They allow their basic
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tangential one (for the tension between elements increases with
1 Let it be noted in passing that the less an element is ' centred ' (i.e. the
1.02 - Twenty-two Letters, #Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice, #Anonymous, #Various
There are twenty-two letters, stamina. Three of them, however, are the first elements, fundamentals or mothers, seven double and twelve simple consonants. The three fundamental letters have as their basis the balance. In one scale 17 is the merit and in the other criminality, which are placed in equilibrium by the tongue. The three fundamental letters signify, as is mute like the water and hissing like the fire, there is among them, a breath of air which reconciles them.
SECTION 2.
1.02 - What is Psycho therapy?, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
conscious of the original traumatic elements with the aid of the cathartic
method. But even this comparatively simple method and its theory
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examination of the material could the traumatic elements be so constellated
as to result in abreaction of the original affective situations from which the
10.31 - The Mystery of The Five Senses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
India, the World and the Ashram The Mystery of the Five elements
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenThe Mystery of The Five Senses
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Continuing farther, if we go beyond the five senses, we have still another sense, it is mind, the sixth sense; it is in and through the mind that the other five senses distil their perceptions allowing a coordinated picture of the sense-experiences. Now, to attain, to realise, to possess the Truth means, first of all, to know the Truth: for, knowing as we know, is the function of the mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is declared, the mind is to be expunged altogether or silenced at least. One must get away, one must withdraw from that play of activity and be far from it. True knowledge comes through revelations. It descends from above, it does not enter by a level side-door and it comes only when the mind is not there. But this also, as in the other cases, as in respect of the other senses, is an extreme view. Like the other senses the mind too can be turned inward or upward, made a receptive organ or instrument. When turned round, when it is the Mind of the mind, then there begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contri bution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surpa (beautiful and perfect form) chanted by the Vedic Rishis that the purified mind models for the Gods to inhabitit is what the poets and prophets always aspire for in their creative consciousness.
But these separate senses with their separate qualities are not really separate. In the final account of things, the account held in the Supreme Consciousness, at the highest height, these diverse elements or movements are diverse but not exclusive of one another. When they find themselves in the supreme consciousness, they do not, like the rivers of which the Upanishads speak, move and merge into the sea giving up their separate individual name and function. These senses do maintain their identity, each its own, even when they together are all of them part and parcel of the Supreme Universal Consciousness. Only, they become supple and malleable, they intertwine, mix together, even one doing another's work. Also, as things exist at present, modern knowledge has found out that a blind man can see, literally see, through some part of his body; the sense of hearing is capable of bringing to you the vision of colours. And the olfactory organ can reveal to you the taste of things. Indeed it has been found that not only at the sight of good food, but in contemplating an extraordinarily beautiful scenery or while listening to an exquisite piece of music, the mouth waters. It is curious to note that Indra, the Lord of the gods, the Vedic lord of the mind and the senses, is said to have transformed the pores of his skin into so many eyes, so that he could see all things around at once, globally: it is why he was called Sahasralochana or Sahasraksha, one with a thousand eyes. The truth is that all the different senses are only extensions of one unitary sensibility and the variation depends on a particular mode or stress on the generalised sensibility.
This is what the Rishis meant when they named and represented even the senses as gods. The gods are many, each has his own attribute and function, but they form one indivisible unity.
The senses therefore are not merely externalisers but they are also internalisers. They are modes and movements that work separately and conjointly and present aspects of the Supreme Reality. These aspects are there in the very essence and the constitution of the One Truth, also they are projected outwards to manifest and embody those very elements in the material manifestation and incarnation of the Supreme Divine:
A magical accord quickened and attuned
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India, the World and the Ashram The Mystery of the Five elements
10.32 - The Mystery of the Five Elements, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:10.32 - The Mystery of the Five elements
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenThe Mystery of the Five elements
The Mystery of the Five elements
The material world, as the ancient sages viewed it, is composed of five elements. They are, as we know, (I) earth (kiti), (2) water (ap), (3) fire (tej), (4) air (marut), and (5) space or ether (vyom), mounting from the grossest to those that are more and more subtle. The subtlest, the topmost in the scale is space or ether. As we descend in the scale, each succeeding element becomes more and more concrete than the preceding one. Thus air is denser than space, fire is denser than air, water is denser than fire and earth is the densest of allsolidity belongs to earth alone. Water is liquid, fire gaseous, air is fluid, and ether is the most tenuous. Now this hierarchy can be considered also as a pyramid of qualities, qualities of matter and the material world tapering upward. The first one, the topmost, space, possesses the quality of sound or vibration; it is the field giving out waves that originate sound.1 The next element is air, its special quality as found in the ancient knowledge is the quality of touch: it gives the sensation of touch, you can touch it, it touches you and you recognise its existence in that way. Touch however is its own, its primary quality but it takes up also the quality of the previous, the subtler element, in order to become more and more evolved, more and more concrete, that is to say, in the material way. Air has thus a double quality, sound and touch It is tactile, and it is sonorous. The third one, fire, has the quality of possessing a form; it has visibility in addition to the two qualities of the two previous elements, which it takes up: thus fire is visible, it can be touchedyes, it may burn also and it gives out sound. The fourth element, water, adds a fourth quality which is its own, namely, taste. Water has taste, very delightful taste to mortals. A Greek poet2 says water has the best taste, hudor men ariston. So you can taste water, you can see its form, you can touch it, you can hear it gurgle. Coming to the last, earth has all these, qualities: in addition, what it has is, curious to say, smell. So you can hear earth's vibrations, you can touch it, see it, taste it for some earth has a very savoury taste but its own special quality is smell: it is odorous, it is sweet-scented. Kalidasa speaks with ecstasy of the strange scent that the earth emits when the fresh rains fall upon it.
So, the five senses open out to the five elements, each sense linked to its own element, each sense presenting a particular aspect of the material universe. Thus ether, the subtlest element, is present to the ear, the organ of hearing, air to the skin (twak) the organ of touch, the fire-element (radiant energy) to the eye, the liquid to the organ of taste, and earth is given over to smell. Earth is linked with smell, perhaps because it is the perfume of creation, the dense aroma of God's material energy. Also earth is the summation of all the elements and all the qualities of matter. It is the epitome of the material creation. The physical beauty of earth is well-known, the landscape and seascape, its rich variegated coloration, we all admire standing upon its bosom, but up in the air, in the wide open spaces earth appears with even a more magical beauty to which cosmonauts have given glowing tri bute. But even this visible beauty pales, I suppose, before the perfume it emits which is its celestial quality, that can only be described indeed as the sweet-scented body of the Divine Substance.
The five elements are thus the five orders of material existence viewed as correlates to the five senses of man. But they are also realities in their own right. They represent the fundamental principles underlying or characterising the nature of matter. Science speaks of the three states of mattersolid, liquid and gaseous. The five elements enumerate five states instead. Thus earth = solid, water = liquid, fire = gaseous or radiant, air = fluid, ether or space = etheric. A distinction is made between gaseous and fluid, fluid being still more dispersive and tenuous. We might take air as representing the ether spoken of in science and what we have been equating with ether may be termed the field the gravitational field, for example, of our days.
The last two may, however, be represented somewhat differently. The Maruts may symbolise the region of the subtler or supra-electromagnetic forceswhat are now called cosmic rays: they are waves or particles of such infinitesimal magnitude that some of them at least have only a mathematical substance or reality, a probability-point, although of calculable or incalculable energy! Vayu then would represent the fundamental field where these forces playperhaps something like the Einsteinian field with its "corrugated" surface: or it is like the "Pradhana" of Sankhya, the original Prakriti or basic Nature before it burst out in its creative activity.
Again, the five elements are not merely substances or states and qualities of substance, but they are also forces and energies, material forces and energiessince we have confined ourselves to matter and the material world. Science (we are always referring to Science, we have to do so since we are dealing with and speaking from the standpoint of matter and material existence), Science has familiarised us with the various forms and types of forces and energies. They are, starting from the most patent and gross, going up to more and more subtle energies, first of all mechanical energy, then (2) chemical energy, (3) electrical energy, (4) gravitational energy, and finally (5) the field energy; the last two are perhaps not very clearly differentiated and distinguished, but still one may make the distinction. And this mounting ladder of energy with its various steps, with its five steps corresponds exactly to the old Indian quintetearth, water, fire, air, space.
This is not to say that the ancients exactly knew the mysteries of modern scientific exploration. This only means that there is a parallelism between the ancient and the modern knowledge. The scale or hierarchy, from the most concrete substance through the subtler ones, to the subtlest, representing the constitution of the material world as conceived by the ancient seers finds a close and curious echo in the picture that modern science has drawn of material existence.
10.33 - On Discipline, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Mystery of the Five elements Effort and Grace
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenOn Discipline
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The Mystery of the Five elements Effort and Grace
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
A mixture that is chemically produced, like hydrogen and oxygen for instance, is not merely an arithmetical combination of two elements, because when the two are combined, some peculiar effect is produced which is not apparently present in either of the components. For instance, water is produced by a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, but we will not find the character of water either in hydrogen or in oxygen. The water that is the effect of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen in a certain proportion is a new effect altogether, and we cannot, by analysis, discover the essence of water in its original causes. Likewise, the words of a mantra, the components of a mantra, have special forces present or inherent in them, and when the words are combined in the requisite proportion and in the manner mentioned in the chandas shastra, they produce a third kind of effect which is the purpose or intention of the mantra, and that effect is called the devata. We may say that water is the devata of hydrogen and oxygen it is the deity. That is the intention. That is the purpose. That is what we require. That is what we are aiming at and want.
The mantra, when it is chanted, generates a force which is the object of the realisation of the sadhaka. A mantra has a chandas, or the combining feature, which is the determining factor of the particular shape that the effect takes, and so the mantra determines the deity, and vice versa. So we have a deity, or the aim or the goal of the mantra, and the chandas of the mantra, as well as another thing altogether, namely, the discoverer of the mantra has some say in this matter. The discoverer of the mantra is called the rishi of the mantra. A rishi is a seer of the mantra not merely a composer like a writer, or an author, or a poet but a seer into the truth of a mantra, to whom the mantra, in its truth, has been revealed in his meditations; and so the will of the seer also is present there. So, according to our tradition, when we chant a mantra we remember the rishi of the mantra, the chandas of the mantra, and the deity of the mantra. Rishis, chandas, devata these three are always remembered before the mantra is chanted, so that we have the grace of these divine precedents of the sacred mantra that we are going to chant, because these are the causes behind the action that the mantra takes.
1.036 - The Rise of Obstacles in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The world appears to be opposed to what we are doing and intending on account of the peculiar, disharmonious elements present in us, into which we cannot have proper insight at present, and when these elements in us get transformed into a state of harmony with the forces of the world outside, then the truth will reveal itself that the enemy is our friend. tmaiva hy tmano bandhur tmaiva ripur tmana (B.G. VI.5). The Bhagavadgita tells us that our higher being may appear as our own enemy. God Himself may look like an enemy one day, because our intentions, based as they are on our psychophysical individuality, may not concur with the will of the Supreme, and then it is likely we will feel the will of the Universe, the will of God, and the intentions of nature are contrary to what we are intending to do.
But when these impending impediments get reversed in their order of action and procedure, we face the world directly and do not turn our backs to it. Now we are turning our backs to nature. It is moving in one direction, and we are moving in the opposite direction, and therefore there is a repulsion of two forces and an apparent feeling of irreconcilability between our intentions and the intentions of the world or of nature. The reason is that we have turned our backs to nature. While the order of nature requires cognition of things from the point of view of their own subjecthood or selfhood, we turn our backs to this truth and regard everything as an object. This is the reason why there is conflict between us and nature.
1.037 - Preventing the Fall in Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The reason is simple. In the practice of yoga the whole being is active and, therefore, it starts waking up every blessed thing in this world whatever may be sleeping anywhere. Even invisible forces, even distant elements may feel that some strange activity is going on in some part of the universe. We must have heard in the Epics and Puranas that even the gods are distressed by the tapas of yogis. It means that the meditative activity of a sincere seeker can tell upon even very far and distant regions like the heavens, and not merely the corners of the earth. But our ordinary little work that is going on in a shop, a factory or an office may not be felt at all in such regions. The reason is that these ordinary activities are shallow; they are not deep enough. They do not touch the bottom of things, and therefore the reactions set up are also mild.
But in yoga, what actually moves is the very root of our being. Our soul itself is yearning in the aspiration for the Ultimate Reality. It is not a function of a part of the psychological organs like mentation, intellection, egoism, etc. It is every blessed thing that is in us that becomes active, and we may say there is a sort of conscription of every part of our personality in this warfare called the practice of yoga. Every individual is harnessed into the army. Everyone is a soldier when this war takes place. There is no civilian at all in the practice of yoga; everyone is active like an army man everyone, and no one is excluded. Every part of the personality becomes roused, and we can imagine what reactions this can set up. You may ask me why they should set up reactions. Can this noble activity called yoga not be carried on without any adverse reactions.
It is not the intention of the practice of yoga to set up reactions, but they automatically happen on account of there being certain obstructing elements within us which get stirred up automatically due to the cleansing process that is going on in the practice of yoga. They are not really enemies working, but are the impurities that are leaving. When the impurities are driven out of the personality within, they look like violent opposing elements putting on various types of faces - sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes unintelligible, sometimes very inscrutable because we have within us, potentially, infinite latencies of past karma, impressions of previous deeds, frustrated desires, and so on and so forth, all of which have to come out one day or the other if the field is to be clean. This cleaning is done by yoga.
Then, we have what are known as the obstacles or the impediments. Though there can be endless types of obstacles in the practice of yoga, Patanjali mentions a few leading obstacles which have to be taken care of by a student, with the guidance of a competent master, because when these obstacles come, they do not come in the form of obstacles. A shrewd enemy always comes like a friend, for if we openly come as an enemy we will not succeed because the other party will know what we are. Ravana always comes as a sannyasin in order that he may succeed. If he comes as Ravana himself, nothing will happen; everybody will understand what is coming. So these peculiar reactions, called impediments, do not come openly as impediments, and we will not know that they are the consequences of our practice. We will attribute these experiences to some other persons or conditions outside us, and will not be able to understand that they are caused by certain internal practices of our own.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
elements exist. The ignored elements conspire, so to speak, as a consequence of their repression and
make their existence known, inevitably, in some undesirable manner.
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these constituent elements of reality is balanced, and stable, in contrast to an ideology and far less
likely to produce an outburst of social psychopathology. But the forces that make up the world as a forum
1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
A material body of the four elements31 is trouble. A material
body is subject to birth and death. But the real body exists without
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four elements, your nature is basically pure. It can't be corrupted.
Your real body is basically pure. It can't be corrupted. Your real
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four elements. Without this mind we can't move. The body has no
awareness. Like a plant or stone, the body has no nature. So how
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
constitutive elements, hear of atoms? This notion had its origin
in archetypal ideas, that is, in primordial images which were
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clusion that the basic psychic elements are infinitely varied and
ever changing, so as utterly to defy our powers of imagination.
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
comprised of various phases, which are elements
allowing us to establish this relationship, such as deity
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This imprint is formed by using all elements of our
personality, body, speech, and mind.
1.03 - On Knowledge of the World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Know, that the state previous to death is called the world, because mortality is close at hand. The state after death is called the future, because its rest is permanent. The purpose and design of the world, is to afford an opportunity [66] to make provision for the future, to acquire knowledge, and to worship God. Man as at first created, was destitute of works, and void of perfection : but he was made capable of reaching perfection and attaining felicity, so that while in a material world he could look forward to a spiritual world, understand whence he came, what are his duties, that he is soon to depart, and might be always ready. Man's felicity, which consists in the contemplation of the beauty of God, cannot be vouchsafed to him, until the eye of his judgment is opened. But the eye of judgment is opened by the contemplation of the works of God, and by understanding his almighty power. The contemplation of the works of God is by means of the senses, which become the key to all knowledge of God. The senses subsist by means of the body, and the body is composed of four different elements. Those therefore who are endowed with understanding, conscious of the frailty of their bodies should make all diligence to quit this kingdom of corruption and to enter permanently into the unchanging kingdom.
Know, O inquirer after the divine secrets, that there are two things needful to man in this world; first of all, he needs to acquire spiritual food to preserve his heart from perishing. The aliment of the heart consists in the love and knowledge of God; for whatever is a necessity of the nature of any one, that he loves, as we have before mentioned. The ruin of the soul consists in the predominance of some other love over the love of God, which veils the divine love. Our refuge is in God !
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
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?
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We see then that, when the crisis came, each of these young men forgot the particular personality, which he had built up out of the elements provided by his heredity and the environment in which he had grown up; that one resisted the normally irresistible temptation to identify himself with his mood of the moment, another the temptation to identify himself with his private day-dreams, and so on with the rest; and that all of them behaved in the same strikingly similar and wholly admirable way. It was as though the crisis and the preliminary training for crisis had lifted them out of their divergent personalities and raised them to the same higher level.
Sometimes crisis alone, without any preparatory training, is sufficient to make a man forget to be his customary self and become, for the time being, something quite different. Thus the most unlikely people will, under the influence of disaster, temporarily turn into heroes, martyrs, selfless labourers for the good of their fellows. Very often, too, the proximity of death produces similar results. For example, Samuel Johnson behaved in one way during almost the whole of his life and in quite another way during his last illness. The fascinatingly complex personality, in which six generations of Boswellians have taken so much delight the learned boor and glutton, the kindhearted bully, the superstitious intellectual, the convinced Christian who was a fetishist, the courageous man who was terrified of deathbecame, while he was actually dying, simple, single, serene and God-centred.
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It is in virtue of his absorption in God and just because he has not identified his being with the inborn and acquired elements of his private personality, that the saint is able to exercise his entirely non-coercive and therefore entirely beneficent influence on individuals and even on whole societies. Or, to be more accurate, it is because he has purged himself of selfness that divine Reality is able to use him as a channel of grace and power. I live, yet not I, but Christ the eternal Logosliveth in me. True of the saint, this must a fortiori be true of the Avatar, or incarnation of God. If, insofar as he was a saint, St. Paul was not I, then certainly Christ was not I; and to talk, as so many liberal churchmen now do, of worshipping the personality of Jesus, is an absurdity. For, obviously, had Jesus remained content merely to have a personality, like the rest of us, he would never have exercised the kind of influence which in fact he did exercise, and it would never have occurred to anyone to regard him as a divine incarnation and to identify him with the Logos. That he came to be thought of as the Christ was due to the fact that he had passed beyond selfness and had become the bodily and mental conduit through which a more than personal, supernatural life flowed down into the world.
Souls which have come to the unitive knowledge of God, are, in Benet of Canfields phrase, almost nothing in themselves and all in God. This vanishing residue of selfness persists because, in some slight measure, they still identify their being with some innate psycho-physical idiosyncrasy, some acquired habit of thought or feeling, some convention or unanalyzed prejudice current in the social environment. Jesus was almost wholly absorbed in the esential will of God; but in spite of this, he may have retained some elements of selfness. To what extent there was any I associated with the more-than-personal, divine Not-I, it is very difficult, on the basis of the existing evidence, to judge. For example, did Jesus interpret his experience of divine Reality and his own spontaneous inferences from that experience in terms of those fascinating apocalyptic notions current in contemporary Jewish circles? Some eminent scholars have argued that the doctrine of the worlds imminent dissolution was the central core of his teaching. Others, equally learned, have held that it was attributed to him by the authors of the Synoptic Gospels, and that Jesus himself did not identify his experience and his theological thinking with locally popular opinions. Which party is right? Goodness knows. On this subject, as on so many others, the existing evidence does not permit of a certain and unambiguous answer.
The moral of all this is plain. The quantity and quality of the surviving biographical documents are such that we have no means of knowing what the residual personality of Jesus was really like. But if the Gospels tell us very little about the I which was Jesus, they make up for this deficiency by telling us inferentially, in the parables and discourses, a good deal about the spiritual not-I, whose manifest presence in the mortal man was the reason why his disciples called him the Christ and identified him with the eternal Logos.
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Can the many fantastic and mutually incompatible theories of expiation and atonement, which have been grafted onto the Christian doctrine of divine incarnation, be regarded as indispensable elements in a sane theology? I find it difficult to imagine how anyone who has looked into a history of these notions, as expounded, for example, by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by Athanasius and Augustine, by Anselm and Luther, by Calvin and Grotius, can plausibly answer this question in the affirmative. In the present context, it will be enough to call attention to one of the bitterest of all the bitter ironies of history. For the Christ of the Gospels, lawyers seemed further from the Kingdom of Heaven, more hopelessly impervious to Reality, than almost any other class of human beings except the rich. But Christian theology, especially that of the Western churches, was the product of minds imbued with Jewish and Roman legalism. In all too many instances the immediate insights of the Avatar and the theocentric saint were rationalized into a system, not by philosophers, but by speculative barristers and metaphysical jurists. Why should what Abbot John Chapman calls the problem of reconciling (not merely uniting) Mysticism and Christianity be so extremely difficult? Simply because so much Roman and Protestant thinking was done by those very lawyers whom Christ regarded as being peculiarly incapable of understanding the true Nature of Things. The Abbot (Chapman is apparently referring to Abbot Marmion) says St John of the Cross is like a sponge full of Christianity. You can squeeze it all out, and the full mystical theory (in other words, the pure Perennial Philosophy) remains. Consequently for fifteen years or so I hated St John of the Cross and called him a Buddhist. I loved St Teresa and read her over and over again. She is first a Christian, only secondarily a mystic. Then I found I had wasted fifteen years, so far as prayer was concerned.
Now see the meaning of these two sayings of Christs. The one, No man cometh unto the Father but by me, that is through my life. The other saying, No man cometh unto me except the Father draw him; that is, he does not take my life upon him and follow after me, except he is moved and drawn of my Father, that is, of the Simple and Perfect Good, of which St. Paul saith, When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
pared ... at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid
bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the ele-
1.03 - Tara, Liberator from the Eight Dangers, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
each particular afiction. In the case of pride, one such antidote is contemplation of a difcult topic, such as the twelve sources and eighteen elements.
What are those? we may ask. But that is the point: these topics, while essential for actualizing the path, are difcult to understand. Recognizing how
1.03 - THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
plicity of the elements still obtains at the periphery, in the more
or less ionised gases of the atmosphere and the stratosphere and,
--
simple bodies) the affinities of their elements. Carrying the
1 Except, chough very fugitively, in the atmosphere of the planets nearest
--
narrow limit to the internal architecture of its elements. Accord-
ing to latest estimates, we have found only a few hundred silicates
--
indefinitely extended mosaic of small elements such as we know
to be the structure of a crystal, which, thanks to X-rays, can now
--
In the course of and by virtue of the initial advance of the elements
on earth towards the crystalline state, energy was constandy
--
complexity and instability of their elements. This is the realm of
polymerisation* in which die particles ' concatenate ', group
--
with the increasing chemical complexity of the elements of which
it represents the inner lining. But the chemical complexity of the
--
in the particular, superficial zone in which its elements polymerise.
72
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
nation of its elements. In our time Mankind seems to be approaching its
critical point of social organization.
--
erable an existence as possible for each of the individual elements
of Mankind. But it comes to the forefront, it thrusts itself urgendy
--
arate elements. For each individual the business, the duty and the
interest of life consist in achieving, in opposition to others, his own ut-
--
ists or finally matters except the Whole. For the elements of the
world to become absorbed within themselves by separation from
--
to another through all the elements, it becomes a process of general
volatilization infecting Mankind as a whole. To adopt the hypothesis
--
ation tends to stifle and neutralize the elements which compose it;
but why should we look for a model of collectivity in what is no more
--
groupings in which the elements intermingle and drown, or more
exactly at the opposite pole to them, Nature shows herself to be full
--
fore the specialization of the elements takes place in the field of
material junctions nutrition, reproduction, defense, etc. which ac-
--
by the fundamental mechanism of union the elements of con-
sciousness, drawing together, enhance what is most incommunica-
--
grees? Before passing into the Beyond, the World and its elements
must attain what may be called their "point of annihilation." And
1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
For, when the son sleeps with the mother, she kills him with the stroke of a viper (viperino conatu). This viciousness recalls the murderous role of Isis,81 who laid the noble worm in the path of the heavenly Father, Ra.82 Isis, however, is also the healer, for she not only cured Ra of the poisoning but put together the dismembered Osiris. As such she personifies that arcane substance, be it dew83 or the aqua permanens84 which unites the hostile elements into one. This synthesis is described in the myth of Isis, who collected the scattered limbs of his body and bathed them with her tears and laid them in a secret grave beneath the bank of the Nile.85 The cognomen of Isis was
, the Black One.86 Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe (palla nigerrima, robe of deepest black),87 and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life88 as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.89 She was also called the Old One,90 and she was rated a pupil of Hermes,91 or even his daughter.92 She appears as a teacher of alchemy in the treatise Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus.93 She is mentioned in the role of a whore in Epiphanius, where she is said to have prostituted herself in Tyre.94 She signifies earth, according to Firmicus Maternus,95 and was equated with Sophia.96 She is
--
Luna is diminished that she may fill the elements. Therefore is this a great mystery. To her it was given by him who confers grace upon all things. He emptied her that he might fill her, as he also emptied himself that he might fill all things. He emptied himself that he might come down to us. He came down to us that he might rise again for all. . . . Thus has Luna proclaimed the mystery of Christ.194
[29] Thus the changefulness of the moon is paralleled by the transformation of the pre-existent Christ from a divine into a human figure through the emptying, that passage in Philippians (2 : 6) which has aroused so much comment: . . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (RSV / DV).195 Even the most tortuous explanations of theology have never improved on the lapidary paradox of St. Hilary: Deus homo, immortalis mortuus, aeternus sepultus (God-man, immortaldead, eternal-buried).196 According to Ephraem Syrus, the kenosis had the reverse effect of unburdening Creation: Because the creatures were weary of bearing the prefigurations of his glory, he disburdened them of those prefigurations, even as he had disburdened the womb that bore him.197
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
a. of a larger number of elements, which are
b. more tighdy organized among themselves.
--
only on the number and diversity of the elements included in
each case, but at least as much on the number and correla-
tive variety of the links formed between these elements. It is
not, therefore, a matter of simple multiplicity but of organ-
--
simple chemical elements (from hydrogen to uranium)
formed by groups of atomic nuclei together with their elec-
--
plexity, the elements succeed one another in the historical
order of their birth. The place in the scale occupied by each
--
very approximately - simply by the number of elements
40
--
of life) : taking these elements in very large numbers, from
4i
--
elements grows, and the more these elements build up into
complex edifices. Such is the case of the earth, the only known
1.03 - The Principle of Water, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
In the previous chapter we have studied the origin and the qualities of the positive element of fire. In this chapter I am going to describe the opposite principle, the water. It is also derived from akasa, the etheric principle. But in comparison with fire, it has quite contrasting qualities. These basic qualities are coldness and shrinkage. The point in question are also two poles, the active one being constructive, life-giving, nourishing and protective, whereas the negative pole, similar to the one of fire, is destructive, dissecting, fermenting, and dividing. As this element owns the basic quality of shrinking and contraction, it has produced the magnetic fluid. Fire, as well as water, are operating in all regions. According to the rules of creation, the fiery principle would not be able to exist all by itself if it did not conceal inside as opposite pole the principle of water. These two elements, fire and water, are the basic elements with the help of which all has been created. In consequence of these facts, we have everywhere to reckon on two main elements. Moreover with the electrical and magnetical fluids which represent the contrasting polarities.
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Sephirah. Malkus is the world of the four elements, matter in its entirety, and all the forms perceived by our five senses, summing up in a crystallization the former nine digits or series of ideas.
Seb is the Egyptian God attri buted to Malkus, since he is figured with the head of a crocodile, the Egyptian hiero- glyph of gross matter. Psyche, the lower Nephthys and the unmarried Isis, are other gods attri buted. The Virgin, or the Bride, is another Zoharic title for Malkus, used however in a particular sense which will be considered in Chapter
1.03 - THE STUDY (The Exorcism), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
(These elements),
Their properties
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is
conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered;
--
scious" (pars. 296!!.), the syzygy consists of three elements: the femininity pertain-
ing to the man and the masculinity pertaining to the woman; the experience
1.03 - The Tale of the Alchemist Who Sold His Soul, #The Castle of Crossed Destinies, #Italo Calvino, #Fiction
We could believe that, from his earliest youth (this was the meaning of the portrait with adolescent features, which could at the same time allude also to the elixir of long life) he had had no other passion (the fountain remained nevertheless an amorous symbol) save the manipulation of the elements, and for years he had waited to see the yellow king of the mineral world precipitate in the depths of his cauldron. And in this quest he had finally sought the counsel and aid of those women sometimes encountered in forests, experts in philters and magic potions, devoted to the arts of witchcraft and foretelling the future (like the woman he indicated, with superstitious reverence, as The Popess).
The card that came next, The Emperor, could naturally refer to a prophecy of the forest witch: You will become the most powerful man in the world.
--
"You lock your gates in vain"-this was the answer that could be expected from the water-bearer. "I take care not to enter a City where all is of solid metal. We who live in what is fluid visit only elements that flow and mingle."
Was she a water nymph? Was she the queen of the elves of the air? An angel of the liquid fire in the earth's center?
1.03 - The three first elements, #Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice, #Anonymous, #Various
object:1.03 - The three first elements
class:chapter
--
The three first elements, are typified by a balance, in one scale the merit and in the other the criminality, which are placed in equilibrium by the tongue. These three mothers, are a great, wonderful and unknown mystery, and are sealed by six 26 rings, or elementary circles, namely: air, water and fire emanated from them, which gave birth to progenitors, and these progenitors gave birth again to some offspring.
1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
When the mind, starting from this unity, takes its second step, it arrives at a point where the possibility of differentiation manifests itself by a sort of duplication of the Unique in its two complementary elements. From the realist standpoint this duplication takes the form of an opposition between Force and the resistance to Force,inverse movements, contrary currents passing between two opposite signs of one and the same essence. From the idealist standpoint it can be regarded as a sort of objectivisation of the subjective by which universal being takes cognizance of itself.
By introducing the third term in Number the mind is able to conceive as possible an indefinite differentiation, the limitation of the two elements and their reciprocal objectivity,the conditions of individual form and individual consciousness.
So we can pass by successive steps from the unknowable to the comprehensible and from the indivisible to the visible.
1.03 - Time Series, Information, and Communication, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
Neumann, which states that, except for a set of elements of zero
probability, any element belonging to a system which goes into
--
measure 0. If we discard all elements except those of such a sub-
set, and use its appropriate measure, we shall find that the time
--
where λ k,1 of the elements to be selected from t k and t q are t 1 , λ k,2
are t 2 , and so on. It immediately results that
1.03 - YIBHOOTI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
By making Sarny ama on the elements, beginning with
the gross, and ending with the superfine, comes
mastery of the elements.
The Yogi make Samyama on the elements, first on the gross,
and then on the finer states. This Samyama is taken up more
--
So with all the elements, the Yogi can conquer them all.
tatoanimadipradurbhavah kayasanpat
--
Just as by the conquest of the elements comes glorified body,
so from the conquest of the mind will come glorified mind.
1.040 - Re-Educating the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Any particular object can be taken for the purpose of concentration, because any particular has the elements of the universal present in it. For instance, we can approach the government through any officer. He may be an officer from Madras, or from Punjab, it makes no difference. He is an officer of the government of India. So to touch the government we need not run about from place to place in search of it, because a government is like the universal it is pervading everything, and it is everywhere. We can contact this universal, called the government, through an individual or a particular that is the officer he may be any officer. Through him we can find our way to that universal principle called the government. When that officer expresses a view, is it the officer's view or is it the government's view? It is not his individual view, but it is the expression of the universal that is behind him. It is the force of the government that works through the individual, and at that time he is not an individual he is a representation of the universal. Likewise, even an idol, or an image, or a picture, or a concept can become a representation of the universal characters behind it, provided we are able to visualise these characters with sincerity of purpose.
As I mentioned, the main point to be remembered here is that while concentrating on any object, no external thought should be allowed, because the thought of an external object is the distraction which prevents concentration. The mind cannot be wholly present in the given object if there is another thing side by side or along with it. This is then vyabhicharini bhakti or divided devotion, as they call it. When we think of two things at the same time because of the presence of another thing outside that given object, the devotion is split. The force of the mind gets diminished on account of a channelisation of the mental energy in two directions. In the beginning, the mind will refuse to concentrate like this because it is fed by diverse food. So what is essential in the beginning is to diminish the directions in which the mind moves to the minimum possible. Though it is not possible to bring the mind to a single point, we can bring it to the minimum possible or conceivable number of items of concentration.
1.045 - Piercing the Structure of the Object, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is now that a condition or a state supervenes where there is a sudden split of this cosmic condition into the external and the internal. This is the beginning of what they call samsara or bondage of the jiva. There is no bondage as long as a bifurcation is not introduced between the subject and the object of knowledge. Bondage commences the moment there is a severance of the consciousness from its content, an isolation of the subject from the object. This happens subsequent to the appearance of ahamkara. So, on the objective side, we have what are known as the tanmatras and the mahabhutas. The tanmatras are the subtle principles behind the five gross elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether, and they are called sabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa and gandha in Sanskrit, meaning thereby the sensations of sound, touch, form, taste and smell which have connection with the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether prithivi, appu, tejo, vayu and akasa. This is the external side of the world. Generally, what we call the world is constituted of these five great elements or mahabhutas. But the experiencing side, the subject side, is what is known as the jiva, the principle of individuality you, I, and everyone included who have an extrovert vision of these five mahabhutas, all of which we regard as something outside us, notwithstanding that every one of us, including the bhutas, have come from the same principle of ahamkara. It is something like the right hand looking at the left hand as an object of its perception, though both these are emanations of a single substance, a single unifying principle - namely, the bodily organism.
The subject side is the individual, the jiva, which has a physical body made up of the five elements themselves earth, water, fire, air and ether. Then we have the five pranas prana, apana, vyana, udana and samana. There are the senses the five senses of knowledge and the five of action. And then there is the principle of mentation there is the intellect and all these complexities constituting what is known as the subtle body of the individual. This is the subject side, while the object side is formed of the five elements mentioned.
The bondage of the jiva consists in the isolation of its experiencing unit, namely, consciousness, from the object of its experience. This is the reason why there is desire of every kind. A desire is nothing but an attempt of consciousness to gain what is not contained within its own self. The content of consciousness is what is desired by consciousness, but that content is cut off due to a peculiar phenomenon that has arisen, and the phenomenon is the principle of isolation of the subject from the object. The purpose of yoga is to bring about a reunion of this twofold principle known as the subject and the object, so that it may go back to the original condition where it was not so separated. The means of action in the process of meditation, of course, is consciousness itself; we may call it mind in a grosser form.
--
So in the various methods of meditation prescribed by Patanjali, he takes us, stage by stage, from the grosser form to the subtler form, from the consciousness of the five elements, which is the lowest form of experience that we can have, higher up to the tanmatras, which are the subtler principles behind the elements, and then to the ahamkara, the mahat and the prakriti, and finally to the supreme purusha itself. The resting of the purusha in its own consciousness is called kaivalya or moksha. The aim of yoga is liberation which is another name for the non-objectification of the consciousness of the purusha by means of manifestation through the forms of prakriti, and a resting of the purusha in its own self, in its Supreme Absoluteness. .
The externalisation of the consciousness of the purusha takes place by degrees, as it was mentioned in this cosmological process. In the beginning there is only a potentiality of such manifestation, which is the condition of mulaprakriti. Then there is an actual manifestation, though not a binding form of it, which is called the mahat. Then again there is a further concretisation of it, which is a lower condition still, yet not a binding condition because of the universality of consciousness still present there, which is the state of the cosmic ahamkara. Then there is a fall, a sudden cut of consciousness into the subjective side and the objective side, which is the problem of the jiva, the difficulty of man every form of tension and unknowing. So, in the beginning, the grossest form becomes the object of meditation. From the gross, we go to the subtle. From the subtle, we rise to that state of awareness which is prior to the manifestation of even the subtle and the gross. And finally, we go to the ultimate cause of all things.
1.04 - A Leader, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, as long as I can, as long as I am not useful to my brothers there, and can be of service to them here by bringing together all the elements we need to take up the struggle again; but this time the struggle will be as peaceful and intellectual as lies within our power.
So you will come and see us again, wont you? Bring us your projects and the plans for your pamphlet. We shall talk about all that again in more detail.
1.04 - Body, Soul and Spirit, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
If we examine the human physical body, we find the same materials and forces in it as we find outside it in the rest of the physical world. It is the same with the spirit-man. In it pulsate the elements of the external spirit world. In it the forces of the rest of the spirit world are active. As a being within the physical skin becomes a self-contained entity, living and feeling, so also in the spirit world. The spiritual skin which separates the spirit man from the uniform spirit world makes him an independent being within it, living a life within himself and perceiving intuitively the spiritual content of the world. This "spiritual skin" will be called spirit-sheath. (In theosophical literature it is called auric sheath.) It must be kept clearly in mind that the spiritual skin expands continually with the advancing human evolution, so that the spiritual individuality of man (his auric sheath) is capable of enlargement to an unlimited extent.
p. 51
1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice,
of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature.
--
religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical,
namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to
--
power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone
knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of which he
1.04 - Narayana appearance, in the beginning of the Kalpa, as the Varaha (boar), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Prīthivī (Earth).-Hail to thee, who art all creatures; to thee, the holder of the mace and shell: elevate me now from this place, as thou hast upraised me in days of old. From thee have I proceeded; of thee do I consist; as do the skies, and all other existing things. Hail to thee, spirit of the supreme spirit; to thee, soul of soul; to thee, who art discrete and indiscrete matter; who art one with the elements and with time. Thou art the creator of all things, their preserver, and their destroyer, in the forms, oh lord, of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Rudra, at the seasons of creation, duration, and dissolution. When thou hast devoured all things, thou reposest on the ocean that sweeps over the world, meditated upon, oh Govinda, by the wise. No one knoweth thy true nature, and the gods adore thee only in the forms it bath pleased thee to assume. They who are desirous of final liberation, worship thee as the supreme Brahmā; and who that adores not Vāsudeva, shall obtain emancipation? Whatever may be apprehended by the mind, whatever may be perceived by the senses, whatever may he discerned by the intellect, all is but a form of thee. I am of thee, upheld by thee; thou art my creator, and to thee I fly for refuge: hence, in this universe, Mādhavī (the bride of Mādhava or Viṣṇu) is my designation. Triumph to the essence of all wisdom, to the unchangeable, the imperishable: triumph to the eternal; to the indiscrete, to the essence of discrete things: to him who is both cause and effect; who is the universe; the sinless lord of sacrifice[4]; triumph. Thou art sacrifice; thou art the oblation; thou art the mystic Omkāra; thou art the sacrificial fires; thou art the Vedas, and their dependent sciences; thou art, Hari, the object of all worship[5]. The sun, the stars, the planets, the whole world; all that is formless, or that has form; all that is visible, or invisible; all, Puruṣottama, that I have said, or left unsaid; all this, Supreme, thou art. Hail to thee, again and again! hail! all hail!
Parāśara said:-
--
[1]: This creation is of the secondary order, or Pratiserga; water, and even the earth, being in existence, and consequently having been preceded by the creation of Mahat and the elements. It is also a different Pratiserga from that described by Manu, in which Swayambhu first creates the waters, then the egg: one of the simplest forms, and perhaps therefore one of the earliest in which the tradition occurs.
[2]: This is the well known verse of Menu, I. 8, rendered by Sir Wm. Jones, "The waters are called Nārā, because they were the production of Nara, or 'the spirit' of God; and since they were his first Ayana, or place of motion, he thence is named Nārāyaṇa, or 'moving on the waters.'" Now although there can be little doubt that this tradition is in substance the same as that of Genesis, the language of the translation is perhaps more scriptural than p. 28 is quite warranted. The waters, it is said in the text of Manu, were the progeny of Nara, which Kullūka Bhaṭṭa explains Paramātmā, the supreme soul; that is, they were the first productions of God in creation. Ayana, instead of 'place of motion,' is explained by Āsraya, place of abiding.' Nārāyaṇa means, therefore, he whose place of abiding was the deep. The verse occurs in several of the Purāṇas, in general in nearly the same words, and almost always as a quotation, as in our text The Li
1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
If you wish, O student of the mysteries of God, to learn the essential facts about death, you must know that there are in man two kinds of spirit, one of which is of the nature of the spirit in animals and which we call animal spirit, and the other is of the nature of the spirit of angels, which we call human spirit. The fountain of the animal spirit is in that heart which is in the left side of the breast, and is a piece of flesh. It is a delicate exhalation from the humors within the animal. Its constitution is fixed in certain [75] proportions, just as is that of oxymel, which is composed of honey and vinegar that on being mixed, while they lose their own flavor, acquire a new, delicate and useful flavor, So also, by the blending of the various elements of the body, a delicate exhalation is the result, which finds its home in the heart. It gains other delicate qualities from the heart, and from thence the blood channels, which are the veins of pulsation, are supplied. The exhalation passes by their means to the brain and from thence flows to all the members. It is exceedingly hot, but in its passage to the brain, it loses some of its heat and becomes tepid. By the distribution of this spirit through the body, the eye sees, the ear hears, the tongue tastes, the nose smells, and the rest of the organs are endowed with their proper movements and perform their appropriate functions....
So long as the spirit works in equilibrium, it is capable of delicate operations and effects; but so soon as excess of heat or cold destroys the equilibrium, the exhaled fluid is diminished, and it becomes incapable of movement and sensation....
--
The nature of death cannot be understood, unless we are acquainted with these two kinds of spirit and with the relations of dependence between them. Know, then, O seeker, that the animal spirit belongs to the inferior world. The elements of its four humors, blood, phlegm, bile and black bile, are fire, air, water and earth. The animal spirit is a product of a delicate exhalation from these elements. The variations in the measure of a man's health depend on the variations of heat, cold, dryness and moisture. Hence it is the object of the science of medicine to preserve these four elements in their due proportions, so that they may serve as instruments to secure perfection to the human spirit.2
The human spirit belongs to the superior world and is of an angelic substance. It has come into this world a stranger, and has descended from its original state to this temporary home, to receive its destiny from divine direction, and for the purpose of acquiring the knowledge of God. In accordance with this, God declares in his holy word, "We said to them - leave paradise all of you just as you are : a book destined for your guidance will come to you from me: fear shall never befall those who will follow it, and they shall not be afflicted."3 And that which God says in another place, points to the different degrees of worlds: "I create man of clay: and when I shall have formed man of clay and shall have breathed my spirit in him, prostrate yourselves before him in adoration."4First of all in his saying "from clay" he points to a material body. The phrase "I shall have formed" indicates the animal spirit. The phrase "shall have breathed my spirit [78] in him," means that I have given to the body of man a well balanced constitution with power and motion. I have made it capable of receiving the law, and to be a home for the knowledge of God.
1.04 - Pratyahara, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
9:Before we go on to this, however, we must consider what is meant by success in Pratyahara. This is a very extensive subject, and different authors take widely divergent views. One writer means an analysis so acute that every thought is resolved into a number of elements (see "The Psychology of Hashish," Section V, in Equinox II).
10:Others take the view that success in the practice is something like the experience which Sir Humphrey Davy had as a result of taking nitrous oxide, in which he exclaimed: "The universe is composed exclusively of ideas."
1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The whole thing is from its origin a very well-made, a very strong and elaborate mental formation, powerfully designed to catch hold of certain vital elements and forces (both outside and inside the individuals) to rule and use them and through the vital to exercise a partial power over the physical.
Formations of this kind are numerous; they translate upon earth into secret societies. I have met many of the kind, more or less ancient, more or less powerfully organised, but all of a similar type. They are not, in their nature, spiritual. If there is any spirituality in them, it comes not from the formation itself but from the presence, in the society, of one or several personalities with a spiritual character and achievement.
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
separate elements and it covers the earth. In terms of space-time
Life comes in the category of immensely large things. It is part of
--
cated elements, successively created by the working of chemistry
and of Life. At the present time I can see no more satisfactory so-
--
ing influence, the elements of Mankind should succeed in making ef-
fective a profound force of mutual attraction, deeper and more
--
but one possible way in which human elements, innumerably di-
verse by nature, can love one another: it is by knowing themselves
--
the gradual concentration of its physicochemical elements in nu-
clei of increasing complexity, each succeeding stage of material
--
than as having emerged by its summit from the elements it super-
personalizes as it unites them to itself.
--
tualizable elements of the Universe. To love God and our neigh-
bor is therefore not merely an act of worship and compassion
1.04 - Sounds, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve,with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light,as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I dont know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmers fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed.
All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things railroad fashion is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an _Atropos_, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no mans business, and the children go to school on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
--
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature.
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
So long as I help the patient to discover the effective elements in his
dreams, and so long as I try to get him to see the general meaning of his
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
between paradoxical elements, within the post-contact individual psyche. Such a war is so difficult so
emotionally upsetting and cognitively challenging that the murder of the anomalous other in the
--
collapse of the idol with feet of clay, as dissolution to constituent bodily or material elements, as journey to
the underworld or sea bottom, as sojourn through the valley of the shadow of death, as forty years (or forty
--
unconscious is alive and well in our own culture. Ellenberger described its characteristic elements:
A creative illness succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for a certain truth.
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the constituent elements of experience conceived in an alternative but familiar arrangement, as heaven
above (father above), underworld/matter/earth below (mother below) conceived in the configuration
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reincarnation dissolution to constituent elements, and systemic reorganization. Such reorganization alters
the meaning of experience, and therefore, the mythology of history and being. If resolution is not reached
--
of paradise and the fall typically describe the first dynamic elements of the way from the perspective of
the chaos presently reigning that is, from the position of the uncertainty and fear that characterizes
--
constituent elements of experience. This uroboric condition or state, conceptualized as a mode of being that
is free from or beyond opposition, is also by necessity that place or state of being where suffering a
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mother-child relationship comprises the union of elements that will in time become separate, and may
therefore be utilized as grist for the symbolic mill. The intimate union of two individuals at the beginning
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constituent elements. Two things that cannot be discerned from one another are not two things, however,
and one thing with no discernible features whatsoever may not even be.
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retains essential unity and associated paradisal elements. Adam and Eve exist as independent beings,
230
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Freuds inclusion of all the elements of the world-tree (negative and positive) that has given his mythology
its remarkable strength, influence and power.
Figure 55: The World-Tree and the Constituent elements of Experience offers another interpretation
and explanation of this tree, relating its place in the cosmos to the constituent elements of experience.
This diagram suffers somewhat from its precise symbolic equation of the tree and the archetypal son.
--
Figure 55: The World-Tree and the Constituent elements of Experience
The tree is to Christ, therefore, as Christ is to the individual (I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that
1.04 - The Conditions of Esoteric Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
This brings to an end the indications to be given in connection with the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds. In the following chapter, and in further connection with the above, it will be shown how this development affects the higher elements of the human organism (the soul-organism or astral body, and the spirit or thought-body.) In this way the indications here given will be placed in a new light, and it will be possible to penetrate them in a deeper sense.
1.04 - The Core of the Teaching, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotion were its whole teaching and put in the background its monistic elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in the one self of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion, its insistence on the aspect of the Divine as Lord and Purusha and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable and who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are the most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.
Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge culminates and the Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well as the
--
But at the present day, since in fact the modern mind began to recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is to subordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to take advantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in it a scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path of action, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is, in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one's whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and not at all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, not at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal,
The Core of the Teaching
1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
pp. 129-209; "A New Classification of the Fundamental elements of the TarBaby Story on the Basis of Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven Versions," ibid., 56,
1943, pp. 31-37; and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "A Note on the Stickfast
1.04 - The Future of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
association of its elements, whether in the oceans or on land.
Upon an imaginary earth of constantly increasing extent,
--
can only occur in the case of reflective, personalized elements.
First the vitalization of matter, associated with the grouping
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(8) The 33 great gods belong to the higher worlds but rest in Swar & work at once in all the strata of consciousness, for the world is always one in its complexity. They are masters of the mental functions, masters also of the vital & material. Agni, for instance, governs the actions of the fiery elements in Nature & in man, but is also the vehicle of pure tapas, tu, tuvis or divine force. They are therefore mankinds greatest helpers.
(9) But in order that they may help, it is necessary to reinforce them in these lower worlds, which are not their own, by self-surrender, by sacrifice, by a share in all mans action, strength, being & bliss, and by this mutual help mans being physical, vital, mental, spiritual is kept in a state of perfect & ever increasing force, energy & joy favourable to the development of immortality. This is the process of Yajna, called often Yoga when applied exclusively to the subjective movements & adhwara when applied to the objective. The Vritras, Panis etc of the Bhuvarloka who are constantly preventing mans growth & throwing back his development, have to be attacked and slain by the gods, for they are not entirely immortal. The sacrifice is largely a battle between evolutionary & reactionary powers.
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But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice,the final & conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic & Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter & material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar & Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality & vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manasei ther in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted & enlightened by buddhipredominates & by the laws of mind determines the life & movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,not unknown to the Vedaconstitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyaktalost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain & only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength & being. Between the upper hemisphere & the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge & pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide & immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth & right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth & ideal knowledge.
We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
1.04 - The Principle of Air, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
Another element derived from akasa is that of air. Initiated people do not regard this principle as a real element, but they will grant it the role of a mediator between the fiery and the watery principles, so that the principle of air will, in a certain way, establish the neutral equilibrium, acting as a medium between the active and the passive activities of water and of fire. Through the interaction of the active and passive elements of fire and water the whole created life has become motion.
In its mediatorship the principle of air has assumed the quality of warmth from the fire and that of humidity from the water. Without these two qualities any life would be inconceivable. These two qualities will also grant two polarities to the airy principle, which means in the positive outcome the life-giving polarity, and in the negative aspect the destructive polarity.
In addition to that let me say that the mentioned elements are not to be regarded as ordinary fire, water and air which would solely represent aspects of the grossly material plane but in this case universal qualities of all elements are concerned.
1.04 - The Qabalah The Best Training for Memory, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Each of these ideas may be explained, investigated, understood, by means very various. Firstly, the Hebrew, Greek and Arabic numbers are also letters. Then, each of these letters is further described by one of the (arbitrarily composed) " elements of Nature; the Four (or Five) elements, the Seven (or Ten) Planets, and the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac.
All these are arranged in a geometrical design composed of ten "Sephiroth" (numbers) and twenty-two "paths" joining them; this is called the Tree of Life.
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On yet another line of approach the seeker meets another corresponding but in aspect distinct Duality in which the biune character is more immediately apparent,the dynamic Duality of Ishwara-Shakti. On one side he is aware of an infinite and self-existent Godhead in being who contains all things in an ineffable potentiality of existence, a Self of all selves, a Soul of all souls, a spiritual Substance of all substances, an impersonal inexpressible Existence, but at the same time an illimitable Person who is here self-represented in numberless personality, a Master of Knowledge, a Master of Forces, a Lord of love and bliss and beauty, a single Origin of the worlds, a self-manifester and self-creator, a Cosmic Spirit, a universal Mind, a universal Life, the conscious and living Reality supporting the appearance which we sense as unconscious inanimate Matter. On the other side he becomes aware of the same Godhead in effectuating consciousness and power put forth as a self-aware Force that contains and carries all within her and is charged to manifest it in universal Time and Space. It is evident to him that here there is one supreme and infinite Being represented to us in two different sides of itself, obverse and reverse in relation to each other. All is either prepared or pre-existent in the Godhead in Being and issues from it and is upheld by its Will and Presence; all is brought out, carried in movement by the Godhead in power; all becomes and acts and develops by her and in her its individual or its cosmic purpose. It is again a Duality necessary for the manifestation, creating and enabling that double current of energy which seems always necessary for the world-workings, two poles of the same Being, but here closer to each other and always very evidently carrying each the powers of the other in its essence and its dynamic nature. At the same time by the fact that the two great elements of the divine Mystery, the Personal and the Impersonal, are here fused together, the seeker of the integral Truth feels in the duality of Ishwara-Shakti his closeness to a more intimate and ultimate secret of the divine Transcendence and the Manifestation than that offered to him by any other experience.
For the Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of her revealing substance; on the other by the reascending current of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put on its divine character. There is not in her, although she devises a cosmic mechanism, the character of an inconscient mechanical Executrix which we find in the first physiognomy of Prakriti, the Nature-Force; neither is there that sense of an Unreality, creatrix of illusions or semi-illusions, which is attached to our first view of Maya. It is at once clear to the experiencing soul that here is a conscious Power of one substance and nature with the Supreme from whom she came. If she seems to have plunged us into the Ignorance and Inconscience in pursuance of a plan we cannot yet interpret, if her forces present themselves as all these ambiguous forces of the universe, yet it becomes visible before long that she is working for the development of the Divine Consciousness in us and that she stands above drawing us to her own higher entity, revealing to us more and more the very essence of the Divine Knowledge, Will and Ananda. Even in the movements of the Ignorance the soul of the seeker becomes aware of her conscious guidance supporting his steps and leading them slowly or swiftly, straight or by many detours out of the darkness into the light of a greater consciousness, out of mortality into immortality, out of evil and suffering towards a highest good and felicity of which as yet his human mind can form only a faint image. Thus her power is at once liberative and dynamic, creative, effective,creative not only of things as they are, but of things that are to be; for, eliminating the twisted and tangled movements of his lower consciousness made of the stuff of the Ignorance, it rebuilds and new-makes his soul and nature into the substance and forces of a higher divine Nature.
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At first there may have to be a prolonged, often tedious and painful period of preparation and purification of all our being till it is ready and fit for an opening to a greater Truth and Light or to the Divine Influence and Presence. Even when centrally fitted, prepared, open already, it will still be long before all our movements of mind, life and body, all the multiple and conflicting members and elements of our personality consent or, consenting, are able to bear the difficult and exacting process of the transformation. And hardest of all, even if all in us is willing, is the struggle we shall have to carry through against the universal forces attached to the present unstable creation when we seek to make the final supramental conversion and reversal of consciousness by which the Divine Truth must be established in us in its plenitude and not merely what they would more readily permit, an illumined Ignorance.
It is for this that a surrender and submission to That which is beyond us enabling the full and free working of its Power is indispensable. As that self-giving progresses, the work of the sacrifice becomes easier and more powerful and the prevention of the opposing Forces loses much of its strength, impulsion and substance. Two inner changes help most to convert what now seems difficult or impracticable into a thing possible and even sure. There takes place a coming to the front of some secret inmost soul within which was veiled by the restless activity of the mind, by the turbulence of our vital impulses and by the obscurity of the physical consciousness, the three powers which in their confused combination we now call our self. There will come about as a result a less impeded growth of a Divine Presence at the centre with its liberating Light and effective Force and an irradiation of it into all the conscious and subconscious ranges of our nature. These are the two signs, one marking our completed conversion and consecration to the great Quest, the other the final acceptance by the Divine of our sacrifice.
1.04 - Vital Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
First, the powers of the senses have to be developed, subtilised and enriched. Next, there are inner and latent senses which are to be discovered and similarly developed. Third, the seekings of these senses have to be trained to reject grossness and coarseness and to enjoy the finer tastes and higher aesthetic experiences. Finally, there has to be a deeper and piercing observation of the desires, passions, ambitions, lusts, etc., their risings, revolts and contradictions, and an attempt by various methods to separate out in each movement the elements that contri bute to the concord and harmony from those tending in the opposite direction, and to eliminate these latter from the very nature and fibre of our psychological constitution.
The effective methods of this last aspect are:
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Therefore, all teachings about the riddle of the world, however seemingly different, should be considered with the same sympathy; for they are all of them perceptions, distinct and sometimes opposite, of one and the same integral truth and may become, with advantage to that truth and to each other, elements in a comprehensive synthesis in which Philosophy may at length find its highest thought and its truest conception.
***
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It would be vain to mass together indefinitely a heap of letters of the alphabet; they would never of themselves arrange words and phrases, if the idea of those phrases and those words did not intervene and preside over the arrangement. Nor, any more, would the elements constituting Matter have organised themselves as they have done if previous affinities, that is to say, first reasons had not determined and rendered possible their combinations.
Thus in the chaos, which can be nothing but an inferior order, an order yet unrealised, existed already the spirit, force or law the word we use matters littleof the order to come.
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The principle of Guph, the physical body, is attri buted to Malkus, the Kingdom, the sphere of the four elements, and is too well known to demand comment or description.
I need only add that the predominate influence of the soul over the body, the body as being interpenetrated and over- flown in all its parts by the Real Man, and dependent upon it for the source of its life, are the implications of the
--- Overview of noun elements
The noun elements has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. elements ::: (violent or severe weather (viewed as caused by the action of the four elements); "they felt the full fury of the elements")
--- Overview of noun element
The noun element has 7 senses (first 4 from tagged texts)
1. (34) component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient ::: (an abstract part of something; "jealousy was a component of his character"; "two constituents of a musical composition are melody and harmony"; "the grammatical elements of a sentence"; "a key factor in her success"; "humor: an effective ingredient of a speech")
2. (10) component, constituent, element ::: (an artifact that is one of the individual parts of which a composite entity is made up; especially a part that can be separated from or attached to a system; "spare components for cars"; "a component or constituent element of a system")
3. (3) chemical element, element ::: (any of the more than 100 known substances (of which 92 occur naturally) that cannot be separated into simpler substances and that singly or in combination constitute all matter)
4. (1) element ::: (the most favorable environment for a plant or animal; "water is the element of fishes")
5. element ::: (one of four substances thought in ancient and medieval cosmology to constitute the physical universe; "the alchemists believed that there were four elements")
6. element ::: (the situation in which you are happiest and most effective; "in your element")
7. element ::: (a straight line that generates a cylinder or cone)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun elements
1 sense of elements
Sense 1
elements
=> weather, weather condition, conditions, atmospheric condition
=> atmospheric phenomenon
=> physical phenomenon
=> natural phenomenon
=> phenomenon
=> process, physical process
=> physical entity
=> entity
Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun element
7 senses of element
Sense 1
component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient
=> part, section, division
=> concept, conception, construct
=> idea, thought
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
component, constituent, element
=> part, portion
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 3
chemical element, element
=> substance
=> matter
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> part, portion, component part, component, constituent
=> relation
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
element
=> environment, environs, surroundings, surround
=> geographical area, geographic area, geographical region, geographic region
=> region
=> location
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 5
element
=> substance
=> matter
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> part, portion, component part, component, constituent
=> relation
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
element
=> situation, state of affairs
=> state
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 7
element
=> straight line
=> line
=> shape, form
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun elements
Hyponyms of noun element
5 of 7 senses of element
Sense 1
component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient
=> be-all and end-all, be all and end all
=> plot element
=> point
Sense 2
component, constituent, element
=> accessory, appurtenance, supplement, add-on
=> addition, add-on, improver
=> audio
=> auto part, car part
=> crystal
=> hardware, computer hardware
=> heating element
=> ingredient
=> input
=> landside
=> making
=> module
=> pixel, pel, picture element
=> retrofit
=> spare part, spare
=> spark gap
Sense 3
chemical element, element
=> allotrope
=> transuranic element
=> noble gas, inert gas, argonon
=> metallic element, metal
=> nonmetal
=> transactinide
=> actinium, Ac, atomic number 89
=> argon, Ar, atomic number 18
=> arsenic, As, atomic number 33
=> astatine, At, atomic number 85
=> bohrium, Bh, element 107, atomic number 107
=> boron, B, atomic number 5
=> bromine, Br, atomic number 35
=> carbon, C, atomic number 6
=> chlorine, Cl, atomic number 17
=> darmstadtium, Ds, element 110, atomic number 110
=> dubnium, Db, hahnium, element 105, atomic number 105
=> fluorine, F, atomic number 9
=> germanium, Ge, atomic number 32
=> hassium, Hs, element 108, atomic number 108
=> helium, He, atomic number 2
=> hydrogen, H, atomic number 1
=> iodine, iodin, I, atomic number 53
=> krypton, Kr, atomic number 36
=> lawrencium, Lr, atomic number 103
=> meitnerium, Mt, element 109, atomic number 109
=> mendelevium, Md, Mv, atomic number 101
=> neon, Ne, atomic number 10
=> nitrogen, N, atomic number 7
=> nobelium, No, atomic number 102
=> oxygen, O, atomic number 8
=> phosphorus, P, atomic number 15
=> plutonium, Pu, atomic number 94
=> radon, Rn, atomic number 86
=> roentgenium, Rg, element 111, atomic number 111
=> rutherfordium, Rf, unnilquadium, Unq, element 104, atomic number 104
=> seaborgium, Sg, element 106, atomic number 106
=> selenium, Se, atomic number 34
=> silicon, Si, atomic number 14
=> sulfur, S, sulphur, atomic number 16
=> tellurium, Te, atomic number 52
=> ununbium, Uub, element 112, atomic number 112
=> ununhexium, Uuh, element 116, atomic number 116
=> ununpentium, Uup, element 115, atomic number 115
=> ununquadium, Uuq, element 114, atomic number 114
=> ununtrium, Uut, element 113, atomic number 113
=> xenon, Xe, atomic number 54
=> trace element
Sense 5
element
=> air
=> fire
=> earth
=> quintessence, ether
=> water
Sense 7
element
=> element of a cone
=> element of a cylinder
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun elements
1 sense of elements
Sense 1
elements
=> weather, weather condition, conditions, atmospheric condition
Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun element
7 senses of element
Sense 1
component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient
=> part, section, division
Sense 2
component, constituent, element
=> part, portion
Sense 3
chemical element, element
=> substance
Sense 4
element
=> environment, environs, surroundings, surround
Sense 5
element
=> substance
Sense 6
element
=> situation, state of affairs
Sense 7
element
=> straight line
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun elements
1 sense of elements
Sense 1
elements
-> weather, weather condition, conditions, atmospheric condition
=> cold weather
=> fair weather, sunshine, temperateness
=> hot weather
=> thaw, thawing, warming
=> precipitation, downfall
=> wave
=> elements
=> wind, air current, current of air
=> atmosphere, atmospheric state
=> good weather
=> bad weather, inclemency, inclementness
Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun element
7 senses of element
Sense 1
component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient
-> part, section, division
=> frame
=> beginning
=> middle
=> end
=> high point
=> component, constituent, element, factor, ingredient
=> chukker, chukka
=> inning, frame
=> game
=> turn, bout, round
=> first period
=> second period
=> final period
=> half
=> period
=> quarter
=> over
Sense 2
component, constituent, element
-> part, portion
=> appendage
=> bit
=> bottleneck
=> bulb
=> butt, stub
=> component, constituent, element
=> cutout
=> foible
=> fore edge, foredge
=> forte
=> fraction
=> heel
=> hub
=> jetsam
=> limb
=> neck
=> peen
=> piece
=> pressing
=> seat
=> section, segment
=> shank, waist
=> spine, backbone
=> toe
=> turnout, widening
=> upstage
=> upstairs
=> wreckage
Sense 3
chemical element, element
-> substance
=> body substance
=> protoplasm, living substance
=> chemistry
=> material, stuff
=> phlogiston
=> mixture
=> atom
=> chemical element, element
=> activator
=> substrate
=> element
=> medium
=> medium
=> fluid
=> volatile
=> essence
Sense 4
element
-> environment, environs, surroundings, surround
=> ambiance, ambience
=> medium
=> setting, scene
=> element
=> habitat, home ground
=> melting pot
=> parts
Sense 5
element
-> substance
=> body substance
=> protoplasm, living substance
=> chemistry
=> material, stuff
=> phlogiston
=> mixture
=> atom
=> chemical element, element
=> activator
=> substrate
=> element
=> medium
=> medium
=> fluid
=> volatile
=> essence
Sense 6
element
-> situation, state of affairs
=> absurd, the absurd
=> acceptance
=> ballgame, new ballgame
=> challenge
=> childlessness
=> complication
=> crowding
=> disequilibrium
=> element
=> environment
=> equilibrium
=> exclusion
=> goldfish bowl, fish bowl, fishbowl
=> hotbed
=> inclusion
=> intestacy
=> picture, scene
=> prison, prison house
=> rejection
=> size, size of it
=> square one
=> status quo
=> thing
Sense 7
element
-> straight line
=> perpendicular
=> asymptote
=> tangent
=> secant
=> radius
=> diameter
=> chord
=> element
=> diagonal, bias
=> diagonal
=> vector
--- Grep of noun elements
elements
Grep of noun element
chemical element
element
element 104
element 105
element 106
element 107
element 108
element 109
element 110
element 111
element 112
element 113
element 114
element 115
element 116
element of a cone
element of a cylinder
elementary education
elementary geometry
elementary particle
elementary school
elements
heating element
identity element
logic element
metallic element
picture element
plot element
rare-earth element
sensing element
threshold element
trace element
transuranic element