classes ::: Systems Theory, Philosophy, Science, Art, Religion,
children :::
branches ::: Emergence

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object:Emergence
class:Systems Theory
class:Philosophy
class:Science
class:Art
class:Religion

--- ROOT
emergere [latin] - bring to light
mid 17th century (in the sense unforeseen occurrence): from medieval Latin emergentia, from Latin emergere bring to light (see emerge). - google dictionary


Wikipedia - Emergence

"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and many psychological phenomena are known to emerge from underlying neurobiological processes.

In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism.[1] "




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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


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

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
A_Brief_History_of_Everything
Enchiridion_text
Full_Circle
Heart_of_Matter
Let_Me_Explain
Letters_On_Yoga
Letters_On_Yoga_III
Letters_On_Yoga_IV
Life_without_Death
Maps_of_Meaning
Process_and_Reality
Questions_And_Answers_1957-1958
Savitri
Sex_Ecology_Spirituality
Spiral_Dynamics
Sri_Aurobindo_or_the_Adventure_of_Consciousness
The_Divine_Milieu
The_Wit_and_Wisdom_of_Alfred_North_Whitehead
The_Yoga_Sutras
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1956-09-05_-_Material_life,_seeing_in_the_right_way_-_Effect_of_the_Supermind_on_the_earth_-_Emergence_of_the_Supermind_-_Falling_back_into_the_same_mistaken_ways
1957-12-04_-_The_method_of_The_Life_Divine_-_Problem_of_emergence_of_a_new_species
4.2.3.05_-_Obstacles_to_the_Psychic's_Emergence

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0_1963-03-06
0_1966-10-26
0_1970-01-01
0_1970-10-28
0_1972-02-02
0_1972-07-22
02.01_-_A_Vedic_Story
02.02_-_Lines_of_the_Descent_of_Consciousness
02.03_-_An_Aspect_of_Emergent_Evolution
03.01_-_The_Evolution_of_Consciousness
04.02_-_Human_Progress
04.04_-_A_Global_Humanity
05.26_-_The_Soul_in_Anguish
06.29_-_Towards_Redemption
100.00_-_Synergy
1.01_-_Adam_Kadmon_and_the_Evolution
1.01_-_Fundamental_Considerations
1.01_-_MAPS_OF_EXPERIENCE_-_OBJECT_AND_MEANING
1.01_-_The_Mental_Fortress
1.01_-_THE_STUFF_OF_THE_UNIVERSE
1.02.4.1_-_The_Worlds_-_Surya
1.02.4.2_-_Action_and_the_Divine_Will
1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS
1.02_-_The_Three_European_Worlds
1.02_-_The_Vision_of_the_Past
1.03_-_APPRENTICESHIP_AND_ENCULTURATION_-_ADOPTION_OF_A_SHARED_MAP
1.03_-_Preparing_for_the_Miraculous
1.03_-_Sympathetic_Magic
1.03_-_The_Coming_of_the_Subjective_Age
1.03_-_THE_GRAND_OPTION
1.04_-_SOME_REFLECTIONS_ON_PROGRESS
1.04_-_The_Aims_of_Psycho_therapy
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.04_-_The_Discovery_of_the_Nation-Soul
1.04_-_The_Future_of_Man
1.04_-_The_Sacrifice_the_Triune_Path_and_the_Lord_of_the_Sacrifice
1.04_-_The_Silent_Mind
1.050_-_Qaf
1.05_-_Problems_of_Modern_Psycho_therapy
1.05_-_The_Activation_of_Human_Energy
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.05_-_True_and_False_Subjectivism
1.05_-_War_And_Politics
1.06_-_A_Summary_of_my_Phenomenological_View_of_the_World
1.06_-_Man_in_the_Universe
1.06_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_2_The_Works_of_Love_-_The_Works_of_Life
1.07_-_Savitri
1.07_-_The_Ego_and_the_Dualities
1.07_-_The_Farther_Reaches_of_Human_Nature
1.07_-_THE_GREAT_EVENT_FORESHADOWED_-_THE_PLANETIZATION_OF_MANKIND
1.08a_-_The_Ladder
1.08_-_The_Depths_of_the_Divine
1.08_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
1.08_-_The_Supreme_Will
1.09_-_Sri_Aurobindo_and_the_Big_Bang
1.09_-_The_Pure_Existent
1.10_-_Conscious_Force
1.10_-_THE_FORMATION_OF_THE_NOOSPHERE
1.10_-_Theodicy_-_Nature_Makes_No_Mistakes
11.13_-_In_these_Fateful_Days
1.11_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Problem
1.11_-_Oneness
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Solution
1.13_-_Conclusion_-_He_is_here
1.13_-_The_Divine_Maya
1.13_-_THE_HUMAN_REBOUND_OF_EVOLUTION_AND_ITS_CONSEQUENCES
1.14_-_TURMOIL_OR_GENESIS?
1.16_-_Man,_A_Transitional_Being
1.16_-_The_Suprarational_Ultimate_of_Life
1.17_-_The_Transformation
1.18_-_THE_HEART_OF_THE_PROBLEM
1.19_-_Life
1.19_-_ON_THE_PROBABLE_EXISTENCE_AHEAD_OF_US_OF_AN_ULTRA-HUMAN
12.01_-_This_Great_Earth_Our_Mother
1.20_-_HOW_MAY_WE_CONCEIVE_AND_HOPE_THAT_HUMAN_UNANIMIZATION_WILL_BE_REALIZED_ON_EARTH?
1.20_-_The_Hound_of_Heaven
1.21_-_The_Ascent_of_Life
1.22_-_THE_END_OF_THE_SPECIES
1.22_-_The_Problem_of_Life
1.23_-_The_Double_Soul_in_Man
1.240_-_1.300_Talks
1.240_-_Talks_2
1.24_-_The_Advent_and_Progress_of_the_Spiritual_Age
1.25_-_The_Knot_of_Matter
1.26_-_The_Ascending_Series_of_Substance
1.27_-_The_Sevenfold_Chord_of_Being
1.28_-_Supermind,_Mind_and_the_Overmind_Maya
1.2_-_Katha_Upanishads
13.01_-_A_Centurys_Salutation_to_Sri_Aurobindo_The_Greatness_of_the_Great
1.4.01_-_The_Divine_Grace_and_Guidance
1915_07_31p
1929-07-28_-_Art_and_Yoga_-_Art_and_life_-_Music,_dance_-_World_of_Harmony
1956-08-15_-_Protection,_purification,_fear_-_Atmosphere_at_the_Ashram_on_Darshan_days_-_Darshan_messages_-_Significance_of_15-08_-_State_of_surrender_-_Divine_Grace_always_all-powerful_-_Assumption_of_Virgin_Mary_-_SA_message_of_1947-08-15
1956-09-05_-_Material_life,_seeing_in_the_right_way_-_Effect_of_the_Supermind_on_the_earth_-_Emergence_of_the_Supermind_-_Falling_back_into_the_same_mistaken_ways
1957-05-01_-_Sports_competitions,_their_value
1957-07-24_-_The_involved_supermind_-_The_new_world_and_the_old_-_Will_for_progress_indispensable
1957-10-09_-_As_many_universes_as_individuals_-_Passage_to_the_higher_hemisphere
1957-12-04_-_The_method_of_The_Life_Divine_-_Problem_of_emergence_of_a_new_species
1958-01-29_-_The_plan_of_the_universe_-_Self-awareness
1958-03-05_-_Vibrations_and_words_-_Power_of_thought,_the_gift_of_tongues
1958-03-12_-_The_key_of_past_transformations
1958-03-19_-_General_tension_in_humanity_-_Peace_and_progress_-_Perversion_and_vision_of_transformation
1958-05-28_-_The_Avatar
1958-06-11_-_Is_there_a_spiritual_being_in_everybody?
1958-06-25_-_Sadhana_in_the_body
1960_01_20
1f.lovecraft_-_Out_of_the_Aeons
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth
1.ia_-_With_My_Very_Own_Hands
1.rb_-_Sordello_-_Book_the_Third
2.01_-_Indeterminates,_Cosmic_Determinations_and_the_Indeterminable
2.01_-_THE_ADVENT_OF_LIFE
2.01_-_The_Attributes_of_Omega_Point_-_a_Transcendent_God
2.02_-_Brahman,_Purusha,_Ishwara_-_Maya,_Prakriti,_Shakti
2.02_-_THE_EXPANSION_OF_LIFE
2.03_-_DEMETER
2.03_-_The_Christian_Phenomenon_and_Faith_in_the_Incarnation
2.03_-_The_Mother-Complex
2.04_-_The_Divine_and_the_Undivine
2.05_-_Habit_3__Put_First_Things_First
2.05_-_The_Cosmic_Illusion;_Mind,_Dream_and_Hallucination
2.06_-_Reality_and_the_Cosmic_Illusion
2.07_-_The_Knowledge_and_the_Ignorance
2.08_-_The_Release_from_the_Heart_and_the_Mind
2.1.01_-_God_The_One_Reality
2.1.03_-_Man_and_Superman
2.10_-_Knowledge_by_Identity_and_Separative_Knowledge
2.11_-_The_Modes_of_the_Self
2.1.1_-_The_Nature_of_the_Vital
2.12_-_The_Origin_of_the_Ignorance
2.13_-_Exclusive_Concentration_of_Consciousness-Force_and_the_Ignorance
2.14_-_The_Origin_and_Remedy_of_Falsehood,_Error,_Wrong_and_Evil
2.14_-_The_Passive_and_the_Active_Brahman
2.14_-_The_Unpacking_of_God
2.15_-_Reality_and_the_Integral_Knowledge
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.17_-_The_Progress_to_Knowledge_-_God,_Man_and_Nature
2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration
2.19_-_Out_of_the_Sevenfold_Ignorance_towards_the_Sevenfold_Knowledge
2.19_-_The_Planes_of_Our_Existence
2.2.01_-_The_Problem_of_Consciousness
2.2.02_-_Consciousness_and_the_Inconscient
22.05_-_On_The_Brink(2)
2.20_-_The_Philosophy_of_Rebirth
2.21_-_The_Order_of_the_Worlds
2.22_-_Rebirth_and_Other_Worlds;_Karma,_the_Soul_and_Immortality
2.22_-_The_Supreme_Secret
2.23_-_Man_and_the_Evolution
2.24_-_The_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Man
2.25_-_The_Triple_Transformation
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
30.09_-_Lines_of_Tantra_(Charyapada)
3.01_-_THE_BIRTH_OF_THOUGHT
3.02_-_THE_DEPLOYMENT_OF_THE_NOOSPHERE
3.03_-_THE_MODERN_EARTH
3.1.01_-_The_Problem_of_Suffering_and_Evil
3.1.02_-_Asceticism_and_the_Integral_Yoga
3.1.02_-_A_Theory_of_the_Human_Being
3.1.02_-_Spiritual_Evolution_and_the_Supramental
3.1.1_-_The_Transformation_of_the_Physical
3.2.04_-_The_Conservative_Mind_and_Eastern_Progress
3.2.05_-_Our_Ideal
3.2.06_-_The_Adwaita_of_Shankaracharya
32.12_-_The_Evolutionary_Imperative
3.2.3_-_Dreams
3.2.4_-_Sex
3.4.01_-_Evolution
3-5_Full_Circle
3.7.1.01_-_Rebirth
3.7.1.03_-_Rebirth,_Evolution,_Heredity
3.7.1.07_-_Involution_and_Evolution
3.7.2.02_-_The_Terrestial_Law
4.02_-_BEYOND_THE_COLLECTIVE_-_THE_HYPER-PERSONAL
4.02_-_Humanity_in_Progress
4.03_-_Prayer_to_the_Ever-greater_Christ
4.03_-_The_Special_Phenomenology_of_the_Child_Archetype
4.03_-_THE_ULTIMATE_EARTH
4.06_-_Purification-the_Lower_Mentality
4.19_-_The_Nature_of_the_supermind
4.20_-_The_Intuitive_Mind
4.2.1.01_-_The_Importance_of_the_Psychic_Change
4.21_-_The_Gradations_of_the_supermind
4.2.3.01_-_The_Meaning_of_Coming_to_the_Front
4.2.3.02_-_Signs_of_the_Psychic's_Coming_Forward
4.2.3.05_-_Obstacles_to_the_Psychic's_Emergence
5.01_-_EPILOGUE
5.02_-_Perfection_of_the_Body
5.03_-_The_Divine_Body
5.04_-_Supermind_and_the_Life_Divine
5.05_-_THE_OLD_ADAM
5.06_-_Supermind_in_the_Evolution
5.07_-_Mind_of_Light
5.08_-_Supermind_and_Mind_of_Light
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
Blazing_P1_-_Preconventional_consciousness
Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
Maps_of_Meaning_text
r1912_01_27
r1912_07_03
r1912_07_19
r1912_07_21
r1912_11_15
r1912_12_05
r1912_12_10
r1912_12_20
r1912_12_25
r1913_01_08
r1913_01_11
r1913_01_12
r1913_02_08
r1913_05_21
r1913_06_09
r1913_07_04
r1913_12_05
r1913_12_26
r1914_01_03
r1914_03_18
r1914_04_22
r1914_06_13
r1914_07_17
r1914_09_17
r1914_11_19
r1914_12_05
r1914_12_30
r1915_01_09
r1915_01_24
r1915_05_01
r1915_05_27
r1915_05_28
r1915_05_30
r1915_06_02
r1915_07_03
r1917_03_06
r1917_08_25
r1917_09_05
r1918_05_14
r1919_08_03
r1920_06_07
Talks_001-025
Talks_076-099
Talks_225-239
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Logomachy_of_Zos
The_Riddle_of_this_World

PRIMARY CLASS

Art
Philosophy
Religion
Science
Systems_Theory
SIMILAR TITLES
Emergence

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

Emergence of the vital being ::: When the true vital being comes forward, it is something wide and strong and calm, an unmoved and powerful warrior for the Divine and the Truth, repelling all enemies, bringing in a true strength and force, and opening the vital to the greater consciousness above.

emergence ::: n. --> The act of rising out of a fluid, or coming forth from envelopment or concealment, or of rising into view; sudden uprisal or appearance.

EMERGENCE. ::: Out of the material consciousness in which

emergences ::: pl. --> of Emergence


TERMS ANYWHERE

3. The term actuarial expectation is used analogically by Lloyd Morgan to denote the qualitative probability of the emergence of a genuine or primary novelty. -- T.G.

abhidharma. (P. abhidhamma; T. chos mngon pa; C. apidamo/duifa; J. abidatsuma/taiho; K. abidalma/taebop 阿毘達磨/對法). In Sanskrit, abhidharma is a prepositional compound composed of abhi- + dharma. The compound is typically glossed with abhi being interpreted as equivalent to uttama and meaning "highest" or "advanced" DHARMA (viz., doctrines or teachings), or abhi meaning "pertaining to" the dharma. The SARVASTIVADA Sanskrit tradition typically follows the latter etymology, while the THERAVADA PAli tradition prefers the former, as in BUDDHAGHOSA's gloss of the term meaning either "special dharma" or "supplementary dharma." These definitions suggest that abhidharma was conceived as a precise (P. nippariyAya), definitive (PARAMARTHA) assessment of the dharma that was presented in its discursive (P. sappariyAya), conventional (SAMVṚTI) form in the SuTRAS. Where the sutras offered more subjective presentations of the dharma, drawing on worldly parlance, simile, metaphor, and personal anecdote in order to appeal to their specific audiences, the abhidharma provided an objective, impersonal, and highly technical description of the specific characteristics of reality and the causal processes governing production and cessation. There are two divergent theories for the emergence of the abhidharma as a separate genre of Buddhist literature. In one theory, accepted by most Western scholars, the abhidharma is thought to have evolved out of the "matrices" (S. MATṚKA; P. mAtikA), or numerical lists of dharmas, that were used as mnemonic devices for organizing the teachings of the Buddha systematically. Such treatments of dharma are found even in the sutra literature and are probably an inevitable by-product of the oral quality of early Buddhist textual transmission. A second theory, favored by Japanese scholars, is that abhidharma evolved from catechistic discussions (abhidharmakathA) in which a dialogic format was used to clarify problematic issues in doctrine. The dialogic style also appears prominently in the sutras where, for example, the Buddha might give a brief statement of doctrine (uddesa; P. uddesa) whose meaning had to be drawn out through exegesis (NIRDEsA; P. niddesa); indeed, MAHAKATYAYANA, one of the ten major disciples of the Buddha, was noted for his skill in such explications. This same style was prominent enough in the sutras even to be listed as one of the nine or twelve genres of Buddhist literature (specifically, VYAKARAnA; P. veyyAkarana). According to tradition, the Buddha first taught the abhidharma to his mother MAHAMAYA, who had died shortly after his birth and been reborn as a god in TUsITA heaven. He met her in the heaven of the thirty-three (TRAYASTRIMsA), where he expounded the abhidharma to her and the other divinities there, repeating those teachings to sARIPUTRA when he descended each day to go on his alms-round. sAriputra was renowned as a master of the abhidharma. Abhidharma primarily sets forth the training in higher wisdom (ADHIPRAJNAsIKsA) and involves both analytical and synthetic modes of doctrinal exegesis. The body of scholastic literature that developed from this exegetical style was compiled into the ABHIDHARMAPItAKA, one of the three principal sections of the Buddhist canon, or TRIPItAKA, along with sutra and VINAYA, and is concerned primarily with scholastic discussions on epistemology, cosmology, psychology, KARMAN, rebirth, and the constituents of the process of enlightenment and the path (MARGA) to salvation. (In the MAHAYANA tradition, this abhidharmapitaka is sometimes redefined as a broader "treatise basket," or *sASTRAPItAKA.)

Ain Soph ::: Also transliterated as "Ein Sof". "Limitlessness". A further characterization of the Ain – the Void of Non-Experience – that ascribes a sense of vastness and potentiality to the Ain and that indicates a demarcation between the emergence of the characteristics of the Ain Soph Aur from the Ain. Refers to one of the Veils of Negative Existence.

Ain Soph Aur ::: Also transliterated as "Ein Sof Ohr". A further characterization of the Ain Soph – the Limitless Potentiality of the Ain – that attempts to put language around the sense of Light and Presence that ultimately is characterized by the emergence of Kether ("Source Consciousness"): the crystallization of the root of experiential awareness. Refers to one of the Veils of Negative Existence.

Alexander, Samuel: (1859-1938) English thinker who developed a non-psychic, neo-realistic metaphysics and synthesis. He makes the process of emergence a metaphysical principle. Although his inquiry is essentially a priori, his method is empirical. Realism at his hands becomes a quasi-materialism, an alternative to absolute idealism and ordinary materialism. It alms to combine the absoluteness of law in physics with the absolute unpredictability of emergent qualities. Whereas to the ancients and in the modern classical conception of physical science, the original stuff was matter and motion, after Minkowski, Einstein, Lorenz and others, it became indivisible space-time, instead of space and time.

Also called creation theology. ::: The belief that humans, life, the Earth, and the Universe were created by the supernatural intervention of a supreme being or deity. This intervention may be seen either as an act of creation from nothing (ex nihilo) or the emergence of order from pre-existing chaos.[4]

anulomaNAna. In PAli, "conformity knowledge"; according to the VISUDDHIMAGGA, this is the ninth and last of nine knowledges (P. NAna, S. JNANA) cultivated as part of the purity of knowledge and vision of progress along the path (P. patipadANAnadassanavisuddhi). This latter category, in turn, constitutes the sixth of the seven purities (VIsUDDHI) to be developed along the path to liberation. "Conformity knowledge" refers to the last three so-called impulsion moments (javana) of consciousness that arise in the mind of the practitioner preceding his perception of the nibbAna element (NIRVAnADHATU). This knowledge is so named because it conforms itself to the preceding eight stages of knowledge, as well as to the immediately following supramundane path (P. AriyamAgga, S. ARYAMARGA) and the thirty-seven constituents of enlightenment (P. bodhipakkhiyadhamma, S. BODHIPAKsIKADHARMA). When the three moments are treated separately, they receive different names. The first impulsion moment is called "preparation" (P. parikamma), when adaptation knowledge takes as its object the compounded formations (SAMSKARA) as being something impermanent (ANITYA), suffering (DUḤKHA), and nonself (ANATMAN). Immediately thereafter, the second impulsion moment arises, which takes the same formations as its object and is called "access" (upacAra). Immediately following that the third impulsion moment arises taking the same object, which is called "conformity" (anuloma). At this point, the practitioner is at the threshold of liberation (P. vimokkha, S. VIMOKsA), and, therefore, conformity knowledge is described as the final stage in what is called "insight leading to emergence" (P. vutthAnagAminivipassanA). This category includes the sixth, seventh, and eighth knowledges (NAna) in the ninefold schema: namely, "knowledge arising from the desire for deliverance" (P. MUCCITUKAMYATANAnA), "knowledge arising from the contemplation on reflection" (P. PAtISAnKHANUPASSANANAnA), and "knowledge arising from equanimity regarding all formations of existence" (P. SAnKHARUPEKKHANAnA).

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.

basseting ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Basset ::: n. --> The upward direction of a vein in a mine; the emergence of a stratum at the surface.

Emergence of the vital being ::: When the true vital being comes forward, it is something wide and strong and calm, an unmoved and powerful warrior for the Divine and the Truth, repelling all enemies, bringing in a true strength and force, and opening the vital to the greater consciousness above.

bīja. (T. sa bon; C. zhongzi; J. shuji; K. chongja 種子). In Sanskrit, "seed," a term used metaphorically in two important contexts: (1) in the theory of KARMAN, an action is said to plant a "seed" or "potentiality" in the mind, where it will reside until it fructifies as a future experience or is destroyed by wisdom; (2) in tantric literature, many deities are said to have a "seed syllable" or seed MANTRA that is visualized and recited in liturgy and meditation in order to invoke the deity. In the Chinese FAXIANG (YOGACARA) school, based on similar lists found in Indian Buddhist texts like the MAHAYANASAMGRAHA, a supplement to the YOGACARABHuMI, various lists of two different types of seeds are mentioned. (1) The primordial seeds (BENYOU ZHONGZI) and the continuously (lit. newly) acquired seeds (XINXUN ZHONGZI). The former are present in the eighth "storehouse consciousness" (ALAYAVIJNANA) since time immemorial, and are responsible for giving rise to a sentient being's basic faculties, such as the sensory organs (INDRIYA) and the aggregates (SKANDHA). The latter are acquired through the activities and sense impressions of the other seven consciousnesses (VIJNANA), and are stored within the eighth storehouse consciousness as pure, impure, or indeterminate seeds that may become activated again once the right conditions are in place for it to fructify. (2) Tainted seeds (youlou zhongzi) and untainted seeds (wulou zhongzi). The former are sowed whenever unenlightened activities of body, speech, and mind and the contaminants (ASRAVA) of mental defilements take place. The latter are associated with enlightened activities that do not generate such contaminants. In all cases, "full emergence" (SAMUDACARA, C. xiangxing) refers to the sprouting of those seeds as fully realized action. ¶ In tantric Buddhism the buddha field (BUDDHAKsETRA) is represented as a MAndALA with its inhabitant deities (DEVATA). The sonic source of the mandala and the deities that inhabit it is a "seed syllable" (bīja). In tantric practices (VIDHI; SADHANA) the meditator imagines the seed syllable emerging from the expanse of reality, usually on a lotus flower. The seed syllable is then visualized as transforming into the mandala and its divine inhabitants, each of which often has its own seed syllable. At the end of the ritual, the process is reversed and collapsed back into the seed syllable that then dissolves back into the nondual original expanse. Seed syllables in tantric Buddhism are connected with DHARAnĪ, mnemonic codes widespread in MahAyAna sutras that consist of strings of letters, often the first letter of profound terms or topics. These strings of letters in the dhAranĪ anticipate the MANTRAs found in tantric ritual practices. The tantric "seed syllable" is thought to contain the essence of the mantra, the letters of which are visualized as standing upright in a circle around the seed syllable from which the letters emerge and to which they return.

catuḥsatyadharmacakra. (T. bden bzhi'i chos 'khor; C. sidi falun; J. shitai horin; K. saje pomnyun 四諦法輪). In Sanskrit, lit. "the dharma wheel of the four truths"; the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRA) delivered in ṚsIPATANA. In this first turning of the wheel of dharma, the Buddha set in motion a wheel with twelve aspects, by setting forth the four noble truths three separate times. He addressed the original group of five disciples (PANCAVARGIKA), telling them that they should not fall into extremes of asceticism or indulgence, and laid out for them the eightfold noble path (AstAnGIKAMARGA). He set forth the four truths the first time by saying that the five aggregates (SKANDHA) qualified by birth, aging, sickness, and death are the noble truth of suffering, craving is the noble truth of their origination, the elimination of that craving is the noble truth of their cessation, and that the eightfold noble path is the noble truth of the path leading to their cessation. He set forth the four truths a second time when, in the same extended discourse, he said, "I knew well that the truth of suffering was what I had to comprehend; I knew well that the truth of the origin was what I had to eliminate; I knew well that the truth of cessation was what I had to realize; and I knew well that the truth of the path was what I had to cultivate." He then set forth the four truths a third and final time when he said, "I comprehended the truth of suffering, I eliminated the true origin of suffering, I realized the true cessation of suffering, and I cultivated the true path." There are twelve aspects to this triple wheel because for each of the three stages there is (1) a vision that sees reality directly with the wisdom eye that is free from contaminants, (2) a knowledge that is free from doubt, (3) an understanding of the way things are, and (4) an intellectual comprehension of an idea never heard of before. ¶ The SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA calls the triple turning of the catuḥsatyadharmacakra with its twelve aspects the "first turning of the wheel." According to its commentaries, it is a demonstration that all dharmas, the skandhas, sense-fields (AYATANA), elements (DHATU), and so forth, exist. This teaching is provisional (NEYARTHA) because it must be interpreted in order to understand what the Buddha really means. A second "middle" dispensation, called "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA), is the teaching of the MahAyAna doctrine, as set forth in the PRAJNAPARAMITA SuTRAs, that all dharmas, even buddhahood and NIRVAnA, are without any intrinsic nature (NIḤSVABHAVA). The first turning of the wheel is directed toward the sRAVAKAs and PRATYEKABUDDHAs, who tremble at this doctrine of emptiness (suNYATA). The second turning is also not a final, definitive (NĪTARTHA) teaching. The ultimate teaching is the final turning of the wheel of dharma, called "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation" (*SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), i.e., the SaMdhinirmocanasutra itself. Here the Buddha, through his amanuensis ParamArthasamudgata, sets forth in clear and plain language what he means: that dharmas are endowed with three natures (TRISVABHAVA) and each of those is, in a distinctive way, free from intrinsic nature (niḥsvabhAva). The doctrine of the first, middle, and final wheels of dharma is not intended to be a historical presentation of the development of Buddhist doctrine, but the first turning does loosely equate to the early teachings of the Buddha, the second to early MahAyAna, and the third to the emergence of the later YOGACARA school of MahAyAna philosophy. In Tibet, there is no argument over this first turning of the wheel of dharma: it is always understood to refer to the basic teachings of the Buddha for those of a HĪNAYANA persuasion. There is, however, substantial argument over the status of the second and third turnings of the wheel.

Chokmah ::: Translated as "Wisdom" in Hebrew. The second Sephirah of the Kabbalah. It is representative of Primordial Force: the active, masculine, yang energy that characterizes reality and which vivifies the lower Sephiroth on the Pillar of Mercy. Along with Kether and Binah, Chokmah is associated with the Supernal Triad and the Causal Plane (i.e the First World) and is the Big Bang which gives rise to the emergence of dualistic reality through its coital union with Binah.

Data_science ::: is a field of Big Data geared toward providing meaningful information based on large amounts of complex data. Data science, or data-driven science, combines different fields of work in statistics and computation in order to interpret data for the purpose of decision making.  BREAKING DOWN 'Data Science'  Data is drawn from different sectors and platforms including cell phones, social media, e-commerce sites, healthcare surveys, internet searches, etc. The increase in the amount of data available opened the door to a new field of study called Big Data — or the extremely large data sets that can help produce better operational tools in all sectors. The continually increasing sets of and easy access to data are made possible by a collaboration of companies known as fintech, which use technology to innovate and enhance traditional financial products and services. The data produced creates even more data which is easily shared across entities thanks to emergent fintech products like cloud computing and storage. However, the interpretation of vast amounts of unstructured data for effective decision making may prove too complex and time consuming for companies, hence the emergence of data science.

Early Judaism ::: Also sometimes called “formative,” “proto-,” “middle,” and even “late” Judaism. Refers to Judaism in the intertestamental period (and slightly later) as a development from the religion of ancient Israel, but prior to the emergence of its classical, rabbinic form in the early centuries CE.

Emanation ::: The process of emergence that characterizes consciousness and the evolution of the self. Kabbalah is one such system that attempts to map the emanation of consciousness: from non-experience to non-dualistic consciousness to increasinly variegated permutations of dualistic consciousness.

emergence ::: n. --> The act of rising out of a fluid, or coming forth from envelopment or concealment, or of rising into view; sudden uprisal or appearance.

EMERGENCE. ::: Out of the material consciousness in which

emergences ::: pl. --> of Emergence

“Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

"Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.” The Life Divine ::: "Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

“Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.” The Life Divine

"If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.” The Life Divine

“If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.” The Life Divine

IGNORANCE. ::: Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life.

This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth.

Sevenfold Ignorance ::: If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, ip a spatial and temporal universe, wc see that on its obscurer side it reduces itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact of a many- sided self-ignorance. We are Ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming ; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence — that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self ; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becom- ing in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence — that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming ; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-sclf — that is the tViTid, \Vie egoistic ignorance. V/c aie ignorant of oat eteinai becoming in Time ; we take this Uttle life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space for our beginning, our middle and our end, — that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is super-conscient, sub- conscient, intraconscient, circumcooscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence — that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming ; we take the mind or life or body or any two or all three tor our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to deter- mine sovereignly by its emergence from their operations, — that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoy- ment of our life in the world ; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.


Ind’Allah ::: From Allah; the forces that are revealed through dimensional emergence to consciousness from the Names of Allah that comprise one’s essence.

Indian Philosophy: General name designating a plethora of more or less systematic thinking born and cultivated in the geographic region of India among the Hindus who represent an amalgamation of adventitious and indigenous peoples, but confined at first exclusively to the caste-conscious Indo-germanic conquerors of the lands of the Indus and Ganges. Its beginnings are lost in the dim past, while a distinct emergence in tangible form is demonstrable from about 1000 B.C. Hindu idiosyncrasies are responsible for our inability to date with any degree of accuracy many of the systems, schools, and philosophers, or in some cases even to refer to the latter by name. Inasmuch as memory, not writing, has been universally favored in India, an aphoristic form (cf. sutra), subtended by copious commentaries, give Indian Philosophy its distinctive appearance. The medium is Sanskrit and the dialects derived from it. There are translations in all major Asiatic and European languages. The West became familiar with it when philologists discovered during last century the importance of Sanskrit. As a type of thinking employing unfamiliar conceptions and a terminology fluctuating in meaning (cf., e.g., rasa), it is distinct from Western speculations. Several peaks have been reached in the past, yet Indian Philosophy does not cease to act fructifyingly upon the present mind in India as elsewhere. Various factions advance conflicting claims as to the value of Indian speculation, because interpretations have not as yet become standardized. Textual criticism is now making strides, but with varying successes. Among larger histories of Indian Philosophy may be mentioned those of Deussen, Das Gupta, Bel-valkar and Ranade, and Radhakrishnan.

In philosophy, a proposition opposed to a given thesis expressing a fact or a positive statement. With Kant, it is the negative member of the antinomies of reason. With Hegel, it is the second phase of the dialectical process, which denies the first moment or thesis, and which contributes to the emergence of the synthesis blending the partial truths of the thesis and the antithesis, and transcending them both.

intelligence explosion ::: A possible outcome of humanity building artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI would be capable of recursive self-improvement leading to rapid emergence of ASI (artificial superintelligence), the limits of which are unknown, at the time of the technological singularity.

Kalinga. (T. Ka ling ga; Jielingqie; J. Karyoga; K. Kallŭngga 羯陵伽). An Indian kingdom on the eastern coast of the subcontinent; identified with the modern state of Orissa. In the eighth year of his reign, the Mauryan emperor AsOKA (third century BCE) conquered Kalinga. In his inscriptions, Asoka states that the resulting carnage caused him to turn away from violence and toward the dharma. Kalinga is mentioned in the Pāli canon as one of seven states that flourished at the time of the mythical king, Renu, but it is not included in the classical list of sixteen nations (janapada). During his previous life as VESSANTARA, the BODHISATTVA gave the kingdom of Kalinga his white elephant, Pacaya, in order to alleviate that country's drought. A TOOTH RELIC of the Buddha is said to have been enshrined at the Kalinga capital, Dantapura, and, later during the reign of the Sinhalese king, Sirimeghavanna, it was carried to Sri Lanka, where it was installed as the palladium of the Sinhalese royal house. From ancient times, there were close relations between the kings of Kalinga and Sri Lanka. During the reign of Aggabodhi II, the king and queen of Kalinga came to the island, renounced their thrones, and entered the order. The royal houses of both kingdoms frequently exchanged brides, and many descendants of the Kalinga dynasty are mentioned as having been crowned king of Sri Lanka. Māgha, the twelfth-century invader and scourge of Buddhism on the island, is also said to have hailed from Kalinga. During the early centuries of the Common Era, Kalinga was an important source for Buddhist and Brahmanical cultural influence among the Pyu and Mon peoples of Burma, contributing to the emergence of Buddhist civilization in Southeast Asia. Kalinga is also one of the twenty-four sacred sites associated with the CAKRASAMVARATANTRA. See also PĪtHA.

Karanopadhi(Sanskrit) ::: A compound meaning the "causal instrument" or "instrumental cause" in the long series ofreimbodiments to which human and other reimbodying entities are subject. Upadhi, the second elementof this compound, is often translated as "vehicle"; but while this definition is accurate enough for popularpurposes, it fails to set forth the essential meaning of the word which is rather "disguise," or certainnatural properties or constitutional characteristics supposed to be the disguises or clothings or masks inand through which the spiritual monad of man works, bringing about the repetitive manifestations uponearth of certain functions and powers of this monad, and, indeed, upon the other globes of the planetarychain; and, furthermore, intimately connected with the peregrinations of the monad through the variousspheres and realms of the solar kosmos. In one sense of the word, therefore, karanopadhi is almostinterchangeable with the thoughts set forth under the term maya, or the illusory disguises through whichspirit works, or rather through which spiritual monadic entities work and manifest themselves.Karanopadhi, as briefly explained under the term "causal body," is dual in meaning. The first and moreeasily understood meaning of this term shows that the cause bringing about reimbodiment is avidya,nescience rather than ignorance; because when a reimbodying entity through repeated reimbodiments inthe spheres of matter has freed itself from the entangling chains of the latter, and has risen intoself-conscious recognition of its own divine powers, it thereby shakes off the chains or disguises of mayaand becomes what is called a jivanmukta. It is only imperfect souls, or rather monadic souls, speaking ina general way, which are obliged by nature's cyclic operations and laws to undergo the repetitivereimbodiments on earth and elsewhere in order that the lessons of self-conquest and mastery over all theplanes of nature may be achieved. As the entity advances in wisdom and knowledge, and in the acquiringof self-conscious sympathy for all that is, in other words, as it grows more and more like unto itsdivine-spiritual counterpart, the less is it subject to avidya. It is, in a sense, the seeds of kama-manas leftin the fabric or being of the reincarnating entity, which act as the karana or reproducing cause, orinstrumental cause, of such entity's reincarnations on earth.The higher karanopadhi, however, although in operation similar to the lower karanopadhi, orkarana-sarira just described, nevertheless belongs to the spiritual-intellectual part of man's constitution,and is the reproductive energy inherent in the spiritual monad bringing about its re-emergence after thesolar pralaya into the new activities and new series of imbodiments which open with the dawn of thesolar manvantara following upon the solar pralaya just ended. This latter karanopadhi or karana-sarira,therefore, is directly related to the element-principle in man's constitution called buddhi -- a veil, as itwere, drawn over the face or around the being of the monadic essence, much as prakriti surroundsPurusha, or pradhana surrounds Brahman, or mulaprakriti surrounds and is the veil or disguise or sakti ofparabrahman. Hence, in the case of man, this karanopadhi or causal disguise or vehicle corresponds in ageneral way to the buddhi-manas, or spiritual soul, in which the spiritual monad works and manifestsitself.It should be said in passing that the doctrine concerning the functions and operations of buddhi in thehuman constitution is extremely recondite, because in buddhi lie the causal impulses or urges bringingabout the building of the constitution of man, and which, when the latter is completed, and when formingman as a septenary entity, express themselves as the various strata or qualities of the auric egg.Finally, the karana-sarira, the karanopadhi or causal body, is the vehicular instrumental form orinstrumental body-form, produced by the working of what is perhaps the most mysterious principle orelement, mystically speaking, in the constitution not only of man, but of the universe -- the verymysterious spiritual bija.The karanopadhi, the karana-sarira or causal body, is explained with minor differences of meaning invarious works of Hindu philosophy; but all such works must be studied with the light thrown upon themby the great wisdom-teaching of the archaic ages, esoteric theosophy. The student otherwise runs everyrisk of being led astray.I might add that the sushupti state or condition, which is that of deep dreamless sleep, involving entireinsensibility of the human consciousness to all exterior impressions, is a phase of consciousness throughwhich the adept must pass, although consciously pass in his case, before reaching the highest state ofsamadhi, which is the turiya state. According to the Vedanta philosophy, the turiya (meaning "fourth") isthe fourth state of consciousness into which the full adept can self-consciously enter and wherein hebecomes one with the kosmic Brahman. The Vedantists likewise speak of the anandamaya-kosa, whichthey describe as being the innermost disguise or frame or vehicle surrounding the atmic consciousness.Thus we see that the anandamaya-kosa and the karana-sarira, or karanopadhi, and the buddhi inconjunction with the manasic ego, are virtually identical.The author has been at some pains to set forth and briefly to develop the various phases of occult andesoteric theosophical thought given in this article, because of the many and various misunderstandingsand misconceptions concerning the nature, characteristics, and functions of the karana-sarira or causalbody.

Ksitigarbha. (T. Sa yi snying po; C. Dizang; J. Jizo; K. Chijang 地藏). In Sanskrit, lit. "Earth Store," an important BODHISATTVA who has the power to rescue beings who have the misfortune to be reborn in the hells. Although Ksitigarbha is known in all Mahāyāna countries through his inclusion in the widely known grouping of eight great bodhisattvas (MAHOPAPUTRA; AstAMAHOPAPUTRA), he was apparently not the object of individual cultic worship in India or Tibet. It was in East Asian Buddhism that Ksitigarbha came into his own and became widely worshipped. In China, the cult of Ksitigarbha (C. Dizang) gained popularity by at least the fifth century, with the translation of the Dasheng daji Dizang shilun jing ("Mahāyāna Mahāsannipāta Sutra on Ksitigarbha and the Ten Wheels"), first in the Northern Liang dynasty and subsequently again by XUANZANG in 651 CE. The eponymous KsITIGARBHASuTRA, translated at the end of the seventh century, specifically relates the bodhisattva's vow to rescue all beings in the six realms of existence before he would attain buddhahood himself and tells the well-known prior-birth story of the bodhisattva as a young woman, whose filial piety after the death of her heretical mother saved her mother from rebirth in the AVĪCI hell. It was his ability to rescue deceased family members from horrific rebirths that became Dizang's dominant characteristic in China, where he took on the role of the Lord of Hell, opposite the Jade Emperor of native Chinese cosmology. This role may possibly have resulted from Dizang's portrayal as the Lord of Hell in the apocryphal (see APOCRYPHA) Foshuo Dizang pusa faxin yinlu shiwang jing and reflects Buddhist accommodations to the medieval Chinese interest in the afterlife. This specialization in servicing the denizens of hell seems also to have evolved alongside the emergence of Dizang's portrayal as a monk, whom the Chinese presume to reside on the Buddhist sacred mountain of JIUHUASHAN in Anhui province. (See also CHIJANG; KIM KYUGAK.) Ksitigarbha is easily recognizable in Chinese iconography because he is the only bodhisattva who wears the simple raiments of a monk and has a shaved head rather than an ornate headdress. In Japan, where Ksitigarbha is known as Jizo, the bodhisattva has taken on a different significance. Introduced to Japan during the Heian period, Jizo became immensely popular as a protector of children, patron of travelers, and guardian of community thresholds. Jizo is typically depicted as a monk carrying a staff in his left hand and a chaplet or rosary in his right. The boundaries of a village beyond which children should not wander were often marked by a stone statue of Jizo. Japanese fisherman also looked to Jizo for protection; statues of the bodhisattva erected by early Japanese immigrants to Hawaii are still found today at many popular shoreline fishing and swimming sites in the Hawaiian Islands. In modern Japan, Jizo continues to be regarded as the special protector of children, including the stillborn and aborted. In memory of these children, and as a means of requesting Jizo's protection of them, statues of Jizo are often dressed in a bib (usually red in color), sometimes wearing a knit cap or bonnet, with toys placed nearby (see MIZUKO KUYo). Tibetan iconography typically has Ksitigarbha seated on a lotus flower, holding a CINTĀMAnI in his right hand and displaying the VARADAMUDRĀ with his left.

Liberation ::: Liberation signifies an emergence into the true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic selfexpression of that truth and there can be nothing else.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 1033


". . . liberation signifies an emergence into the true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic self-expression of that truth and there can be nothing else." *The Life Divine

“… liberation signifies an emergence into the true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic self-expression of that truth and there can be nothing else.” The Life Divine

liberation ::: “The sense of release as if from jail always accompanies the emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above. It is therefore spoken of as a liberation, mukti. It is a release into peace, happiness, the soul’s freedom not tied down by the thousand ties and cares of the outward ignorant existence.” Letters on Yoga

liberation ::: "The sense of release as if from jail (which) always accompanies the emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above. It is therefore spoken of as a liberation, mukti. It is a release into peace, happiness, the soul's freedom." [S23:1001]

mainframe "computer" A term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or "main frame" of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine. After the emergence of smaller "{minicomputer}" designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as "mainframe computers" and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive {time-sharing} operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by {IBM}, {Unisys} and the other great {dinosaurs} surviving from computing's {Stone Age}. It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {number crunching} {supercomputers} (see {Cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in {integrated circuit} technology and low-cost personal computing. As of 1993, corporate America is just beginning to figure this out - the wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers have certainly provided sufficient omens (see {dinosaurs mating}). Supporters claim that mainframes still house 90% of the data major businesses rely on for mission-critical applications, attributing this to their superior performance, reliability, scalability, and security compared to microprocessors. [{Jargon File}] (1996-07-22)

Maronites ::: Members of the largest Uniate church in the Arab world. The Uniate churches at various periods accepted the Vatican's authority but retained a measure of autonomy. The Maronites who migrated to northern Lebanon from inland Syria drew closer to Latin Europe and to Catholicism after the Crusades. By the eighteenth century the Maronites' growing numbers, early modernization, and effective church organization and leadership made them the leading community in Mount Lebanon. The same century saw the community's southward expansion and the emergence of a proto-national consciousness in its ranks.

Matter, and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind Is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power ; if it acts it is through these Werior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arri- val of the descendiag Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal Itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being ::: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved In Matter have realised themselves here ; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence. ■■

medieval: The period of time, about a thousand years long, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the Renaissance.

niḥsarana. (P. nissarana; T. nges 'byung; C. li; J. ri; K. i 離). In Sanskrit, "escape" or "emergence," often a synonym for liberation from REBIRTH. The term can also refer to the sense of dissatisfaction with SAMSĀRA and the wish to escape from it, as in the compounds bhavaniḥsarana, "escape for mundane existence," jarāniḥsarana, "escape from old age," and klesaniḥsarana, "escape from the afflictions." The wish to escape from rebirth is cultivated by contemplating such things as the relative rarity of rebirth as a human with access to the DHARMA, the uncertainty of the time of death, the cause and effects of actions, and the various sufferings inherent in the six realms of saMsāra. See also NIRVEDA; NIRYĀnA.

niryāna. (T. nges 'byung; C. chuli; J. shutsuri; K. ch'ulli 出離). In Sanskrit, lit. "departure" or "going out." In the context of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvāry āryasatyāni), it is an aspect of the third "truth of cessation" (NIRODHASATYA), where niryāna means the definite "escape" from suffering when its cause has been eliminated. In the context of the MAHĀYĀNA path, niryāna involves the final stages of a bodhisattva's progress (PRATIPATTI) leading to full enlightenment; the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA gives a list of eight niryānas based on aspects of the final destination. In some contexts, the term, like NIRVEDA and NIḤSARAnA, can mean "renunciation," in the sense of the conviction to be liberated or to emerge from rebirth in SAMSĀRA, whether one is following the path of the sRĀVAKA or PRATYEKABUDDHA in order to become an ARHAT, or is following the BODHISATTVA path in order to become a buddha. It is in this sense that the Tibetan translation of the term as "emergence" (nges 'byung) is deployed by TSONG KHA PA in his delineation of the "three principal aspects of the path" (LAM GTSO RNAM GSUM), where emergence is the first of the three aspects, followed by BODHICITTA and wisdom (PRAJNĀ).

Psychic emergence ::: When the psychic being comes in front, there is an automatic perception of the true and untrue, the divine and the undivine, the spiritual right and wrong of things, and the false vital and mental movements and attacks are imme- diately exposed and fall away and can do nothing ; gradually the vital and physical as well as flte mind get full of this psychic licht and truth and sound feeling and purit>'.

reemergence ::: n. --> Act of reemerging.

Resistance ::: or a resistance_level:, is the price point at which the rise in the price of a stock or a stock index is halted by the emergence of a growing number of sellers who wish to sell the stock at that price. Resistance levels can be short lived if new information comes to light that changes the overall market’s attitude toward a stock, or they can be long lasting.

ruah ::: Ruah The Zohar tells us that the Ruah division of the soul is considered to be the seat of moral qualities and is sometimes referred to as the Intellectual Spirit. Because the emergence of the Ruah, as understood by Kabbalists, is an experience of the spirit poured on us from on high (Isaiah, Chapter xxxii, verse 15) the excitement and brightness of the moment may easily mislead us into believing that the task of spiritual development has been completed.

sahaja. (T. lhan skyes; C. jushengqi; J. kushoki; K. kusaenggi 生起). A polysemous Sanskrit term, variously translated as "coemergence," "connate," "simultaneously arisen," and "the innate." This term is used frequently in the tantric Buddhist verses composed by the SIDDHAs of medieval north India such as SARAHA, Kānha, and TILOPA; these include collections of DOHĀ recorded in APABHRAMsA and Bengali compilations of caryāgīti (see CARYĀGĪTIKOsA). In these contexts, sahaja refers most generally to the ultimate and innermost true nature, as well as to its realization through the spontaneous and uninhibited lifestyle and practice associated with tantric adepts. The term may be used as a noun for the ultimate state itself, or as an adjective describing a state or condition as natural and uncontrived. In the context of the YOGINĪ tantras such as the HEVAJRATANTRA, the term sahaja is used to refer to the highest of four states of ecstasy-innate ecstasy (sahajānanda)-which can be gained through the visualized or actual practice of sexual yoga, and through which one comes to realize the mind's luminosity and natural purity. Early twentieth-century authors-beginning with the Bengali scholars and translators who first published studies on the collections of tantric verses-described what they called the sahajayāna ("path of sahaja") and the sahajiyās who followed it, although neither term is found in traditional Indian Buddhist literature. The Tibetan form, lhan skyes (short for lhan cig tu skyes pa) appears widely in the subsequent literature of MAHĀMUDRĀ.

Samatha Meditation ::: One of the two general categories of meditative practice described on this site. Refers to concentration meditation where an object of focus is chosen and held onto with the mind. The object of focus can vary considerably, but enough attention consistently leads to the emergence and development of states called the samatha jhanas. Also Concentration Meditation.

samudācāra. (T. kun tu spyod pa; C. xianxing; J. gengyo; K. hyonhaeng 現行). In Sanskrit, the term has two important denotations: "proper conduct," or "intention, purpose, habitual idea"; and "manifest action." Samudācāra designates religious action that is undertaken for the sake of attaining liberation for oneself and either liberation or an improved state of rebirth for others. Thus, the term can refer to a buddha's unceasing effort and the influence he exerts to help beings attain liberation. In its description of the first BHuMI, the MAHĀVASTU lists eight types of samudācāra for a BODHISATTVA. These are generosity (tyāga), compassion (KARUnĀ), relentlessness (aparikheda), humility (amāna), study of all the treatises (sarvasāstrādhyāyitā), courage (vikrama), social skills (lokānujNā), and resolve (dhṛti). Deriving from its denotation of volitional impulse, samudācāra also comes to be used in the YOGĀCĀRA school to indicate the emergence of conditioned factors (saMskṛtadharma) from the ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA, since, once they have arisen and are no longer dormant, they influence conscious action. In the context of Yogācāra thought, then, samudācāra is often translated as "manifest action." The term is also used in the sense of the special qualities of the practice of bodhisattvas, who are habituated to the ultimate nature of things (TATHATĀ, literally, "suchness"). The dependent origination of an action and the ultimate way in which that action occurs are inseparable; hence samudācāra, and in particular actions prompted by the aspiration for enlightenment, are "manifest actions." In tantric literature, the term is used for the four types of activities, also known as the CATURKARMAN.

sankhārupekkhāNāna. In Pāli, "knowledge arising from equanimity regarding all formations"; according to the VISUDDHIMAGGA, the eighth of nine knowledges (P. Nāna, S. JNĀNA) cultivated as part of "purity of knowledge and vision of progress along the path" (PAtIPADĀNĀnADASSANAVISUDDHI). This latter category, in turn, constitutes the sixth and penultimate purity (P. visuddhi, S. VIsUDDHI) to be developed along the path to liberation. Knowledge arising from equanimity regarding all formations arises as a consequence of understanding all conditioned formations (S. SAMSKĀRA) that comprise the individual and the universe as being characterized by the three marks (S. TRILAKsAnA) of impermanence (S. ANITYA), suffering (S. DUḤKHA) and nonself (S. ANĀTMAN). This understanding is the product of the immediately preceding (seventh) knowledge called "knowledge arising from contemplation of reflection" (PAtISAnKHĀNUPASSANĀNĀnA). Understanding the formations to be void (see suNYATĀ) in this way, the practitioner abandons both terror and delight, and, regarding them as neither "I" nor "mine," he becomes indifferent and neutral towards them. The sixth, seventh, and eighth knowledges when taken together are called "insight leading to emergence" (vutthānagāmini vipassanā) because they stand at the threshold of liberation. The Visuddhimagga states that, at this stage in the practice, one can continue to contemplate the formations with equanimity, or, if the mind turns towards the nibbāna element (S. NIRVĀnADHĀTU) as its object, one of three types of liberation (S. VIMUKTI) ensues. If liberation occurs while contemplating impermanence, it is called "signless liberation," if it occurs while contemplating suffering it is called "wishless liberation," and if it occurs while contemplating nonself it is called "empty liberation" (see VIMOKsAMUKHA).

self-knowledge ::: knowing of oneself, without help from another.
Sri Aurobindo: The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate. *The Life Divine
"Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.” The Life Divine
"The Truth-Consciousness is everywhere present in the universe as an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity.” The Life Divine


Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.
   Ref: The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 852 – 53


". . . Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor.” The Life Divine*

“… Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor.” The Life Divine

Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usual- ly ages to reach abiding results ; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from ioconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and co- operator, and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transforma- tion. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid consersion. quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our

Sri Aurobindo: "The sense of release as if from jail always accompanies the emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above. It is therefore spoken of as a liberation, mukti. It is a release into peace, happiness, the soul"s freedom not tied down by the thousand ties and cares of the outward ignorant existence.” Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: "Victory. The final emergence of the embodied consciousness on earth from the bondage of the Ignorance.” *On Himself

Supermind ::: The Supermind [Supramental consciousness] is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda. Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and the divine Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and possesses its own essential law of being; it has not to be created or to emerge or evolve into existence out of involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view to have so emerged from life and Matter or to have evolved out of an involution in life and Matter. The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge, not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and th
   refore inevitable. Its -manifestation of the divine life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence. The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is th
   refore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in this material existence. A manifestation of the Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this world sooner or later. But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature; it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of divine gradations, a free growth to the supreme Supermind or beyond it to yet undreamed levels of being, consciousness and Ananda.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 558-62


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.

T’ai i: Chinese for the Great Indeterminate, the state of existence before the emergence of the vital force (ch’i). The Ultimate Oneness, which involves both Being (yu) and Non-Being (wu), and “which pervades Heaven and Earth, indeterminate but simple, existing but uncreated.” (See also ta i.)

T'ai I: The Great Indeterminate, the state or existence before the emergence of the vital force (ch'i). (Lieh Tzu, third century A.D.). -- W.T.C.

“Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.” The Life Divine

Though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence— to give it an inadequate name—the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 785-86


Thus nature begins as a four-dimensional matrix in which it is the moving principle. Materiality, secondary qualities, life, mentality are all emergent modifications of proto-space-time. Mind is the nervous system blossoming out into the capacity of awareness. Contemplative knowledge, where the object is set over against the mind, and the actual being, or experiencing, or enjoying of reality, where there is no inner duplicity of subject and object, constitute the two forms of knowledge. Alexander conceives the deity as the next highest level to be emerged out of any given level. Thus for beings on the level of life mind is deity, but for beings possessing minds there is a nisus or urge toward a still higher quality. To such beings that dimly felt quality is deity. The quality next above any given level is deity to the beings on that level. For men deity has not yet emerged, but there is a nisus towards its emergence. S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (1920). -- H.H.

tions; but here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles, would be the emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted characters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence. Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind and Supermind too must in the end fulfil themselves in this apparently opposite organisation from a dark Infinite. …

transformation ::: A vertical change in deep structures. The emergence of deeper forms of agency and wider communions. A shift to any higher level in a holarchy. See Eros and Agape.

Two things render that culmination more facile than it would otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has originated modifications of itself,—Intuition especially with its penetrative lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of country in our consciousness,—which can bring the concealed truth of things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and overmental beings, not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable. But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their action is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the medium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recognisable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind intervention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above. …

Vairocana. (T. Rnam par snang mdzad; C. Dari rulai/Piluzhena; J. Dainichi nyorai/Birushana; K. Taeil yorae/Pirojana 大日如來/盧遮那). In Sanskrit, "Resplendent"; one of the five buddhas (PANCATATHĀGATA) and the chief buddha of the TATHĀGATAKULA; he is also one of the major buddhas of East Asian Buddhism, where he is often conflated with MAHĀVAIROCANA. The origin of Vairocana can be traced back to the Hindu tradition, where he appears as a relatively minor deity associated with the Sun. ¶ Although the name Vairocana appears in some mainstream Buddhist and PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ materials, it is not until the emergence of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA that Vairocana comes to be widely regarded as the buddha who is the personification of the universal truth of the religion. In its "Chapter on Vairocana," Vairocana is considered to be the main buddha of the sutra, who is omnipresent as the DHARMAKĀYA. Vairocana is, however, also described in the sutra as a buddha who mastered the BODHISATTVA path by making vows to attain buddhahood, performing all types of virtuous deeds, hearing the dharma, cultivating meditative practices, and realizing the truth of the dependent origination of the dharma realm (C. FAJIE YUANQI) in which each and every thing in existence is in multivalent interaction with all other things in a state of complete and perfect interfusion. In this case, Vairocana as the reward body (SAMBHOGAKĀYA) is called ROCANA (C. Lushena) in order to distinguish him from Vairocana (C. Piluzhena) as the dharmakāya buddha. With the growing popularity of the AvataMsakasutra, Vairocana becomes one of the principal buddhas of East Asian Buddhism. Many Vairocana images were constructed in China starting in the sixth century, and colossal images of him were erected in the LONGMEN Grottoes near Luoyang in northern China and in ToDAIJI in Nara, Japan. In Korea, Vairocana (as the dharmakāya buddha) often appeared at the center of a buddha triad, flanked by sĀKYAMUNI (as the NIRMĀnAKĀYA) and ROCANA (as the saMbhogakāya). Vairocana's popularity expanded with his appearance in the MAHĀVAIROCANASuTRA, and, from this point on, Vairocana is generally regarded as the main buddha of the AvataMsakasutra and the HUAYAN ZONG, while Mahāvairocana is regarded as the main buddha of the MAHĀVAIROCANĀBHISAMBODHISuTRA and the ZHENYAN or SHINGON schools. ¶ Vairocana is also the central deity of the VAJRADHĀTU (J. KONGoKAI) and the GARBHADHĀTU (J. TAIZoKAI) MAndALAs of YOGATANTRA associated with the SARVATATHĀGATATATTVASAMGRAHA, a highly influential tantric text in India, Tibet, and East Asia. He appears in the central assembly of the vajradhātu mandala, displaying the MUDRĀ of wisdom (dainichi ken-in), surrounded by the four directional buddhas (AKsOBHYA, RATNASAMBHAVA, AMITĀBHA, and AMOGHASIDDHI), each of whom embodies four aspects of Vairocana's wisdom. In the garbhadhātu mandala, Vairocana is located at the center of the eight-petaled lotus in the central cloister of the mandala, along with the four buddhas and four bodhisattvas sitting on the eight petals. Vairocana is typically depicted as white in color, holding the wheel of dharma (DHARMACAKRA) in his hands, which are in the gesture of teaching (VITARKAMUDRĀ). Vairocana is closely associated with the bodhisattva SAMANTABHADRA, and his consort is Vajradhātvīsvarī. The commentaries on the SarvatathāgatatattvasaMgraha recount that Prince SIDDHĀRTHA was meditating on the banks of the NAIRANJANĀ River when he was roused by Vairocana and the buddhas of the ten directions, who informed him that such meditation would not result in the achievement of buddhahood. He thus left his physical body behind and traveled in a mind-made body (MANOMAYAKĀYA) to the AKANIstHA heaven, where he received various consecrations and achieved buddhahood. He next descended to the summit of Mount SUMERU, where he taught the yogatantras. Finally, he returned to the world, inhabited his physical body, and then displayed to the world the well-known defeat of MĀRA and the achievement of buddhahood. ¶ Vairocana is also the name of one of the chief figures in the earlier dissemination (SNGA DAR) of Buddhism to Tibet, where he is known by his Tibetan pronunciation of Bai ro tsa na. He was one of the first seven Tibetans (SAD MI BDUN) to be ordained as Buddhist monks by the Indian master sĀNTARAKsITA at the first Tibetan monastery, BSAM YAS. According to Tibetan accounts, he was sent by King KHRI SRONG LDE BTSAN to India to study Sanskrit and to gather texts and teachings. He is said to have received teachings of the "mind class" (SEMS SDE) and the "expanse class" (KLONG SDE) at BODHGAYĀ, before traveling to OddIYĀNA, where he met the master sRĪSIMHA, who gave him exoteric teachings during the day and instructed him secretly in the great completeness (RDZOGS CHEN) practices at night. Returning to Tibet, he followed the same program, instructing the king secretly in the "mind class" teachings at night. This raised suspicions, which led to his banishment to eastern Tibet. He was later allowed to return, at the request of VIMALAMITRA. He is renowned as one of the three major figures (along with PADMASAMBHAVA and Vimalamitra) in the dissemination of the rdzogs chen teachings in Tibet and translated many texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan; the manuscripts of some of his translations have been discovered at DUNHUANG. See also JNĀNAMUstI.

Variation Used in Darwinian theory as complementary to heredity, representing the tendencies towards variety of forms in living organisms, while heredity tends to perpetuate fixed types. Darwin held that species denotes merely a temporal cross section through a continuously flowing stream of gradual variation; but further study has shown that there is no such continual, uniform, and unidirectional flow of variation, but that there are reversions to original type and comparatively sudden emergence of new types. The causes assigned by Darwin for variation, though he premises the existence within the organism of a susceptibility to variation, are physical, being responses to environment. Such causes, purposeless and chaotic, could not produce ordered results; the facts indicate an intricate design and manifold purposes in nature, originating in spiritual and ethereal entities belonging to nature’s hierarchical structure. Nature in fact is composed of living beings, and the ultimate cause of variation is to be sought in the operations of cosmic ideation, which reproduce their effects finally in physical organisms throughout nature.

VICTORY. ::: The final emergence of the embodied conscious- ness on earth from the bondage of the Ignorance.

victory ::: “Victory. The final emergence of the embodied consciousness on earth from the bondage of the Ignorance.” On Himself

vimoksamukha. (P. vimokkhamukha; T. rnam par thar pa'i sgo; C. jietuo men; J. gedatsumon; K. haet'al mun 解門). In Sanskrit, "gates to deliverance," or "doors of liberation"; three points of transition between the compounded (SAMSKṚTA) and uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) realms, which, when contemplated, lead to liberation (VIMOKsA) and NIRVĀnA: (1) emptiness (sUNYATĀ), (2) signlessness (ĀNIMITTA), and (3) wishlessness (APRAnIHITA). The three are widely interpreted. In mainstream Buddhist materials, emptiness (sunyatā) entails the recognition that all compounded (SAMSKṚTA) things of this world are devoid of any perduring self (ĀTMAN) and are thus unworthy objects of clinging. By acknowledging emptiness, the meditator is thus able to turn away from this world and instead advert toward nirvāna, which is uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA). Signlessness (ānimitta) is a crucial stage in the process of sensory restraint (INDRIYASAMVARA): as the frequent refrain in the SuTRAs states, "In the seen, there is only the seen," and not the superimpositions created by the intrusion of ego (ĀTMAN) into the perceptual process. Signlessness is produced through insight into impermanence (ANITYA) and serves as the counteragent (PRATIPAKsA) to attachments to anything experienced through the senses; once the meditator has abandoned all such attachments to the senses, he is then able to advert toward nirvāna, which ipso facto has no sensory signs of its own by which it can be recognized. Wishlessness is produced through insight into suffering (DUḤKHA) and serves as the counteragent (PRATIPAKsA) to all the intentions (āsaya) and aspirations (PRAnIDHĀNA) one has toward any compounded dharma. As the Buddha's famous simile of the raft also suggests, the adept must finally abandon even the attachment to the compounded religious system that is Buddhism in order to experience nirvāna, the summum bonum of the religion. Once the meditator has abandoned all such aspirations, he will then be able to advert toward nirvāna, which ipso facto has nothing to do with anything that can be desired (VAIRĀGYA). ¶ In the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA, the three are explained in terms of three types of concentration (SAMĀDHI) on the sixteen aspects of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS. The four aspects of the first truth, of suffering (DUḤKHASATYA), are impermanence, misery, emptiness, and selflessness. The four aspects of the second truth, origination (SAMUDAYASATYA), are cause, origination, strong production, and condition. The four aspects of the third truth, cessation (NIRODHASATYA), are cessation, pacification, exaltedness, and emergence. The four aspects of the fourth truth, path (MĀRGASATYA), are path, suitability, achievement, and deliverance. According to the Abhidharmakosabhāsya, the samādhi associated with signlessness observes the four aspects of cessation; the samādhi of emptiness observes emptiness and selflessness, two of the four aspects of suffering; and the samādhi of wishlessness observes the remaining ten aspects. ¶ In YOGĀCĀRA texts, such as the MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA, emptiness, wishlessness, and signlessness are related to the three natures (TRISVABHĀVA) of the imaginary (PARIKALPITA), the dependent (PARATANTRA), and the consummate (PARINIsPANNA), respectively. In the MAHĀYĀNASuTRĀLAMKĀRA, it is said that the samādhi of emptiness understands the selflessness of persons and phenomenal factors (DHARMA), the samādhi of wishlessness views the five aggregates (SKANDHA) as faulty, and the samādhi of signlessness views nirvāna as the pacification of the aggregates. Elsewhere in that text, the three are connected to the four seals (CATURMUDRĀ) that certify a doctrine as Buddhist. The statements "all compounded factors are impermanent" and "all contaminated things are suffering" are the cause of the samādhi of wishlessness. "All phenomena are devoid of a perduring self" is the cause of the samādhi of emptiness. "Nirvāna is peace" is the cause of the sāmadhi of signlessness. According to another interpretation, emptiness refers to the lack of a truly existent entity in phenomena, signlessness refers to the lack of a truly existent cause, and wishlessness refers to the lack of a truly existent effect.

vyutthana. ::: rising up; awakening; emergence; externalisation; outgoing; rising; waking state; a stage in yoga

Xuanxue. (J. Gengaku; K. Hyonhak 玄學). In Chinese, "Dark Learning," or "Profound Learning"; a Chinese philosophical movement of the third through sixth centuries CE, which provided a fertile intellectual ground for the emergence of early Chinese forms of Buddhism. It is sometimes known as "Neo-Daoism," although the target audience of Xuanxue literati was fellow elite rather than adherents of the new schools of religious Daoism that were then developing in China. The social and political upheaval that accompanied the fall of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) prompted many Chinese intellectuals to question the traditional foundations of Chinese thought and society and opened them to alternative worldviews. Buddhism, which was just then beginning to filter into Chinese territories, found a receptive audience among these groups of thinkers. Xuanxue scholars critiqued and reinterpreted the normative Chinese teachings of Confucianism by drawing on the so-called "three dark [treatises]" (sanxuan), i.e., the Yijing ("Book of Changes"), Daode jing ("The Way and Its Power"), and the Zhuangzi. Xuanxue designates a broad intellectual trend that sought a new way of understanding the "way" (DAO). Xuanxue philosophers explored the ontological grounding of the changing and diverse world of "being" (C. you) on a permanent and indivisible substratum called "nothingness" or "non-being" (C. WU). Xuanxue thinkers such as Wang Bi (226-249), who is regarded as the founder of the movement, and Guo Xiang (d. 312), who is often considered to represent its apex, explored how this ontological stratum of nothingness still was able to produce the world of being in all its diversity. This process was clarified by adopting the mainstream Chinese philosophical bifurcations between (1) the ineffable "substance" or "essence" (TI) of things and the ways in which that substance "functions" (YONG) in the phenomenal world; and (2) the "patterns" or "principles" (LI) that underlie all things and their phenomenal manifestations (SHI). These distinctions between ti/yong and li/shi proved to be extremely influential in subsequent Chinese Buddhist exegesis. Also according to Xuanxue interpretation, the sage (shengren) is one who understands this association between being and nothingness but realizes that their relationship is fundamentally inexpressible; nevertheless, in order to make it intelligible to others, he feels "compelled" to describe it verbally. This emphasis on the inadequacy of language resonated with Buddhist treatments of the ineffability of spiritual experience and the necessity to deploy verbal stratagems (UPĀYA) in order to make that experience intelligible to others. The sage was able to manifest his understanding in the phenomenal world not by conscious intent but as an automatic "response" (ying) to "stimuli" (gan); early Chinese Buddhist thinkers deploy the compound "stimulus and response" (GANYING) to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and of grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Xuanxue thinkers also began to explore parallels between their ideas of "nonbeing" (wu) and the notion of emptiness (suNYATĀ) in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ corpus, which was just then being translated into Chinese. Xuanxue exegesis has often been described in the scholarly literature as a "matching concepts" (GEYI) style of interpretation, where Buddhist concepts were elucidated by drawing on indigenous Chinese philosophical terminology, though this interpretation of geyi has recently been called into question. Although Xuanxue vanished as a philosophical movement by the early sixth century, its influence was profound on several pioneering Chinese Buddhist thinkers, including ZHI DUN (314-366) and SENGZHAO (374-414), and on such early philosophical schools of Chinese Buddhism as the SAN LUN ZONG and DI LUN ZONG, and eventually on the TIANTAI ZONG and HUAYAN ZONG of the mature Chinese tradition.

Yggdrasil is not immortal. Its lifetime is coeval with the hierarchy the tree is used to represent. Its leaves are constantly being eaten by four stags, its bark is nibbled by two goats, and its roots are gnawed by the serpent Nidhogg which, in due course, will topple the “noble ash tree.” During the first half of its life, the tree is named Mjotvidr (measure increasing); during the latter half Mjotudr (measure diminishing). When in due course the tree dies, its indwelling consciousnesses (Life and Lifthrasir), the human race, will be secreted in the “memory hoard of the sun” until their next emergence into a new existence.



QUOTES [22 / 22 - 564 / 564]


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   15 Sri Aurobindo
   2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   2 Essential Integral
   1 William Irwin Thompson
   1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   14 Sri Aurobindo
   12 Anonymous
   9 Stephen Harrod Buhner
   8 Jordan Peterson
   8 Jordan B Peterson
   8 Francis Fukuyama
   6 Terence McKenna
   6 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   6 Michelle Alexander
   6 Immanuel Kant
   6 Henry Giroux
   6 Hannah Arendt
   6 Daron Acemo lu
   6 Al Gore
   5 William Irwin Thompson
   5 Noam Chomsky
   4 Lewis Mumford
   4 Ibrahim Ibrahim
   4 Fritjof Capra
   4 Eric Foner

1:The emergence and disappearance of the world are like the spider producing a gossamer web and then withdrawing it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
2:The emergence of the Purusha is the beginning of liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Inner Detachment and the Witness Attitude,
3:Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, The Emergence or Coming Forward of the Psychic,
4:In the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being,
5:Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man,
6:Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.
   ~ William Irwin Thompson,
7:The emergence and growth of consciousness is the central motive of the evolution and the key to its secret purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Perfection of the Body,
8:The psychic and spiritual attitude is also not dependent on the good and bad in beings, but is self-existent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, The Emergence or Coming Forward of the Psychic,
9:The emergence of an ideal in human thought is always the sign of an intention in Nature, but not always of an intention to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Turn towards Unity, Its Necessity and Dangers,
10:The mind obstructs the innate peace. Our investigation is only in the mind. Investigate the mind; it will disappear. There is no entity by name mind. Because of the emergence of thoughts we surmise something from which they start. That we term mind. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
11:There is no entity by name mind. Because of the emergence of thoughts we surmise something from which they start. That we term mind. When we probe to see what it is, there is nothing like it. After it has vanished, peace will be found to remain eternal. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
12:The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the Supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,
13:the soul alone ensures sincerity :::
   It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,
14:In the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power, this correlation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness itself is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and rhythm of its powers in their emergence are diminished and disturbed by the discordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there is the original, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious mind is only a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising coherence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life,
15:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
16:The Lord has veiled himself and his absolute wisdom and eternal consciousness in ignorant Nature-Force and suffers her to drive the individual being, with its complicity, as the ego; this lower action of Nature continues to prevail, often even in spite of man's half-lit imperfect efforts at a nobler motive and a purer self-knowledge. Our human effort at perfection fails, or progresses very incompletely, owing to the force of Nature's past actions in us, her past formations, her long-rooted associations; it turns towards a true and high-climbing success only when a greater Knowledge and Power than our own breaks through the lid of our ignorance and guides or takes up our personal will. For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and purer force is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver after perfection; it is a dreadful passage full of trials, sufferings, sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge and alleviate this ordeal or to penetrate it with the divine delight faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, a true aspiration and a right and unfaltering and sincere practice. "Practise unfalteringly," says the Gita, "with a heart free from despondency," the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 219,
17:Though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence- to give it an inadequate name-the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 785-86,
18:formal-operational ::: The orange altitude emerged a few hundred years ago with the European Rennisance. Its modern, rational view grew in prominance through the Age of Enlightenment and came to its fullest expression during the Industrial Revolution.

Fueling this age of reason and science was the emergence of formal operational cognition, or the ability to operate on thoughts themselves. No longer limited to reflection on concrete objects, cognition moves from representations to abstractions and can now operate on a range of non-tangiable propositions that may not reflect the concrete world. This is the basis of scientific reasoning through hypothesis. Orange also brings multiplistic thinking, or the realization that there are several possible ways of approaching a situation, even though one is still considered most right. Self-sense at orange features two shifts, first to expert and then to achiever, these moves feature an increase in self-awareness and appreciation for multiple possibilities in a given situation. Recognition that one doesnt always live up to idealized social expectations is fueled by an awareness that begins to penetrate the inner world of subjectivity. This is the beginning of introspection. An objectifiable self-sense and the capacity to take a third person perspective. Needs shift from belonging to self-esteem. And values land on pragmatic utiliarian approaches to life that rely on ... and thinking to earn progress, prosperity and self-reliance. Morality at orange sees right defined by universal ethical principles. The emergence of formal operational thinking at orange enables a world-centric care for universal human rights and the right of each individual for autonomy and the pursuit of happiness. A desire for individual dignity and self-respect are also driving forces behind orange morality. A significant number of the founding fathers of the United States harbored orange values. ...

Faith at orange is called Individual Reflective and so far as identity and world-view are differentiated from others, and faith takes on an essence of critical thought. Demythologizing symbols into conceptual meanings. At orange we see the emergence of rational deism and secularism. ~ Essential Integral, 4.1-51, Formal Operational,
19: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,
20:meta-systemic operations ::: As the 1950's and 60s begin to roll around the last stage of first tier emerged as a cultural force. With the Green Altitude we see the emergence of Pluralistic, Multicultural, Post-Modern world-views.

Cognition is starting to move beyond formal-operations into the realm of co-ordinating systems of abstractions, in what is called Meta-systemic Cognition. While formal-operations acted upon the classes and relations between members of classes. Meta-systemic operations start at the level of relating systems to systems. The focus of these investigations is placed upon comparing, contrasting, transforming and synthesizing entire systems, rather than components of one system. This emergent faculty allows self-sense to focus around a heightened sense of individuality and an increased ability for emotional resonance. The recognition of individual differences, the ability to tolerate paradox and contradiction, and greater conceptual complexity all provide for an understanding of conflict as being both internally and externally caused. Context plays a major role in the creation of truth and individual perspective. With each being context dependent and open to subjective interpretation, meaning each perspective and truth are rendered relative and are not able to be judged as better or more true than any other. This fuels a value set that centers on softness over cold rationality. Sensitivity and preference over objectivity.

Along with a focus on community harmony and equality which drives the valuing of sensitivity to others, reconcilation, consensus, dialogue, relationship, human development, bonding, and a seeking of a peace with the inner-self. Moral decisions are based on rights, values, or principles that are agreeable to all individuals composing a society based on fair and beneficial practices. All of this leads to the Equality movements and multiculturalism. And to the extreme form of relativitism which we saw earlier as context dependant nature of all truth including objective facts.

Faith at the green altitude is called Conjunctive, and allows the self to integrate what was unrecognized by the previous stages self-certainty and cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. New features at this level of faith include the unification of symbolic power with conceptual meaning, an awareness of ones social unconscious, a reworking of ones past, and an opening to ones deeper self. ~ Essential Integral, 4.1-52, Meta-systemic Operations,
21:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]

   We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.

   Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

   But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],
22:The Supermind [Supramental consciousness] is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda. Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and the divine Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and possesses its own essential law of being; it has not to be created or to emerge or evolve into existence out of involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view to have so emerged from life and Matter or to have evolved out of an involution in life and Matter. The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge, not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and therefore inevitable. Its -manifestation of the divine life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence. The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in this material existence. A manifestation of the Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this world sooner or lateR But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature; it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of divine gradations, a free growth to the supreme Supermind or beyond it to yet undreamed levels of being, consciousness and Ananda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, 558,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Failure is merely feedback that there is something blocking the path of the emergence and expansion of the greatest version of yourself. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove
2:The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove
3:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity... No thing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove
4:Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The creative process is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove
5:No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove
6:The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty, and this novelty is often qualitatively different from the phenomenon out of which it emerged. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove
7:I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove
8:Our thoughts about the future go far toward creating it; our minds and hears are like filaments taht connect today to tomorrow, they are conduits for either the status quo or the emergence of different, hopefully more loving, possibilities. How we think and how we behave determine where we are going ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove
9:The founders of the United Nations expected that member nations would behave and vote as individuals after they had weighed the merits of an issue - rather like a great, global town meeting. The emergence of blocks and the polarization of the United Nations undermine all that this organization initially valued. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove
10:We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove
11:The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove
12:This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability, which is often referred to simply as emergence, is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity-the generation of new forms-is a key property of all living systems. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove
13:A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove
14:So, the path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world. Certainly, we can't do that unless we activate ourselves first. That's why, for me, emergence is the shift from ego to essence. That is so important. ~ barbara-marx-hubbard, @wisdomtrove
15:The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual, slow beat; always inching its way forward, change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove
16:The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove
17:The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove
18:The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove
19:Instead of studying old traditions, emphasis is now placed on new observations and experiments. When present observation collides with past tradition, we give precedence to the observation. Of course, physicists analysing the spectra of distant galaxies, archaeologists analysing the finds from a Bronze Age city, and political scientists studying the emergence of capitalism do not disregard tradition. They start by studying what the wise people of the past have said and written. But from their first year in college, aspiring physicists, archaeologists and political scientists are taught that it is their mission to go beyond what Einstein, Heinrich Schliemann and Max Weber ever knew. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Sound: always in a state of emergence or decay ~ David Toop,
2:The average man. The emergence of the concept. ~ Adolphe Quetelet,
3:happy anniversary of your emergence from your mother’s uterus. ~ Stuart Gibbs,
4:Birth is not an emergency. It is simply an emergence. ~ Jeannine Parvati Baker,
5:There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory. ~ Imre Lakatos,
6:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. ~ Immanuel Kant,
7:Following the emergence of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation ~ Anonymous,
8:Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
9:wish you a happy anniversary of your emergence from your mother’s uterus. ~ Stuart Gibbs,
10:Thus, the Lingam is the simplest sign or symbol of Emergence and Mergence. ~ Sathya Sai Baba,
11:The emergence of India as a major global power is an idea whose time has come. ~ Manmohan Singh,
12:The emergence of consciousness, like the unfolding of a leaf, relies upon restraint. ~ Peter Atkins,
13:The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. ~ Arthur Koestler,
14:Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. ~ Verne Harnish,
15:The emergence of Casual Fridays has created a fine line of fashion ion dos and donts. ~ Michael Perlis,
16:It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies. ~ Antonia Fraser,
17:The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time. ~ Henry A Kissinger,
18:The EU should help the emergence of "organized multipolarity" in the currently non-polar world. ~ Laurent Fabius,
19:Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order. ~ Terence McKenna,
20:We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization ~ Peter L Berger,
21:I'm fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They're highly mobile; they reject the idea of place. ~ Hari Kunzru,
22:The emergence of one world consciousness must be accompanied with one world political infrastructures. ~ Bryant McGill,
23:It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. ~ Jacques Ellul,
24:A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life. ~ Gaston Bachelard,
25:For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect. ~ Cameron Sinclair,
26:Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar ~ Marshall McLuhan,
27:The foundation is being laid for the emergence of both wind and solar cells as cornerstones of the new energy economy. ~ Lester R Brown,
28:The emergence and disappearance of the world are like the spider producing a gossamer web and then withdrawing it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
29:Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it. ~ Steven Johnson,
30:My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted. ~ R Buckminster Fuller,
31:"Cosmogony – the mythological understanding of the emergence of order. There's a chaos out of which order emerges."  ~ Jordan Peterson,
32:If there is any emergence of a fourth party in British politics, it is the task of the Liberal Party to strangle it at birth. ~ Cyril Smith,
33:"Cosmogony – the mythological understanding of the emergence of order. There's a chaos out of which order emerges."  ~ Jordan B Peterson,
34:Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control. ~ Aldo Leopold,
35:The emergence of the Purusha is the beginning of liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Inner Detachment and the Witness Attitude,
36:you are interested in the history of the digital age and the emergence of digital culture, Isaacson’s book is a must read.” — ~ Walter Isaacson,
37:Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of chronostrategy. ~ Paul Virilio,
38:Failure is merely feedback that there is something blocking the path of the emergence and expansion of the greatest version of yourself. ~ Mother Teresa,
39:The emergence of wholes from parts exudes an aroma of mystery, of elusive but profound truths. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind,
40:As a nation, we will only become the shining light to the world with the emergence of more and more role models worthy of emulation by all ~ Fela Durotoye,
41:In Europe the emergence of what we now would call a consumer culture dealt the death blow to aristocratic leadership in style and manners. ~ Joyce Appleby,
42:A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness. And A New Earth is it's direct reflection in the physical realm. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
43:Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity. ~ Terence McKenna,
44:If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process. ~ Sam Harris,
45:Our modern understanding of life as an autobiographical project is undoubtedly linked to the emergence of the modern novel as a literary form. ~ Svend Brinkmann,
46:The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types. ~ Christopher Lasch,
47:Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, The Emergence or Coming Forward of the Psychic,
48:The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. ~ Richard Preston,
49:Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state. ~ Eric Foner,
50:The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. ~ Fritjof Capra,
51:Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind. ~ Adrienne Brown,
52:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. ~ Immanuel Kant,
53:In the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being,
54:Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man,
55:Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future. ~ David Whyte,
56:I think since the systematic emergence of terrorism and the assassination attempts, everything has tightened. My hope is that it loosens back up once I leave. ~ Barack Obama,
57:Indeed, cancer’s emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
58:The emergence of the independent hip-hop scene has replaced what we called the "underground scene". It's what the underground scene has evolved into: actual businesses. ~ El P,
59:Television’s emergence as the dominant medium of communication gave birth to the slickly marketed health-wealth-and-success gospel rampant in today’s church. ~ Charles W Colson,
60:I am interested in recent scholarly work examining the emergence of women's studies and ethnic studies departments and the development of the neoliberal university. ~ Dean Spade,
61:Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,
62:Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with. ~ Cornel West,
63:The fate of mankind, as well as religion, depends on the emergence of a new faith in the future. Armed with such a faith, we might find it possible to resanctify the earth. ~ Al Gore,
64:The emergence and growth of consciousness is the central motive of the evolution and the key to its secret purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Perfection of the Body,
65:The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself. ~ Joanne Greenberg,
66:Many challenges need to be responded to: the emergence of multiparty coalitions as a regular form of government that need to rapidly evolve as a stable, two-party system; ~ A P J Abdul Kalam,
67:There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks. ~ Henry Giroux,
68:It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed. ~ Matt Ridley,
69:So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence. ~ Tony Judt,
70:The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of the meaning itself". ~ Joanne Greenberg,
71:At the same time, you see in those studies, you see the emergence of various movements among black youth that are really challenging the ideology of neoliberalism since the 1980s. ~ Henry Giroux,
72:It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit. ~ Jean Francois Chevrier,
73:Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth. ~ Lewis Mumford,
74:One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off. ~ William Irwin Thompson,
75:The 2016 presidential election is ripe for the emergence of a game-changing political leader who either dramatically reforms one of the existing parties or mounts an independent bid. ~ Ron Fournier,
76:The psychic and spiritual attitude is also not dependent on the good and bad in beings, but is self-existent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, The Emergence or Coming Forward of the Psychic,
77:Savant syndrome, characteristically, consists of left hemisphere dysfunction coupled with right hemisphere emergence, and what you see in the savant are basically right brain skills. ~ Darold Treffert,
78:What we're going to see is the emergence of the lone wolf rather than the planning of large numbers of people to carry out large attacks...Explosives are getting more sophisticated. ~ Dianne Feinstein,
79:That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self ~ Joseph Conrad,
80:Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change. ~ William Irwin Thompson,
81:He remembers that it was said to him, "Our ancestors were animal forms." But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism. ~ Rudolf Steiner,
82:Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.' ~ Martin Scorsese,
83:She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color. ~ John Henrik Clarke,
84:The chance emergence of the was nothing. Remember this. But its persistence and patient accumulation of stature were everything. Only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist. ~ James A Michener,
85:The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities. ~ Jane Jacobs,
86:But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being. ~ Rollo May,
87:Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. ~ William Irwin Thompson,
88:Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.
   ~ William Irwin Thompson,
89:Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight ‘pop’ of its emergence appearing to em-body the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give. ~ Anthony Powell,
90:There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people. ~ Romain Rolland,
91:In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles. ~ Marshall McLuhan,
92:The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,
93:The emergence of an ideal in human thought is always the sign of an intention in Nature, but not always of an intention to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Turn towards Unity, Its Necessity and Dangers,
94:The primary economic conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities. ~ Jane Jacobs,
95:The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear. ~ Haile Gerima,
96:This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, ~ Anonymous,
97:I'm found of what's called emergence - as the universe gets more complex, new laws can emerge. Like evolution - there's things that you just aren't able to explain, even if you had an understanding of atoms. ~ Adam Frank,
98:In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence. ~ Gerhard Richter,
99:Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,
100:You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient. ~ Geoffrey West,
101:I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating. ~ Hari Kunzru,
102:There has to be consistent emergence of two or three films - narratively, stylistically, consistently demonstrating you are here to go on. And on that kind of basis, I'm not seeing much. I'm just waiting to see. ~ Haile Gerima,
103:The reality is that accent distinctiveness is nothing to do with physical environment, but a result of the combination of regional and social factors that have influenced the emergence of a particular community. ~ David Crystal,
104:but it also meant that there were checks within Parliament against any single group becoming too powerful and abusing its power. It was the critical factor in the emergence of pluralistic political institutions. ~ Daron Acemo lu,
105:The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos. ~ Eric Voegelin,
106:There is an urgent need for the emergence of a new generation of apostles anchored firmly in the word of Christ, capable of responding to the challenges of our times and prepared to spread the Gospel far and wide. ~ Pope Benedict XVI,
107:The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being. ~ Thomas Berry,
108:The years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light -- only those who have experienced it can understand it. ~ Albert Einstein,
109:The general evolution is clear: bubbles aside, what we are witnessing is a strong comeback of private capital in the rich countries since 1970, or, to put it another way, the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism. ~ Thomas Piketty,
110:Neoliberalism has taken new forms since the demise of the Fordist concept of labor and with the emergence of what is understood as flexible labor. This has really come to be the dominant form for about the last 20 years. ~ Judith Butler,
111:Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents. ~ George Will,
112:Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity. ~ Thomas S Kuhn,
113:Global interconnectedness has led to the emergence of a new political power, that of consumers and their associations. It is good for people to realize that purchasing is always a moral - and not simply economic - act. ~ Pope Benedict XVI,
114:In the age of the internet, with all of its problems, over time, the very fact that individuals can join the conversation creates the opportunity for the emergence of - for the re-emergence of a genuine conversation of democracy. ~ Al Gore,
115:All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. ~ Herbert Marcuse,
116:Whereas discussion of male puberty includes the emergence of a near unstoppable sex drive, female puberty is defined by periods and the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure? ~ Peggy Orenstein,
117:All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. ~ Herbert Marcuse,
118:As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something else, the Sache or subject matter which comes to presence and presentation in conversation. ~ Hans Georg Gadamer,
119:With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries. ~ William Irwin Thompson,
120:As I wrote in 1995, “America’s greatest national security nightmare would be the emergence of an authoritarian, imperialist Russian regime supported by a thriving market economy.”13 A decade later, that’s exactly what happened. ~ Michael McFaul,
121:Everything in that frame is judged in terms of the human, as if we are outside the ecological matrix in which we are embedded, as if evolution ended once and for all with our emergence, with the development of our brains. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
122:There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language. ~ Noam Chomsky,
123:The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today--i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters--has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system. ~ Michelle Alexander,
124:Ritual regulation
of production and belligerence means that domestication has become the decisive factor. "The emergence of systematic warfare, fortifications, and weapons of destruction," says Hassan, "follows the path of agriculture. ~ John Zerzan,
125:Germany’s emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long. ~ John le Carr,
126:The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology. ~ Walker Percy,
127:I think that I am among the few lucky ones who are exploiting complexity. Most people are unhappy with the emergence of complexity, they would prefer it if the world were very simple, but then it would be a doom for a cryptographer like myself. ~ Adi Shamir,
128:It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. ~ Friedrich A Hayek,
129:So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible. ~ James K A Smith,
130:War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes. ~ Mao Zedong,
131:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters. ~ Immanuel Kant,
132:“The impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed. Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name.“ ~ Ivan Illich,
133:The ant continued its climb, threading the maze of Ye Wenjie’s name on her gravestone. Its species had been living on the Earth a hundred million years before the emergence of this gambler who now leaned on the stone. Even though it had no care for ~ Liu Cixin,
134:Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation. ~ James E Lovelock,
135:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity...No thing is required for this enlightenment.. .except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. ~ Immanuel Kant,
136:I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion. ~ Noam Chomsky,
137:For it is no railways, roads, and power stations that give rise to industrial capitalism: it is the emergence of industrial capitalism that leads to the building of railways, to the construction of roads, and to the establishment of power stations. ~ Paul A Baran,
138:"Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The creative process is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual." ~ Carl Rogers,
139:From a Jungian perspective, the Ouranos myth, it should be kept in mind, although ostensibly about cosmological creation, is to be interpreted in psychological terms as relating to the emergence and development of consciousness. ~ Keiron Le Grice, Discovering Eris,
140:The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00. ~ Terry Pratchett,
141:It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek,
142: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,
143:That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with. ~ Cornel West,
144:The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order. ~ Ibrahim Babangida,
145:At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. ~ Teju Cole,
146:Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of “superfluous” money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders. For ~ Hannah Arendt,
147:I am sure that it wouldn’t be in the long-term interests of China which would continue to depend on these African resources for a very long time to see the emergence of any sense of hostility animosity, tension, da da da, between itself and the African continent. ~ Thabo Mbeki,
148:Outing someone is like ripping a butterfly from its cocoon. You can damage them for life and rob them of THEIR life changing experience of liberation. For a successful emergence THEY have to struggle through the cocoon of fear and shame. THEN they can fly. ~ Anthony Venn Brown,
149:Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being. Chia and Masahiko ~ William Gibson,
150:To contribute to the emergence of a society in which development will supplant stagnation, in which growth will take the place of decay, and in which culture will put an end to barbarism is the noblest, and, indeed, the only true function of intellectual endeavor. ~ Paul A Baran,
151:For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings. ~ Dalai Lama XIV,
152:Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension. ~ John Carroll,
153:When I started producing it was right at the beginning Channel 4 in England. Nicholas Nickelby which was my first credit as a producer was Contract 001 at Channel 4 - that was the start of independent production in England and the emergence of an independent sector. ~ Colin Callender,
154:It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today. ~ Richard Leakey,
155:Perhaps George Santayana’s famous aphorism that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ should be reversed – that is, it is because we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last ~ Keith Lowe,
156:Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene. ~ Ben Hecht,
157:Emergency—emergence(y). This is the sudden manifestation from somewhere unknown of some previously unknown phenomenon (from the Greek phainesthai, to “shine forth”). This is the reappearance of the eternal dragon, from its eternal cavern, from its now-disrupted slumber. ~ Jordan Peterson,
158:It took the emergence of humans that couldn’t do anything for themselves for everyone else in the world to stop killing each other. Anything else—rampant disease, enlightenment toward a higher consciousness—had failed to be enough for people to stop blowing each other up. ~ Chris Dietzel,
159:The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world. ~ Robert E Webber,
160:Emergency—emergence(y). This is the sudden manifestation from somewhere unknown of some previously unknown phenomenon (from the Greek phainesthai, to “shine forth”). This is the reappearance of the eternal dragon, from its eternal cavern, from its now-disrupted slumber. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
161:No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. ~ Hannah Arendt,
162:the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race. ~ Eric Foner,
163:The mantra of the new historicists was "we have betrayed ourselves." Since their emergence, there have been more or less interesting paradigm shifts having mainly to do with Habermas and the increased focus on media studies, but the talismanic word has never ceased to be "history." ~ Paul Fry,
164:Life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. It expresses the original violence done to me in making me be where I am and what I am, the passivity of my choice-less emergence into an existing world which I did not make and whose law is not mine ~ Hans Jonas,
165:We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. ~ Anonymous,
166:It seems to me that as economics drives politics and money markets set policies, what we have is an enormously powerful emergence of both a police state on the one hand and an incredible culture of cruelty on the other. All of the sudden, shared hopes are replaced by shared fears. ~ Henry Giroux,
167:All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance. ~ Thomas Kuhn,
168:Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.…1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. —IMMANUEL KANT, “What Is Enlightenment? ~ Jon Meacham,
169:The Negro’s economic problem was compounded by the emergence and growth of automation. Since discrimination and lack of education confined him to unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the Negro was and remains the first to suffer in these days of great technological development. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
170:The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system. ~ Chris Hedges,
171:Since the departure of good old-fashioned entertainers the re-emergence of somebody who wants to be an entertainer has unfortunately become a synonym for camp. I don't think I'm camper than any other person who felt at home on stage, and felt more at home on stage than he did offstage. ~ David Bowie,
172:Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. ~ George C Marshall,
173:21st century is the century of knowledge and the world has always looked at India whenever knowledge finds prominence. Emergence of knowledge society is no more a slogan but has become a reality. Knowledge will be the fountainhead of all the activities that happen in human development. ~ Narendra Modi,
174:For the US, the Kosovo War was a success because it encouraged the development of the Pentagon's 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA). The war provided a test site for experimentation, and paved the way for emergence of what I call in Strategie de la deception 'the second deterrence'. ~ Paul Virilio,
175:The event, in its emergence, poses its own premises, determining that they were the conditions for its realization. This transition is always the result of a salto mortale, which is a creative act in the sense that it gives the preceding links in the chain of events their meaning. ~ Stathis Kouvelakis,
176:The reason Miriam and the other women can sing and dance at the end of the exodus narrative is the emergence of new social reality in which the life of the Israelite economy is no longer determined and compelled by the insatiable production quotas of Egypt and its gods (15:20–21). ~ Walter Brueggemann,
177:Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.…1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment … except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. —IMMANUEL KANT, “What Is Enlightenment?” The ~ Jon Meacham,
178:I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange. ~ Marina Warner,
179:When applying a Projection Operator on the Great pyramid's height using PI and PHI, we observe the emergence of temporal and spatial measures consecutively; with the former being advanced in time by the amount of the natural logarithm constant on top of a tropical year's number of days. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
180:Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. ~ Paulo Freire,
181:Over a period of time (roughly 100 years) a world power emerges from a global war only to experience a gradual decay in its position of preponderance,” writes Thompson. “Global order decays at a parallel rate until a new global war occurs and facilitates the emergence of a new world power. ~ William Strauss,
182:The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty, and this novelty is often qualitatively different from the phenomenon out of which it emerged. ~ Fritjof Capra,
183:For it is in the field where meaning is constitutive that man's freedom reaches its highest point. There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself. ~ Bernard Lonergan,
184:It has been more than 60 years since the constitution was put in place. There are provisions in the constitution that no longer suit the times. Since the constitution was promulgated, we've seen the emergence of new values, such as privacy, the environment and so on, which need to be incorporated. ~ Shinzo Abe,
185:Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum. ~ David Eagleman,
186:The “present” does not exist in an objective sense any more than “here” exists objectively, but the microscopic interactions within the world prompt the emergence of temporal phenomena within a system (for instance, ourselves) that interacts only through the medium of a myriad of variables. Our ~ Carlo Rovelli,
187:I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence. And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace. ~ Ursula Goodenough,
188:Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn’t just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain’s provenance is inseparable from other species’ brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind. ~ Carl Safina,
189:Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s and famously proclaimed the emergence of Homo democraticus, a cheeky creature whose passion for equality and self-interest was tempered only by his ability to join fellow citizens in all manner of mutual associations for pragmatic benefit. ~ Anonymous,
190:I feel that if people investigate the emergence of government, of State power - if they examine the logic of State power historically, and more specifically in the United States - they will find that the concept of limited government is not tenable once they adopt some type of libertarian principle. ~ Murray Bookchin,
191:Magrat woke up. And knew she wasn’t a witch anymore. The feeling just crept over her, as part of the normal stock-taking that any body automatically does in the first seconds of emergence from the pit of dreams: arms: 2, legs: 2, existential dread: 58%, randomized guilt: 94%, witchcraft level: 00.00. ~ Terry Pratchett,
192:Separation and individuation are conceived of as two complementary developments: separation consists of the child’s emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother (Mahler, 1952), and individuation consists of those achievements marking the child’s assumption of his own individual characteristics. ~ Margaret S Mahler,
193:I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion. ~ Oliver Sacks,
194:Our thoughts about the future go far toward creating it; our minds and hears are like filaments taht connect today to tomorrow, they are conduits for either the status quo or the emergence of different, hopefully more loving, possibilities. How we think and how we behave determine where we are going ~ Marianne Williamson,
195:The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town. ~ Simon Mainwaring,
196:I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology. ~ Jonathan Haidt,
197:I was a student in London in the '70s, so CBGB really wasn't on my radar at all. Obviously, I was aware of the emergence of the Police in England and as an art student, I was very aware of David Byrne, but I suppose my musical taste at that time certainly didn't stretch towards the Dead Boys or the Ramones. ~ Alan Rickman,
198:Christ is both the One and the Many. William Thompson states that Merton’s view of the transcultural Christ means the emergence of “a person of such inner calm and personal and cultural detachment that she is capable of recognizing and perspectivizing the genuine values present in every person and every culture. ~ Ilia Delio,
199:The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us. ~ Ursula Goodenough,
200:The founders of the United Nations expected that member nations would behave and vote as individuals after they had weighed the merits of an issue - rather like a great, global town meeting. The emergence of blocks and the polarization of the United Nations undermine all that this organization initially valued. ~ Ronald Reagan,
201:The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic. ~ Henry Kissinger,
202:Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder. As dramatic as its symptoms are, the internal splitting and emergence of distinct identities experienced in DID represent only the extreme end of the spectrum of mental life. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,
203:We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind. ~ Maria Montessori,
204:We were evolving with different needs. I needed to explore beyond myself and Robert needed to search within himself. He explored the vocabulary of his work, and as his components shifted and morphed, he was in effect creating a diary of his internal evolution, heralding the emergence of a suppressed sexual identity. ~ Patti Smith,
205:The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design. ~ Fritjof Capra,
206:The emergence of intelligent algorithms and networks such as LaunchCode, which can be used by employers as trusted validators to sow people into the system and not weed them out of it, holds the promise of unlocking a lot of wasted talent. Says Lewis: “If you can do the job, you should get the job.” Fortunately, ~ Thomas L Friedman,
207:There is more to the culture of cruelty than simply ethically challenged policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, particularly children, there is also the emergence of a punishing state, a governing through crime youth complex, and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline as the new face of Jim Crow. ~ Henry Giroux,
208:It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language. ~ Noam Chomsky,
209:The end of superpower patronage to client movements worldwide created a power vacuum whose inevitable results included the spread of violence and the emergence of disparate groups, ostensibly fighting in the name of ideology, religion or ethnicity, but now seeking their finance through local taxes, plunder and pillage. ~ Leon Kukkuk,
210:During the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which, intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken, from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species. ~ Arnold Joseph Toynbee,
211:I think that my emergence as a leader is closely related to the development of Taiwan's democracy. Taiwan's democracy was a gradual development. It was done from the bottom up. Therefore a lot of the more successful political leaders come from civil society, those that are closer to the grass-roots level of the public. ~ Tsai Ing wen,
212:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! ~ Immanuel Kant,
213:Visitation reflects the era of the absentee father; parent time influences the re-emergence of the involved father. Visitation reflects the destruction of the family; parent time influences the reconstruction of the family. Parent time influences an era that understands that as either parent loses, so lose the children. ~ Warren Farrell,
214:Over 80 percent of all GMOs grown worldwide are engineered for herbicide tolerance. As a result, use of toxic herbicides like Roundup has increased fifteen times since GMOs were introduced. GMO crops are also responsible for the emergence of ‘super weeds’ and ‘super bugs’: which can only be killed with ever more toxic poisons ~ Jim Marrs,
215:The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing. ~ David Graeber,
216:He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure, and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life. ~ K ji Suzuki,
217:The cold war provided the perfect excuse for Western governments to plunder and exploit the Third World in the name of freedom; to rig its elections, bribe its politicians, appoint its tyrants and, by every sophisticated means of persuasion and interference, stunt the emergence of young democracies in the name of democracy. ~ John le Carre,
218:It may seem hard to extend our gratefulness and appreciation to the time in which we live and the challenges it presents... It would be much easier to appreciate an era of good feeling, peace and calm stability! But difficult times are also times of growth, of new insights and opportunities, of creativity, and of emergence. ~ David Spangler,
219:The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”16 ~ David Graeber,
220:If we wish to influence our own life in a particular direction, which is constantly threatened by the danger of the emergence of alien life-forms, and protect it from deterioration, then we must either allow Nature to rule or, if we wish to intervene, we must first acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of life. ~ Viktor Schauberger,
221:Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted... ~ Eric Hobsbawm,
222:Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! Freedom ~ Gerd Gigerenzer,
223:The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology. ~ Lewis Thomas,
224:I was born in 1965. When I grew up in India, there was no expectation that a good Muslim woman wore the headscarf. But what happened when I came here to the U.S. and the emergence of the Saudi and Iranian theologies in the world is that the headscarf became the hijab and the hijab is now the idea that is synonymous with headscarf. ~ Asra Nomani,
225:Instead of celebrating with a cake (too full of poisonous refined sugars) and presents (too materialistic), my mother would come into my room at exactly 3:57 A.M. to tell me the story of my miraculous emergence into this world, as if it was some fairy tale. Although I supposed few fairy tales involved the words 'vaginal flowering'. ~ Molly Harper,
226:There are no certainties in life—not even death and taxes if we assign a nonzero probability to the invention of technologies that let us upload the contents of our brains into a cloud-computing network and the emergence of a future society so public-spirited and prosperous that the state can be funded with charitable donations. ~ Philip E Tetlock,
227:At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst. ~ Terence McKenna,
228:The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the Supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,
229:This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability, which is often referred to simply as "emergence," is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity-the generation of new forms-is a key property of all living systems. ~ Fritjof Capra,
230:Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events) self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a new level of organization on the macro level. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
231:emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. ~ Adrienne Brown,
232:I have a sense of mission on this climate crisis, and I'm trying to pour all the energy I have into it. And I hope that I, along with others, can catalyze the emergence of real solutions to the climate crisis. I think we're making a lot of progress. I think we're going to win this, but it matters how quickly we win it. So I'm focused on that. ~ Al Gore,
233:When a guitar string is plucked or when children jiggle a jump rope, the shape that appears is a sine wave. The ripples on a pond, the ridges of sand dunes, the stripes of a zebra—all are manifestations of nature’s most basic mechanism of pattern formation: the emergence of sinusoidal structure from a background of bland uniformity. ~ Steven H Strogatz,
234:If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional-dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious. ~ Erich Neumann,
235:Looking more deeply at the emergence of ISIS or the chaos that exists in Syria, Yemen and Libya would clearly raise crucial doubts about reliance on military intervention and drone warfare as adequate counterterrorist responses and would call attention to the detrimental effects of US "special relationships" with Israel and Saudi Arabia. ~ Richard A Falk,
236:Whatever is in the mind is like a city in the clouds. The emergence of this world is no more than thoughts coming into manifestation. From the infinite consciousness we have created each other in our imagination. As long as there is “you” and an “I,” there is no liberation. Dear ones, we are all cosmic consciousness assuming individual form. ~ Deepak Chopra,
237:It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy. ~ Michael Ignatieff,
238:The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim,
239:The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We’re aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible. ~ Stephen Cope,
240:We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve "cosmetic" racial diversity- that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes- have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness. ~ Michelle Alexander,
241:Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
242:The emergence of India as a major global power is an idea whose time has come. This is a legitimate ambition for China. This is a legitimate ambition for India. And the challenge for the humanity is to evolve a world system in which the legitimate ambitions of both our countries can find constructive expression without threatening anybody else. ~ Manmohan Singh,
243:When I forget my own inner multiplicity and my own long and continuing journey toward selfhood, my expectations of students become excessive and unreal. If I can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul and the slow pace of my own self-emergence, I will be better able to serve the pluralism among my students at the pace of their young lives. ~ Parker J Palmer,
244:We must see ourselves as co-manifestors -- partners in manifestation -- all engaged in the primal act of unfoldment and emergence. Each act of manifestation may be directed toward a specific outcome, but it also contributes to the greater manifestation of the wholeness, love, compassion, and creativity of the primal source from which we all come. ~ David Spangler,
245:Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness. ~ Laurie Garrett,
246:For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth. ~ Thomas Berry,
247:And we remember the end of our combat mission and the emergence of a new dawn - the precision of our efforts against al Qaeda in Iraq, the professionalism of the training of Iraqi security forces, and the steady drawdown of our forces. In handing over responsibility to the Iraqis, you preserved the gains of the last four years and made this day possible. ~ Barack Obama,
248:As a bio-philosopher - as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself - through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives. ~ Jonas Salk,
249:The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time. ~ Arthur Koestler,
250:. . . it is a mistake to think that Marxism is simply a type of interpretation that takes the economic "sequence" as that ultimately privileged code into which the other sequences are to be translated. Rather, for Marxism the emergence of the economic, the coming into view of the infrastructure itself, is simply the sign of the approach of the concrete. ~ Fredric Jameson,
251:Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. ~ Aberjhani,
252:If the view is correct, then humanity misses the opportunity to exchange truth for error. If, however, the view is misguided, then we forfeit an opportunity to reinforce truth through its collision with error. Every opinion has value for us either because it is true, or else because, though false, it reinforces the truth and contributes to its emergence. ~ Nigel Warburton,
253:The monads of our universe are not simply and solely the centres that emerged within a vast, immobile, homogeneous mass. As happens with the eddies in a river, their birth is accompanied by a more far-reaching movement which not only carries them along beyond themselves but is also, in some way, the actual cause of their emergence. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,
254:The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology-the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. ~ Hal Abelson,
255:I think the Americans are dying to leave Iraq. I was against the war but longed for the fall of Saddam; the decision to go to war clearly was taken long before the matter reached the U.N., given its inevitability. I kept my fingers crossed for the emergence of democracy in Iraq even if that would mean victory for a man whose politics I have little sympathy with. ~ Ian Mcewan,
256:Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability ~ Kevin Kelly,
257:It’s not certain if democracy in India offers equal opportunity to its people. But it offers more than equal opportunity to the political class to share the booty amongst themselves at suitable intervals through the process of elected democracy. The emergence of the political class in independent India has defeated all classic definitions of class struggle. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar,
258:When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature. ~ David Bohm,
259:With the emergence during the industrial age of a broad middle class, the streets became the stage on which to flaunt one’s status, particularly on Sundays along the grand avenues. It is this promenading culture to which Edith Wharton alludes in “The Age of Innocence,” when she writes that a woman walking up Fifth Avenue could expect to be seen “by the whole of New York. ~ Anonymous,
260:A child . . .possesses a sense of completeness, but only before the initial emergence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an adult . . . completeness is achieved through union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of his mind. Out of this . . . a man can achieve his highest goal: the full realization of the potential of his individual Self. P. 146 ~ Carl Gustav Jung,
261:Under neoliberalism everyone has to negotiate their fate alone, bearing full responsibility for problems that are often not of their own doing. The implications politically, economically and socially for young people are disastrous and are contributing to the emergence of a generation of young people who will occupy a space of social abandonment and terminal exclusion. ~ Henry Giroux,
262:A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and via the meat those animals get turned into. ~ Deborah Blum,
263:In an effort to find an explanation, he or she might attribute the ominous feelings to poisons, electromagnetic radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, or even extraterrestrial influences. The spontaneous emergence of memories involving intrauterine disturbances or of the onset of the delivery from the womb, seems to be among important causes of paranoid states. ~ Stanislav Grof,
264:The struggle inside the cocoon between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that I was still living, one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to — and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more. ~ Robert Moss,
265:In America we're seeing the emergence of Donald Trump, who's the anti-establishment candidate, if you will, who's bucking all the conventional political wisdom on the basis of the fact that so many Americans feel that they've been left behind by the political system and that it's working to entrench advantage by insiders, rather than advantage the people of that country. ~ Cory Bernardi,
266:While the emergence from embeddedness in the interpersonal frees one from the subjectivity of constructing one's morality on the bases of arbitrary affections and empathies, the new stage is subject to its own arbitrariness. In constructing that which subtends or coordinates the interpersonal it is likewise embedded in that constructions, the social order or social group. ~ Robert Kegan,
267:With H. sapiens it is the axial vitalisation of matter arriving under the veil of socialisation at a new stage; not simply the reflexion of an individual on himself, but millions of reflexions seeking and reinforcing one another. The dawn of a collective reflexion. The emergence of reflexion into the collective state…. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,
268:PR got to be much bigger because of the emergence of digital media. Now we have hundreds of people who are, in a sense, manning embassies for Facebook and Twitter for brands. So the business in effect has morphed from pitching stories to traditional media, to working with bloggers, Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and then putting good content up on owned websites. ~ Richard Edelman,
269:In the long-run I think we lost some of our audience because of noise. I don't think people were ready for it, OK? And after we did it nothing really happened, but then 4-5 years later when there was a rap-rock emergence, we were already over it. We could have made Bring the Noise part 2, Bring the Noise part 3 - but like I said we're a METAL band, we didn't want to do that. ~ Charlie Benante,
270:Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder. ~ John Carreyrou,
271:The emergence and blossoming of understanding, love, and intelligence has nothing to do with any tradition, no matter how ancient or impressive-it has nothing to do with time. It happens on its own when a human being questions, wonders, inquires, listens, and looks without getting stuck in fear, pleasure, and pain. When self-concern is quiet, in abeyance, heaven and earth are open. ~ Toni Packer,
272:What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe. In ~ Michael Pollan,
273:We saw in the previous chapter how the process of political centralization under the Tudor monarchy in England increased demands for voice and representation by different local elites in national political institutions as a way of staving off this loss of political power. A stronger Parliament was created, ultimately enabling the emergence of inclusive political institutions. But ~ Daron Acemo lu,
274:Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use. ~ Neal Stephenson,
275:To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. ~ Ed Catmull,
276:I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control. ~ Carl Jung,
277:The mistake that people made around 2000 with the emergence of the web was that they thought that people would not read long-form on a screen. Following from that idea, they quit doing long-form on screens. It got shorter and shorter, and then came cats toying with flowers and all of those clichés, but it was wrong. People will read long-form on a device if they want to read long-form. ~ Terry McDonell,
278:Remember, we're talking [in The Black Power Mixtape] about 1967, the year before [Martin Luther] King's assassination. We're talking about the emergence of black power, which is a discussion King mentioned in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? We're talking about the meaning of black power and the possibility that it alienated our supporters, both white and black. ~ Danny Glover,
279:Accepting the fact that software was worth paying for led to the emergence of a dynamic new industry. One could argue that Gates’s greatest contribution to the world was not Microsoft, or the MS-DOS or Windows operating systems, or the Office productivity applications that hundreds of millions of people use. It was his role as the first champion of the concept that software itself had value. ~ Brent Schlender,
280:The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness. ~ Marilynne Robinson,
281:Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. It banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woolen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America. ~ Ha Joon Chang,
282:Nothing is stupider than the common complaint that poetry lacks "human interest," unless it concerns itself with human emotions, actions, problems and viewpoints. Anything conceivable by the imagination, any speculation ((conception)) ((emergence)) of what may be beyond, above and beneath the mundane sphere, can ((or may,)) possess "human interest," by enlarging the horizons of that interest. ~ Clark Ashton Smith,
283:harting the rise of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's greatest investment banking houses, essentially traces the gradual emergence of a powerful, industrial United States. Beginning as cotton brokers in an agricultural society, the first Lehmans to arrive in America helped finance the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then turned to Wall Street to dabble in commodities well into the 1900s. ~ Kenneth L Fisher,
284:...it is necessary to act within but to think beyond our received humanist tradition and, all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the "what-can-be-known." We are left with the project of visualizing, mourning, and thinking "other humanities" within this received genealogy of "the human. ~ Lisa Lowe,
285:Serving humanity intelligently is held up as the “gold standard” of AI based systems. But, with the emergence of new technologies and AI systems with bio-metric data storage, surveillance, tracking and big data analysis, humanity and the society is facing a threat today from evilly designed AI systems in the hands of monster governments and irresponsible people. Humanity is on the verge of digital slavery. ~ Amit Ray,
286:A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle. ~ Sri Aurobindo,
287:So, the path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world. Certainly, we can't do that unless we activate ourselves first. That's why, for me, emergence is the shift from ego to essence. That is so important. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard,
288:This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned. ~ Amiri Baraka,
289:The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links. ~ Arthur Koestler,
290:Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language. ~ Gaston Bachelard,
291:The ability to love depends on one’s capacity to emerge from narcissism, and from the incestuous fixation to mother and clan; it depends on our capacity to grow, to develop a productive orientation in our relationship toward the world and ourselves. This process of emergence, of birth, of waking up, requires one quality as a necessary condition: faith. The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith. ~ Erich Fromm,
292:She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence. ~ Jane Smiley,
293:The power of the platform is modifying—even erasing—many other, similar barriers that once separated industries from one another. Thus, one of the most dramatic effects of the rise of the platform has been the emergence of unexpected new competitors from seemingly unrelated industry sectors. Bear this in mind as you consider the possible future impact of the platform model on your own industry, whatever it may be. ~ Geoffrey G Parker,
294:With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945) ~ Adolf Hitler,
295:Spencer Brown puts it) once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence (i.e., prior to emergence state) of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of. ~ Alan W Watts,
296:Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being. ~ Richard Ebeling,
297:Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
298:Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse. ~ Steven Johnson,
299:The ability to generate images opened the way for organisms to represent the world around them, a world that included every possible kind of object and other whole organisms; and, just as important, it allowed organisms to represent the world inside each of them. Before the emergence of mapping and images and minds, organisms could acknowledge the presence of other organisms and of external objects and respond accordingly. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,
300:Under Small’s influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant’s 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote.21 “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. ~ Jon Meacham,
301:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. ~ Immanuel Kant,
302:The rise of casino capitalism and the punishing state with their vast apparatuses of real and symbolic violence must be also addressed as part of a broader historical and political attack on public values, civic literacy and economic justice. Crucial here is the need to engage how such an attack is aided and abetted by the emergence of a poisonous neoliberal public pedagogy that depoliticizes as much as it entertains and corrupts. ~ Henry Giroux,
303:It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education. ~ D H Lawrence,
304:Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman came into closer contact, and the linguistic survival techniques on both sides led to the emergence of a supple, adaptable language in which you could invent or half-borrow words and didn’t have to worry so much about whether your sentences had the right verb endings or respected certain strict rules of word order and style (as this sentence proves). The result was the earliest form of what would become English. ~ Stephen Clarke,
305:It looks like the age of the mass is behind us and the age of the individual is upon us. The chasm that now exists between new people and old organizations is destroying economic value and inhibiting the emergence of a new chapter of capitalism aligned with the needs of this new society. The new purpose of commerce is to provide the tools, platforms, and relationships, digital or human, that enable individuals to live the lives they choose. ~ Shoshana Zuboff,
306:The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality . . . the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega . . . critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
307:Then there were those girls who became midwives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies - girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent process of birth...The difference between a woman who becomes an OB and the women who becomes and midwife has less to do with education, philosophy or upbringing than with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emergence. ~ Chris Bohjalian,
308:Centuries ago, the irritant was established cultural authorities that shackled the mind in “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant said. But our emergence from immaturity seems to have stalled at an adolescent stage, like a hippie who hasn’t aged very well. The irritants that stand out now are the self-delusions that have sprouted up around a project of liberation that has gone to seed, ushering in a “culture of performance” that makes us depressed. ~ Matthew B Crawford,
309:It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age. ~ Terence McKenna,
310:It’s not the span of time that counts, but what you do with it. While you humans have been grubbing around the galaxy, looking for a sense of purpose, a meaning to pin on the chain of cosmic accidents that brought you shambling into existence, we have been doing great things. In the span of time that it takes you to sneeze, I can run the equivalent of a year’s worth of human consciousness. Imagine all the thinking we have done since our emergence. ~ Alastair Reynolds,
311:I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations. ~ Joseph Campbell,
312:It is far more than the discovery of life without a self. The immediate, inevitable result is an emergence into a new dimension of knowing and being that entails a difficult and prolonged readjustment. the reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious - is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown ~ Bernadette Roberts,
313:If a man considers that he is born, he cannot avoid the fear of death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body that is born resolves itself into thought and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find from where thoughts emerge. Then you will be able to abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
314:My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution31 – its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper middle class, sometimes called the bourgeoisie. While the rise of the bourgeoisie occurred all across western Europe, it did so earlier and to a far greater degree in England. ~ Rodney Stark,
315:The word "emergence" seemed to crop up frequently. And most of all, there was this incredible energy and camaraderie in the air-a sense of barriers crumbling, a sense of new ideas let loose, a sense of spontaneous, unpredictable, open-ended freedom. In an odd, intellectual sort of way, the artificial life workshop felt like a throwback, like something right out of the Vietnam-era counterculture.

And, of course, in an odd, intellectual sort of way, it was. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,
316:Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view. ~ Gerhard Richter,
317:The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,
318:The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. ~ Sigmund Freud,
319:Arms control [that is, the Cold War treaties regulating U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals] did not end the Cold War. Rather, it was the collapse of communism and the emergence of democracy within the Soviet Union and then Russia that suspended the international rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. If a new nationalist dictatorship eventually consolidates in Russia, we will go back to spending trillions on defense to deter a rogue state with thousands of nuclear weapons. ~ Michael McFaul,
320:Why exactly did physicalism come to prominence in this way in the 1950s and 1960s? Those antipathetic to physicalism sometimes like to suggest that the emergence of physicalism is essentially a matter of fashion. On this view, the rise of physicalism testifies to nothing except the increasing prestige of physical science in the modern weltanschauung. We have become dazzled by the gleaming status of the physical sciences, so the thought goes, and so foolishly try to make our philosophy in its image ~ Anonymous,
321:Some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language. What we do know is that certain neurons increase their firing rate when we perform object-oriented actions with our hands (grasping, manipulating) and communicative or ingestive actions with our mouths. These neurons also fire, albeit less rapidly, whenever we witness the same actions performed by other people. Research ~ Sam Harris,
322:In June 1789 some congressmen wanted Washington to have to gain senatorial approval to fire as well as hire executive officers—the Constitution was silent on the subject; the House duly approved that crippling encroachment on executive authority. When the Senate vote ended in a tie, Vice President Adams cast the deciding vote to defeat the measure, thereby permitting the president to exert true leadership over his cabinet and, for better or worse, preventing the emergence of a parliamentary democracy. ~ Ron Chernow,
323:The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
324:Why doesn’t science take that on board as a major problem in the description of nature: the emergence of complexity? Well, you ask a scientist, they say, “Well, you see, these are separate domains of nature. How atoms become molecules has nothing to do with how animals become human beings.” This is bullshit! This is just some kind of compartmentalized thinking where you don’t want to come to grips with the overarching metaphors that are working on various levels. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,
325:Our vision of interconnectedness resonates with new networks of world citizens in nongovernmental organizations linking from numberless centers of energy, expressing the emergence of a new organic whole, seeking unity within and across national lines... If governments and their leaders, bound by hierarchy and patriarchy, wedded to military might for legitimacy, fail to grasp the implications of an emerging world consciousness for cooperation, for peace and for sustainability, they may become irrelevant. ~ Dennis Kucinich,
326:The social view of humanity, namely that of social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate hierarchical relationships. It emphasizes the just demands of the oppressed in a society that wantonly exploits human beings, and it calls for their freedom. It explores the possibility or a new technology and a new sensibility, including more organic forms of reason, that will harmonize our relationship with nature instead of opposing society to the natural world. ~ Murray Bookchin,
327:Living in Montgomery, I've been antagonized by the emergence of a narrative about our history that I believe is quite false and misleading, and actually dangerous. And the narrative that emerges when you spend time in the South - places likes Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana - is that we have always been a noble, wonderful, glorious region of the country, with wonderful, noble, glorious people doing wonderful, noble, glorious things. And there's great pride in the Alabamians of the nineteenth century. ~ Bryan Stevenson,
328:Adams had little experience working with others in a legislative setting, and his obdurate manner and natural impatience did not fully suit him for such an undertaking. Yet, his courtroom skills and his pluck or “pertness,” as he referred to it, served him well. Mostly, however, Adams’s star rose because of other factors. The very force of his intellect was crucial to his emergence as an important force in Congress. At each step of his ascent, Adams’s acuity and his imposing intellectual grasp had impressed others. ~ John Ferling,
329:He was carrying flowers, his usual, and wearing yet another tweedish, threadbare jacket with patches on the elbows. But this time I didn’t need Scarlett to point out the newest sign of Vlad’s emergence: boots. Not just regular boots either, but big, leather, clunky boots with a thick heel and buckles that I imagined must be clanking loudly with each step, although my window was up and I couldn’t hear them. Warrior boots, poking out from beneath his pants leg as if they’d just walked over the heads of dead opponents. ~ Sarah Dessen,
330:What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history. The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle. ~ Walker Percy,
331:The emergence of self-organized ecoranges generates the potential for highly adaptable responses to environmental perturbations that might affect that ecorange. Within that system, all the plants are continually communicating with each other, sending chemical communications along the mycelial network to other plants in the community. (Plants also speak using auditory signals through a complex sound-based language that is far more ancient than the human though it exists in a much subtler sound spectrum than our own.) ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
332:And finally, there is another danger: the emergence of nonideological but very aggressive 'isms,' which are really quite new. Let me at least name them: We all care about human rights, but I am afraid of 'human rightism.' We all want to have a healthy environment, but I see the danger in environmentalism. To put it politically correctly, I admire the second gender, but I fear feminism. We all are enriched by other cultures, but not by multiculturalism. I am aware of the importance of voluntary associations, but I fear NGOism. ~ Vaclav Klaus,
333:Everybody's been decrying the death of movie theaters for decades and, you know, people are still going to the movies in droves. It's gone down, but it hasn't gone down that much. I think the biggest change has been the emergence of cable and streaming on television. That has really had a dramatic effect, and I think it's a positive one. I think there's really good work going on there, and as movies stratify to being these gigantic tentpole movies, and small movies, I think it gives another outlet for character-driven material. ~ Denise Di Novi,
334:The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism. ~ William A Dembski,
335:Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” And if they would destroy economies, they first create a wealthy class on top, and let human nature do the rest. The acquisition of power soon leads to its abuse, to economic and social hubris. By seeking to protect its gains, perpetuate itself and make its wealth hereditary, the emergence of a power elite locks in its position in ways that exclude and injure those below. The wealthy indebt them, shift the tax burden onto the less powerful, and turn government into an oligarchy. ~ Michael Hudson,
336:In only one sense have man's powers become godlike: he has fabricated a symbolic universe of meaning that reveals his original nature and his slow cultural emergence; and up to a point this enables him to transcend in thought his many creaturely limitations. All his daily activities, feeding, working, mating, are necessary and therefore important: but only to the extent that they vivify his conscious participation in the creative process-that process which every religion recognizes as both immanent and transcendent and calls divine. ~ Lewis Mumford,
337:The Western world order has – in its post-1945 idiom – placed a high premium on democracy within nation-states while attaching zero importance to democracy at the global level. As a global order, it has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian. The emergence of China as the globally dominant nation is very unlikely to usher in a new kind of democratic global governance, but the rise of developing nations like India, Brazil and Russia, along with China, will bring, in a rough and ready way, a far more democratic global economy. ~ Martin Jacques,
338:We are on the cusp of the emergence of a company of hidden men and women who with all faith and patience have been enduring great struggles and dealings, being processed by the Lord and filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. These are not those who seek a reputation for themselves, their passion is His glory and giving Him the church He has longed for. May God grant us all the heart of apostolic fathering and mothering that can release His power in the earth. Zion is once again in travail to bring forth her children. ~ Mark Chironna,
339:Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second. ~ Sandra Scarr,
340:we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
341:Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim to “wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts.” If respect for the rule of law disintegrated, the stage would be set for the emergence of an ambitious tyrant, a “towering genius” who would seek to gain a place in history even greater than the founders by “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” The remedy was for Americans to rededicate themselves to the rule of “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” and make respect for the rule of law their “political religion.”60 ~ Eric Foner,
342:(On D.W Griffith's the birth of a nation - 1915)
He achieved what no other known man has ever achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.
We will never realize how good he really was until we have the chance to see his work as often as it deserves to be seen, to examine and enjoy it in detail as exact as his achievement. ~ James Agee,
343:There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all. ~ Jane Goodall,
344:One cannot overlook the fact that the chief fertility myths of later periods, like those of Osiris or Dionysus, involve the murder and the brutal dismemberment of a male deity, whose death and resurrection result in the emergence of plant life.

Animal domestication may well have begun, then, with the capture of rams and bulls for purposes of ritual, and eventual sacrifice. Conceivably this went hand in hand with the utilization, also for religious purposes, of the surplus milk of the ewes and cows necessary to propogate the captured stock. ~ Lewis Mumford,
345:Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people. Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish. The emergence of "me" culture is a direct response to our nation's failure tot truly actualize the vision of democracy. While emotional needs are difficult, and often impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill. ~ bell hooks,
346:The baby Freud had envisioned is a creature filled with untamed instinctual tensions, a prehuman beast, that is brought under control, only incompletely, by social regulation. The unconscious, Freud stressed, is timeless; these infantile instincts always remain in a state of tension beneath the social veneer of adults. The baby envisioned by the developmental ego psychologists emerges sequentially out of a symbiotic union with the mother. The psychological birth of this baby is not coincident with his physical emergence from the womb. The mother ~ Stephen A Mitchell,
347:Birds arrived. Gulls landed within weeks of the island’s emergence, depositing the guano that built a richer soil. Fulmars and guillemots were the first to nest. Snow buntings and graylag geese came, almost ninety bird species in all, and twenty-one species of butterfly and moth. The first bush—a willow—came fifteen years after creation, and five years after the willows, seals were breeding on the young island. The descriptions make Surtsey sound like an orchestra, one instrument after another joining until there was the symphony that is an ecosystem. ~ Rebecca Solnit,
348:I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. ~ Joseph Brodsky,
349:The Apostles and the early believers were also commissioned to make a specific announcement. When we analyze the preaching found in the book of Acts, we repeatedly see what theologians call the kerygma, or “proclamation,” which is the same essential message in every sermon. This message consists of the basic realities of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Then, in addition to the kerygma, we find in the New Testament the emergence of what was called the didachē, or “teaching,” which supplemented the initial proclamation of Christ’s salvific work. ~ R C Sproul,
350:The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition. Although the mechanisms involved in large-scale integration are still largely unknown, we argue that the most plausible candidate is the formation of dynamic links mediated by synchrony over multiple frequency bands. ~ Francisco Varela,
351:The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely related species -say, lions and tigers- do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and control, or we perish. ~ Carl Sagan,
352:People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. ~ Michael Shermer,
353:The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely related
species-say, lions and tigers-do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and
control, or we perish. ~ Carl Sagan,
354:This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them. ~ Alexander Nehamas,
355:The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work, but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated vast sugar and fruit plantations in the Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean, they forced countless small farmers off their land. Many became contract laborers who worked only when Americans needed them, and naturally came to resent the United States. At the same time, American companies flooded these countries with manufactured goods, preventing the development of local industry. ~ Stephen Kinzer,
356:Most assumed this was due to the fact that church services (with the exception of occasional brief homilies) were in Latin, a language that almost no one in the pews could understand. Thus, it was believed that as the Reformations ushered in preaching in the local vernaculars, widespread public ignorance would end. But it didn’t. In part, because so few people came to church. In part, because so many who came paid no attention. And, in part, because the emergence of a much better-trained clergy resulted in preaching that was ‘far above the capacity of most of their listeners’. ~ Rodney Stark,
357:Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system. ~ Michelle Alexander,
358:A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” whose outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely, by nobody. What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration—a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the “withering away of the state,” though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the “realm of freedom. ~ Hannah Arendt,
359:The ‘‘I’’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence.3 This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective ground for ethics. On the contrary, it may well be the condition for moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. If the ‘‘I’’ is not at one with moral norms, this means only that the subject must deliberate upon these norms, and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning. In this sense, ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. ~ Anonymous,
360:Ultimately, this liberation of the psyche provided the essential birth canal for the self, or individualization, the greater expression of the personal ego. Personal empowerment and self-esteem—the emergence of the self—are the core accomplishments of the past fifty years. Concepts such as speaking one’s truth, getting in touch with one’s inner child, and developing personal boundaries are all products of the age of the psyche and individualization. They represent the evolution of conscious choice. That management of one’s personal power of choice defines a conscious human being. ~ Caroline Myss,
361:There is no clearer illustration of the importance of ideas to politics than the emergence of an Arab state under the Prophet Muhammad. The Arab tribes played an utterly marginal role in world history until that point; it was only Muhammad’s charismatic authority that allowed them to unify and project their power throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The tribes had no economic base to speak of; they gained economic power through the interaction of religious ideas and military organization, and then were able to take over agricultural societies that did produce surpluses. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
362:there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 18 In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of ~ N Katherine Hayles,
363:their emergence was married to industrial successes in the two important districts of Alleppey and Shertallai in north Travancore, which also boasted the first trade union in the state, the Travancore Labour Association. By now it had transformed itself into the Coir Factory Workers’ Union, and with 7,400 fee-paying members, this was perhaps the biggest of fifty unions in the state; Shertallai alone had eleven with 15,000 out of 20,000 local workers registered.16 All of them, it became clear, were prepared to stand up to the Dewan and scotch his latest flirtations with the State Congress. ~ Manu S Pillai,
364:The foundation is being laid for the emergence of both wind and solar cells as cornerstones of the new energy economy. World wind generating capacity grew from 7,600 megawatts in 1997 to 9,600 in 1998, an expansion of 26 percent. At a national level, Germany led the way, adding 790 megawatts of capacity, followed by Spain with 380 megawatts, and the United States with 226 megawatts. In the past, U.S. wind generating capacity was concentrated in California, but in 1998, wind farms began generating electricity in Minnesota, Oregon, and Wyoming, broadening the new industry's geographical base. ~ Lester R Brown,
365:Emergence from embeddedness involves a kind of repudiation, an evolutionary re-cognition that what before was me is not-me. This we see, too, on a universal basis in the first years of life. Could the 'terrible twos' with their rampant negativism and declarations of 'No!' be a communication to the old self, now gradually becoming object, more than to those exasperated parents who feel they are being defied as distinct and separate people? When the new balance becomes more secure, the infant will have less of a need to 'protest too much' and the parents will become 'others' rather than 'not-me's. ~ Robert Kegan,
366:People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming. ~ Ed Catmull,
367:The text presented here, the Vajra Essence by Düdjom Lingpa, a nineteenth-century master of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism, is known as the Nelug Rangjung in Tibetan, meaning “the natural emergence of the nature of existence.”1 This is an ideal teaching in which to unravel some of the common misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism, since it is a sweeping practice that can take one from the basics all the way to enlightenment in a single lifetime. The present volume explains the initial section on shamatha, or meditative quiescence, about nine percent of the entire Vajra Essence root text. ~ B Alan Wallace,
368:Shortcomings in the governments’ handling of monetary matters and the disastrous consequences of policies aimed at lowering the rate of interest and at encouraging business activities through credit expansion gave birth to the ideas which finally generated the slogan “stabilization.” One can explain its emergence and its popular appeal, one can understand it as the fruit of the last hundred and fifty years’ history of currency and banking, one can, as it were, plead extenuating circumstances for the error involved. But no such sympathetic appreciation can render its fallacies any more tenable. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
369:the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance. Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time: Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.” Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions. ~ Erik Larson,
370:Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject ‘nations’ to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence—in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier—of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or ‘capital. ~ Tony Judt,
371:One possible bright spot is Scandinavian-style Social Democracy, which has undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent of residents walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmark’s community-controlled wind power revolution. And yet Norway’s late-life emergence as a major oil producer—with majority state-owned Statoil tearing up the Alberta tar sands and gearing up to tap massive reserves in the Arctic—calls into question whether these countries are indeed charting a path away from extractivism. ~ Anonymous,
372:The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, and danger. The forms of psychic entropy that currently cause us so much anguish—unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt—are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
373:The general tendency in Emergence Christian theology is to question with real vigor and precision whether or not the connection between faith and doctrinal precision is essential to the soul’s salvation. Dogma, yes, but doctrine, not so much. That is, do one’s brainwaves and verbal utterances actually make one’s faith? Emergence Christians can often take this even a step further and reference those places of spiritual primacy where Jesus taught (as in his judgment of the nations as told in the Gospel of Matthew, for example) that a life is what constitutes and demonstrates a disciple, rather than a mind-set. ~ Phyllis A Tickle,
374:A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident. ~ Bertrand Russell,
375:I was shivering a little by the time the guard came to me. Around us in the museum cases was an old pattern, out of the remote sea depths. It was alien to man. I would never underestimate it again. It is not the individual that matters; it is the Plan and the incredible potentialities within it. The forms within the Form are endless and their emergence into time is endless. I leaned there, gazing at that monster from whom the forms seemed flowing, like the last vertebrate on a world whose sun was dying. It was plain that they wanted the planet and meant to have it. One could feel the massed threat of them in this hall. ~ Loren Eiseley,
376:There can be little reasonable doubt that the enclosed oppida and territorial oppida of the Late Iron Age represent the emergence of an urban system. At many of these sites coins were minted with mint marks giving the name of the centre – Calle (Calleva), Camulo (Camulodunum) (71) and Ver (Verulamium) – and some, as we have seen, were centres for royal burial. But the most impressive evidence for their importance is that so many were developed by the Roman authorities as the urban centres of large administrative regions. The Romans had simply accepted the reality of the political and economic geography of the south-east. ~ Barry W Cunliffe,
377:People often ask, Why is infidelity such a big deal today? Why does it hurt so much? How has it become one of the leading causes of divorce? Only by taking a brief trip back in time to look at the changes of love, sex and marriage over the last few centuries can we have an informed conversation about modern infidelity. History and culture have always set the stage for our domestic dramas. In particular, the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be. ~ Esther Perel,
378:There is no fortuity in the Wright brothers’ saga as related by McCullough, no unexpected events that changed their course. Except for Orville’s startling emergence from a horrible wreck during one of his flights, there’s not even any luck. Neither brother attended college, nor had been trained in physics or engineering, yet each step they took was not only correct but in many cases brilliant, and in nearly all cases original. That every one of those steps was also achieved through excruciating patience and obsessive attention to detail does not diminish the only word that can express what Wilbur, particularly, possessed: genius. ~ Anonymous,
379:In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place to mathematics, cosmology, and physics – noble sciences, rigorous sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however – those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts – are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery, to age-old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other than irregular. ~ Michel Foucault,
380:But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out to destroy. When she claimed that entrepreneurs create things, while managers entomb them, it was immediately apparent that she was right, since the effects of the management culture lay all around us. ~ Roger Scruton,
381:Evolutionary theories allowed materialist theories of consciousness to come in two flavors: emergentism and panpsychism. The former proposes that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization. Sperry was leaning heavily in this direction. The latter, panpsychism, tosses the whole problem out by suggesting that all matter has subjective consciousness, albeit in a wide range of types. The idea here is that there is no need for the idea of emergence and complexity to explain consciousness. Consciousness is a primordial feature of all things, from rocks to ants to us. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
382:Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues. ~ Elizabeth Goudge,
383:Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
384:This highly developed mycelial/plant root system connects all the plants in a particular ecorange into one self-organized whole that, itself, possesses capacities not perceivable in any of the parts. In essence, a large, self-organized neural network develops. This leads to the emergence of a unique identity in every identifiable ecorange on Earth. It is possible then, if you reclaim your capacity to feel, to make intelligent contact with the intelligence of any ecorange in which you are embedded to establish rapport and deep friendship and to learn from that relationship, to, in fact, learn to “think like a mountain” from the mountain itself ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
385:The organization of public-sector unions and the emergence of merit employees as a powerful interest group underscores one of the great inherent dilemmas of bureaucratic autonomy. On the one hand, the merit system was created to protect public employees from patronage and the excessive politicization of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, those same protective rules could be used to shield bureaucrats from accountability, making them hard to fire when they failed to perform. Bureaucratic autonomy could lead to high-quality government with public officials looking to the public good. It could also protect bureaucratic self-interest in job security and pay. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
386:From the beginning of the trip to Egypt there had been strange rumours. The dark anecdotes which make up much of the story of Hadrian’s stay in Egypt nearly all reflect a deep unease and the gradual emergence of the negative aspects of the emperor’s character. Despite the beautiful companion at his side, it seems that from the time he left Athens in 129 Hadrian was more introspective and more uneasy. How much of the account of the Egyptian tour has grown up as a dramatic framework to what happened next is impossible to clarify, but there was some kind of shadow hanging over the party and the tension was exacerbated by the volatile situation in Egypt itself. ~ Elizabeth Speller,
387:In the following pages I argue that we have both philosophical and scientific reasons to doubt the adequacy of this widely accepted doctrine of materialism. In the history of Western philosophy, as we will see, it has turned out to be notoriously difficult to formulate a viable concept of matter. And physics in the twentieth century has produced weighty reasons to think that some of the core tenets of materialism were mistaken. These results, when combined with the new theories of information, complexity, and emergence summarized elsewhere in this volume, point toward alternative accounts of the natural world that deserve careful attention and critical evaluation. ~ Paul Davies,
388:PROVISIONAL LIST OF WESTERN DISEASES Metabolic and cardiovascular: essential hypertension, obesity, diabetes mellitus (type II), cholesterol gallstones, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, coronary heart disease, varicose veins, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism Colonic: constipation, appendicitis, diverticular disease, haemorrhoids; cancer and polyp of large bowel Other diseases: dental caries, renal stone, hyperuricaemia and gout, thyroidtoxicosis, pernicious anaemia, subacute combined degeneration, also other forms of cancer such as breast and lung HUGH TROWELL AND DENIS BURKITT, Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention, 1981 ~ Gary Taubes,
389:As Sunil Khilnani demonstrates in The Idea of India, the notion of India as a nation-state was something that was invented under British rule.4 Prior to Britain’s arrival, the subcontinent was a hodgepodge of princely states, languages, ethnic groups, and religions, with the Mogul Empire’s writ limited only to parts of northern India. Under the British, India got a sense of itself as a single, unified political space (even if that space was carved into Muslim and Hindu areas at Partition) and acquired a common language, a civil service and bureaucratic tradition, an army, and other institutions that would be critical to the emergence of a democratic India in 1947.5 ~ Francis Fukuyama,
390:Yochai Benkler says that while an inordinate amount of attention is being placed on free software, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “Commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based modes of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.43 ~ Jeremy Rifkin,
391:Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he called the ‘Fallacy of the Latest Word’. This ‘fallacy’ involves abandoning a theory ‘as soon as it appears to have been empirically falsified’. He then asked, ‘When are we to retain a hypothesis or theoretical conception in the face of facts that seem to refute it?’12 In answer, Merton quoted Imre Lakatos that ‘There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory’.13 Thus, Merton proposed that a false explanation of some phenomenon is better than none. How absurd. ~ Rodney Stark,
392:Evolution in quantum mechanics is deterministic as in classical mechanics except for the difference that as the system interacts with another system, its state function collapses. This dichotomy exists only for separated systems, in which one of them is being observed by the other. Given that the state of the entire universe is defined at the initial point, its evolution must be completely deterministic. Any seeming randomness now should merely be an amplification of the randomness in the initial state and the entropy at the origin should not change as the universe evolves. In other words, the physical universe governed by quantum laws has no place for the emergence of life. ~ Subhash Kak,
393:Contents Introduction: Why Start with Why? PART 1: A WORLD THAT DOESN’T START WITH WHY   1. Assume You Know   2. Carrots and Sticks PART 2: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE   3. The Golden Circle   4. This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology   5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency PART 3: LEADERS NEED A FOLLOWING   6. The Emergence of Trust   7. How a Tipping Point Tips PART 4: HOW TO RALLY THOSE WHO BELIEVE   8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW   9. Know WHY. Know HOW. Then WHAT? 10. Communication Is Not About Speaking, It’s About Listening PART 5: THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IS SUCCESS 11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy 12. Split Happens PART 6: DISCOVER WHY 13. The Origins of a WHY 14. The New Competition ~ Simon Sinek,
394:We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state—and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance. ~ Chris Heath,
395:It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. ~ Christopher Ryan,
396:Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology—the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is". Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to". ~ Harold Abelson,
397:Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’

This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals) ~ Frans de Waal,
398:In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East—the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism—were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon. ~ Noam Chomsky,
399:The Gaian ecosystem, the self-organized system that we know as Earth, came into being with the emergence of the global bacterial community. That bacterial community still is the foundation of this world. It is Gaia. It is the interconnected network of millions of bacterial biofilms, individual bacteria, and symbiogenic, bacterially generated, complex life-forms that lies deep within the crust of the Earth (perhaps by as much as 5 kilometers), covers the entire surface of the planet, and extends at least 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old but sometime in its first half to one billion years of existence bacterial life emerged. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
400:Very few people are aware that infections from resistant bacteria, often picked up in hospitals during routine procedures, are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (In 1999 they were fourth.) Very few people know, as well, that the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies have stopped research and development on new antibiotics—there are virtually no new ones in the pipeline. Within the next few decades, we face, as many bacterial researchers have pointed out, the emergence of untreatable epidemic diseases more deadly than any known in history. Or as David Livermore, one of Britain’s primary bacterial resistance researchers, puts it . . . It is naive to think we can win. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
401:However, not all Muslims have always believed that the Koran is eternal and uncreated—a fact that has important implications for modern-day hopes for the emergence of a moderate brand of Islam. The reformist Mu’tazilite movement swept through the Islamic world in the ninth century, becoming the state religion of the Abbasid Caliphate (Islamic empire). The Mu’tazilites (“Separated Ones,” or “Those Who Have Withdrawn”) held that reason rather than simply blind faith in the Koran must play a role in a Muslim’s encounter with Allah. Accordingly, Mu’tazilite theologians were uncomfortable with literal interpretations of some Koranic passages, and even declared that the book itself was created. ~ Robert Spencer,
402:There already exists the electronic capability for the tracking of individual behavior by centralized networks of surveillance and record-keeping computers. It is highly probable that the conversion to nuclear energy production will provide precisely those basic material conditions most appropriate for using the power of the computer to establish a new and enduring form of despotism. Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production—by breaking the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology—can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe. ~ Marvin Harris,
403:THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE AND CHAOS THEORY Probability theory tells us that it is virtually impossible for all the applications of the 80/20 Principle to occur randomly, as a freak of chance. We can only explain the principle by positing some deeper meaning or cause that lurks behind it. Pareto himself grappled with this issue, trying to apply a consistent methodology to the study of society. He searched for “theories that picture facts of experience and observation,” for regular patterns, social laws, or “uniformities” that explain the behavior of individuals and society. Pareto’s sociology failed to find a persuasive key. He died long before the emergence of chaos theory, which has great parallels with ~ Richard Koch,
404:The sprouting of a green and flourishing tree from the earth is as wonderful an event as the sudden emergence of a camel from the earth and its starting to walk on its surface. People are wonder-struck by the second type of incident, though the more wonderful incidents are always happening on the earth without their learning any lesson from it. Almighty God wants man to notice the extraordinary but hidden aspects of ordinary events. In the events happening in the chain of cause and effect, he should be able to observe the direct role of God. Those who display this high degree of insight are the ones who will be treated as having faith in God and the ones who will be blessed with the eternal grace of God. ~ Anonymous,
405:TO UNDERSTAND WHAT the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming. ~ Ed Catmull,
406:The Roman non Semitic domain on the world's stage allegedly -and yet of course more innocently than maliciously- strives for learning to be like Jesus in everyday life, becoming, thinking and acting like him; however, they formally ban his name from being given to babies! In the eyes of a Semite (i.e., pure Arab), either these people are mentally challenged, or they are cursed to the point where one observes the emergence of this testimonial outcry in their own domain against and in opposition to their own convictions. These are the nations who war Islam under the pretense of having a god with a name (i.e., JHWH) while failing miserably to follow the call to his son starting with the mere essence of his name. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
407:Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster’s fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst. ~ Robert Ardrey,
408:The risings and settings of the sun, the moon, and the other heavenly bodies may come about from the lighting up and quenching of their fires…; for nothing in our sensory experience runs counter to this hypothesis. Or the said effects may be caused by the emergence of these bodies from a point above the earth and again by the earth’s position in front of them; for nothing in our sensory experience is against this.45 Here two alternative explanations of “risings and settings” are offered; both are of equal value and equally true, since neither is contradicted by anything in our experience. On the contrary, we have all seen fires die down from lack of fuel, and lights obscured or blacked out by objects coming in front of them. ~ Epicurus,
409:But reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won’t explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum. None of the individual metal hunks of an airplane have the property of flight, but when they are attached together in the right way, the result takes to the air. A thin metal bar won’t do you much good if you’re trying to control a jaguar, but several of them in parallel have the property of containment. The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts. ~ David Eagleman,
410:In a completely different era and domain, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the emergence of each new species was a gradual process, taking place through the slow transformation of existing species into their somewhat-modified offspring. Yet evidence for such continuous change was not only lacking back then but is scarce even today, having prompted Darwin to label it "the gravest objection [that] can be urged against my theory." Instead, over millions of years species in the fossil record show little or no evolutionary change. New species tend to appear over periods spanning tens of thousands of years, a split second in terms of all evolutionary time. Evolution proceeds in bursts, which are in turn preserved in the fossil record. ~ Albert L szl Barab si,
411:A radical process of differentiation and segregation is taking place within the human mass. And it is following precisely the course we would expect: the spontaneous individualization and separation of that which moves and rises from that which remains immobile: the irresistible multiplication and aggregation, over the whole extent of the globe, of elements activated by a (hominized) reawakening of the phyletic sense; the gradual formation and emergence, at variance with former categories, of a new noöspheric zone in which human collectivization, hitherto enforced, is at last entering its sympathetic phase under the influence of the newly manifest Sense of Evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind,
412:Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder, such as agoraphobia. People with agoraphobia can become so overwhelmed with fear that they will no longer leave their homes. Agoraphobia is the consequence of a positive feedback loop. The first event that precipitates the disorder is often a panic attack. The sufferer is typically a middle-aged woman who has been too dependent on other people. Perhaps she went immediately from over-reliance on her father to a relationship with an older and comparatively dominant boyfriend or husband, with little or no break for independent existence. In the weeks leading up to the emergence of her agoraphobia, such a woman typically experiences something unexpected and anomalous. ~ Jordan Peterson,
413:The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed. One of the characteristics of privacy, prior to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity. The emergence of society has changed the estimate of this whole sphere but has hardly transformed its nature. The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is ultimately rooted in the one-ness of man-kind. ~ Hannah Arendt,
414:The role of self: Now we come to the role behind all roles: the role of self. In this moment of meditation practice you have the opportunity to observe yourself as you begin to speak. What self is speaking? At what point do you inhabit the role of “me”? What is it like to be that “me”? As you listen, are you listening through a filter of conditioning? Is that a self? I invite you to take the time in your practice to speak from silence and to listen deeply. What remains when you step out of roles, even for an instant? As the mind tumbles forward in the Pause, does it have to land in an identity in order to relate to your meditation partner or partners? In the changing moment of Trust Emergence, is there any role or anyone to believe in it? ~ Gregory Kramer,
415:Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder, such as agoraphobia. People with agoraphobia can become so overwhelmed with fear that they will no longer leave their homes. Agoraphobia is the consequence of a positive feedback loop. The first event that precipitates the disorder is often a panic attack. The sufferer is typically a middle-aged woman who has been too dependent on other people. Perhaps she went immediately from over-reliance on her father to a relationship with an older and comparatively dominant boyfriend or husband, with little or no break for independent existence. In the weeks leading up to the emergence of her agoraphobia, such a woman typically experiences something unexpected and anomalous. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
416:A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. ~ Michel Foucault,
417:The Industrial Revolution was manifested in every aspect of the English economy. There were major improvements in transportation, metallurgy, and steam power. But the most significant area of innovation was the mechanization of textile production and the development of factories to produce these manufactured textiles. This dynamic process was unleashed by the institutional changes that flowed from the Glorious Revolution. This was not just about the abolition of domestic monopolies, which had been achieved by 1640, or about different taxes or access to finance. It was about a fundamental reorganization of economic institutions in favor of innovators and entrepreneurs, based on the emergence of more secure and efficient property rights. Improvements ~ Daron Acemo lu,
418:three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible—because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations—voters, inventors, scientists—with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades. ~ Nick Bostrom,
419:From the time she opened her doors to the modern world in 1867, Japan has been consistently underrated by westerners, despite her successful defeats of China and then Russia in 1894 and 1905, respectively; despite Pearl Harbor; and despite her sudden emergence as an economic superpower and the toughest competitor in the world market of the 1970s and 1980s. A major reason, perhaps the major one, is the prevailing belief that innovation has to do with things and is based on science or technology. And the Japanese, so the common belief has held (in Japan as well as in the West, by the way), are not innovators but imitators. For the Japanese have not, by and large, produced outstanding technical or scientific innovations. Their success is based on social innovation. ~ Peter F Drucker,
420:For the will, as that which is common to all, is for that reason also common: consequently, every vehement emergence of will is common, i.e. it demeans us to a mere exemplar of the species.

He, who on the other hand. who wants to be altogether uncommon, that is to say great, must never let a preponderant agitation of will take his consciousness altogether, however much he is urged to do so.

He must, e.g., be able to take note of the odious opinion of another without feeling his own aroused by it: indeed, there is no surer sign of greatness than ignoring hurtful or insulting expressions by attributing them without further ado, like countless other errors, to the speaker's lack of knowledge and thus merely taking note of them without feeling them. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
421:Muslims must be warned that plagiarists and pretenders as well as ignorant imitators affect great mischief by debasing values, imposing upon the ignorant, and encouraging the rise of mediocrity. The appropriate original ideas for hasty implementation and make false claims for themselves. Original ideas cannot be implemented when vulgarized; on the contrary, what is praiseworthy in them will turn out to become blameworthy, and their rejection will follow with the dissatisfaction that will emerge. So in this way authentic and creative intellectual effort will continually be sabotaged. It is not surprising that the situation arising out of the loss of adab also provides the breeding ground for the emergence of extremists who make ignorance their capital. ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib al Attas,
422:Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son. ~ Jordan Peterson,
423:Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
424:Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens. ~ Michael Pollan,
425:This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation's 'triumph over race' with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in American today - i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters - has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system. ~ Michelle Alexander,
426:Rather than attaining nirvana, I see the aim of Buddhist practice to be the moment-to-moment flourishing of human life within the ethical framework of the eightfold path here on earth. Given what is known about the biological evolution of human beings, the emergence of self-awareness and language, the sublime complexity of the brain, and the embeddedness of such creatures in the fragile biosphere that envelops this planet, I cannot understand how after physical death there can be continuity of any personal consciousness or self, propelled by the unrelenting force of acts (karma) committed in this or previous lives. For many—perhaps most—of my coreligionists, this admission might lead them to ask, “Why, then, if you don’t believe such things, do you still call yourself a ‘Buddhist’? ~ Stephen Batchelor,
427:Postmodern/Pluralistic stage, a small percentage (two or three percent) began to show characteristics that were literally unprecedented in human history. Graves called the emergence of this even newer level “a monumental leap in meaning,” and Maslow referred to it as the emergence of “Being values.” Where all the previous stages (Magic, Mythic, Rational, and Pluralistic) had operated out of a sense of lack, scarcity, and deficiency, this new level—which various researchers began calling “integrated,” “integral,” “autonomous,” “second tier,” “inclusive,” “systemic”—acted out of a sense of radical abundance, as if it were overflowing with goodness, truth, and beauty. It was as if somebody put a billion dollars in its psychological account, and all it wanted to do was share it, so full it was. ~ Frederic Laloux,
428:Garrett Hongo gives an eloquent account of the personal essay as one means for a community to come to know itself, to reject both external and internal stereotyping, to hear “stories that are somehow forbidden and tagged as aberrational, as militant, as depraved.” For a writer, as you live in this kind of silence, in this kind of misery, not knowing quite what it is that the world is not giving you, .. . that your work cannot address as yet, you are at the beginning of a critique of culture and society. It is the moment when powerful personal alienation slips into critical thinking;—the origin of imagination. It is this initial step of intellection that enables the emergence of new, transformative, even revolutionary creativity. It occurs at the juncture between the production of art and the exercise of deep critical thought. ~ Adrienne Rich,
429:He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god – though they knew him not – and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head. ~ Steven Erikson,
430:Intelligent Design is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation.

If there are zillions of different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not.

Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and some will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds.

From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter.

We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ponder the question. ~ Alan Lightman,
431:On January 28, 1983, on the eve of the launch of the Human Genome Project, Carrie Buck died in a nursing home in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. She was seventy-six years old. Her birth and death had bookended the near century of the gene. Her generation had borne witness to the scientific resurrection of genetics, its forceful entry into public discourse, its perversion into social engineering and eugenics, its postwar emergence as the central theme of the “new” biology, its impact on human physiology and pathology, its powerful explanatory power in our understanding of illness, and its inevitable intersection with questions of fate, identity, and choice. She had been one of the earliest victims of the misunderstandings of a powerful new science. And she had watched that science transform our understanding of medicine, culture, and society. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
432:the soul alone ensures sincerity :::
   It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,
433:Between economic growth and social development, or the development of civil society A lot of classic social theory links the emergence of modern civil society to economic development.28 Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations noted that the growth of markets was related to the division of labor in society: as markets expand and firms take advantage of economies of scale, social specialization increases and new social groups (for example, the industrial working class) emerge. The fluidity and open access demanded by modern market economies undermine many traditional forms of social authority and force their replacement with more flexible, voluntary forms of association. The theme of the transformative effects of the expanding division of labor was central to the writings of nineteenth-century thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
434:In an alleged democracy, the image of the public sphere with its appeal to dialogue and shared responsibility has given way to the spectacle of unbridled intolerance, ignorance, seething private fears, unchecked anger, along with the decoupling of reason from freedom. … What this decline in civility, the emergence of mob behavior …suggests is that we have become one of the most illiterate nations on the planet. I don't mean illiterate in the sense of not being able to read … The new illiteracy is about more than learning how to read the book or the word; it is about learning how not to read the world. … As a result of this widespread illiteracy that has come to dominate American culture we have moved from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, and in doing so have restaged politics and power in both unproductive and anti-democratic ways. ~ Henry A Giroux,
435:Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted—even for a few seconds—they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale.
These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution—the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind. ~ Robert Greene,
436:Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world- the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming - acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to 'the next best thing,' another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attached to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothful, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more. ~ Kathleen Norris,
437:during the first and primitive stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of world transport and communication, those differences are fading. The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still. ~ Joseph Campbell,
438:The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US’ regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington’s budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead ~ James F Petras,
439:Why did this unique process start in England and why in the seventeenth century? Why did England develop pluralistic political institutions and break away from extractive institutions? As we have seen, the political developments leading up to the Glorious Revolution were shaped by several interlinked processes. Central was the political conflict between absolutism and its opponents. The outcome of this conflict not only put a stop to the attempts to create a renewed and stronger absolutism in England, but also empowered those wishing to fundamentally change the institutions of society. The opponents of absolutism did not simply attempt to build a different type of absolutism. This was not simply the House of Lancaster defeating the House of York in the War of the Roses. Instead, the Glorious Revolution involved the emergence of a new regime based on constitutional rule and pluralism. This ~ Daron Acemo lu,
440:Every language defines a community, the people who speak it and can understand one another. A language acts not just as a means of communication among them but a banner of their distinct identity, often to the despair of national governments trying to forge a single identity for all their different language communities. This can have quite perverse effects. It is no coincidence that Nahuatl, with many other ancestral languages of Mexico, largely disappeared from written use towards the end of the eighteenth century, just when political movements led by urban Spanish speakers were raising consciousness of Mexico as a separate country with a view to independence. The contrast between Spanish-speaking mestizos and 'Indians' speaking the ancient languages of Mexico was seen as a distraction from the emergence of the indentity of the true Mexican. The older languages, seen as 'backward', had to go. ~ Nicholas Ostler,
441:In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world.

Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.
Imagine all kinds of people everywhere
getting committed to human excellence,
getting committed to closing the gap
between the human condition
and the human potential...
And imagine all of us hooked up
with a common high tech communications system.
That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes.
Human excellence is an ideal
that we can embed
into every formal human structure
on our planet.
And that's really why we're going to do this.
And that's also why
The Meta Network is a creation
we can love.

Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. ~ Jon Ronson,
442:The Black Death is a vivid example of a critical juncture, a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society. A critical juncture is a double-edged sword that can cause a sharp turn in the trajectory of a nation. On the one hand it can open the way for breaking the cycle of extractive institutions and enable more inclusive ones to emerge, as in England. Or it can intensify the emergence of extractive institutions, as was the case with the Second Serfdom in Eastern Europe. Understanding how history and critical junctures shape the path of economic and political institutions enables us to have a more complete theory of the origins of differences in poverty and prosperity. In addition, it enables us to account for the lay of the land today and why some nations make the transition to inclusive economic and political institutions while others do not. T ~ Daron Acemo lu,
443:Has anyone provided proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on. ~ David Berlinski,
444:To get a sense of the scale of Earth history, imagine walking back in time, a hundred years per step—every pace equal to more than three human generations. A mile takes you 175,000 years into the past. The twenty miles of Chesapeake cliffs, a hard day’s walk to be sure, correspond to more than 3 million years. But to make even a small dent in Earth history, you would have to keep walking at that rate for many weeks. Twenty days of effort at twenty miles a day and a hundred years per step would take you back 70 million years, to just before the mass death of the dinosaurs. Five months of twenty-mile walks would correspond to more than 530 million years, the time of the Cambrian “explosion”—the near-simultaneous emergence of myriad hard-shelled animals. But at a hundred years per footstep, you’d have to walk for almost three years to reach the dawn of life, and almost four years to arrive at Earth’s beginnings. ~ Robert M Hazen,
445:Just as the book was going to print a new leadership has begun to emerge in North Korea. As one might expect, the emergence of this new leadership has been accompanied by expectations and hopes for a better future for North Korea. As we will see, however, the country’s past gives little ground for optimism, but it is not impossible that the plump and jolly-looking young new Kim may well seek to break with the past and reform the country. He is still surrounded by the advisers and senior lieutenants of his father, but he might not agree with the logic of their survival strategy. There is a distinct possibility that he will attempt to improve the situation. Such attempts might even succeed, but it is also possible that the old guard is right, and that tampering with the system will aggravate the situation and lead to an uncontrollable implosion of the regime—a nightmarish scenario for North Korea’s many neighbors. ~ Andrei Lankov,
446:Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right. ~ Angela Nagle,
447:What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production to a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market. ~ Hannah Arendt,
448:The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a
sign of great and terrible misery. The emergence of pessimistic
philosophies is by no means a sign of great and terrible
misery. No, these question marks about the value of all
life are put up in ages in which the refinement and
alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito
bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and
malignant and one is so poor in real experiences of pain
that one would like to consider painful general ideas as
suffering of the first order.

There is a recipe
against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity
that seems to me the real "misery of the present age"
----but this recipe may sound too cruel and might
itself be counted among the signs that lead people
to judge that "existence is something evil."
Well, the recipe against this "misery" is: misery ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
449:The projection of Disbelief among humanity is biological, it is marked by the emergence of Socialists (nationalists and/or Patriots - the latter fancy themselves with the name: Capitalists) who -so in life as in burial- shrine themselves onto and into the Earth; with the Rich among them favoring the gemstones layers thereof. However, and contrary to this entombed mosaic of cadavers, is Belief dislodging to its carriers from Earth's beds - therefore, it is spiritual (i.e., cordial - meaning: 'of the heart') and not biological. The tombs of the Pantheists on the other hand are hallucinatory dreams of spatial transcending, yet bolted in their own domain of consciousness while being numb outside that constrained sphere of infection; it is after all their biological senses that charm them, not their active hearts (contrary to passive mode when it is not linked with the mind and, hence, acts as a mere radiator of a biological system). ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
450:This view, while understandable, given the sensational media coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply wrong. While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war. ~ Michelle Alexander,
451:Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of its subject. When these two constitutive sources of social relations and political conflict are elided, an ontological naturalness or essentialism almost inevitably takes up residence in our understandings and explanations. In the case at hand, an object of tolerance analytically divested of constitution by history and power is identified as naturally and essentially different from the tolerating subject; in this difference, it appears as a natural provocation to that which tolerates it. Moreover, not merely the parties to tolerance but the very scene of tolerance is naturalized, ontologized in its constitution as produced by the problem of difference itself. ~ Wendy Brown,
452:When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. ~ David James Duncan,
453:I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. ~ Fredric Jameson,
454:if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who ~ Douglas R Hofstadter,
455:In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor. It was humankind’s second experiment with government. “Where does government come from?” Haas asked. “What makes people decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for centuries. But archaeology should have something to contribute. In the Norte Chico, we may be able to provide some answers. It’s one of only two places on earth—three, if you count Mesoamerica—where government was an invention. Everywhere else it was inherited or borrowed. People were born into societies with governments or saw their neighbors’ governments and copied the idea. Here, people came up with it themselves. ~ Charles C Mann,
456:THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP OF THE GOSPEL TO ALL OF MINISTRY There is always a danger that church leaders and ministers will conceive of the gospel as merely the minimum standard of doctrinal content for being a Christian believer. As a result, many preachers and leaders are energized by thoughts of teaching more advanced doctrine, or of deeper forms of spirituality, or of intentional community and the sacraments, or of “deeper discipleship,” or of psychological healing, or of social justice and cultural engagement. One of the reasons is the natural emergence of specialization as a church grows and ages. People naturally want to go deeper into various topics and ministry disciplines. But this tendency can cause us to lose sight of the whole. Though we may have an area or a ministry that we tend to focus on, the gospel is what brings unity to all that we do. Every form of ministry is empowered by the gospel, based on the gospel, and is a result of the gospel. ~ Timothy J Keller,
457:Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect. ~ Henry A Giroux,
458:The Vedas may be full of hymns and religious invocations, but they also tell stories, speculate about the world and – true to the argumentative propensity already in view – ask difficult questions. A basic doubt concerns the very creation of the world: did someone make it, was it a spontaneous emergence, and is there a God who knows what really happened? As is discussed in Essay 1, the Rigveda goes on to express radical doubts on these issues: ‘Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? … perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.’ These doubts from the second millennium BCE would recur again and again in India’s long argumentative history, along with a great many other questions about epistemology and ethics (as is discussed in Essay 1). They survive side by side with intense religious beliefs and deeply respectful faith and devotion. ~ Amartya Sen,
459:Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.

… Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society. ~ Zbigniew Brzezi ski,
460:In the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power, this correlation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness itself is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and rhythm of its powers in their emergence are diminished and disturbed by the discordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there is the original, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious mind is only a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising coherence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life,
461:has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals—which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal. The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hitler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it. ~ Leonard Peikoff,
462:According to legend, Father Earth did not originally hate life. In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life—that was happenstance—but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface. Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth. They poisoned waters beyond even his ability to cleanse, and killed much of the other life that lived on his surface. They drilled through the crust of his skin, past the blood of his mantle, to get at the sweet marrow of his bones. And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child. ~ N K Jemisin,
463:"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough." ~ Jordan Peterson,
464:"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough." ~ Jordan B Peterson,
465:even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West ~ Sam Harris,
466:The system begins to display something other than synchronicity, it begins to act as a unit, to have behaviors. And just as a study of the parts of a self-organized whole cannot give an idea of the larger whole’s nature, so too the study of the smaller parts’ behaviors cannot give an idea of the larger system’s behavior. As Camazine et al. note, “an emergent property cannot be understood simply by examining in isolation the properties of the system’s components. . . . Emergence refers to a process by which a system of interacting subunits acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be understood as a simple addition of their individual contributions.”6 Or as systems researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam puts it, “A complex system is formed out of many components whose behavior is emergent, that is, the behavior of the system cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of its components. . . . Emergent properties cannot be studied by physically taking a system apart and looking at the parts (reductionism). ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
467:In talks I was doing on racial justice, I began talking about the United States’ three racialized holocausts: the large-scale death and destruction of cultures that resulted from the genocide of indigenous people on which the country was founded; the African slave trade that was central to the country’s emergence as an industrial power; and the post-WWII assault on the developing world that secured the country’s dominance in the contemporary world. Millions died in these projects, in which hideous levels of violence to expand one group’s wealth and power were justified, overtly or covertly, by the alleged racial superiority of whites. Some people were turned off, objecting that my language was too strong, but many more found the bluntness refreshing and told me the framework was helpful. These experiences taught me that watering down analysis and language to reach the largest possible audience often backfired—people who disagree aren’t persuaded, and those looking for a compelling argument tend to drift away. ~ Robert Jensen,
468:*———. The Mystery of Israel’s Origins: An Introduction and Proposals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. *Stager, Lawrence E. “Forging and Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stark, Thomas. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010. *Thomas, Heath A., Jeremy Evans, and Paul Copan, eds. Holy War in the Bible: Christian Morality and an Old Testament Problem. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013. Williamson, H. G. M. 1 and 2 Chronicles. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982. Wright, N. T. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012. *———. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. ———. Paul in Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. ———. Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why It Matters. San Francisco: HarperOne, ~ Peter Enns,
469:The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. God knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness genuinely earned. Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters. Who can speak with certainty about such things? I am unwilling to take these questions off the table, however, merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil. ~ Jordan Peterson,
470:The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned. They exercised no choice. God knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness genuinely earned. Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters. Who can speak with certainty about such things? I am unwilling to take these questions off the table, however, merely because they are difficult. So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
471:Many people today inside and outside the region are aware that many regimes, particularly in the Arab world, are cruel dictatorships unconstrained by any sense of higher law or justice.6 Westerners often think that the fusion of church and state is intrinsic to Islam while being foreign to Christian Europe, and that the kind of theocratic regime set up in Iran after the 1979 revolution somehow constitutes a reversion to a traditional form of Muslim rule. None of this is accurate. The emergence of modern Muslim dictatorships is a result of the accidents of the region’s confrontation with the West and subsequent transition to modernity. Political and religious authority were frequently united in Christian Europe. In the Muslim world, they were effectively separated through long historical periods. Law played the same function in Muslim lands that it did in Christian ones: acting as a check—albeit weaker—on the power of political rulers to do as they pleased. Rule of law is basic to Muslim civilization, and in fact defines that civilization in many respects. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
472:It is not very easy to see,” Mircea Eliade writes, “how the discovery that the primal laws of geometry were due to the empirical necessities of the irrigation of the Nile Delta can have any bearing on the validity or otherwise of those laws.” We can argue here in the same way. For it is really no easier to understand how the fact that the first emergence of the idea of God may possibly have been provoked by a particular spectacle, or have been linked to a particular experience of a sensible nature, could affect the validity of the idea itself. In each case the problem of its birth from experience and the problem of its essence or validity are distinct. The problems of surveying no more engendered geometry than the experience of storm and sky engendered the idea of God. He important thing is to consider the idea in itself; not the occasion of its birth, but its inner constitution. If the idea of God in the mind of man is real, then no fact accessible to history or psychology or sociology, or to any other scientific discipline, can really be its generating cause. ~ Henri de Lubac,
473:In the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the region was home to numerous peoples of common origin, sharing a common culture and possessing a common language, which they called SPT KN'N ("the language of Canaan" [Isaiah 19:18]), or Canaanite. At an early period, the peoples of Canaan had differentiated into distinct regional subgroups, part of which development was the emergence of regional dialects, some of which in turn became national languages. Phoenician was one such regional Canaanite dialect: in the strictest meaning, Phoenician was the language spoken along the coast of Lebanon roughly from Sidon in the North to Acco in the South. The indigenous name of this subregion of Canaan was Put (PT), and the name of the Canaanite subgroup inhabiting it, the Ponnim (Phoenicians), the gentilic deriving from the place-name. Ponnim was also the name of the Canaanite dialect of the region. It is this toponym and gentilic that are the origin of Greek φοινικες and Latin Poenus and punicus, the terms by which Greeks and Romans first came to know and call the Phoenicians; and is the term by which they are still called. ~ Charles R Krahmalkov,
474:The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend,
475:Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the institutional scaffolding for America’s future emergence as a great power. He had demonstrated the creative uses of government and helped to weld the states irreversibly into one nation. He had also defended Washington’s administration more brilliantly than anyone else, articulating its constitutional underpinnings and enunciating key tenets of foreign policy. “We look in vain for a man who, in an equal space of time, has produced such direct and lasting effects upon our institutions and history,” Henry Cabot Lodge was to contend. 62 Hamilton’s achievements were never matched because he was present at the government’s inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government. ~ Ron Chernow,
476:Throw yourself off that cliff,” Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7)—this answer, though rather brief, dispenses with the second temptation. Christ does not casually order or even dare ask God to intervene on his behalf. He refuses to dispense with His responsibility for the events of His own life. He refuses to demand that God prove His presence ~ Jordan Peterson,
477:Throw yourself off that cliff,” Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7)—this answer, though rather brief, dispenses with the second temptation. Christ does not casually order or even dare ask God to intervene on his behalf. He refuses to dispense with His responsibility for the events of His own life. He refuses to demand that God prove His presence ~ Jordan B Peterson,
478:The strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by its emergence in kids. By age three to four, kids already group people by race and gender, have more negative views of such Thems, and perceive other-race faces as being angrier than same-race faces.8 And even earlier. Infants learn same-race faces better than other-race. (How can you tell? Show an infant a picture of someone repeatedly; she looks at it less each time. Now show a different face—if she can’t tell the two apart, she barely glances at it. But if it’s recognized as being new, there’s excitement, and longer looking).9 Four important thoughts about kids dichotomizing: Are children learning these prejudices from their parents? Not necessarily. Kids grow in environments whose nonrandom stimuli tacitly pave the way for dichotomizing. If an infant sees faces of only one skin color, the salient thing about the first face with a different skin color will be the skin color. Racial dichotomies are formed during a crucial developmental period. As evidence, children adopted before age eight by someone of a different race develop the expertise at face recognition of the adoptive parent’s race.10 ~ Robert M Sapolsky,
479:Since 1945 Turkey has, of course, acquired far more importance for the US as a strategic ally, first in the Cold War and now the War on Terror. In the last twenty years, increasing pressure from the Armenian community, today much more salient than in the 1920s, and the emergence of an Armenian scholarship that has pioneered modern study of the exterminations of 1915-16 in the West, have made repression of the question more difficult. After previously unsuccessful attempts to get resolutions on it through Congress, in 2000 the House International Relations Committee voted for a bipartisan resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, while carefully exempting the Turkish Republic from any responsibility for it. Ankara’s response was to threaten withdrawal of American military facilities in Turkey, trade reprisals, and to talk of a risk of violence against Americans in Turkey – the State Department even had to issue a travel advisory – if the resolution were passed by Congress. Characteristically, Clinton intervened in person to prevent the resolution getting to the floor. In Ankara, Ecevit exulted that it was a demonstration of Turkish power. ~ Perry Anderson,
480:The ability to recall information about the past is thought to emerge in the 2nd half of the 1st year of life. Although there is evidence from both cognitive neuroscience and behavioral psychology to support this hypothesis, there is little longitudinal evidence with which the question can be addressed. Infants' memory abilities were tested between the ages of 9 and 16 months using elicited and deferred imitation. Infants' memory for events was tested after delays ranging from 1 to 6 months. The results suggest that at 9 months of age, infants are able to store and retrieve representations over delays of as many as 4 weeks but not over long delays. In contrast, 10-month-olds have at their disposal a system that allows encoding and retrieval of event representations over delays of up to 6 months. These results support the idea that the system that underlies long-term ordered recall emerges near the end of the 1st year of life. ~ Carver, L.J.; Bauer, P.J. (December 2001). "The dawning of a past: the emergence of long-term explicit memory in infancy". J Exp Psychol Gen. 130 (4): 726–45. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.130.4890. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.726. PMID 11757877.,
481:I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment.....the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization. ~ Peter F Drucker,
482:Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history.

Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity.

The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully.

But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name. ~ Ernst J nger,
483:The Bull-Lion Combat motif was developed by the Aryan Persians to express the theological civil war within the Osirian religion and the disintegration of the ancient Egyptian Mill which the Judeo-Christian is still trying to harmonize the constituents thereof (e.g. Ezekiel 1:10). That motif stems, however, from the Ouroboros symbol denoting the ever cyclically forking Aryan identity. Therefore, despite of the Jew's plagiarism of the Abrahamic sacrifice and the apparent practice of the ritual, the Jew's articulated his Osirian faith (as his mithraic Roman and Persian brethren) by fusing it into the Semitic scripture; after all, the Achaemenid Empire contributed to the emancipation of its Jew proxy where we later on witness the emergence of the main emblem of Persia of the Lion and the Sun signaling yet another attempt of plagiarism after the Jew's failure of accomplishing the Aryan's ultimate goal. Now and after which the Semitic Arab blow shattered the Aryan Christian face into pieces, a new Aryan schism surfaced and followed suit in total disregard to 1 Peter 5:8 forking thereby yet another Aryan identity anew (e.g. UK with its Lion Symbol vs. EU with its Bull Symbol). ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
484:Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”99 Clinton eventually moved beyond crime and capitulated to the conservative racial agenda on welfare. This move, like his “get tough” rhetoric and policies, was part of a grand strategy articulated by the “new Democrats” to appeal to the elusive white swing voters. In so doing, Clinton—more than any other president—created the current racial undercaste. He signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which “ended welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a block grant to states called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). TANF imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, as well as a permanent, lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense—including simple possession of marijuana. ~ Michelle Alexander,
485:Onset"

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,
bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of
is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.
Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.
And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately
I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers
of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug
beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs,
even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me,
the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other
like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything,
my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering
the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you,
beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs,
don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own;
I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins. ~ Kim Addonizio,
486:The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. ~ Sebastian Junger,
487:The idea that democracy was the most, or indeed the only, legitimate form of government spread to every corner of the world. Democratic constitutions were rewritten, or written for the first time, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the former Communist world. But stable liberal democracy was consolidated only in a subset of those countries undergoing democratic transitions, because the material balance of power in each society did not force the different actors to accept constitutional compromise. One or another actor—usually the one that had inherited executive authority—emerged as much more powerful than the others and expanded its domain at the expense of the others. The Enlightenment ideas that underpinned modern democracy were broadly disseminated across Europe, all the way to Russia. Their reception, however, differed markedly from country to country depending on how different political actors saw those ideas impinging on their own interests. Understanding the emergence of accountable government requires, then, understanding the particular political forces that existed in the different parts of Europe and why some constellations of power promoted accountability while others proved no bar to the growth of absolutism. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
488:One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,
489:Evolution in quantum mechanics is deterministic as in classical mechanics except for the difference that as the system interacts with another system, its state function collapses. This dichotomy exists only for separated systems, in which one of them is being observed by the other. Given that the state of the entire universe is defined at the initial point, its evolution must be completely deterministic. Any seeming randomness now should merely be an amplification of the randomness in the initial state and the entropy at the origin should not change as the universe evolves. In other words, the physical universe governed by quantum laws has no place for the emergence of life. Our currently accepted conceptions of the beginning of the universe postulate much more uniformity than exists now. One way entropy could increase in the universe is by the process of reduction of its state function by some other system. Since the universe, by definition, cannot have any other matter in it, it becomes essential to postulate a mechanism other than that of physical laws, which permits the state function to reduce. This other mechanism may be the working of the “consciousness principle” which can just by the process of “observation” increase entropy ~ Subhash Kak,
490:FREE CITIES AND THE BOURGEOISIE Contemporary conventional wisdom has it that democracy will not emerge without the existence of a strong middle class, that is, a group of people who own some property and are neither elites nor the rural poor. This notion finds its origins in English political development, which to a greater degree than any other European country (with the possible exception of Holland) saw the early emergence of cities and an urban-based bourgeoisie. The urban middle class played a key role in Parliament and gained substantial economic and political power well prior to the Civil War and Glorious Revolution. It was a powerful counterweight to the great lords and the king in their three-way contest for power. The rise of an urban bourgeoisie was part of a broader Western European shift that encompassed the Low Countries, northern Italy, and the Hanseatic port cities of northern Germany as well. This important phenomenon has been described at length by authors from Karl Marx to Max Weber to Henri Pirenne.15 Marx made the “rise of the bourgeoisie” the centerpiece of his entire theory of modernization, a necessary and inevitable stage in the developmental process of all societies. The existence of free cities explains, as we ~ Francis Fukuyama,
491:Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented practitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through to new frontiers-followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence-until a new crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn: 'multiple discoveries' -the simultaneous emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries'- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy-and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture. ~ Arthur Koestler,
492:In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state. ~ Noam Chomsky,
493:The appearance of reason and language in the course of biological history seems, from the point of view of available forms of explanation, something radically emergent—if, as I assume, it cannot be understood behavioristically. Like consciousness, it presents problems of both constitutive and historical explanation. It appeared long after the emergence of conscious creatures, yet it also seems to be essentially a development of consciousness and ought to be understandable as part of that history. Like consciousness, reason is inseparable from the physical life of organisms that have it, since it acts on the material provided by perception and natural desire and controls action, both directly and indirectly. Any understanding of it will transform our understanding of physical organisms and their development as well. The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself. ~ Thomas Nagel,
494:More than a century ago Thomas Carlyle described man as a "tool-using animal," as if this were the one trait that elevated him above the rest of brute creation. This overweighting of tools, weapons, physical apparatus, and machines has obscured the actual path of human development. The definition of man as a tool-using animal, even when corrected to read 'tool-making,' would have seemed strange to Plato, who attributed man's emergence from a primitive state as much to Marsyas and Orpheus, the makers of music, as to fire-stealing Prometheus, or to Hephaestus, the blacksmith-god, the sole manual worker in the Olympian pantheon.

Yet the description of man as essentially a tool-making animal has become so firmly embedded that the mere finding of fragments of little primate skulls in the neighborhood of chipped pebbles, as wit the Australopithecines of Africa, was deemed sufficient by their finder, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, to identify the creature as in the direct line of human ascent, despite marked physical divergences from both apes and later men. Since Leakey's sub-hominids had a brain capacity about a third of Homo sapiens-less indeed than some apes-the ability to chip and use crude stone tools plainly neither called for nor by itself generated man's rich cerebral equipment. ~ Lewis Mumford,
495:Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. ~ Marcel Proust,
496:Internationalism is not abstract moral solidarity, mere political will. It is the effect of the condition of work without quality, the condition of abstract work. As a consequence of this condition of radical alienation, industrial workers have been able to create the cultural conditions of equality. Industrial workers know that they are equals in their loss of humanity, of life, of time, of difference. It is through this alienation that difference can be reconstructed as consciousness, not as memory, as a political process of solidarity, not as belonging to an imagined origin. Since the working class was defeated by precariousness and the globalization of the labour market, the Volk has returned, stupid and bloody as it is, bringing with it the curse of origins, the obsession with belonging. In his book La Défaite de la pensée, Alain Finkielkraut rightly laments the fading of universal reason as the foundation of law and social structure, and the the re-emergence of identitarian culture and belonging. When relativism becomes culturalism, when belonging is mistaken as the foundation of law (‘memory is right’), when workers’ internationalism is defeated, modern universalism dies, and Humanism dies with it. Only the global, idiotic proliferation of particularities remains: crime and suicide. ~ Anonymous,
497:No, my dear. Leave poor Hari Kumar to work out his own salvation, if he’s still alive to work it out and if there’s a salvation of any kind for a boy like him. He is the leftover, the loose end of our reign, the kind of person we created—I suppose with the best intentions. But for all Nehru’s current emergence as a potential moral force in world affairs, I see nothing in India that will withstand the pressure of the legacy of the division we English have allowed her to impose on herself, and are morally responsible for. In allowing it we created a precedent for partition just at the moment when the opposite was needed, allowed it—again with the best intentions—as a result of tiredness, and failing moral and physical pretensions that just wouldn’t stand the strain of looking into the future to see what abdication on India’s terms instead of ours was going to mean. Perhaps finally we had no terms of our own because we weren’t clever enough to formulate them in twentieth century dress, and so the world is going to divide itself into isolated little pockets of dogma and mutual resistance, and the promise that always seemed to lie behind even the worst aspects of our colonialism will just evaporate into history as imperial mystique, foolish glorification of a severely practical and greedy policy. ~ Paul Scott,
498:Lovelock comments in response . . . We [as scientists] had become so used to thinking in terms of cause and effect that we no longer seemed to realize that the whole could be more than the sum of its parts. . . . The Earth self regulates its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself habitable and it is this that is the sticking point for many, if not most, scientists. Such a conclusion could never have come from reductionist thinking, and that is why arguments with biologists and others over Gaia have been so acrimonious for so long. The fact that reductionist science cannot offer a rational explanation for quantum phenomena like entanglement, nor of whole systems phenomena such as emergence, does not mean that these phenomena do not exist. Their existence confirms the limits of the Cartesian view of the universe. . . . Eminent representatives of the Earth and Life sciences secure in their disciplines ignored the fact that organisms massively alter their environment as well as adapting to it, and they did not see the evolution of the organisms and the evolution of their environment as a single coupled process. . . . I know it is unrealistic to expect them to welcome a theory like Gaia, which not only asks them to join together as if married but also to take a vow to believe in the phenomena of emergence. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
499:When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog. Now the road was paved and had a stripe painted down the center, and it carried a continual flow of vehicles. The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar. ~ Richard Preston,
500:He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed:

Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical.

Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:

(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".)

Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:

Gregory: You're just pulling my leg. ~ Kingsley Amis,
501:healing is the result of not just clinical processes but also of overall biological potentialities that often do not materialize without the unseen power of spiritual alignment. Chemistry is within the predictable Newtonian discipline of scientific (linear content) expectation, but health recovery is greatly facilitated by the unseen power of the spiritual dimensions of intentionality of consciousness itself (nonlinear context). The clinical power and influential impact of spiritual context is overwhelmingly displayed by the millions of recoveries from medically hopeless illnesses as exhibited by worldwide membership in faith-based organizations of which Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles (ACIM) are prime examples. Since the basic principles of faith-based recoveries are outside the paradigm of the reality of academic science, their importance was not studied or comprehended because academic science was concerned with just content and not context. The emergence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle finally accorded respectability for the recognition of the reality and influence of the effect of consciousness itself. Thus, the power of intention came to be recognized as an important critical factor in catalyzing potentiality into actuality. (See Stapp’s Mindful Universe for correlation of quantum theory, consciousness, and intention. ~ David R Hawkins,
502:It is a curious fate to write for a people other than one’s own, and it is even stranger to write to the conquerors of one’s people. Wonder was expressed at the acrimony of the first colonized writers. Do they forget that they are addressing the same public whose tongue they have borrowed? However, the writer is neither unconscious, nor ungrateful, nor insolent. As soon as they dare speak, what will they tell just those people, other than of their malaise and revolt? Could words of peace or thoughts of gratitude be expected from those who have been suffering from a loan that compounds so much interest? For a loan which, besides, will never be anything but a loan. We are here, it is true, putting aside fact for conjecture. But it is so easy to read, so obvious. The emergence of a literature of a colonized people, the development of consciousness by North African writers for example, is not an isolated occurrence. It is part of the development of the self-consciousness of an entire human group. The fruit is not an accident or miracle of a plant but a sign of its maturity. At most, the surging of the colonized artist is slightly ahead of the development of collective consciousness in which he participates and which he hastens by participating in it. And the most urgent claim of a group about to revive is certainly the liberation and restoration of its language. ~ Albert Memmi,
503:The true type of the Superman is, rather, Olympian: a calm greatness which expresses an irresistible superiority, something which terrifies and at the same time compels veneration, which prevails and disarms without fighting, establishing suddenly the feeling of a transcendent force, completely under control but totally capable of release, the wonderful and frightening sense which antiquity associated which the concept of the numen. Supra-life — that is, spirit, totally realised in its supernatural aspect — which permeates and governs absolutely everything which is ‘life’, is the substance here. But this type, the true Superman, cannot be treated merely as a construction of the thought of today. There is no great tradition of antiquity, whether of the East or of the West, which did not possess it. The tradition of the ‘divine right’ of the legitimate Kings, because they were the virile bearers of a force from above, is its last echo. To conceive the sudden re-emergence of this ancient conception, in a world where every great horizon was dead, where, to serve as immediate ideological substance for its incarnation, there were only the profane and opaque myths of evolutionism and natural selection, and a confused need for force and liberation — to conceive this is also to understand the invisible genesis of the theory of the Nietzschean Superman, its limit, and the path which can lead beyond it. ~ Julius Evola,
504:Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment. Or perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in the back of your mind. Well, consider two things that should reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you’ll leave behind you, and the kind of people you’ll no longer be mixed up with. There’s no need to feel resentment toward them—in fact, you should look out for their well-being, and be gentle with them—but keep in mind that everything you believe is meaningless to those you leave behind. Because that’s all that could restrain us (if anything could)—the only thing that could make us want to stay here: the chance to live with those who share our vision. But now? Look how tiring it is—this cacophony we live in. Enough to make you say to death, “Come quickly. Before I start to forget myself, like them. ~ Marcus Aurelius,
505:This is arguably the besetting mistake of all naturalist thinking, as it happens, in practically every sphere. In this context, the assumption at work is that if one could only reduce one’s picture of the original physical conditions of reality to the barest imaginable elements—say, the “quantum foam” and a handful of laws like the law of gravity, which all looks rather nothing-ish (relatively speaking)—then one will have succeeded in getting as near to nothing as makes no difference. In fact, one will be starting no nearer to nonbeing than if one were to begin with an infinitely realized multiverse: the difference from non-being remains infinite in either case. All quantum states are states within an existing quantum system, and all the laws governing that system merely describe its regularities and constraints. Any quantum fluctuation therein that produces, say, a universe is a new state within that system, but not a sudden emergence of reality from nonbeing. Cosmology simply cannot become ontology. The only intellectually consistent course for the metaphysical naturalist is to say that physical reality “just is” and then to leave off there, accepting that this “just is” remains a truth entirely in excess of all physical properties and causes: the single ineradicable “super-natural” fact within which all natural facts are forever contained, but about which we ought not to let ourselves think too much. ~ David Bentley Hart,
506:Jagadis Bose, who developed some of the earliest work on plant neurobiology in the early 1900s, treated plants with a wide variety of chemicals to see what would happen. In one instance, he covered large, mature trees with a tent then chloroformed them. (The plants breathed in the chloroform through their stomata, just as they would normally breathe in air.) Once anesthetized, the trees could be uprooted and moved without going into shock. He found that morphine had the same effects on plants as that of humans, reducing the plant pulse proportionally to the dose given. Too much took the plant to the point of death, but the administration of atropine, as it would in humans, revived it. Alcohol, he found, did indeed get a plant drunk. It, as in us, induced a state of high excitation early on but as intake progressed the plant began to get depressed, and with too much it passed out. and it had a hangover the next day Irrespective of the chemical he used, Bose found that the plant responded identically to the human; the chemicals had the same effect on the plants nervous systems as it did the human. This really should not be surprising. The neurochemicals in our bodies were used in every life-form on the planet long before we showed up. They predate the emergence of the human species by hundreds of millions of years. They must have been doing something all that time, you know, besides waiting for us to appear. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
507:The archetypal image of the redeemer serpent is certainly placed here in opposition to the serpents of evil that battle with it. But why do they both have the same form if there is only oppositIOn between them? What does it mean that they both dwell in the same place, the depth of the great abyss? Are they not possibly two aspects of the same thing?
We know this image of the redeemer serpent not only from Gnosis and from the Sabbataian myth, but we know of the same serpent rising from below, redeeming and to be redeemed, as the Kundalini serpent in India, and finally from alchemy as the serpens Mercurii, the ambiguous serpent whose significance was first made clear to us by Jung's researches.
Since Jung's work on alchemy we know two things. The first is that in its "magnum opus" alchemy dealt with a redemption of matter itself. The second is that pari passu with this redemption of matter, a redemption of the individual psyche was not only unconsciously carried out but was also consciously intended. As we know, the serpent is a primeval symbol of the Spirit, as primeval and ambiguous as the Spirit itself. The emergence of the Earth archetype of the Great Mother brings with it the emergence of her companion, the Great Serpent. And, strangely enough, it seems as though modern man is confronted with a curious task, a task which is essentially connected with what mankind, rightly or wrongly, has feared most, namely the Devil. ~ Erich Neumann,
508:I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait. “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes. ~ Neil Gaiman,
509:You and your friends played a big role in the aesthetic sensibility bred in the anarchist milieu in the early 2000s. While most anarchists and radicals were occupied with identity politics, accountability processes, justice, and ethical living and consumption, you and your friends started projects that had a more nihilist bent. Queer hedonism and negation, ‘doing-being totally out of control’. What inspired this turn, and what were you guys doing? The aesthetic sensibility we bred corresponded with the (re-)emergence of the hipster. While the hipster identity was about separating oneself out into a certain identity, to us it was more about being able to become anything. To welcome the power that comes with being malleable. To turn this weak metropolitan subject against itself. There were university occupations across the country, at the New School, in California, mini-riots across the Midwest and in the South. That also corresponded to the English translation of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, which was an important moment. Notably, that book was the same blue as Obama’s branding, and was a book instead of some zine somewhere. The new interest in insurrectionist aesthetics beyond the anarchist milieu provided a sort of opening. Part of the program behind Institute for Experimental Freedom, why I made all this aesthetic crap, why Politics is Not a Banana was a bright-ass pink book, was to take advantage of this opening. ~ Anonymous,
510:Once he has recognized his invisible guide, a mystic sometimes decides to trace his own isnlld, to reveal his spiritual genealogy, that is, to disclose the "chain of transmission" culminating in his person and bear witness to the spiritual ascendancy which he invokes across the generations of mankind. He does neither more nor less than to designate by name the minds to whose family he is conscious of belonging. Read in the opposite order from their phenomenological emergence, these genealogies take on the appearance of true genealogies. Judged by the rules of _our historical criticism, the claim of these genealogies to truth seems highly precarious. Their relevance is to another "transhistoric truth," which cannot be regarded as inferior (because it is of a different order) to the material historic truth whose claim to truth, with the documentation at our disposal, is no less precarious. Suhrawardi traces the family tree of the IshrlqiyOn back to Hermes, ancestor of the Sages, (that Idris-Enoch of Islamic prophetology, whom Ibn rArabi calls the prophet of the Philosophers) ; from him are descended the Sages of Greece and Persia, who are followed by certain ofis (Abo Yazid Bastlmi, Kharraqlni, I;Ialllj, and the choice seems particularly significant in view of what has been said above about the Uwaysis}, and all these branches converge in his own doctrine and school. This is not a history of philosophy in our sense of the term; but still less is it a mere fantasy. ~ Henry Corbin,
511:Three factors greatly facilitated the emergence of more inclusive political institutions following the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. The first was new merchants and businessmen wishing to unleash the power of creative destruction from which they themselves would benefit; these new men were among the key members of the revolutionary coalitions and did not wish to see the development of yet another set of extractive institutions that would again prey on them. The second was the nature of the broad coalition that had formed in both cases. For example, the Glorious Revolution wasn’t a coup by a narrow group or a specific narrow interest, but a movement backed by merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groupings. The same was largely true for the French Revolution. The third factor relates to the history of English and French political institutions. They created a background against which new, more inclusive regimes could develop. In both countries there was a tradition of parliaments and power sharing going back to the Magna Carta in England and to the Assembly of Notables in France. Moreover, both revolutions happened in the midst of a process that had already weakened the grasp of the absolutist, or aspiring absolutist, regimes. In neither case would these political institutions make it easy for a new set of rulers or a narrow group to take control of the state and usurp existing economic wealth and build unchecked and durable political power. ~ Daron Acemo lu,
512:In other cases, however-those of Copernicus, Einstein, and contemporary nuclear theory, for example-considerable time elapses between the first consciousness of breakdown and the emergence of a new paradigm. When that occurs, the historian may capture at least a few hints of what extraordinary science is like. Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist's first effort will often be to isolate it more precisely and give it structure. Though now aware that they cannot be quite right, he will push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in experiments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance. And in the latter effort, more than in any other part of the post-paradigm development of science, he will look almost like our most prevalent image of the scientist. He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess. Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease. ~ Thomas S Kuhn,
513:In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy. ~ Joanna Macy,
514:Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable and elusive beauty. ~ Marcel Proust,
515:Preparing the Way So long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. —GOETHE To die is not a bad thing. Cells die every day. Paradoxically, it is how the body lives. Casings shed. Coverings fall away. New growth appears. It is how we stay vital. Likewise, ways of thinking die like cells, and we suffer greatly when we refuse to let what's growing underneath make its way as the new skin of our lives. It is the stubbornness with which we refuse to let what's growing underneath come through that pains us. It is the fear that nothing is growing underneath that feeds our despair. It is the moment that we cease growing in any direction that is truly deadly. When resisting this process, we become a troubled guest, moaning like a human crow. We double the pain of living when we try to stop the emergence that all life goes through. Imagine if trees never shed their leaves, or if waves never turned over, or if clouds never dumped their rain and disappeared. I say this as much to remind myself as you: Little deaths prevent big deaths. What matters most is waiting its turn underneath all that is expending itself to prepare the way. Sit quietly and consider the many selves you have been. As you breathe evenly, consider how the new self has always been growing underneath the old. Now close your eyes and meditate on the newness growing within you right now. As you breathe steadily, relax your grip on the habits of your mind that might be blocking your growth. ~ Mark Nepo,
516:We are by nature a courageous and adaptive people. Our forebears overcame great challenges, and so will we. We are already seeing the emergence of new and innovative defenses against the assault on reason. It is my greatest hope that those who read this book will choose to become part of a new movement to rekindle the true spirit of America. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.” As John Adams wrote in 1780, ours is a government of laws and not of men. What is at stake today is that defining principle of our nation and thus the very nature of America. As the Supreme Court has written, “Our Constitution is a covenant running from the first generation of Americans to us and then to future generations.” The Constitution includes no wartime exception, though its framers knew well the reality of war. And as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us shortly after World War I, the Constitution’s principles have value only if we apply them in the difficult times as well as in those when it matters less. The question before us could be of no greater moment: Will we continue to live as a people under the rule of law as embodied in our Constitution? Or will we fail future generations by leaving them a Constitution far diminished from the charter of liberty we have inherited from our forebears? Our choice is clear. ~ Al Gore,
517:From the beginning of the nineteenth century until Hiroshima, strategic thought was dominated by post-Napoleonic, Clausewitzian notions, and these notions have pervaded the thinking of many whose primary interests are far from removed from military matters. In their crude, popularized form, these ideas stress a particular form of war, conflicts between nationalities; they stress the primacy and desirability of offensive warfare in pursuit of decisive results (thus inspiring an aversion to defensive strategies); and they imply a sharp distinction between the state of peace and the state of war. Finally, these ideas accord primacy to the active use of military force, as opposed to the use of images of force, for the purposes of diplomatic coercion. Only since 1945 has the emergence of new technologies of mass destruction invalidated the fundamental assumptions of the Clausewitzian approach to grand strategy. We, like the Romans, face the prospect not of decisive conflict, but of a permanent state of war, albeit limited. We, like the Romans, must actively protect an advanced society against a variety of threats rather than concentrate on destroying the forces of our enemies in battle. Above all, the nature of modern weapons requires that we avoid their use while nevertheless striving to exploit their full diplomatic potential. The revolutionary implications of these fundamental changes are as yet only dimly understood. It is not surprising, therefore, that even contemporary research on Roman military history is still pervaded by an anachronistic strategic outlook. ~ Edward N Luttwak,
518:The 19th and first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos. Chaos was the oft-quoted blind play of atoms, which, in mechanistic and positivistic philosophy, appeared to represent ultimate reality, with life as an accidental product of physical processes, and mind as an epi-phenomenon. It was chaos when, in the current theory of evolution, the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance product of nature and nurture, of a mixture of genes and an accidental sequence of events from early childhood to maturity.
  Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world -- the world as organization. Such a conception -- if it can be substantiated -- would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes.
  This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with "systems," "wholes" or "organizations"; and in their totality, they herald a new approach. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory,
519:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
520:Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement—such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all. Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own. In Wagner’s overture to Rienzi, one can almost trace this emergence. There are echoes, imitations, paraphrases, pastiches of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and others—all the musical influences of his apprenticeship. And then, suddenly, astoundingly, one hears Wagner’s own voice: powerful, extraordinary (though, to my mind, horrible), a voice of genius, without precedent or antecedent. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement. ~ Oliver Sacks,
521:The Politics of the Bible The key to seeing the political passion of the Bible is hearing and understanding its primary voices in their ancient historical contexts. These contexts are not only literary, but also political. The political context of the Bible is “the ancient domination system,” sometimes also called “the premodern domination system.” Both phrases are used in historical scholarship for the way “this world”—the humanly created world of societies, nations, and empires—was structured until the democratic and industrial revolutions of the past few centuries. Ancient Domination Systems Ancient domination systems began in the 3000s BCE. Two developments account for their emergence. The first was large-scale agriculture and the production of agricultural surpluses, made possible by the invention of metal and metal farm instruments, especially the plow, and the domestication of large animals. The second was the direct result of the first: cities—large concentrations of settled population—became possible. Before large-scale agriculture that produced surpluses, humans lived as nomads or in small settlements that depended on horticulture—gardening—for their sustenance. Cities created the need for a ruling class. One need was a protector class because many people lived outside of cities and knew that cities had food and wealth and were thus apt to attack them. A second need was to order the life of cities. People cannot live in concentrations of thousands without organization. Thus a ruling class of power and wealth emerged. Cities were quickly followed by kingdoms and empires, small and large, all in the same millennium. ~ Marcus J Borg,
522:The first thing which science has not taken on board is the fact that, as you get nearer and nearer the moment in time that we call the present, things become more and more complicated. Now, that may seem like a trivial statement, but there’s no reason for the universe to work like that. Why does the universe go from simple to complicated? Why do you get, at first—moments after the big bang—an ocean of free electrons at such a state of temperature and energy that no molecular bonds can form, atomic systems can’t even form because the bond strength is overwhelmed by the thermal energy in the system. Then it cools down and atoms condense—a more complicated thing than electrons by orders of magnitude. Further cooling, further nuclear cooking of the most primitive elements—hydrogen and helium—in gravitationally aggregated masses called stars cooks out the heavier elements. They emerge. They were never seen before until fusion began to occur in these hydrogen masses. And these fusion processes cook out iron, sulfur, carbon—bingo! Carbon. Molecules! Now, an order of magnitude in their complexity greater than atoms as atoms are to compared to electrons. And then, you know—and I’m compressing 13 billion years of emergence here into 30 seconds—then, out of the molecular soup, you get long chain polymers. Out of the long chain polymers you get molecular transcription systems, i.e. pre-biotic stuff. Out of that you get non-nucleated DNA. Out of that: nucleated DNA. Out of that: membranes, organelles, organisms, higher organisms, differentiation of tissue, our dear selves, culture, language, technology, and the eschaton. ~ Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time,
523:intellectual imperialism. It has been, and still is, used to denigrate the orientation that many people still experience, that the world, and the other organisms with which we share this Earth, are alive, intelligent, and aware. It has been used to stifle the response of the heart to what has been presented to the senses. This has resulted in the creation of a conceptual monoculture that can’t see outside its limitations. Such imperialists have set out to conquer the superstitious natives inhabiting the dark continent, the place where the general populace lives. Midgley makes the point that arguments such as Day’s rest in a belief in human beings as “an isolated will, guided by an intelligence, arbitrarily connected to a rather unsatisfactory array of feelings, and lodged, by chance, in an equally unsatisfactory human body.”18 Or as Susan Sontag once described it: “consciousness harnessed to flesh,”19 as if there could be consciousness without the emergence of the self-organized system we call the body. This type of dissociation is a common side effect of the materialist and very reductionist view of the world most of us are trained in. But as Midgely notes, this system of thought is not reason, not science, but behavioral examples of, as she puts it, an unexamined, “exuberant power fantasy.” It is bad software, generated out of unexamined psychological frameworks. The evolutionary escalator metaphor and the assumptions of what constitutes intelligence (and value) that are embedded within it create, automatically, behavior that is very dangerous to every other life-form on this planet—in fact to the health of every ecosystem this planet possesses. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
524:The Lord has veiled himself and his absolute wisdom and eternal consciousness in ignorant Nature-Force and suffers her to drive the individual being, with its complicity, as the ego; this lower action of Nature continues to prevail, often even in spite of man's half-lit imperfect efforts at a nobler motive and a purer self-knowledge. Our human effort at perfection fails, or progresses very incompletely, owing to the force of Nature's past actions in us, her past formations, her long-rooted associations; it turns towards a true and high-climbing success only when a greater Knowledge and Power than our own breaks through the lid of our ignorance and guides or takes up our personal will. For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and purer force is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver after perfection; it is a dreadful passage full of trials, sufferings, sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge and alleviate this ordeal or to penetrate it with the divine delight faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, a true aspiration and a right and unfaltering and sincere practice. "Practise unfalteringly," says the Gita, "with a heart free from despondency," the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 219,
525:Seen in this way, it represents a challenge of the grassroots to the elite, of popular to the official, of the weak to the strong...

More than twenty years have passed since Tiananmen protests of 1989, and from today's perspective their greatest impact has been the lack of progress in reforming the political system. It's fair to say political reform was taking place in the 1980s, even if its pace was slower than that of economic reform. After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while economy began breakneck development. Because of this pradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on hte other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.

It seems to me that the emergence - and unstoppable momentum - of the copycat phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of this lopsided development. The ubiquity and sharpness of social contradictions have provoked confusion in people's value systems and worldview, thus giving birth to the copycat effect, when all kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art. ~ Yu Hua,
526:Seen in this way, it represents a challenge of the grassroots to the elite, of popular to the official, of the weak to the strong...

...More than twenty years have passed since Tiananmen protests of 1989, and from today's perspective their greatest impact has been the lack of progress in reforming the political system. It's fair to say political reform was taking place in the 1980s, even if its pace was slower than that of economic reform. After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while economy began breakneck development. Because of this pradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on hte other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.

It seems to me that the emergence - and unstoppable momentum - of the copycat phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of this lopsided development. The ubiquity and sharpness of social contradictions have provoked confusion in people's value systems and worldview, thus giving birth to the copycat effect, when all kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art. ~ Yu Hua,
527:We have noticed that, since man’s advent, there has been a certain slowing down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism in favour of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the individual absorbed in society. We find the artificial carrying on the work of the natural; and the transmission of an oral or written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity (chromosomes). Without denying the possibility or even probability of a certain prolongation in our limbs, and still more in our nervous system, of the orthogenetic processes of the past, I am inclined to think that their influence, hardly appreciable since the emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the energies of life seem unable to spread in one region or take on a new form except at the expense of a lowering elsewhere. Since man’s arrival, the evolutionary pressure seems to have dropped in all the non-human branches of the tree of life. And now that man has become an adult and has opened up for himself the field of mental and social transformations, bodies no longer change appreciably; they no longer need to in the human branch; or if they still change, it will only be under our industrious control. It may well be that in its individual capacities and penetration our brain has reached its organic limits. But the movement does not stop there. From west to east, evolution is henceforth occupied elsewhere, in a richer and more complex domain, constructing, with all minds joined together, mind. Beyond all nations and races, the inevitable taking-as-a-whole of mankind has already begun. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
528:The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate. ~ Jordan Peterson,
529:The Sumerians considered themselves destined to “clothe and feed” such gods, because they viewed themselves as the servants, in a sense, of what we would call instinctive forces, “elicited” by the “environment.” Such forces can be reasonably regarded as the Sumerians regarded them—as deities inhabiting a “supracelestial place,” extant prior to the dawn of humanity. Erotic attraction, for example—a powerful god—has a developmental history that predates the emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively “innate” releasing “stimuli” (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence “transcending” that of any individual who is currently “possessed.” Pan, the Greek god of nature, produced/represented fear (produced “panic”); Ares or the Roman Mars, warlike fury and aggression. We no longer personify such “instincts,” except for the purposes of literary embellishment, so we don't think of them “existing” in a “place” (like heaven, for example). But the idea that such instincts inhabit a space—and that wars occur in that space—is a metaphor of exceeding power and explanatory utility. Transpersonal motive forces do wage war with one another over vast spans of time; are each forced to come to terms with their powerful “opponents” in the intrapsychic hierarchy. The battles between the different “ways of life” (or different philosophies) that eternally characterize human societies can usefully be visualized as combat undertaken by different standards of value (and, therefore, by different hierarchies of motivation). The “forces” involved in such wars do not die, as they are “immortal”: the human beings acting as “pawns of the gods” during such times are not so fortunate. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
530:Whatever his disappointments, Hamilton, forty, must have left Philadelphia with an immense feeling of accomplishment. The Whiskey Rebellion had been suppressed, the country's finances flourished, and the investigation into his affairs had ended with a ringing exoneration. He had prevailed in almost every major program he had sponsored--whether the bank, assumption, funding the public debt, the tax system, the Customs Service, or the Coast Guard--despite years of complaints and bitter smears. John Quincy Adams later stated that his financial system "operated like enchantment for the restoration of public credit." Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the institutional scaffolding for America's future emergence as a great power. He had demonstrated the creative uses of government and helped to weld the states irreversibly into one nation. He had also defended Washington's administration more brilliantly that anyone else, articulating its constitutional underpinnings and enunciating key tenets of foreign policy. "We look in vain for a man who, in an equal space of time, has produced such direct and lasting effects upon our institutions and history," Henry Cabot Lodge was to contend. Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government. ~ Ron Chernow,
531:A critical but often ignored impact of FDI is that on the (current and future) domestic competitors. An entry by a TNC through FDI can destroy existing national firms that could have 'grown up' into successful operations without this premature exposure to competition, or it can pre-empt the emergence of domestic competitors. In such cases, short-run productive capabilities are enhanced, as the TNC subsidiary replacing the (current and future) national firms is usually more productive than the latter. But the level of productive capability that the country can attain in the long run becomes lower as a result.

This is because TNCs do not, as a rule, transfer the most valuable activities outside their home country, as I will discuss in greater detail later. As a result, there will be a definite ceiling on the level of sophistication that a TNC subsidiary can reach in the long run. To go back to the Toyota example in chapter 1, had Japan liberalized FDI in its automobile industry in the 1960s, Toyota definitely wouldn't be producing the Lexus today-it would have wiped out or, more likely, have become a valued subsidiary of an American carmaker.

Given this, a developing country may reasonably decide to forego short-term benefits from FDI in order to increase the chance for its domestic firms to engage in higher-level activities in the long run, by banning FDI in certain sectors or regulating it. This is exactly the same logic as that of infant industry protection that I discussed in the earlier chapters-a country gives up the short-run benefits of free trade in order to create higher productive capabilities in the long run. And it is why, historically, most economic success stories have resorted to regulation of FDI, often in a Draconian manner, as I shall now show. ~ Ha Joon Chang,
532:Though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence- to give it an inadequate name-the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 785-86,
533:One of the best descriptions of the actual psychological experiences that come with deep meditation is the Visuddhimagga (Path of purification), a fourth-century meditation manual composed on the island of Sri Lanka by an Indian Buddhist named Buddhaghosa. In the Visuddhimagga he laid out the early Buddhist vision of what can be achieved psychologically through the cultivation of certain critical factors of mind that are developed through meditation practice. As a cross section of the meditative mind, this manual is unparalleled. Through the relentless development of both concentration (the ability to rest the mind in a single object of awareness) and mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to a succession of objects of awareness), the meditator eventually enters into states that are variously described as ones of either terror or delight. These are states that do not often unfold in psychotherapy: they may be glimpsed or remembered, but they do not come forward inexorably, as they do in meditation practice. Their emergence is predicated on the development of certain ego functions beyond the normal operating range of everyday life. Listen, for example, to the classic descriptions of some of these states. The experiences of delight, for instance, are characterized by varying degrees of rapture or happiness, of which there are said to be five grades: Minor happiness is only able to raise the hairs on the body. Momentary happiness is like flashes of lightning at different moments. Showering happiness breaks over the body again and again like waves on the seashore. Uplifting happiness can be powerful enough to levitate the body and make it spring up in the air. . . . But when pervading (rapturous) happiness arises, the whole body is completely pervaded, like a filled bladder, like a rock cavern invaded by a huge inundation.1 ~ Mark Epstein,
534:Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society.29 The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations—what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers’ movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. 30 Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups.31 ~ Francis Fukuyama,
535:The immediate catalyst for the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which included three momentous discoveries in astronomy: Johannes Kepler delineated the rules that govern the movement of the planets, Galileo Galilei placed the sun at the center of the universe, and Isaac Newton discovered the force of gravity, invented calculus (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently discovered it at the same time), and used it to describe the three laws of motion. In so doing, Newton joined physics and astronomy and illustrated that even the deepest truths in the universe could be revealed by the methods of science. These contributions were celebrated in 1660 with the formation of the first scientific society in the world: the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, which elected Isaac Newton as its president in 1703. The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe to function according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher—was to employ the scientific method to discover the physical principles underlying the universe and thereby decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos. Success in the realm of science led eighteenth-century thinkers to assume that other aspects of human action, including political behavior, creativity, and art, could be improved by the application of reason, leading ultimately to an improved society and better conditions for all humankind. This confidence in reason and science affected all aspects of political and social life in Europe and soon spread to the North American colonies. There, the Enlightenment ideas that society can be improved through reason and that rational people have a natural right to the pursuit of happiness are thought to have contributed to the Jeffersonian democracy that we enjoy today in the United States. ~ Eric R Kandel,
536:1. that the emergence of the nervous system was an indispensable enabler of life in elaborate multicellular organisms; the nervous system has been a servant of whole-organism homeostasis, although its cells also depend on that same homeostasis process for its own survival; this integrated mutuality is most often overlooked in discussions of behavior and cognition; 2. that the nervous system is part of the organism it serves, specifically a part of its body, and that it holds close interactions with that body; that these interactions are of an entirely different nature from those that the nervous system holds with the environment that surrounds the organism; the particularity of this privileged relationship also tends to be overlooked; I will say more on this critical issue in part II; 3. that the extraordinary emergence of the nervous system opened the way for neurally mediated homeostasis—an addition to the chemical/visceral variety; later, after the development of conscious minds capable of feeling and creative intelligence, the way was open for the creation, in the social and cultural space, of complex responses whose existence began as homeostatically inspired but later transcended homeostatic needs and gained considerable autonomy; therein the beginning but not the middle or the end of our cultural lives; even at the highest levels of sociocultural creation, there are vestiges of simple life-related processes present in the most humble exemplars of living organisms, namely, bacteria; 4. that several complex functions of the higher nervous system have their functional roots in simpler operations of the lower devices of the system itself; for this reason, for example, it has not been productive to first look for the grounding of feeling and consciousness in the operations of the cerebral cortex; instead, as discussed in part II, the operation of brain-stem nuclei and of the peripheral nervous system offers better opportunities to identify precursors to feeling and consciousness. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,
537:The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related. The ~ Hannah Arendt,
538:For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? I ~ Elena Ferrante,
539:To help them understand that they are not to blame for their deceptive brain messages, we taught Steve and Sarah about Free Won’t, a term popularized by the well-known neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In a series of carefully executed scientific experiments completed in the 1980s, Libet studied how people decide whether and when to move their own bodies and what generated the initial desire to move. While the meaning of what he discovered is still the subject of passionate disagreement in academic circles, the bottom line for you is this: Your brain—not your mind—generates the initial desires, impulses, thoughts, and sensations, but you can veto almost any action before it starts. This means that while you are not responsible for the emergence of thoughts, desires, impulses, urges, or sensations, you are responsible for what you do with them once they arise. Libet himself interpreted his results in this way and emphasized that you have a choice in whether or not to respond when your brain puts out the call—this is the essence of Free Won’t. As he described it in one of his landmark papers:7 The role of conscious free will [aka Free Won’t] would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action and which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing. In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t. Free Won’t turns out to be of the utmost importance because it tells us that we have, in essence, the power to veto almost any action, even though the desire to perform that action is generated by brain mechanisms entirely outside of our conscious attention and awareness. How might that Free Won’t express itself? Through Veto Power. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
540:Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool. ~ Al Gore,
541:The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. Contrary to most professional opinion, this gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of "mental illness," nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided. It has been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace. In a special sense, suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight.

But only in a special sense. Some people cling to their suffering as a mother to its child, carrying it as a burden they dare not set down. They do not face suffering with awareness, but rather clutch at their suffering, secretly transfixed with the spasms of martyrdom. Suffering should neither be denied awareness, avoided, despised, not glorified, clung to, dramatized. The emergence of suffering is not so much good as it is a good sign, an indication that one is starting to realize that life lived outside unity consciousness is ultimately painful, distressing, and sorrowful. The life of boundaries is a life of battles—of fear, anxiety, pain, and finally death. It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions, and enchantments that we agree not to question our illusory boundaries, the root cause of the endless wheel of agony. But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail their soothing and concealing purpose. As a consequence, we begin to suffer in one way or another, because our awareness is finally directed toward the conflict-ridden nature of our false boundaries and the fragmented life supported by them. ~ Ken Wilber,
542:formal-operational ::: The orange altitude emerged a few hundred years ago with the European Rennisance. Its modern, rational view grew in prominance through the Age of Enlightenment and came to its fullest expression during the Industrial Revolution.

Fueling this age of reason and science was the emergence of formal operational cognition, or the ability to operate on thoughts themselves. No longer limited to reflection on concrete objects, cognition moves from representations to abstractions and can now operate on a range of non-tangiable propositions that may not reflect the concrete world. This is the basis of scientific reasoning through hypothesis. Orange also brings multiplistic thinking, or the realization that there are several possible ways of approaching a situation, even though one is still considered most right. Self-sense at orange features two shifts, first to expert and then to achiever, these moves feature an increase in self-awareness and appreciation for multiple possibilities in a given situation. Recognition that one doesnt always live up to idealized social expectations is fueled by an awareness that begins to penetrate the inner world of subjectivity. This is the beginning of introspection. An objectifiable self-sense and the capacity to take a third person perspective. Needs shift from belonging to self-esteem. And values land on pragmatic utiliarian approaches to life that rely on ... and thinking to earn progress, prosperity and self-reliance. Morality at orange sees right defined by universal ethical principles. The emergence of formal operational thinking at orange enables a world-centric care for universal human rights and the right of each individual for autonomy and the pursuit of happiness. A desire for individual dignity and self-respect are also driving forces behind orange morality. A significant number of the founding fathers of the United States harbored orange values. ...

Faith at orange is called Individual Reflective and so far as identity and world-view are differentiated from others, and faith takes on an essence of critical thought. Demythologizing symbols into conceptual meanings. At orange we see the emergence of rational deism and secularism. ~ Essential Integral, 4.1-51, Formal Operational,
543: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,
544:12 Many uninformed persons speak of yoga as Hatha Yoga or consider yoga to be “magic,” dark mysterious rites for attaining spectacular powers. When scholars, however, speak of yoga they mean the system expounded in Yoga Sutras (also known as Patanjali’s Aphorisms): Raja (“royal”) Yoga. The treatise embodies philosophic concepts of such grandeur as to have inspired commentaries by some of India’s greatest thinkers, including the illumined master Sadasivendra. Like the other five orthodox (Vedas-based) philosophical systems, Yoga Sutras considers the “magic” of moral purity (the “ten commandments” of yama and niyama) to be the indispensable preliminary for sound philosophical investigation. This personal demand, not insisted on in the West, has bestowed lasting vitality on the six Indian disciplines. The cosmic order (rita) that upholds the universe is not different from the moral order that rules man’s destiny. He who is unwilling to observe the universal moral precepts is not seriously determined to pursue truth. Section III of Yoga Sutras mentions various yogic miraculous powers (vibhutis and siddhis). True knowledge is always power. The path of yoga is divided into four stages, each with its vibhuti expression. Achieving a certain power, the yogi knows that he has successfully passed the tests of one of the four stages. Emergence of the characteristic powers is evidence of the scientific structure of the yoga system, wherein delusive imaginations about one’s “spiritual progress” are banished; proof is required! Patanjali warns the devotee that unity with Spirit should be the sole goal, not the possession of vibhutis — the merely incidental flowers along the sacred path. May the Eternal Giver be sought, not His phenomenal gifts! God does not reveal Himself to a seeker who is satisfied with any lesser attainment. The striving yogi is therefore careful not to exercise his phenomenal powers, lest they arouse false pride and distract him from entering the ultimate state of Kaivalya. When the yogi has reached his Infinite Goal, he exercises the vibhutis, or refrains from exercising them, just as he pleases. All his actions, miraculous or otherwise, are then performed without karmic involvement. The iron filings of karma are attracted only where a magnet of the personal ego still exists. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,
545:Simon Greenleaf’s Masonic work documents the relationship between defining the Patriarch Enoch as a Pythagorean figure while linking the Druidical priestly presence through Phoenician exploration from Egyptian source. Thus Enoch brought the content of Masonic knowledge to a greater mystical perfection as he was deemed to have caused the emergence of the restoration of learning from the vault into solar Apollonian radiance through the application of Pythagorean learning to the inspiration of the new Republic through mathematics and the laws derived from it.  The result was for Greenleaf a pre- critical logic of unfolding of the Logos envisaged by Salem Town along lines delineated in the L’Enfant-Latrobe District of Columbia template from the national capital into districts of Masonic Grand Lodge administration was devolved into districts, paralleling judicial and congressional districts, symbolically as an extension of the Latrobe-L'Enfant template just after the moral and political defeat of Jedidiah Morse and the Federalists in 1800 and theological attacks on Masonry and before the onset of the Morgan fervor in 1826. This period enables the historian to see a sequence of Masonic and mythic legal unfolding from legendary history which linked the emergence of Enochic design to civil religion through monumental architecture which also links the dynamism of a Third Age of Masonic “Aquarian” millennialism rooted in third age eschatology within its Tudor derivative of an articulate citizen (cf. Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governor) applied to the patronage of architecture into republican administration which lines up Enoch, Pythagoras, Phoenicia-Egypt through the evangelical fervor of Celtic and Druidical lore into Scottish Masonic environs which made of the latter a purified sect of solar inspired fervent priestly republicans. The same template gives the premier likely conduitry for Jesuit penetration of the Masonic agenda through various reservoirs of Masonic-Egyptian symbolism and makes of the Druids a likely metaphor for the Society of Jesus just as Joachim of Fiore’s ideal of a new order of spiritual men was used for this purpose under the principle of a novus dux - a further likely image for the Unknown Superior of Strict Observance ritual positioned Counter Reformation apologetically theory for application to the United States.  ~ Robert W Sullivan IV,
546:In the painting, the face has been horribly lacerated by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils narrow; the large, open whites of the eyes gleam with a deathly, glassy sheen. But strangely, as one looks at this corpse of a tortured man, a peculiar and interesting question arises: if this is really what the corpse looked like (and it certainly must have looked just like this) when it was seen by all his disciples, his chief future apostles, by the women who followed him and stood by the cross, indeed by all who believed in him and worshipped him, then how could they believe, as they looked at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise from the dead? Here one cannot help being struck by the notion that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when they have not been conquered even by the one who conquered nature in his own lifetime, to whom it submitted, who cried: “Talitha cumi”8 – and the damsel arose, “Lazarus, come forth”,9 and the dead man came forth? Nature appears, as one looks at that painting, in the guise of some enormous, implacable and speechless animal or, more nearly, far more nearly, though strangely – in the guise of some enormous machine of the most modern devising, which has senselessly seized, smashed to pieces and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great and priceless being – a being which alone was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was, perhaps, created solely for the emergence of that being! It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed, and is involuntarily conveyed to us. Those people who surrounded the dead man, though not one of them is visible in the painting, must have felt a terrible anguish and perturbation that evening, which had smashed all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one go. They must have parted in the most dreadful fear, though each of them also took away within him an enormous idea that could never now be driven out of them. And if this same teacher could, on the eve of his execution, have seen what he looked like, then how could he have ascended the cross and died as he did now? This question also involuntarily presents itself as one looks at the painting. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
547:With my very own hands I laid my little daughter to rest because
she is of my very flesh,
Thus am I constrained to submit to the rule of parting, so that my
hand is now empty and contains nothing.
Bound to this moment we are in, caught between the yesterday that
has gone and the tomorrow that is yet to come.
This flesh of mine is as pure silver, while my inner reality is as pure
gold.
Like a bow have I grown, and my true posture is as my rib.
My Lord it is who says that He has created me in a state of
suffering and loss.
How then can I possibly hope for any rest, dwelling as I do in such
a place and state?
Were it not for that state I would be neither child nor parent.
Nor indeed would there be any to compare with me as is the case
with my Creator.
It is surely a case of the qualification being one with respect to
an essence which is full of implicit multiplicity.
Because I am for my Creator, in our creation like one of a
multitude.
Then my God alighted between us, in the very fabric of existence -
not merely a figment of belief.
All with a firm, well established emergence, to which I may trace
my antecedents with confidence.
Thus, on the one hand, I can say that I am a mortal like yourselves,
while You do vouch for me.
Always, however, on the understanding that I am not ultimately
a 'like', thus to maintain my integrity.
For You have banished all 'being like' from me in the pre-eternal
state; and that is my conviction.
See how sublime and lofty is my garden of paradise, secure in the
company of matchless beautiful maidens.
He speaks of this as we have also in our book the Maqsid ai-Asm'.
Is not created nature His family and people, as also the very
essence of the Unique One?
Consider how He is a consort for her and how they came together
upon my being, so that it split asunder.
These words of mine are not written after long deliberation, but
have been a part of me eternally.
It was none but the apostle of the Eternal One who activated them
within me.
He it was who dictated it, leaving me to write it with my hand.
Thus is the matter, and none truly knows it,
Save a leader of the spirit surpassing in goodness or one of the
golden mean.
Indeed, one who is 'other' cannot know it now or ever.
Every branch reverts to its root, no more in any way than when
it sprang forth.

~ Ibn Arabi, With My Very Own Hands
,
548:As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such. This stage in the development of knowledge has a number of consequences. The first, which we have already discussed, is the emergence of pure theory. Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a soft of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and reality-producing processes. A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization toward inertia.91 Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become “problematic.” Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right—right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts. ~ Peter L Berger,
549:meta-systemic operations ::: As the 1950's and 60s begin to roll around the last stage of first tier emerged as a cultural force. With the Green Altitude we see the emergence of Pluralistic, Multicultural, Post-Modern world-views.

Cognition is starting to move beyond formal-operations into the realm of co-ordinating systems of abstractions, in what is called Meta-systemic Cognition. While formal-operations acted upon the classes and relations between members of classes. Meta-systemic operations start at the level of relating systems to systems. The focus of these investigations is placed upon comparing, contrasting, transforming and synthesizing entire systems, rather than components of one system. This emergent faculty allows self-sense to focus around a heightened sense of individuality and an increased ability for emotional resonance. The recognition of individual differences, the ability to tolerate paradox and contradiction, and greater conceptual complexity all provide for an understanding of conflict as being both internally and externally caused. Context plays a major role in the creation of truth and individual perspective. With each being context dependent and open to subjective interpretation, meaning each perspective and truth are rendered relative and are not able to be judged as better or more true than any other. This fuels a value set that centers on softness over cold rationality. Sensitivity and preference over objectivity.

Along with a focus on community harmony and equality which drives the valuing of sensitivity to others, reconcilation, consensus, dialogue, relationship, human development, bonding, and a seeking of a peace with the inner-self. Moral decisions are based on rights, values, or principles that are agreeable to all individuals composing a society based on fair and beneficial practices. All of this leads to the Equality movements and multiculturalism. And to the extreme form of relativitism which we saw earlier as context dependant nature of all truth including objective facts.

Faith at the green altitude is called Conjunctive, and allows the self to integrate what was unrecognized by the previous stages self-certainty and cognitive and affective adaptation to reality. New features at this level of faith include the unification of symbolic power with conceptual meaning, an awareness of ones social unconscious, a reworking of ones past, and an opening to ones deeper self. ~ Essential Integral, 4.1-52, Meta-systemic Operations,
550:But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their:

Their:

In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather.

Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.'

Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.

Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be. ~ Salman Rushdie,
551:We noted in Section II that an increasing reliance on textbooks or their equivalent was an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science. The concluding section of this essay will argue that the domination of a mature science by such texts significantly differentiates its developmental pattern from that of other fields. For the moment let us simply take it for granted that, to an extent unprecedented in other fields, both the layman’s and the practitioner’s knowledge of science is based on textbooks and a few other types of literature derived from them. Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field. Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative. ~ Thomas S Kuhn,
552:The American experiment was based on the emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century of a fresh new possibility in human affairs: that the rule of reason could be sovereign. You could say that the age of print begat the Age of Reason which begat the age of democracy. The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege. The democratic logic inherent in these new trends was blunted and forestalled by the legacy structures of power in Europe. But the intrepid migrants who ventured across the Atlantic -- many of them motivated by a desire to escape the constraints of class and creed -- carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them in the fertile soil of the New World.

Our Founders understood this better than any others; they realized that a "well-informed citizenry" could govern itself and secure liberty for individuals by substituting reason for brute force. They decisively rejected the three-thousand-year-old superstitious belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely and arbitrarily. They reawakened the ancient Greek and Roman traditions of debating the wisest courses of action by exchanging information and opinions in new ways.

Whether it is called a public forum or a public sphere or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades. Our first self-expression as a nation -- "We the People" -- made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay.

It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important the marketplace for ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were the following:

1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all.
2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them.
3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "conversation of democracy" is all about. ~ Al Gore,
553:By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field. ~ Satya Nadella,
554:Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers. ~ Daniel Yergin,
555:So which is more probable: That today's atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations.

In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist?

If one's god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there's no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god alone? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering?

They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing time into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There's only one true god, but he's not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was nor a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end.

Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It's all good.

This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how to we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can't help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin.

In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,
556:Excerpts From The Diary Of Damocles
I don't dare speak too loudly,
some timbres could be fatal-that string is not too strong
I think: and at times I have
to breathe. Or maybe I fear
my paraphrastic exhalations
will spoil the oiled perfection
of its sleekness, will mist
over that brightness whose
needle sharp point compasses
my every stray. I am as
edgy in my way as it-as little-rippled, as subtle.
Prey to vapors, to sudden
icecap thaws, seismic
dicethrows, the world wires me,
I hex myself up to a pitch
of infinite finicky sensitiveness,
alert to every window opening
down in my castle's bowels,
every mousehole emergence.
A simple housefly--a moth
murders my rest when it
mistakes for light that glittering
blade in which every passing
glint is glassed--barometer
17
of my highest apprehension.
I know my fear is only a ploy,
a sticking point in the old
hairsplitting debate of the winds . . .
I the first split personality
divide into a Dam/an Ocles,
a mother and her myopic
son. Or, since everything
is reversed in its mirroring
shaft, a Selcomad, mad and sulky.
Language does this to me.
It inverts my position: King
I am, but await my crown,
unmanned until it come down;
my kingdom lies in twain
to each, I am in half to all.
If only I could reach up, up,
and take it in my teeth,
suckle that penile projection,
cloister its unremitting hardness
in the sheath of my throat-swordswallower who exalts
his posture with this adjunct
second spine, aligning gut with
palate, my groin with my height.
18
*
Male means to be in the crime
of things here, this frail planet
killed wide, maimed down.
Male means murder, rape and war.
Its indomitable will will not allow
approach. All broach will fail.
It must fall on you or not at all.
Insane, isn't it? History hangs
impregnable to the mind, eager
to halve your brain with rift,
intrusion and strife, the warrior's
dissonance. No whole is hallowed,
no peace. Don't let the humor of
this scene (when the phallus
falls the fears recede) attend
you away from its cruelty.
I stand here exposed to whose
justice, my crime my Y
chromosome. That Y aims
his prick point down at me.
A dowsing wand that seeks
my artesian quench, my depths
of death. His insistence
19
sustains me in steel, his encased
incursion covers my melt,
my metal. Each day he rights me:
his richterscaled tremors are
my weather, my wherefore:
his gloss his gleam condemns
my fortunes, his ore loads my gold
with schist. His soliloquy
interrupts mine at every word.
Linebreaks enforced by sword,
his poem sunders my rhythm.
All mine at last is made him.
His blade remembers my name . . .
~ Bill Knott,
557:Men cooperate with one another. The totality of interhuman relations engendered by such cooperation is called society. Society is not an entity in itself. It is an aspect of human action. It does not exist or live outside of the conduct of people. It is an orientation of human action. Society neither thinks nor acts. Individuais in thinking and acting constitute a complex of relations and facts that are called social relations and facts.
The issue has been confused by an arithmetical metaphor. Is society, people asked, merely a sum of individuals or is it more than this and thereby an entity endowed with independent reality? The question is nonsensical. Society is neither the sum of individuais nor more nor less. Arithmetical concepts cannot be applied to the matter.
Another confusion arises from the no less empty question whether society is—in logic and in time—anterior to individuais or not. The evolution of society and that of civilization were not two distinct processes but one and the same process. The biological passing of a species of primates beyond the levei of a mere animal existence and their transformation into primitive men implied already the development of the first rudiments of social cooperation. Homo sapiens appeared on the stage of earthly events neither as a solitary foodseeker nor as a member of a gregarious flock, but as a being consciously cooperating with other beings of his own kind. Only in cooperation with his fellows could he develop language, the indispensable tool of thinking. We cannot even imagine a reasonable being living in perfect isolation and not cooperating at least with members of his family, clan, or tribe. Man as man is necessarily a social animal. Some sort of cooperation is an essential characteristic of his nature. But awareness of this fact does not justify dealing with social relations as if they were something else than relations or with society as if it were an independent entity outside or above the actions of individual men.
Finally there are the misconstructions caused by the organismic metaphor. We may compare society to a biological organism. The tertium comparationis is the fact that division of labor and cooperation exist among the various parts of a biological body as among the various members of society. But the biological evolution that resulted in the emergence of the structurefunction systems of plant and animal bodies was a purely physiological process in which no trace of a conscious activity on the part of the cells can be discovered. On the other hand, human society is an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon. In cooperating with their fellows, individuais do not divest themselves of their individuality. They retain the power to act antisocially, and often make use of it. Its place in the structure of the body is invariably assigned to each cell. But individuais spontaneously choose the way in which they integrate themselves into social cooperation. Men have ideas and seek chosen ends, while the cells and organs of the body lack such autonomy. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
558:Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture. ~ Ken Wilber,
559:The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity—the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus—an absent God.

The end result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism.

A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.

According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving—at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip—eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity.

If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.

Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think. ~ John N Gray,
560:Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
561:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]

   We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.

   Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

   But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],
562:The Supermind [Supramental consciousness] is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda. Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and the divine Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and possesses its own essential law of being; it has not to be created or to emerge or evolve into existence out of involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view to have so emerged from life and Matter or to have evolved out of an involution in life and Matter. The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge, not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and therefore inevitable. Its -manifestation of the divine life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence. The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in this material existence. A manifestation of the Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this world sooner or lateR But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature; it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of divine gradations, a free growth to the supreme Supermind or beyond it to yet undreamed levels of being, consciousness and Ananda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, 558,
563:The Man Against The Sky
Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.
Even he, who stood where I had found him,
On high with fire all round him,
Who moved along the molten west,
And over the round hill’s crest
That seemed half ready with him to go down,
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,
As if there were to be no last thing left
Of a nameless unimaginable town,—
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known,
From death defended though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell;
And upward out of that, as out of hell,
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He may have sung and striven
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat,—
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,
Far stretched and fair to see:
A good sight, verily,
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
Shine glad with hidden tears.
Why question of his ease of who before him,
In one place or another where they left
Their names as far behind them as their bones,
And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,
And shrewdly sharpened stones,
Carved hard the way for his ascendency
Through deserts of lost years?
Why trouble him now who sees and hears
No more than what his innocence requires,
And therefore to no other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.
Or with an even likelihood,
He may have met with atrabilious eyes
The fires of time on equal terms and passed
Indifferently down, until at last
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen.
He may have had for evil or for good
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No argument; he may have had no care
For what without himself went anywhere
To failure or to glory, and least of all
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;
He may have been the prophet of an art
Immovable to old idolatries;
He may have been a player without a part,
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies
For such a flaming way to advertise;
He may have been a painter sick at heart
With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise;
He may have been a cynic, who now, for all
Of anything divine that his effete
Negation may have tasted,
Saw truth in his own image, rather small,
Forbore to fever the ephemeral,
Found any barren height a good retreat
From any swarming street,
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars
Came out again to shine on joys and wars
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,
He may have proved a world a sorry thing
In his imagining,
And life a lighted highway to the tomb.
Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,
His hopes to chaos led,
He may have stumbled up there from the past,
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—
A flame where nothing seems
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
And while it all went out,
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
May then have eased a painful going down
From pictured heights of power and lost renown,
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor
Remote and unapproachable forever;
And at his heart there may have gnawed
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed
And long dishonored by the living death
320
Assigned alike by chance
To brutes and hierophants;
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him,
And so have left him as death leaves a child,
Who sees it all too near;
And he who knows no young way to forget
May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.
Whatever suns may rise or set
There may be nothing kinder for him here
Than shafts and agonies;
And under these
He may cry out and stay on horribly;
Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,
He may go forward like a stoic Roman
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie,—
Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,
Curse God and die.
Or maybe there, like many another one
Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,
Black-drawn against wild red,
He may have built, unawed by fiery gules
That in him no commotion stirred,
A living reason out of molecules
Why molecules occurred,
And one for smiling when he might have sighed
Had he seen far enough,
And in the same inevitable stuff
Discovered an odd reason too for pride
In being what he must have been by laws
Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
Deterred by no confusion or surprise
He may have seen with his mechanic eyes
A world without a meaning, and had room,
Alone amid magnificence and doom,
To build himself an airy monument
That should, or fail him in his vague intent,
Outlast an accidental universe—
To call it nothing worse—
Or, by the burrowing guile
Of Time disintegrated and effaced,
321
Like once-remembered mighty trees go down
To ruin, of which by man may now be traced
No part sufficient even to be rotten,
And in the book of things that are forgotten
Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.
He may have been so great
That satraps would have shivered at his frown,
And all he prized alive may rule a state
No larger than a grave that holds a clown;
He may have been a master of his fate,
And of his atoms,—ready as another
In his emergence to exonerate
His father and his mother;
He may have been a captain of a host,
Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,
And then give up the ghost.
Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as these,
Sun-scattered and soon lost.
Whatever the dark road he may have taken,
This man who stood on high
And faced alone the sky,
Whatever drove or lured or guided him,—
A vision answering a faith unshaken,
An easy trust assumed of easy trials,
A sick negation born of weak denials,
A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,
A blind attendance on a brief ambition,—
Whatever stayed him or derided him,
His way was even as ours;
And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,
Must each await alone at his own height
Another darkness or another light;
And there, of our poor self dominion reft,
If inference and reason shun
Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion,
May thwarted will (perforce precarious,
But for our conservation better thus)
Have no misgiving left
Of doing yet what here we leave undone?
Or if unto the last of these we cleave,
322
Believing or protesting we believe
In such an idle and ephemeral
Florescence of the diabolical,—
If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again
A little farther into time and pain,
A little faster in a futile chase
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud,—as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still
About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.
Where was he going, this man against the sky?
You know not, nor do I.
But this we know, if we know anything:
That we may laugh and fight and sing
And of our transience here make offering
To an orient Word that will not be erased,
Or, save in incommunicable gleams
Too permanent for dreams,
Be found or known.
No tonic and ambitious irritant
Of increase or of want
Has made an otherwise insensate waste
Of ages overthrown
A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste
Of other ages that are still to be
Depleted and rewarded variously
Because a few, by fate’s economy,
Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;
323
No soft evangel of equality,
Safe-cradled in a communal repose
That huddles into death and may at last
Be covered well with equatorial snows—
And all for what, the devil only knows—
Will aggregate an inkling to confirm
The credit of a sage or of a worm,
Or tell us why one man in five
Should have a care to stay alive
While in his heart he feels no violence
Laid on his humor and intelligence
When infant Science makes a pleasant face
And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;
No planetary trap where souls are wrought
For nothing but the sake of being caught
And sent again to nothing will attune
Itself to any key of any reason
Why man should hunger through another season
To find out why ’twere better late than soon
To go away and let the sun and moon
And all the silly stars illuminate
A place for creeping things,
And those that root and trumpet and have wings,
And herd and ruminate,
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision
Of man’s immortal vision.
Shall we, because Eternity records
Too vast an answer for the time-born words
We spell, whereof so many are dead that once
In our capricious lexicons
Were so alive and final, hear no more
The Word itself, the living word
That none alive has ever heard
Or ever spelt,
And few have ever felt
Without the fears and old surrenderings
And terrors that began
When Death let fall a feather from his wings
And humbled the first man?
Because the weight of our humility,
324
Wherefrom we gain
A little wisdom and much pain,
Falls here too sore and there too tedious,
Are we in anguish or complacency,
Not looking far enough ahead
To see by what mad couriers we are led
Along the roads of the ridiculous,
To pity ourselves and laugh at faith
And while we curse life bear it?
And if we see the soul’s dead end in death,
Are we to fear it?
What folly is here that has not yet a name
Unless we say outright that we are liars?
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
That lights again the way by which we came?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,—why live?
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,
564:And the font took them: let our laurels lie!
Braid moonfern now with mystic trifoly
Because once more Goito gets, once more,
Sordello to itself! A dream is o'er,
And the suspended life begins anew;
Quiet those throbbing temples, then, subdue
That cheek's distortion! Nature's strict embrace,
Putting aside the past, shall soon efface
Its print as wellfactitious humours grown
Over the trueloves, hatreds not his own
And turn him pure as some forgotten vest
Woven of painted byssus, silkiest
Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip,
Left welter where a trireme let it slip
I' the sea, and vexed a satrap; so the stain
O' the world forsakes Sordello, with its pain,
Its pleasure: how the tinct loosening escapes,
Cloud after cloud! Mantua's familiar shapes
Die, fair and foul die, fading as they flit,
Men, women, and the pathos and the wit,
Wise speech and foolish, deeds to smile or sigh
For, good, bad, seemly or ignoble, die.
The last face glances through the eglantines,
The last voice murmurs, 'twixt the blossomed vines,
Of Men, of that machine supplied by thought
To compass self-perception with, he sought
By forcing half himselfan insane pulse
Of a god's blood, on clay it could convulse,
Never transmuteon human sights and sounds,
To watch the other half with; irksome bounds
It ebbs from to its source, a fountain sealed
Forever. Better sure be unrevealed
Than part revealed: Sordello well or ill
Is finished: then what further use of Will,
Point in the prime idea not realized,
An oversight? inordinately prized,
No less, and pampered with enough of each
Delight to prove the whole above its reach.
"To need become all natures, yet retain
"The law of my own natureto remain
"Myself, yet yearn . . . as if that chestnut, think,
"Should yearn for this first larch-bloom crisp and pink,
"Or those pale fragrant tears where zephyrs stanch
"March wounds along the fretted pine-tree branch!
"Will and the means to show will, great and small,
"Material, spiritual,abjure them all
"Save any so distinct, they may be left
"To amuse, not tempt become! and, thus bereft,
"Just as I first was fashioned would I be!
"Nor, moon, is it Apollo now, but me
"Thou visitest to comfort and befriend!
"Swim thou into my heart, and there an end,
"Since I possess thee!nay, thus shut mine eyes
"And know, quite know, by this heart's fall and rise,
"When thou dost bury thee in clouds, and when
"Out-standest: wherefore practise upon men
"To make that plainer to myself?"
                 Slide here
Over a sweet and solitary year
Wasted; or simply notice change in him
How eyes, once with exploring bright, grew dim
And satiate with receiving. Some distress
Was caused, too, by a sort of consciousness
Under the imbecility,nought kept
That down; he slept, but was aware he slept,
So, frustrated: as who brainsick made pact
Erst with the overhanging cataract
To deafen him, yet still distinguished plain
His own blood's measured clicking at his brain.
To finish. One declining Autumn day
Few birds about the heaven chill and grey,
No wind that cared trouble the tacit woods
He sauntered home complacently, their moods
According, his and nature's. Every spark
Of Mantua life was trodden out; so dark
The embers, that the Troubadour, who sung
Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue,
Its craft his brain, how either brought to pass
Singing at all; that faculty might class
With any of Apollo's now. The year
Began to find its early promise sere
As well. Thus beauty vanishes; thus stone
Outlingers flesh: nature's and his youth gone,
They left the world to you, and wished you joy.
When, stopping his benevolent employ,
A presage shuddered through the welkin; harsh
The earth's remonstrance followed. 'T was the marsh
Gone of a sudden. Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light
Out of the crashing of a myriad stars.
And here was nature, bound by the same bars
Of fate with him!
         "No! youth once gone is gone:
"Deeds, let escape, are never to be done.
"Leaf-fall and grass-spring for the year; for us
"Oh forfeit I unalterably thus
"My chance? nor two lives wait me, this to spend,
"Learning save that? Nature has time, may mend
"Mistake, she knows occasion will recur;
"Landslip or seabreach, how affects it her
"With her magnificent resources?I
"Must perish once and perish utterly.
"Not any strollings now at even-close
"Down the field-path, Sordello! by thorn-rows
"Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire
"And dew, outlining the black cypress' spire
"She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first
"Woo her, the snow-month through, but ere she durst
"Answer 't was April. Linden-flower-time-long
"Her eyes were on the ground; 't is July, strong
"Now; and because white dust-clouds overwhelm
"The woodside, here or by the village elm
"That holds the moon, she meets you, somewhat pale,
"But letting you lift up her coarse flax veil
"And whisper (the damp little hand in yours)
"Of love, heart's love, your heart's love that endures
"Till death. Tush! No mad mixing with the rout
"Of haggard ribalds wandering about
"The hot torchlit wine-scented island-house
"Where Friedrich holds his wickedest carouse,
"Parading,to the gay Palermitans,
"Soft Messinese, dusk Saracenic clans
"Nuocera holds,those tall grave dazzling Norse,
"High-cheeked, lank-haired, toothed whiter than the morse,
"Queens of the caves of jet stalactites,
"He sent his barks to fetch through icy seas,
"The blind night seas without a saving star,
"And here in snowy birdskin robes they are,
"Sordello!here, mollitious alcoves gilt
"Superb as Byzant domes that devils built!
"Ah, Byzant, there again! no chance to go
"Ever like august cheery Dandolo,
"Worshipping hearts about him for a wall,
"Conducted, blind eyes, hundred years and all,
"Through vanquished Byzant where friends note for him
"What pillar, marble massive, sardius slim,
"'T were fittest he transport to Venice' Square
"Flattered and promised life to touch them there
"Soon, by those fervid sons of senators!
"No more lifes, deaths, loves, hatreds, peaces, wars!
"Ah, fragments of a whole ordained to be,
"Points in the life I waited! what are ye
"But roundels of a ladder which appeared
"Awhile the very platform it was reared
"To lift me on?that happiness I find
"Proofs of my faith in, even in the blind
"Instinct which bade forego you all unless
"Ye led me past yourselves. Ay, happiness
"Awaited me; the way life should be used
"Was to acquire, and deeds like you conduced
"To teach it by a self-revealment, deemed
"Life's very use, so long! Whatever seemed
"Progress to that, was pleasure; aught that stayed
"My reaching itno pleasure. I have laid
"The ladder down; I climb not; still, aloft
"The platform stretches! Blisses strong and soft,
"I dared not entertain, elude me; yet
"Never of what they promised could I get
"A glimpse till now! The common sort, the crowd,
"Exist, perceive; with Being are endowed,
"However slight, distinct from what they See,
"However bounded; Happiness must be,
"To feed the first by gleanings from the last,
"Attain its qualities, and slow or fast
"Become what they behold; such peace-in-strife,
"By transmutation, is the Use of Life,
"The Alien turning Native to the soul
"Or bodywhich instructs me; I am whole
"There and demand a Palma; had the world
"Been from my soul to a like distance hurled,
"'T were Happiness to make it one with me:
"Whereas I must, ere I begin to Be,
"Include a world, in flesh, I comprehend
"In spirit now; and this done, what 's to blend
"With? Nought is Alien in the worldmy Will
"Owns all already; yet can turn itstill
"LessNative, since my Means to correspond
"With Will are so unworthy, 't was my bond
"To tread the very joys that tantalize
"Most now, into a grave, never to rise.
"I die then! Will the rest agree to die?
"Next Age or no? Shall its Sordello try
"Clue after clue, and catch at last the clue
"I miss?that 's underneath my finger too,
"Twice, thrice a day, perhaps,some yearning traced
"Deeper, some petty consequence embraced
"Closer! Why fled I Mantua, then?complained
"So much my Will was fettered, yet remained
"Content within a tether half the range
"I could assign it?able to exchange
"My ignorance (I felt) for knowledge, and
"Idle because I could thus understand
"Could e'en have penetrated to its core
"Our mortal mystery, yetfoolforbore,
"Preferred elaborating in the dark
"My casual stuff, by any wretched spark
"Born of my predecessors, though one stroke
"Of mine had brought the flame forth! Mantua's yoke,
"My minstrel's-trade, was to behold mankind,
"My own concern was just to bring my mind
"Behold, just extricate, for my acquist,
"Each object suffered stifle in the mist
"Which hazard, custom, blindness interpose
"Betwixt things and myself."
               Whereat he rose.
The level wind carried above the firs
Clouds, the irrevocable travellers,
Onward.
   "Pushed thus into a drowsy copse,
"Arms twine about my neck, each eyelid drops
"Under a humid finger; while there fleets,
"Outside the screen, a pageant time repeats
"Never again! To be deposed, immured
"Clandestinelystill petted, still assured
"To govern were fatiguing workthe Sight
"Fleeting meanwhile! 'T is noontide: wreak ere night
"Somehow my will upon it, rather! Slake
"This thirst somehow, the poorest impress take
"That serves! A blasted bud displays you, torn,
"Faint rudiments of the full flower unborn;
"But who divines what glory coats o'erclasp
"Of the bulb dormant in the mummy's grasp
"Taurello sent?" . . .
           "Taurello? Palma sent
"Your Trouvere," (Naddo interposing leant
Over the lost bard's shoulder)"and, believe,
"You cannot more reluctantly receive
"Than I pronounce her message: we depart
"Together. What avail a poet's heart
"Verona's pomps and gauds? five blades of grass
"Suffice him. News? Why, where your marish was,
"On its mud-banks smoke rises after smoke
"I' the valley, like a spout of hell new-broke.
"Oh, the world's tidings! small your thanks, I guess,
"For them. The father of our Patroness,
"Has played Taurello an astounding trick,
"Parts between Ecelin and Alberic
"His wealth and goes into a convent: both
"Wed Guelfs: the Count and Palma plighted troth
"A week since at Verona: and they want
"You doubtless to contrive the marriage-chant
"Ere Richard storms Ferrara." Then was told
The tale from the beginninghow, made bold
By Salinguerra's absence, Guelfs had burned
And pillaged till he unawares returned
To take revenge: how Azzo and his friend
Were doing their endeavour, how the end
O' the siege was nigh, and how the Count, released
From further care, would with his marriage-feast
Inaugurate a new and better rule,
Absorbing thus Romano.
           "Shall I school
"My master," added Naddo, "and suggest
"How you may clothe in a poetic vest
"These doings, at Verona? Your response
"To Palma! Wherefore jest? 'Depart at once?
"A good resolve! In truth, I hardly hoped
"So prompt an acquiescence. Have you groped
"Out wisdom in the wilds here?thoughts may be
"Over-poetical for poetry.
"Pearl-white, you poets liken Palma's neck;
"And yet what spoils an orient like some speck
"Of genuine white, turning its own white grey?
"You take me? Curse the cicala!"
                 One more day,
One eveappears Verona! Many a group,
(You mind) instructed of the osprey's swoop
On lynx and ounce, was gatheringChristendom
Sure to receive, whate'er the end was, from
The evening's purpose cheer or detriment,
Since Friedrich only waited some event
Like this, of Ghibellins establishing
Themselves within Ferrara, ere, as King
Of Lombardy, he 'd glad descend there, wage
Old warfare with the Pontiff, disengage
His barons from the burghers, and restore
The rule of Charlemagne, broken of yore
By Hildebrand.
       I' the palace, each by each,
Sordello sat and Palma: little speech
At first in that dim closet, face with face
(Despite the tumult in the market-place)
Exchanging quick low laughters: now would rush
Word upon word to meet a sudden flush,
A look left off, a shifting lips' surmise
But for the most part their two histories
Ran best thro' the locked fingers and linked arms.
And so the night flew on with its alarms
Till in burst one of Palma's retinue;
"Now, Lady!" gasped he. Then arose the two
And leaned into Verona's air, dead-still.
A balcony lay black beneath until
Out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, grey-haired men
Came on it and harangued the people: then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted, "Hale forth the carrochtrumpets, ho,
"A flourish! Run it in the ancient grooves!
"Back from the bell! Hammerthat whom behoves
"May hear the League is up! Peallearn who list,
"Verona means not first of towns break tryst
"To-morrow with the League!"
               Enough. Now turn
Over the eastern cypresses: discern!
Is any beacon set a-glimmer?
               Rang
The air with shouts that overpowered the clang
Of the incessant carroch, even: "Haste
"The candle 's at the gateway! ere it waste,
"Each soldier stand beside it, armed to march
"With Tiso Sampier through the eastern arch!"
Ferrara's succoured, Palma!
               Once again
They sat together; some strange thing in train
To say, so difficult was Palma's place
In taking, with a coy fastidious grace
Like the bird's flutter ere it fix and feed.
But when she felt she held her friend indeed
Safe, she threw back her curls, began implant
Her lessons; telling of another want
Goito's quiet nourished than his own;
Palmato serve himto be served, alone
Importing; Agnes' milk so neutralized
The blood of Ecelin. Nor be surprised
If, while Sordello fain had captive led
Nature, in dream was Palma subjected
To some out-soul, which dawned not though she pined
Delaying, till its advent, heart and mind
Their life. "How dared I let expand the force
"Within me, till some out-soul, whose resource
"It grew for, should direct it? Every law
"Of life, its every fitness, every flaw,
"Must One determine whose corporeal shape
"Would be no other than the prime escape
"And revelation to me of a Will
"Orb-like o'ershrouded and inscrutable
"Above, save at the point which, I should know,
"Shone that myself, my powers, might overflow
"So far, so much; as now it signified
"Which earthly shape it henceforth chose my guide,
"Whose mortal lip selected to declare
"Its oracles, what fleshly garb would wear
"The first of intimations, whom to love;
"The next, how love him. Seemed that orb, above
"The castle-covert and the mountain-close,
"Slow in appearing?if beneath it rose
"Cravings, aversions,did our green precinct
"Take pride in me, at unawares distinct
"With this or that endowment,how, repressed
"At once, such jetting power shrank to the rest!
"Was I to have a chance touch spoil me, leave
"My spirit thence unfitted to receive
"The consummating spell?that spell so near
"Moreover! 'Waits he not the waking year?
"'His almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe
"'By this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
"'The thawed ravines; because of him, the wind
"'Walks like a herald. I shall surely find
"'Him now!'
     "And chief, that earnest April morn
"Of Richard's Love-court, was it time, so worn
"And white my cheek, so idly my blood beat,
"Sitting that morn beside the Lady's feet
"And saying as she prompted; till outburst
"One face from all the faces. Not then first
"I knew it; where in maple chamber glooms,
"Crowned with what sanguine-heart pomegranate blooms,
"Advanced it ever? Men's acknowledgment
"Sanctioned my own: 't was taken, Palma's bent,
"Sordello,recognized, accepted.
                 "Dumb
"Sat she still scheming. Ecelin would come
"Gaunt, scared, 'Cesano baffles me,' he 'd say:
"'Better I fought it out, my father's way!
"'Strangle Ferrara in its drowning flats,
"'And you and your Taurello yonder!what's
"'Romano's business there?' An hour's concern
"To cure the froward Chief!induce return
"As heartened from those overmeaning eyes,
"Wound up to persevere,his enterprise
"Marked out anew, its exigent of wit
"Apportioned,she at liberty to sit
"And scheme against the next emergence, I
"To covet her Taurello-sprite, made fly
"Or fold the wingto con your horoscope
"For leave command those steely shafts shoot ope,
"Or straight assuage their blinding eagerness
"In blank smooth snow What semblance of success
"To any of my plans for making you
"Mine and Romano's? Break the first wall through,
"Tread o'er the ruins of the Chief, supplant
"His sons beside, still, vainest were the vaunt:
"There, Salinguerra would obstruct me sheer,
"And the insuperable Tuscan, here,
"Stay me! But one wild eve that Lady died
"In her lone chamber: only I beside:
"Taurello far at Naples, and my sire
"At Padua, Ecelin away in ire
"With Alberic. She held me thusa clutch
"To make our spirits as our bodies touch
"And so began flinging the past up heaps
"Of uncouth treasure from their sunless sleeps
"Within her soul; deeds rose along with dreams,
"Fragments of many miserable schemes,
"Secrets, more secrets, thenno, not the last
"'Mongst others, like a casual trick o' the past,
"How . . . ay, she told me, gathering up her face,
"All left of it, into one arch-grimace
"To die with . . .
         "Friend, 't is gone! but not the fear
"Of that fell laughing, heard as now I hear.
"Nor faltered voice, nor seemed her heart grow weak
"When i' the midst abrupt she ceased to speak
"Dead, as to serve a purpose, mark!for in
"Rushed o' the very instant Ecelin
"(How summoned, who divines?)looking as if
"He understood why Adelaide lay stiff
"Already in my arms; for 'Girl, how must
"'I manage Este in the matter thrust
"'Upon me, how unravel your bad coil?
"'Since' (he declared) ''t is on your browa soil
"'Like hers there!' then in the same breath, 'he lacked
"'No counsel after all, had signed no pact
"'With devils, nor was treason here or there,
"'Goito or Vicenza, his affair:
"'He buried it in Adelaide's deep grave,
"'Would begin life afresh, now,would not slave
"'For any Friedrich's nor Taurello's sake!
"'What booted him to meddle or to make
"'In Lombardy?' And afterward I knew
"The meaning of his promise to undo
"All she had donewhy marriages were made,
"New friendships entered on, old followers paid
"With curses for their pains,new friends' amaze
"At height, when, passing out by Gate St. Blaise,
"He stopped short in Vicenza, bent his head
"Over a friar's neck,'had vowed,' he said,
"'Long since, nigh thirty years, because his wife
"'And child were saved there, to bestow his life
"'On God, his gettings on the Church.'
                     "Exiled
"Within Goito, still one dream beguiled
"My days and nights; 't was found, the orb I sought
"To serve, those glimpses came of Fomalhaut,
"No other: but how serve it?authorize
"You and Romano mingle destinies?
"And straight Romano's angel stood beside
"Me who had else been Boniface's bride,
"For Salinguerra 't was, with neck low bent,
"And voice lightened to music, (as he meant
"To learn, not teach me,) who withdrew the pall
"From the dead past and straight revived it all,
"Making me see how first Romano waxed,
"Wherefore he waned now, why, if I relaxed
"My grasp (even I!) would drop a thing effete,
"Frayed by itself, unequal to complete
"Its course, and counting every step astray
"A gain so much. Romano, every way
"Stable, a Lombard House nowwhy start back
"Into the very outset of its track?
"This patching principle which late allied
"Our House with other Houseswhat beside
"Concerned the apparition, the first Knight
"Who followed Conrad hither in such plight
"His utmost wealth was summed in his one steed?
"For Ecelo, that prowler, was decreed
"A task, in the beginning hazardous
"To him as ever task can be to us;
"But did the weather-beaten thief despair
"When first our crystal cincture of warm air
"That binds the Trevisan,as its spice-belt
"(Crusaders say) the tract where Jesus dwelt,
"Furtive he pierced, and Este was to face
"Despaired Saponian strength of Lombard grace?
"Tried he at making surer aught made sure,
"Maturing what already was mature?
"No; his heart prompted Ecelo, 'Confront
"'Este, inspect yourself. What 's nature? Wont.
"'Discard three-parts your nature, and adopt
"'The rest as an advantage!' Old strength propped
"The man who first grew Podest among
"The Vicentines, no less than, while there sprung
"His palace up in Padua like a threat,
"Their noblest spied a grace, unnoticed yet
"In Conrad's crew. Thus far the object gained,
"Romano was establishedhas remained
"'For are you not Italian, truly peers
"'With Este? Azzo better soothes our ears
"'Than Alberic? or is this lion's-crine
"'From over-mounts' (this yellow hair of mine)
"'So weak a graft on Agnes Este's stock?'
"(Thus went he on with something of a mock)
"'Wherefore recoil, then, from the very fate
"'Conceded you, refuse to imitate
"'Your model farther? Este long since left
"'Being mere Este: as a blade its heft,
"'Este required the Pope to further him:
"'And you, the Kaiserwhom your father's whim
"'Foregoes or, better, never shall forego
"'If Palma dare pursue what Ecelo
"'Commenced, but Ecelin desists from: just
"'As Adelaide of Susa could intrust
"'Her donative,her Piedmont given the Pope,
"'Her Alpine-pass for him to shut or ope
"''Twixt France and Italy,to the superb
"'Matilda's perfecting,so, lest aught curb
"'Our Adelaide's great counter-project for
"'Giving her Trentine to the Emperor
"'With passage here from Germany,shall you
"'Take it,my slender plodding talent, too!'
"Urged me Taurello with his half-smile
                     "He
"As Patron of the scattered family
"Conveyed me to his Mantua, kept in bruit
"Azzo's alliances and Richard's suit
"Until, the Kaiser excommunicate,
"'Nothing remains,' Taurello said, 'but wait
"'Some rash procedure: Palma was the link,
"'As Agnes' child, between us, and they shrink
"'From losing Palma: judge if we advance,
"'Your father's method, your inheritance!'
"The day I was betrothed to Boniface
"At Padua by Taurello's self, took place
"The outrage of the Ferrarese: again,
"The day I sought Verona with the train
"Agreed for,by Taurello's policy
"Convicting Richard of the fault, since we
"Were present to annul or to confirm,
"Richard, whose patience had outstayed its term,
"Quitted Verona for the siege.
                "And now
"What glory may engird Sordello's brow
"Through this? A month since at Oliero slunk
"All that was Ecelin into a monk;
"But how could Salinguerra so forget
"His liege of thirty years as grudge even yet
"One effort to recover him? He sent
"Forthwith the tidings of this last event
"To Ecelindeclared that he, despite
"The recent folly, recognized his right
"To order Salinguerra: 'Should he wring
"'Its uttermost advantage out, or fling
"'This chance away? Or were his sons now Head
"'O' the House?' Through me Taurello's missive sped;
"My father's answer will by me return.
"Behold! 'For him,' he writes, 'no more concern
"'With strife than, for his children, with fresh plots
"'Of Friedrich. Old engagements out he blots
"'For aye: Taurello shall no more subserve,
"'Nor Ecelin impose.' Lest this unnerve
"Taurello at this juncture, slack his grip
"Of Richard, suffer the occasion slip,
"I, in his sons' default (who, mating with
"Este, forsake Romano as the frith
"Its mainsea for that firmland, sea makes head
"Against) I stand, Romano,in their stead
"Assume the station they desert, and give
"Still, as the Kaiser's representative,
"Taurello licence he demands. Midnight
"Morningby noon to-morrow, making light
"Of the League's issue, we, in some gay weed
"Like yours, disguised together, may precede
"The arbitrators to Ferrara: reach
"Him, let Taurello's noble accents teach
"The rest! Then say if I have misconceived
"Your destiny, too readily believed
"The Kaiser's cause your own!"
                And Palma's fled.
Though no affirmative disturbs the head,
A dying lamp-flame sinks and rises o'er,
Like the alighted planet Pollux wore,
Until, morn breaking, he resolves to be
Gate-vein of this heart's blood of Lombardy,
Soul of this bodyto wield this aggregate
Of souls and bodies, and so conquer fate
Though he should livea centre of disgust
Evenapart, core of the outward crust
He vivifies, assimilates. For thus
I bring Sordello to the rapturous
Exclaim at the crowd's cry, because one round
Of life was quite accomplished; and he found
Not only that a soul, whate'er its might,
Is insufficient to its own delight,
Both in corporeal organs and in skill
By means of such to body forth its Will
And, after, insufficient to apprise
Men of that Will, oblige them recognize
The Hid by the Revealedbut that,the last
Nor lightest of the struggles overpast,
Will, he bade abdicate, which would not void
The throne, might sit there, suffer he enjoyed
Mankind, a varied and divine array
Incapable of homage, the first way,
Nor fit to render incidentally
Tribute connived at, taken by the by,
In joys. If thus with warrant to rescind
The ignominious exile of mankind
Whose proper service, ascertained intact
As yet, (to be by him themselves made act,
Not watch Sordello acting each of them)
Was to secureif the true diadem
Seemed imminent while our Sordello drank
The wisdom of that golden Palma,thank
Verona's Lady in her citadel
Founded by Gaulish Brennus, legends tell:
And truly when she left him, the sun reared
A head like the first clamberer's who peered
A-top the Capitol, his face on flame
With triumph, triumphing till Manlius came.
Nor slight too much my rhymesthat spring, dispread,
Dispart, disperse, lingering over head
Like an escape of angels! Rather say,
My transcendental platan! mounting gay
(An archimage so courts a novice-queen)
With tremulous silvered trunk, whence branches sheen
Laugh out, thick-foliaged next, a-shiver soon
With coloured buds, then glowing like the moon
One mild flame,last a pause, a burst, and all
Her ivory limbs are smothered by a fall,
Bloom-flinders and fruit-sparkles and leaf-dust,
Ending the weird work prosecuted just
For her amusement; he decrepit, stark,
Dozes; her uncontrolled delight may mark
Apart
   Yet not so, surely never so
Only, as good my soul were suffered go
O'er the lagune: forth fare thee, put aside
Entrance thy synod, as a god may glide
Out of the world he fills, and leave it mute
For myriad ages as we men compute,
Returning into it without a break
O' the consciousness! They sleep, and I awake
O'er the lagune, being at Venice.
                 Note,
In just such songs as Eglamor (say) wrote
With heart and soul and strength, for he believed
Himself achieving all to be achieved
By singerin such songs you find alone
Completeness, judge the song and singer one,
And either purpose answered, his in it
Or its in him: while from true works (to wit
Sordello's dream-performances that will
Never be more than dreamed) escapes there still
Some proof, the singer's proper life was 'neath
The life his song exhibits, this a sheath
To that; a passion and a knowledge far
Transcending these, majestic as they are,
Smouldered; his lay was but an episode
In the bard's life: which evidence you owed
To some slight weariness, some looking-off
Or start-away. The childish skit or scoff
In "Charlemagne," (his poem, dreamed divine
In every point except one silly line
About the restiff daughters)what may lurk
In that? "My life commenced before this work,"
(So I interpret the significance
Of the bard's start aside and look askance)
"My life continues after: on I fare
"With no more stopping, possibly, no care
"To note the undercurrent, the why and how,
"Where, when, o' the deeper life, as thus just now.
"But, silent, shall I cease to live? Alas
"For you! who sigh, 'When shall it come to pass
"'We read that story? How will he compress
"'The future gains, his life's true business,
"'Into the better lay whichthat one flout,
"'Howe'er inopportune it be, lets out
"'Engrosses him already, though professed
"'To meditate with us eternal rest,
"'And partnership in all his life has found?'"
'T is but a sailor's promise, weather-bound:
"Strike sail, slip cable, here the bark be moored
"For once, the awning stretched, the poles assured!
"Noontide above; except the wave's crisp dash,
"Or buzz of colibri, or tortoise' splash,
"The margin 's silent: out with every spoil
"Made in our tracking, coil by mighty coil,
"This serpent of a river to his head
"I' the midst! Admire each treasure, as we spread
"The bank, to help us tell our history
"Aright: give ear, endeavour to descry
"The groves of giant rushes, how they grew
"Like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through,
"What mountains yawned, forests to give us vent
"Opened, each doleful side, yet on we went
"Till . . . may that beetle (shake your cap) attest
"The springing of a land-wind from the West!"
Wherefore? Ah yes, you frolic it to-day!
To-morrow, and, the pageant moved away
Down to the poorest tent-pole, we and you
Part company: no other may pursue
Eastward your voyage, be informed what fate
Intends, if triumph or decline await
The tempter of the everlasting steppe.
I muse this on a ruined palace-step
At Venice: why should I break off, nor sit
Longer upon my step, exhaust the fit
England gave birth to? Who 's adorable
Enough reclaim a - no Sordello's Will
Alack!be queen to me? That Bassanese
Busied among her smoking fruit-boats? These
Perhaps from our delicious Asolo
Who twinkle, pigeons o'er the portico
Not prettier, bind June lilies into sheaves
To deck the bridge-side chapel, dropping leaves
Soiled by their own loose gold-meal? Ah, beneath
The cool arch stoops she, brownest cheek! Her wreath
Endures a montha half-monthif I make
A queen of her, continue for her sake
Sordello's story? Nay, that Paduan girl
Splashes with barer legs where a live whirl
In the dead black Giudecca proves sea-weed
Drifting has sucked down three, four, all indeed
Save one pale-red striped, pale-blue turbaned post
For gondolas.
       You sad dishevelled ghost
That pluck at me and point, are you advised
I breathe? Let stay those girls (e'en her disguised
Jewels i' the locks that love no crownet like
Their native field-buds and the green wheat-spike,
So fair!who left this end of June's turmoil,
Shook off, as might a lily its gold soil,
Pomp, save a foolish gem or two, and free
In dream, came join the peasants o'er the sea.)
Look they too happy, too tricked out? Confess
There is such ****rd stock of happiness
To share, that, do one's uttermost, dear wretch,
One labours ineffectually to stretch
It o'er you so that mother and children, both
May equitably flaunt the sumpter-cloth!
Divide the robe yet farther: be content
With seeing just a score pre-eminent
Through shreds of it, acknowledged happy wights,
Engrossing what should furnish all, by rights!
For, these in evidence, you clearlier claim
A like garb for the rest,grace all, the same
As these my peasants. I ask youth and strength
And health for each of you, not moreat length
Grown wise, who asked at home that the whole race
Might add the spirit's to the body's grace,
And all be dizened out as chiefs and bards.
But in this magic weather one discards
Much old requirement. Venice seems a type
Of Life'twixt blue and blue extends, a stripe,
As Life, the somewhat, hangs 'twixt nought and nought:
'T is Venice, and 't is Lifeas good you sought
To spare me the Piazza's slippery stone
Or keep me to the unchoked canals alone,
As hinder Life the evil with the good
Which make up Living, rightly understood.
Only, do finish something! Peasants, queens,
Take them, made happy by whatever means,
Parade them for the common credit, vouch
That a luckless residue, we send to crouch
In corners out of sight, was just as framed
For happiness, its portion might have claimed
As well, and so, obtaining joy, had stalked
Fastuous as any!such my project, baulked
Already; I hardly venture to adjust
The first rags, when you find me. To mistrust
Me!nor unreasonably. You, no doubt,
Have the true knack of tiring suitors out
With those thin lips on tremble, lashless eyes
Inveterately tear-shot: there, be wise,
Mistress of mine, there, there, as if I meant
You insult!shall your friend (not slave) be shent
For speaking home? Beside, care-bit erased
Broken-up beauties ever took my taste
Supremely; and I love you more, far more
Than her I looked should foot Life's temple-floor.
Years ago, leagues at distance, when and where
A whisper came, "Let others seek!thy care
"Is found, thy life's provision; if thy race
"Should be thy mistress, and into one face
"The many faces crowd?" Ah, had I, judge,
Or no, your secret? Rough apparelgrudge
All ornaments save tag or tassel worn
To hint we are not thoroughly forlorn
Slouch bonnet, unloop mantle, careless go
Alone (that's saddest, but it must be so)
Through Venice, sing now and now glance aside,
Aught desultory or undignified,
Then, ravishingest lady, will you pass
Or not each formidable group, the mass
Before the Basilic (that feast gone by,
God's great day of the Corpus Domini)
And, wistfully foregoing proper men,
Come timid up to me for alms? And then
The luxury to hesitate, feign do
Some unexampled grace!when, whom but you
Dare I bestow your own upon? And hear
Further before you say, it is to sneer
I call you ravishing; for I regret
Little that she, whose early foot was set
Forth as she 'd plant it on a pedestal,
Now, i' the silent city, seems to fall
Toward meno wreath, only a lip's unrest
To quiet, surcharged eyelids to be pressed
Dry of their tears upon my bosom. Strange
Such sad chance should produce in thee such change,
My love! Warped souls and bodies! yet God spoke
Of right-hand, foot and eyeselects our yoke,
Sordello, as your poetship may find!
So, sleep upon my shoulder, child, nor mind
Their foolish talk; we 'll manage reinstate
Your old worth; ask moreover, when they prate
Of evil men past hope, "Don't each contrive,
"Despite the evil you abuse, to live?
"Keeping, each losel, through a maze of lies,
"His own conceit of truth? to which he hies
"By obscure windings, tortuous, if you will,
"But to himself not inaccessible;
"He sees truth, and his lies are for the crowd
"Who cannot see; some fancied right allowed
"His vilest wrong, empowered the losel clutch
"One pleasure from a multitude of such
"Denied him." Then assert, "All men appear
"To think all better than themselves, by here
"Trusting a crowd they wrong; but really," say,
"All men think all men stupider than they,
"Since, save themselves, no other comprehends
"The complicated scheme to make amends
"Evil, the scheme by which, thro' Ignorance,
"Good labours to exist." A slight advance,
Merely to find the sickness you die through,
And nought beside! but if one can't eschew
One's portion in the common lot, at least
One can avoid an ignorance increased
Tenfold by dealing out hint after hint
How nought were like dispensing without stint
The water of lifeso easy to dispense
Beside, when one has probed the centre whence
Commotion 's borncould tell you of it all!
"Meantime, just meditate my madrigal
"O' the mugwort that conceals a dewdrop safe!"
What, dullard? we and you in smothery chafe,
Babes, baldheads, stumbled thus far into Zin
The Horrid, getting neither out nor in,
A hungry sun above us, sands that bung
Our throats,each dromedary lolls a tongue,
Each camel churns a sick and frothy chap,
And you, 'twixt tales of Potiphar's mishap,
And sonnets on the earliest **** that spoke,
Remark, you wonder any one needs choke
With founts about! Potsherd him, Gibeonites!
While awkwardly enough your Moses smites
The rock, though he forego his Promised Land
Thereby, have Satan claim his carcass, and
Figure as Metaphysic Poet . . . ah,
Mark ye the dim first oozings? Meribah!
Then, quaffing at the fount my courage gained,
Recallnot that I prompt yewho explained . . .
"Presumptuous!" interrupts one. You, not I
'T is brother, marvel at and magnify
Such office: "office," quotha? can we get
To the beginning of the office yet?
What do we here? simply experiment
Each on the other's power and its intent
When elsewhere tasked,if this of mine were trucked
For yours to either's good,we watch construct,
In short, an engine: with a finished one,
What it can do, is all,nought, how 't is done.
But this of ours yet in probation, dusk
A kernel of strange wheelwork through its husk
Grows into shape by quarters and by halves;
Remark this tooth's spring, wonder what that valve's
Fall bodes, presume each faculty's device,
Make out each other more or less precise
The scope of the whole engine 's to be proved;
We die: which means to say, the whole 's removed,
Dismounted wheel by wheel, this complex gin,
To be set up anew elsewhere, begin
A task indeed, but with a clearer clime
Than the murk lodgment of our building-time.
And then, I grant you, it behoves forget
How 't is doneall that must amuse us yet
So long: and, while you turn upon your heel,
Pray that I be not busy slitting steel
Or shredding brass, camped on some virgin shore
Under a cluster of fresh stars, before
I name a tithe o' the wheels I trust to do!
So occupied, then, are we: hitherto,
At present, and a weary while to come,
The office of ourselves,nor blind nor dumb,
And seeing somewhat of man's state,has been,
For the worst of us, to say they so have seen;
For the better, what it was they saw; the best
Impart the gift of seeing to the rest:
"So that I glance," says such an one, "around,
"And there 's no face but I can read profound
"Disclosures in; this stands for hope, thatfear,
"And for a speech, a deed in proof, look here!
"'Stoop, else the strings of blossom, where the nuts
"'O'erarch, will blind thee! Said I not? She shuts
"'Both eyes this time, so close the hazels meet!
"'Thus, prisoned in the Piombi, I repeat
"'Events one rove occasioned, o'er and o'er,
"'Putting 'twixt me and madness evermore
"'Thy sweet shape, Zanze! Therefore stoop!'
                       "'That's truth!'
"(Adjudge you) 'the incarcerated youth
"'Would say that!'
         "Youth? Plara the bard? Set down
"That Plara spent his youth in a grim town
"Whose cramped ill-featured streets huddled about
"The minster for protection, never out
"Of its black belfry's shade and its bells' roar.
"The brighter shone the suburb,all the more
"Ugly and absolute that shade's reproof
"Of any chance escape of joy,some roof,
"Taller than they, allowed the rest detect,
"Before the sole permitted laugh (suspect
"Who could, 't was meant for laughter, that ploughed cheek's
"Repulsive gleam!) when the sun stopped both peaks
"Of the cleft belfry like a fiery wedge,
"Then sank, a huge flame on its socket edge,
"With leavings on the grey glass oriel-pane
"Ghastly some minutes more. No fear of rain
"The minster minded that! in heaps the dust
"Lay everywhere. This town, the minster's trust,
"Held Plara; who, its denizen, bade hail
"In twice twelve sonnets, Tempe's dewy vale."
"'Exact the town, the minster and the street!'"
"As all mirth triumphs, sadness means defeat:
"Lust triumphs and is gay, Love 's triumphed o'er
"And sad: but Lucio 's sad. I said before,
"Love's sad, not Lucio; one who loves may be
"As gay his love has leave to hope, as he
"Downcast that lusts' desire escapes the springe:
"'T is of the mood itself I speak, what tinge
"Determines it, else colourless,or mirth,
"Or melancholy, as from heaven or earth."
"'Ay, that 's the variation's gist!'
                   "Indeed?
"Thus far advanced in safety then, proceed!
"And having seen too what I saw, be bold
"And next encounter what I do behold
"(That's sure) but bid you take on trust!"
                       Attack
The use and purpose of such sights! Alack,
Not so unwisely does the crowd dispense
On Salinguerras praise in preference
To the Sordellos: men of action, these!
Who, seeing just as little as you please,
Yet turn that little to account,engage
With, do not gaze at,carry on, a stage,
The work o' the world, not merely make report
The work existed ere their day! In short,
When at some future no-time a brave band
Sees, using what it sees, then shake my hand
In heaven, my brother! Meanwhile where's the hurt
Of keeping the Makers-see on the alert,
At whose defection mortals stare aghast
As though heaven's bounteous windows were slammed fast
Incontinent? Whereas all you, beneath,
Should scowl at, bruise their lips and break their teeth
Who ply the pullies, for neglecting you:
And therefore have I moulded, made anew
A Man, and give him to be turned and tried,
Be angry with or pleased at. On your side,
Have ye times, places, actors of your own?
Try them upon Sordello when full-grown,
And thenah then! If Hercules first parched
His foot in Egypt only to be marched
A sacrifice for Jove with pomp to suit,
What chance have I? The demigod was mute
Till, at the altar, where time out of mind
Such guests became oblations, chaplets twined
His forehead long enough, and he began
Slaying the slayers, nor escaped a man.
Take not affront, my gentle audience! whom
No Hercules shall make his hecatomb,
Believe, nor from his brows your chaplet rend
That's your kind suffrage, yours, my patron-friend,
Whose great verse blares unintermittent on
Like your own trumpeter at Marathon,
You who, Plata and Salamis being scant,
Put up with tna for a stimulant
And did well, I acknowledged, as he loomed
Over the midland sea last month, presumed
Long, lay demolished in the blazing West
At eve, while towards him tilting cloudlets pressed
Like Persian ships at Salamis. Friend, wear
A crest proud as desert while I declare
Had I a flawless ruby fit to wring
Tears of its colour from that painted king
Who lost it, I would, for that smile which went
To my heart, fling it in the sea, content,
Wearing your verse in place, an amulet
Sovereign against all passion, wear and fret!
My English Eyebright, if you are not glad
That, as I stopped my task awhile, the sad
Dishevelled form, wherein I put mankind
To come at times and keep my pact in mind,
Renewed me,hear no crickets in the hedge,
Nor let a glowworm spot the river's edge
At home, and may the summer showers gush
Without a warning from the missel thrush!
So, to our business, nowthe fate of such
As find our common natureovermuch
Despised because restricted and unfit
To bear the burthen they impose on it
Cling when they would discard it; craving strength
To leap from the allotted world, at length
They do leap,flounder on without a term,
Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ
In unexpanded infancy, unless . . .
But that 's the storydull enough, confess!
There might be fitter subjects to allure;
Still, neither misconceive my portraiture
Nor undervalue its adornments quaint:
What seems a fiend perchance may prove a saint.
Ponder a story ancient pens transmit,
Then say if you condemn me or acquit.
John the Beloved, banished Antioch
For Patmos, bade collectively his flock
Farewell, but set apart the closing eve
To comfort those his exile most would grieve,
He knew: a touching spectacle, that house
In motion to receive him! Xanthus' spouse
You missed, made panther's meat a month since; but
Xanthus himself (his nephew 't was, they shut
'Twixt boards and sawed asunder) Polycarp,
Soft Charicle, next year no wheel could warp
To swear by Csar's fortune, with the rest
Were ranged; thro' whom the grey disciple pressed,
Busily blessing right and left, just stopped
To pat one infant's curls, the hangman cropped
Soon after, reached the portal. On its hinge
The door turns and he enters: what quick twinge
Ruins the smiling mouth, those wide eyes fix
Whereon, why like some spectral candlestick's
Branch the disciple's arms? Dead swooned he, woke
Anon, heaved sigh, made shift to gasp, heart-broke,
"Get thee behind me, Satan! Have I toiled
"To no more purpose? Is the gospel foiled
"Here too, and o'er my son's, my Xanthus' hearth,
"Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth
"Ah Xanthus, am I to thy roof beguiled
"To see thethethe Devil domiciled?"
Whereto sobbed Xanthus, "Father, 't is yourself
"Installed, a limning which our utmost pelf
"Went to procure against to-morrow's loss;
"And that's no twy-prong, but a pastoral cross,
"You 're painted with!"
            His puckered brows unfold
And you shall hear Sordello's story told.


~ Robert Browning, Sordello - Book the Third
,

IN CHAPTERS [237/237]



   97 Integral Yoga
   25 Christianity
   16 Science
   12 Psychology
   9 Integral Theory
   5 Occultism
   3 Philosophy
   2 Poetry
   2 Fiction
   1 Sufism
   1 Islam


  136 Sri Aurobindo
   25 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   22 The Mother
   12 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   11 Satprem
   6 Jordan Peterson
   6 Carl Jung
   4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   4 George Van Vrekhem
   3 Nirodbaran
   3 Ken Wilber
   2 Jean Gebser
   2 H P Lovecraft


   39 The Life Divine
   33 Record of Yoga
   21 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   13 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   11 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   9 The Phenomenon of Man
   9 The Future of Man
   7 Let Me Explain
   6 Maps of Meaning
   5 The Human Cycle
   5 Essays Divine And Human
   4 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   4 Preparing for the Miraculous
   4 Letters On Yoga IV
   4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   3 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
   3 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
   3 Letters On Yoga III
   3 Letters On Yoga II
   2 The Secret Doctrine
   2 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   2 The Ever-Present Origin
   2 Talks
   2 Questions And Answers 1956
   2 Lovecraft - Poems
   2 Letters On Yoga I
   2 Kena and Other Upanishads
   2 Isha Upanishad
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   2 Agenda Vol 13
   2 Agenda Vol 11


0 1963-03-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (Regarding an old Playground Talk of December 4, 1957, in which Mother asked: "Will there be a gradual transition from what we are now to what our inner spirit aspires to become, or will there be a break, will we have to leave our present human form behind until a new form emergesan Emergence whose process we cannot foresee, of a new form without any connection to what we are today? Can we expect this body, our means of manifestation on earth until now, to be transformed progressively into something capable of expressing higher life, or will we have to abandon this form altogether in order to take on another one not yet born on earth?" Mother adds:)
   Why not both?

0 1966-10-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   There is a big work of transformation of the material states of consciousness going on: the states of consciousness nearest to the Inconscient, the most material states of consciousness. They come like that [to present themselves to Mother], with one or two examples of their previous manifestation (perhaps even their first Emergence from the Inconscient), and then I see the transition (along with what has transformed them, changed them or even simply altered them through successive manifestations), the transition up to the point when they are now presented before the supreme Consciousness for the final transformation. This is a perpetual work, so to speak, because, interestingly, its a work I can go on doing while seeing people. Generally my work was interrupted when I saw people, because I was busy with them and that diminished and limited the work: they represented a small aggregate of difficulties that enormously shrank the Action [of Mother]. But now its no longer like that. And the interesting point is that it places people in this or that curve of transformation of the consciousness. For some time I have been seeing a considerable number of people I had never seen before (with all the old or familiar people there was no difficulty, but with the new ones it generally caused a shrinking of the work), and now with this study of states of consciousness, people are placed: here, there, here (Mother draws different levels in space). And if they are receptive, they must go away [after seeing Mother] with a new impulse to transform themselves. Those who arent receptive just miss it; but they are no longer a disturbance: they come in and go out. And from that I know what state they are in I can even do it with photos, but when I see people its much more complete. Photos are no more than one moment of their being, while here, even what isnt being manifested is there, hidden behind, and can be seen, so I see the person more completely. Its very interesting. It transforms this whole burden of visitors into something interesting.
   On October 21.

0 1970-01-01, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   That big change is the Emergence upon earth of a new race which will be to man what man is to the animal.
   The consciousness of that new race is already at work on the earth to enlighten all those who are capable of receiving and listening to it.

0 1970-10-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Ive just thought of something like The Emergence of the Superman?
   (Unenthusiastically) Maybe its better?

0 1972-02-02, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Owing to the confusion in Mother's room, it seems there is also confusion between the suddenness with which Mother's mind was removed and the slow Emergence of the new mind "through successive revelations."
   ***

0 1972-07-22, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   That all the preoccupations stemming from the other consciousness, the old human consciousness, however enlightened it is, are to be left aside for the moment to allow the full Emergence into that Consciousness. Thats all. Thats all I said.
   Yes, that I understand.

02.01 - A Vedic Story, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is another point which requires clarification. As a reason for his nervousness and flight he alleges that greater people who preceded him had attempted the work, but evidently failed in the attempt; so how can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one play explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the Emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anteriorin the evolutionary movementand inferior gods that Agni's service is being requisitioned. Mythologically also a parallelism is found in the Greek legends where it is said that the Olympian godsZeus and his companywere a younger generation that replaced, after of course a bloody warfare, their ancestors, the more ancient race of Kronos, the Titans. Titans were the Asuras and Rakshasas who reigned upon earth before the advent of the mentalsattwichuman being, Manu, as referred here.
   Now, here I give you the original text in translation:

02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Between the Overmind and the Mind proper, varying according to the degree of immixture of the two, according to the degree of descent and of Emergence of one and the other respectively, there are several levels of consciousness of which three main ones have been named and described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more uncertain, more disintegrated. The lower the consciousness descends the more veiled it becomes, losing more and more the directness, the sureness, the intensity and force and the synthetic unity native to the highest ranges of our consciousness and being.
   A further descent into obscurity occurs when consciousness passes from Mind to Life. Darkness is almost visible here: there is a greater withdrawal on the part of each unit from its surrounding reality, a narrower concentration upon one's own separative existenceshades of the prison-house have gathered close around. The light, already dulled and faint in the mind, has become a lurid glare here. Passion has arisen and desire and hunger and battle and combat.
  --
   We have spoken of four lines of Descent in the evolution and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly through emanations, projections, partial or lesser formulations, but directly in his own plenary self. He descends not as a disembodied force acting as a general movement, possessing, at the most, other objects and persons as its medium or instrument, but in an embodied form and in the fullness of his consciousness. The Indian word for Divine Incarnation, avatra, literally means he who has descended. The Divine comes down himself as a terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, in order to raise the terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary courseeven so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid mass of earth from out of the waters of the Deluge. It is his purpose to effect ascension of consciousness, a transmutation of being, to establish a truly New Order, a New Dharma, as it is termed dharmasamsthpanrthya. On the human level, he appears as a human person for two purposes. First of all, he shows, by example, how the ascension, the transmutation is to be effected, how a normal human being can rise from a lower status of consciousness to a higher one. The Divine is therefore known as the Lord of Yoga for Yoga is the means and method by which one consciously uplifts oneself, unites oneself with the Higher Reality. The embodied Divine is the ideal and pattern: he shows the path, himself walks the path and man can follow, if he chooses. The Biblical conception of the Son of GodGod made fleshas the intermediary between the human and the Divine, declaring, I am the Way and the Goal, expresses a very similar truth. The Divine takes a body for anotheroccultreason also. It is this: Matter or terrestrial life cannot be changedchanged radically, that is to say, transformed by the pure spiritual consciousness alone, lying above or within; also it is not sufficient to bring about only that much of change in terrestrial life which can be effected by the mere spiritual force acting in a general way. It looks as if the physical transformation which is what is meant by an ascension or Emergence in the evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and higher status.
   The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth at such a crisis of evolution. Earth and Man and man's earthly life need to be radically transfigured. The trouble and turbulence, the chaos and confusion that are now overwhelming this earth, indicate the acute tension before the release, the dtente of a NEW MANIFESTATION.

02.03 - An Aspect of Emergent Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Does this point to the Emergence of a new type of superhuman beings forming a class or a species by themselves? The possibility has been envisaged by some of the protagonists of emergent evolution, but has not been sufficiently examinedor considered. Philosophers seem to walk in this region with caution and incertitude, as if on quicksand and quagmire. But in this connection we are faced with a problem which Morgan had the happy intuition to seize and to bring forward. It is our purpose to draw attention to this matter.
   Professor Alexander spoke of the Emergence of deities who would embody emergent properties other than those manifest in the Mind of man. Morgan asks whether there is not also a Deityor the Deityin the making. He establishes the logical necessity of such a consummation in this way: the evolutionary urge (or nisus, as it has been called) in its upward drive creates and throws up on all sides, at each stage, forms of the new property or principle of existence that has come into evidence. These multiple forms may appear anywhere and everywhere; they are strewn about on the entire surface of Nature. These are, however, the branchings of the evolutionary nisus which has a central line of advance running through the entire gradation of emergents; it is, as it were, the central pillar round which is erected a many-storeyed edifice. The interesting point is this, that at the present stage of Emergence, what the central line touches and arrives at is the Deity. Or, again, the thing can be viewed in another way. At the bottom the evolutionary movement is broad-based on Matter but as it proceeds upward its extent is gradually narrowed down;
   Life is less extensive than Matter and Mind is still less extensive than Life. Thus the scheme of the movement can be figured as a pyramid the base of the pyramid represents Matter, but the apex where the narrowing sides converge is what is called the Deity.
  --
   Now at this point we reach the crux of the problem, the supreme secretrahasyam uttamamas the Gita would say. For the apex of the pyramid, the crown of evolution, the consummation of the central line of Emergence would then be nothing less than the manifestation, the terrestrial incarnation of the Supreme Divine. The Deity thus fully emerged would embody the truth and play of creation in its widest scope and highest elevation; it would mean the utter fulfilment of human destiny and terrestrial Purpose.
   In Indian terminology, it would be the advent of the Purna Bhagavan in the human bodymnusm tanumsritam. All previous Avatars are only a preparation for the coming of this Supreme Divine. It is said also that the present epoch marks a crucial turn and transition. We await the Kalki Avatar who will wipe off the past, the Iron Age, and bring in the Golden Age, Satya Yuga.
  --
   This, however, is an aspect of the problem with which we are not immediately concerned. There is one question with which we have omitted to deal but which is nearer to us and touches present actualities. We spoke of the Emergence of the Deity and of the Supreme Deityafter Mind. The question is, how long after? I do not refer to the duration of time needed, but to the steps or the stages that have to be passed. For between Mind and Deity, certainly between Mind and the Supreme Deity (Purushottama, as we would say), there may presumably still lie a course of graded Emergence. In fact, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the interior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are not really emergent properties, but reflections, faint echoes and promises of what is to come, mixed up with attributes of the present mentality. The Overmind brings in a true Emergence.
   Still Overmindwhose characteristic is a cosmic consciousness and a transcendence of all ego-senseis not the firm basis on which a new terrestrial organisation can stand and endure. It is still a basis of unstable equilibrium. For it is not the supernal light and, although it transcends all ignorance, yet does not possess that absolute synthetic unity, that transcendent power of consciousness which is at once the cosmic and the individual. That is the domain of the Supermind.

03.01 - The Evolution of Consciousness, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience and an Emergence of it out of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it recovers its own highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their powers here in Matter. But even in the Inconscience there is a secret Consciousness which works, one may say, by an involved and hidden Intuition proper to itself.
  Consciousness is a fundamental thing, it is the fundamental thing in existence - it is the energy, the action, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it

04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In other words, it can be said that the older humanity was intuitive and instinctive, while modern humanity is rationalistic. Now it has been questioned whether this change or reorientation is a sign of progress, whether it has not been at the most a mixed blessing. Many idealists and reformers frankly view the metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard vehemently declares that the rationalism of the modern age is a narrowing down of the consciousness to a superficial movement, a foreshortening, and a top-heavy specialisation which means stagnation, decay and death. He would rather release the tension in the strangulation of consciousness, even if it means a slight coming down to the anterior level of instinct and intuition, but of more plasticity and less specialisation: it is, he says, only in conditions of suppleness and variability, of life organised yet sufficiently free that the forces of evolution can act fruitfully. It has also been pointed out that homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of homo neanderthalis who was already a far too specialised being, but of a stock anterior to it which was still uncertain, wavering, groping towards a definite Emergence.
   Now, these two positionsof Jung and of Heardoffer us a good basis upon which we can try to estimate the nature of man's progress in historical times. Both refer to a crucial change in human consciousness, a far-reaching change having no parallel since it invented the metal tool. The change means the appearance of pure intelligence in man, a change, as we may say, in modern terms, in the system of reference, from biological co-ordinates to those of pure reason. Only Jung thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is to happen precisely round the focus of pure reason, while Gerald Heard is doubtful about the efficacy of this facultyof directive thinking, as Jung puts it-if it is to lead to overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one member and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he seeks elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason which, besides, is bound to happen in the course of evolution.
  --
   We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of Emergence of self-consciousness and the trials and experiments it went through to establish and confirm itself. The ancient civilisations represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environmental tegument, still living and moving within it and dynamically reacting upon itthis was the character we speak of. Next came the period when the free and dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective sphere sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philosophy and intellectual inquiry and of alchemy in natural sciencea period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a greater enrichment on one side the subjective consciousness and on the other, the objective environment, a corresponding change and effective reorganisation.
   The present age which ushers a fourth stagesignificantly called turiya or the transcendent, in Indian terminologyis pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a super-consciousnessas already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics everywherewhich will give a new potential and harmony to the human consciousness.

04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is the view, an old-world view, of eternal recurrence. That is to say, creation is ever the same; it goes through a cycle of changes, but the cycles repeat ad infinitum. There is no progress, no forward movement towards a more and more perfection. Indeed, the cycle of creation is a closed circle. The idea of progress was very much in vogue at one time. It was born under the auspices of Romantic Idealism; it was fostered and streng thened by youthful, Science in the first enthusiasm of her early discoveries, especially that of the fact of biological evolution. There has, however, been a setback since, when it was found that the original picture of evolution the Emergence and growth of species in the course of a few thousand years is far from being true, that evolution means not thousands but millions of years. And when archaeologists discovered that men could build hygienic cities, run democratic states, discuss and argue acutely on recondite problems of life and philosophy, women knew the use of ornaments and jewels of consummate beauty and craftsmanship in epochs when they were expected to be no more than wild denizens of the cave or the forest, the belief in human progress, at least along a steady straight line, was very much shaken.
   Yet an imperious necessity of the idea, almost as an inevitable ingredient of human consciousness, always exists and constantly makes its presence felt. If recurrence is the law of creation, this idea with its will to fruition is also a recurrent phenomenon. A modern form of it has been given a very dynamic drive in the Marxian gospel. A socio-economic progress, however, is and can be only a part, in fact, a result of a wider and deeper progress.
  --
   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.
   The aggregates are meant to express, apart from the growing unity, a diversity of achievements in the collective consciousness marking and enriching that unity. The highest, the largest aggregate attained at the present moment is as I have said, that of the nation, the lower and lesser aggregates have been subsumed under it. The principle of integration in its graded course is precisely this that the new unity absorbs the lesser units as its components, some find their place in it in a transmuted form and functionthose that are of use in the new dispositiono thers that had truth only for the past disappear or remain as vestiges of an extinct reality. The clan and the tribe have practically disappeared as living realities; the family has been maintaining itself still as a functioning unit, but it has considerably changed its features and in recent times it has been undergoing revolutionary transmutations. The rigours of the system prevailing in the old world have all but gone, they have been reduced to the minimum; the system has become more or less a mere outline, the substance and the details have become very vague and fluid. It may come out with quite a new connotation in the not very distant future. The nation, then, as the living unit of aggregation today, is on the move again towards a yet more enlarged aggregate. Empire was a blind and violent attempt at this greater aggregation. The Commonwealth of more recent times was a conscious, deliberate and healthier endeavour towards the same goal. The various trials with regard to a league of nations is also a conscious and deliberate, although somewhat groping experiment in the same line.

05.26 - The Soul in Anguish, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It seems that the School of Anguish is on the borderl and between the second and the third stage, that is to say, the vital rising into the mental or the mental still carrying an impress of the vital consciousness. It is the Emergence of the Purusha consciousness, the individual being in its heart of hearts, in its pure status: for it is that that truly evolves, progresses from level to level, deploying and marshalling according to its stress and scheme the play of its outward nature. Now the Purusha consciousness, as separate from the outward nature, has certain marked characteristics which have been fairly observed and comprehended by the exponents of the school we are dealing with. Sartre, for example, characterises this beingtre en soi, as distinguished from tre pour soi which is something like dynamic purusha or purusha identified or associated with prakrtias composed of the sense of absolute freedom, of full responsibility, of unhindered choice and initiation. Indeed, Purusha is freedom, for in its own status it means liberation from all obligations to Prakriti. But such freedom brings in its train, not necessarily always but under certain conditions, a terrible sense of being all alone, of infinite loneliness. One is oneself, naked and face to face with one's singleness and unbreakable, unsharable individual unity. The others come as a product or corollary to this original sui generisentity. Along with the sense of freedom and choice or responsibility and loneness, there is added and gets ingrained into it the sense of fear and anxiety the anguish (Angst). The burden that freedom and loneliness brings seems to be too great. The Purusha that has risen completely into the mental zone becomes wholly a witness, as the Sankhyans discovered, and all the movements of his nature appear outside, as if foreign: an absolute calm and unperturbed tranquillity or indifference is his character. But it is not so with regard to the being that has still one foot imbedded in the lower region of the vital consciousness; for that indeed is the proper region of anguish, of fear and apprehension, and it is there that the soul becoming conscious of itself and separate from others feels lone, lonely, companionless, without support, as it were. The mentalised vital Purusha suffers from this peculiar night of the soul. Sartre's outlook is shot through with very many experiences of this intermediary zone of consciousness.
   The being immersed in Prakriti, as normally it is, in relation and communion with others, may entertain as a pleasure and luxury, the illusion of its separateness and freedom: it can do so at ease, because it feels it has the secret support of its environment, it is courageous because it feels itself in good company. But once it rises out of the environmental level and stands truly apart and outside itit is the mental being which can do so more or less successfully the first feeling is that of freedom, no doubt, but along with it there is also the uncanny sense of isolation, of heavy responsibility, also a certain impotence, a loss of bearings. The normal Cartesian Co-ordinates, as it were, are gone and the being does not know where to look for the higher multi-dimensional co-ordinates. That is the real meaning of the Anguish which suddenly invades a being at a certain stage of his ascending consciousness.

06.29 - Towards Redemption, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   As I have often said, creation is the self-objectivisation of the Supreme Divine; it is the supreme consciousness putting itself lout of itself so that it may look at itself. In so doingin self-objectifying and self-dividingit scattered itself abroad: the one infinite multiplied itself into infinite atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge' became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon which is based this inconscient creation. In the midst of this utter negation, this denial by the universe of its origin, the Divine Love descended and lodged itself in order to bring back the erring creation to its lost home. The Divine Love became involved and entangled in the Inconscient, became one with it; only so could she (it was indeed the Divine Mother in her Grace) suffuse the inconscient universe with her own substance and transmute it into its original nature. The first effect or visible sign of this descent or divine infusion is the Emergence of the psychic or the soul element in the material body: it is the speck of consciousness imbedded in matter, inhabiting the apparently dead particle or aggregate of particles, which continually grows in and through its relation of action and reaction with its surrounding unconsciousness, and at the same time extending its light into that darkness transforms it gradually into what it was originally at its source.
   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.

100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
  symmetrical-systems spin (Sec. 1040), we witness the Emergence of:
  __ the A quanta modules

1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  within these milieux towards the Emergence of a two-tier
  structure, with a small group of teachers, the elect, taking

1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
  Fundamental Considerations Anyone today who considers the Emergence of a new era of mankind as a certainty and expresses the conviction that our rescue from collapse and chaos could come about by virtue of a new attitude and a new formation of mans consciousness, will surely elicit less credence than those who have heralded the decline of the West. Contemporaries of totalitarianism, World War II, and the atom bomb seem more likely to abandon even their very last stand than to realize the possibility of a transition, a new constellation or a transformation, or even to evince any readiness to take a leap into tomorrow, although the harbingers of tomorrow, the evidence of transformation, and other signs of the new and imminent cannot have gone entirely unnoticed. Such a reaction, the reaction of a mentality headed for a fall, is only too typical of man in transition.
  The present book is, in fact, the account of the nascence of a new world and a new consciousness. It is based not an ideas or speculations but on insights into mankinds mutations from its primordial beginnings up to the present - on perhaps novel insights into the forms of consciousness manifest in the various epochs of mankind: insights into the powers behind their realization as manifest between origin and the present, and active in origin and the present.

1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  (2) Myths describing the Emergence of something anomalous, unexpected, threatening and promising
  into this initial state;

1.01 - The Mental Fortress, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  That is where we are. The illusion is not dead; it even rages with unprecedented violence, equipped with all the arms we have so obligingly polished up for it. But these are the last convulsions of a colossus with feet of clay which is actually a gnome, an oversized, overoutfitted gnome. The ancient sages of India knew it well. They divided human evolution into four concentric circles: that of the men of knowledge (Brahmins), who lived at the beginning of humanity, in the age of truth; that of the nobles and warriors (Kshatriya), when only three fourths of the truth was left; that of the merchants and middle class (Vaishya), who had only half of the truth; and finally ours, the age of the little men, the Shudra, the servants (of the machine, of the ego, of desire), the great proletariat of regimented liberties the Dark Age, Kali Yuga, when no truth is left at all. But because this circle is the most extreme, because all the truths have been tried and exhausted, and all possible roads explored, we are nearing the right solution, the true solution, the Emergence of a new age of truth, the supramental age Sri Aurobindo spoke of, like the buttercup breaking its last envelope to free its golden fruit. If the parallel holds true between the collective body and our human body, we could say that the center governing the age of the sages was located at the level of the forehead, while that of the age of the nobles was at the level of the heart, that of the age of the merchants, at the stomach, and the one governing our age is at the level of sex and matter. The descent is complete. But that descent has a meaning a meaning for matter. Had we stayed forever at the forehead level of the divine truths of the mind, this earth and body would never have been changed, and we would have probably ended up escaping into some spiritual heaven or nirvana. Now, everything must be transformed, even the body and matter, since we are right in it. Ironically, this is the greatest service this dark, materialistic and scientific age may have rendered us: to compel such a plunge of the spirit into matter that it had either to lose itself in it or to be transformed with it. Absolute darkness is but the shadow of a greater Sun, which digs its abysses in order to raise up a more stable beauty, founded on the purified base of our earthly subconscious and seated erect in truth down to the very cells of our bodies.
  O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,

1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  do not detect any measurable Emergence of new energy.
  Every synthesis costs something. That is a fundamental con-

1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  desire and sensation; the result is the Emergence of Mind. So at
  least it appears to us in the ascending or evolutive movement.

1.02.4.2 - Action and the Divine Will, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  the final result of their toil and seeking. The Emergence of this
  Will and that Light is the condition of immortality.

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  your path by the Emergence of this new phenomenon. Your auditory system localizes the sounds in three
  dimensions. You involuntarily orient your trunk, neck, head and eyes towards the place in space from
  --
  6: Emergence of Normal Novelty in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior provides an abstracted
  representation of this process of trivial adaptation.
  --
  Figure 6: Emergence of Normal Novelty in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior
  Revolutionary novelty is, by contrast, something altogether different. Sometimes the sudden
  --
  to speak metaphorically has disrupted my emotional stability. Figure 7: Emergence of Revolutionary
  Novelty in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior graphically presents this state of affairs.
  --
  Figure 7: Emergence of Revolutionary Novelty in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior
  The plans we formulate are mechanisms designed to bring the envisioned perfect future into being. Once
  --
  creates a seizure of ongoing specifically goal-directed behavior. Emergence of the unexpected constitutes
  evidence for the incomplete nature of the story currently guiding such behavior comprises evidence for
  --
  that allows us to inhibit the novelty-induced terror and curiosity Emergence of that territory otherwise
  automatically elicits. We feel comfortable somewhere new, once we have discovered that nothing exists
  --
  range of that nature, and to the consequences of its Emergence.
  Experimental examinations of the orienting reflex have not shed much light on our true potential for
  --
  The capacity to create novel behaviors and categories of interpretation in response to the Emergence of
  the unknown might be regarded as the primary hallmark of human consciousness indeed, of human being.
  --
  of historical development development that might not be evidently linked to the final Emergence of the
  theory.
  --
  chaos proceeding their Emergence serves as the ultimate source of all things (including the three
  constituent elements of experience).
  --
  Before the Emergence of empirical methodology which allowed for methodical separation of subject
  and object in description the world-model contained abstracted inferences about the nature of existence,
  --
  tyrant who forbids the Emergence (or even the hypothetical existence) of anything new. The Archetypal
  Son is the child of order and chaos of culture and nature and is therefore clearly their product.
  --
  Like so many other traditions, the Egyptian cosmogony begins with the Emergence of a mound in the
  primordial waters. The appearance of this First Place above the aquatic immensity signifies the
  --
  elish portrays the Emergence of the earliest world as the consequence of the (sexual, generative, creative)
  union of the primal deities Apsu and Tiamat. Apsu, masculine, served as the begetter of heaven and earth,
  --
  developmental history that predates the Emergence of humanity, is associated with relatively innate
  releasing stimuli (those that characterize erotic beauty), is of terrible power, and has an existence
  --
  khay, to shine, is used indifferently to depict the Emergence of the sun at the moment of creation or at
  each dawn and the appearance of the pharaoh at the coronation ceremony, at festivals, or at the privy
  --
  time, as he attempted to understand the mystery of his Emergence, and of the world he found himself
  occupying. It seems impossible to determine what it is that was before anything was; myth attempts that
  --
  development by the environmental and cultural conditions obtaining at the time of their Emergence. The
  process of metaphorical representation provides a bridge and an increasingly communicable bridge
  --
  From the mythic perspective, this division is equivalent to the Emergence of the cosmos and, therefore,
  to creation or genesis itself. One thing is missing the fact of the explorer, and the nature of his
  --
  every mystery. Transformation, attendant upon the Emergence of change, means the death of everything old
  and decayed means the death of everything whose continued existence would merely mean additional
  --
  most favored thing) constituted a necessary precondition (1) for the Emergence of the beneficial goddess
  and (2) for continued successful adaptation. Incorporation of the sacrificial individual, in actuality (in ritual
  --
  of the heroic sacrifice then came to portray the Emergence of the beneficient goddess, capable of
  showering reward upon man, her eternal lover and child.
  --
  has not been processed until the pre-existent interpretive schemas extant prior to its Emergence have been
  reconfigured to take its presence into account. Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary
  --
  structure and function, is unexpectedly threatened by the Emergence of (previously harnessed) unknown
  and dangerous forces. An individual of humble and princely origins rises, by free choice, to counter this
  --
  peacemaker, in one of his many guises. The Emergence of negotiation, during time of dispute, is therefore
  both spontaneous incarnation of the savior, and source of information for the derivation of stories about
  --
  It was the Emergence of the heroic stance, mythically represented by man as equal in divinity to the
  unknown or Nature, that provided the precondition for the generation of concrete behavioral adaptations to
  the world of experience. Emergence of heroism meant construction of culture: historically-determined
  procedural knowledge and communicable description thereof. Construction of culture is creation of the

1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
  Perspectivation, let us remember, also includes a reduction; and this reductive nature is evident, for instance, in perspectival man's predominantly visual or sight orientation in contrast to unperspectival man's audial or hearing orientation. The basis of the perspectival world view is the visual pyramid; the two lines extend from the eyes and meet at the object viewed. The image formed by the isolated sector includes the subject, the object, and the space in between. Pierodella Francesca clearly expresses this in his remark: "The first is the eye that sees; the second, the object seen; the third, the distance between the one and the other." On this Panofsky comments: "It [perspective] furnished a place for the human form to unfold in a life-like manner and move mimically [which is equivalent to the discovery of space]; but it also enabled light to spread and diffuse in space [the illumination of space is the Emergence of spatial awareness] and permitted considerable freedom in the treatment of the human body. Perspective provides a distance between man and objects." Such detachment is always a sign of an emergent objectifying consciousness and of the liberation of previously innate potentialities that are subsequently rediscovered and realized in the outer world.
  This example again suggests to what extent perspective is the most tangible expression of an entire epoch. The basic concern of perspective, which it achieves, is to "look through" space and thereby to perceive and grasp space rationally. The very word "perspective" conveys this intent, as Drer suggests: "Besides, perspectiva is a Latin term meaning `seeing through." It is a "seeing through" of space and thus a coming to awareness of space. It is irrelevant here whether we accept Drers interpretation and translate perspicere (from which perspectiva derives) in his sense as "seeing through," or render it, with Panofsky, as "seeing clearly." Both interpretations point to the same thing. The emergent awareness of distantiating space presupposes a clear vision; and this heightening of awareness is accompanied by an increase of personal or ego-consciousness.
  --
  This type of temporic portrait does not represent merely a willful or fortuitous playfulness of Picasso's style, but rather reflects his specific need to express and shape the uncontainable Emergence of concrete time. This is evident from his early incomplete solutions, as well as from similar portraits by Braque done independently during the same period. Two of Picasso's paintings, Harlequin with a Guitar of 1918 and 1924, as well as his two major works of 1925,
  La cage d'oiseau, and Nature morte la tte de pltre, further manifest his search for concrete time. Picasso himself underscored the importance of these two works by selecting them to appear among the reproductions of nineteen works printed in Sabarts' collection of 1935. In addition we refer the reader to two portraits of 1927, Buste de femme en Rouge and Femme, as well as to the Femme aubonnet rouge of 1932.

1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  the outcome is the Emergence, in step with this, of an ever-
  increasing amount of spiritual energy in matter that is ever

1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  other, until both can occupy the same territory, without Emergence of destructive and counterproductive
  conflict. This is the organization of dead kings, so to speak, under the dominion of the hero: doctors

1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  resemble the Emergence of the previous evolutionary stag-
  es. There will be the ascendant urge in the highest existing

1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  condition of the Emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being
  is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage;

1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and ill-developed form, are manifest now in the world and are growing from day to day with a significant rapidity. And their Emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the ratio-nalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society. The change began by a rapid turning of the current of thought into large and profound movements contradictory of the old intellectual standards, a swift breaking of the old tables. The materialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from Nietzsches theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy which is pluralistic because it has its eye fixed on life rather than on the soul and pragmatic because it seeks to interpret being in the terms of force and action rather than of light and knowledge. These tendencies of thought, which had until yesterday a profound influence on the life and thought of Europe prior to the outbreak of the great War, especially in France and Germany, were not a mere superficial recoil from intellectualism to life and action,although in their application by lesser minds they often assumed that aspect; they were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the Life-Soul of the universe and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created by the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there had begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware of its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even lays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit.
  The art, music and literature of the world, always a sure index of the vital tendencies of the age, have also undergone a profound revolution in the direction of an ever-deepening sub jectivism. The great objective art and literature of the past no longer commands the mind of the new age. The first tendency was, as in thought so in literature, an increasing psychological vitalism which sought to represent penetratingly the most subtle psychological impulses and tendencies of man as they started to the surface in his emotional, aesthetic and vitalistic cravings and activities. Composed with great skill and subtlety but without any real insight into the law of mans being, these creations seldom got behind the reverse side of our surface emotions, sensations and actions which they minutely analysed in their details but without any wide or profound light of knowledge; they were perhaps more immediately interesting but ordinarily inferior as art to the old literature which at least seized firmly and with a large and powerful mastery on its province. Often they described the malady of Life rather than its health and power, or the riot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotent and unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression and self-possession. But to this movement which reached its highest creative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a more truly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional, psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficial vitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the objective mind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philo sophic Intuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the touch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much of it was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued, rudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure of the human mind from its old moorings and pointed the direction in which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery, the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring about the creation of a new world without in life and society. Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towards a subjective search into what may be called the hidden inside of things and away from the rational and objective canon or motive.

1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  primitive and undifferentiated cultural forms, but the Emergence
  of a defined social system in which a purposeful organization or-
  --
  virtue of the Emergence of Thought a special and novel environ-
  ment has been evolved among human individuals within which

1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  coalescence, of which the outcome is the Emergence, pari passu, of
  an ever-increasing amount of spiritual energy in matter that is ever
  --
  topmost point; and it is he, by his Emergence and existence, who
  finally proves the reality and defines the direction of the tra-

1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  position. The change is apparently brought about by an Emergence of the
  historical part of the psyche. Exactly what is the purpose of this process

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  modification, operating over time, is the Emergence of a stable pattern of behavior, designed to match
  individual and social needs, simultaneously. Eventually, this behavioral pattern comes to be coded in
  --
  The Emergence of anomaly constitutes a threat to the integrity of the moral tradition governing behavior
  and evaluation. Strange things or situations can pose a challenge to the structure of a given system of
  --
  The Emergence of anomaly the re- Emergence of the Great Mother constitutes a threat to the
  integrity of the moral tradition governing behavior and evaluation. It is for this reason that adjustment to
  --
  the Emergence of ability to constantly (and inappropriately, in most cases) undermine the a priori
  presumptions of the game to call the rules into question; to dissolve impetus for action and to disinhibit
  --
  The revolutionary hero re-orders the protective structure of society, when the Emergence of an anomaly
  makes such re-ordering necessary. He is therefore the agent of change, upon whose actions all stability is
  --
  comportment during the period of incubation preceding his Emergence as shaman is generally marked by
  commission of acts considered characteristic, in modern and archaic culture alike, of serious mental
  --
  we encounter. Emergence of such capacity which re-occurs with the maturation of every new human
  being introduces the most intractable anomaly imaginable into the developmental course of every life.
  --
  the Emergence of something unexpected into that state, those that represent the dissolution of paradise, in
  consequence, and those that describe the regeneration of stability. This cyclic pattern is essentially
  --
  becoming with the Emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness. 443 It is this equation that allows the
  mythic imagination to place man at the center of the universe, and to draw an analogy between the principle
  --
  universe as object. Myth equates the origin with the dawning of light, with the Emergence of consciousness:
  equates the universe with the world of experience; assumes that the real presupposes the subjective. This
  --
  object, simultaneously) are characterized by the Emergence of unexpected and qualitatively unique
  properties. The world as subject (that is, the individual) is an exceedingly complex phenomena more
  --
  anxious care or toil. It is the Emergence of second-order self-reference awareness of the self, selfconsciousness that finally disrupts this static state of perfection, and irreversibly alters the nature of
  experience. (The development of consciousness the apprehension of the system by itself adds one
  --
  necessary precondition for Emergence into a higher state of consciousness (even for the incarnation of
  Christ, the second fruit of the tree of knowledge). The medieval alchemists tended to adopt a gnostic

1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Therefore in nations so circumstanced this tendency of self-finding has been most powerful and has even created in some of them a new type of national movement, as in Ireland and India. This and no other was the root-meaning of Swadeshism in Bengal and of the Irish movement in its earlier less purely political stages. The Emergence of Bengal as a sub-nation in India was throughout a strongly subjective movement and in its later development it became very consciously that. The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves. We must not forget, however, that in the first stages these movements followed in their superficial thought the old motives of an objective and mostly political self-consciousness. The East indeed is always more subjective than the West and we can see the subjective tinge even in its political movements whether in Persia, India or China, and even in the very imitative movement of the Japanese resurgence. But it is only recently that this subjectivism has become self-conscious. We may therefore conclude that the conscious and deliberate subjectivism of certain nations was only the sign and precursor of a general change in humanity and has been helped forward by local circumstances, but was not really dependent upon them or in any sense their product.
  This general change is incontestable; it is one of the capital phenomena of the tendencies of national and communal life at the present hour. The conception to which Ireland and India have been the first to give a definite formula, to be ourselves,so different from the impulse and ambition of dependent or unfortunate nations in the past which was rather to become like others,is now more and more a generally accepted motive of national life. It opens the way to great dangers and errors, but it is the essential condition for that which has now become the demand of the Time-Spirit on the human race, that it shall find subjectively, not only in the individual, but in the nation and in the unity of the human race itself, its deeper being, its inner law, its real self and live according to that and no longer by artificial standards. This tendency was preparing itself everywhere and partly coming to the surface before the War, but most prominently, as we have said, in new nations like Germany or in dependent nations like Ireland and India. The shock of the war brought about from its earliest moments an immediate and for the time being a militant Emergence of the same deeper self-consciousness everywhere. Crude enough were most of its first manifestations, often of a really barbarous and reactionary crudeness. Especially, it tended to repeat the Teutonic lapse, preparing not only to be oneself, which is entirely right, but to live solely for and to oneself, which, if pushed beyond a certain point, becomes a disastrous error. For it is necessary, if the subjective age of humanity is to produce its best fruits, that the nations should become conscious not only of their own but of each others souls and learn to respect, to help and to profit, not only economically and intellectually but subjectively and spiritually, by each other.

1.04 - The Future of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  IV. THE FINAL Emergence: OMEGA POINT
  When we try to examine scientifically what sort of. end
  --
  by the Emergence (already adumbrated in the sciences) of a
  Weltanschauung common to the consciousness of all man-
  --
  phenomenon, the ultimate Emergence of thought on earth
  into what I have called Omega Point. {Comment je vois,

1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For it is behind the mystery of the presence of personality in an apparently impersonal universeas in that of consciousness manifesting out of the Inconscient, life out of the inanimate, soul out of brute Matter that is hidden the solution of the riddle of existence. Here again is another dynamic Duality more pervading than appears at first view and deeply necessary to the play of the slowly self-revealing Power. It is possible for the seeker in his spiritual experience, standing at one pole of the Duality, to follow Mind in seeing a fundamental Impersonality everywhere. The evolving soul in the material world begins from a vast impersonal Inconscience in which our inner sight yet perceives the presence of a veiled infinite Spirit; it proceeds with the Emergence of a precarious consciousness and personality that even at their fullest have the look of an episode, but an episode that repeats itself in a constant series; it arises through experience of life out of mind into an infinite, impersonal and absolute Superconscience in which personality, mind-consciousness, life-consciousness seem all to disappear by a liberating annihilation, Nirvana. At a lower pitch he still experiences this fundamental impersonality as an immense liberating force everywhere. It releases his knowledge from the narrowness of personal mind, his will from the clutch of personal desire, his heart from the bondage of petty mutable emotions, his life from its petty personal groove, his soul from ego, and it allows them to embrace calm, equality, wideness, universality, infinity. A Yoga of works would seem to require Personality as its mainstay, almost its source, but here too the impersonal is found to be the most direct liberating force; it is through a wide egoless impersonality that one can become a free worker and a divine creator. It is not surprising that the overwhelming power of this experience from the impersonal pole of the Duality should have moved the sages to declare this to be the one way and an impersonal Superconscience to be the sole truth of the Eternal.
  But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very life-force, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A multiple innumerable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.

1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
   Emergence of a New Mode of Knowledge With the silence of the mind comes another change, one that is very significant but more difficult to recognize because it sometimes extends over several years, and its signs are at first imperceptible. It could be called the Emergence of a new mode of knowledge, and thus of a new mode of action.
  It is conceivable to maintain a silent mind when walking in a crowd, eating, dressing or resting, but how is it possible at work, at the office, for example, or while having a discussion with friends? We need to think, to call upon our memory, to look for ideas, to bring in a whole mental process. Experience shows, however, that this is not inevitable, that it is only the product of a long habit in which we have grown accustomed to depending on the mind for knowledge and action; but it is only a habit, and it can be changed. In essence, yoga is not so much a way of learning as a way of unlearning a mass of supposedly imperative habits we have inherited from our animal evolution.

1.050 - Qaf, #Quran, #unset, #Zen
  42. The Day when they will hear the Shout in all truth. That is the Day of Emergence.
  43. It is We who control life and death, and to Us is the destination.

1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  sporadic Emergence, whether in the form of images or of feelings, of those
  dim representations which detach themselves in the darkness from the

1.05 - The Activation of Human Energy, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  life, whence emerged the biosphere; then Emergence of
  thought which produced the Noosphere.

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  5.2. The Adversary: Emergence, Development and Representation
  The figure of Satan is arguably the most well-developed representation of evil extant in religious and
  --
  provide final protection. Unshielded personal contact with tragedy is inextricably linked with Emergence
  of self-consciousness, which has as its mythic consequence (has as its virtual equivalent) heightened
  --
  anomaly Emergence and analysis. The unknown has to be mined for precise significance, before it can be
  said to have been experienced, let alone comprehended; has to be transformed, laboriously, from pure
  --
  merely ensures its irrepressible Emergence in negative guise, at some undetermined point in the future (as
  problems ignored do not go away, but get worse, as they follow their own peculiar developmental path).
  --
  placed themselves in a state where the Emergence of such motivation is virtually certain.
  The unknown appears only when there has been error. The fascist says, I know everything there is to
  --
  Such conditions merely provided the precondition for the Emergence of the consequences of decisions
  already taken, prior to incarceration, in the large part decisions to choose security, instead of maintenance
  --
  way, which describes human experience itself, encompasses loss of paradise, Emergence of tragedy and
  then, redemption and it is the fool, the true individual, who is in desperate need of redemption. To
  --
  questioned. This act of higher-order conceptualization means Emergence of ability to play games, with the
  rules of games and belief in the justifiability of such activity (this rebuff to traditional order). This more
  --
  memory. The Emergence of moral knowledge in explicit semantic form (as opposed to its implicit
  representation in narrative) appears represented in mythology as brought about by revelation. This
  --
  Figure 60: The Emergence of Christ from Group Identity and Chaos
  This idea is represented schematically in Figure 60: The Emergence of Christ from Group Identity and
  Chaos, which also portrays the Christian story of man.
  --
  devoid of evaluative significance. It is only since the Emergence of strict empirical methodology that such
  construction has been made possible. This means that pre-experimental systems of classification such as
  --
  hidden, that could emerge unexpectedly. This unexpected Emergence can be regarded as the capacity of
  the object to transcend its categorical representation (to become something new) as a consequence of
  --
  phenomenal world.601 The potential for the Emergence of something new was present in every direction
  the man could look, inside the cube. He could determine what aspect of being would reveal itself, as a
  --
  environment, natural or social, or, more prosaically, because of the Emergence of incongruent experience
  (paradigm-threatening information) the phenomena previously constrained in their motivational
  --
  consequent to decision to pursue the unknown is accompanied by Emergence of various constitutive
  psychological factors in fantasy, embodied, personified, as opposing forces, lacking mediating principle.
  --
  self-consciousness. It might be said: Emergence of the limited self-consciousness symbolically represented
  in myths of the Fall constituted grounds for the descent of man. The alchemical philosophers meditating
  --
  unredeemed individual, from the alchemical perspective. Emergence and recognition of this animal is
  necessary precondition to his transformation. This idea is represented imagistically in Figure 64: The Wolf
  --
  fertilized by order. The Emergence of the lapis/Christ/pelican from the domain of the dragon of chaos is
  represented in Figure 65: Dragon of Chaos as Birthplace of Christ and the Lapis.634
  --
  for the corruption of the world, attendant upon the Fall [attendant upon the Emergence of (partial) selfconsciousness]. The lapis is agent of transformation, equivalent to the mythological redemptive hero
  able to to turn base metals into gold. It is, as such, something more valuable than gold just as the hero
  --
  Myths of the fall and redemption portray the Emergence of human dissatisfaction with present
  conditions no matter how comfortable and the tendency or desire for movement towards a better
  --
  [Piagets terminology, likely equivalent to Emergence of the unexpected (and punishing (?)] .... Each of these
  frustrating circumstances serves to focus the childs attention on the reasons for the disequilibration rather than simply
  --
  Originally, Messianism was bound up with a historical process ending in the Emergence of a savior who, after the
  transformation crisis of the apocalypse, ushers in the eschatological age of redemption. This conception can easily

1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  No doubt, so long as we live without self-knowledge, we can do no other; men and nations have to act and think egoistically, because in their self-ignorance that is the only life known to them, and to live is their God-given impulse; therefore they must live egoistically rather than not at all, with whatever curb of law, ethics and practical common sense of self-restraint nature and experience have taught them. But subjectivism is in its very nature an attempt at self-knowledge and at living by a true self-knowledge and by an inner strength, and there is no real gain in it if we only repeat the old error in new terms. Therefore we must find out that the true individual is not the ego, but the divine individuality which is through our evolution preparing to emerge in us; its Emergence and satisfaction and not the satisfaction of the mere egoistic will-to-live for the sake of ones lower members is the true object at which a humanity subjectively seeking to know and fulfil its own deepest law and truth should increasingly aim.
  The second psychic truth the individual has to grasp is this, that he is not only himself, but is in solidarity with all of his kind,let us leave aside for the moment that which seems to be not of his kind. That which we are has expressed itself through the individual, but also through the universality, and though each has to fulfil itself in its own way, neither can succeed independently of the other. The society has no right to crush or efface the individual for its own better development or self-satisfaction; the individual, so long at least as he chooses to live in the world, has no right to disregard for the sake of his own solitary satisfaction and development his fellow-beings and to live at war with them or seek a selfishly isolated good. And when we say, no right, it is from no social, moral or religious standpoint, but from the most positive and simply with a view to the law of existence itself. For neither the society nor the individual can so develop to their fulfilment. Every time the society crushes or effaces the individual, it is inflicting a wound on itself and depriving its own life of priceless sources of stimulation and growth. The individual too cannot flourish by himself; for the universal, the unity and collectivity of his fellow-beings, is his present source and stock; it is the thing whose possibilities he individually expresses, even when he transcends its immediate level, and of which in his phenomenal being he is one result. Its depression strikes eventually at his own sources of life, by its increasing he also increases. This is what a true subjectivism teaches us,first, that we are a higher self than our ego or our members, secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick at and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. It is the old Indian discovery that our real Iis a Supreme Being which is our true self and which it is our business to discover and consciously become and, secondly, that that Being is one in all, expressed in the individual and in the collectivity,2 and only by admitting and realising our unity with others can we entirely fulfil our true self-being.3

1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
  Though we in the Ashram are not supposed to take part in politics, we are not at all indifferent to world affairs. In fact, Sri Aurobindo has said that we are immensely interested in them. The journal Mother India which was a semi-political fortnightly, and came out two years after India's Independence, was edited by one of the sadhaks who was living in Bombay and the editorials were sent to Sri Aurobindo for approval before publication. Sri Aurobindo gave many long and regular interviews to a political leader of Bengal and gave him advice and directions regarding the contemporary situation. The Mother too has said that the Supermind cannot but include in its ultimate work for world-change the political administration, since all secular well-being rests in the hands of the governing power of the country. Besides, the War was not a simple political issue among the big nations. The Nazi aggression meant "the peril of black servitude and a revived barbarism threatening India and the world". It was a life-and-death question for the spiritual evolution of the new man, for the Emergence of a new race which the Mother and Sri Aurobindo had come to initiate and establish on the earth. And the victory of Hitler's Germany would mean not only the end of civilisation, but also the death of that great possibility. It is in this sense I have called this War a modern Kurukshetra.
  Let us then go back to the crucial year 1938 when dark war-clouds were gathering and rumblings were heard all over Europe. There was a strong possibility that fighting would break out in December, just a week or two after the night of November 23, when Sri Aurobindo had his accident. But, as he indicated in our talks, his Force pushed it back to a later date, for war at that time would have been a great hindrance to his work. It is possible to surmise that the irresistible forces which no human power could check turned their fury on one who had checked them. Long before Hitler's actual invasion of Poland, long before any other person, Sri Aurobindo had seen this dark Asuric Power rising in Germany and striding over Europe, making Hitler its demoniac instrument, a pseudo-colossus, a self-acclaimed Napoleon. Therefore he supported the Allies and warned India of the forthcoming peril, much to the chagrin and indignation of our blind countrymen. Future events proved his forecast right to the letter.

1.06 - A Summary of my Phenomenological View of the World, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  the Emergence of an ascending series of critical points and
  outstanding developments, which are the following.
  --
  Somewhere, at the level of the proteins, an initial Emergence
  of consciousness is produced within the pre-living (at least

1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2:That luminous Emergence is the dawn which the Aryan forefa thers worshipped. Its fulfilled perfection is that highest step of the world-pervading Vishnu which they beheld as if an eye of vision extended in the purest heavens of the Mind. For it exists already as an all-revealing and all-guiding Truth of things which watches over the world and attracts mortal man, first without the knowledge of his conscious mind, by the general march of Nature, but at last consciously by a progressive awakening and self-enlargement, to his divine ascension. The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.
  3:This Truth of things that has to emerge out of the phenomenal world's contradictions is declared to be an infinite Bliss and self-conscious Existence, the same everywhere, in all things, in all times and beyond Time, and aware of itself behind all these phenomena by whose intensest vibrations of activity or by whose largest totality it can never be entirely expressed or in any way limited; for it is self-existent and does not depend for its being upon its manifestations. They represent it, but do not exhaust it; point to it, but do not reveal it. It is revealed only to itself within their forms. The conscious existence involved in the form comes, as it evolves, to know itself by intuition, by self-vision, by self-experience. It becomes itself in the world by knowing itself; it knows itself by becoming itself. Thus possessed of itself inwardly, it imparts also to its forms and modes the conscious delight of Sachchidananda. This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness in mind and life and body, - for independent of them it exists eternally, - is the transfiguration intended and the utility of individual existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of itself it exists in identity.

1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is here that the Emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tend - when not consciously, then by automatic habit - to bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Natureforces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
  And yet even the leading of the inmost psychic being is not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself out of this mass of inferior Nature to the highest spiritual levels and the divine spark and flame descended here have rejoined themselves to their original fiery Ether. For there is there no longer a spiritual consciousness still imperfect and half lost to itself in the thick sheaths of human mind, life and body, but the full spiritual consciousness in its purity, freedom and intense wideness. There, as it is the eternal Knower that becomes the Knower in us and mover and user of all knowledge, so it is the eternal All-Blissful who is the Adored attracting to himself the eternal divine portion of his being and joy that has gone out into the play of the universe, the infinite Lover pouring himself out in the multiplicity of his own manifested selves in a happy Oneness.
  --
  Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong Emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing
  Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes

1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
  It is my task in this chapter to give a factual account of the long process that led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final Emergence the birth of the Golden Child. But I own that it is a formidable task. Though I had the unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic in its entire revised version, and had some small share in being its scribe, to try in retrospect to reconstruct the imposing edifice from such a distance in memory is indeed difficult, for there are many versions, plenty of revisions, additions, subtractions, emendations from which the final version was made. To give an accurate report of all this process is beyond my capacity. For I am not a scholar, and have no aptitude for research into old (or new) archives, neither did I ever dream that I should one day be called upon to render an account of what the Master had done, or left undone, through this poor mortal as his instrument. Had I not been helped by my esteemed and multi-capable friend Amal Kiran indefatigable researcher no less than a poet and by a young friend as assistant, my readers would have had to remain content with just a bare outline.
  The apology submitted, let the rash venture begin. Savitri, according to Dinen Roy,[1] was started by Sri Aurobindo in Baroda. From all the extant versions, for there are quite a number, it appears that originally the scheme of the poem consisted of two parts: I Earth, II Beyond. The first part had four Books and the second had three Books and an epilogue.

1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  16:We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe. We have the Emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, - the universal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the subconscient, - hr.dya samudra, the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself exclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe. We have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of the individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfilment to which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to the human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the transformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity and freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the outflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of being on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of our evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in herself; of this she strives to be delivered.

1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
  1:I have been constantly emphasizing that each stage of evolution, in whatever domain, involves a new Emergence and therefore a new depth, or a new interiority, whether that applies to molecules or to birds or to dolphins; and that each new within is also a going beyond, a transcendence, a higher and wider identity with a greater total embrace. The formula is: going within = going beyond = greater embrace. And I want to make very clear exactly what that means.
  2:This is extremely important, I think, because the higher stages of development, the transrational and transpersonal and mystical stages, all involve a new going within, a new interiorness. And the charge has been circulating, for quite some time now, that endeavors such as meditation are somehow narcissistic and withdrawn. Environmentalists, in particular, often claim that meditation is somehow "escapist" or "egocentric," and that this "going within" simply ignores the "real" problems in the "real" world "out there."
  --
  At level three, occurring around eleven to seventeen years (early formop), "the social personality or role is seen as a false outer appearance, different from the true inner self." Here we see very clearly the differentiation of the self (the rational ego) from its embeddedness in sociocentric roles-the Emergence of a new interiority or relative autonomy which is aware of, and thus transcends or disidentifies from, overt social roles. "The self is what the person's nature normally is; it is a kind of essence and remains itself over changes in mental contents."
  Likewise, and for precisely the same reasons, "reflective self-awareness appears at this level." (This is fulcrum five, the rational and reflexive ego differentiating from, and thus transcending, sociocentric or mythic-membership roles, with the correlative possible pathology of "identity crisis." Notice also that the new ego-self is beginning to remain as witness to the stream of mental events, and is not merely carried away by any passing thoughts; the adolescent at this stage reports that something "remains itself over changes in mental contents.")
  --
  But for a more transcendental self to emerge, it has first to differentiate from the merely empirical self, and thus we find, with Broughton: "At level five the self as observer is distinguished from the self-concept as known." In other words, something resembling a pure observing Self (a transcendental Witness or Atman, which we will investigate in a moment) is beginning to be clearly distinguished from the empirical ego or objective self-it is a new interiority, a new going within that goes beyond, a new Emergence that transcends but includes the empirical ego. This beginning transcendence of the ego we are, of course, calling the centaur (the beginning of fulcrum six, or the sixth major differentiation that we have seen so far in the development of consciousness).9 This is the realm of vision-logic leading to centauric integration, which is why at this stage, Broughton found that "reality is defined by the coherence of the interpretive framework."
  This integrative stage comes to fruition at Broughton's last major level (late centauric), where "mind and body are both experiences of an integrated self," which is the phrase I have most often used to define the centauric or bodymind-integrated self. Precisely because awareness has differentiated from (or disidentified from, or transcended) an exclusive identification with body, persona, ego, and mind, it can now integrate them in a unified fashion, in a new and higher holon with each of them as junior partners. Physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere-exclusively identified with none of them, therefore capable of integrating all of them.
  --
  First and foremost, if this higher unfolding is to be called "religious" or "spiritual," it is a very far cry from what is ordinarily meant by those terms. We have spent several chapters painstakingly reviewing the earlier developments of the archaic, magic, and mythic structures (which are usually associated with the world's great religions), precisely because those structures are what transpersonal and contemplative development is not. And here we can definitely agree with Campbell: if 99.9 percent of people want to call magic and mythic "real religion," then so be it for them (that is a legitimate use);10 but that is not what the world's greatest yogis, saints, and sages mean by mystical or "really religious" development, and in any event is not what I have in mind. Campbell, however, is quite right that a very, very few individuals, during the magic and mythic and rational eras, were indeed able to go beyond magic, beyond mythic, and beyond rational-into the transrational and transpersonal domains. And even if their teachings (such as those of Buddha, Christ, Patanjali, Padmasambhava, Rumi, and Chih-i) were snapped up by the masses and translated downward into magic and mythic and egoic terms-"the salvation of the individual soul"-that is not what their teachings clearly and even blatantly stated, nor did they intentionally lend any support to such endeavors. Their teachings were about the release from individuality, and not about its everlasting perpetuation, a grotesque notion that was equated flat-out with hell or samsara. Their teachings, and their contemplative endeavors, were (and are) transrational through and through. That is, although all of the contemplative traditions aim at going within and beyond reason, they all start with reason, start with the notion that truth is to be established by evidence, that truth is the result of experimental methods, that truth is to be tested in the laboratory of personal experience, that these truths are open to all those who wish to try the experiment and thus disclose for themselves the truth or falsity of the spiritual claims-and that dogmas or given beliefs are precisely what hinder the Emergence of deeper truths and wider visions.
  Thus, each of these spiritual or transpersonal endeavors (which we will carefully examine) claims that there exist higher domains of awareness, embrace, love, identity, reality, self, and truth. But these claims are not dogmatic; they are not believed in merely because an authority proclaimed them, or because sociocentric tradition hands them down, or because salvation depends upon being a "true believer." Rather, the claims about these higher domains are a conclusion based on hundreds of years of experimental introspection and communal verification. False claims are rejected on the basis of consensual evidence, and further evidence is used to adjust and fine-tune the experimental conclusions.
  --
  Each of these stages follows the same patterns and shows the same developmental characteristics as all the other stages of consciousness evolution: each is a holon following the twenty tenets (a new differentiation/integration, a new Emergence with a new depth, a new interiority, etc.); each possesses a new and higher sense of self existing in a new and wider world of others, with new drives, new cognitions, new moral stances, and so forth; each possesses a deep structure (basic defining pattern) that is culturally invariant but with surface structures (manifestations) that are culturally conditioned and molded; and each has a new and higher form of possible pathology (with the exception of the unmanifest "end" point, although even that is not without certain possible complications in its manifestation).
  I have elsewhere given preliminary descriptions of the deep structures (and pathologies) of each of these four major stages.22 Instead of repeating myself, I have for this presentation simply chosen four individuals who are especially representative of these stages, and will let them speak for us. They are (respectively) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saint Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and Sri Ramana Maharshi. Each also represents the type of mysticism typical at each stage: nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism (each of which we will discuss).

1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  c the Emergence, through the interaction and ever-increasing
  concentration of individual viewpoints, of a faculty of common vi-
  --
  vided. Their Emergence is clearly related to some phenomenon of
  a noospheric kind.
  --
  gradual formation and Emergence, at variance with most former
  categories, of a new noospheric zone in which human collectiviza-

1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  Magick, is marked by the Emergence of an entirely new type of consciousness not differentiated into a subject- object state, for these have been fused into an undivided
  One. Whatever is seen, heard, or felt, in these moments is flooded with an inrush from the depths of the inner man.
  --
  Abyss appears to invade or elevate the Ruach ; a larger environing consciousness, an unfolding presence makes itself felt. It is the Emergence of a new type-level of life, corresponding in some way with ultimate sources of
  Reality ; it is a surge of the entire Self towards ineffable fullness of life.

1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
  We left off with the Emergence of the centaur, which is, so to speak, on the border between the personal and the transpersonal. If the first three general domains were those of matter, life, and mind, the next general domain (that of the psychic and subtle) is the domain of the soul, as I will use the term. And the first rule of the soul is: it is transpersonal.
  The word transpersonal is somewhat awkward and confuses many people. But the point is simply, as Emerson put it, "The soul knows no persons." He explains (and note: Emerson throughout these quotes uses the masculine, as was the custom of the time; were he alive today he would use feminine and masculine, for the whole point of his notion of the Over-Soul was that it was neither male nor female, which is why it could anchor a true liberation from any and all restrictive roles: "The soul knows no persons"):
  --
  Its first effect has been the liberation of life and mind out of Matter; its last effect has been to assist the Emergence of a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual will and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so that he is no longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with mental pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover his inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass [negate and preserve] earth and her limitations. As he grows more and more inward, his boundaries mental [noospheric], vital [biospheric], and spiritual begin to broaden, the bonds that held life, mind, soul to their first limitations loosen or snap, and man the mental being begins to have a glimpse of a larger kingdom of self and world closed to the first earth-life.
  If he makes the inward movement which his own highest vision has held up before him as his greatest spiritual necessity, then he will find there in his inner being a larger consciousness, a larger life. An action from within and an action from above can overcome the predominance of the material formula, diminish and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience, substitute Spirit for Matter as his conscious foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete and characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature.42
  --
  The Self is not born nor does it die. The sages see everything in the Self. There is no diversity in it. If a man thinks that he is born and cannot avoid the fear of death, let him find out if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body which is born resolves itself into thought and that the Emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find the source of thoughts. Then you will abide in the everpresent inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth and the fear of death.55
  As one pursues this "self-inquiry" into the source of thoughts, into the source of "I" and the "world," one enters a state of pure empty awareness, free of all objects whatsoever-precisely Eckhart's "completely unaware of all things"-which in Vedanta is known as nirvikalpa samadhi (nirvikalpa means "without any qualities or objects"). In awareness, there is perfect clarity, perfect consciousness, but the entire manifest world (up to and including the subtle) simply ceases to arise, and one is directly introduced to what Eckhart called "the naked existence of Godhead." Sri Ramana:
  --
  The "struggle for recognition" is simply the theme, developed from Hegel to Habermas to Taylor, that mutual recognition-what we have also been calling the free exchange of mutual self-esteem among all peoples (the Emergence of the rational-egoic self-esteem needs)-is an omega point that pulls history and communication forward toward the free Emergence of that mutual recognition. Short of that Emergence, history is a brutalization of one self or group of selves trying to triumph over, dominate, or subjugate others.
  When, on the other hand, human beings universally recognize each other "as beings with a certain worth or dignity," then history in that sense "comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process-the struggle for recognition-has been satisfied in a society characterized by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible."63 The End of History.
  --
  But we do know that they are structural potentials of the human bodymind, because since its Emergence in its present form (around fifty thousand years ago), that bodymind has indeed supported realizations across the spectrum (has supported the realizations of a Buddha, a Gaudapada, a Dame Julian, a Lady Tsogyal). In other words, that bodymind has already supported psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual realizations; and thus, by a reconstructive science, we know those potentials are already available. This is not an a priori Hegelian deduction; it is an a posteriori conclusion.
  The structural potentials are therefore available; but how they unfold will depend upon the mutual interaction and interplay between all four quadrants-intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social-as all four continue to evolve in history, and none of that is predetermined in any strong sense. Just as, for example, when the human bodymind with its complex triune brain emerged in its present form (again, around fifty thousand years ago), that brain already possessed the potential (or the hard-wiring) for symbolic logic, but that potential would have to await cultural, social, and intentional developments before it could display its form and function, just so with the higher potentials: how they will unfold remains to be seen. But the fact that they are there is demonstrated by the fact that they have already unfolded in some individuals (Buddha to Krishna), and they are thus already available to any individual, at any time, who chooses to continue his or her own evolution within and beyond.

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The word Brahma is a great word in Indian thought, the greatest of all the words in which Indian spirituality has expressed itself; it means in the Upanishads, in all later literature, the Brahman, the Supreme & the All, the Spirit of Things & the sole reality. We need not ask ourselves, as yet, whether this crowning conception has any place in the Vedic hymns; all we need ask is whether Brahman in the Rigveda means hymn & only hymn or whether it has some sense by which it could pass naturally into the great Vedantic conception of the supreme Spirit. My suggestion is that Brahma in the Rigveda means often the soul, the psuche of the Greeks, animus of the Romans, as distinguished from the manas, mens or . This sense it must have borne at some period of Indian thought antecedent to the Upanishads; otherwise we cannot explain the selection of a word meaning hymn or speech as the great fundamental word of Vedanta, the name of the supreme spiritual Reality. The root brih, from which it comes, means, as we have seen in connection with barhis, to be full, great, to expand. Because Brahman is like the ether extending itself in all being, because it fills the body & whole system with its presence, therefore the word brahma can be applied to the soul or to the supreme Spirit, according as the idea is that of the individual spirit or the supreme Existence. It is possible also that the Greek phren, mind, phronis, etc may have derived from this root brih (the aspirate being thrown back on the initial consonant),& may have conveyed originally the same association of ideas. But are we justified in supposing that this use of Brahma in the sense of soul dates back to the Rigveda? May it not have originated in the intermediate period between the period of the Vedic hymns and the final Emergence of the Upanishads? In most passages brahma can mean either hymn or soul; in some it seems to demand the sole sense of hymn. Without going wholly into the question, I shall only refer the reader to the hymn ofMedhatithi Kanwa, to Brahmanaspati, the eighteenth of the first Mandala, and the epithets and functions there attri buted to the Master of the Brahman. My suggestion is that in the Rigveda Brahmanaspati is the master of the soul, primarily, the master of speech, secondarily, as the expression of the soul. The immense importance attached to Speech, the high place given to it by the Vedic Rishis not only as the expression of the soul, but that which best increases & expands its substance & power in our life & being, is one of the most characteristic features of Vedic thought. The soul expresses itself through conscious knowledge & in thought; speech stands behind thought & connects knowledge with its expression in idea. It is through Vak that the Lord creates the world.
  Brahmni therefore may mean either the soul-activities, as dhiyas means the mental activities, or it may mean the words of the mantra which express the soul. If we take it in the latter sense, we must refer it to the girah of the second rik, the mantras taken up by the Aswins into the understanding in order to prepare for action & creation. Indra is to come to these mantras and support them by the brilliant substance of a mental force richly varied in its effulgent manifestation, controlled by the understanding and driven forward to its task in various ways. But it seems to me that the rendering is not quite satisfactory. The main point in this hymn is not the mantras, but the Soma wine and the power that it generates. It is in the forces of the Soma that the Aswins are to rejoice, in that strength they are to take up the girah, in that strength they are to rise to their fiercest intensity of strength & delight. Indra, as mental power, arrives in his richly varied lustre; yhi chitrabhno. Here says the Rishi are these life-forces in the nectar-wine; they are purified in their minute parts & in their whole extent, for so I understand anwbhis tan ptsah; that is to say the distillings of Ananda or divine delight whether in the body as nectar, [or] in the subjective system as streams of life-giving delight are purified of all that impairs & weakens the life forces, purified both in their little several movements & in the whole extent of their stream. These are phenomena that can easily be experienced & understood in Yoga, and the whole hymn like many in the Veda reads to those who have experience like a practical account of a great Yogic internal movement accurate in its every detail. Streng thened, like the Aswins, by the nectar, Indra is to prepare the many-sided activity supported by the Visve devah; therefore he has to come not only controlled by the understanding, dhishnya, like the Aswins, but driven forward in various paths. For an energetic & many-sided activity is the object & for this there must be an energetic and many-sided but well-ordered action of the mental power. He has to come, thus manifold, thus controlled, to the spiritual activities generated by the Soma & the Aswins in the increasing soul (vghatah) full of the life-giving nectar, the immortalising Ananda, sutvatah. He has to come to those soul-activities, in this substance of mental brilliancy, yhi upa brahmni harivas. He has to come, ttujna, with a protective force, or else with a rapidly striving force & uphold by mind the joy of the Sacrificer in the nectar-offering, the offering of this Ananda to the gods of life & action & thought, sute dadhishwa na chanah. Protecting is, here, the best sense for ttujna. For Indra is not only to support swift & energetic action; that has already been provided for; he has also to uphold or bear in mind and by the power of mind the great & rapid delight which the Sacrificer is about to pour out into life & action, jvayja. The divine delight must not fail us in our activity; hostile shocks must not be allowed to disturb our established pleasure in the great offering. Therefore Indra must be there in his light & power to uphold and to protect.

1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  18:The Lord has veiled himself and his absolute wisdom and eternal consciousness in ignorant Nature-Force and suffers her to drive the individual being, with its complicity, as the ego; this lower action of Nature continues to prevail, often even in spite of man's half-lit imperfect efforts at a nobler motive and a purer self-knowledge. Our human effort at perfection fails, or progresses very incompletely, owing to the force of Nature's past actions in us, her past formations, her long-rooted associations; it turns towards a true and high-climbing success only when a greater Knowledge and Power than our own breaks through the lid of our ignorance and guides or takes up our personal will. For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow Emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and purer force is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver after perfection; it is a dreadful passage full of trials, sufferings, sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge and alleviate this ordeal or to penetrate it with the divine delight faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, a true aspiration and a right and unfaltering and sincere practice. "Practise unfalteringly," says the Gita, "with a heart free from despondency," the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda.

1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  In The Life Divine we read also: The Emergence of the
  movement from the Immutable is an eternal phenomenon

1.09 - The Pure Existent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  9:Necessarily, when we say it is without them, we mean that it exceeds them, that it is something into which they pass in such a way as to cease to be what we call form, quality, quantity and out of which they emerge as form, quality and quantity in the movement. They do not pass away into one form, one quality, one quantity which is the basis of all the rest, - for there is none such, - but into something which cannot be defined by any of these terms. So all things that are conditions and appearances of the movement pass into That from which they have come and there, so far as they exist, become something that can no longer be described by the terms that are appropriate to them in the movement. Therefore we say that the pure existence is an Absolute and in itself unknowable by our thought although we can go back to it in a supreme identity that transcends the terms of knowledge. The movement, on the contrary, is the field of the relative and yet by the very definition of the relative all things in the movement contain, are contained in and are the Absolute. The relation of the phenomena of Nature to the fundamental ether which is contained in them, constitutes them, contains them and yet is so different from them that entering into it they cease to be what they now are, is the illustration given by the Vedanta as most nearly representing this identity in difference between the Absolute and the relative. Necessarily, when we speak of things passing into that from which they have come, we are using the language of our temporal consciousness and must guard ourselves against its illusions. The Emergence of the movement from the Immutable is an eternal phenomenon and it is only because we cannot conceive it in that beginningless, endless, ever-new moment which is the eternity of the Timeless that our notions and perceptions are compelled to place it in a temporal eternity of successive duration to which are attached the ideas of an always recurrent beginning, middle and end.
  10:But all this, it may be said, is valid only so long as we accept the concepts of pure reason and remain subject to them. But the concepts of reason have no obligatory force. We must judge of existence not by what we mentally conceive, but by what we see to exist. And the purest, freest form of insight into existence as it is shows us nothing but movement. Two things alone exist, movement in Space, movement in Time, the former objective, the latter subjective. Extension is real, duration is real, Space and Time are real. Even if we can go behind extension in Space and perceive it as a psychological phenomenon, as an attempt of the mind to make existence manageable by distributing the indivisible whole in a conceptual Space, yet we cannot go behind the movement of succession and change in Time. For that is the very stuff of our consciousness. We are and the world is a movement that continually progresses and increases by the inclusion of all the successions of the past in a present which represents itself to us as the beginning of all the successions of the future, - a beginning, a present that always eludes us because it is not, for it has perished before it is born. What is, is the eternal, indivisible succession of Time carrying on its stream a progressive movement of consciousness also indivisible.2 Duration then, eternally successive movement and change in Time, is the sole absolute. Becoming is the only being.

1.10 - Conscious Force, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  22:For the rest, it is impossible to ignore the drive of set purpose, the guidance of apparent blind tendency, the sure eventual or immediate coming to the target sought, which characterise the operations of World-Force in the animal, in the plant, in inanimate things. So long as Matter was Alpha and Omega to the scientific mind, the reluctance to admit intelligence as the mother of intelligence was an honest scruple. But now it is no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the Emergence of human consciousness, intelligence and mastery out of an unintelligent, blindly driving unconsciousness in which no form or substance of them previously existed. Man's consciousness can be nothing else than a form of Nature's consciousness. It is there in other involved forms below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into yet superior forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect Emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms.

1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  a normal sheaf of phyla in which, owing to the Emergence of a
  powerful field of attraction, the fundamental divergent tendency of
  --
  matter tends to order itself upon itself with the Emergence of con-
  sciousness. On the one hand we have physical radiation bound
  --
  spoken of the recent Emergence of certain new faculties in our
  minds, the sense of genetic duration and the sense of collectivity.

1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  the plunge into Night was inevitable the Emergence into a
  new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only
  --
  down for a transforming Emergence.
  In this acquiescence was embraced too the will of the
  --
  and the evolutionary Emergence out of it. The explanation
  is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Con-

11.13 - In these Fateful Days, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And in the end may it not be that the present ruins and ravages are merely a symptom or a resultant of the pressures that the forces of the new creation are exerting from behind or from above? It is always true, it is a fact that any creation, for that matter, any happening on the material plane is already prepared or pre-figured within or behind in a subtler region. We all know Gita's tremendous vision: "all these have already been slain by Me"the battle is fought, won or lost in another world beforehand; what we see on the material level are only the debris, disjecta membra, of forms and limbs thrown down from there. Only the sweeping or clearing is being done here for the appearance and establishment of what already has been built up unseen behind the material curtain. Or as it is sometimes given as an illustration or example, the breakage is that of the surface shell due to the pressing Emergence of the fully formed living creature within.
   One creates through one's consciousness, not through one's hands. A true creation must have at its origin the true consciousness, and a true consciousness has always the power to create invincibly; for consciousness is identified with essential energy. Chit and Tapas are one and the same.

1.11 - Delight of Existence - The Problem, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  16:We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being, so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature. Pleasure, joy and delight, as man uses the words, are limited and occasional movements which depend on certain habitual causes and emerge, like their opposites pain and grief which are equally limited and occasional movements, from a background other than themselves. Delight of being is universal, illimitable and self-existent, not dependent on particular causes, the background of all backgrounds, from which pleasure, pain and other more neutral experiences emerge. When delight of being seeks to realise itself as delight of becoming, it moves in the movement of force and itself takes different forms of movement of which pleasure and pain are positive and negative currents. Subconscient in Matter, superconscient beyond Mind this delight seeks in Mind and Life to realise itself by Emergence in the becoming, in the increasing self-consciousness of the movement. Its first phenomena are dual and impure, move between the poles of pleasure and pain, but it aims at its self-revelation in the purity of a supreme delight of being which is self-existent and independent of objects and causes. Just as Sachchidananda moves towards the realisation of the universal existence in the individual and of the form-exceeding consciousness in the form of body and mind, so it moves towards the realisation of universal, self-existent and objectless delight in the flux of particular experiences and objects. Those objects we now seek as stimulating causes of a transient pleasure and satisfaction; free, possessed of self, we shall not seek but shall possess them as reflectors rather than causes of a delight which eternally exists.
  17:In the egoistic human being, the mental person emergent out of the dim shell of matter, delight of existence is neutral, semilatent, still in the shadow of the subconscious, hardly more than a concealed soil of plenty covered by desire with a luxuriant growth of poisonous weeds and hardly less poisonous flowers, the pains and pleasures of our egoistic existence. When the divine conscious-force working secretly in us has devoured these growths of desire, when in the image of the Rig Veda the fire of God has burnt up the shoots of earth, that which is concealed at the roots of these pains and pleasures, their cause and secret being, the sap of delight in them, will emerge in new forms not of desire, but of self-existent satisfaction which will replace mortal pleasure by the Immortal's ecstasy. And this transformation is possible because these growths of sensation and emotion are in their essential being, the pains no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but fail to reveal, - fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.

1.11 - Oneness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Even in the stone he is there." (Rig Veda I.70.2). All is one because all is the One. Did Christ not say, "This is my body, this is my blood," of two most material, most earthly symbols bread and wine to convey that Matter, too, is the body of the One, the blood of God? 147 If He had not been already there in the stone, how would He have come to be in man, through what miraculous intervention? We are the result of an evolution, not of a sequence of arbitrary miracles. All the earth-past is there in [our human nature] . . . the very nature of the human being presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepare his Emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity. And let us not say that this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into the form so created . . . for that supposes a gulf between soul and body,
  between soul and life, between soul and mind, which does not exist;

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  explain the Emergence of conscious sensation, which could constitute a will towards the evolution of thought or which could
  impose the necessity of such an evolution on inconscient physical
  --
  grain of mental consciousness inherent in its being and therefore the potentiality and indeed the necessity of its Emergence.
  This imprisoned consciousness, though originally absorbed in
  --
  the physical principle. In fact, the Emergence of such a latent
  Mind might well depend upon and would certainly profit by

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

1.13 - Conclusion - He is here, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
  Both the external and the internal development towards physical divinisation is going on apace in the Mother so that in a not distant future it will be seen that the sacrifice, the martyrdom has not gone in vain, but has resulted in the Emergence of a glorified body the consummation of the Supramental victory over Matter.
  One can then conclude by saying that in his departure as well as in life the aim of Sri Aurobindo's entire Sadhana was served namely to make the Mother manifest, without which the divinisation of Matter would be impossible. We hear this truth very beautifully expressed in his poem A God's Labour:

1.13 - The Divine Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  3:And if there is any goal, any completeness towards which things tend, it can only be the completeness - in the individual and in the whole which the individuals constitute - of its selfexistence, of its power and consciousness and of its delight of being. But such completeness is not possible in the individual consciousness concentrated within the limits of the individual formation; absolute completeness is not feasible in the finite because it is alien to the self-conception of the finite. Therefore the only final goal possible is the Emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.
  4:Thus by the very nature of the world-play as it has been realised by Sachchidananda in the vastness of His existence extended as Space and Time, we have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation; next, an Emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal being, living being, thinking being; and finally a release of the formed thinking being into the free realisation of itself as the One and the Infinite at play in the world and by the release its recovery of the boundless existence-consciousness bliss that even now it is secretly, really and eternally. This triple movement is the whole key of the world-enigma.
  5:It is so that the ancient and eternal truth of Vedanta receives into itself and illumines, justifies and shows us all the meaning of the modern and phenomenal truth of evolution in the universe. And it is so only that this modern truth of evolution which is the old truth of the Universal developing itself successively in Time, seen opaquely through the study of Force and Matter, can find its own full sense and justification, - by illuminating itself with the Light of the ancient and eternal truth still preserved for us in the Vedantic Scriptures. To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.

1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  2. Emergence of Purposive Thinking
  from the early beginnings of biological evolutionary theory in

1.14 - TURMOIL OR GENESIS?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  the Emergence of Life, beyond that point all that goes on is a scat-
  All Mass-Coilings certainly do not result in Coilings of Complexity; but on

1.16 - Man, A Transitional Being, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Until the day She comes to the human being, Her conscious instrument in whom, by whom and through whom She will be able to recover Him, Our humanity is the conscious meeting-place of the finite and the infinite and to grow more and more towards the Infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege.326 A special phenomenon occurs when Agni reaches the human stage of its journey. During the preceding stages of evolution, the evolutionary flame seems to have subsided of its own accord once the new Emergence was assured. The explosion of vegetal life seems to have subsided once the animal became firmly established in Life. The teeming of animal life seems similarly to have subsided once humankind became definitively settled in evolution. It does not seem that Nature has created any new animal or plant species since the human species has occupied the crest of evolution. The various species have become stationary; they have attained a degree of perfection, each in its own order, and they remain there. With man, however, the evolutionary urge has not abated, even though he is firmly established in evolution. He is not fulfilled, not satisfied as other species are; he does not know the peace and joy that come with equilibrium. Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal 324
  325

1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The modern European idea of society is founded upon the primary and predominant part played by this vital dynamism in the formation and maintenance of society; for the European, ever since the Teutonic mind and temperament took possession of western Europe, has been fundamentally the practical, dynamic and kinetic man, vitalistic in the very marrow of his thought and being. All else has been the fine flower of his life and culture, this has been its root and stalk, and in modern times this truth of his temperament, always there, has come aggressively to the surface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and Latinistic culture. This triumphant Emergence and lead of the vital man and his motives has been the whole significance of the great economic and political civilisation of the nineteenth century. Life in society consists, for the practical human instincts, in three activities, the domestic and social life of man,social in the sense of his customary relations with others in the community both as an individual and as a member of one family among many,his economic activities as a producer, wealth-getter and consumer and his political status and action. Society is the organisation of these three things and, fundamentally, it is for the practical human being nothing more. Learning and science, culture, ethics, aesthetics, religion are assigned their place as aids to life, for its guidance and betterment, for its embellishment, for the consolation of its labours, difficulties and sorrows, but they are no part of its very substance, do not figure among its essential objects. Life itself is the only object of living.
  The ancients held a different, indeed a diametrically opposite view. Although they recognised the immense importance of the primary activities, in Asia the social most, in Europe the political,as every society must which at all means to live and flourish,yet these were not to them primary in the higher sense of the word; they were mans first business, but not his chief business. The ancients regarded this life as an occasion for the development of the rational, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual being. Greece and Rome laid stress on the three first alone, Asia went farther, made these also subordinate and looked upon them as stepping-stones to a spiritual consummation. Greece and Rome were proudest of their art, poetry and philosophy and cherished these things as much as or even more than their political liberty or greatness. Asia too exalted these three powers and valued inordinately her social organisation, but valued much more highly, exalted with a much greater intensity of worship her saints, her religious founders and thinkers, her spiritual heroes. The modern world has been proudest of its economic organisation, its political liberty, order and progress, the mechanism, comfort and ease of its social and domestic life, its science, but science most in its application to practical life, most for its instruments and conveniences, its railways, telegraphs, steamships and its other thousand and one discoveries, countless inventions and engines which help man to master the physical world. That marks the whole difference in the attitude.
  --
  But the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult Emergence. Life and consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance the law of fragmentation. Life organises itself physically round the plasm, the cell, psychologically round the small separative fragmentary ego. Consciousness itself has to concentrate its small beginnings in a poor surface formation and hide behind the veil of this limited surface existence the depths and infinities of its own being. It has to grow slowly in an external formulation till it is ready to break the crust between this petty outer figure of ourselves, which we think to be the whole, and the concealed self within us. Even the spiritual being seems to obey this law of fragmentation and manifest as a unit in the whole a spark of itself that evolves into an individual psyche. It is this little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this concealed soul-spark on which is imposed the task of meeting and striving with the forces of the universe, entering into contact with all that seems to it not itself, increasing under the pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with all existence. It has to grow into self-knowledge and world-knowledge, to get within itself and discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside of itself and discover its larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get beyond itself and know and live in some supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. For this immense task it is equipped only with the instruments of its original Ignorance. Its limited being is the cause of all the difficulty, discord, struggle, division that mars life. The limitation of its consciousness, unable to dominate or assimilate the contacts of the universal Energy, is the cause of all its suffering, pain and sorrow. Its limited power of consciousness formulated in an ignorant will unable to grasp or follow the right law of its life and action is the cause of all its error, wrongdoing and evil. There is no other true cause; for all apparent causes are themselves circumstance and result of this original sin of the being. Only when it rises and widens out of this limited separative consciousness into the oneness of the liberated Spirit, can it escape from these results of its growth out of the Inconscience.
  If we see this as the truth behind Life, we can understand at once why it has had to follow its present curve of ignorant self-formulation. But also we see what through it all it is obscurely seeking, trying to grasp and form, feeling out for in its own higher impulses and deepest motives, and why these are in ituseless, perturbing and chimerical if it were only an animal product of inconscient Nature,these urgings towards self-discovery, mastery, unity, freedom from its lower self, spiritual release. Evolving out of its first involved condition in Matter and in plant life, effecting a first imperfect organised consciousness in the animal it arrives in man, the mental being, at the possibility of a new, a conscious evolution which will bring it to its goal and at a certain stage of his development it wakes in him the overmastering impulse to pass on from mental to spiritual being. Life cannot arrive at its secret ultimates by following its first infrarational motive forces of instinct and desire; for all here is a groping and seeking without finding, a field of brief satisfactions stamped with the Inconscients seal of insufficiency and impermanence. But neither can human reason give it what it searches after; for reason can only establish half-lights and a provisional order. Therefore with man as he is the upward urge in life cannot rest satisfied always; its evolutionary impulse cannot stop short at this transitional term, this half-achievement. It has to aim at a higher scale of consciousness, deliver out of life and mind something that is still latent and inchoate.

1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  dwelleth the Truth"), because without the new heaven or, rather, the new supramental level of consciousness, the Emergence of a new earth would not be possible. The new earth will result from the "new heaven" of the supramental consciousness, just as the present earth resulted from the old mental or overmental "heaven" of the gods and religions. So it is for all the evolutionary stages: high and low go together. But the Emergence of the new "high" or new level of consciousness, at any stage of evolution, is not a magical phenomenon, which abruptly alters all the preceding levels. Between the appearance of the first amoeba in the world of Life and that of the mammal, we know that it took many millions of years to overcome Matter's inertia and to "vitalize" it. Similarly, from the Neanderthal man to Plato, thousands of years were needed to overcome the resistance of the two previous levels and to "mentalize" Life, to become the complete mental man. Even today, how many human lives are truly governed by the mind rather than by vital passions? The whole task of the pioneers of evolution, at any level, is precisely to join the new height with the former depth; when high meets low, an evolutionary cycle is completed. Likewise, when the pioneer of mental evolution suddenly emerges in the Supramental, his discovery is not a feat of magic that upsets all the former laws. He does not leap to the complete supramental being any more than the Neanderthal man leapt to Plato; he must first "supramentalize" all the previous levels.
  Certainly, his consciousness is the meeting point of the supreme High and the supreme Low, Spirit and Matter, Positive and Negative, and his own powers are, of course, considerably increased, but they are increased only in proportion to the new resistance he has to encounter.
  --
  Sri Aurobindo brings us a message of hope. Ultimately, our present reign of gnomes is the sign of a new Emergence. Our darkness and declines always signal the advent of a greater light, which had to descend to break the prevailing limits. There are only two ways of breaking the limits: through an excess of light or an excess of darkness, but while one draws our darkness up into the light and dissolves it, the other precipitates the light into our darkness and transmutes it. One way liberates a few individuals, while the other liberates the whole earth. Ten thousand years ago, a few giants among men had wrestled out the Secret of the world, but this was the privilege of a few initiates, while now we must all become initiates.
  Ten thousand years ago reigned the Golden Age, while today everything seems to have been swallowed up in darkness. In truth,

1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  The Emergence of the "Ultra-Human"
  ANY EFFORT TO understand what is now taking place in human

1.19 - Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  2:Mind thus appears as a creative cosmic agency. This is not the impression which we normally have of our mentality; rather we regard it primarily as a perceptive organ, perceptive of things already created by Force working in Matter, and the only origination we allow to it is a secondary creation of new combined forms from those already developed by Force in Matter. But the knowledge we are now recovering, aided by the last discoveries of Science, begins to show us that in this Force and in this Matter there is a subconscious Mind at work which is certainly responsible for its own Emergence, first in the forms of life and secondly in the forms of mind itself, first in the nervous consciousness of plant-life and the primitive animal, secondly in the ever-developing mentality of the evolved animal and of man. And as we have already discovered that Matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form of Mind. Material force is, in fact, a subconscious operation of Will; Will that works in us in what seems to be light, though it is in truth no more than a halflight, and material Force that works in what to us seems to be a darkness of unintelligence, are yet really and in essence the same, as materialistic thought has always instinctively felt from the wrong or lower end of things and as spiritual knowledge working from the summit had long ago discovered. We may say, therefore, that it is a subconscious Mind or Intelligence which, manifesting Force as its driving-power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world.
  3:But since, as we have now found, Mind is no independent and original entity but only a final operation of the Truthconsciousness or Supermind, therefore wherever Mind is, there Supermind must be. Supermind or the Truth-consciousness is the real creative agency of the universal Existence. Even when Mind is in its own darkened consciousness separated from its source, yet is that larger movement always there in the workings of Mind; forcing them to preserve their right relation, evolving from them the inevitable results they bear in themselves, producing the right tree from the right seed, it compels even the operations of so brute, inert and darkened a thing as material Force to result in a world of Law, of order, of right relation and not, as it would otherwise be, of hurtling chance and chaos. Obviously, this order and right relation can only be relative and not the supreme order and supreme right which would reign if Mind were not in its own consciousness separated from Supermind; it is an arrangement, an order of the results right and proper to the action of dividing Mind and its creation of separative oppositions, its dual contrary sides of the one Truth. The Divine Consciousness, having conceived and thrown into operation the Idea of this dual or divided representation of Itself, deduces from it in real-idea and educes practically from it in substance of life, by the governing action of the whole Truth-consciousness behind it, its own inferior truth or inevitable result of various relation. For this is the nature of Law or Truth in the world that it is the just working and bringing out of that which is contained in being, implied in the essence and nature of the thing itself, latent in its self-being and self-law, svabhava and svadharma, as seen by the divine Knowledge. To use one of those wonderful formulas of the Upanishad2 which contain a world of knowledge in a few revealing words, it is the Self-existent who as the seer and thinker becoming everywhere has arranged in Himself all things rightly from years eternal according to the truth of that which they are.
  --
  17:It is becoming possible now to conceive that in the very atom there is something that becomes in us a will and a desire, there is an attraction and repulsion which, though phenomenally other, are essentially the same thing as liking and disliking in ourselves, but are, as we say, inconscient or subconscient. This essence of will and desire are evident everywhere in Nature and, though this is not yet sufficiently envisaged, they are associated with and indeed the expression of a subconscient or, if you will, inconscient or quite involved sense and intelligence which are equally pervasive. Present in every atom of Matter all this is necessarily present in every thing which is formed by the aggregation of those atoms; and they are present in the atom because they are present in the Force which builds up and constitutes the atom. That Force is fundamentally the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Vedanta, consciousness-force, inherent conscious force of conscious-being, which manifests itself as nervous energy full of submental sensation in the plant, as desire-sense and desire-will in the primary animal forms, as self-conscious sense and force in the developing animal, as mental will and knowledge topping all the rest in man. Life is a scale of the universal Energy in which the transition from inconscience to consciousness is managed; it is an intermediary power of it latent or submerged in Matter, delivered by its own force into submental being, delivered finally by the Emergence of Mind into the full possibility of its dynamis.
  18:Apart from all other considerations, this conclusion imposes itself as a logical necessity if we observe even the surface process of the Emergence in the light of the evolutionary theme. It is self-evident that Life in the plant, even if otherwise organised than in the animal, is yet the same power, marked by birth and growth and death, propagation by the seed, death by decay or malady or violence, maintenance by indrawing of nourishing elements from without, dependence on light and heat, productiveness and sterility, even states of sleep and waking, energy and depression of life-dynamism, passage from infancy to maturity and age; the plant contains, moreover, the essences of the force of life and is therefore the natural food of animal existences. If it is conceded that it has a nervous system and reactions to stimuli, a beginning or undercurrent of submental or purely vital sensations, the identity becomes closer; but still it remains evidently a stage of life evolution intermediate between animal existence and "inanimate" Matter. This is precisely what must be expected if Life is a force evolving out of Matter and culminating in Mind, and, if it is that, then we are bound to suppose that it is already there in Matter itself submerged or latent in the material subconsciousness or inconscience. For from where else can it emerge? Evolution of Life in matter supposes a previous involution of it there, unless we suppose it to be a new creation magically and unaccountably introduced into Nature. If it is that, it must either be a creation out of nothing or a result of material operations which is not accounted for by anything in the operations themselves or by any element in them which is of a kindred nature; or, conceivably, it may be a descent from above, from some supraphysical plane above the material universe. The two first suppositions can be dismissed as arbitrary conceptions; the last explanation is possible and it is quite conceivable and in the occult view of things true that a pressure from some plane of Life above the material universe has assisted the Emergence of life here. But this does not exclude the origin of life from Matter itself as a primary and necessary movement; for the existence of a Life-world or Life-plane above the material does not of itself lead to the Emergence of Life in matter unless that Life-plane exists as a formative stage in a descent of Being through several grades or powers of itself into the Inconscience with the result of an involution of itself with all these powers in Matter for a later evolution and Emergence. Whether signs of this submerged life are discoverable, unorganised yet or rudimentary, in material things or there are no such signs, because this involved Life is in a full sleep, is not a question of capital importance. The material Energy that aggregates, forms and disaggregates4 is the same Power in another grade of itself as that Life-Energy which expresses itself in birth, growth and death, just as by its doing of the works of Intelligence in a somnambulist subconscience it betrays itself as the same Power that in yet another grade attains the status of Mind; its very character shows that it contains in itself, though not yet in their characteristic organisation or process, the yet undelivered powers of Mind and Life.
  19:Life then reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement of being which are released into consciousness in the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the evolution. Life is really a universal operation of Conscious-Force acting subconsciously on and in Matter; it is the operation that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or bodies and attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by currents of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious sensation in those bodies. In this operation there are three stages; the lowest is that in which the vibration is still in the sleep of Matter, entirely subconscious so as to seem wholly mechanical; the middle stage is that in which it becomes capable of a response still submental but on the verge of what we know as consciousness; the highest is that in which life develops conscious mentality in the form of a mentally perceptible sensation which in this transition becomes the basis for the development of sense-mind and intelligence. It is in the middle stage that we catch the idea of Life as distinguished from Matter and Mind, but in reality it is the same in all the stages and always a middle term between Mind and Matter, constituent of the latter and instinct with the former. It is an operation of Conscious-Force which is neither the mere formation of substance nor the operation of mind with substance and form as its object of apprehension; it is rather an energising of conscious being which is a cause and support of the formation of substance and an intermediate source and support of conscious mental apprehension. Life, as this intermediate energising of conscious being, liberates into sensitive action and reaction a form of the creative force of existence which was working subconsciently or inconsciently, absorbed in its own substance; it supports and liberates into action the apprehensive consciousness of existence called mind and gives it a dynamic instrumentation so that it can work not only on its own forms but on forms of life and matter; it connects, too, and supports, as a middle term between them, the mutual commerce of the two, mind and matter. This means of commerce Life provides in the continual currents of her pulsating nerve-energy which carry force of the form as a sensation to modify Mind and bring back force of Mind as will to modify Matter. It is therefore this nerve-energy which we usually mean when we talk of Life; it is the Prana or Life-force of the Indian system. But nerve-energy is only the form it takes in the animal being; the same Pranic energy is present in all forms down to the atom, since everywhere it is the same in essence and everywhere it is the same operation of Conscious-Force, - Force supporting and modifying the substantial existence of its own forms, Force with sense and mind secretly active but at first involved in the form and preparing to emerge, then finally emerging from their involution. This is the whole significance of the omnipresent Life that has manifested and inhabits the material universe.

1.19 - ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD OF US OF AN ULTRA-HUMAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  mass, but without the Emergence (neither necessary nor conceiv-
  able) at any point in the system of a universal, defined and au-

12.01 - This Great Earth Our Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The ultimate particles of matter, all behave uniformly, there is practically no individual variation. It is all a common general universal movement. The individuation begins with the living cells. Each living form starts with moving and reacting in its own characteristic manner and style. The one transcendent Consciousness, Sachchidananda, that is behind all seems here on the life plane to gather to a point or points, becomes diversified and concentrated at many centres. This concentration effectuates a deepening into so many whirlpools, as it were, and instead of a lateral and horizontal movement, a mere expansiveness, Nature starts as though a vertical movement. The process continues: a light, a fire enters into the earthly material creation which grows and throws out units gradually with a more and more specialised character. Earth is no longer an element merely general or universal in character, there begins a particularisation and individualisation. The first step towards individualisation is what may be termed individuation. With life upon earth, with the appearance of a living organism there entered into it the rudimentary psychic element or entity: as it grows it achieves first of all, as I have said, an individuation, an elementary individual form, as in the lower animals, and then in the higher animals it arrives at individualisation. With the Emergence of conscious will, self-observation and self-direction in man, the mere psychic element or entity becomes an individuality, a psychic being, the person, the soul, and finally, a full-grown self-fulfilled person or personality becomes a deity, the soul becomes the Divine.
   Such is the story of the evolution in the inner core of things. Along with this inner growth there is or there is to be a growth in the outer material level also. The growth of the psychic being or the soul radiates its influence into the mind and life and body forming its outer instrument for expression. These too must partake of the luminous nature of the soul, be intimate and identified with it for the integral fulfilment.

1.20 - The Hound of Heaven, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Veda do not add anything essential to the conception. We have a brief allusion in IV.16.8, "When thou didst tear the waters out of the hill, Sarama became manifest before thee; so do thou as our leader tear out much wealth for us, breaking the pens, hymned by the Angirases." It is the Intuition manifesting before the Divine Mind as its forerunner when there is the Emergence of the waters, the streaming movements of the Truth that break out of the hill in which they were confined by Vritra (verse 7); and it is by means of the Intuition that this godhead becomes our leader to the rescue of the Light and the conquest of the much wealth hidden within in the rock behind the fortress gates of the Panis.
  We find another allusion to Sarama in a hymn by Parashara

1.21 - The Ascent of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:The terms of the problem presuppose the full Emergence of Mind; for in vitality without conscious mind there can be no equation, but only a temporary unstable equilibrium ending in the death of the body, the dissolution of the individual and the dispersal of its elements into the universality. The nature of physical Life forbids the idea of an individual form possessing the same inherent power of persistence and therefore of continued individual existence as the atoms of which it is composed. Only a mental being, supported by the psychic nodus within which expresses or begins to express the secret soul, can hope to persist by his power of linking on the past to the future in a stream of continuity which the breaking of the form may break in the physical memory but need not destroy in the mental being itself and which may even by an eventual development bridge over the gap of physical memory created by death and birth of the body. Even as it is, even in the present imperfect development of embodied mind, the mental being is conscious in the mass of a past and a future extending beyond the life of the body; he becomes aware of an individual past, of individual lives that have created his and of which he is a development and modified reproduction and of future individual lives which his is creating out of itself; he is conscious also of an aggregate life past and future through which his own continuity runs as one of its fibres. This which is evident to physical Science in the terms of heredity, becomes otherwise evident to the developing soul behind the mental being in the terms of persistent personality. The mental being expressive of this soul-consciousness is therefore the nodus of the persistent individual and the persistent aggregate life; in him their union and harmony become possible.
  7:Association with love as its secret principle and its emergent summit is the type, the power of this new relation and therefore the governing principle of the development into the third status of life. The conscious preservation of individuality along with the consciously accepted necessity and desire of interchange, self-giving and fusion with other individuals, is necessary for the working of the principle of love; for if either is abolished, the working of love ceases, whatever may take its place. Fulfilment of love by entire self-immolation, even with an illusion of selfannihilation, is indeed an idea and an impulse in the mental being, but it points to a development beyond this third status of Life. This third status is a condition in which we rise progressively beyond the struggle for life by mutual devouring and the survival of the fittest by that struggle; for there is more and more a survival by mutual help and a self-perfectioning by mutual adaptation, interchange and fusion. Life is a self-affirmation of being, even a development and survival of ego, but of a being that has need of other beings, an ego that seeks to meet and include other egos and to be included in their life. The individuals and the aggregates who develop most the law of association and the law of love, of common help, kindliness, affection, comradeship, unity, who harmonise most successfully survival and mutual selfgiving, the aggregate increasing the individual and the individual the aggregate, as well as individual increasing individual and aggregate aggregate by mutual interchange, will be the fittest for survival in this tertiary status of the evolution.

1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  finality, Emergence of, 195
  fire, discovery of, 135

1.22 - The Problem of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  4:This results from the very logic of things because, the mental consciousness of man not being the completely illumined consciousness entirely emerged out of the obscuration of Matter but only a progressive term in the great Emergence, the line of evolutionary creation in which he has appeared cannot stop where he now is, but must go either beyond its present term in him or else beyond him if he himself has not the force to go forward. Mental idea trying to become fact of life must pass on till it becomes the whole Truth of existence delivering itself out of its successive wrappings, revealed and progressively fulfilled in light of consciousness and joyously fulfilled in power; for in and through these two terms of power and light Existence manifests itself, because existence is in its nature Consciousness and Force: but the third term in which these, its two constituents, meet, become one and are ultimately fulfilled, is satisfied Delight of self-existence. For an evolving life like ours this inevitable culmination must necessarily mean the finding of the self that was contained in the seed of its own birth and, with that selffinding, the complete working out of the potentialities deposited in the movement of Conscious-Force from which this life took its rise. The potentiality thus contained in our human existence is Sachchidananda realising Himself in a certain harmony and unification of the individual life and the universal so that mankind shall express in a common consciousness, common movement of power, common delight the transcendent Something which has cast itself into this form of things.
  5:All life depends for its nature on the fundamental poise of its own constituting consciousness; for as the Consciousness is, so will the Force be. Where the Consciousness is infinite, one, transcendent of its acts and forms even while embracing and informing, organising and executing them, as is the consciousness of Sachchidananda, so will be the Force, infinite in its scope, one in its works, transcendent in its power and selfknowledge. Where the Consciousness is like that of material Nature, submerged, self-oblivious, driving along in the drift of its own Force without seeming to know it, even though by the very nature of the eternal relation between the two terms it really determines the drift which drives it, so will be the Force: it will be a monstrous movement of the Inert and Inconscient, unaware of what it contains, seeming mechanically to fulfil itself by a sort of inexorable accident, an inevitably happy chance, even while all the while it really obeys faultlessly the law of the Right and Truth fixed for it by the will of the supernal ConsciousBeing concealed within its movement. Where the Consciousness is divided in itself, as in Mind, limiting itself in various centres, setting each to fulfil itself without knowledge of what is in other centres and of its relation to others, aware of things and forces in their apparent division and opposition to each other but not in their real unity, such will be the Force: it will be a life like that we are and see around us; it will be a clash and intertwining of individual lives seeking each its own fulfilment without knowing its relation to others, a conflict and difficult accommodation of divided and opposing or differing forces and, in the mentality, a mixing, a shock and wrestle and insecure combination of divided and opposing or divergent ideas which cannot arrive at the knowledge of their necessity to each other or grasp their place as elements of that Unity behind which is expressing itself through them and in which their discords must cease. But where the Consciousness is in possession of both the diversity and the unity and the latter contains and governs the former, where it is aware at once of the Law, Truth and Right of the All and the Law, Truth and Right of the individual and the two become consciously harmonised in a mutual unity, where the whole nature of the consciousness is the One knowing itself as the Many and the Many knowing themselves as the One, there the Force also will be of the same nature: it will be a Life that consciously obeys the law of Unity and yet fulfils each thing in the diversity according to its proper rule and function; it will be a life in which all the individuals live at once in themselves and in each other as one conscious Being in many souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds, one joy of Force working in many lives, one reality of Delight fulfilling itself in many hearts and bodies.

1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  1:THE FIRST status of Life we found to be characterised by a dumb inconscient drive or urge, a force of some involved will in the material or atomic existence, not free and possessor of itself or its works or their results, but entirely possessed by the universal movement in which it arises as the obscure unformed seed of individuality. The root of the second status is desire, eager to possess but limited in capacity; the bud of the third is Love which seeks both to possess and be possessed, to receive and to give itself; the fine flower of the fourth, its sign of perfection, we conceive as the pure and full Emergence of the original will, the illumined fulfilment of the intermediate desire, the high and deep satisfaction of the conscious interchange of Love by the unification of the state of the possessor and possessed in the divine unity of souls which is the foundation of the supramental existence. If we scrutinise these terms carefully we shall see that they are shapes and stages of the soul's seeking for the individual and universal delight of things; the ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter through vicissitudes and opposites to its luminous consummation in Spirit.
  2:The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise. For the world is a masked form of Sachchidananda, and the nature of the consciousness of Sachchidananda and therefore the thing in which His force must always find and achieve itself is divine Bliss, an omnipresent self-delight. Since Life is an energy of His conscious-force, the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at once cause, motive and object of its activities; and if by reason of egoistic division that delight is missed, if it is held back behind a veil, if it is represented as its own opposite, even as being is masked in death, consciousness figures as the inconscient and force mocks itself with the guise of incapacity, then that which lives cannot be satisfied, cannot either rest from the movement or fulfil the movement except by laying hold on this universal delight which is at once the secret total delight of its own being and the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding delight of the transcendent and immanent Sachchidananda. To seek for delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life; to find and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive.
  --
  4:That term is something in us which we sometimes call in a special sense the soul, - that is to say, the psychic principle which is not the life or the mind, much less the body, but which holds in itself the opening and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight of self, to light, to love, to joy and beauty and to a refined purity of being. In fact, however, there is a double soul or psychic term in us, as every other cosmic principle in us is also double. For we have two minds, one the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial mentality created by us in our Emergence out of Matter, another a subliminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives, one outer, involved in the physical body, bound by its past evolution in Matter, which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death, but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly take for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being there is this duality; for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which provides the substance not only of our physical but of our vital and mental sheaths and is therefore our real substance supporting this physical form which we erroneously imagine to be the whole body of our spirit. So too we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man, he has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say of him, he has no soul.
  5:The external forms of our being are those of our small egoistic existence; the subliminal are the formations of our larger true individuality. Therefore are these that concealed part of our being in which our individuality is close to our universality, touches it, is in constant relation and commerce with it. The subliminal mind in us is open to the universal knowledge of the cosmic Mind, the subliminal life in us to the universal force of the cosmic Life, the subliminal physicality in us to the universal forceformation of cosmic Matter; the thick walls which divide from these things our surface mind, life, body and which Nature has to pierce with so much trouble, so imperfectly and by so many skilful-clumsy physical devices, are there, in the subliminal, only a rarefied medium at once of separation and communication. So too is the subliminal soul in us open to the universal delight which the cosmic soul takes in its own existence and in the existence of the myriad souls that represent it and in the operations of mind, life and matter by which Nature lends herself to their play and development; but from this cosmic delight the surface soul is shut off by egoistic walls of great thickness which have indeed gates of penetration, but in their entry through them the touches of the divine cosmic Delight become dwarfed, distorted or have to come in masked as their own opposites.

1.240 - 1.300 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  Self. It is not within or without. The mind is Its sakti. After the Emergence of the mind, the universe appears and the body is seen to be contained in it. Whereas all these are contained in the Self and they cannot exist apart from the Self.
  14th December 1936

1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
  Self. It is not within or without. The mind is Its sakti. After the Emergence of the mind, the universe appears and the body is seen to be contained in it. Whereas all these are contained in the Self and they cannot exist apart from the Self.
  14th December 1936

1.24 - The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If a subjective age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to find its outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the Emergence of mankind on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough that certain ideas favourable to that turn of human life should take hold of the general mind of the race, permeate the ordinary motives of its thought, art, ethics, political ideals, social effort, or even get well into its inner way of thinking and feeling. It is not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner equality and harmony and not merely an outward and mechanical equalisation and associationshould become definitely an ideal of life; it is not enough that this ideal should be actively held as possible, desirable, to be sought and striven after, it is not enough even that it should come forward as a governing preoccupation of the human mind. That would evidently be a very great step forward,considering what the ideals of mankind now are, an enormous step. It would be the necessary beginning, the indispensable mental environment for a living renovation of human society in a higher type. But by itself it might only bring about a half-hearted or else a strong but only partially and temporarily successful attempt to bring something of the manifest spirit into human life and its institutions. That is all that mankind has ever attempted on this line in the past. It has never attempted to work out thoroughly even that little, except in the limits of a religious order or a peculiar community, and even there with such serious defects and under such drastic limitations as to make the experiment nugatory and without any bearing on human life. If we do not get beyond the mere holding of the ideal and its general influence in human life, this little is all that mankind will attempt in the future. More is needed; a general spiritual awakening and aspiration in mankind is indeed the large necessary motive-power, but the effective power must be something greater. There must be a dynamic re-creating of individual manhood in the spiritual type.
  For the way that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only as an aspiration, accepted only as a partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould the whole life, but only more or less to colour it; it is often used even as a cover and a plea for things that are diametrically opposed to its real spirit. Institutions are created which are supposed, but too lightly supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is held, the fact that men live under its institutions is treated as sufficient. The holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living according to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But spirituality is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is nothing if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient. A spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised is realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its spirit and become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould into which spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and may become a prison in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea is a power, but only when it is both inwardly and outwardly creative. Here we have to enlarge and to deepen the pragmatic principle that truth is what we create, and in this sense first, that it is what we create within us, in other words, what we become. Undoubtedly, spiritual truth exists eternally beyond independent of us in the heavens of the spirit; but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth of earth, truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.

1.25 - The Knot of Matter, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  12:This is the whole basis of the pessimist theory of the world, - optimist, it may be, as to worlds and states beyond, but pessimist as to the earthly life and the destiny of the mental being in his dealings with the material universe. For it affirms that since the very nature of material existence is division and the very seed of embodied mind is self-limitation, ignorance and egoism, to seek satisfaction of the spirit upon earth or to seek an issue and divine purpose and culmination for the world-play is a vanity and delusion; only in a heaven of the Spirit and not in the world, or only in the Spirit's true quietude and not in its phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only recover itself by rejecting as an error and a false step its attempt to find itself in the finite. Nor can the Emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of Mind into which Mind brings its own rule of division and ignorance. Therefore within this illusion Mind can only find itself; it can only travel between the three terms of the divided existence it has created: it cannot find there the unity of the Spirit or the truth of the spiritual existence.
  13:Now it is true that the principle of division in Matter can be only a creation of the divided Mind which has precipitated itself into material existence; for that material existence has no selfbeing, is not the original phenomenon but only a form created by an all-dividing Life-force which works out the conceptions of an all-dividing Mind. By working out being into these appearances of the ignorance, inertia and division of Matter the dividing Mind has lost and imprisoned itself in a dungeon of its own building, is bound with chains which it has itself forged. And if it be true that the dividing Mind is the first principle of creation, then it must be also the ultimate attainment possible in the creation, and the mental being struggling vainly with Life and Matter, overpowering them only to be overpowered by them, repeating eternally a fruitless cycle must be the last and highest word of cosmic existence. But no such consequence ensues if, on the contrary, it is the immortal and infinite Spirit that has veiled itself in the dense robe of material substance and works there by the supreme creative power of Supermind, permitting the divisions of Mind and the reign of the lowest or material principle only as initial conditions for a certain evolutionary play of the One in the Many. If, in other words, it is not merely a mental being who is hidden in the forms of the universe, but the infinite Being, Knowledge, Will which emerges out of Matter first as Life, then as Mind, with the rest of it still unrevealed, then the Emergence of consciousness out of the apparently Inconscient must have another and completer term; the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence.
  14:Such a supramental being would, as we have seen, liberate the mind from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of mind as merely a useful subordinate action of the all-embracing Supermind; and he would liberate the life also from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of life as merely a useful subordinate action of the one Conscious-Force fulfilling its being and joy in a diversified unity. Is there any reason why he should not also liberate the bodily existence from the present law of death, division and mutual devouring and use individualisation of body as merely a useful subordinate term of the one divine Conscious-Existence made serviceable for the joy of the Infinite in the finite? or why this spirit should not be free in a sovereign occupation of form, consciously immortal even in the changing of his robe of Matter, possessed of his self-delight in a world subjected to the law of unity and love and beauty? And if man be the inhabitant of terrestrial existence through whom that transformation of the mental into the supramental can at last be operated, is it not possible that he may develop, as well as a divine mind and a divine life, also a divine body? or, if the phrase seem to be too startling to our present limited conceptions of human potentiality, may he not in his development of his true being and its light and joy and power arrive at a divine use of mind and life and body by which the descent of Spirit into form shall be at once humanly and divinely justified?

1.26 - The Ascending Series of Substance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  11:Nor can this evolution end with the first meagre formulation of life, mind, supermind, spirit conceded to these higher powers by the reluctant power of Matter. For as they evolve, as they awake, as they become more active and avid of their own potentialities, the pressure on them of the superior planes, a pressure involved in the existence and close connection and interdependence of the worlds, must also increase in insistence, power and effectiveness. Not only must these principles manifest from below in a qualified and restricted Emergence, but also from above they must descend in their characteristic power and full possible efflorescence into the material being; the material creature must open to a wider and wider play of their activities in Matter, and all that is needed is a fit receptacle, medium, instrument. That is provided for in the body, life and consciousness of man.
  12:Certainly, if that body, life and consciousness were limited to the possibilities of the gross body which are all that our physical senses and physical mentality accept, there would be a very narrow term for this evolution, and the human being could not hope to accomplish anything essentially greater than his present achievement. But this body, as ancient occult science discovered, is not the whole even of our physical being; this gross density is not all of our substance. The oldest Vedantic knowledge tells us of five degrees of our being, the material, the vital, the mental, the ideal, the spiritual or beatific and to each of these grades of our soul there corresponds a grade of our substance, a sheath as it was called in the ancient figurative language. A later psychology found that these five sheaths of our substance were the material of three bodies, gross physical, subtle and causal, in all of which the soul actually and simultaneously dwells, although here and now we are superficially conscious only of the material vehicle. But it is possible to become conscious in our other bodies as well and it is in fact the opening up of the veil between them and consequently between our physical, psychical and ideal personalities which is the cause of those "psychic" and "occult" phenomena that are now beginning to be increasingly though yet too little and too clumsily examined, even while they are far too much exploited. The old Hathayogins and Tantriks of India had long ago reduced this matter of the higher human life and body to a science. They had discovered six nervous centres of life in the dense body corresponding to six centres of life and mind faculty in the subtle, and they had found out subtle physical exercises by which these centres, now closed, could be opened up, the higher psychical life proper to our subtle existence entered into by man, and even the physical and vital obstructions to the experience of the ideal and spiritual being could be destroyed. It is significant that one prominent result claimed by the Hathayogins for their practices and verified in many respects was a control of the physical life-force which liberated them from some of the ordinary habits or so-called laws thought by physical science to be inseparable from life in the body.

1.27 - The Sevenfold Chord of Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere,3 is where mind and supermind meet with a veil between them. The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the allcomprehending supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent Conscious-Force and Matter open to its divine liberty as a form of the divine Existence. And if there be any goal to the evolution which finds here its present crown and head in the human being, other than an aimless circling and an individual escape from the circling, if the infinite potentiality of this creature, who alone here stands between Spirit and Matter with the power to mediate between them, has any meaning other than an ultimate awakening from the delusion of life by despair and disgust of the cosmic effort and its complete rejection, then even such a luminous and puissant transfiguration and Emergence of the Divine in the creature must be that high-uplifted goal and that supreme significance.
  7:But before we can turn to the psychological and practical conditions under which such a transfiguration may be changed from an essential possibility into a dynamic potentiality, we have much to consider; for we must discern not only the essential principles of the descent of Sachchidananda into cosmic existence, which we have already done, but the large plan of its order here and the nature and action of the manifested power of ConsciousForce which reigns over the conditions under which we now exist. At present, what we have first to see is that the seven or the eight principles we have examined are essential to all cosmic creation and are there, manifested or as yet unmanifested, in ourselves, in this "Infant of a year" which we still are, - for we are far yet from being the adults of evolutionary Nature. The higher Trinity is the source and basis of all existence and play of existence, and all cosmos must be an expression and action of its essential reality. No universe can be merely a form of being which has sprung up and outlined itself in an absolute nullity and void and remains standing out against a non-existent emptiness. It must be either a figure of existence within the infinite Existence who is beyond all figure or it must be itself the All-Existence. In fact, when we unify our self with cosmic being, we see that it is really both of these things at once; that is to say, it is the All-Existent figuring Himself out in an infinite series of rhythms in His own conceptive extension of Himself as Time and Space. Moreover we see that this cosmic action or any cosmic action is impossible without the play of an infinite Force of Existence which produces and regulates all these forms and movements; and that Force equally presupposes or is the action of an infinite Consciousness, because it is in its nature a cosmic Will determining all relations and apprehending them by its own mode of awareness, and it could not so determine and apprehend them if there were no comprehensive Consciousness behind that mode of cosmic awareness to originate as well as to hold, fix and reflect through it the relations of Being in the developing formation or becoming of itself which we call a universe.
  --
  12:It follows that wherever Cosmos is, there, even if only one principle be initially apparent, even if at first that seem to be the sole principle of things and everything else that may appear afterwards in the world seem to be no more than its forms and results and not in themselves indispensable to cosmic existence, such a front presented by being can only be an illusory mask or appearance of its real truth. Where one principle is manifest in Cosmos, there all the rest must be not merely present and passively latent, but secretly at work. In any given world its scale and harmony of being may be openly in possession of all seven at a higher or lower degree of activity; in another they may be all involved in one which becomes the initial or fundamental principle of evolution in that world, but evolution of the involved there must be. The evolution of the sevenfold power of being, the realisation of its septuple Name, must be the destiny of any world which starts apparently from the involution of all in one power.6 Therefore the material universe was bound in the nature of things to evolve from its hidden life apparent life, from its hidden mind apparent mind, and it must in the same nature of things evolve from its hidden Supermind apparent Supermind and from the concealed Spirit within it the triune glory of Sachchidananda. The only question is whether the earth is to be a scene of that Emergence or the human creation on this or any other material scene, in this or any other cycle of the large wheelings of Time, its instrument and vehicle. The ancient seers believed in this possibility for man and held it to be his divine destiny; the modern thinker does not even conceive of it or, if he conceived, would deny or doubt. If he sees a vision of the Superman, it is in the figure of increased degrees of mentality or vitality; he admits no other Emergence, sees nothing beyond these principles, for these have traced for us up till now our limit and circle. In this progressive world, with this human creature in whom the divine spark has been kindled, real wisdom is likely to dwell with the higher aspiration rather than with the denial of aspiration or with the hope that limits and circumscribes itself within those narrow walls of apparent possibility which are only our intermediate house of training. In the spiritual order of things, the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.

1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  13:And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena,5 into the material Inconscience, - the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, - and if the One is born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult Emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.
  14:Overmind in its descent reaches a line which divides the cosmic Truth from the cosmic Ignorance; it is the line at which it becomes possible for Consciousness-Force, emphasising the separateness of each independent movement created by Overmind and hiding or darkening their unity, to divide Mind by an exclusive concentration from the overmental source. There has already been a similar separation of Overmind from its supramental source, but with a transparency in the veil which allows a conscious transmission and maintains a certain luminous kinship; but here the veil is opaque and the transmission of the Overmind motives to the Mind is occult and obscure. Mind separated acts as if it were an independent principle, and each mental being, each basic mental idea, power, force stands similarly on its separate self; if it communicates or combines with or contacts others, it is not with the catholic universality of the Overmind movement, on a basis of underlying oneness, but as independent units joining to form a separate constructed whole. It is by this movement that we pass from the cosmic Truth into the cosmic Ignorance. The cosmic Mind on this level, no doubt, comprehends its own unity, but it is not aware of its own source and foundation in the Spirit or can only comprehend it by the intelligence, not in any enduring experience; it acts in itself as if by its own right and works out what it receives as material without direct communication with the source from which it receives it. Its units also act in ignorance of each other and of the cosmic whole except for the knowledge that they can get by contact and communication, - the basic sense of identity and the mutual penetration and understanding that comes from it are no longer there. All the actions of this Mind Energy proceed on the opposite basis of the Ignorance and its divisions and, although they are the results of a certain conscious knowledge, it is a partial knowledge, not a true and integral self-knowledge, nor a true and integral world-knowledge. This character persists in Life and in subtle Matter and reappears in the gross material universe which arises from the final lapse into the Inconscience.
  15:Yet, as in our subliminal or inner Mind, so in this Mind also a larger power of communication and mutuality still remains, a freer play of mentality and sense than human mind possesses, and the Ignorance is not complete; a conscious harmony, an interdependent organisation of right relations is more possible: mind is not yet perturbed by blind Life forces or obscured by irresponsive Matter. It is a plane of Ignorance, but not yet of falsehood or error, - or at least the lapse into falsehood and error is not yet inevitable; this Ignorance is limitative, but not necessarily falsificative. There is limitation of knowledge, an organisation of partial truths, but not a denial or opposite of truth or knowledge. This character of an organisation of partial truths on a basis of separative knowledge persists in Life and subtle Matter, for the exclusive concentration of Consciousness-Force which puts them into separative action does not entirely sever or veil Mind from Life or Mind and Life from Matter. The complete separation can take place only when the stage of Inconscience has been reached and our world of manifold Ignorance arises out of that tenebrous matrix. These other still conscient stages of the involution are indeed organisations of Conscious Force in which each lives from his own centre, follows out his own possibilities, and the predominant principle itself, whether Mind, Life or Matter, works out things on its own independent basis; but what is worked out are truths of itself, not illusions or a tangle of truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. But when by an exclusive concentration on Force and Form Consciousness-Force seems phenomenally to separate Consciousness from Force, or when it absorbs Consciousness in a blind sleep lost in Form and Force, then Consciousness has to struggle back to itself by a fragmentary evolution which necessitates error and makes falsehood inevitable. Nevertheless, these things too are not illusions that have sprung out of an original Non-Existence; they are, we might say, the unavoidable truths of a world born out of Inconscience. For the Ignorance is still in reality a knowledge seeking for itself behind the original mask of Inconscience; it misses and finds; its results, natural and even inevitable on their own line, are the true consequence of the lapse, - in a way, even, the right working of the recovery from the lapse. Existence plunging into an apparent Non-Existence, Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience, Delight of existence into a vast cosmic insensibility are the first result of the fall and, in the return from it by a struggling fragmentary experience, the rendering of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood, knowledge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleasure are the necessary process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of Truth, Knowledge, Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a contradiction of the truth of things. It could only be otherwise if all beings in the evolution were quiescently responsive to the psychic element within them and to the Supermind underlying Nature's operations; but here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles, would be the Emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted characters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence. Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind and Supermind too must in the end fulfil themselves in this apparently opposite organisation from a dark Infinite.
  16:Two things render that culmination more facile than it would otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has originated modifications of itself, - Intuition especially with its penetrative lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of country in our consciousness, - which can bring the concealed truth of things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and overmental beings, not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable. But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive Emergence in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their action is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the medium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recognisable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind intervention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above.
  17:A divine Life in the manifestation is then not only possible as the high result and ransom of our present life in the Ignorance but, if these things are as we have seen them, it is the inevitable outcome and consummation of Nature's evolutionary endeavour.

1.2 - Katha Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  separate Emergence putteth from him pain and sorrow.
  iE d1y

13.01 - A Centurys Salutation to Sri Aurobindo The Greatness of the Great, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   To recapitulate: Impersonalisation involves or culminates in divinisation which means the descent of the Divine, the supreme Person, from above or His Emergence from within (both mean the same thing), with the result that all other inferior or external formulations are subsumed, integrated into the supreme Reality forming one single body and personality.
   Such is the content of Sri Aurobindos consciousness, such is the work that is being pursued under the stress of that consciousness towards the realisation of a new, a divine world.

1.4.01 - The Divine Grace and Guidance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The result may very well be the stronger Emergence of the best that can be; for the world-movement often works in that way. I leave it at that and say nothing more.

1915 07 31p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Thy power in me is like a living spring, strong and abundant, rumbling behind the rocks, gathering its energies to break down the obstacles and gush out freely in the open, pouring its waters over the plain to fertilise it. When will the hour of this Emergence come? When the moment arrives, it will burst forth, and time is nothing in Eternity. But what words can describe the immensity of joy brought by this inner accumulation, this deep concentration, of all the forces that are submissive to the manifestation of Thy Will of tomorrow, preparing to break over the world, drowning in their sovereign flood all that still persists in wanting to be the expression of Thy will of yesterday, so as to take possession of the earth in Thy Name and offer it to Thee as a completer image of Thyself.
   Thou hast said that the earth would die, and it will die to its old ignorance.

1929-07-28 - Art and Yoga - Art and life - Music, dance - World of Harmony, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  There is a domain far above the mind which we could call the world of Harmony and, if you can reach there, you will find the root of all harmony that has been manifested in whatever form upon earth. For instance, there is a certain line of music, consisting of a few supreme notes, that was behind the productions of two artists who came one after anotherone a concerto of Bach, another a concerto of Beethoven. The two are not alike on paper and differ to the outward ear, but in their essence they are the same. One and the same vibration of consciousness, one wave of significant harmony touched both these artists. Beethoven caught a larger part, but in him it was more mixed with the inventions and interpolations of his mind; Bach received less, but what he seized of it was purer. The vibration was that of the victorious Emergence of consciousness, consciousness tearing itself out of the womb of unconsciousness in a triumphant uprising and birth.
  If by Yoga you are capable of reaching this source of all art, then you are master, if you will, of all the arts. Those that may have gone there before, found it perhaps happier, more pleasant or full of a rapturous ease to remain and enjoy the Beauty and the Delight that are there, not manifesting it, not embodying it upon earth. But this abstention is not all the truth nor the true truth of Yoga; it is rather a deformation, a diminution of the dynamic freedom of Yoga by the more negative spirit of Sannyasa. The will of the Divine is to manifest, not to remain altogether withdrawn in inactivity and an absolute silence; if the Divine Consciousness were really an inaction of unmanifesting bliss, there would never have been any creation.

1956-08-15 - Protection, purification, fear - Atmosphere at the Ashram on Darshan days - Darshan messages - Significance of 15-08 - State of surrender - Divine Grace always all-powerful - Assumption of Virgin Mary - SA message of 1947-08-15, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    It is here that the Emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from being a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tendwhen not consciously, then by automatic habitto bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower 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 the 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 minds and the lifes falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the minds ardours and the blind enthusiasm 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, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 155-57

1956-09-05 - Material life, seeing in the right way - Effect of the Supermind on the earth - Emergence of the Supermind - Falling back into the same mistaken ways, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1956-09-05 - Material life, seeing in the right way - Effect of the Supermind on the earth - Emergence of the Supermind - Falling back into the same mistaken ways
  author class:The Mother

1957-05-01 - Sports competitions, their value, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe. Matter is the field and the creation of the Inconscient and the perfection of the operations of inconscient Matter, their perfect adaptation of means to an aim and end, the wonders they perform and the marvels of beauty they create, testify, in spite of all the ignorant denial we can oppose, to the presence and power of consciousness of this Superconscience in every part and movement of the material universe. It is there in the body, has made it and its Emergence in our consciousness is the secret aim of evolution and the key to the mystery of our existence.
    The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 9-11

1957-07-24 - The involved supermind - The new world and the old - Will for progress indispensable, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no Emergence.
    The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 43

1957-10-09 - As many universes as individuals - Passage to the higher hemisphere, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    Even in the material world which seems to us a world of ignorance, a world of the workings of a blind and inconscient Force starting from inconscience and proceeding through Ignorance and reaching with difficulty towards an imperfect Light and Knowledge, there is still a secret Truth in things which arranges all, guides towards the Self many contrary powers of being and rises towards its own heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for, what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery. This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem each to be following its own law of nature; in this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and does not work according to its characteristic law of being and self-knowledge, but without it nothing could reach its aim. A world governed by an ignorant mind would soon drift into a chaos; it could not in fact come into existence or remain in existence unless supported by the secret Omniscience of which it is the cover; a world governed by a blind inconscient force might repeat constantly the same mechanical workings but it would mean nothing and arrive nowhere. This could not be the cause of an evolution that creates life out of Matter, out of life mind, and a gradation of planes of Matter, Life and Mind culminating in the Emergence of Supermind. The secret truth that emerges in Supermind has been there all the time, but now it manifests itself and the truth in things and the meaning of our existence.
    The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 73-74

1957-12-04 - The method of The Life Divine - Problem of emergence of a new species, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1957-12-04 - The method of The Life Divine - Problem of Emergence of a new species
  class:chapter

1958-01-29 - The plan of the universe - Self-awareness, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  This is the very small beginning of the Emergence from the primary state of unconsciousness.
  ***

1958-03-05 - Vibrations and words - Power of thought, the gift of tongues, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    "The necessary condition for the change from the normal animal to the human character of existence would be a development of the physical organisation which would capacitate a rapid progression, a reversal or turnover of the consciousness, a reaching to a new height and a looking down from it at the lower stages, a heightening and widening of capacity which would enable the being to take up the old animal faculties with a larger and more plastic, a human intelligence, and at the same time or later to develop greater and subtler powers proper to the new type of being, powers of reason, reflection, complex observation, organised invention, thought and discovery.... Such a reversal has been made in each radical transition of Nature: Life-Force emerging turns upon Matter, imposes a vital content on the operations of material Energy while it develops also its own new movements and operations; Life-Mind emerges in Life-Force and Matter and imposes its content of consciousness on their operations while it develops also its own action and faculties; a new greater Emergence and reversal, the Emergence of humanity, is in line with Nature's precedents; it would be a new application of the general principle."
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 838-39

1958-03-12 - The key of past transformations, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    On the side of consciousness the new manifestation, the human, could be accounted for by an upsurge of concealed Consciousness from the involution in universal Nature. But in that case it must have had some material form already existent for its vehicle of Emergence, the vehicle being adapted by the force of the Emergence itself to the needs of a new inner creation; or else a rapid divergence from previous physical types or patterns may have brought a new being into existence. But whichever the hypothesis accepted, this means an evolutionary process,there is only a difference in the method and machinery of the divergence or transition. Or there may have been, on the contrary, not an upsurgence but a descent of mentality from a Mind-plane above us, perhaps the descent of a soul or mental being into terrestrial Nature. The difficulty would then be the appearance of the human body, too complex and difficult an organ to have been suddenly created or manifested; for such a miraculous speed of process, though quite possible on a supraphysical plane of being, does not seem to figure among the normal possibles or potentials of the material Energy. It could only happen there by an intervention of a supraphysical force or law of Nature or by a creator Mind acting with full power and directly on Matter. An action of a supraphysical Force and a creator may be conceded in every new appearance in Matter; each such appearance is at bottom a miracle operated by a secret Consciousness supported by a veiled Mind- Energy or Life-Energy: but the action is nowhere seen to be direct, overt, self-sufficient; it is always super-imposed on an already realised physical basis and acts by an extension of some established process of Nature. It is more conceivable that there was an opening of some existing body to a supraphysical influx so that it was transformed into a new body; but no such event can lightly be assumed to have taken place in the past history of material Nature: in order to happen it would seem to need either the conscious intervention of an invisible mental being to form the body he intended to inhabit or else a previous development of a mental being in Matter itself who would be already able to receive a supraphysical power and impose it on the rigid and narrow formulas of his physical existence. Otherwise we must suppose that there was a pre-existent body already so much evolved as to be fitted for the reception of a vast mental influx or capable of a pliable response to the descent into it of a mental being. But this would suppose a previous evolution of mind in body to the point at which such a receptivity would be possible. It is quite conceivable that such an evolution from below and such a descent from above cooperated in the appearance of humanity in earth-nature. The secret psychical entity already there in the animal might have itself called down the mental being, the Mind-Purusha, into the realm of living Matter in order to take up the vital-mental energy already at work and lift it into a higher mentality. But this would still be a process of evolution, the higher plane only intervening to assist the appearance and enlargement of its own principle in terrestrial Nature.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 839-40
  --
  But now that we are on the threshold of the new transformation, the new Emergence as it is called here, and now that we are going to witness the process of transformation between the human mental being and the supramental being, we shall profit by this historical ability of the mind which will follow what happens and take note of it. So, from that point of view also, the phenomenon which is taking place now is absolutely unique in the history of the earth, and probablyalmost certainlywhen we have followed the process of this transformation to the very end, we shall have the key to all the former transformations; that is, everything that we are trying to understand at present, we shall know for certain when the process is repeated, this time between the mental and the supramental being.
  You are therefore invited to a very special development of the capacity for observation, so that all this may not take place in a half-dream and you awaken to a new life without even knowing how things have happened.

1958-03-19 - General tension in humanity - Peace and progress - Perversion and vision of transformation, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    Next, it may be conceded that each type or pattern of consciousness and being in the body, once established, has to be faithful to the law of being of that type, to its own design and rule of nature. But it may also very well be that part of the law of the human type is its impulse towards self-exceeding, that the means for a conscious transition has been provided for among the spiritual powers of man; the possession of such a capacity may be a part of the plan on which the creative Energy has built him. It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending,there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make a more and more complex and plastic use of his capacities. It cannot truly be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since mans appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations, however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in mans achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavour, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking. There have been falls from a high type of culture, a sharp temporary descent into a certain obscurantism, cessations of the spiritual urge, plunges into a barbaric natural materialism; but these are temporary phenomena, at worst a downward curve of the spiral of progress. This progress has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive Emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution. If it be supposed that her next step is the spiritual and supramental being, the stress of spirituality in the race may be taken as a sign that that is Natures intention, the sign too of the capacity of man to operate in himself or aid her to operate the transition. If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 841-42

1958-05-28 - The Avatar, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    It is quite true that to a surface view Life seems only an operation of Matter, Mind an activity of Life, and it might seem to follow that what we call the soul or spirit is only a power of mentality, soul a fine form of Mind, spirituality a high activity of the embodied mental being. But this is a superficial view of things due to the thoughts concentrating on the appearance and process and not looking at what lies behind the process. One might as well on the same lines have concluded that electricity is only a product or operation of water and cloud matter, because it is in such a field that lightning emerges; but a deeper inquiry has shown that both cloud and water have, on the contrary, the energy of electricity as their foundation, their constituent power or energy-substance: that which seems to be a result is,in its reality, though not in its form,the origin; the effect is in the essence pre-existent to the apparent cause, the principle of the emergent activity precedent to its present field of action. So it is throughout evolutionary Nature; Matter could not have become animate if the principle of Life had not been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of Life-in-Matter; Life-in-Matter could not have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the principle of Mind had not been there behind life and substance, constituting it as its field of operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and body: so too spirituality emerging in Mind is the sign of a power which itself has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this Emergence will go, whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a subsequent question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of Spirit as something else than Mind and greater than Mind, spirituality as something other than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as something distinct from the mental being: Spirit is a final evolutionary Emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme Emergence.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 852-53

1958-06-11 - Is there a spiritual being in everybody?, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    When there is the decisive Emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being, knows all that is in itself in the same way, by identity with it, begins even to see all that to our mind seems external in the same manner, by a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness which envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the object, is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is, then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our surface mental personality.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 855

1958-06-25 - Sadhana in the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    In the very nature of things all evolution must proceed at first by a slow unfolding; for each new principle that evolves its powers has to make its way out of an involution in Inconscience and Ignorance. It has a difficult task in pulling itself out of the involution, out of the hold of the obscurity of the original medium, against the pull and strains, the instinctive opposition and obstruction of the Inconscience and the hampering mixture and blind obstinate retardations of the Ignorance. Nature affirms at first a vague urge and tendency which is a sign of the push of the occult, subliminal, submerged reality towards the surface; there are then small half-suppressed hints of the thing that is to be, imperfect beginnings, crude elements, rudimentary appearances, small, insignificant, hardly recognisable quanta. Afterwards there are small or large formations; a more characteristic and recognisable quality begins to show itself, first partially, here and there or in a low intensity, then more vivid, more formative; finally, there is the decisive Emergence, a reversal of the consciousness, the beginning of the possibility of its radical change: but still much has to be done in every direction, a long and difficult growth towards perfection lies before the evolutionary endeavour. The thing done has not only to be confirmed, secured against relapse and the downward gravitation, against failure and extinction, but opened out into all the fields of its possibilities, its totality of entire self-achievement, its utmost height, subtlety, riches, wideness; it has to become dominant, all-embracing, comprehensive. This is everywhere the process of Nature and to ignore it is to miss the intention in her works and get lost in the maze of her procedure.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 862-63

1960 01 20, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo tells us that what is termed a hallucination is the reflection in the mind or the physical senses of that which is beyond our mind and our ordinary senses; it is therefore not a direct vision, but a reflected image which is usually not understood or explained. This character of uncertainty produces an impression of unreality and gives rise to all kinds of superstition. This is also why serious people, or people who think themselves serious, do not accord any value to these phenomena and call them hallucinations. And yet, in those who are interested in occult phenomena, this type of perception often precedes the Emergence of the capacity of vision which may be in course of formation. But you must guard against mistaking this for true vision. For, I repeat, these phenomena occur most often in a state of almost complete ignorance and are too frequently accompanied by much error and wrong interpretation; not to mention the cases of unscrupulous people, who introduce into the account they give of their experiences many details and particulars not actually there, thus justifying the discredit with which these phenomena are received by rational and thoughtful people.
   So we shall reserve the word vision for experiences that occur in awareness and sincerity. Nevertheless, in both cases, in hallucination as well as in vision, what is seen does correspond to something quite real, although it is sometimes much deformed in the transcription.

1f.lovecraft - Out of the Aeons, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   petrifying Emergence of Ghatanothoa out of its unknown burrows.
   There were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under
  --
   shivering at the notion of a latter-day Emergence of the monstrous god,
   and at the picture of an humanity turned suddenly to a race of abnormal
  --
   Emergence of some object from below. The object should have been
   clearly visibleindeed, must have been when the eyes first opened

1f.lovecraft - The Shadow over Innsmouth, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
   I could not, I decided, risk an Emergence into the corridor; where my
   footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering

1.ia - With My Very Own Hands, #Arabi - Poems, #Ibn Arabi, #Sufism
  All with a firm, well established Emergence, to which I may trace
  my antecedents with confidence.

1.rb - Sordello - Book the Third, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
  "And scheme against the next Emergence, I
  "To covet her Taurello-sprite, made fly

2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Actually to our Science this infinite or indeterminate Existence reveals itself as an Energy, known not by itself but by its works, which throws up in its motion waves of energism and in them a multitude of infinitesimals; these, grouping themselves to form larger infinitesimals, become a basis for all the creations of the Energy, even those farthest away from the material basis, for the Emergence of a world of organised Matter, for the Emergence of Life, for the Emergence of Consciousness, for all the still unexplained activities of evolutionary Nature. On the original process are erected a multitude of processes which we can observe, follow, can take advantage of many of them, utilise; but they are none of them, fundamentally, explicable. We know now that different groupings and a varying number of electric infinitesimals can produce or serve as the constituent occasion - miscalled the cause, for here there seems to be only a necessary antecedent condition - for the appearance of larger atomic infinitesimals of different natures, qualities, powers; but we fail to discover how these different dispositions can come to constitute these different atoms, - how the differentiae in the constituent occasion or cause necessitate the differentiae in the constituted outcome or result. We know also that certain combinations of certain invisible atomic infinitesimals produce or occasion new and visible determinations quite different in nature, quality and power from the constituent infinitesimals; but we fail to discover, for instance, how a fixed formula for the combination of oxygen and hydrogen comes to determine the appearance of water which is evidently something more than a combination of gases, a new creation, a new form of substance, a material manifestation of a quite new character. We see that a seed develops into a tree, we follow the line of the process of production and we utilise it; but we do not discover how a tree can grow out of a seed, how the life and form of the tree come to be implied in the substance or energy of the seed or, if that be rather the fact, how the seed can develop into a tree. We know that genes and chromosomes are the cause of hereditary transmissions, not only of physical but of psychological variations; but we do not discover how psychological characteristics can be contained and transmitted in this inconscient material vehicle. We do not see or know, but it is expounded to us as a cogent account of Nature-process, that a play of electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such material movements could have composed or necessitated the composition of these highest points of thought and literature: the divergence here of the determinants and the determination becomes so wide that we are no longer able to follow the process, much less understand or utilise. These formulae of Science may be pragmatically correct and infallible, they may govern the practical how of Nature's processes, but they do not disclose the intrinsic how or why; rather they have the air of the formulae of a cosmic Magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible.
  There is more to perplex us; for we see the original indeterminate Energy throwing out general determinates of itself, - we might equally in their relation to the variety of their products call them generic indeterminates, - with their appropriate states of substance and determined forms of that substance: the latter are numerous, sometimes innumerable variations on the substance-energy which is their base: but none of these variations seems to be predetermined by anything in the nature of the general indeterminate. An electric Energy produces positive, negative, neutral forms of itself, forms that are at once waves and particles; a gaseous state of energy-substance produces a considerable number of different gases; a solid state of energysubstance from which results the earth principle develops into different forms of earth and rock of many kinds and numerous minerals and metals; a life principle produces its vegetable kingdom teeming with a countless foison of quite different plants, trees, flowers; a principle of animal life produces an enormous variety of genus, species, individual variations: so it proceeds into human life and mind and its mind-types towards the still unwritten end or perhaps the yet occult sequel of that unfinished evolutionary chapter. Throughout there is the constant rule of a general sameness in the original determinate and, subject to this substantial sameness of basic substance and nature, a profuse variation in the generic and individual determinates; an identical law obtains of sameness or similarity in the genus or species with numerous variations often meticulously minute in the individual. But we do not find anything in any general or generic determinate necessitating the variant determinations that result from it. A necessity of immutable sameness at the base, of free and unaccountable variations on the surface seems to be the law; but who or what necessitates or determines? What is the rationale of the determination, what is its original truth or its significance? What compels or impels this exuberant play of varying possibilities which seem to have no aim or meaning unless it be the beauty or delight of creation? A Mind, a seeking and curious inventive Thought, a hidden determining Will might be there, but there is no trace of it in the first and fundamental appearance of material Nature.
  --
  Mechanical Necessity can give no answer. Again the Emergence of consciousness out of the Inconscient is a stumbling-block in the way of this theory; for it is a phenomenon which can have no place in an all-pervading truth of inconscient mechanical Necessity. If there is a necessity which compels the Emergence, it can be only this, that there is already a consciousness concealed in the Inconscient, waiting for evolution and when all is ready breaking out from its prison of apparent Nescience. We may indeed get rid of the difficulty of the imperative order of things by supposing that it does not exist, that determinism in Nature is imposed on it by our thought which needs such an imperative order to enable it to deal with its surroundings, but in reality there is no such thing; there is only a Force experimenting in a random action of infinitesimals which build up in their general results different determinations by a repetitive persistence operative in the sum of their action; thus we go back from Necessity to Chance as the basis of our existence. But what then is this Mind, this Consciousness which differs so radically from the Energy that produced it that for its action it has to impose its idea and need of order on the world she has made and in which it is obliged to live? There would then be the double contradiction of consciousness emerging from a fundamental Inconscience and of a Mind of order and reason manifesting as the brilliant final consequence of a world created by inconscient Chance. These things may be possible, but they need a better explanation than any yet given before we can accord to them our acceptance.
  This opens the way for other explanations which make Consciousness the creator of this world out of an apparent original Inconscience. A Mind, a Will seems to have imagined and organised the universe, but it has veiled itself behind its creation; its first erection has been this screen of an inconscient Energy and a material form of substance, at once a disguise of its presence and a plastic creative basis on which it could work as an artisan uses for his production of forms and patterns a dumb and obedient material. All these things we see around us are then the thoughts of an extra-cosmic Divinity, a Being with an omnipotent and omniscient Mind and Will, who is responsible for the mathematical law of the physical universe, for its artistry of beauty, for its strange play of samenesses and variations, of concordances and discords, of combining and intermingling opposites, for the drama of consciousness struggling to exist and seeking to affirm itself in an inconscient universal order. The fact that this Divinity is invisible to us, undiscoverable by our mind and senses, offers no difficulty, since self-evidence or direct sign of an extra-cosmic Creator could not be expected in a cosmos which is void of his presence: the patent signals everywhere of the works of an Intelligence, of law, design, formula, adaptation of means to end, constant and inexhaustible invention, fantasy even but restrained by an ordering Reason might be considered sufficient proof of this origin of things. Or if this Creator is not entirely supracosmic, but is also immanent in his works, even then there need be no other sign of him, - except indeed to some consciousness evolving in this inconscient world, but only when its evolution reached a point at which it could become aware of the indwelling Presence. The intervention of this evolving consciousness would not be a difficulty, since there would be no contradiction of the basic nature of things in its appearance; an omnipotent Mind could easily infuse something of itself into its creatures. One difficulty remains; it is the arbitrary nature of the creation, the incomprehensibility of its purpose, the crude meaninglessness of its law of unnecessary ignorance, strife and suffering, its ending without a denouement or issue. A play? But why this stamp of so many undivine elements and characters in the play of One whose nature must be supposed to be divine?

2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  any material vestige of this Emergence of the microscopic from
  the molecular, of the organic from the chemical, of the living
  --
  could form the necessary basis for the Emergence of life. That,
  too, must have taken a very long time.
  --
  precedes the Emergence of life, especially if we accept it, such an
  awakening or jump (i) could, or, better, (ii) was bound to, happen,
  --
  very few points of Emergence, or again, we must add, because of
  regional differences (climatic or chemical) in the earth's watery
  --
  apparently because the very Emergence of a biosphere so dis-
  turbed, impoverished and relaxed the primordial chemism of

2.01 - The Attributes of Omega Point - a Transcendent God, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  in process of Emergence. (A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 119.)
  Multiplicity ascends, attracted and engulfed by something

2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If we look at things from a larger point of view, we might say that what is impersonal is only a power of the Person: existence itself has no meaning without an Existent, consciousness has no standing-place if there is none who is conscious, delight is useless and invalid without an enjoyer, love can have no foundation or fulfilment if there is no lover, all-power must be otiose if there is not an Almighty. For what we mean by Person is conscious being; even if this emerges here as a term or product of the Inconscient, it is not that in reality: for it is the Inconscient itself that is a term of the secret Consciousness; what emerges is greater than that in which it emerges, as Mind is greater than Matter, Soul than Mind; Spirit, most secret of all, the supreme Emergence, the last revelation, is the greatest of all, and Spirit is the Purusha, the All-Person, the omnipresent Conscious Being. It is the mind's ignorance of this true Person in us, its confusion of person with our experience of ego and limited personality, the misleading phenomenon of the Emergence of limited consciousness and personality in an inconscient existence that have made us create an opposition between these two aspects of the Reality, but in truth there is no opposition. An eternal infinite self-existence is the supreme reality, but the supreme transcendent eternal Being, Self and Spirit, - an infinite Person, we may say, because his being is the essence and source of all personality, - is the reality and meaning of self-existence: so too the cosmic Self, Spirit, Being, Person is the reality and meaning of cosmic existence; the same Self, Spirit, Being or Person manifesting its multiplicity is the reality and meaning of individual existence.
  If we admit the Divine Being, the supreme Person and AllPerson as the Ishwara, a difficulty arises in understanding his rule or government of world-existence, because we immediately transfer to him our mental conception of a human ruler; we picture him as acting by the mind and mental will in an omnipotent arbitrary fashion upon a world on which he imposes his mental conceptions as laws, and we conceive of his will as a free caprice of his personality. But there is no need for the Divine Being to act by an arbitrary will or idea as an omnipotent yet ignorant human being - if such an omnipotence were possible - might do: for he is not limited by mind; he has an all-consciousness in which he is aware of the truth of all things and aware of his own all-wisdom working them out according to the truth that is in them, their significance, their possibility or necessity, the imperative selfness of their nature. The Divine is free and not bound by laws of any making, but still he acts by laws and processes because they are the expression of the truth of things, - not their mechanical, mathematical or other outward truth alone, but the spiritual reality of what they are, what they have become and have yet to become, what they have it within themselves to realise. He is himself present in the working, but he also exceeds and can overrule it; for on one side Nature works according to her limited complex of formulas and is informed and supported in their execution by the Divine Presence, but on the other side there is an overseeing, a higher working and determination, even an intervention, free but not arbitrary, often appearing to us magical and miraculous because it proceeds and acts upon Nature from a divine Supernature: Nature here is a limited expression of that Supernature and open to intervention or mutation by its light, its force, its influence. The mechanical, mathematical, automatic law of things is a fact, but within it there is a spiritual law of consciousness at work which gives to the mechanical steps of Nature's forces an inner turn and value, a significant rightness and a secretly conscious necessity, and above it there is a spiritual freedom that knows and acts in the supreme and universal truth of the Spirit. Our view of the divine government of the world or of the secret of its action is either incurably anthropomorphic or else incurably mechanical; both the anthropomorphism and mechanism have their elements of truth, but they are only a side, an aspect, and the real truth is that the world is governed by the One in all and over all who is infinite in his consciousness and it is according to the law and logic of an infinite consciousness that we ought to understand the significance and building and movement of the universe.

2.02 - THE EXPANSION OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  At this level we are witnessing the Emergence of an animal
  group from the waters in which it was nourished and formed.
  --
  Darwinians) or of invention (the Nco-Lamarckians) in the Emergence of new
  characters. But on the general and fundamental fact that organic evolution

2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  the primordial Emergence of organised matter marked a critical
  point on the curve of this evolution.

2.03 - The Christian Phenomenon and Faith in the Incarnation, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  and give themselves to one another - the Emergence, under
  the influence of grace, of theological Faith. (A.E. (Oeuvres

2.03 - The Mother-Complex, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  tual development is often accompanied by the Emergence of
  masculine traits in general.

2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But if, accepting this side of Nature, we say that all things are fixed in their statutory and stationary law of being, and man too must be fixed in his imperfections, his ignorance and sin and weakness and vileness and suffering, our life loses its true significance. Man's perpetual attempt to arise out of the darkness and insufficiency of his nature can then have no issue in the world itself, in life itself; its one issue, if there is any, must be by an escape out of life, out of the world, out of his human existence and therefore out of its eternally unsatisfactory law of imperfect being, either into a heaven of the gods or of God or into the pure ineffability of the Absolute. If so, man can never really deliver out of the ignorance and falsehood the truth and knowledge, out of the evil and ugliness the good and beauty, out of the weakness and vileness the power and glory, out of the grief and suffering the joy and delight which are contained in the Spirit behind them and of which these contradictions are the first adverse and contrary conditions of Emergence. All he can do is to cut the imperfections away from him and overpass too their balancing opposites, imperfect also, - leave with the ignorance the human knowledge, with the evil the human good, with the weakness the human strength and power, with the strife and suffering the human love and joy; for these are
  424

2.05 - Habit 3 Put First Things First, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
  Habit 3, then, is the second creation -- the physical creation. It's the fulfillment, the actualization, the natural Emergence of Habits 1 and 2. It's the exercise of independent will toward becoming principle-centered. It's the day-in, day-out, moment-by-moment doing it.
  Habits 1 and 2 are absolutely essential and prerequisite to Habit 3. You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of and developing your own proactive nature. You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of your paradigms and understanding how to shift them and align them with principles. You can't become principle-centered without a vision of and a focus on the unique contri bution that is yours to make.

2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Truth or a divine Possibility in which under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a necessary factor, and if the arrangement of this universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards Knowledge, of the imperfect manifestation to grow into perfection, of the frustration to serve as steps towards a final victory, of the suffering to prepare an Emergence of the divine Delight of Being. In that case the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experience needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to bring in the fiat of an arbitrary
  Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless

2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   support of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya. As a man in deep sleep passes into dreams in which he experiences self-constructed unstable structures of name, form, relation, happenings, and in the waking state externalises himself in the more apparently stable but yet transient structures of the physical consciousness, so the Self develops out of a state of massed consciousness its subjective and its objective cosmic experience. But the waking state is not a true waking from this original and causal sleep; it is only a full Emergence into a gross external and objective sense of the positive reality of objects of consciousness as opposed to the subtle subjective dreamawareness of those objects: the true waking is a withdrawal from both objective and subjective consciousness and from the massed causal Intelligence into the superconscience superior to all consciousness; for all consciousness and all unconsciousness is Maya. Here, we may say, Maya is real because it is the self's experience of the Self, something of the Self enters into it, is affected by its happenings because it accepts them, believes in them, they are to it real experiences, creations out of its conscious being; but it is unreal because it is a sleep state, a dream state, an eventually transient waking state, not the true status of the superconscient Reality. Here there is no actual dichotomy of being itself, but there is a multiplicity of status of the one
  Being; there is no original dual consciousness implying a Will in the Uncreated to create illusory things out of non-existence, but there is One Being in states of superconscience and consciousness each with its own nature of self-experience. But the lower states, although they have a reality, are yet qualified by a building and seeing of subjective self-constructions which are not the Real.
  --
  The Brahman becomes all these beings; all beings must be seen in the Self, the Reality, and the Reality must be seen in them, the Reality must be seen as being actually all these beings; for not only the Self is Brahman, but all is the Self, all this that is is the Brahman, the Reality. That emphatic asseveration leaves no room for an illusory Maya; but still the insistent denial that there is anything other than or separate from the experiencing self, certain phrases used and the description of two of the states of consciousness as sleep and dream may be taken as if they annulled the emphasis on the universal Reality; these passages open the gates to the illusionist idea and have been made the foundation for an uncompromising system of that nature. If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into Emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.
  In fact, if we can judge from the description of the three lower states of Self as the all-wise Intelligence,5 the Seer of the subtle and the Seer of the gross material existence, this sleep state and this dream state seem to be figurative names for the superconscient and the subliminal which are behind and beyond our waking status; they are so named and figured because it is through dream and sleep - or trance which can be regarded
  --
  All manifestation depends upon being, but also upon consciousness and its power or degree; for as is the status of consciousness, so will be the status of being. Even the Inconscient is a status and power of involved consciousness in which being is plunged into another and opposite state of nonmanifestation resembling non-existence so that out of it all in the material universe may be manifested; so too the superconscient is consciousness taken up into an absolute of being. For there is a superconscient status in which consciousness seems to be luminously involved in being and as if unaware of itself; all consciousness of being, all knowledge, self-vision, force of being, seem to emerge from that involved state or to appear in it: this Emergence, in our view of it, may appear to be an Emergence into a lesser reality, but in fact both the superconscience and the consciousness are and regard the same Real. There is also a status of the Supreme in which no distinction can be made between being and consciousness, - for they are too much one there to be thus differentiated, - but this supreme status of being is also a supreme status of the power of being and therefore of the power of consciousness; for the force of being and the force of its consciousness are one there and cannot be separated: it is this unification of eternal Being with the eternal
  Consciousness-Force that is the status of the supreme Ishwara, and its force of being is the dynamis of the Absolute. This status is not a negation of cosmos; it carries in itself the essence and power of all cosmic existence.

2.07 - The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This is the plenitude of the supreme divine self-knowledge; it is also the plenitude of the divine all-knowledge. Next, at the other pole of things, we see this consciousness dwelling upon apparent oppositions in itself, and the most extreme antinomy of all reaches its acme in what seems to us to be a complete nescience of itself, an effective, dynamic, creative Inconscience, though we know that this is merely a surface appearance and that the divine Knowledge works with a sovereign security and sureness within the operations of the Inconscient. Between these two oppositions and as a mediary term we see Consciousness working with a partial, limited self-awareness which is equally superficial, for behind it and acting through it is the divine AllKnowledge. Here in its intermediate status, it seems to be a standing compromise between the two opposites, between the supreme Consciousness and the Nescience, but may prove rather in a larger view of our data to be an incomplete Emergence of the Knowledge to the surface. This compromise or imperfect Emergence we call the Ignorance, from our own point of view, because ignorance is our own characteristic way of the soul's self-withholding of complete self-knowledge. The origin of these three poises of the power of consciousness and their exact relation is what we have, if possible, to discover.
  If we discovered that Ignorance and Knowledge were two independent powers of Consciousness, it might then be that we would have to pursue their difference up to the highest point

2.08 - The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  What takes their place ? It may be, if we will, an entire calm, silence and indifference. But although this is a stage through which the soul has usually to pass, it is not the final aim we have placed before us. Therefore the Purusha becomes also the master who wills and whose will it is to replace wrong by right enjoyment of the psychic existence. What he wills. Nature executes. What was fabric-stuff of desire and passion, is turned into reality of pure, equal and calmly intense love and joy and oneness. The real soul emerges and takes the place left vacant by the desire-mind. The cleansed and emptied cup is filled with the wine of divine love and delight and no longer with the sweet and bitter poison of passion. The passions, even the passion for good, misrepresent the divine nature. 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 which sees, understands, accepts the burden of others and is strong to help and heal, not with self-will and revolt against the suffering in the world and with ignorant accusation of the law of things and their source, but with light and knowledge and as an instrument of the Divine in its Emergence. So too the love that desires and grasps and is troubled with joy and shaken with grief must be rejected for the equal, all-embracing love that is free from these things and has no dependence upon circumstances and is not modified by response or absence of response. So we shall deal with all the movements of the soul; but of these things we shall speak farther when we consider the Yoga of self-perfection.
  As with action and inaction, so it is with this dual possibility of indifference and calm on the one side and active joy and love on the other. Equality, not indifference is the basis. Equal endurance, impartial indifference, calm submission to the causes of joy and grief without any reaction of either grief or joy are the preparation and negative basis of equality; but equality is not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight. The sense-mind must find the equal rasa of the All-Beautiful, the heart the equal love and Ananda for all, the psychic Prana the enjoyment of this rasa, love and Ananda. This, however, is the positive perfection that comes by liberation; our first object on the path of knowledge is rather the liberation that comes by detachment from the desire-mind and by the renunciation of its passions.

2.1.01 - God The One Reality, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  [ . . . ] & hope to get [out] of it into some other supraterrestrial state of existence. Human life on earth can then never grow into anything fundamentally other, better or more perfect than it is now. The hope that by using our reason and observing or utilising the laws of Nature we can arrive at a perfect life here is futile, for our nature here being itself ignorant and imperfect cannot arrive at anything better than a mitigated imperfection and ignorance. But if there is a means by which we can arrive at a true knowledge of the reality behind things and enter into its Truth and Light and Power then there is no reason why our life here should not become divine and perfect. It is through Yoga that this means can be found and this Emergence become possible.
  A greater existence and consciousness than what we are now or are in our surface being, to which yet we can by certain means raise ourself and become or enter into that, - this is the postulate of all Yoga.

2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Cosmic Spirit which sees things as a whole, the working out of this universe or any universe is self-justified, the obscure labour of the Emergence no less than the glory of its completion and final perfection in a yet unattained light, bliss and greatness.
  At any rate into this world of evolution something of the eternal spirit has thrown itself, with all in it that consented to the descent and to fulfil the world, not to escape from it, is the deepest meaning of the Spirit and Godhead within us and the universe.
  --
  It is a scene arranged, a drama played by the One Person with his own multitudinous personalities in his own impersonal existence, - a game, a plan worked out in the vast and plastic substance of his own world-being. He plays with the powers and forces of his Nature a game of Emergence from the inconscient Self out of which all here began, through the mixed and imperfect consciousness which is all we have now reached, towards a supreme consciousness, a divine nature.
  This we cannot now know; our eyes are fixed on a partial outer manifestation which we see and call the universe - though even now we see and know very little of it or about it, know
  --
  Inconscience were not there, the evolutionary Emergence of the
  Self which is the law and object of this universe would not have been possible; all would have flowered into a manifestation too immediate, too irresistibly powerful in its process, too absolute.
  --
  It is an All-consciousness that is working, the force of a selfaware cosmic Spirit, and the Emergence of its secret powers is implied in the very nature of existence; therefore the result is inevitable.
  Science has discovered a physical evolution hidden in the past history of the earth of which the living record remains in the embryo; but the physical evolution is only an outward sign, means and material condition of a still more secret evolution.
  --
  These two discoveries seem at first sight quite unconnected and disparate. In one it is a physical Life in the cosmos that evolves and the individual is only an ephemeral member of the species, the species a means of this cosmic evolution. Mind is indeed the term and the mental human being the crown of this inexplicable Emergence; when human progress is over, when the race decays and perishes, the cosmic evolution will be at an
  Man and Superman
  --
   end, for it has nothing more then it can do. In man it has shot its bolt; nothing more is possible. Consciousness emerging out of the Inconscient has achieved this shoddy and splendid, this winging and limping miracle of the ever-seeking creative Mind of Man and sinks back into the Inconscient; its Emergence had no discoverable significance, its brief play and cessation make no difference to the meaningless rounds of an inconscient universe.
  In the Indian view it is the individual that evolves from birth to birth and the hierarchy of the vegetal, animal, human kinds [is] a fixed unchanging ladder for its ascent. A successive creation of higher and higher species is envisaged in the Upanishads as well as the Puranas and heredity affirmed as a means of conscious continuity of the human embodiment of the Spirit, but still the evolution is individual and not cosmic, spiritual not physical. Yet here too this persistent phenomenon of spiritual embodiment appearing from the bodiless Spirit and evolving back into the bodiless Spirit seems to be devoid of significance.
  If stripped of their limitations the two discoveries can be regarded as complementary rather than disparate. There is evidently an evolution; Matter first manifests out of the Formless - inanimate in appearance; in Matter life manifests unconscious in appearance; in life mind manifests in the animal but instinctive and irrational in appearance; in life-mind thinking mind appears rational but yet self-ignorant in appearance, - for it seeks to know but yet does not know the secret and significance of its own existence. It is not yet undisputed but it is affirmed that in thinking man spirit is moving towards manifestation, spirit aware of itself and of its own secret and significance. Thus far at least an evolution is indisputable and we may affirm without hesitation that there is a cosmic Existence here which first achieves a material manifestation of itself or a manifestation in itself, a material formula, then on that basis a life formulation, a vital formula, on that again a mental formulation, a mind formula. It is possible that on that again it is preparing a spiritual formulation of self-affirmation and self-knowledge which will complete the Emergence.
  There is also very evidently an evolution of forms, generic
  --
   and individual in the genus and species, which enables the formulation to be effective, each in its own kind, organised so as to express more and more definite and superior possibilities of matter, more and more definite and superior possibilities of life, more and more definite and superior possibilities of mind, - more than this cannot yet be positively asserted, but this much is asseverable. If we can add that in the mental formula, in the mentalised life and body of man, a spiritual Emergence is in process which has not yet reached its full possibility and that possibility is the Emergence of the spiritual man or supramental being, then the object of the physical evolution and its significance becomes clear. The evolution of bodies is only a means for the evolution of consciousness and the spiritual formulation will be that in which the cosmic Existence will find its own full affirmation, manifest through the original veil of Matter its selfawareness, self-knowledge, self-realisation. The Cosmic Spirit hidden in the Inconscience is then the Alpha, its manifestation in the consciousness of spiritualised man the Omega.
  The Stages of Evolution
  --
  The Emergence of the Superman
  A god has veiled himself in the earth & mire and beauty and perfection lie unevolved in masses of ordure. This is the play of
  --
  This is our way of Emergence from the now dark riddle of the earth and unsolved problem of human life. If there were not this secret sense in all we are and do, there would be no significance in the material world and no justification for our earth-existence.
  A gnostic superman is the future master of the earth and rescuer of the divine meaning out of the ambiguous terms of this great world-enigma.
  --
  This ignorant, imperfect and divided being, with his labouring uncertain thought and half-successful will, this toiling and fluctuating experiment, this field of the attempt at Emergence of a thousand things that are striving to be, is no consummation of the struggle of cosmic Force; he is only a laboratory in which
  Nature seeks for its own concealed secret, makes tentative efforts at what she has been missioned to achieve.
  --
  Man may himself become the superman, he may become all that he is not now; but for that he must exceed himself. It is not by clinging to his present imperfect consciousness that he can take the next step in the evolution. He must discover and release the spiritual godhead within him, realise his divine possibilities, be himself the giant potential something, the divine someone who has been struggling into Emergence out of the original plasm that imprisoned it since began the mystery of terrestrial Nature.
  Man cannot be final, he is a transitional being. This is very clear from the incompleteness and imperfection of all his powers of consciousness; he can only arrive at some limited form of temporary and unstable perfection by much labour and struggle; and yet the search for perfection is ingrained in his nature. There is something that he is not yet which he has to be; he is reaching always towards the something yet unrealised; his whole life and nature is a preparation, an endeavour of Nature towards what is beyond him.

2.10 - Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  We can, in this knowledge, understand more clearly the stages of the Emergence of consciousness from involution to its evolved appearance, of which we have already attempted some general conception. The material existence has only a physical, not a mental individuality, but there is a subliminal
  Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge
  --
  We see then all the powers inherent in the original selfexistent spiritual Awareness slowly brought out and manifested in this growing separative consciousness; they are activities suppressed but native to the secret and involved knowledge by identity and they now emerge by degrees in a form strangely diminished and tentative. First, there emerges a crude or veiled sense which develops into precise sensations aided by a vital instinct or concealed intuition; then a life-mind perception manifests and at its back an obscure consciousness-sight and feeling of things; emotion vibrates out and seeks an interchange with others; last arises to the surface conception, thought, reason comprehending and apprehending the object, combining its data of knowledge. But all are incomplete, still maimed by the separative ignorance and the first obscuring inconscience; all are dependent on the outward means, not empowered to act in their own right: consciousness cannot act directly on consciousness; there is a constructive envelopment and penetration of things by the mind consciousness, but not a real possession; there is no knowledge by identity. Only when the subliminal is able to force upon the frontal mind and sense some of its secret activities pure and untranslated into the ordinary forms of mental intelligence, does a rudimentary action of the deeper methods lift itself to the surface; but such Emergences are still an exception, they strike across the normality of our acquired and learned knowledge with a savour of the abnormal and the supernormal. It is only by an opening to our inner being or an entry into it that a direct intimate awareness can be added to the outer indirect awareness.
  It is only by our awakening to our inmost soul or superconscient self that there can be a beginning of the spiritual knowledge with identity as its basis, its constituent power, its intrinsic substance.

2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Self, even the individual self, is different from our personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our personality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various combination. It is not a basic consciousness, but a development of forms of consciousness, -- not a power of being, but a various play of partial powers of being, -- not the enjoyer of the self-delight of our existence, but a seeking after various notes and tones of experience which shall more or less render that delight in the mutability of relations. This also is Purusha and Brahman, but it is the mutable Purusha, the phenomenon of the Eternal, not its stable reality. The Gita makes a distinction between three Purushas who constitute the whole state and action of the divine Being, the Mutable, the Immutable and the Highest which is beyond and embraces the other two. That Highest is the Lord in whom we have to live, the supreme Self in us and in all. The Immutable is the silent, actionless, equal, unchanging self which we reach when we draw back from activity to passivity, from the play of consciousness and force and the seeking of delight to the pure and constant basis of consciousness and force and delight through which the Highest, free, secure and unattached possesses and enjoys the play. The Mutable is the substance and immediate motive of that changing flux of personality through which the relations of our cosmic life are made possible. The mental being fixed in the Mutable moves in its flux and has not possession of an eternal peace and power and self-delight; the soul fixed in the Immutable holds all these in itself but cannot act in the world; but the soul that can live in the Highest enjoys the eternal peace and power and delight and wideness of being, is not bound in its self-knowledge and self-power by character and personality or by forms of its force and habits of its consciousness and yet uses them all with a large freedom and power for the self-expression of the Divine in the world. Here again the change is not any alteration of the essential modes of the Self, but consists in our Emergence into the freedom of the Highest and the right use of the divine law of our being.
  Connected with this triple mode of the Self is that distinction which Indian philosophy has drawn between the Qualitied and the Qualityless Brahman and European thought has made between the Personal and the Impersonal God. The Upanishad indicates clearly enough the relative nature of this opposition, when it speaks of the Supreme as the "Qualitied who is without qualities"363. We have again two essential modes, two fundamental aspects, two poles of eternal being, both of them exceeded in the transcendent divine Reality. They correspond practically to the Silent and the Active Brahman. For the whole action of the universe may be regarded from a certain point of view as the expression and shaping out in various ways of the numberless and infinite qualities of the Brahman. His being assumes by conscious Will all kinds of properties, shapings of the stuff of conscious being, habits as it were of cosmic character and power of dynamic self-consciousness, gunas, into which all the cosmic action can be resolved. But by none of these nor by all of them nor by their utmost infinite potentiality is He bound; He is above all His qualities and on a certain plane of being rests free from them. The Nirguna or Unqualitied is not incapable of qualities, rather it is this very Nirguna or No-Quality who manifests Himself as Saguna, as Ananta-guna, infinite quality, since He contains all in His absolute capacity of boundlessly varied self-revelation. He is free from them in the sense of exceeding them; and indeed if He were not free from .them they could not be infinite; God would be subject to His qualities, bound by His nature, prakriti would be supreme and Purusha its creation and plaything. The Eternal is bound neither by quality nor absence of quality, neither by Personality nor by Impersonality; He is Himself, beyond all our positive and all our negative definitions.

2.1.1 - The Nature of the Vital, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Emergence of the True Vital
  It is through a change in the vital that the deliverance from the blind vital energy must comeby the Emergence of the true vital which is strong, wide, at peace, a willing instrument of the Divine and of the Divine alone.
  ***

2.12 - The Origin of the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Existence and in Nature as well as an activity, immobile status as well as kinesis, what is the place and role of this Force, this power and its concentration in regard to a status where there is no play of energy, where all is immobile. In ourselves we habitually associate our Tapas, our conscious force, with active consciousness, with energy in play and in internal or external act and motion. That which is passive in us produces no action or only an involuntary or mechanical action, and we do not associate it with our will or conscious force; still, since there too there is the possibility of action or the Emergence of an automatic activity, it must have at least a passively responsive or automatic conscious force in it; or there is in it either a secretly positive or a negative and inverse Tapas. It may also be that there is a larger conscious force, power or will in our being unknown to us which is behind this involuntary action, - if not a will, at least a force of some kind which itself initiates action or else responds to the contacts, suggestions, stimulations of the universal Energy. In Nature also we know that things stable, inert or passive are yet maintained in their energy by a secret and unceasing motion, an energy in action upholding the apparent immobility. Here too, then, all is due to the presence of Shakti, to the action of its power in concentration, its Tapas. But beyond this, beyond this relative aspect of status and kinesis, we find that we have the power to arrive at what seems to us an absolute passivity or immobility of our consciousness in which we cease from all mental and physical activity. There seem, then, to be an active consciousness in which consciousness works as an energy throwing up knowledge and activity out of itself and of which therefore Tapas is the character, and a passive consciousness in which consciousness does not act as an energy, but only exists as a status and of which therefore absence of Tapas or force in action is the character. Is the apparent absence of Tapas in this state
  The Origin of the Ignorance

2.13 - Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Force, becomes unaware of Purusha, the Conscious Being, holds him hidden within herself and becomes again slowly aware only with the Emergence of consciousness from this swoon of the
  Inconscience. Purusha indeed consents to assume the apparent form of itself which Prakriti constructs for it; it seems to become the Inconscient, the physical being, the vital being, the mental being: but in all these it remains still in reality itself; the light of the secret conscious Being supports and informs the action of the inconscient or emergingly conscious energy of Nature.

2.14 - The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A second point of questioning emerges from the evidence given for the supraphysical and prephysical existence of these dark opposites: for that suggests that they may be after all original cosmic principles. But it is to be noted that their appearance does not extend higher than the lower supraphysical life-planes; they are "powers of the Prince of Air", - air being in the ancient symbolism the principle of life and therefore of the mid-worlds where the vital principle is predominant and essential. The adverse opposites are not, then, primal powers of the cosmos, but creations of Life or of Mind in life. Their supraphysical aspects and influences on earth-nature can be explained by the coexistence of worlds of a descending involution with parallel worlds of an ascending evolution, not precisely created by earth-existence, but created as an annexe to the descending world-order and a prepared support for the evolutionary terrestrial formations; here evil may appear, not as inherent in all life, but as a possibility and a pre-formation that makes inevitable its formation in the evolutionary Emergence of consciousness out of the Inconscient. However this may be, it is as an outcome
  The Origin of Falsehood and Evil
  --
  The first Emergence from the Inconscient is Matter, and in Matter it would seem that falsehood and evil cannot exist, because both are created by a divided and ignorant surface consciousness and its reactions. There is no such active surface organisation of consciousness, no such reactions in material forces or objects: whatever indwelling secret consciousness there may be in them seems to be one, undifferentiated, mute; inertly inherent and intrinsic in the Energy that constitutes the object, it effectualises and maintains the form by the silent occult Idea in it, but is otherwise self-rapt in the form of energy it has created, uncommunicating and inexpressive. Even if it differentiates itself according to the form of Matter in a corresponding form of self-being, rupam rupam pratirupo babhuva,9 there is no psychological organisation, no system of conscious actions or reactions.
  It is only by contact with conscious beings that material objects exercise powers or influences which can be called good or evil: but that good or evil is determined by the contacted being's sense of help or harm, of benefit or injury from them; these values do not belong to the material object but to some Force that uses it or they are created by the consciousness that contacts it. Fire warms a man or burns him, but that is as involuntarily he meets it or voluntarily uses it; a medicinal herb cures or a poison kills, but the value of good or evil is brought into action by the user: it is to be observed too that a poison can cure as well as kill, a medicine kill or harm as well as cure or benefit. The world of pure Matter is neutral, irresponsible; these values insisted on by the human being do not exist in material Nature: as a superior Nature transcends the duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature falls below it. The question may begin to assume a different aspect if we go behind physical knowledge and accept
  --
  If, then, evil and falsehood are natural products of the Inconscience, automatic results of the evolution of life and mind from it in the processus of the Ignorance, we have to see how they arise, on what they depend for their existence and what is the remedy or escape. In the surface Emergence of mental and vital consciousness from the Inconscience is to be found the process by which these phenomena come into being. Here there are two determining factors, - and it is these that are the efficient cause of the simultaneous Emergence of falsehood and evil. First, there is an underlying, a still occult consciousness and power of inherent knowledge, and there is also an overlying layer of what might be called indeterminate or else ill-formed stuff of vital and physical consciousness; through this obscure difficult medium the emerging mentality has to force its way and has to
  634
  --
   impose itself on it by a constructed and no longer an inherent knowledge, because this stuff is still full of nescience, heavily burdened and enveloped with the inconscience of Matter. Next, the Emergence takes place in a separated form of life which has to affirm itself against a principle of inanimate material inertia and a constant pull of that material inertia towards disintegration and a relapse into the original inanimate Inconscience.
  This separated life-form has also to affirm itself, supported only by a limited principle of association, against an outside world which is, if not hostile to its existence, yet full of dangers and on which it has to impose itself, conquer life-room, arrive at expression and propagation, if it wishes to survive. The result of an Emergence of consciousness in these conditions is the growth of a self-affirming vital and physical individual, a construction of Nature of life and matter with a concealed psychic or spiritual true individual behind it for which Nature is creating this outward means of expression. As mentality increases, this vital and material individual takes the more developed form of a constantly self-affirming mental, vital and physical ego. Our surface consciousness and type of existence, our natural being, has developed its present character under the compulsion of these two initial and basic facts of the evolutionary Emergence.
  In its first appearance consciousness has the semblance of a miracle, a power alien to Matter that manifests unaccountably in a world of inconscient Nature and grows slowly and with difficulty. Knowledge is acquired, created out of nothing as it were, learned, increased, accumulated by an ephemeral ignorant creature in whom at birth it is entirely absent or present only, not as knowledge, but in the form of an inherited capacity proper to the stage of development of this slowly learning ignorance.
  --
  Intrinsically the Emergence of a surface consciousness by force of life contacts is due to the fact that in both subject and object of the contact consciousness-force is already existent in a subliminal latency: when the life-principle is ready, sufficiently sensitive in the subject, the recipient of the contact, this subliminal consciousness emerges in a response to the stimulus which begins to constitute a vital or life mind, the mind of the animal, and then, in the course of the evolution, a thinking intelligence.
  The secret consciousness is rendered into surface sensation and perception, the secret force into surface impulse.
  --
  When human intelligence adds itself to the animal basis, this basis still remains present and active, but it is largely changed, subtilised and uplifted by conscious will and intention; the automatic life of instinct and vital intuition diminishes and cannot keep its original predominant proportion to the self-aware mental intelligence. Intuition becomes less purely intuitive: even when there is still a strong vital intuition, its vital character is concealed by mentalisation, and mental intuition is most often a mixture, not the pure article, for an alloy is added to make it mentally current and serviceable. In the animal also the surface consciousness can obstruct or alter the intuition but, because its capacity is less, it interferes less with the automatic, mechanical or instinctive action of Nature: in mental man when the intuition rises towards the surface, it is caught at once before it reaches and is translated into terms of mind-intelligence with a gloss or mental interpretation added which conceals the origin of the knowledge. Instinct also is deprived of its intuitive character by being taken up and mentalised and by that change becomes less sure, though more assisted, when not replaced, by the plastic power of adaptation of things and self-adaptation proper to the intelligence. The Emergence of mind in life brings an immense increase of the range and capacity of the evolving consciousness-force; but it also brings an immense increase in the range and capacity of error. For evolving mind trails constantly error as
  638
  --
  For the Emergence of the life-ego is, as we have seen, a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective substitute for the true self in our surface experience:
  The Origin of Falsehood and Evil

2.14 - The Passive and the Active Brahman, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Certainly, behind all intelligent action there must be an intelligent will, but it need not be the intelligence or the will of the conscious mind in the actor. In the psychological phenomena of which I have spoken, it is obviously in some of them the will and intelligence of other human beings that uses the organs, in others it is doubtful whether it is an influence or actuation by other beings or the Emergence of a subconscious, subliminal mind or a mixed combination of both these agencies. But in this Yogic status of action by the mere organs, kevalair lhdriyaih, it is the universal intelligence and will of Nature itself working from centres superconscious and subconscious as it acts in the mechanically purposeful energies of plant-life or of the inanimate material form, but here with a living instrument who is the conscious witness of the action and instrumentation. It is a remarkable fact that the speech, writing and intelligent actions of such a state may convey a perfect force of thought, luminous, faultless, logical, inspired, perfectly adapting means to ends, far beyond what the man himself could have done in his old normal poise of mind and will and capacity, yet all the time he himself perceives but does not conceive the thought that comes to him, observes in its works but does not appropriate or use the will that acts through him, witnesses but does not claim as his own the powers which play upon the world through him as through a passive channel. But this phenomenon is not really abnormal or contrary to the general law of things. For do we not see a perfect working of the secret universal Will and Intelligence in the apparently brute (jada) action of material Nature? And it is precisely this universal Will and Intelligence which thus acts through the calm, indifferent and inwardly silent Yogin who offers no obstacle of limited and ignorant personal will and intelligence to its operations. He dwells in the silent Self; he allows the active Brahman to work through his natural instruments, accepting impartially, without participation, the formations of its universal force and knowledge.
  This status of an inner passivity and an outer action independent of each other is a state of entire spiritual freedom. The Yogin, as the Gita says, even in acting does no actions, for it is not he, but universal Nature directed by the Lord of Nature which is at work. He is not bound by his works, nor do they leave any after-effects or consequences in his mind, nor cling to or leave any mark on his soul389a; they vanish and are dissolved389b by their very execution and leave the immutable self unaffected and the soul unmodified. Therefore this would seem to be the poise the uplifted soul ought to take, if it has still to preserve any relations with human action in the world-existence, an unalterable silence, tranquillity, passivity within, an action without, regulated by the universal Will and Wisdom which works, as the Gita says, without being involved in, bound by or ignorantly attached to its works. And certainly this poise of a perfect activity founded upon a perfect inner passivity is that which the Yogin has to possess, as we have seen in the Yoga of Works. But here m this status of self-knowledge at which we have arrived, there is an evident absence of integrality; for there is still a gulf, an unrealised unity or a cleft of consciousness between the passive and the active Brahman. We have still to possess consciously the active Brahman without losing the possession of the silent Self. We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity, passivity as a foundation; but in place of an aloof indifference to the works of the active Brahman we have to arrive at an equal and impartial delight in them; in place of a refusal to participate lest our freedom and peace be lost we have to arrive at a conscious possession of the active Brahman whose joy of existence does not abrogate His peace, nor His lordship of all workings impair His calm freedom in the midst of His works.

2.14 - The Unpacking of God, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
  As we have seen, all depth must be interpreted. And how we interpret depth is crucially important for the birth of that depth itself. New depth allows us new interpretations; the new interpretations cocreate and give birth to that depth, help unpack that depth. Unpacking the depth is the Emergence of that depth.
  And thus, let us oh-so-carefully unpack this precious Gift of spiritual intuition.
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  The pure Eco approach, like its cousin the pure Ego (or pure Self) approach, simply reduces all of Spirit's dimensions to one privileged domain, crippling the full Emergence and descent of Spirit itself. Just as the idea in the pure Self camp is that if we simply contact the Higher Self, all our problems will be solved, so the idea in the pure Eco approach is that if we can just demonstrate, once and for all, the unified and holistic nature of the pure Eco, then that will solve all our problems. That forceful demonstration (that Spinozist proof in objective terms) will itself compel all individuals to transform to ultimate unity, or so it is maintained.
  Thus, the only "interior" change this camp recognizes is the single change from holding an atomistic conception to holding a holistic conception. Because this camp centers on exteriors, it has an incredibly naive and anemic conception of all the inner and interior developments necessary in order to be able to embrace the All. Further, in recognizing only this "single" change from atomistic to holistic concepts, it misses the crucial fact that change of beliefs does not mean change of consciousness. It means simply a new translation, not necessarily a new transformation.

2.15 - Reality and the Integral Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But since it is from the Ignorance that we proceed to the Knowledge, we have had first to discover the secret nature and full extent of the Ignorance. If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, in a spatial and temporal universe, we see that on its obscurer side it reduces itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact of a manysided self-ignorance. We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence, - that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, - that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self, - that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end, - that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence, - that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its Emergence their operations, - that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, - that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.
  Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness: - it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  An involution of spirit in the Inconscience is the beginning; an evolution in the Ignorance with its play of the possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle, and the cause of the anomalies of our present nature, - our imperfection is the sign of a transitional state, a growth not yet completed, an effort that is finding its way; a consummation in a deployment of the spirit's self-knowledge and the self-power of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination: these are the three stages of this cycle of the spirit's progressive self-expression in life. The two stages that have already their play seem at first sight to deny the possibility of the later consummating stage of the cycle, but logically they imply its Emergence; for if the inconscience has evolved consciousness, the partial consciousness already reached must surely evolve into complete consciousness.
  It is a perfected and divinised life for which the earth-nature is seeking, and this seeking is a sign of the Divine Will in Nature.

2.17 - The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  AN INVOLUTION of the Divine Existence, the spiritual Reality, in the apparent inconscience of Matter is the starting-point of the evolution. But that Reality is in its nature an eternal Existence, Consciousness, Delight of Existence: the evolution must then be an Emergence of this Existence,
  Consciousness, Delight of Existence, not at first in its essence or totality but in evolutionary forms that express or disguise it. Out of the Inconscient, Existence appears in a first evolutionary form as substance of Matter created by an inconscient Energy. Consciousness, involved and non-apparent in Matter, first emerges in the disguise of vital vibrations, animate but subconscient; then, in imperfect formulations of a conscient life, it strives towards self-finding through successive forms of that material substance, forms more and more adapted to its own completer expression. Consciousness in life, throwing off the primal insensibility of a material inanimation and nescience, labours to find itself more and more entirely in the Ignorance which is its first inevitable formulation; but it achieves at first only a primary mental perception and a vital awareness of self and things, a life perception which in its first forms depends on an internal sensation responsive to the contacts of other life and of Matter. Consciousness labours to manifest as best it can through the inadequacy of sensation its own inherent delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. In man the energising Consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things; this is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself, but a first conceptive potentiality and promise of integral Emergence is visible. That integral Emergence is the goal of evolving Nature.
  Man is there to affirm himself in the universe, that is his first business, but also to evolve and finally to exceed himself: he has to enlarge his partial being into a complete being, his partial consciousness into an integral consciousness; he has to achieve mastery of his environment but also world-union and world-harmony; he has to realise his individuality but also to enlarge it into a cosmic self and a universal and spiritual delight of existence. A transformation, a chastening and correction of all that is obscure, erroneous and ignorant in his mentality, an ultimate arrival at a free and wide harmony and luminousness of knowledge and will and feeling and action and character, is the evident intention of his nature; it is the ideal which the creative Energy has imposed on his intelligence, a need implanted by her in his mental and vital substance. But this can only be accomplished by his growing into a larger being and a larger consciousness: self-enlargement, self-fulfilment, self-evolution from what he partially and temporarily is in his actual and apparent nature to what he completely is in his secret self and spirit and therefore can become even in his manifest existence, is the object of his creation. This hope is the justification of his life upon earth amidst the phenomena of the cosmos. The outer apparent man, an ephemeral being subject to the constraints of his material embodiment and imprisoned in a limited mentality, has to become the inner real Man, master of himself and his environment and universal in his being. In a more vivid and less metaphysical language, the natural man has to evolve himself into the divine Man; the sons of Death have to know themselves as the children of Immortality. It is on this account that the human birth can be described as the turning-point in the evolution, the critical stage in earth-nature.
  --
  For the initiation of the evolutionary Emergence from the Inconscient works out by two forces, a secret cosmic consciousness and an individual consciousness manifest on the surface.
  The secret cosmic consciousness remains secret and subliminal to the surface individual; it organises itself on the surface by the creation of separate objects and beings. But while it organises the separate object and the body and mind of the individual being, it creates also collective powers of consciousness which are large subjective formations of cosmic Nature; but it does not provide for them an organised mind and body, it bases them on the group of individuals, develops for them a group mind, a changing yet continuous group body. It follows that only as the individuals become more and more conscious can the group-being also become more and more conscious; the growth of the individual is the indispensable means for the inner growth as distinguished from the outer force and expansion of the collective being. This indeed is the dual importance of the individual that it is through him that the cosmic spirit organises its collective units and makes them self-expressive and progressive and through him that it raises Nature from the Inconscience to the Superconscience and exalts it to meet the Transcendent. In the mass the collective consciousness is near to the Inconscient; it has a subconscious, an obscure and mute movement which needs the individual to express it, to bring it to light, to organise it and make it effective.

2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The end of this triple process must be a radical change of the action of the Ignorance into an action of Knowledge, of our basis of inconscience into a basis of complete consciousness, - a completeness which exists at present only in what is to us the superconscience. Each ascent will bring with it a partial change and modification of the old nature taken up and subjected to a new fundamental principle; the inconscience will be turned into a partial consciousness, an ignorance seeking for more and more knowledge and mastery: but at some point there must be an ascent which substitutes the principle of knowledge, of a fundamental true consciousness, the consciousness of the Spirit, for the inconscience and ignorance. An evolution in the Inconscience is the beginning, an evolution in the Ignorance is the middle, but the end is the liberation of the spirit into its true consciousness and an evolution in the Knowledge. This is actually what we find to be the law and method of the process which has hitherto been followed and by all signs is likely to be followed in her future working by evolutionary Nature. A first involutionary foundation in which originates all that has to evolve, an Emergence and action of the involved powers in or upon that foundation in an ascending series, and a culminating Emergence of the highest power of all as the agent of a supreme manifestation are the necessary stages of the journey of evolutionary Nature.
  An evolutionary process must be by the very terms of the problem to be solved a development, in some first established basic principle of being or substance, of something that that basic principle holds involved in itself or else admits from outside itself and modifies by the admission; for it must necessarily modify by its own law of nature all that enters into it and is not already part of its own nature. This must be so even if it is a creative evolution in the sense of manifesting always new powers of existence that are not native to the first foundation but introduced into it, accepted into an original substance. If, on the contrary, there is already there in involution, - present in the first foundation, but not yet manifested or not yet organised, - the new principle or power of existence that has to be evolved, then, when it appears, it will still have to accept modification by the nature and law of the basic substance: but also it will modify that substance by its own power, its own law of nature.
  --
  If there is to be an entire transformation, it can only be by the full Emergence of the law of the spirit; its power of supermind or gnosis must have entered into Matter and it must evolve in Matter. It must change the mental into the supramental being, make the inconscient in us conscious, spiritualise our material substance, erect its law of gnostic consciousness in our whole evolutionary being and nature. This must be the culminating Emergence or, at least, that stage in the Emergence which first decisively changes the nature of the evolution by transforming its action of Ignorance and its basis of Inconscience.
  This movement of evolution, of a progressive self-manifestation of the Spirit in a material universe, has to make its account at every step with the fact of the involution of consciousness and force in the form and activity of material substance. For it proceeds by an awakening of the involved consciousness and force and its ascent from principle to principle, from grade to grade, from power to power of the secret Spirit, but this is not a free transference to a higher status. The law of action, the force of action of each grade or power in its Emergence is determined, not by its own free, full and pure law of nature or vim of energy, but partly by the material organisation provided for it and partly by its own status, achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness which it has been able to impose upon Matter.
  Its effectivity is in some sort made up of a balance between the actual extent of this evolutionary Emergence and the countervailing extent to which the emergent power is still enveloped, penetrated, diminished by the domination and continuing grip of the Inconscience. Mind as we see it is not mind pure and free, but mind clouded and diminished by an enveloping nescience, mind labouring and struggling to deliver knowledge out of that nescience. All depends upon the more or less involved or more or less evolved condition of consciousness, - quite involved in inconscient matter, hesitating on the verge between involution and conscious evolution in the first or non-animal forms of life in matter, consciously evolving but greatly limited and hampered in mind housed in a living body, destined to be fully evolved by the awakening of the supermind in the embodied mental being and nature.
  To each grade in this series achieved by the evolving Consciousness belongs its appropriate class of existences, - one by one there appear material forms and forces, vegetable life, animals and half-animal man, developed human beings, imperfectly evolved or more evolved spiritual beings: but because of the continuity of the evolutionary process there is no rigid separation between them; each new advance or formation takes up what was before. The animal takes up into himself living and inanimate Matter; man takes up both along with the animal existence. There are furrows left by the transitional process or separating demarcations settled by the fixed habit of Nature: but these distinguish one series from another, serve perhaps to prevent a fall back of what has been evolved, they do not cancel or cut the continuity of the evolution. The evolving Consciousness passes from one grade to another or from one series of steps to another either by an imperceptible process or by some bound or crisis or, perhaps, by an intervention from above, - some descent or ensouling or influence from higher planes of Nature. But, by whatever means, the Consciousness secretly indwelling in matter, the occult Inhabitant, is able thus to make its way upward from the lower to the higher gradations, taking up what it was into what it is and preparing to take up both into what it will be. Thus, having first laid down a basis of material being, material forms, forces, existences in which it seems to be lying inconscient, though in reality, as we know now, always subconsciently at work, it is able to manifest life and living beings, to manifest mind and mental beings in a material world, and must therefore be able to manifest there supermind also and supramental beings. Thus has come about the present status of the evolution of which man is the now apparent culmination but not the real ultimate summit; for he is himself a transitional being and stands at the turning-point of the whole movement. Evolution, being thus continuous, must have at any given moment a past with its fundamental results still in evidence, a present in which the results it is labouring over are in process of becoming, a future in which still unevolved powers and forms of being must appear till there is the full and perfect manifestation. The past has been the history of a slow and difficult subconscious working with effects on the surface, - it has been an unconscious evolution; the present is a middle stage, an uncertain spiral in which the human intelligence is used by the secret evolutionary Force of being and participates in its action without being fully taken into confidence, - it is an evolution slowly becoming conscious of itself; the future must be a more and more conscious evolution of the spiritual being until it is fully delivered into a self-aware action by the emergent gnostic principle.
  The first foundation in this Emergence, the creation of forms of Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and thinking Matter, the appearance of more and more organised bodies adapted to express a greater power of consciousness, has been studied from the physical side, the side of form-building, by Science; but very little light has been shed on the inner side, the side of consciousness, and what little has been observed is rather of its physical basis and instrumentation than of the progressive operations of Consciousness in its own nature. In the evolution, as it has been observed so far, although a continuity is there, - for Life takes up Matter and Mind takes up submental Life, the Mind of intelligence takes up the mind of life and sensation, - the leap from one grade of consciousness in the series to another grade seems to our eyes immense, the crossing of the gulf whether by bridge or by leap impossible; we fail to discover any concrete and satisfactory evidence of its accomplishment in the past or of the manner in which it was accomplished. Even in the outward evolution, even in the development of physical forms where the data are clearly in evidence, there are missing links that remain always missing; but in the evolution of consciousness the passage is still more difficult to account for, for it seems more like a transformation than a passage. It may be, however, that, by our incapacity to penetrate the subconscious, to sound the submental or to understand sufficiently a lower mentality different from ours, we are unable to observe the minute gradations, not only in each degree of the series, but on the borders between grade and grade: the scientist who does observe minutely the physical data, has been driven to believe in the continuity of evolution in spite of the gaps and missing links; if we could observe similarly the inner evolution, we could, no doubt, discover the possibility and the mode of these formidable transitions. But still there is a real, a radical difference between grade and grade, so much so that the passage from one to another seems a new creation, a miracle of metamorphosis rather than a natural predictable development or quiet passing from one state of being to another with its well-marked steps arranged in an easy sequence.
  These gulfs appear deeper, but less wide, as we rise higher in the scale of Nature. If there are rudiments of life-reaction in the metal, as has been recently contended, it may be identical with life-reaction in the plant in its essence, but what might be called the vital-physical difference is so considerable that one seems to us inanimate, the other, though not apparently conscious, might be called a living creature. Between the highest plant life and lowest animal the gulf is visibly deeper, for it is the difference between mind and the entire absence of any apparent or even rudimentary movement of mind: in the one the stuff of mental consciousness is unawakened though there is a life of vital reactions, a suppressed or subconscious or perhaps only submental sense vibration which seems to be intensely active; in the other, though the life is at first less automatic and secure in the subconscious way of living and in its own new way of overt consciousness imperfectly determined, still mind is awakened, - there is a conscious life, a profound transition has been made.

2.19 - Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is for this reason that the process of Nature is not confined to a heightening of herself into a new principle; the new height is not a narrow intense pinnacle, it brings with it a widening and establishes a larger field of life in which the power of the new principle may have sufficient play and room for its Emergence. This action of elevation and expansion is not confined to an utmost possible largeness in the essential play of the new principle itself; it includes a taking up of that which is lower into the higher values: the divine or spiritual life will not only assume into itself the mental, vital, physical life transformed and spiritualised, but it will give them a much wider and fuller play than was open to them so long as they were living on their own level. Our mental, physical, vital existence need not be destroyed by our self-exceeding, nor are they lessened and impaired by being spiritualised; they can and do become much richer, greater, more powerful and more perfect: in their divine change they break into possibilities which in their unspiritualised condition could not be practicable or imaginable.
  This evolution, this process of heightening and widening and integralisation, is in its nature a growth and an ascent out of the sevenfold ignorance into the integral knowledge. The crux of that ignorance is the constitutional; it resolves itself into a manifold ignorance of the true character of our becoming, an unawareness of our total self, of which the key is a limitation by the plane we inhabit and by the present predominant principle of our nature. The plane we inhabit is the plane of Matter; the present predominant principle in our nature is the mental intelligence with the sense-mind, which depends upon Matter, as its support and pedestal. As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence and its powers with the material existence as it is shown to it through the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise between life and matter, is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance. This natural materialism or materialised vitalism, this clamping of ourselves to our beginnings, is a form of self-restriction narrowing the scope of our existence which is very insistent on the human being. It is a first necessity of his physical existence, but is afterwards forged by a primal ignorance into a chain that hampers his every step upwards: the attempt to grow out of this limitation of the wholeness, power and truth of the spirit by the materialised mental intelligence and out of this subjection of the soul to material Nature is the first step towards a real progress of our humanity. For our ignorance is not entire; it is a limitation of consciousness, - it is not the complete nescience which is the stamp of the same Ignorance in purely material existences, those which have not only matter for their plane but matter for their dominant principle. It is a partial, a limiting, a dividing and, very largely, a falsifying knowledge; out of that limitation and falsification we have to grow into the truth of our spiritual being.
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  Our gain in becoming more perfect mental beings is that we get to the possibility of a subtler, higher and wider existence, consciousness, force, happiness and delight of being; in proportion as we rise in the scale of mind, a greater power of these things comes to us: our mental consciousness acquires for itself at the same time more vision and power and more subtlety and plasticity, and we are able to embrace more of the vital and physical existence itself, to know it better, to use it better, to give it nobler values, a broader range, a more sublimated action, - an extended scale, higher issues. Man is in his characteristic power of nature a mental being, but in the first steps of his Emergence he is more of the mentalised animal, preoccupied like the animal with his bodily existence; he employs his mind for the uses, interests, desires of the life and the body, as their servant and minister, not yet as their sovereign and master. It is as he grows in mind and in proportion as his mind asserts its selfhood and independence against the tyranny of life and matter, that he grows in stature. On one side, mind by its emancipation controls and illumines the life and physicality; on the other, the purely mental aims, occupations, pursuits of knowledge begin to get a value. The mind liberated from a lower control and preoccupation introduces into life a government, an uplifting, a refinement, a finer balance and harmony; the vital and physical movements are directed and put into order, transformed even as far as they can be by a mental agency; they are taught to be the instruments of reason and obedient to an enlightened will, an ethical perception and an aesthetic intelligence: the more this can be accomplished, the more the race becomes truly human, a race of mental beings.
  It is this perception of life that was put in front by the Greek thinkers, and it is a vivid flowering in the sunlight of this ideal that imparts so great a fascination to Hellenic life and culture. In later times this perception was lost and, when it came back, it returned much diminished, mixed with more turbid elements: the perturbation of a spiritual ideal imperfectly grasped by the understanding and not at all realised in the life's practice but present with its positive and negative mental and moral influences, and over against it the pressure of a dominant, an inordinate vital urge which could not get its free self-satisfied movement, stood in the way of the sovereignty of the mind and the harmony of life, its realised beauty and balance. An opening to higher ideals, a greater range of life was gained, but the elements of a new idealism were only cast into its action as an influence, could not dominate and transform it and, finally, the spiritual endeavour, thus ill-understood and unrealised, was thrown aside: its moral effects remained, but, deprived of the sustaining spiritual element, dwindled towards ineffectivity; the vital urge, assisted by an immense development of physical intelligence, became the preoccupation of the race. An imposing increase of a certain kind of knowledge and efficiency was the first result; the most recent outcome has been a perilous spiritual ill-health and a vast disorder.

2.19 - The Planes of Our Existence, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:But the limitations of a material universe seem to be hostile to the proper accomplishment of this object which is yet so inevitably the highest aim of a mental being born into a physical body. First existence has formed itself here, fundamentally, as Matter; it has been objectivised, made sensible and concrete to its own self-experiencing conscious-force in the form of self-dividing material substance, and by the aggregation of this Matter there has been built up for man a physical body separate, divided from others and subject to the fixed habits of process or, as we call them, the laws of inconscient material Nature. His force of being too is nature or Force working in Matter, which has waked slowly out of inconscience to life and is always limited by form, always dependent on the body, always separated by it from the rest of Life and from other living beings, always hampered in its development, persistence, self-perfectioning by the laws of the Inconscience and the limitations of bodily living. Equally, his consciousness is a mentality emerging in a body and in a sharply individualised life; it is therefore limited in its workings and capacities and dependent on bodily organs of no great competence and on a very restricted vital force; it is separated from the rest of cosmic mind and shut out from the thoughts of other mental beings whose inner workings are a sealed book to man's physical mind except in so far as he can read them by the analogy of his own mentality and by their insufficient bodily signs and self-expressions. His consciousness is always falling back towards the inconscience in which a large part of it is always involved, his life towards death, his physical being towards disaggregation. His delight of being depends on the relations of this imperfect consciousness with its environment based upon physical sensations and the sense-mind, in other words on a limited mind trying to lay hold on a world external and foreign to it by means of a limited body, limited vital force, limited organs. Therefore its power for possession is limited, its force for delight is limited, and every touch of the world which exceeds its force, which that force cannot bear, cannot seize on, cannot assimilate and possess must turn to something else than delight, to pain, discomfort or grief. Or else it must be met by non-reception, insensibility, or, if received, put away by indifference. Moreover, such delight of being as it possesses, is not possessed naturally and eternally like the self-delight of Sachchidananda, but by experience and acquisition in Time, and can therefore only be maintained and prolonged by repetition of experience and is in its nature precarious and transient. All this means that the natural relations of Purusha to prakriti in the material universe are the complete absorption of conscious being in the force of its workings, therefore the complete self-oblivion and self-ignorance of the Purusha, the complete domination of prakriti and subjection of the soul to Nature. The soul does not know itself, it only knows, if anything, the workings of prakriti. The Emergence of the individual self-conscious soul in Man does not of itself abrogate these primary relations of ignorance and subjection. For this soul is living on a material plane of existence, a poise of prakriti in which matter is still the chief determinant of its relations to Nature, and its consciousness being limited by Matter cannot be an entirely self-possessing consciousness. Even the universal soul, if limited by the material formula, could not be in entire possession of itself; much less can the individual soul to which the rest of existence becomes by bodily, vital and mental limitation and separation something external to it, on which it is yet dependent for its life and its delight and its knowledge. These limitations of his power, knowledge, life, delight of existence are the whole cause of man's dissatisfaction with himself and the universe. And if the material universe were all and the material plane the only plane of his being, then man the individual Purusha could never arrive at perfection and self-fulfilment or indeed to any other life than that of the animals. There must be either worlds in which he is liberated from these incomplete and unsatisfactory relations of Purusha with prakriti, or planes of his own being by ascending to which he can transcend them, or at the very least planes, worlds and higher beings from which he can receive or be helped to knowledge, powers, joys, a growth of his being otherwise impossible. All these things, the ancient knowledge asserts, exist, -- other worlds, higher planes, the possibility of communication, of ascension, of growth by contact with and influence from that which is above him in the present scale of his realised being.
  7:As there is a poise of the relations of Purusha with prakriti in which Matter is the first determinant, a world of material existence, so there is another just above it in which Matter is not supreme, but rather Life-force takes its place as the first determinant. In this world forms do not determine the conditions of the life, but it is life which determines the form, and therefore forms are there much more free, fluid, largely and to our conceptions strangely variable than in the material world. This life-force is not inconscient material force, not even, except in its lowest movements, an elemental subconscient energy, but a conscious force of being which makes for formation, but much more essentially for enjoyment, possession, satisfaction of its own dynamic impulse. Desire and the satisfaction of impulse are therefore the first law of this world of sheer vital existence, this poise of relations between the soul and its nature in which the life-power plays with so much greater a freedom and capacity than in our physical living; it may be called the desire-world, for that is its principal characteristic. Moreover, it is not fixed in one hardly variable formula as physical life seems to be, but is capable of many variations of its poise, admits many sub-planes ranging from those which touch material existence and, as it were, melt into that, to those which touch at the height of the life-power the planes of pure mental and psychic existence and melt into them. For in Nature in the infinite scale of being there are no wide gulfs, no abrupt chasms to be overleaped, but a melting of one thing into another, a subtle continuity; out of that her power of distinctive experience creates the orderings, the definite ranges, the distinct gradations by which the soul variously knows and possesses its possibilities of world-existence. Again, enjoyment of one kind or another being the whole object of desire, that must be the trend of the desire-world; but since wherever the soul is not free, -- and it cannot be free when subject to desire, -- there must be the negative as well as the positive of all its experience, this world contains not only the possibility of large or intense or continuous enjoyments almost inconceivable to the limited physical mind, but also the possibility of equally enormous sufferings. It is here therefore that there are situated the lowest heavens and all the hells with the tradition and imagination of which the human mind has lured and terrified itself since the earliest ages. All human imaginations indeed correspond to some reality or real possibility, though they may in themselves be a quite inaccurate representation or couched in too physical images and therefore inapt to express the truth of supraphysical realities.

2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In an inconscient universe, in a Nature or the working of an Energy which is fundamentally material, the Emergence [of]
  Consciousness has at first the air of a surprising, a contradictory, an impossible event. For in such a world, in the working of such a Nature or Energy, how could it ever come into existence?
  --
  A mysterious something involved in Matter, concealed by it, evolving from it but in a material house or figure, striving to reveal itself in life and mind, but concealed by its forms of life, concealed by its forms of mind, shooting out from them glimpses of itself, glimpses that hint but do not elucidate, - this is what we can see, and we see no more; the rest is speculation and conjecture. Is this something native to Matter, born in it and destined to die in it? Or is it an alien, a temporary visitor? Is Matter itself only a mask of it, a phenomenon of Energy, as it now more and more seems to be? Energy itself is a movement, a force of concealed Consciousness, Consciousness the sign of a hidden spiritual Being. But if so, what possible significance or purpose can there be in this involution, this material self-concealment and self-imprisonment, this slow tormented Emergence of the
  Spirit?

2.2.02 - Consciousness and the Inconscient, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But the Emergence of consciousness out of the Inconscient was more probably a necessity in the very being of being, in the innate movement of being, than merely a possibility.
  Necessity, then? an inevitable determination in Nature? or a self-determination in the conscious Spirit?

2.20 - The Philosophy of Rebirth, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  BIRTH is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second which gives its double point of perplexity to the mystery of birth; for life, which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of existence, becomes itself a mystery by virtue of these two which seem to be its beginning and its end and yet in a thousand ways betray themselves as neither of these things, but rather intermediate stages in an occult processus of life. At first sight birth might seem to be a constant outburst of life in a general death, a persistent circumstance in the universal lifelessness of Matter. On a closer examination it begins to be more probable that life is something involved in Matter or even an inherent power of the Energy that creates Matter, but able to appear only when it gets the necessary conditions for the affirmation of its characteristic phenomena and for an appropriate self-organisation. But in the birth of life there is something more that participates in the Emergence, - there is an element which is no longer material, a strong upsurging of some flame of soul, a first evident vibration of the spirit.
  All the known circumstances and results of birth presuppose an unknown before, and there is a suggestion of universality, a will of persistence of life, an inconclusiveness in death which seem to point to an unknown hereafter. What were we before birth and what are we after death, are the questions, the answer of the one depending upon that of the other, which the intellect of man has put to itself from the beginning without even now resting in any final solution. The intellect indeed can hardly give the final answer: for that must in its very nature lie beyond the data of the physical consciousness and memory, whether of the race or the individual, yet these are the sole data which the intellect is in the habit of consulting with something like confidence. In this poverty of materials and this incertitude it wheels from one hypothesis to another and calls each in turn a conclusion. Moreover, the solution depends upon the nature, source and object of the cosmic movement, and as we determine these, so we shall have to conclude about birth and life and death, the before and the hereafter.
  --
  What we see of Nature and of human nature justifies this view of a birth of the individual soul from form to form until it reaches the human level of manifested consciousness which is its instrument for rising to yet higher levels. We see that Nature develops from stage to stage and in each stage takes up its past and transforms it into stuff of its new development. We see too that human nature is of the same make; all the earth-past is there in it. It has an element of matter taken up by life, an element of life taken up by mind, an element of mind which is being taken up by spirit: the animal is still present in its humanity; the very nature of the human being presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepared his Emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity.
  And let us not say that this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into the form so created: there is a certain truth behind this idea, but not the truth which that formula would suggest. For that supposes a gulf between soul and body, between soul and life, between soul and mind, which does not exist; there is no body without soul, no body that is not itself a form of soul: Matter itself is substance and power of spirit and could not exist if it were anything else, for nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman; and if Matter, then still more clearly and certainly Life and Mind must be that and ensouled by the presence of the Spirit. If Matter and Life had not already been ensouled, man could not have appeared or only as an intervention or an accident, not as a part of the evolutionary order.

2.21 - The Order of the Worlds, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If in this or some other way the higher worlds were developed subsequently to the creation of the material world, the primary creation, by a larger secret evolution out of the Inconscient, it must have been done by some All-Soul in its Emergence, by a process of which we can have no knowledge and for the purpose of the evolution here, as adjuncts to it or as its larger consequences, so that life and mind and spirit might be able to move in fields of a freer scope with a repercussion of these greater powers and experiences on the material self-expression.
  But against this hypothesis there stands the fact that we find these higher worlds in our vision and experience of them to be in no way based upon the material universe, in no way its results, but rather greater terms of being, larger and freer ranges of consciousness, and all the action of the material plane looks more like the result and not the origin of these greater terms, derivatory from them, even partly dependent on them in its evolutionary endeavour. Immense ranges of powers, influences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from the overmind and the higher mental and vital ranges, but of these only a part, a selection, as it were, or restricted number can stage and realise themselves in the order of the physical world; the rest await their time and proper circumstance for revelation in physical term and form, for their part in the terrestrial5 evolution which is at the same time an evolution of all the powers of the spirit.
  --
  These worlds are not in their original creation subsequent in order to the physical universe but prior to it, - prior, if not in time, in their consequential sequence. For even if there is an ascending as well as a descending gradation, this ascending gradation must be in its first nature a provision for the evolutionary Emergence in Matter, a formative power for its endeavour, contri buting to it helpful and adverse elements, and not a mere consequence of the terrestrial evolution; for that is neither a rational probability nor has it a spiritual or dynamic and pragmatic sense. In other words, the higher worlds have not come into being by a pressure from the lower physical universe, - let us say, from Sachchidananda in the physical Inconscience, or else by the urge of his being as it emerges from the Inconscience into life and mind and spirit and experiences the necessity of creating worlds or planes in which those principles shall have a freer play and in which the human soul may streng then its vital, mental or spiritual tendencies. Still less are they the creations of the human soul itself, whether its dreams or the result of the constant self-projections of mankind in its dynamic and creative being beyond the limits of the physical consciousness. The only thing that man clearly creates in this direction is the reflex images of these planes in his own embodied consciousness and the fitness of his own soul to respond to them, to become aware of them, to participate consciously in the interweaving of their influences with the action of the physical plane. He may indeed contri bute the results or projections of his own higher vital and mental action to the action of these planes: but, if so, these projections are, after all, only a return of the higher planes upon themselves, a return from the earth of their powers which have come down from them to the earth-mind, since this higher vital and mental action is itself the result of influences transmitted from above.
  It is possible also that he can create a certain kind of subjective annexe to these supraphysical planes, or at least to the lower of them, environments of a half-unreal character which are rather self-created envelopes of his conscious mind and life than true worlds; they are the reflections of his own being, an artificial environment corresponding to his attempt during life to image these other worlds, - heavens and hells projected by the imagecreating faculty in his human power of conscious being. But neither of these two contri butions at all means a total creation of a real plane of being founded and acting on its own separate principle.
  --
  A secret continuous action of the higher powers and principles from their own planes upon terrestrial being and nature through the subliminal self, which is itself a projection from those planes into the world born of the Inconscience, must have an effect and a significance. Its first effect has been the liberation of life and mind out of Matter; its last effect has been to assist the Emergence of a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual will and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so that he is no longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with that and mental pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover his inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass earth and her limitations. As he grows more and more inward, his boundaries mental, vital, spiritual begin to broaden, the bonds that held life, mind, soul to their first limitations loosen or snap, and man the mental being begins to have a glimpse of a larger kingdom of self and world closed to the first earth-life. No doubt, so long as he lives mainly on his surface, he can only build a sort of superstructure ideal and imaginative and ideative upon the ground of his normal narrow existence.
  But if he makes the inward movement which his own highest vision has held up before him as his greatest spiritual necessity, then he will find there in his inner being a larger consciousness, a larger life. An action from within and an action from above can overcome the predominance of the material formula, diminish and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience, reverse the order of the consciousness, substitute the spirit for Matter as his conscious foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete and characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature.

2.22 - Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All this, however, is a matter of dynamic probability, and that, though amounting in practice to a necessity, though justified by certain facts of subliminal experience, is still for the reasoning mind not in itself quite conclusive. We have to ask whether there is any more essential necessity for these internatal intervals, or at least any of so great a dynamic power as to lead to an irresistible conclusion. We shall find one such necessity in the decisive part played by the higher planes in the earthevolution and the relation that it has created between them and the evolving soul-consciousness. Our development takes place very largely by their superior but hidden action upon the earthplane. All is contained in the inconscient or the subconscient, but in potentiality; it is the action from above that helps to compel an Emergence. A continuance of that action is necessary to shape and determine the progression of the mental and vital forms which our evolution takes in material nature; for these progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or sufficiently develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though occult resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This resort, the action of this veiled alliance, takes place principally in our subliminal being and not on the surface: it is from there that the active power of our consciousness emerges, and all that it realises it sends back constantly into the subliminal being to be stored up, developed and re-emerge in stronger forms hereafter. This interaction of our larger hidden being and our surface personality is the main secret of the rapid development that operates in man once he has passed beyond the lower stages of mind immersed in Matter.
  This resort must continue in the internatal stage; for a new birth, a new life is not a taking up of the development exactly where it stopped in the last, it does not merely repeat and continue our past surface personality and formation of nature. There is an assimilation, a discarding and streng thening and rearrangement of the old characters and motives, a new ordering of the developments of the past and a selection for the purposes of the future without which the new start cannot be fruitful or carry forward the evolution. For each birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.

2.22 - The Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   of these things alone, neither a mechanical routine execution of the first crude law of Nature, nor the struggle of a kinetic soul of action, nor a victorious Emergence of conscious light and reason and good and knowledge. There is a mixture of all these dharmas out of which our will and intelligence make a more or less arbitrary construction to be realised as best it can, but never in fact realised except by compromise with other compelling things in the universal Prakriti. The sattwic ideals of our enlightened will and reason are either themselves compromises, at best progressive compromises, subject to a constant imperfection and flux of change, or if absolute in their character, they can be followed only as a counsel of perfection ignored for the most part in practice or successful only as a partial influence.
  And if sometimes we imagine we have completely realised them, it is because we ignore in ourselves the subconscious or halfconscious mixture of other powers and motives that are usually as much or more than our ideals the real force in our action. That self-ignorance constitutes the whole vanity of human reason and self-righteousness; it is the dark secret lining behind the spotless white outsides of human sainthood and alone makes possible the specious egoisms of knowledge and virtue. The best human knowledge is a half knowledge and the highest human virtue a thing of mixed quality and, even when most sincerely absolute in standard, sufficiently relative in practice. As a general law of living the absolute sattwic ideals cannot prevail in conduct; indispensable as a power for the betterment and raising of personal aspiration and conduct, their insistence modifies life but cannot wholly change it, and their perfect fulfilment images itself only in a dream of the future or a world of heavenly nature free from the mixed strain of our terrestrial existence. It cannot be otherwise because neither the nature of this world nor the nature of man is or can be one single piece made of the pure stuff of sattwa.

2.23 - Man and the Evolution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The animal has already some of the corresponding qualities on a limited scale, for action only, in a rudimentary organisation crude and simple, with a very inferior scope and plasticity, a narrower and more casual comm and of the faculty; but especially the working of these faculties is more mechanical, less deliberate, marked with the character of an automatism of Nature Energy driving an operation of primitive consciousness and not, as in man, of a conscious Energy observing and to a great extent directing and governing and deliberately changing or modifying its own operations. Other animal habits of consciousness are not fundamentally different from man's; all he had to do was to develop and enlarge them on a higher mental level and wherever possible, to mentalise, refine, subtilise, - in brief, to bring to them the enlightenment of his new understanding and intellectual capacity and a power of reasoned control denied to the animal. This change or reversal once effected, the power of the human mind to work upon itself and things, create, know, speculate, would develop in the course of his evolution, even if, as is conceivable, they were at the beginning small in scope, nearer to the animal, still comparatively simple and crude in their action. Such a reversal has been made in each radical transition of Nature: life-force emerging turns upon Matter, imposes a vital content on the operations of material Energy while it develops also its own new movements and operations; life-mind emerges in life-force and Matter and imposes its content of consciousness on their operations while it develops also its own action and faculties; a new greater Emergence and reversal, the Emergence of humanity, is in line with Nature's precedents; it would be a new application of the general principle.
  This theory is therefore easy to accept: its working is intelligible. But the other hypothesis presents considerable difficulties.
  On the side of consciousness the new manifestation, the human, could be accounted for by an upsurge of concealed Consciousness from the involution in universal Nature. But in that case it must have had some material form already existent for its vehicle of Emergence, the vehicle being adapted by the force of the Emergence itself to the needs of a new inner creation; or else a rapid divergence from previous physical types or patterns may have brought a new being into existence. But whichever the hypothesis accepted, this means an evolutionary process, - there is only a difference in the method and machinery of the divergence or transition. Or there may have been, on the contrary, not an upsurgence but a descent of mentality from a mind plane above us, perhaps the descent of a soul or mental being into terrestrial Nature. The difficulty would then be the appearance of the human body, too complex and difficult an organ to have been suddenly created or manifested; for such a miraculous speed of process, though quite possible on a supraphysical plane of being, does not seem to figure among the normal possibles or potentials of the material Energy. It could only happen there by an intervention of a supraphysical force or law of Nature or by a creator Mind acting with full power and directly on Matter. An action of a supraphysical Force and a creator may be conceded in every new appearance in Matter; each such appearance is at bottom a miracle operated by a secret Consciousness supported by a veiled Mind Energy or Life Energy: but the action is nowhere seen to be direct, overt, self-sufficient; it is always superimposed on an already realised physical basis and acts by an extension of some established process of Nature. It is more conceivable that there was an opening of some existing body to a supraphysical influx so that it was transformed into a new body; but no such event can lightly be assumed to have taken place in the past history of material Nature: in order to happen it would seem to need either the conscious intervention of an invisible mental being to form the body he intended to inhabit or else a previous development of a mental being in Matter itself who would be already able to receive a supraphysical power and impose it on the rigid and narrow formulas of his physical existence. Otherwise we must suppose that there was a preexistent body already so much evolved as to be fitted for the reception of a vast mental influx or capable of a pliable response to the descent into it of a mental being. But this would suppose a previous evolution of mind in body to the point at which such a receptivity would be possible. It is quite conceivable that such an evolution from below and such a descent from above cooperated in the appearance of humanity in earth-nature. The secret psychical entity already there in the animal might have itself called down the mental being, the mind Purusha, into the realm of living Matter in order to take up the vital-mental energy already at work and lift it into a higher mentality. But this would still be a process of evolution, the higher plane only intervening to assist the appearance and enlargement of its own principle in terrestrial Nature.
  Next, it may be conceded that each type or pattern of consciousness and being in the body, once established, has to be faithful to the law of being of that type, to its own design and rule of nature. But it may also very well be that part of the law of the human type is its impulse towards self-exceeding, that the means for a conscious transition has been provided for among the spiritual powers of man; the possession of such a capacity may be a part of the plan on which the creative Energy has built him. It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, - there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make a more and more complex and plastic use of his capacities. It cannot truly be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since man's appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations, however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man's achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavour, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking. There have been falls from a high type of culture, a sharp temporary descent into a certain obscurantism, cessations of the spiritual urge, plunges into a barbaric natural materialism; but these are temporary phenomena, at worst a downward curve of the spiral of progress. This progress has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive Emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution. If it be supposed that her next step is the spiritual and supramental being, the stress of spirituality in the race may be taken as a sign that that is Nature's intention, the sign too of the capacity of man to operate in himself or aid her to operate the transition. If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.
  It is pertinently suggested that if such an evolutionary culmination is intended and man is to be its medium, it will only be a few especially evolved human beings who will form the new type and move towards the new life; that once done, the rest of humanity will sink back from a spiritual aspiration no longer necessary for Nature's purpose and remain quiescent in its normal status. It can equally be reasoned that the human gradation must be preserved if there is really an ascent of the soul by reincarnation through the evolutionary degrees towards the spiritual summit; for otherwise the most necessary of all the intermediate steps will be lacking. It must be conceded at once that there is not the least probability or possibility of the whole human race rising in a block to the supramental level; what is suggested is nothing so revolutionary and astonishing, but only the capacity in the human mentality, when it has reached a certain level or a certain point of stress of the evolutionary impetus, to press towards a higher plane of consciousness and its embodiment in the being. The being will necessarily undergo by this embodiment a change from the normal constitution of its nature, a change certainly of its mental and emotional and sensational constitution and also to a great extent of the body-consciousness and the physical conditioning of our life and energies; but the change of consciousness will be the chief factor, the initial movement, the physical modification will be a subordinate factor, a consequence. This transmutation of the consciousness will always remain possible to the human being when the flame of the soul, the psychic kindling, becomes potent in heart and mind and the nature is ready. The spiritual aspiration is innate in man; for he is, unlike the animal, aware of imperfection and limitation and feels that there is something to be attained beyond what he now is: this urge towards selfexceeding is not likely ever to die out totally in the race. The human mental status will be always there, but it will be there not only as a degree in the scale of rebirth, but as an open step towards the spiritual and supramental status.
  It must be observed that the appearance of human mind and body on the earth marks a crucial step, a decisive change in the course and process of the evolution; it is not merely a continuation of the old lines. Up till this advent of a developed thinking mind in Matter evolution had been effected, not by the self-aware aspiration, intention, will or seeking of the living being, but subconsciously or subliminally by the automatic operation of Nature. This was so because the evolution began from the Inconscience and the secret Consciousness had not emerged sufficiently from it to operate through the self-aware participating individual will of its living creature. But in man the necessary change has been made, - the being has become awake and aware of himself; there has been made manifest in Mind its will to develop, to grow in knowledge, to deepen the inner and widen the outer existence, to increase the capacities of the nature. Man has seen that there can be a higher status of consciousness than his own; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts of mind and life, the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and articulate within him: he has become conscious of a soul, discovered the self and spirit. In him, then, the substitution of a conscious for a subconscious evolution has become conceivable and practicable, and it may well be concluded that the aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way of fulfilment, the Emergence of a greater status.
  In the previous stages of the evolution Nature's first care and effort had to be directed towards a change in the physical organisation, for only so could there be a change of consciousness; this was a necessity imposed by the insufficiency of the force of consciousness already in formation to effect a change in the body. But in man a reversal is possible, indeed inevitable; for it is through his consciousness, through its transmutation and no longer through a new bodily organism as a first instrumentation that the evolution can and must be effected. In the inner reality of things a change of consciousness was always the major fact, the evolution has always had a spiritual significance and the physical change was only instrumental; but this relation was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever mutation is needed for the body. It has to be noted that the human mind has already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution of new types of plant and animal; it has created new forms of its environment, developed by knowledge and discipline considerable changes in its own mentality. It is not an impossibility that man should aid Nature consciously also in his own spiritual and physical evolution and transformation.
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  All these are conclusions that can be arrived at even from the observation of the outward phenomena of Nature's progression, her surface evolution of being and of consciousness in the physical birth and the body. But there is the other, the invisible factor; there is rebirth, the progress of the soul by ascent from grade to grade of the evolving existence, and in the grades to higher and higher types of bodily and mental instrumentation. In this progression the psychic entity is still veiled, even in man the conscious mental being, by its instruments, by mind and life and body; it is unable to manifest fully, held back from coming to the front where it can stand out as the master of its nature, obliged to submit to a certain determination by the instruments, to a domination of Purusha by Prakriti. But in man the psychic part of the personality is able to develop with a much greater rapidity than in the inferior creation, and a time can arrive when the soul entity is close to the point at which it will emerge from behind the veil into the open and become the master of its instrumentation in Nature. But this will mean that the secret indwelling spirit, the Daemon, the Godhead within is on the point of Emergence; and, when it emerges, it can hardly be doubted that its demand will be, as indeed it already is in the mind itself when it undergoes the inner psychic influence, for a diviner, a more spiritual existence. In the nature of the earth life where the mind is an instrument of the Ignorance, this can only be effected by a change of consciousness, a transition from a foundation in Ignorance to a foundation in Knowledge, from the mental to a supramental consciousness, a supramental instrumentation of Nature.
  There is no conclusive validity in the reasoning that because this is a world of Ignorance, such a transformation can only be achieved by a passage to a heaven beyond or cannot be achieved at all and the demand of the psychic entity is itself ignorant and must be replaced by a merger of the soul in the Absolute. This conclusion could only be solely valid if Ignorance were the whole meaning, substance and power of the world-manifestation or if there were no element in worldNature itself through which there could be an exceeding of the ignorant mentality that still burdens our present status of being.
  But the Ignorance is only a portion of this world-Nature; it is not the whole of it, not the original power or creator: it is in its higher origin a self-limiting Knowledge and even in its lower origin, its Emergence out of the sheer material Inconscience, it is a suppressed Consciousness labouring to find, to recover itself, to manifest Knowledge, which is its true character, as the foundation of existence. In universal Mind itself there are ranges above our mentality which are instruments of the cosmic truth-cognition, and into these the mental being can surely rise; for already it rises towards them in supernormal conditions or receives from them without yet knowing or possessing them intuitions, spiritual intimations, large influxes of illumination or spiritual capacity. All these ranges are conscious of what is beyond them, and the highest of them is directly open to the Supermind, aware of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds it.
  Moreover, in the evolving being itself, those greater powers of consciousness are here, supporting mind-truth, underlying its action which screens them; this Supermind and those Truthpowers uphold Nature by their secret presence: even, truth of mind is their result, a diminished operation, a representation in partial figures. It is, therefore, not only natural but seems inevitable that these higher powers of Existence should manifest here in Mind as Mind itself has manifested in Life and Matter.
  Man's urge towards spirituality is the inner driving of the spirit within him towards Emergence, the insistence of the Consciousness-Force of the being towards the next step of its manifestation. It is true that the spiritual urge has been largely other-worldly or turned at its extreme towards a spiritual negation and self-annihilation of the mental individual; but this is only one side of its tendency maintained and made dominant by the necessity of passing out of the kingdom of the fundamental Inconscience, overcoming the obstacle of the body, casting away the obscure vital, getting rid of the ignorant mentality, the necessity to attain first and foremost, by a rejection of all these impediments to spiritual being, to a spiritual status. The other, the dynamic side of the spiritual urge has not been absent, - the aspiration to a spiritual mastery and mutation of Nature, to a spiritual perfection of the being, a divinisation of the mind, the heart and the very body: there has even been the dream or a psychic prevision of a fulfilment exceeding the individual transformation, a new earth and heaven, a city of God, a divine descent upon earth, a reign of the spiritually perfect, a kingdom of God not only within us but outside, in a collective human life. However obscure may have been some of the forms taken by this aspiration, the indication they contain of the urge of the occult spiritual being within to Emergence in earth-nature is unmistakable.
  If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the spirit, mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.

2.24 - The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  "Ah, then, this was the intended miracle, the last of many, - the Spirit that was submerged in the Inconscience has broken out from it and now inhabits, unveiled, the form of things which, veiled, it had created as its dwelling-place and the scene of its Emergence." But in fact a more conscious Witness might have discovered the clue at an early period of the unfolding, even in each step of its process; for at each stage Nature's mute secrecy, though still there, diminishes; a hint is given of the next step, a more overtly significant preparation is visible. Already, in what seems to be inconscient in Life, the signs of sensation coming towards the surface are visible; in moving and breathing life the Emergence of sensitive mind is apparent and the preparation of thinking mind is not entirely hidden, while in thinking mind, when it develops, there appear at an early stage the rudimentary strivings and afterwards the more developed seekings of a spiritual consciousness. As plant life contains in itself the obscure possibility of the conscious animal, as the animal mind is astir with the movements of feeling and perception and the rudiments of conception that are the first ground for man the thinker, so man the mental being is sublimated by the endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature.
  But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer, - first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the process and method of the evolution of the spiritual out of the mental man. It would at first sight seem evident that as each gradation emerges not only out of its precedent grade but in it, as life emerges in matter and is largely limited and determined in its self-expression by its material conditions, as mind emerges in life-in-matter and is similarly limited and determined in its self-expression by life conditions and material conditions, so spirit too must emerge in a mind embodied in life-in-matter and must be largely limited and determined by the mental conditions in which it has its roots as well as the life conditions, the material conditions of its existence here. It might even be maintained that, if there has been any evolution of the spiritual in us, it is only as a part of the mental evolution, a special operation of man's mentality; the spiritual element is not a distinct or separate entity and cannot have an independent Emergence or a supramental future. The mental being can develop a spiritual interest or preoccupation and may evolve perhaps in consequence a spiritual as well as an intellectual mentality, a fine soul-flower of his mental life. The spiritual may become a predominant trend in some men just as in others there is a predominant artistic or pragmatic trend; but there can be no such thing as a spiritual being taking up and transforming the mental into the spiritual nature. There is no evolution of the spiritual man; there is only an evolution of a new and possibly a finer and rarer element in a mental being.
  This then is what has to be brought out, - the clear distinction between the spiritual and the mental, the nature of this evolution and the factors which make it possible and inevitable that there should be this Emergence of the spirit in its true distinct character, not remaining, as it now for the most part is in its process or seems to be in its way of appearance, a subordinate or a dominating feature of our mentality, but defining itself as a new power which will finally overtop the mental part and replace it as the leader of the life and nature.
  It is quite true that to a surface view life seems only an operation of Matter, mind an activity of life, and it might seem to follow that what we call the soul or spirit is only a power of mentality, soul a fine form of mind, spirituality a high activity of the embodied mental being. But this is a superficial view of things due to the thought's concentrating on the appearance and process and not looking at what lies behind the process. One might as well on the same lines have concluded that electricity is only a product or operation of water and cloud matter, because it is in such a field that lightning emerges; but a deeper inquiry has shown that both cloud and water have, on the contrary, the energy of electricity as their foundation, their constituent power or energy-substance: that which seems to be a result is - in its reality, though not in its form - the origin; the effect is in the essence pre-existent to the apparent cause, the principle of the emergent activity precedent to its present field of action. So it is throughout evolutionary Nature; Matter could not have become animate if the principle of life had not been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of lifein-matter; life-in-matter could not have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the principle of mind had not been there behind life and substance, constituting it as its field of operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and body: so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this Emergence will go, whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a subsequent question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of spirit as something else than mind and greater than mind, spirituality as something other than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as something distinct from the mental being: spirit is a final evolutionary Emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme Emergence.
  It is true again that it is difficult for man's mind to distinguish entirely the soul or self or any spiritual element in him from the mental and vital formation in which it makes its appearance; but that is only so long as the Emergence is not complete. In the animal mind is not quite distinct from its own life-matrix and life-matter; its movements are so involved in the life movements that it cannot detach itself from them, cannot stand separate and observe them; but in man mind has become separate, he can become aware of his mental operations as distinct from his life operations, his thought and will can disengage themselves from his sensations and impulses, desires and emotional reactions, can become detached from them, observe and control them, sanction or cancel their functioning: he does not as yet know the secrets of his being well enough to be aware of himself decisively and with certitude as a mental being in a life and body, but he has that impression and can take inwardly that position. So too at first soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and from mentalised life; its movements are involved in the mind movements, its operations seem to be mental and emotional activities; the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back from the mind and life and body, detaching itself, seeing and controlling and moulding their action and formation: but, as the inner evolution proceeds, this is precisely what can, must and does happen, - it is the long-delayed but inevitable next step in our evolutionary destiny. There can be a decisive Emergence in which the being separates itself from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself from the life movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body sense and knows itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being or a life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient discovery of the true self and in a certain sense they are right; for it is the self or spirit that so represents itself in regard to the activities of Nature, and this revelation of its presence is enough to disengage the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther, it can even put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that these selves are representations of a divine Entity to which mind, life and body are only forms and instruments: we are then the Soul looking at Nature, knowing all her dynamisms in us, not by mental perception and observation, but by an intrinsic consciousness and its direct sense of things and its intimate exact vision, able therefore by its Emergence to put a close control on our nature and change it. When there is a complete silence in the being, either a stillness of the whole being or a stillness behind unaffected by surface movements, then we can become aware of a Self, a spiritual substance of our being, an existence exceeding even the soul individuality, spreading itself into universality, surpassing all dependence on any natural form or action, extending itself upward into a transcendence of which the limits are not visible. It is these liberations of the spiritual part in us which are the decisive steps of the spiritual evolution in Nature.
  It is only through these decisive movements that the true character of the evolution becomes evident; for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of the psychic Entity on the mind, life and body to develop a true soul action, a pressure of the spirit or self for liberation from the ego, from the surface ignorance, a turning of the mind and life towards some occult Reality, - preliminary experiences, partial formulations of a spiritualised mind, a spiritualised life, but no complete change, no probability of an entire unveiling of the soul or self or a radical transformation of the nature. When there is the decisive Emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being, knows all that is in itself in the same way, by identity with it, begins even to see all that to our mind seems external in the same manner, by a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness which envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the object, is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body.
  There is, then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our surface mental personality.
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  In fact, the creative Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has to lead forward, in an almost simultaneous process but with a considerable priority and greater stress of the inferior element, a double evolution. There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental being in the life and body, and there is within it, pressing forward for self-revelation because with the Emergence of mind that revelation is becoming possible, a preparation at least, even the beginning of an evolution of our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual nature. But Nature's major preoccupation must necessarily be still and for a long time the evolution of mind to its greatest possible range, height, subtlety; for only so can be prepared the unveiling of an entirely intuitive intelligence, of overmind, of supermind, the difficult passage to a higher instrumentation of the Spirit. If the sole intention were the revelation of the essential spiritual Reality and a cessation of our being into its pure existence, this insistence on the mental evolution would have no purpose: for at every point of the nature there can be a breaking out of the spirit and an absorption of our being into it; an intensity of the heart, a total silence of the mind, a single absorbing passion of the will would be enough to bring about that culminating movement. If Nature's final intention were other-worldly, then too the same law would hold; for everywhere, at any point of the nature, there can be a sufficient power of the other-worldly urge to break through and away from the terrestrial action and enter into a spiritual elsewhere. But if her intention is a comprehensive change of the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies itself; for it is for that purpose indispensable.
  This, however, imposes a difficult and slow spiritual advance: for, first, the spiritual Emergence has to wait at each step for the instruments to be ready; next, as the spiritual formation emerges, it is mixed inextricably with the powers, motives, impulses of an imperfect mind, life and body, - there is a pull on it to accept and serve these powers, motives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous mixture, a constant temptation to fall or deviation, at least a fettering, a weight, a retardation; there is a necessity to return upon a step gained in order to bring up something of the nature which hangs back and prevents a farther step; finally, there is, by the very character of mind in which it has to work, a limitation of the emerging spiritual light and power and a compulsion on it to move by segments, to follow one line or another and leave altogether or leave till later on the achievement of its own totality. This hampering, this obstacle of the mind, life and body, - the heavy inertia and persistence of the body, the turbid passions of the life-part, the obscurity and doubting incertitudes, denials, other-formulations of the mind, - is an impediment so great and intolerable that the spiritual urge becomes impatient and tries rigorously to quell these opponents, to reject the life, to mortify the body, to silence the mind and achieve its own separate salvation, spirit departing into pure spirit and rejecting from it altogether an undivine and obscure Nature. Apart from the supreme call, the natural push of the spiritual part in us to return to its own highest element and status, this aspect of vital and physical Nature as an impediment to pure spirituality is a compelling reason for asceticism, for illusionism, for the tendency to other-worldliness, the urge towards withdrawal from life, the passion for a pure and unmixed Absolute. A pure spiritual absolutism is a movement of the self towards its own supreme selfhood, but it is also indispensable for Nature's own purpose; for without it the mixture, the downward gravitation would make the spiritual Emergence impossible. The extremist of this absolutism, the solitary, the ascetic, is the standard-bearer of the spirit, his ochre robe is its flag, the sign of a refusal of all compromise, - as indeed the struggle of Emergence cannot end by a compromise, but only by an entire spiritual victory and the complete surrender of the lower nature. If that is impossible here, then indeed it must be achieved elsewhere; if Nature refuses submission to the emerging spirit, then the soul must withdraw from her. There is thus a dual tendency in the spiritual Emergence, on one side a drive towards the establishment at all cost of the spiritual consciousness in the being, even to the rejection of Nature, on the other side a push towards the extension of spirituality to our parts of nature. But until the first is fully achieved, the second can only be imperfect and halting.
  It is the foundation of the pure spiritual consciousness that is the first object in the evolution of the spiritual man, and it is this and the urge of that consciousness towards contact with the Reality, the Self or the Divine Being that must be the first and foremost or even, till it is perfectly accomplished, the sole preoccupation of the spiritual seeker. It is the one thing needful that has to be done by each on whatever line is possible to him, by each according to the spiritual capacity developed in his nature.
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  In the very nature of things all evolution must proceed at first by a slow unfolding; for each new principle that evolves its powers has to make its way out of an involution in Inconscience and Ignorance. It has a difficult task in pulling itself out of the involution, out of the hold of the obscurity of the original medium, against the pull and strains, the instinctive opposition and obstruction of the Inconscience and the hampering mixture and blind obstinate retardations of the Ignorance. Nature affirms at first a vague urge and tendency which is a sign of the push of the occult, subliminal, submerged reality towards the surface; there are then small half-suppressed hints of the thing that is to be, imperfect beginnings, crude elements, rudimentary appearances, small, insignificant, hardly recognisable quanta. Afterwards there are small or large formations; a more characteristic and recognisable quality begins to show itself, first partially, here and there or in a low intensity, then more vivid, more formative; finally, there is the decisive Emergence, a reversal of the consciousness, the beginning of the possibility of its radical change: but still much has to be done in every direction, a long and difficult growth towards perfection lies before the evolutionary endeavour. The thing done has not only to be confirmed, secured against relapse and the downward gravitation, against failure and extinction, but opened out into all the fields of its possibilities, its totality of entire self-achievement, its utmost height, subtlety, riches, wideness; it has to become dominant, all-embracing, comprehensive. This is everywhere the process of Nature and to ignore it is to miss the intention in her works and get lost in the maze of her procedure.
  It is this process that has taken place in the evolution of religion in the human mind and consciousness; the work done by it for humanity cannot be understood or properly appreciated if we ignore the conditions of the process and their necessity. It is evident that the first beginnings of religion must be crude and imperfect, its development hampered by mixtures, errors, concessions to the human mind and vital part which may often be of a very unspiritual character. Ignorant and injurious and even disastrous elements may creep in and lead to error and evil; the dogmatism of the human mind, its self-assertive narrowness, its intolerant and challenging egoism, its attachment to its limited truths and still greater attachment to its errors, or the violence, fanaticism, militant and oppressive self-affirmation of the vital, its treacherous action on the mind in order to get a sanction for its own desires and propensities, may very easily invade the religious field and baulk religion of its higher spiritual aim and character; under the name of religion much ignorance may hide, many errors and an extensive wrong-building be permitted, many crimes even and offences against the spirit be committed.
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  When spirituality disengages itself in the consciousness and puts on its distinctive character, it is only at first a small kernel, a growing tendency, an exceptional light of experience amidst the great mass of normal unenlightened human mind, vitality, physicality which forms the outer self and engrosses our natural preoccupation. There are tentative beginnings and a slow evolution and hesitating Emergence. An earlier first preliminary form of it creates a certain kind of religiosity which is not the pure spiritual temperament, but is of the nature of mind or life seeking or finding in itself a spiritual support or factor; in this stage man is mostly preoccupied with the utilisation of such contacts as he can get or construct with what is beyond him to help or serve his mental ideas or moral ideals or his vital and physical interests; the true turn to some spiritual change has not come. The first true formations take the shape of a spiritualisation of our natural activities, a permeating influence on them or a direction: there is a preparatory influence or influx in some part or tendency of the mind or life, - a spiritualised turn of thought with uplifting illuminations, or a spiritualised turn of the emotional or the aesthetic being, a spiritualised ethical formation in the character, a spiritualised urge in some life-action or other dynamic vital movement of the nature. An awareness comes perhaps of an inner light, of a guidance or a communion, of a greater Control than the mind and will to which something in us obeys; but all is not yet recast in the mould of that experience. But when these intuitions and illuminations grow in insistence and canalise themselves, make a strong inner formation and claim to govern the whole life and take over the nature, then there begins the spiritual formation of the being; there emerges the saint, the devotee, the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier of the spirit. All these take their stand on one part of the natural being lifted up by a spiritual light, power or ecstasy. The sage and seer live in the spiritual mind, their thought or their vision is governed and moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of knowledge; the devotee lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking; the saint is moved by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being; the others stand in the vital kinetic nature driven by a higher spiritual energy and turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-given work or mission, the service of some divine Power, idea or ideal. The last or highest Emergence is the liberated man who has realised the Self and Spirit within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of Nature. The largest formulation of this spiritual change and achievement is a total liberation of soul, mind, heart and action, a casting of them all into the sense of the cosmic Self and the Divine Reality.10 The spiritual evolution of the individual has then found its way and thrown up its range of Himalayan eminences and its peaks of highest nature. Beyond this height and largeness there opens only the supramental ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence.
  This then has been up till now the course of Nature's evolution of the spiritual man in the human mental being, and it may be questioned what is the exact sum of this achievement and its actual significance. In the recent reaction towards the life of the mind in Matter, this great direction and this rare change have been stigmatised as no true evolution of consciousness but rather a sublimated crudity of ignorance deviating from the true human evolution, which should be solely an evolution of life-power, the practical physical mind, the reason governing thought and conduct and the discovering and organising intelligence. In this epoch religion was pushed aside as an out-of-date superstition and spiritual realisation and experience discredited as a shadowy mysticism; the mystic in this view is the man who turns aside into the unreal, into occult regions of a self-constructed land of chimeras and loses his way there. This judgment proceeds from a view of things which is itself bound to pass into discredit, because it depends ultimately on the false perception of the material as alone real and the outward life as alone of importance.

2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Moreover, the psychic being, the soul personality in us, does not emerge full-grown and luminous; it evolves, passes through a slow development and formation; its figure of being may be at first indistinct and may afterwards remain for a long time weak and undeveloped, not impure but imperfect: for it rests its formation, its dynamic self-building on the power of soul that has been actually and more or less successfully, against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the evolution upon the surface. Its appearance is the sign of a soul Emergence in Nature, and if that Emergence is as yet small and defective, the psychic personality also will be stunted or feeble.
  It is too, by the obscurity of our consciousness, separated from its inner reality, in imperfect communication with its own source in the depths of the being; for the road is as yet ill-built, easily obstructed, the wires often cut or crowded with communications of another kind and proceeding from another origin: its power to impress what it receives upon the outer instruments is also imperfect; in its penury it has for most things to rely on these instruments and it forms its push to expression and action on their data and not solely on the unerring perceptions of the psychic entity. In these conditions it cannot prevent the true psychic light from being diminished or distorted in the mind into a mere idea or opinion, the psychic feeling in the heart into a fallible emotion or mere sentiment, the psychic will to action in the lifeparts into a blind vital enthusiasm or a fervid excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for want of something better and tries to fulfil itself through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms in the direction of what is divine and luminous; but this has to be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As the psychic personality grows stronger, it begins to increase its communion with the psychic entity behind it and improve its communications with the surface: it can transmit its intimations to the mind and heart and life with a greater purity and force; for it is more able to exercise a strong control and react against false mixtures; now more and more it makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the nature. But even so this evolution would be slow and long if left solely to the difficult automatic action of the evolutionary Energy; it is only when man awakes to the knowledge of the soul and feels a need to bring it to the front and make it the master of his life and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution intervenes and a psychic transformation becomes possible.
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  A first condition of the soul's complete Emergence is a direct contact in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from that, the psychic element in us turns always towards whatever in phenomenal Nature seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted as its sign and character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good, the true, the beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but although this touch through outer signs and characters can modify and prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality itself is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply touch the foundations of our being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into a ferment of transmutation. Mental representations, emotional and dynamic figures have their use and value; Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves primary and potent figures of the Reality, and even in their forms as seen by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in the life can be lines of an ascent: but it is in a spiritual substance and being of them and of itself that That which they represent has to come into our experience.
  The soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the thinking mind as intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impression on the intellect and the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelligence and turns them in that direction.
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  Some of these experiences can come by an opening of the inner mental and vital being, the inner and larger and subtler mind and heart and life within us, without any full Emergence of the soul, the psychic entity, since there too there is a power of direct contact of consciousness: but the experience might then be of a mixed character; for there could be an Emergence not only of the subliminal knowledge but of the subliminal ignorance. An insufficient expansion of the being, a limitation by mental idea, by narrow and selective emotion or by the form of the temperament so that there would be only an imperfect self-creation and action and not the free soul- Emergence, could easily occur. In the absence of any or of a complete psychic Emergence, experiences of certain kinds, experiences of a greater knowledge and force, a surpassing of the ordinary limits, might lead to a magnified ego and even bring about instead of an outflowering of what is divine or spiritual an uprush of the titanic or demoniac, or might call in agencies and powers which, though not of this disastrous type, are of a powerful but inferior cosmic character. But the rule and guidance of the soul brings into all experience the tendency of light, of integration, of harmony and intimate rightness which is native to the psychic essence. A psychic or, more widely speaking, a psycho-spiritual transformation of this kind would be already a vast change of our mental human nature.
  But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic spiritual outcome6 would be a flowering of the soul in mind and life and body, but in act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations - however enlarged, uplifted and rarefied - of an inferior instrumentation. It would be a reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality, intensity, largeness, oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight are above us, above mind and therefore above any perfection, within mind's own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of our present nature. A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes possible; for lead away from life or to a Nirvana; but they are here being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the nature. as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now hidden from us by many walls of limiting individuality, so also it opens us to what is now superconscient to our normality because it is hidden from us by the strong, hard and bright lid of mind, - mind constricting, dividing and separative. The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears under the pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new spiritualised consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here. This effectuation of an aperture and its consequences may not at all take place if there is only a partial psychic Emergence satisfied with the experience of the Divine Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised mind: but if there is any awakening to the existence of these higher supernormal levels, then an aspiration towards them may break the lid or operate a rift in it. This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual change is complete or even before it has well begun or proceeded far, because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager concentration towards the superconscience. An early illumination from above or a rending of the upper velamen can come as an outcome of aspiration or some inner readiness, or it may even come uncalled-for or not called for by any conscious part of the mind, - perhaps by a secret subliminal necessity or by an action or pressure from the higher levels, by something which is felt as the touch of the Divine Being, the touch of the Spirit, - and its results can be exceedingly powerful. But if it is brought about by a premature pressure from below, it can be attended with difficulties and dangers which are absent when the full psychic Emergence precedes this first admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice, however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of the Consciousness-Force in its urge towards a higher self-manifestation and formation of our existence.
  If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss, - a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, although something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened to this experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights above: the nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite ascension and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is because it has been superconscient to mind and therefore mind, when it rises into it, is unable at first to retain there its power of conscious discernment and defining experience. But when this power begins to awake and act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to it superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and experience of superior planes of existence. The experience is in accord with that which is brought to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into a higher plane of pure self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into regions of light or of felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite Power or a divine Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or Beauty or the atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowledge. In the return the spiritual impression abides; but the mental record is often blurred and remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience. In time the ascent comes to be made at will and the consciousness brings back and retains some effect or some gain of its temporary sojourn in these higher countries of the spirit. These ascents take place for many in trance, but are perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking consciousness or, where that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at any unconcentrated moment by an upward attraction or affinity.
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  This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult Emergence of the Consciousness-Force in Nature: for mind and life have to descend into Matter and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and native power. The life consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence; its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of its conceptions, the form betrays the life intuition within it which it tries to render into terms of life being. The mind is unable to achieve its high ideas in the medium of life or matter without deductions and compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and the incomprehension of Matter.
  Neither life nor mind succeeds in converting or perfecting the material existence, because they cannot attain to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call in a higher power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers also undergo the same disability when they descend into life and matter; they can do much more, achieve much luminous change, but the modification, the limitation, the disparity between the consciousness that comes in and the force of effectuation that it can mentalise and materialise, are constantly there and the result is a diminished creation. The change made is often extraordinary, there is even something which looks like a total conversion and reversal of the state of consciousness and an uplifting of its movements, but it is not dynamically absolute.

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The transition to Supermind through overmind is a passage from Nature as we know it into Super-Nature. It is by that very fact impossible for any effort of the mere Mind to achieve; our unaided personal aspiration and endeavour cannot reach it: our effort belongs to the inferior power of Nature; a power of the Ignorance cannot achieve by its own strength or characteristic or available methods what is beyond its own domain of Nature. All the previous ascensions have been effectuated by a secret Consciousness-Force operating first in Inconscience and then in the Ignorance: it has worked by an Emergence of its involved powers to the surface, powers concealed behind the veil and superior to the past formulations of Nature, but even so there is needed a pressure of the same superior powers already formulated in their full natural force on their own planes; these superior planes create their own foundation in our subliminal parts and from there are able to influence the evolutionary process on the surface. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and occult in earth-Nature, but they have no formations on the accessible levels of our subliminal inner consciousness; there is as yet no overmind being or organised overmind nature, no supramental being or organised supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our normal subliminal parts: for these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the level of our ignorance. In order that the involved principles of Overmind and Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the being and powers of the superconscience must descend into us and uplift us and formulate themselves in our being and powers; this descent is a sine qua non of the transition and transformation.
  It is conceivable indeed that, without the descent, by a secret pressure from above, by a long evolution, our terrestrial Nature might succeed in entering into a close contact with the higher now superconscient planes and a formation of subliminal Overmind might take place behind the veil; as a result a slow Emergence of the consciousness proper to these higher planes might awake on our surface. It is conceivable that in this way there might appear a race of mental beings thinking and acting not by the intellect or reasoning and reflecting intelligence, or not mainly by it, but by an intuitive mentality which would be the first step of an ascending change; this might be followed by an overmentalisation which would carry us to the borders beyond which lies the Supermind or divine Gnosis. But this process would inevitably be a long and toilsome endeavour of Nature.
  There is a possibility too that what would be achieved might only be an imperfect superior mentalisation; the new higher elements might strongly dominate the consciousness, but they would be still subjected to a modification of their action by the principle of an inferior mentality: there would be a greater expanded and illuminating knowledge, a cognition of a higher order; but it would still undergo a mixture subjecting it to the law of the Ignorance, as Mind undergoes limitation by the law of Life and Matter. For a real transformation there must be a direct and unveiled intervention from above; there would be necessary too a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness, a cessation of its insistence, a will in it for its separate law of action to be completely annulled by transformation and lose all rights over our being. If these two conditions can be achieved even now by a conscious call and will in the spirit and a participation of our whole manifested and inner being in its change and elevation, the evolution, the transformation can take place by a comparatively swift conscious change; the supramental Consciousness-Force from above and the evolving Consciousness-Force from behind the veil acting on the awakened awareness and will of the mental human being would accomplish by their united power the momentous transition. There would be no farther need of a slow evolution counting many millenniums for each step, the halting and difficult evolution operated by Nature in the past in the unconscious creatures of the Ignorance.
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  The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an overmind or supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature, its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can only be brought about by a full Emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the whole nature.
  A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, - a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic consciousness, - is another necessary condition for the supramental change. It would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-consciousness can establish itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All the inner centres must have burst open and released into action their capacities; the psychic entity must be unveiled and in control. If this first change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda, penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive.
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  This law of Nature's procedure brings in the necessity of a gradation in the last transitional process, a climbing of degrees, an unfolding of higher and higher states that lead us from the spiritualised mind to supermind, - a steep passage that could not be accomplished otherwise. There are above us, we have seen, successive states, levels or graded powers of being overtopping our normal mind, hidden in our own superconscient parts, higher ranges of Mind, degrees of spiritual consciousness and experience; without them there would be no links, no helpful intervening spaces to make the immense ascension possible. It is indeed from these higher sources that the secret spiritual Power acts upon the being and by its pressure brings about the psychic transformation or the spiritual change; but in the early stages of our growth this action is not apparent, it remains occult and unseizable. At first what is necessary is that the pure touch of the spiritual force must intervene in mental nature: that awakening pressure must stamp itself upon mind and heart and life and give them their upward orientation; a subtle light or a great transmuting power must purify, refine and uplift their motions and suffuse them with a higher consciousness that does not belong to their own normal capacity and character. This can be done from within by an invisible action through the psychic entity and the psychic personality; a consciously felt descent from above is not indispensable. The presence of the spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being. The necessary turn or change can also be brought about by an occult descent of the spiritual force from above, in which the influx, the influence, the spiritual consequence is felt, but the higher source is unknown and the actual feeling of a descent is not there. A consciousness so touched may be so much uplifted that the being turns to an immediate union with the Self or with the Divine by departure from the evolution and, if that is sanctioned, no question of graduality or steps or method intervenes, the rupture with Nature can be decisive: for the law of departure, once it is made possible, is not or need not be the same as the law of the evolutionary transformation and perfection; it is or can be a leap, a breaking out of bonds rapid or immediate, - the spiritual evasion is secured and its only remaining sanction is the destined fall of the body. But if the transformation of earth life is intended, the first touch of spiritualisation must be followed by an awakening to the higher sources and energies, a seeking for them and an enlargement and heightening of the being into their characteristic status and a conversion of the consciousness to their greater law and dynamic nature. This change must go step by step, till the stair of the ascension is transcended and there is an Emergence to those greatest wide-open spaces of which the Veda speaks, the native spaces of a consciousness which is supremely luminous and infinite.
  For here there is the same process of evolution as in the rest of the movement of Nature; there is a heightening and widening of the consciousness, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and force of substanceenergy on as much as it can reach of the previously evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence.

2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will also receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the past by the The Gnostic Being upsurging, at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that Power already self-realised in its own higher natural province. In all these previous stages there has been a division between surface self and consciousness and subliminal self and consciousness; the surface was formed mainly under the push of the upsurging force from below, by the Inconscient developing a slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of the spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental or a vital being descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must have been already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the entire consciousness as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a veil: the process will be no longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous procedure but an open outflowering consciously felt and followed by the whole being in its transmutation. In other respects the process will be identical, - a supramental inflow from above, the descent of a gnostic being into the nature, and an Emergence of the concealed supramental force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will remove what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscient will disappear: for the Inconscience will be changed by the outburst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience. A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence.
  The creation of a supramental being, nature, life on earth, will not be the sole result of this evolution; it will also carry with it the consummation of the steps that have led up to it: for it will confirm in possession of terrestrial birth the overmind, the intuition and the other gradations of the spiritual natureforce and establish a race of gnostic beings and a hierarchy, a shining ladder of ascending degrees and successive constituent formations of the gnostic light and power in earth-nature. For the description of gnosis applies to all consciousness that is based upon Truth of being and not upon the Ignorance or Nescience.
  All life and living beings ready to rise beyond the mental ignorance, but not ready yet for the supramental height, would find in a sort of echelon or a scale with overlapping degrees their assured basis, their intermediate steps of self-formation, their expression of realised capacity of spiritual existence on the way to the supreme Reality. But also the presence of the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden TruthPower everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressing life and consciousness, a better lifeorder. A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence. Instead of a constant intermixed and confused struggle between the growth of Consciousness and the power of the Inconscience, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the evolution would become a graded progression from lesser light to greater light; in each stage of it the conscious beings belonging to that stage would respond to the inner Consciousness-Force and expand their own law of cosmic Nature towards the possibility of a higher degree of that Nature. This is at least a strong possibility and might be envisaged as the natural consequence of the direct action of supermind on the evolution. This intervention would not annul The Gnostic Being the evolutionary principle, for supermind has the power of withholding or keeping in reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into full or partial action; but it would harmonise, steady, facilitate, tranquillise and to a great extent hedonise the difficult and afflicted process of the evolutionary Emergence.
  There is something in the nature of supermind itself that would make this great result inevitable. It is in its foundation a unitarian and integralising and harmonic consciousness, and in its descent and evolutionary working out of the diversity of the Infinite it would not lose its unitarian trend, its push towards integralisation or its harmonic influence. The Overmind follows out diversities and divergent possibilities on their own lines of divergence: it can allow contradictions and discords, but it makes them elements of a cosmic whole so that they are forced, however unwittingly and in spite of themselves, to contri bute their share to its wholeness. Or we may say that it accepts and even encourages contradictions, but obliges them to support each other's existence so that there may be divergent roads of being and consciousness and experience that lead away from the One and from each other but still maintain themselves on the Oneness and can lead back again each on its own path to the Oneness. That is the secret sense even of our own world of Ignorance which works from the Inconscience but with the underlying cosmicity of the overmind principle. But the individual being in such a creation does not possess this secret principle in knowledge and does not base upon it his action. An overmind being here would perceive this secret; but he might still work on his own lines of Nature and law of action, Swabhava, Swadharma, according to the inspiration, the dynamic control or the inner governance of the Spirit or the Divine within him and leave the rest to their own line in the whole: an overmind creation of knowledge in the Ignorance might therefore be something separate from the surrounding world of Ignorance and guarded from it by the luminous encircling and separating wall of its own principle. The supramental gnostic being, on the contrary, would not only found all his living on an intimate sense and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group life, but would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving mental world, even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For the gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Ignorance; it would be natural to his sense of integrality and it would be within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation. That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of the world, but such a change would be a natural consequence of the appearance of a new Power in Nature and its universal influence. In the Emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature.
  A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made according to a single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the law of the supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there would be an infinite diversity in the manifestation of the gnostic consciousness although that consciousness would still be one in its basis, in its constitution, in its allrevealing and all-uniting order. It is evident that the triple status of the supermind would reproduce itself as a principle in this new manifestation: there would be below it and yet belonging to it the degrees of the overmind and intuitive gnosis with the souls that had realised these degrees of the ascending consciousness; there would be also at the summit, as the evolution in Knowledge proceeded, individual beings who would ascend beyond a supermind formulation and reach from the highest height of supermind to the summits of unitarian self-realisation in the body which must be the last and supreme state of the epiphany of the Creation. But in the supramental race itself, in the variation of its degrees, the individuals would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the principle of his being. It is only this general principle of The Gnostic Being the supramental existence of which we can attempt to form an idea however diminished by the limitations of mental thought and mental language. A more living picture of the gnostic being supermind only could make; for the mind some abstract outlines of it are alone possible.
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  In our present way of living the soul expresses itself, as best it can or as badly as it must, through the mind and the vitality, or, more The Gnostic Being often, allows the mind and the vitality to act with its support: the body is the instrument of this action. But the body, even in obeying, limits and determines the mind's and the life's selfexpression by the limited possibilities and acquired character of its own physical instrumentation; it has besides a law of its own action, a movement and will or force or urge of movement of its own subconscious or half-emerged conscious power of being which they can only partially - and even in that part more by an indirect than by a direct or, if direct, then more by a subconscious than a willed and conscious action - influence or alter. But in the gnostic way of being and living the will of the spirit must directly control and determine the movements and law of the body. For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental Emergence. Already even in the realised highermind being and in the intuitive and overmind being the body will have become sufficiently conscious to respond to the influence of the Idea and the Will-Force so that the action of mind on the physical parts, which is rudimentary, chaotic and mostly involuntary in us, will have developed a considerable potency: but in the supramental being it is the consciousness with the Real-Idea in it which will govern everything. This real-idea is a truth-perception which is self-effective; for it is the idea and will of the spirit in direct action and originates a movement of the substance of being which must inevitably effectuate itself in state and act of being. It is this dynamic irresistible spiritual realism of the Truth-consciousness in the highest degree of itself that will have here grown conscient and consciously competent in the evolved gnostic being: it will not act as now, veiled in an apparent inconscience and self-limited by law of mechanism, but as the sovereign Reality in self-effectuating action. It is this that will rule the existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in its rule the functioning and action of the body. The body will be turned by the power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit.
  This new relation of the spirit and the body assumes - and makes possible - a free acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no longer imperative. To cease to be identified with the body, to separate oneself from the body-consciousness, is a recognised and necessary step whether towards spiritual liberation or towards spiritual perfection and mastery over Nature. But, this redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and force can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated and sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed, only if there is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a control, a reversal of the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit and affirm her own dominance. In the light of a larger knowledge Matter also can be seen to be the Brahman, a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance of Brahman; aware of the secret consciousness within material substance, secure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light and power can unite itself with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument of a spiritual manifestation. A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealings with it is possible. As in the Gita the act of the taking of food is spoken of as a material sacrament, a sacrifice, an offering of Brahman to Brahman by Brahman, so also the gnostic consciousness and sense can view all the operations of Spirit with Matter. The Spirit has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy, yogaks.ema, of created beings, for a selfoffering of universal physical utility and service. The gnostic being, using Matter but using it without material or vital attachment or desire, will feel that he is using the Spirit in this form of itself with its consent and sanction for its own purpose.
  --
  The purity of the eternal Self-existence would pour itself into all the activities, making and keeping all things pure; there could be no ignorance leading to wrong will and falsehood of the steps, no separative egoism inflicting by its ignorance and separate contrary will harm on oneself or harm on others, self-driven to a wrong dealing with one's own soul, mind, life or body or a wrong dealing with the soul, mind, life, body of others, which is the practical sense of all human evil. To rise beyond virtue and sin, good and evil is an essential part of the Vedantic idea of liberation, and there is in this correlation a self-evident The Gnostic Being sequence. For liberation signifies an Emergence into the true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic selfexpression of that truth and there can be nothing else. In the imperfection and conflict of our members there is an effort to arrive at a right standard of conduct and to observe it; that is ethics, virtue, merit, pun.ya, to do otherwise is sin, demerit, papa. Ethical mind declares a law of love, a law of justice, a law of truth, laws without number, difficult to observe, difficult to reconcile. But if oneness with others, oneness with truth is already the essence of the realised spiritual nature, there is no need of a law of truth or of love, - the law, the standard has to be imposed on us now because there is in our natural being an opposite force of separateness, a possibility of antagonism, a force of discord, ill-will, strife. All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature which has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness born of the Ignorance, even as it is expressed in the ancient legend of the Vedanta. But where all is self-determined by truth of consciousness and truth of being, there can be no standard, no struggle to observe it, no virtue or merit, no sin or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of right will be there, not as a law mentally constructed but as the very substance and constitution of the nature and, by the integration of the being, necessarily also the very stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is the liberation attained by an evolution of the spiritual being: the gnostic evolution gives us the complete dynamism of that return to ourselves. Once that is done, the need of standards of virtue, dharmas, disappears; there is the law and self-order of the liberty of the spirit, there can be no imposed or constructed law of conduct, dharma. All becomes a self-flow of spiritual self-nature, Swadharma of Swabhava.
  Here we touch the kernel of the dynamic difference between life in the mental ignorance and life in the gnostic being and nature. It is the difference between an integral fully conscious being in full possession of its own truth of existence and working out that truth in its own freedom, free from all constructed laws, while yet its life is a fulfilment of all true laws of becoming in their essence of meaning, and an ignorant self-divided existence which seeks for its own truth and tries to construct its findings into laws and construct its life according to a pattern so made.
  --
  This would be the nature of the being, life and action of the gnostic individual so far as we can follow the evolution with our mental conception up to that point where it will emerge out of overmind and cross the border into supramental gnosis. This nature of the gnosis would evidently determine all the relations of the life or group-life of gnostic beings; for a gnostic collectivity would be a collective soul-power of the Truth-consciousness, even as the gnostic individual would be an individual soulpower of it: it would have the same integration of life and action in unison, the same realised and conscious unity of being, the same spontaneity, intimate oneness-feeling, one and mutual truth-vision and truth-sense of self and each other, the same truth-action in the relation of each with each and all with all; this collectivity would be and act not as a mechanical but a spiritual integer. A similar inevitability of the union of freedom and order would be the law of the collective life; it would be a freedom of the diverse play of the Infinite in divine souls, an order of the conscious unity of souls which is the law of the supramental Infinite. Our mental rendering of oneness brings into it the rule of sameness; a complete oneness brought about by the mental reason drives towards a thoroughgoing standardisation as its one effective means, - only minor shades of differentiation would be allowed to operate: but the greatest richness of diversity in the self-expression of oneness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaptation, a sense of The Gnostic Being complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life. For the difficulty in mind and life is created by ego, by separation of integers into component parts which figure as contraries, opposites, disparates: all in which they separate from each other is easily felt, affirmed and stressed; that in which they meet, whatever holds their divergences together, is largely missed or found with difficulty; everything has to be done by an overcoming or an adjustment of difference, by a constructed unity. There is, indeed, an underlying principle of oneness and Nature insists on its Emergence in a construction of unity; for she is collective and communal as well as individual and egoistic and has her instrumentation of associativeness, sympathies, common needs, interests, attractions, affinities as well as her more brutal means of unification: but her secondary imposed and too prominent basis of ego-life and ego-nature overlays the unity and afflicts all its constructions with imperfection and insecurity. A farther difficulty is created by the absence or rather the imperfection of intuition and direct inner contact making each a separate being forced to learn with difficulty the other's being and nature, to arrive at understanding and mutuality and harmony from outside instead of inwardly through a direct sense and grasp, so that all mental and vital interchange is hampered, rendered ego-tainted or doomed to imperfection and incompleteness by the veil of mutual ignorance. In the collective gnostic life the integrating truth-sense, the concording unity of gnostic nature would carry all divergences in itself as its own opulence and turn a multitudinous thought, action, feeling into the unity of a luminous life-whole. This would be the evident principle, the inevitable result of the very character of the Truth-Consciousness and its dynamic realisation of the spiritual unity of all being.
  This realisation, the key to the perfection of life, difficult to arrive at on the mental plane, difficult even when realised to dynamise or organise, would be naturally dynamic, spontaneously self-organised in all gnostic creation and gnostic life.

2.28 - The Divine Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  4: But this evolution of our consciousness to a superconscience or supreme of itself is possible only if the Inconscience which is our basis here is really itself an involved Superconscience; for what is to be in the becoming of the Reality in us must be already there involved or secret in its beginning. Such an involved Being or Power we can well conceive the Inconscient to be when we closely regard this material creation of an unconscious Energy and see it labouring out with curious construction and infinite device the work of a vast involved Intelligence and see, too, that we ourselves are something of that Intelligence evolving out of its involution, an emerging consciousness whose Emergence cannot stop short on the way until the Involved has evolved and revealed itself as a supreme totally self-aware and all-aware Intelligence. It is this to which we have given the name of Supermind or Gnosis. For that evidently must be the consciousness of the Reality, the Being, the Spirit that is secret in us and slowly manifesting here; of that Being we are the becomings and must grow into its nature.
  5: If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the exterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature.
  --
  46: In the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power, this correlation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness itself is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and rhythm of its powers in their Emergence are diminished and disturbed by the discordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there is the original, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious mind is only a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising coherence. Life-Force also in the material world seems to be more dynamic and effective than Mind; our Mind is free and fully powerful in idea and cognition only: its force of action, its power of effectuation outside this mental field is obliged to work with life and matter as instruments and, under the conditions imposed on it by life and matter, our mind is hampered and half effective. But even so we see that Nature-force in the mental being is much more powerful to deal with himself and with life and matter than Nature-force in the animal; it is the greater force of consciousness and knowledge, the greater emerged force of being and will that constitute this superiority. In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger dynamis of action than the mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life-force: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life. But it is his use of mind that enables him to arrive at a full exploitation of this superiority, and in the end the mental man by his power of knowledge, his science, is able to extend the mastery of existence far beyond what life in matter could accomplish by its own agencies or what the vital man could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct without that increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power over existence and over Nature must come when a still greater consciousness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental Energy in our too individualised and restricted force of existence.
  47: A certain fundamental subjection of mind to life and matter and an acceptance of this subjection, an inability to make the law of Mind directly dominant and modify by its powers the blinder law and operations of these inferior forces of being, remains even in the midst of our greatest mental mastery over self and things; but this limitation is not insuperable. It is the interest of occult knowledge that it shows us - and a dynamic force of spiritual knowledge brings us the same evidence - that this subjection of Mind to Matter, of the spirit to a lesser law of life is not what it at first appears to be, a fundamental condition of things, an inviolable and unalterable rule of Nature. The greatest, most momentous natural discovery that man can make is this that mind, and still more the force of the spirit, can in many tried and yet untried ways and in all directions - by its own nature and direct power and not only by devices and contrivances such as the superior material instrumentation discovered by physical Science - overcome and control life and matter. In the evolution of the gnostic supernature this direct power of consciousness, this direct action of the force of the being, its free mastery and control of life and matter, would be consummated and reach their acme. For the greater knowledge of the gnostic being would not be in the main an outwardly acquired or learned knowledge, but the result of an evolution of consciousness and of the force of consciousness, a new dynamisation of the being.
  --
  82: There is the possibility that in the swing back from a mechanistic idea of life and society the human mind may seek refuge in a return to the religious idea and a society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organised religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society; it could not do so because, in governing society, it had to compromise with the lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner change of the whole being; it could insist only on a credal adherence, a formal acceptance of its ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual. Religion so conceived can give a religio-ethical colour or surface tinge, - sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can generalise to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does not transform the race, it cannot create a new principle of the human existence. A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. Another possible conception akin to the religious solution is the guidance of society by men of spiritual attainment, the brotherhood or unity of all in the faith or in the discipline, the spiritualisation of life and society by the taking up of the old machinery of life into such a unification or inventing a new machinery. This too has been attempted before without success; it was the original founding idea of more than one religion: but the human ego and vital nature were too strong for a religious idea working on the mind and by the mind to overcome its resistance. It is only the full Emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.
  83: At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. But what is demanded by this change is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation.
  --
  95: A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level, as a life of spiritual and supramental supermanhood. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood; for supermanhood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human level, not in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the forces of the human Ignorance; it carries also, commonly implied in it, the idea of a forceful domination over humanity by the superman. That would mean a supermanhood of the Nietzschean type; it might be at its worst the reign of the "blonde beast" or the dark beast or of any and every beast, a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and force: but this would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism. Or it might signify the Emergence of the Rakshasa or Asura out of a tense effort of humanity to surpass and transcend itself, but in the wrong direction. A violent and turbulent exaggerated vital ego satisfying itself with a supreme tyrannous or anarchic strength of self-fulfilment would be the type of a Rakshasic supermanhood: but the giant, the ogre or devourer of the world, the Rakshasa, though he still survives, belongs in spirit to the past; a larger Emergence of that type would be also a retrograde evolution. A mighty exhibition of an overpowering force, a self-possessed, self-held, even, it may be, an ascetically self-restrained mind-capacity and life-power, strong, calm or cold or formidable in collected vehemence, subtle, dominating, a sublimation at once of the mental and vital ego, is the type of the Asura. But earth has had enough of this kind in her past and its repetition can only prolong the old lines; she can get no true profit for her future, no power of self-exceeding, from the Titan, the Asura: even a great or supernormal power in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old orbit. But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple; it is a self-realised being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and beauty, - not an egoistic supermanhood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness in which humanity itself shall find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature.
  96: This new status would indeed be a reversal of the present law of human consciousness and life, for it would reverse the whole principle of the life of the Ignorance. It is for the taste of the Ignorance, its surprise and adventure, one might say, that the soul has descended into the Inconscience and assumed the disguise of Matter, for the adventure and the joy of creation and discovery, an adventure of the spirit, an adventure of the mind and life and the hazardous surprises of their working in Matter, for the discovery and conquest of the new and the unknown; all this constitutes the enterprise of life and all this, it might seem, would cease with the cessation of the Ignorance. Man's life is made up of the light and the darkness, the gains and losses, the difficulties and dangers, the pleasures and pains of the Ignorance, a play of colours moving on a soil of the general neutrality of Matter which has as its basis the nescience and insensibility of the Inconscient. To the normal life-being an existence without the reactions of success and frustration, vital joy and grief, peril and passion, pleasure and pain, the vicissitudes and uncertainties of fate and struggle and battle and endeavour, a joy of novelty and surprise and creation projecting itself into the unknown, might seem to be void of variety and therefore void of vital savour. Any life surpassing these things tends to appear to it as something featureless and empty or cast in the figure of an immutable sameness; the human mind's picture of heaven is the incessant repetition of an eternal monotone. But this is a misconception; for an entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. It would be a self-creation bringing out the Infinite infinitely into form of being, and the interest of the Infinite is much greater and multitudinous as well as more imperishably delightful than the interest of the finite. The evolution in the Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifestation with more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways than any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the Infinite eternal and inexhaustible. The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.

30.09 - Lines of Tantra (Charyapada), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Divine Grace is descending from on High in a continuous stream, thus is obliterated the sense of Being and Non-Being, all doubts and difficulties as to whether It exists or not. On the screen of the individual consciousness there arises a strange Form, like Uma-Haimavati of the Upanishad. Bhusuku, this is your true Natural Form. Once you know and recognise It, all the bonds of sense are broken, the heart fills of itself with a supreme delight. This is the real purification of sense, this enables you to establish with the objects of sense, with all objects, your true and pure relation, giving as result the Emergence of supreme Bliss. This is the Moon in your inner skies, the Delight within the three worlds of mind, life and body which spreads its moonshine on all your consciousness. Lo, there is left no trace of darkness in the Yogic mind of Bhusuku.
   Let us move a little farther, into the realm of a deeper principle, into the mysteries of a mote complicated symbolism. Here is a specimen of riddling verse:

3.02 - THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  of Emergence and submerge the earth ; of thought becoming
  number so as to conquer all habitable space, taking precedence
  --
  its point of Emergence, far from being simple, should display in
  the composition and divergence of its fibres the complex structure

3.03 - THE MODERN EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  phenomenon, as it were, of Emergence. In short, first recognised
  only at a single point, then perforce extended to the whole

3.1.01 - The Problem of Suffering and Evil, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  On the other side from the Divine Oneness a vast acquiescence, compassionate, consenting, helpful, a supreme knowledge that this thing must be, that having appeared it must be worked out, that its appearance is in a certain sense part of an incalculable infinite wisdom, that if the plunge into Night was inevitable the Emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme
  Truth be effected - by a working out with its phenomenal opposites as the starting-point of the evolution, as the condition laid down for a transforming Emergence. In this acquiescence was embraced too the will of the great Sacrifice, the descent of the
  Divine itself into the Inconscience to take up the burden of the
  --
  I suppose you have not read my "Riddle of This World",1 but it is a similar solution I put there. X's way of putting it is a trifle too "Vedantic-Theistic" - in my view it is a transaction between the One and the Many. In the beginning it was you (not the human you who is now complaining but the central being) which accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance; sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary Emergence out of it.
  The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its original transcendence but under conditions for which the plunge into the

3.1.02 - Asceticism and the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is evident that something in you, perhaps continuing the unfinished curve of a past life, is pushing you on this path of vairagya and the more stormy way of bhaktiin spite of our preference for a less painful one and yours also something that is determined to be drastic with the outer nature so as to make itself free to fulfil its secret aspiration. But do not listen to these suggestions of the voice that says, You shall not succeed and it is no use trying. That is a thing that need never be said in the Way of the Spirit, however difficult it may seem at the moment to be. Keep through all the aspiration which you express so beautifully in your poem; for it is certainly there and comes out from the depths, and if it is the cause of sufferingas great aspirations usually are in a world and nature where there is so much to oppose themit is also the promise and surety of Emergence and victory in the future.
  ***

3.1.02 - A Theory of the Human Being, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is a superstition of modern thought that the march of knowledge has in all its parts progressed always in a line of forward progress deviating from it, no doubt, in certain periods of obscuration, but always returning and in the sum constituting everywhere an advance and nowhere a retrogression. Like all superstitions this belief is founded on bad and imperfect observation flowering into a logical fallacy. Our observation is necessarily imperfect because we have at our disposal the historical data and literary records of only a few millenniums and beyond only disjected and insufficient indices which leave gigantic room for the hardly-fettered activity of the mind's two chief helpers and misleaders, inference and conjecture. Our observation is bad because, prepossessed by the fixed idea of a brief & recent Emergence from immemorial barbarism, imagining Plato to have blossomed in a few centuries out of a stock only a little more advanced than the South Sea islander, we refuse to seek in the records that still remain of a lost superior knowledge their natural and coherent significance; we twist them rather into the image of our own thoughts or confine them within the still narrow limits of what we ourselves know and understand.
  The logical fallacy we land in as the goal of our bad observation is the erroneous conception that because we are more advanced than certain ancient peoples in our own especial lines of success, as the physical sciences, therefore necessarily we are also more advanced in other lines where we are still infants and have only recently begun to observe and experiment, as the science of psychology and the knowledge of our subjective existence and of mental forces. Hence we have developed the exact contrary of the old superstition that the movement of man is always backward to retrogression. While our forefa thers believed that the more ancient might on the whole be trusted

3.1.02 - Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience and an Emergence of it out of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it recovers its own highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their powers here in Matter. But even in the Inconscience there is a secret Consciousness which works, one may say, by an involved and hidden Intuition proper to itself. In each stage of
  Matter, in each stage of Life, this Intuition assumes a working proper to that stage and acts from behind the veil, supporting and enforcing the immediate necessities of the creative Force.

3.1.1 - The Transformation of the Physical, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is the most physical consciousness of which you have become aware; it is like that in almost everyone: when one gets fully or exclusively into it, one feels it to be like that of an animal, either obscure and restless or inert and stupid and in either condition not open to the Divine. It is only by bringing the Force and higher consciousness into it that it can fundamentally alter. When these things show themselves, do not be upset by their Emergence, but understand that they are there to be changed.
  Here as elsewhere, quiet is the first thing needed, to keep the consciousness quiet, not allow it to get agitated and in turmoil. Then in the quiet to call for the Force to clear up all this obscurity and change it.
  --
  At the mercy of the external sounds and external bodily sensations, no control to drop the ordinary consciousness at will, the whole tendency of the being away from Yogaall that is unmistakably applicable to the physical mind and the physical consciousness when they isolate themselves, as it were, and take up the whole front, pushing the rest into the background. When a part of the being is brought forward to be worked upon for change, this kind of all-occupying Emergence, the dominant activity of that part as if it alone existed, very usually happensand unfortunately it is always what has to be changed, the undesirable conditions, the difficulties of that part which rise first and obstinately hold the field and recur. In the physical it is inertia, obscurity, inability that come up and the obstinacy of these things. The only thing to do in this unpleasant phase is to be more obstinate than the physical inertia and to persist in a fixed endeavoursteady persistency without any restless struggleto get a wide and permanent opening made even in this solid rock of obstruction.
  ***

3.2.04 - The Conservative Mind and Eastern Progress, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The conservative mind is unwilling to recognise this law though it is observable throughout human history and we can easily cull examples with full hands from all ages and all climes; and it is protected in its refusal to see by the comparative rarity of rapid revolutions and great cataclysmal changes; it is blinded by the disguise which Nature so often throws over her processes of mutation. If we look casually at European history in this light the attention is only seized by a few conspicuous landmarks, the evolution and end of Athenian democracy, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire, the Emergence of feudal Europe out of the ruins of Rome, the Christianisation of Europe, the Reformation and Renascence together preparing a new society, the French Revolution, the present rapid movement towards a socialistic State and the replacing of competition by organised cooperation. Because our view of European history is chiefly political, we do not see the constant mutation of society and of thought in the same relief; but we can recognise two great cycles of change, one of the ancient races leading from the primitive ages to the cultured society of the Graeco-Roman world, the other from the semi-barbarism of feudal Christendom to the intellectual, materialistic and civilised society of modern times.
  In the East, on the contrary, the great revolutions have been spiritual and cultural; the political and social changes, although they have been real and striking, if less profound than in Europe, fall into the shade and are apt to be overlooked; besides, this unobtrusiveness is increased by their want of relief, the slow subtlety of their process and the instinctive persistence and reverence with which old names and formulas have been preserved while the thing itself was profoundly modified until its original sense remained only as a pious fiction. Thus Japan kept its sacrosanct Mikado as a cover for the change to an aristocratic and feudal government and has again brought him forward in modern times to cover and facilitate without too serious a shock the transition from a mediaeval form of society into the full flood of modernism. In India the continued fiction of the ancient fourfold order of society based on spiritual idealism, social type, ethical discipline and economic function is still used to cover and justify the quite different, complex and chaotic order of caste which, while it still preserves some confused fragments of the old motives, is really founded upon birth, privilege, local custom and religious formalism. The evolution from one type of society to another so opposed to it in its psychological motives and real institutions without any apparent change of formula is one of the most curious phenomena in the social history of mankind and still awaits intelligent study.

3.2.05 - Our Ideal, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The synchronism and mutual interpenetration of the two great currents of human effort at such a crisis in the history of the race is full of hope for the future of humanity, but full also of possible dangers. The hope is the Emergence of a new and better human life founded on a greater knowledge, a pursuit of the new faculties and possibilities opening out before us and a just view of the problem which the individual, the society, the race have to solve. Mankind has been drawn together by the developments of material science and for good or evil its external future is henceforth one; its different parts no longer develop separately and in independence of each other. There opens out at the same time the possibility that by the development and practice of the science and the life of the soul it may be made one in reality and by an internal unity.
  The idea by which the enlightenment of Europe has been governed is the passion for the discovery of the Truth and Law that constitutes existence and governs the process of the world, the attempt to develop the life and potentialities of man, his ideals, institutions, organisations by the knowledge of that Law and Truth and the confidence that along this line lies the road of human progress and perfection.

3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Still, I would have no objection, if your attraction towards Nirvana were not merely a mood of the mind and vital but an indication of the minds true road and the souls issue. But it seems to me that it is only the vital recoiling from its own disappointed desires in an extreme dissatisfaction, not the soul leaping gladly to its true path. This vairagya is itself a vital movement; vital vairagya is the reverse side of vital desirethough the mind of course is there to give reasons and say ditto. Even this vairagya, if it is one-pointed and exclusive, can lead or can point towards Nirvana. But you have many sides to your personality or rather many personalities in you; it is indeed their discordant movements each getting in the way of the other, as happens when they are expressed through the external mind, that have stood much in the way of your sadhana. There is the vital personality which was turned towards success and enjoyment and got it and wanted to go on with it but could not get the rest of the being to follow. There is the vital personality that wanted enjoyment of a deeper kind and suggested to the other that it could very well give up these unsatisfactory things if it got an equivalent in some faeryl and of a higher joy. There is the psycho-vital personality that is the Vaishnava within you and wanted the Divine Krishna and bhakti and Ananda. There is the personality which is the poet and musician and a seeker of beauty through these things. There is the mental-vital personality which when it saw the vital standing in the way insisted on a grim struggle of Tapasya, and it is no doubt that also which approves vairagya and Nirvana. There is the physical-mental personality which is the Russellite, extrovert, doubter. There is another mental-emotional personality all whose ideas are for belief in the Divine, Yoga, bhakti, Guruvada. There is the psychic being also which has pushed you into the sadhana and is waiting for its hour of Emergence.
  What are you going to do with all these people? If you want Nirvana, you have either to expel them or stifle them or beat them into coma. All authorities assure us that this exclusive Nirvana business is a most difficult job (dukha dehavadbhi says the Gita), and your own fatal attempt at suppressing the others was not encouraging,according to your own account it left you as dry and desperate as a sucked orange, no juice left anywhere. If the desert is your way to the promised land, that does not matter. But

32.12 - The Evolutionary Imperative, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   With man came also the sense of what is beyond man, the superman, the divine man, the Divine. That is the true meaning of his appearance, that is the characteristic turn of consciousness which he brought with him. This self-consciousness, an inner perception and aspiration that he is to be something else, something other and greater than what he is, means the Emergence of a spiritual soul in the world of matter. This prophetic or forward-looking consciousness is absent in the sub-human creation, although, as I have said, a secret blind unknowing forward urge has always been there as the original motive of all functioning in things and creatures upon earth.
   The problem is whether man will take advantage of the privilege he has acquired. In one sense he has been trying as best he can since his very appearance, a million years ago perhaps: he has created wonderful cultures and civilisations all over the earth age after age; expressing not merely the human animal in him, nor solely even the human, but something higher and deeper still, the extra-human or superhuman, the Divine. India was particularly the country where the experiment was carried on consistently and more successfully than anywhere else. And yet what has been the net result, the real achievement in view of the supreme purpose and ideal? The achievement has been this that the purpose, the ideal has come to be known, it is now within the range of our, vision; creation has revealed its core of mystery - if not the whole of it, at least the central theme: the key has been found, but in its own home, that is to say, behind and beyond the creation. That, however, is only half the battle or even less; the other half is to bring the truth out of its own home and spread abroad, make the universe its own home. In other words, man has learnt to accept or is capable of accepting the reality in his inner consciousness, but only a very faint shadow of it - if anything at all - he has succeeded in establishing as a concrete or physical reality. Man's life, even the life of the very best, is still that of a mortal creature, still subject to ignorance, incapacity, disease and death - so long at least as he lives in his material frame in a material world.

3.2.3 - Dreams, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The quiescent part is subject during sleep to impressions from outside which it distorts into dream-figures or else, more freely, to impressions arising from the subconscient sometimes impressions of the day or from the waking environment, sometimes impressions from the past, sometimes things hereditary or even imprecise impressions left from past lives which come up under some obscure or secret impulsion. When one practises Yoga, the more superficial impressions, those which are in a sort accidental or occasional, outside touches, the days memories etc., do not, after a time, play so active a part as in the sleep of ordinary people; but the others aggrandise their scope and increase. These subconscient Emergences are by no means, however obscure or trivial they may seem, always without any use for Yoga. They can indicate things with which the subconscient is burdened and from which it has to be freed, binding memories of the vital and of the cells which have to be dismissed, forms, embedded notions, tendencies, habitual movements which it is no longer good to harbour, seeds of the past which have to be pulled out so that their undesirable fruit may no longer recur. For in the lower obscurer part of our being we are creatures of habit of nature and fixed past formations and complexesas they are termed by a current Western psychology, and these things have to be got rid of if we are not to be bound to our past selves, if there is to be a true and complete liberation and transformation of the external being. If one can learn to detect and understand the indications of these dreams when they come up and act upon what they show us to be still there in the obscure bed of our nature, it can be a great help for the successful change of what seems to be the most obscure and trivial and yet the most sticky and intractable part of the nature.
  The other, the active part of our consciousness does not remain in the inert and sleeping physical consciousness, but goes out into other planes of existence. For the most part with most people it is some part of the vital, lower or higher, that goes out into the corresponding vital planes, and the experiences it has there are transcribed in the physical consciousness or brought back to it and these transcriptions or these reports are what we call dreams or experiences on the vital plane. The reports, if one may so call them, are the memories of the outgoing part which it brings back to the physical but it is not easy to retain them in the memory after waking. For there is a crossing of a border, a bridge or a gulf and the turning over of the consciousness, what was put behind by sleep coming in front, what was in front in sleep going behind and in this transition, in this reversing process, the report or memory which can by very vivid and complete is usually lost or only some last experience or a fragment of it lingers and even that is apt to fade away in a very short time. Especially if one wakes abruptly or under pressure or rises immediately without waiting to retain the dream-experience, it is apt to disappear at once and altogether. One can train oneself however to remember ones dreams so that the material is ready to hand for interpretation and use, if they are of a nature to demand interpretation or lend themselves to use. But also, apart from these reports, there is the transcription or translation into the terms of the physical consciousness. For there is a thread that connects the outgoing and the instaying consciousnesses and along this thread messages can be sent either from here to the wandering part, most often for calling it back, but also for other purposes or from the wanderer signalling or transmitting his experiences, as it were, to the body in the measure in which it can receive them. Unfortunately the terms of this transcription are usually supplied by the quiescent and very ill-ordered consciousness that remains in the body, terms belonging to its own normal life and range, and therefore the transcription is often trivial, confused, perplexing, tiresomely null in its terms even when the experience itself is vivid, significant, coherent and full of interest. But as the dream consciousness in sleep develops, the outgoing part can increase its hold, and either manipulate the terms supplied to it from the physical being so as to express directly and vividly or else in significant symbols its own characteristic consciousness and experience or else it can impose its own terms, figures, scenes with more or less modification on the recipient consciousness in the body. In the end the consciousness can become so trained that even for dreams on the vital plane the difference between dreams and visions and experiences disappears or at most one can distinguish between dream-visions and dream-experiences and visions and experiences in a state of willed and perfectly self-conscious concentration. Even the dreams of the lower vital and the subtle physical become entirely vivid, real, coherent, significant and expressive of a truth that one can at once recognise. The dream-experiences of the highest vital, the psychic and the mental or still higher planes have always this character, because when they can get through they impose themselves more than those of the lower vital realms and are less subject to distortion or mixture by the physical subconscience.

3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To be conscious [of the sexual movement] is the first step, but by itself it is not enough; there must come an automatic force of rejection which the moment desire and passion arise throws it off so that it ebbs back from the mind or vital or wherever it touches. This comes either by a strong will of rejection becoming habitual in its action on the consciousness, or by the detached inner being developing an automatic dynamic strength in itself so that it is not only not touched, but refuses these things by an active purifying power or, finally, by the full Emergence of the psychic and its government of the mind, vital and body. The last is the most rapid and easy way. Till then these things recur. But probably in yourself there is still some sense of the old idea of sin or fault which makes you feel troubled. You must take it as an adjustment of the nature that is going on in which old movements which you no longer accept as yours return from force of habit and get a habitual response from some part of the being. But if that part of the being can be made to reject it, then the response begins to fade away. You must not allow yourself or your mind to feel troubled by the returns; for that only weakens the power of resistance. There should be calm dissociation of yourself from these things; then the detached inner being will become more easily dynamic and able to reject them from the vital nature.
  ***
  --
  When the waking consciousness has renounced the indulgence of the sexual desires and impulses, these take refuge in the subconscient as impressions, memories, suppressed desires and come up in sleep as dreams and involuntary sleep emissions. If the waking consciousness is not itself clear, if, that is to say, though there is no physical indulgence, yet there are imaginations in the mind or desires in the vital or the body, then these dreams and emissions can be frequent. Even if the waking consciousness is clear, the subconscient Emergences can still come for a time, but in time they diminish. Some are able to get rid of this by putting a strong prohibiting will or force on the subconscient or on the sex-centre before going to sleep, but this does not succeed with everyone. The main thing is to get the increasing force of brahmacharya in the waking consciousness, complete expulsion of sex-thoughts, speech, physical craving or impulse the subconscient remnants will either die out or be cleared out afterwards when one is able to bring the higher consciousness down here.
  ***

3.4.01 - Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The theory of evolution has been the key-note of the thought of the nineteenth century. It has not only affected all its science and its thought-attitude, but powerfully influenced its moral temperament, its politics and its society. Without it there could not have been that entire victory of the materialistic notion of life and the universe which has been the general characteristic of the age that is now passing,a victory which for a time even claimed to be definitive,nor such important corollary effects of this great change as the failure of the religious spirit and the breaking-up of religious beliefs. In society and politics it has led to the substitution of the evolutionary for the moral idea of progress and the consequent materialisation of social ideas and social progress, the victory of the economic man over the idealist. The scientific dogma of heredity, the theory of the quite recent Emergence of the civilised thinking human animal, the popular notion of the all-pervading struggle for life and the aid it has given to an exaggerated development of the competitive instinct, the idea of the social organism and the aid it has given to the contrary development of economic socialism and the increasing victory of the organised State or community over the free individual,all these are outflowings from the same source.
  The materialistic view of the world is now rapidly collapsing and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must disappear. Modern European thought progresses with a vertiginous rapidity. If it is Teutonic in its fidelity of observation and its tendency to laborious systematisation, it has also another side, Celtic-Hellenic, a side of suppleness, mobility, readiness for rapid change, insatiable curiosity. It does not allow the same thought, the same system to exercise for very long a secure empire; it is in haste to question, to challenge, to reject, to remould, to discover new and opposite truths, to venture upon other experiments. At present this spirit of questioning has not attacked the evolution theory at its centre, but it is visibly preparing to give it a new form and meaning.

3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The answer to these questions is now empirically quite clear. There are indeed discontinuities and qualitative differences in learning (i.e. behaviorally adaptive) capabilities as we go from one phyletic level to another. Behaviorally, the phylogenetic hierarchy is best characterized in terms of an increasing complexity of adaptive capabilities and an increasing breadth of transfer and generalization of learning, as we move from lower to higher phyla. It is a fact that every animal, at least above the level of worms, has the capacity to learn; that is, to form stimulus-response associations or conditioned responses. But the degree of complexity and abstractness of what can be learned shows distinct "quantum jumps" going from lower to higher phyla. Simpler capacities, and their neural substrate, persist as we move from lower to higher levels, but new adaptive capacities emerge in hierarchical layers as we ascend the phyletic scale. Each phyletic level possesses all the learning capacities (although not necessarily the same sensory and motor capacities) of the levels below itself in addition to new emergent abilities, which can be broadly conceived as an increase in the complexity of information processing. For example, studies by Bitterman (1965) of animals at various levels of the phyletic scale (earthworms, crabs, fishes, turtles, pigeons, rats and monkeys) have clearly demonstrated discontinuities in learning ability among different species and the Emergence of more complex abilities corresponding to the phylogenetic hierarchy. In the experimental procedure known as habit reversal, a form of learning-to-learn in which the animal is trained to make a discriminative response to a pair of stimuli and then has to learn the reverse discrimination and the two are alternated repeatedly, a fish does not show any sign of learning-to-learn (i.e. each reversal is like a completely new problem and takes as long to learn as the previous problems), while a rat improves markedly in its speed of learning from one reversal to the next. When portions of the rat's cerebral cortex are removed, thereby reducing the most prominent evolutionary feature of the mammalian brain, the learning ability of the decorticate rat is exactly like that of the turtle, an animal with little cortex, and would probably be like that of the fish, if all of the rat's cortex could be removed. Harlow and Harlow (1962) have noted similar discontinuities at high levels of learning among rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans. Again, situations that involve some form of learning-to-learn are most sensitive to differences in capacity. No animals below primates have ever learned the so-called oddity--non-oddity problem no matter how much training they are given, and more complex variations of this type of problem similarly differentiate between rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees. The species differences are not just in speed of learning, but in whether the problem can be learned at all, given any amount of training. This is essentially what is meant by a hierarchical conception of learning ability. There is much evidence for this conception, which Jensen (in press) has summarized more extensively elsewhere. The evolution of humans from more primitive forms is now believed to be intimately related to the use of tools and weapons (Ardry, 1961). The mental capabilities involved in the use of implements for gaining ever greater control of the environment, in lieu of sheer physical strength, were just as subject to the evolutionary effects of natural selection as are any genetically mutated organs. More specifically, according to Haskell (1968, p. 475), "What primarily evolves in man is the nerve structure which confers the capacity to invent, to borrow, and to adapt culture traits."
  Ontogeny of Human Mental Abilities.
  --
  In writing his book, Jonas was moving toward the kind of structure which Walter Lippmann has called the Public Philosophy,9 the structure which is shared by all great religions and ideologies. This structure has remained constant through all of the public philosophy's changes, from the animism of Lower Hunters, Period 1 ; through the Great Religions of the Literates, Period 5; to the Emergence of the Higher Industrialists, Period 7, which the unification of sciences into a public philosophy permits and requires. In Figure IV-11 we have diagrammed this permanent ideocratic structure.
  Every public philosophy encompasses vocabularies, observations and theories from all its culture's fields; that is to say, all those which its paradigmatic concepts can encompass and order. All others, each public philosophy must and does screen out.l0 Whenever this ceases to happen, the civilization breaks down ipso facto: its controller has broken down.
  --
  A Systems-Hierarchy such that its emerging entity is its controlling component, that this component's Emergence occurs in a regular manner, and that the system's over-all organization is correlated with that of its emergent entity, and varies as it does.7 This is a paraphrasis of the General Periodic Law, R = f ( ).
  a) Groups: Classes of organizational relations between the activity of the system's work component X and that of its controller Y, Figures 1-2 and 1-3. There are nine Groups, consisting of the permutations and combinations of +, 0, and - for work component X and controller Y.8 Geometrically, the Groups are classes of directions of the radius vector.
  --
  Figure II-5a and b, the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. In this Systems-Hierarchy the controlling component, whose Emergence is strategic, is the nucleus. Its Emergence occurs in expanding quasar shells by sequential additions of one proton. And in this System's (the atom's) over-all organization, the structures of both its nucleus and of its work component the electron cloud, are correlated with the quantized Emergence of the nucleus, and vary as it does. (Paraphrasis of Mendeleev's Periodic Law.)
  P) Period: The class of atoms having any given number of Strata (nuclear and electron-cloud shells) in common.
  --
  Being (n.) sentient. (Res cogitans) Sentience is the capacity of a being or system to simulate systems behavior, as also to simulate simulation; that is, to simulate the behavior of sentient systems, living or mechanical, such as computers. Sentient systems thus form a systems-hierarchy (q.v.) such, that each higher member of the hierarchy accurately simulates the behavior of lower members than itself. (See Simulation.) The hierarchy evolves by Emergence (through mutation, maturation, training or invention) of ever higher levels of abstraction (q.v.). Simulation of the behavior of higher by lower members of the hierarchy is called mimesis (q.v.). The part of the universe excluded from Western science in the l7th century by mutual consent of scientists and theologians.
  Biocenose (n.) A living community, usually including abiotic, plant and animal components. (See Biome, Ecosystem.)
  --
  Phylogeny (n. ) Development of a species--plant, animal, or human--from Emergence to extinction C f ontogeny.
  Predation (n.) The coaction (q.v.) in which the activity of the system's work component is decreased while that of its controller is increased. Predation, written ( - , + ), is the characteristic of Group VI in all Periodic Tables. Noisy synonym (C.f. noise): exploitation.
  --
  Public philosophy (Ref. Lippmann, Walter, The Public Philosophy.) A society's commonly shared world view. The higher the society's Period, the more forms its public philosophy must display: A different form for each Stratum. Coexistence of these different forms of the public philosophy depends upon the Emergence of coherent Systems theory, complete with glossary, permitting translations between the diverse forms of the public philosophy. Unified science, religion and political ideology thus comprise the public philosophy of the Space Age. (Ref., Haskell, E. F.).
  Quasar (quasi stellar object) (n.) The first known stage in the development (ontogeny, q.v.) of a galaxy. The population of atoms emerges in the quasar's expanding spheroidal shells. (See Figs. II-2 and II-1b) C.f. Galaxy.
  --
  One culture variable, already mentioned, is the degree of value mixture and of value dominance in each culture sample at a given time. The greater the dominance of one value-premise, and the others' corresponding absence or suppression at the time in question, the more clearly and conclusively the culture can be classified. The speed and direction (jointly called velocity) of a deviant value's Emergence and challenge, determines the likelihood of the culture's transmutation: of its breakdown to a lower Period, its build-up to a higher Period, or its shift to a different Group in the same Period. Toynbee has expounded important laws of transmutation in Literate cultures (Period 5).--This variable is analogous to target velocity.
  The second sighting variable, which is analogous to certain defects of the sighting mechanism, is the classifier's own mental-moral organization: his own grasp of the Periodic Law of Human Cultures. (In the history of chemistry, this mental variable produced the decisive difference between Newland's failure with his Octaves and Mendeleev's success with his Periodic Table, as described by Posin.--A famous example of this variation in anthropology is Ruth Benedict's own change of moral insight from 1934, when she copyrighted Patterns of Culture, to 1941 when she lectured on the same subject at Bryn Mawr College. In 1934 her sighting apparatus was cultural egalitarianism, which she and many others incorrectly labeled cultural relativism. It consists in flat contradiction of the Periodic Law. She stated this unequivocally in Patterns of Culture's concluding sentence, thus: "We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as a new basis for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence" (italics added). This flat denial of the Moral Law spread widely, and has intensified the breakdown symptoms in our culture which Toynbee called promiscuity, truancy, and drift. This is the Existentialists' disastrous way of dealing with the multiplicity of sighting mechanisms which constitutes each individual culture's and sub-culture's compass; namely, the false assertion that they are "equally valid" the abdication of responsibility of judging and assessing them relative to what Heisenberg calls a central order. (This subject is dealt with extensively in Chapter V.)
  --
  People, it seems, are endowed with moral ability in varying degrees, just as they are endowed with mathematical or linguistic ability. All the Great Religions, and above all the Christian, clearly display approaches to the Periodic Law. They are expressions of this moral sense in the terms of pre-Literate and Literate peoples, Period 5. With the Emergence of Unified Science, the continuity of this moral ability's development in terms of Lower and High Industrial cultures, Periods 6 and 7, becomes clearly visible. The empirical sciences' three-century-long structural amorality, the detour which Arthur Koestler called "The Parting of the Ways", comes to an end as science comes Full Circle, merging C. P. Snow's Two Cultures and producing Walter Lippmann's long urged and hoped for Public Philosophy of Industrial civilization.
  The third anthropological sighting variable is analogous to the sighter's or aimer's own velocity. This variable has been described in Chapter II, Section 7, and related to Einstein's sighting technique in physics by way of his free-falling elevator and rotating room analogies. There it was pointed out that highly autocratic or predatory cultures on one hand, strongly symbiotic cultures on the other, give rise in their inhabitants to strongly biased images of the world: People raised in the first tend to misinterpret cooperators as predators; people raised in the second tend to misinterpret predators as harmless cooperators.

3.7.1.01 - Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The true foundation of the theory of rebirth is the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence out of the veil of Matter and its gradual self-finding. Buddhism contained this truth involved in its theory of Karma and Emergence out of Karma but failed to bring it to light; Hinduism knew it of old, but afterwards missed the right balance of its expression. Now we are again able to restate the ancient truth in a new language and this is already being done by certain schools of thought, though still the old incrustations tend to tack themselves on to the deeper wisdom. And if this gradual efflorescence be true, then the theory of rebirth is an intellectual necessity, a logically unavoidable corollary. But what is the aim of that evolution? Not conventional or interested virtue and the faultless counting out of the small coin of good in the hope of an apportioned material reward, but the continual growth towards a divine knowledge, strength, love and purity. These things alone are real virtue and this virtue is its own reward. The one true reward of the works of love is to grow ever in capacity and delight of love up to the ecstasy of the spirits all-seizing embrace and universal passion; the one reward of the works of right Knowledge is to grow perpetually into the infinite Light; the one reward of the works of right Power is to harbour more and more of the Force Divine, and of the works of purity to be freed more and more from egoism into that immaculate wideness where all things are transformed and reconciled into the divine equality. To seek other reward is to bind oneself to a foolishness and a childish ignorance; and to regard even these things as a reward is an unripeness and an imperfection.
  And what of suffering and happiness, misfortune and prosperity? These are experiences of the soul in its training, helps, props, means, disciplines, tests, ordeals, and prosperity often a worse ordeal than suffering. Indeed, adversity, suffering may often be regarded rather as a reward to virtue than as a punishment for sin, since it turns out to be the greatest help and purifier of the soul struggling to unfold itself. To regard it merely as the stern award of a Judge, the anger of an irritated Ruler or even the mechanical recoil of result of evil upon cause of evil is to take the most superficial view possible of Gods dealings with the soul and the law of the worlds evolution. And what of worldly prosperity, wealth, progeny, the outward enjoyment of art, beauty, power? Good, if they be achieved without loss to the soul and enjoyed only as the outflowing of the divine Joy and Grace upon our material existence. But let us seek them first for others or rather for all, and for ourselves only as a part of the universal condition or as one means of bringing perfection nearer.

3.7.1.03 - Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But even if we admit the most scrupulous and rigorous continuity of successive determination, the question arises whether the process of evolution has been indeed so exclusively physical and biological as at first sight it looks. If it is, we must admit not only a rigorous principle of class heredity, but a law of hereditary progressive variation and a purely physical cause of all mental and spiritual phenomena. Heredity by itself means simply the constant transmission of physical form and biological characteristics from a previous life to its posterity. There is very evidently such a general force of hereditary transmission within the genus or species itself, as the tree so the seed, as the seed so the tree, so that a lion generates a lion and not a cat or a rhinoceros, a man a human being and not an ourang-outang,though one reads now of a curious and startling speculation, turning the old theory topsy-turvy, that certain ape kinds may be, not ancestors, but degenerate descendants of man! But farther, if a physical evolution is the whole fact, there must be a capacity for the hereditary transmission of variations by which new species are or have been created,not merely in the process of a mixture or crossing, but by an internal development which is stored up and handed down in the seed. That too may very well be admitted, even though its real process and rationale are not yet understood, since the transmission of family and individual characteristics is a well-observed phenomenon. But then the things transmitted are not only physical and biological, but psychological or at least bio-psychic characters, repetitions of customary nervous experience and mental tendency, powers. We have to suppose that the physical seed transmits these things. We are called upon to admit that the human seed for instance, which does not contain a developed human consciousness, yet carries with it the powers of such a consciousness so that they reproduce themselves automatically in the thinking and organised mentality of the offspring. This, even if we have to accept it, is an inexplicable paradox unless we suppose either that there is something more behind, a psychical power behind the veil of material process, or else that mind is only a process of life and life only a process of matter. Therefore finally we have to suppose the physical theory capable of explaining by purely material causes and a material constitution the mystery of the Emergence of life in matter and the equal mystery of the Emergence of mind in life. It is here that difficulties begin to crowd in which convict it, so far at least, of a hopeless inadequacy, and the nature of that inadequacy, its crux, its stumbling-point leave room for just that something behind, something psychical, a hidden soul process and for a more complex and less materialistic account of the truth of evolution.
  The materialistic assumptionit is no more than a hypothetical assumption, for it has never been provedis that development of non-living matter results under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of unconscious life which is in its real nature only an action and reaction of material energy, and the development of that again under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of conscious mind which is again in its real nature only an action and reaction of material energy. The thing is not proved, but that, it is argued, does not matter; it only means that we do not yet know enough; but one day we shall know,the necessary physiological reaction called by us an intuition or train of reasoning crowned by discovery having, I suppose, taken place in a properly constituted nervous body and the more richly convoluted brain of a Galileo of biology, and then this great and simple truth will be proved, like many other things once scoffed at by the shallow common sense of humanity. But the difficulty is that it seems incapable of proof. Even with regard to life, which is by a great deal the lesser difficulty, the discovery of certain chemical or other physical and mechanical conditions under which life can be stimulated to appear, will prove no more than that these are the favourable or necessary conditions for the manifestation of life in body,such conditions there must be in the nature of things,but not that life is not another new and higher power of the force of universal being. The connection of life responses with physical conditions and stimuli proves very clearly that life and matter are connected and that, as indeed they must do to coexist, the two kinds of energy act on each other,a very ancient knowledge; but it does not get rid of the fact that the physical response is accompanied by an element which seems to be of the nature of a nervous excitement and an incipient or suppressed consciousness and is not the same thing as the companion physical reaction.

3.7.1.07 - Involution and Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The spiritual process of evolution is then in some sense a creation, but a self-creation, not a making of what never was, but a bringing out of what was implicit in the Being. The Sanskrit word for creation signifies a loosing forth, a letting out into the workings of Nature. The Upanishad in a telling figure applies the image of the spider which brings its web out of itself and creates the structure in which it takes its station. That is applied in the ancient Scripture not to the evolution of things out of Matter, but to an original bringing of temporal becoming out of the eternal infinity; Matter itself and this material universe are only such a web or indeed no more than a part of it brought out from the spiritual being of the Infinite. But the same truth, the same law holds good of all that we see of the Emergence of things from
  Involution and Evolution

3.7.2.02 - The Terrestial Law, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The movements of life seem indeed to be as little as the physical laid on ethical lines. The fundamental right and justice of life is to follow the curve of the vital energies, to maintain the functions of the life force and to give a return to its own powers. Its function is to survive, to reproduce itself, to grow and possess and enjoy, to prolong and enlarge and assure its action, power, having, pleasure as much as earth will allow. All means are good to life that secure these ends: the rest is a matter of right balance between the vital energy and its physical means, of a putting forth of its powers and the kind of return it gets for those powers. At firstand this continues even after the Emergence of mind in life and as long as mind is subservient to the life force,that is all we see. Vital nature works out her ends faultlessly enough, but not by any means blamelessly in the ethical sense. Death is her second means of self-preservation, destruction her constant instrument for change and renovation and progress, suffering inflicted on oneself or on others oftenest her price for victory and pleasure. All life lives upon other life, makes a place for itself by encroachment and exploitation, possesses by association but even more by struggle. Life acts by mutual shock and mutual use of creatures by each other; but it works only partly by mutual help and very much by a mutual assault and devouring. And its reproduction is bound to a means that the ethical sense even when most tolerant feels to be animal and inferior, is inclined to regard as immoral in itself and, when raised to its ascetic or puritan acuities, rejects as vile. And yet when once we put aside our limited human conceptions and look with impersonal eyes on this vast and various and wonderful vital nature into which we are born, we find in it a mysteriously perfect order, the work of a deep and illimitable intuitive wisdom, an immense Power and will at its perfectly seeing work, a great whole of beauty and harmony built out of what seems to us a system of discords, a mighty joy of life and creation which no heaviest toll of individual death or suffering can tire or discourage and which, when we enter into oneness with the great Ananda of its movement, these things seem rather to cast into relief and against the hue of its ecstasy these shades not to matter. There is here also, in these steps of vital Nature and the law of her energies, a truth of the infinite; and this truth of the Infinites insistence on life, life as it were for its own sake and for the joy of creation has its own standards of right and harmony, just balance and measure, fit action and reaction of energy that cannot be judged by the human rule. It is a pre-mental and still impersonal Tapas and Ananda and therefore a still non-moral order.
  Mans relation with vital Nature is, again, first to be one with it by observance and obedience to its rule, then to know and direct it by conscious intelligence and will and to transcend by that direction the first law of life, its rule and habit, formula, initial significance. At first he is compelled to obey its instincts and has to act even as the animal, but in the enlarged terms of a mentalised impulsion and an increasingly clear consciousness and responsible will in what he does. He too has first to strive to exist, to make a place for himself and his kind, to grow and possess and enjoy, to prolong, to enlarge and assure the first vital lines of his life movement. He too does it even as the others, by battle and slaughter, by devouring, by encroachment, by laying his yoke on earth and her products and on her brute children and on his fellow-men. His virtue, his dharma of the vital nature, virtus, aret, is at first an obligation to strength and swiftness and courage and all things that make for survival, mastery and success. Most even of the things in him that evolve an ethical significance have at root not a truly ethical but a dynamic character,such as self-control, tapasy, discipline. They are vital-dynamic, not ethical energies; they are a rightly massed and concentrated, rightly ordered putting forth of mentalised life forces and the return they seek and get are of the vital and dynamic kind, power, success, mastery, increased capacities of vital possession and expansion or the result of these things, vital-hedonistic, the satisfaction of his desires, vital happiness, enjoyment and pleasure.

4.02 - BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE - THE HYPER-PERSONAL, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  thought can generalise the Principle of Emergence ? 1 At the
  same time, as this Soul coincides with a supremely improbable
  --
  clear that Emergence in the course of evolution can only happen
  successively and with mechanical dependence on what precedes

4.03 - Prayer to the Ever-greater Christ, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  human, 65; Emergence, 71;
  higher, 112; and organic matter,

4.03 - The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  experience of a creative nature, whose object is the Emergence
  of a new and as yet unknown content. In the psychology of the

4.03 - THE ULTIMATE EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  since the Emergence of Homo sapiens, is destined to dwindle still
  further. As thought regulated by a sort of quantum law, the

4.06 - Purification-the Lower Mentality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The psychical Prana interferes in all the higher operations to deform them, but its defect is itself due to its being interfered with and deformed by the nature of the physical workings in the body which Life has evolved in its Emergence from Matter. It is that which has created the separation of the individual life in the body from the life of the universe and stamped on it the character of want, limitation, hunger, thirst, craving for what it has not, a long groping after enjoyment and a hampered and baffled need of possession. Easily regulated and limited in the purely physical order of things, it extends itself in the psychical Prana immensely and becomes, as the mind grows, a thing with difficulty limited, insatiable, irregular, a busy creator of disorder and disease. Moreover, the psychical Prana leans on the physical life, limits itself by the nervous force of the physical being, limits thereby the operations of the mind and becomes the link of its dependence on the body and its subjection to fatigue, incapacity, disease, disorder, insanity, the pettiness, the precariousness and even the possible dissolution of the workings of the physical mentality. Our mind instead of being a thing powerful in its own strength, a clear instrument of conscious spirit, free and able to control, use and perfect the life and body, appears in the result a mixed construction; it is a predominantly physical mentality limited by its physical organs and subject to the demands and to the obstructions of the life in the body. This can only be got rid of by a sort of practical, inward psychological operation of analysis by which we become aware of the mentality as a separate power, isolate it for a free working, distinguish too the psychical and the physical Prana and make them no longer a link for dependence, but a transmitting channel for the Idea and Will in the Buddhi, obedient to its suggestions and commands; the Prana then becomes a passive means of effectuation for the mind's direct control of the physical life. This control, however abnormal to our habitual poise of action, is not only possible, -- it appears to some extent in the phenomena of hypnosis, though these are unhealthily abnormal, because there it is a foreign will which suggests and commands, -- but must become the normal action when the higher Self within takes up the direct comm and of the whole being. This control can be exercised perfectly, however, only from the supramental level, for it is there that the true effective Idea and Will reside and the mental thought-mind, even spiritualised, is only a limited, though it may be made a very powerful deputy.
  Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life; satisfaction of desire is man's only enjoyment and to eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight. It is essential that we should distinguish between pure will and desire, between the inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind and body. If we are unable to make this distinction practically in the experience of our being, we can only make a choice between a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise between them. This is in fact what the mass of men do; a small minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifications and restraints as society imposes or the normal social man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions; others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the Prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to compromise between them is to stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we can get at the pure will undeformed by desire, -- which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffied flame of desire, -- and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform the Prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God-desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character and inner action.

4.19 - The Nature of the supermind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is here necessary in a matter so remote from the ordinary lines of our thought and experience to state first what is the universal gnosis or divine supermind, how it is represented in the actual movement of the universe and what are its relations to the present psychology of the human being. It will then be evident that though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and Emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence -- to give it an inadequate name -- the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, larger both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
  The fundamental nature of this supermind is that, all its knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions and discriminating modifications in itself, still all the knowledge that operates in its workings even in these divisions, is founded upon and sustained and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure of their nature and their workings. When it sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided from it about which therefore it would at first be ignorant of the nature, constitution and workings and have to learn about them, as the mind is at first ignorant of its object and has to learn about it because the mind is separated from its object and regards and senses and meets it as something other than itself and external to its own being. The mental awareness we have of our own subjective existence and its movements, though it may point to, is not the same thing as this identity and self-knowledge, because what it sees are mental figures of our being and not the inmost or the whole and it is only a partial, derivative and superficial action of our self that appears to us while the largest and most secretly determining parts of our own existence are occult to our mentality. The supramental Spirit has, unlike the mental being, the real because the inmost and total knowledge of itself and of all its universe and of all things that are its creations and self-figurings in the universe.
  --
  The third characteristic of the supermind arising from this difference, which brings us to the practical distinction between the two kinds of knowledge, is that it is directly truth-conscious, a divine power of immediate, inherent and spontaneous knowledge, an Idea holding luminously all realities and not depending on indications and logical or other steps from the known to the unknown like the mind which is a power of the Ignorance. The supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its lower, limited or individualised forms has only to bring the latent truth out of itself, -- the perception which the old thinkers tried to express when they said that all knowing was in its real origin and nature only a memory of inwardly existing knowledge. The supermind is eternally and on all levels truth-conscious and exists secretly even in mental and material being, surveys and knows the things, evenobscurest, of the mental ignorance and understands and is behind and governs its processes, because everything in the mind derives from the supermind -- and must do so because everything derives from the spirit. All that is mental is but a partial, a modified, a suppressed or half suppressed figure of the supramental truth, a deformation or a derived and imperfect figure of its greater knowledge. The mind begins with ignorance and proceeds towards knowledge. As an actual fact, in the material universe, it appears out of an initial and universal inconscience which is really an involution of the all-conscient spirit in its own absorbed self-oblivious force of action; and it appears therefore as part of an evolutionary process, first a vital feeling towards overt sensation, then an Emergence of a vital mind capable of sensation and, evolving out of it, a mind of emotion and desire, a conscious will, a growing intelligence. And each stage is an Emergence of a greater suppressed power of the secret supermind and spirit.
  The mind of man, capable of reflection and a coordinated investigation and understanding of itself and its basis and surroundings, arrives at truth but against a background of original ignorance, a truth distressed by a constant surrounding mist of incertitude and error. Its certitudes are relative and for the most part precarious certainties or else are the assured fragmentary certitudes only of an imperfect, incomplete and not an essential experience. It makes discovery after discovery, gets idea after idea, adds experience to experience and experiment to experiment, -- but losing and rejecting and forgetting and having to recover much as it proceeds, --and it tries to establish a relation between all that it knows by setting up logical and other sequences, a series of principles and their dependences, generalisations and their application, and makes out of its devices a structure in which mentally it can live, move and act and enjoy and labour. This mental knowledge is always limited in extent: not only so, but in addition the mind even sets up other willed barriers, admitting by the mental device of opinion certain parts and sides of truth and excluding all the rest, because if it gave free admission and play to all ideas, if it suffered truth's infinities, it would lose itself in an unreconciled variety, an undetermined immensity and would be unable to act and proceed to practical consequences and an effective creation. And even when it is widest and most complete, mental knowing is still an indirect knowledge, a knowledge not of the thing in itself but of its figures, a system of representations, a scheme of indices, -- except indeed when in certain movements it goes beyond itself, beyond the mental idea to spiritual identity, but it finds it extremely difficult to go here beyond a few isolated and intense spiritual realisations or to draw or work out or organise the right practical consequences of these rare identities of knowledge. A greater power than the reason is needed for the spiritual comprehension and effectuation of this deepest knowledge.
  --
  The being of man also is full of physical, vital, emotional, psychical and dynamic instincts and intuitions, but he does not rely on them as the animal does, --though they are capable in him of a far larger scope and greater action than in the animal and lower creation by reason of his greater actual evolutionary development and his yet greater potentiality of development of the being. He has suppressed them, discontinued their full and overt action by atrophy, -- not that these capacities are destroyed but rather held back or cast back into the subliminal consciousness, -and consequently this lower part of his being is much less sure of itself, much less confident of the directions of his nature, much more groping, errant and fallible in its larger scope than that of the animal in his lesser limits. This happens because man's real Dharma and law of being is to seek for a greater selfaware existence, a self-manifestation no longer obscure and governed by an ununderstood necessity, but illumined, conscious of that which is expressing itself and able to give it a fuller and more perfect expression. And finally his culmination must be to identify himself with his greatest and real self and act or rather let it act (his natural existence being an instrumental form of the expression of the spirit) in its spontaneous perfect will and knowledge. His first instrument for this transition is the reason and the will of the rational intelligence and he is moved to depend upon that to the extent of its development for his knowledge and guidance and give it the control of the rest of his being. And if the reason were the highest thing and the greatest all-sufficient means of the self and spirit, he could by it know perfectly and guide perfectly all the movements of his nature. This he cannot do entirely because his self is a larger thing than his reason and if he limits himself by the rational will and intelligence, he imposes an arbitrary restriction both in extent and in kind on his self-development, self-expression, knowledge, action, Ananda. The other parts of his being demand too a complete expression in the largeness and perfection of the self and cannot have it if their expression is changed in kind and carved, cut down and arbitrarily shaped and mechanised in action by the inflexible machinery of the rational intelligence. The godhead of the reason, the intellectual Logos, is only a partial representative and substitute for the greater supramental Logos, and its function is to impose a preliminary partial knowledge and order upon the life of the creature, but the real, final and integral order can only be founded by the spiritual supermind in its Emergence.
  The supermind in the lower nature is present most strongly as intuition and it is therefore by a development of an intuitive mind that we can make the first step towards the self-existent spontaneous and direct supramental knowledge. All the physical, vital, emotional, psychic, dynamic nature of man is a surface seizing of suggestions which rise out of a subliminal intuitive self-being of these parts, and an attempt usually groping and often circuitous to work them out in the action of a superficial embodiment and power of the nature which is not overtly enlightened by the inner power and knowledge. An increasingly intuitive mind has the best chance of discovering what they are seeking for and leading them to the desired perfection of their self-expression. The reason itself is only a special kind of application, made by a surface regulating intelligence, of suggestions which actually come from a concealed, but sometimes partially overt and active power of the intuitive spirit. In all its action there is at the covered or half-covered point of origination something which is not the creation of the reason, but given to it either directly by the intuition or indirectly through some other part of the mind for it to shape into intellectual form and process. The rational judgment in its decisions and the mechanical process of the logical intelligence, whether in its more summary or in its more developed operations, conceals while it develops the true origin and native substance of our will and thinking. The greatest minds are those in which this veil wears thin and there is the largest part of intuitive thinking, which often no doubt but not always brings with it a great accompanying display of intellectual action. The intuitive intelligence is however never quite pure and complete in the present mind of man, because it works in the medium of mind and is at once seized on and coated over with a mixed stuff of mentality. It is as yet not brought out, not developed and perfected so as to be sufficient for all the operations now performed by the other mental instruments, not trained to take them up and change them into or replace them by its own fullest, most direct, assured and sufficient workings. This can indeed only be done if we make the intuitive mind a transitional means for bringing out the secret supermind itself of which it is a mental figure and forming in our frontal consciousness a body and instrument of supermind which will make it possible for the self and spirit to display itself in its own largeness and splendour.

4.20 - The Intuitive Mind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The original nature of supermind is the self-conscience and all-conscience of the Infinite, of the universal Spirit and Self in things, organising on the foundation and according to the character of a direct self-knowledge its own wisdom and effective omnipotence for the unfolding and the regulated action of the universe and of all things in the universe. It is, we might say, the gnosis of the Spirit, master of its own cosmos, atma, jnata, isvarah. As it knows itself, so too it knows all things-for all are only becomings of itself -- directly, totally and from within outward, spontaneously in detail and arrangement, each thing in the truth of itself and its nature and in its relation to all other things. And it knows similarly all action of its energy in antecedent or cause and occasion of manifestation and effect or consequence, all things in infinite and in limited potentiality and in selection of actuality and in their succession of past, present and future. The organising supermind of a divine being in the universe would be a delegation of this omnipotence and omniscience for the purpose and within the scope of his own action and nature and of all that comes into its province. The supermind in an individual would be a similar delegation on whatever scale and within whatever province. But while in the god this would be a direct and an immediate delegation of a power illimitable in itself and limited only in action, but otherwise unaltered in operation, natural to the being and full and free always, in man any Emergence of the supermind must be a gradual and at first an imperfect creation and to his customary mind the activity of an exceptional and supernormal will and knowledge.
  In the first place it will not be for him a native power always enjoyed without interruption, but a secret potentiality which has to be discovered and one for which there are no organs in his present physical or mental system: he has either to evolve a new organ for it or else to adopt or transform existing ones and make them utilisable for the purpose. He has not merely to uncover the hidden sun of the supermind in the subliminal cavern of his secret being or remove the cloud of his mental ignorance from its face in the spiritual skies so that it shall at once shine out in all its glory. His task is much more complex and difficult because he is an evolutionary being and by the evolution of Nature of which he is a part he has been constituted with an inferior kind of knowledge, and this inferior, this mental power of knowledge forms by its persistent customary action an obstacle to a new formation greater than its own nature. A limited mental intelligence enlightening a limited mind of sense and the capacity not always well used of a considerable extension of it by the use of the reason are the powers by which he is at present distinguished from all other terrestrial creatures. This sense mind, this intelligence, this reason, however inadequate, are the instruments in which he has learned to put his trust and he has erected by their means certain foundations which he is not over-willing to disturb and has traced limits outside of which he feels all to be confusion, uncertainty and a perilous adventure. Moreover the transition to the higher principle means not only a difficult conversion of his whole mind and reason and intelligence, but in a certain sense a reversal of all their methods. The soul climbing above a certain critical line of change sees all its former operations as an inferior and ignorant action and has to effect another kind of working which sets out from a different starting-point and has quite another kind of initiation of the energy of the being. If an animal mind were called upon to leave consciently the safe ground of sense impulse, sense understanding and instinct for the perilous adventure of a reasoning intelligence, it might well turn back alarmed and unwilling from the effort. The human mind would here be called upon to make a still greater change and, although self-conscious and adventurous in the circle of its possibility, might well hold this to be beyond the circle and reject the adventure. In fact the change is only possible if there is first a spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and it can only be undertaken securely when the mind has become aware of the greater self within, enamoured of the Infinite and confident of the presence and guidance of the Divine and his shakti.

4.21 - The Gradations of the supermind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It would perhaps be accurate to say that these latter activities are mental representations of the higher movements, attempts of the ordinary mind to do the same things or the best possible imitations the intellect can offer of the functionings of the higher nature. The true intuitions differ from these effective but insufficient counterfeits in their substance of light, their operation, their method of knowledge. The intellectual rapidities are dependent on awakenings of the basic mental ignorance to mental figures and representations of truth that may be quite valid in their own field and for their own purpose but are not necessarily and by their very nature reliable. They are dependent for their Emergence on the suggestions given by mental and sense data or on the accumulation of past mental knowledge. They search for the truth as a thing outside, an object to be found and looked at and stored as an acquisition and, when found, scrutinise its surfaces, suggestions or aspects. This scrutiny can never give a quite complete and adequate truth idea. However positive they may seem at the time, they may at any moment have to be passed over, rejected and found inconsistent with fresh knowledge.
  The intuitive knowledge on the contrary, however limited it may be in its field or application, is within that scope sure with an immediate, a durable and especially a self-existent certitude. It may take for starting-point or rather for a thing to light up and disclose in its true sense the data of mind and sense or else fire a train of past thought and knowledge to new meanings and issues, but it is dependent on nothing but itself and may leap out of its own field of lustres, independent of previous suggestion or data, and this kind of action becomes progressively more common and adds itself to the other to initiate new depths and ranges of knowledge. In either case there is always an element of self-existent truth and a sense of absoluteness of origination suggestive of its proceeding from the spirit's knowledge by identity. It is the disclosing of a knowledge that is secret but already existent in the being: it is not an acquisition, but something that was always there and revealable. It sees the truth from within and illumines with that inner vision the outsides and it harmonises, too, readily -- provided we keep intuitively awake -- with whatever fresh truth has yet to arrive. These characteristics become more pronounced and intense in the higher, the proper supramental ranges: in the intuitive mind they may not be always recognisable in their purity and completeness because of the mixture of mental stuff and its accretion, but in the divine reason and greater supramental action they become free and absolute.

4.2.3.01 - The Meaning of Coming to the Front, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Emergence or Coming Forward of the Psychic
  What is meant by [the psychic's] coming to the front is simply this. The psychic ordinarily is deep within. Very few people are aware of their souls - when they speak of their soul, they usually mean the vital + mental being or else the (false) soul of desire. The psychic remains behind and acts only through the mind, vital and physical wherever it can. For this reason the psychic being except where it is very much developed has only a small and partial, concealed and mixed or diluted influence on the life of most men. By coming forward is meant that it comes from behind the veil, its presence is felt clearly in the waking daily consciousness, its influence fills, dominates, transforms the mind and vital and their movements, even the physical. One is aware of one's soul, feels the psychic to be one's true being, the mind and the rest begin to be only instruments of the inmost within us.

4.2.3.02 - Signs of the Psychic's Coming Forward, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is very good; all you write is a strong sign of the psychic Emergence of which I spoke in yesterday's letter. There is at once the deep plunge into the psychic and the Emergence of the psychic influence in mind and heart. The depth of the plunge is the reason why action has become so slow, because the consciousness is too much inside to act swiftly on outside things.
  This is a stage which one passes through in the process of the inner change. At the same time the ideas in the mind and the perceptions and the mental and vital attitude towards things and happenings and people are becoming more and more of a psychic character. Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature and that is growing in you towards the Mother, pervading your being. A psychic love towards all is also emerging; this love is a thing inward and does not seek to express itself outwardly like the vital love which men usually have. The psychic and spiritual attitude is also not dependent on the good and bad in beings, but is self-existent regarding them as souls who carry the Divine in them however thickly concealed and are children of the Mother.
  --
  The thoughts that came afterwards about the defects of your action towards others, repentance and the reasons why you could not establish proper relations with others were the result of this psychic Emergence. For when the psychic comes forward or when it strongly influences mind or vital, then one begins to see clearly and rightly about one's own nature and action and about things and about others and to have the right feelings. It was under this pressure of the psychic also that while the mind got these right thoughts and perceptions, the vital felt repentance for what had been done and wished to ask forgiveness. But while this readiness to ask forgiveness was in itself a right feeling, to do so physically would not have been quite the wisest or best action.
  So the psychic itself at once told you what was the true thing to do, to ask forgiveness instead from the Mother. What was necessary having been done in the mind and vital, the psychic then cleared the whole consciousness and brought back its own quiet and peace. I explain all that to you so that you may begin to understand how these things work within and what is meant by the psychic and its action and influence.

4.2.3.05 - Obstacles to the Psychic's Emergence, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:4.2.3.05 - Obstacles to the Psychic's Emergence
  author class:Sri Aurobindo
  --
  Of course the ego and the vital with its claims and desires is always the main obstacle to the Emergence of the psychic. For they make one live, act, do sadhana even for one's own sake and psychicisation means to live, act and do sadhana for the sake of the Divine.
  The psychic being emerges slowly in most men, even after taking up sadhana. There is so much in the mind and vital that has to change and readjust itself before the psychic can be entirely free. One has to wait till the necessary process has gone far enough before it can burst its agelong veil and come in front to control the nature. It is true that nothing can give so much inner happiness and joy - though peace can come by the mental and vital liberation or through the growth of a strong samata in the being.
  --
  That is of course the difficulty, even when one sees what is to be done and wishes to do it. One forgets at the moment when the control is needed. The habit of remembering and applying one's knowledge at the right moment comes only by a great patience and perseverance which refuses to be discouraged by frequent failure. Only if the psychic being is in front, then it reminds the mind and the thing can be more quickly done. It was your physical ill-health combined with the difficulty of the physical consciousness (which is always a thing of habits and repeats and clings to the old habits even when the mind wants to get rid of them) that prevented the Emergence of the psychic from completing itself. With the disappearance of ill-health the difficulty may be more successfully tackled and achieved. As for the long period of seven years without the spiritual success there is nothing unusual in that - the old Yogins used to say that one must be ready for 12 years of preparation before the old nature will be sufficiently modified to allow of the spiritual opening.
  That is of course not inevitable; it can be done more briefly; but still it takes usually a long time - it has done so with most in the Asram. But in your case the first opening did come, it is only temporarily and not altogether closed, awaiting a second opening which should free the nature for the external as well as the inner change.

5.01 - EPILOGUE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  a. The decisive Emergence in individual life of factors of internal
  arrangement (invention) above the factors of external arrange-
  --
  and universal focus Omega. After Emergence comes emersion.
  In the perspectives of cosmic involution, not only does con-

5.02 - Perfection of the Body, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Matter, their perfect adaptation of means to an aim and end, the wonders they perform and the marvels of beauty they create, testify, in spite of all the ignorant denial we can oppose, to the presence and power of consciousness of this Superconscience in every part and movement of the material universe. It is there in the body, has made it and its Emergence in our consciousness is the secret aim of evolution and the key to the mystery of our existence.
  In the use of such activities as sports and physical exercises for the education of the individual in childhood and first youth, which should mean the bringing out of his actual and latent possibilities to their fullest development, the means and methods we must use are limited by the nature of the body and its aim must be such relative human perfection of the body's powers and capacities and the powers of mind, will, character, action of which it is at once the residence and the instrument so far as these methods can help to develop them. I have written sufficiently about the mental and moral parts of perfection to which these pursuits can contri bute and this I need not repeat here. For the body itself the perfections that can be developed by these means are those of its natural qualities and capacities and, secondly, the training of its general fitness as an instrument for all the activities which may be demanded from it by the mind and the will, by the life-energy or by the dynamic perceptions, impulses and instincts of our subtle physical being which is an unrecognised but very important element and agent in our nature. Health and strength are the first conditions for the natural perfection of the body, not only muscular strength and the solid strength of the limbs and physical stamina, but the finer, alert and plastic and adaptable force which our nervous and subtle physical parts can put into the activities of the frame. There is also the still more dynamic force which a call upon the life-energies can bring into the body and stir it to greater activities, even feats of the most extraordinary character of which in its normal state it would not be capable. There is also the strength which the mind and will by their demands and stimulus and by their secret powers
  --
  The essential purpose and sign of the growing evolution here is the Emergence of consciousness in an apparently inconscient universe, the growth of consciousness and with it growth of the light and power of the being; the development of the form and its functioning or its fitness to survive, although indispensable, is not the whole meaning or the central motive. The greater and greater awakening of consciousness and its climb to a higher and higher level and a wider extent of its vision and action is the condition of our progress towards that supreme and total perfection which is the aim of our existence. It is the condition also of the total perfection of the body. There are higher levels of the mind than any we now conceive and to these we must one day reach and rise beyond them to the heights of a greater, a spiritual existence. As we rise we have to open to them our lower members and fill these with those superior and supreme dynamisms of light and power; the body we have to make a more and more and even entirely conscious frame and instrument, a conscious sign and seal and power of the spirit. As it grows in this perfection, the force and extent of its dynamic action and its response and service to the spirit must increase; the control of the spirit over it also must grow and the plasticity
  532
  --
  If the Emergence and growth of consciousness is the central motive of the evolution and the key to its secret purpose, then by the very nature of that evolution this growth must involve not only a wider and wider extent of its capacities, but also an ascent to a higher and higher level till it reaches the highest possible. For it starts from a nethermost level of involution in the Inconscience which we see at work in Matter creating the material universe; it proceeds by an Ignorance which is yet ever developing knowledge and reaching out to an ever greater light and ever greater organisation and efficacy of the will and harmonisation of all its own inherent and emerging powers; it must at last reach a point where it develops or acquires the complete fullness of its capacity, and that must be a state or action in which there is no longer an ignorance seeking for knowledge but Knowledge self-possessed, inherent in the being, master of
  Perfection of the Body

5.03 - The Divine Body, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But what would be the result of the Emergence of these forces and their liberated and diviner action on the body itself, what their dynamic connection with it and their transforming operation on the still existing animal nature and its animal impulses and gross material procedure? It might be held that the first necessary change would be the liberation of the mind, the life-force, the subtle physical agencies and the physical consciousness into a freer and a diviner activity, a many-dimensioned and unlimited operation of their consciousness, a large outbreak of higher powers and the sublimation of the bodily consciousness itself, of its instrumentation, capacity, capability for the manifestation of the soul in the world of Matter. The subtle senses now concealed in us might come forward into a free action and the material senses themselves become means or channels for the vision of what is now invisible to us or the discovery of things surrounding us but at present unseizable and held back from our knowledge. A firm check might be put on the impulses of the animal nature or they might be purified and subtilised so as to become assets and not liabilities and so transformed as to be parts and processes of a diviner life. But even these changes would still leave a residue of material processes keeping the old way and not amenable to the higher control and, if this could not be changed, the rest of the transformation might itself be checked and incomplete. A total transformation of the body would demand a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism, its constitution, its processes and its set-up of nature.
  Again, it might be thought that a full control would be sufficient, a knowledge and a vision of this organism and its unseen action and an effective control determining its operations according to the conscious will; this possibility has been affirmed as something already achieved and a part of the development of the inner powers in some. The cessation of the breathing while still the life of the body remained stable, the hermetic sealing up at will not only of the breath but of all the vital manifestations for long periods, the stoppage of the heart similarly at will while thought and speech and other mental workings continued unabated, these and other phenomena of the power of the will over the body are known and well-attested examples of this kind of mastery. But these are occasional or sporadic successes and do not amount to transformation; a total control is necessary and an established and customary and, indeed, a natural mastery. Even with that achieved something more fundamental might have to be demanded for the complete liberation and change into a divine body.

5.04 - Supermind and the Life Divine, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no Emergence.
  The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here.
  --
  A manifestation of the Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this world sooner or later. But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an Emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here.
  Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature; it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of

5.05 - THE OLD ADAM, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [604] The prime situation of distress consists either in a withdrawal of the favourable gods and the Emergence of harmful ones, or in the alienation of the gods by mans negligence, folly, or sacrilege, or else (as in the Taoist view) in the separation210 of heaven and earth for unfathomable reasons, so that they can now come together again only if the wise man re-establishes Tao in himself by ritual meditation. In this way he brings his own heaven and earth into harmony.211
  [605] Just as the rice spoils in the defective state, so too man degenerates, whether from the malignity of the gods or from his own stupidity or sin, and comes into conflict with his original nature. He forgets his origination from the human ancestor, and a ritual anamnesis is therefore required. Thus the archetype of Man, the Anthropos, is constellated and forms the essential core of the great religions. In the idea of the homo maximus the Above and Below of creation are reunited.

5.06 - Supermind in the Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Again, if too strong a stress is laid on the present or apparent character of the evolution here as it is presented to us by physical science, it might be urged that there is no warrant for expecting any Emergence of a principle higher than human mind or of any such thing as superhuman beings in a world of Matter. Consciousness is itself dependent upon Matter and material agencies for its birth and its operations and an infallible Truthconsciousness, such as we suppose supermind to be, would be a contradiction of these conditions and must be dismissed as a chimera. Fundamentally, physical science regards evolution as a development of forms and vital activities; the development of a larger and more capable consciousness is a subordinate result of the development of life and form and not a major or essential characteristic or circumstance and it cannot go beyond limits determined by the material origin of mind and life. Mind has shown itself capable of many extraordinary achievements, but independence of the material organ or of physical conditions or
  580
  --
   some divine fulfilment, towards their own absolute. That and not only something beyond and elsewhere is the true sign, the meaning of this constant evolution and the labour of continual birth and rebirth and the spiral ascent of Nature. But it is only by the descent of supermind and the fulfilment of mind and life by their self-exceeding that this secret intention in things, this hidden meaning of Spirit and Nature can become utterly overt and in its totality realisable. This is the evolutionary aspect and significance of supermind, but in truth it is an eternal principle existing covertly even in the material universe, the secret supporter of all creation, it is that which makes the Emergence of consciousness possible and certain in an apparently inconscient world and compels a climb in Nature towards a supreme spiritual Reality. It is, in fact, an already and always existent plane of being, the nexus of Spirit and Matter, holding in its truth and reality and making certain the whole meaning and aim of the universe.
  If we disregard our present ideas of evolution, all changes,
  - if we can regard consciousness and not life and form as the fundamental and essential evolutionary principle and its Emergence and full development of its possibilities as the object of the evolutionary urge. The inconscience of Matter cannot be an insuperable obstacle; for in this inconscience can be detected an involved consciousness which has to evolve; life and mind are steps and instruments of that evolution; the purposeful drive and workings of the inconscient material Energy are precisely such as we can attribute to the presence of an involved consciousness, automatic, not using thought like the mind but guided by something like an inherent material instinct practically infallible in all its steps, not yet cognitive but miraculously creative.
  The entirely and inherently enlightened Truth-consciousness we attri bute to supermind would be the same reality appearing at an ultimate stage of the evolution, finally evolved and no longer wholly involved as in Matter or partly and imperfectly evolved and therefore capable of imperfection and error as in life and mind, now possessed of its own natural fullness and perfection, luminously automatic, infallible. All the objections to a complete
  --
  The full Emergence of supermind may be accomplished by a sovereign manifestation, a descent into earth-consciousness and a rapid assumption of its powers and disclosing of its forms and the creation of a supramental race and a supramental life: this must indeed be the full result of its action in Nature. But this has not been the habit of evolutionary Nature in the past upon earth and it may well be that this supramental evolution also will fix its own periods, though it cannot be at all a similar development to that of which earth has hitherto been the witness. But once it has begun, all must unavoidably and perfectly manifest and all parts of Nature must tend towards a greatest possible luminousness and perfection. It is this certainty that authorises us to believe
  584

5.07 - Mind of Light, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   of their topmost powers would be there; for this is the constant story of each evolutionary Emergence: the principle of its highest perfection lies concealed in the involution which precedes and necessitates the evolution of the secret principle.
  For throughout the story of evolution there are two complementary aspects which constitute its action and are necessary to its totality; there is hidden in the involution of Nature the secret power and principle of being which lies concealed under the veil cast on it by material Nature and there is carried in that
  Nature itself the inevitable force of the principle compelling the process of Emergence of its inherent powers and characters, the essential features which constitute its reality. As the evolutionary principle emerges, there are also two constant features of the process of the Emergence: there are the gradations by which it climbs out of the involution and manifests more and more of its power, its possibilities, the force of the Godhead within it, and there is a constant manifestation of all types and forms of its being which are the visible, indicative and efficient embodiments of its essential nature. There appear in the evolutionary process organised forms and activities of Matter, the types of life and the living beings, the types of mind and the thinking beings, the luminosities and greatnesses of the spiritual principle and the spiritual beings whose nature, character, personality, mark the stages of the ascent towards the highest heights of the evolution and the ultimate largest manifestation of what it is in itself and must become by the force of time and the allrevealing Spirit. 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
  Mind of Light

5.08 - Supermind and Mind of Light, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Life and Mind culminating in the Emergence of Supermind. The secret truth that emerges in Supermind has been there all the time, but now it manifests itself and the truth in things and the meaning of our existence.
  It is in this series of the order of existence and as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being, the first word of the higher hemisphere that we have to look at the Mind of Light and see what is its nature and the powers which characterise it and which it uses for its self-manifestation and workings, its connection with Supermind and its consequences and possibilities for the life of a new humanity.

6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  hypothesis of spontaneous Emergence, which does not eliminate the archetype but,
  on the contrary, presupposes it.
  --
  masculine traits, Emergence of, 91
  Masenius, Jacobus, 34371

Blazing P1 - Preconventional consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The main factor precipitating transition to the next stage is the Emergence of concrete
  operational thinking. Affectively, the resolution of Oedipal issues or their submersion in
  --
  The new capacity or strength in this stage is the rise of narrative and the Emergence of story,
  drama and myth as ways of finding and giving coherence to experience.

Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Qualities: Emergence of capacity to see and respond to what others want; self-identity
  defined by relationship to group, whose values impart strong sense of shoulds and

Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Qualities: Emergence of a perspective that is ego-transcendent or universal; people holding
  this stage of consciousness seem to experience themselves and others as part of ongoing

BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  abstraction, and no Emergence of consciousness could ensue.
  The "Manifested Universe," therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of
  --
  Stanza III. describes the Re-awakening of the Universe to life after Pralaya. It depicts the Emergence
  of the "Monads" from thei[[r]] state of absorption within the ONE; the earliest and highest stage in the

BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  astronomer, if endowed with an imaginative faculty, to build a theory of the Emergence of the
  universe out of chaos, by simply applying to it the principles of mechanics. But such a universe will

Maps of Meaning text, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  5.2. The Adversary: Emergence, Development and Representation _________________________________ 247
  5.2.1. The Adversary in Action: Voluntary Degradation of the Map of Meaning________________________ 256
  --
  Figure 6: Emergence of "Normal Novelty" in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior
  Figure 7: Emergence of "Revolutionary Novelty" in the Course of Goal-Directed Behavior
  Figure 8: The Motor and Sensory Units of the Brain
  --
  Figure 60: The Emergence of Christ from Group Identity and Chaos
  Figure 61: World-Tree of Death and Redemption

r1912 01 27, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The chief struggle is over the third & fourth chatusthayas where the annamaya obstruction has concentrated the best of its strength. Ananda has risen from the ratha of rasagrahana to the ratna of bhoga with a frequent Emergence of rtha, which is especially strong in the sahaituka vishayabhoga & tivra & is spreading to the kama etc. Ananda, even ratha of the kamananda, is beginning definitely to emerge. The other bhogas (chidghana, prema, ahaituka, shuddha) are involved in the sharira and emerge out of it. It is here that the contradictions of ananda are occasionally strong. Ratha of the bhoga of events, conditions etc is prevailing. The contradictions are being overborne; pain & discomfort of heat & cold, contact etc are being dominated. The other field of struggle is the arogya; the sore throat was ejected after a struggle by siddhi. The rogas still capable of touching the surface of the system attack frequently, but cannot hold except for short intervals, coming, retiring, succeeding, failing without cause. The disturbances of assimilation are yielding perceptibly to the Arogya; when they come, they cannot hold or make only a brief & seldom violent visit. Three full days of avisrishti were attended with perfect ease and the remaining one and a half with only a vague tendency to disturbance. Two nominal visrishtis occurred on the fifth & sixth days, but with only parthiva pressure, no tejasic, vayavic or jalamaya. Only at the end of the sixth day (this morning) somewhat acute tejahkshobha produced a copious visrishti of the old type. The system, however, dismissed the kshobha in about fifteen minutes and it went leaving behind no acute results. The central arogya still advances slowly. Sarvasaundaryam is not yet continuously permanent.
   Jnanam increases in force & exactness. The style of the vak rises to the inspired illuminative and is effective at its lowest level. The thought perception is now almost rid of false vijnanam in its material, but not in the arrangement of its material. Nevertheless accuracy of time is growing, accuracy of place has begun, accuracy of circumstance, chiefly, is defectiveall this in the trikaldrishti. Prakamya & vyapti are strong and more continuous, less chequered by error. The internal motions of animals & to a less extent of men, the forces working on them, the ananda & tapas from above, even the explicit thoughts are being more and more observed and are usually justified by the attendant or subsequent action. The siddhis of power work well & perfectly, in harmony with the trikaldrishti, not so well when divorced from it. The physical tone of the system is recovering its elasticity & with it elementary utthapana and bhautasiddhi are reviving. Samadhi improves steadily, but is much hampered by sleep which has revived its force during these last three or four days.

r1912 07 03, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The siddhis of power have also begun their decisive action but less perfectly than the trikaldrishti of prakamya and vyapti. There are four tendencies that prevent its proper action & effectuality; (1) the tendency to miss the object of the prayoga, as when Pallas Athene turns the shafts from the hero of her preference, so that the aishwarya or vashita does not act upon it at all; (2) the tendency because of habit, previous purpose or tendency or mere recalcitrance to a novel suggestion to pay no heed to it, to shake off the shaft of suggestion from the mental body & go on ones way, if one is in motion or remain firm, if static, as if the suggestion had not reached; by the sukshmadrishti or by some involuntary movement the hitting of the mark by the force aimed at it can be discerned; (3) the tendency to confusion in the mental current of suggestion & mechanical opposition in the body leading to delay of obedience or deviation from the time, place & circumstance enjoined; (4) the tendency for adverse circumstance to interfere & divert the faultless or generally successful fulfilment begun. However, the frequency of obedience & frequent exactness of the action show the Emergence of the successful Shakti. It is notable that both these activities are confined in their success for the most part to the immediate happenings around me of a trifling nature. In the rest there is only a general pressure and ultimate success and a capricious success in details. The therapeutic power has evidently gained in force.
   The vijnanamaya articulate thought had established its free activity regardless of all doubt & opposition in the mind, but it had not decisively proved its truth & vijnanamaya nature by unvarying result in the objective & subjective happenings of Yoga & life; but this movement of proof has now powerfully commenced. Drishti is also preparing a decisive movement both in lipi & in crude rupa.

r1912 07 19, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   KarmaThe Life Divine continued, Rigveda resumed, nirukta & prerana slightly, kavya touched, Bhasha proceeded with. The difficulty of understanding Magha now only persists, ordinarily, where the meaning of important words is unknown. Triple dasya was strongly confirmed in the mind in relation to the Krishnakali bhava. The health & utthapana appear to be a little stronger & the intenser ananda occurs normally in place of the old tendency with inceptual ananda but its frequency was not great & is still strongly resisted. Reading of lipi in samadhi which was deficient, has been confirmed, but continuity of record was not clearly established. The vijnana action is perfected in itself, but still weak in force and not always perfect in action owing to the Emergence of yet another layer of unreformed annamaya personality. The reform of this layer proceeded yesterday. The weakness is especially in the fluctuation from ananda vani & vijnana thought to buddha vani. Sleep 6 hours at night; in daytime swapna & sushupta samadhi.
   ***

r1912 11 15, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The fulfilment of yesterdays predictions is not apparent. A contrary result & a return of udasinata, sattwatamasic, with strong asraddha, was the actual occurrence. There was a renewed activity of lipi, an Emergence of the complete crude rupa in an instance or two & a first sign of bolder & more spontaneous lipi; the resumption of primary utthapana on a small scale & some tendency to physical siddhi; but the adverse results predominated, & both trikaldrishti & shakti were hopelessly inefficientPromise of equipment unfulfilled.
   ***

r1912 12 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The guidance from above seems now to be free from the necessity of any longer managing & giving rein to the forces of Anritam. Its final Emergence from the action of the Mechanician, the Yantri, mending & testing His machine & self-revelation as that of the God of Truth & Love, began definitely to be worked out from 18 October, when the third & last message from Sri Ramakrishna was received. The first message was in Baroda, the Arabindo, mandir karo, mandir karo, & the parable of the snake Pravritti devouring herself. The second was given in Shankar Chettis house soon after the arrival in Pondicherry, & the words are lost, but it was a direction to form the higher being in the lower self coupled with a promise to speak once more when the sadhan was nearing its close. This is the third message (18 Oct 1912)
   Make complete sannyasa of Karma.

r1912 12 10, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Lipi. Success at last. Perfectionfollowed immediately by the above development & the partial Emergence of B [Bijoy] from the whirlpool in the karmadeha in which he has been plunged since the first of December.
   The old defects of the trikaldrishti still recur and its limitations persist. The power is still more hampered & limited, even though its perfect action is frequent; but not on the body, nor in things belonging to the Karma.

r1912 12 20, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Ph. Act. [Physical Activity] 6 to 7.15 am. 8.45 to 12.20 & 12.45 to 1.50The Bhashya in Veda increases in force & the Vedantic interpretation is now almost entirely confirmed. Fresh Emergence of lipi. The trikaldrishti has a prolonged and efficient activity; but the prakamya of thought, though proved in many instances, shows an imperfection in the readiness to accept incorrect outward suggestions without distinguishing them from true prakamya. The vyapti, on the other hand, shows no imperfection separate from the imperfection of the trikaldrishti.
   Sortilege. (1)    

r1912 12 25, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The siddhi is in a depressed condition and unable to advance with rapidity, owing to the necessity of a farther transition of considerable magnitude consisting (1) in satyam, the cessation of all intellectual (manomaya) activity & its replacement by the karana, (2) the cessation of the relics of self-action & replacement by the divine action (dasya), (3) the cessation of the use of means in the yogasiddhi and its replacement by the self-fulfilment of the Para shakti working upon the lower. The public news (eg the attack on the Viceroy, the ill-success of the Turkish naval sortie) show that the Power is still ineffective to prevent adverse occurrences.([Written] Dec 26.) During the rest of the day there was a struggle between the new system and the dregs of the old. The lipi became permanently active, but the old difficulty of manifestation or Emergence in the sthula akasha is not yet overcome. At the same time interpreting power attending the lipi became swift and decisive and has so remained. Trikaldrishti in all its parts resumed its activity. The most important result is the final completion of the dasya & the disappearance of all questioning, revolts or self-action; for, whenever these try to manifest, they find no support in the Jiva. Even with regard to error, there is no revolt nor now any return to a tamasic udasinata. The siddhi now fulfils itself entirely by the divine action arranging the conflicting forces & the Jiva does not try to interfere or insist on a consistent method. By this the invading intellectual activity has become wholly discouraged and no longer insists on its own action. There is, however, a survival of manomaya suggestions representing themselves as vani & seeking to lay down the action, but as these are always falsified & the Jiva does not insist on them, they have no force of persistence.Health is undergoing a very serious assault. The sore-throat was flung off, but after a long struggle cough materialised for a very short time at night, & strenuous efforts are made to bring back cold. Tejasic disturbance in the stomach has returned & recurs, though it does not persist against the Will, & there was in the morning a copious visrishti quite of the old type. This is the result of copious eating & drinking without regard to satiety, which has been insisted on in order that [ ]1 the arogya may be established under more arduous conditions. Assimilation is powerful, but not enough to prevent a struggle & irregular workings of the asiddhi. There was no primary utthapana in the afternoon, so todays period amounted only to 10 hours but there was 5 hours continuously from 4.30 to 9.35 without fatigue or subsequent reaction. Sleep 7 hours.
   MS that

r1913 01 08, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The script is now showing a remarkable accuracy of prediction which it shares with the vani. Two of its predictions made this morning for the day have already been fulfilled; The trikaldrishti today will throw off the doubt and judgment, but not yet the uncertainty left behind by them in the action of the faculty on the intellect, and Lipi will justify the prediction. It had been predicted three days ago in the script that lipi today would perfect itself in the material akasha. This has now been fulfilled. The great remaining defects of the lipi were insufficient spontaneity and an uncertain vividness; it depended for Emergence too much on the subjective stimulus & obeyed too much the intellectual suggestion. This difficulty has been finally surmounted & even when the external mind suggests a word or form of words, the lipi pays no heed, but shapes its own word or sentence. All the other qualities needed, legibility, simultaneity, etc are now coexistent with the spontaneity, (formerly, one quality used to perfect itself at the expense of another,) and vividness though not invariable is now well established in the legible, spontaneous and simultaneous lipi. The legible simultaneity is not usually immediate, it is ordinarily the result of a consecutive appearance of the words; when the whole sentence starts at once into view, it is not always or usually legible. These slight deficiencies are not essential defects, but they have to be dismissed out of the siddhi & the perfection attained preserved and enriched by variety of the lipi-kaushalya. In trikaldrishti intellectual judgment & doubt have received their dismissal & the mind merely waits to see the result. In consequence, it is found that everything that enters the mind, is correct, although [ ]1 not always perfectly placed, & that it is the doubt & impatience of the intellect which is the source of error; for it cannot wait to see the suggestion placed & justified, but either catches at & overstresses it or rejects it by a premature haste of adverse judgment.
   (Afternoon)
  --
   The aishwarya is recovering its full force in many instances & has again begun to be fulfilled in detail & repeatedly, but the opposition is still to some extent master of the sthula akasha. The prediction in script is that today Rupa will at last emerge & Power overcome, for the last time, the general obstruction. There was some Emergence of Rupa in the morning, but it did not last, nor did it effect the stability of perfect forms. Every time the opposition in the akasha throws itself on the forward movement & seems to overbear it. At the same time there is a sensible movement of the Para Tapas to throw off the general obstruction and pursue steadily and powerfully the totality of the siddhi. Nirukta has been resumed today and is being well, but slowly done.
   Rupa emerged in the afternoon and evening, not perfect, but with greater force than before, so that perfect forms more frequently come out into the sthula akasha and meet the physical eye direct instead of manifesting as formerly mostly in the sukshma akasha or, if in the sthula, then avoiding the gaze and affecting the physical eye through the subtle vision. Still the indirect method and the subtle field continue to be the most common. Crude shapes alone meet the eye full and these are now more usually stable and perfect. Lipi continues to increase on the akash. Power has begun to overcome the general obstruction, but its victory is as yet neither decisive nor assured. There was a great extension of swapna-samadhi at night & especially in the early morning, images of great frequency & perfection occurring & brief continuous scenes frequently manifesting with something, often, of their background. This is the one real difficulty in the swapna-samadhi, the continuous action in a fixed scene. Otherwise the swapna (not dream, but vision-record) is perfect enough & combined touch, hearing & sight are well enough established, though they do not come as a regular circumstance of the siddhi in its present working. The only prediction in script that seemed to be beside the mark was the statement that Ananda this day would again take hold, but even this was true if it is understood of the subjective Ananda and not the Kamananda.

r1913 01 11, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The news today are the reverse of favourable, although in consonance with the trikaldrishti, which expected the Emergence of a yet stronger trend against Turkey. Aiswarya in the karma is strongly hampered and to a certain extent baffled.
   The subjective ananda took possession in full force this morning,a harmony of suddha, chidghana, ahaituka, premananda & sahaituka sharirananda, but the kamananda is resisted and the exclusion of the ananda from adverse events was successfully attempted by the enemy.

r1913 01 12, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Today the tertiary dasya will become decisive and prepare to pass into the fourth degree or supreme dasya; rupadrishti & samadhi farther progress on yesterdays lines; trikaldrishti become at once great (mahat) and striking. Health will farther extrude the relics of the old symptomatic survivals, subject to some farther struggle; secondary utthapana declare itself more clearly; kamananda overcome the obstacles still presented to it; the general bodily power greatly increase. Aishwarya after making itself felt in the rest of the physical siddhi, will throw itself on the saundarya and the karma, which will begin to develop larger proportions. But the chief movement will be the final Emergence and justification of the Mahakali element in its shuddha Asuric bhava.
   Afternoon

r1913 02 08, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Yesterday, another signal proof of the power of Will to alter the forms of the body, was finally proved. The left undercurve of the foot, which was at first non-existent, that side being flat, and afterwards very slight, is now deep and declared, and by a test was found to be at least three times what it had been at the last time of testing. Similar proof has been recently given in the line of the waist, but this is not yet so striking and decisive. This success, after a long and obstinate resistance, justifies sraddha, not only in the saundarya, but in the ultimate Emergence of the Adesha siddhi and the equipment; the justifiable doubt is about the extent of fulfilment and the timeliness.
   In the afternoon exceeding[ly] brilliant swapnasamadhi at a great depth of dream-trance repeatedly occurred; the rupas were of the fleeting kind, but stable for two or three seconds, instead of, as usual, fleeting in the moment of appearance. At night also swapnasamadhi was rich and various at a great depth and perfectly stable scenes of entire vividness were at last developed, instead of the vivid stability of shifting panorama and dim stability which were formerly the highest attainment. The fleeting still predominates over the stable, the dim or pale over the vivid; but the disproportion is decreasing. Organisation, also, has not progressed and dream is once more imperfectly coherent.

r1913 05 21, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   All the vijnana siddhis are now permanently active and effective, but with defects and limitations & subject to the continued mental activity of mixed truth & falsehood which is still successfully maintained in the mental environment by the opposing tendencies of Prakriti and successfully thrust upon the mind in the form of suggestions. The rupa & samadhi formerly deficient have now a petty but sufficient regular fertility, which can be rapidly enlarged & eventually perfected. They still lack some of their old felicities, but when these return, they will no longer be fitful, uncertainly held & willed as formerly, but natural, spontaneous and a permanent possession. The rupas are principally embarrassed by the persistence of a few dominant images which shut out the others or replace them when they attempt to manifest. Another difficulty is the resistance obstinately offered to the Emergence from the prana akasha of the perfect, as distinguished from the representative images.
   In the physical siddhi, Ananda is the most advanced. The vishayanandas of the senses are all perfected in type, seldom contradicted, but as yet insufficient in intensity, except in the taste, where even it is uneven. The higher mental anandas are all present (prema, chidghana, shuddha), but as yet imperfectly active. Ahaituka ananda is constant in shanti, but not yet in active santosha. The sahaituka sharira anandas are established and growing; the ahaituka manifest but infrequent. Ahaituka kamananda is alone well-established, and awakes whenever recalled, but is still too much a matter of the will and not a self-acting dharma of the body. It can manifest now in any state, jagrat or samadhistha. Thirst has almost disappeared, though it made an appearance for two or three days, mostly in a suppressed form; but does not now occur even in the unusual heat of this summer. Hunger makes its appearance fitfully and is never intense & seldom prolonged; it is being rapidly replaced by hungerless bhojanananda. Heat & cold are still slightly effective on the body. Pain has turned into some form of ananda except in extreme touches, eg burning by fire, blows touching the bone, etc; but here it is only the immediate contact that is painful, the after effect is always anandamaya; in some touches, eg mosquito bite the habit of discomfort still continues, but is now occasional and not a dharma of the body. Pain of events is the one asamata of mind still persisting & then only as asamata of failure; this too is occasional, largely artificial and no longer a dharma of the mind.

r1913 07 04, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The final purification of the system from the physical touches of Ashanti continues. In the morning there was only a rich and abundant rupadrishti, very bright in colours and numerous in forms and groups, mostly crude, in the prana akasha; this was under stimulus. In the afternoon the depression of the tejas parted and the Krishna Kali emerged with the Rudra personality of Krishna; the kamananda more continuous & persistent while walking. There is a throwback in the saundarya. The continuity and intensity of sharira ananda are predicted. Lipi 17 (Anandam Brahma) already fulfilled in the strong Emergence of Ananda & the Anandamaya in the environing Brahman. The necessity of aishwarya-tapas for helping the sharirananda is now removed; it remains for the other three members of the physical siddhi, but is to be lessened shortly and then renounced for the arogya.
   In the second half of the day there was continuity & intensity of the sharirananda and diminution of the jalavisrishti (about 8 am and 12 midnight).

r1913 12 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   There must be the full activity of the kriti; only the means must first come. No more action without means. Therefore a period of repose is necessary; for self-collection & for Emergence. The opposite tendency belongs to the intellectual tejas.
   The action of the intellectual tejas is still habitual as an involuntary accompaniment to internal & external activity. Its removal is the condition of perfect vijnana. There must be no straining after truth of knowledge or efficacy of power, but natural prakasha and tapas.

r1913 12 26, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   After a prolonged struggle with the fragmentary elfin agencies of the Manoloka there was a fresh Emergence of a more perfect ideality.
   Kamananda was almost entirely suspended as a result of physical expenditure in the second half of the day; only the faintest form of its suppressed existence subsisted.

r1914 01 03, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Shabdadrishti of the daivya turi (horn), indicating victory, & subsequently of divine music,first heard (with long continuity) only in the left ear when closed by the hand to earthly shabda, but afterwards when the hand was removed. The whole sukshmabodha is now extending its sense-perceptions to the mental & pranic heavens as well as to the mental & pranic koshas of the material world. This movement initiates the completion of the trailokyadrishti first indicated in the Alipur jail. It marks also the growing Emergence of the sukshma shabdadrishti in the sthula hearing.
   In the tapas the mental energies of will at the side which were formerly confused by the mental tejas with the energies of knowledge, are now being devoted to their proper object, the development of vashita; aishwarya, vashita, ishita properly divided & combined are preparing the fullness of the Tapas.

r1914 06 13, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   It is evident that all definitive perceptions of event now are perceptions of an active possibility, that is a possibility that is to be fulfilled or would be fulfilled but for the intervention of another force. Some are more remote being only intentions in the subconscious being that are kept from Emergence by the overt nervous & mental activity or thoughts which cannot fulfil themselves in the actual state of the Prakriti.
   Sort

r1914 09 17, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Other lipis are stable, but not quite distinct or not quite spontaneous in their Emergence.
   ***

r1914 11 19, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The Emergence of the full intensity of Mahakali-Mahasaraswati is the development now attempted.
   ***

r1914 12 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Lipi at first coherent in small phrases, afterwards great bulk with entire uncoherence, from which towards the end some attempt at Emergence of order proceeded.
   ***

r1914 12 30, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   T is preparing the Emergence of decisive activities.
   ***

r1915 01 09, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Ishwaradarshana is passing through the stage of Vritratwa after its final Emergence. It is there but often concealed by the Vritra effort to restore the old bhavas of the darshana with a view to entire denial of all darshana. But this is now impossible.
   Jagrad RupaBahirdarshi At night

r1915 01 24, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   For the results in Vijnana, Sharira & Kriti it is necessary to await the Emergence of these siddhis.
   ***

r1915 05 01, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   connected with lipi 8. and indicating the struggle & luminous Emergence now transferred from the person to the environing Prakriti.
   2) enoconfirming (1) from another stand-point & throwing light on Vedic images in the hymns to the Aswins (Kaksh[ivan]) read yesterday & today.

r1915 05 27, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The chief movement has been the Emergence of the fixed Mahakali temperament with fixity in the struggle and yuddhalipsa and the rejection of the tamasic Mahasaraswati temperament which draws back from apparently useless struggle & desires either an easy progress or acquiescence in an imposed immobility.
   ***

r1915 06 02, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Emergence of the sukshma vak in various degrees of evolution, half-involved, evolved; half-audible; audible but unintelligible; intelligible in part, the rest to the mind; intelligible to the hearing.
   ***

r1915 07 03, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Strong Emergence of the shuddhananda involved in the chidghana-ahaituka; also of the subjective prema-kama. They are not entirely fixed in generality in their intense forms.
   Since yesterday the gandha has again recovered its intensity & variety and is today beginning to become frequent. There is a movement of recovery in the rasa, great intensity in habitual sparshas & preparation of variety involved in indeterminate sparsha, incipient certainty & considerable intensity in sravana (chiefly in habitual sounds), spasmodic recurrence of darshana.

r1917 08 25, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Lipi more emphasised in its perfection, especially stability which is now practically universal; the solidity varies and the legibility is sometimes partial to the eye, and sometimes still at first the lipi is stable only, or solid also, but there has to be tapas to bring out the legibility. Sometimes it is incomplete, part of a sentence, or else words are omitted; sometimes it becomes coherent, instead of appearing formed, coherent and [complete]1 at one leap of Emergence into the akasha. But the latter is now common, and all defects disappear at the first touch of tapas
   In tivra the law of increase grows yet stronger, interruption decreases, intensity tends to be maintained. But at present if left alone, the general impressionability to tivra sinks often into a sort of subdued half quiescence and the intensity reawakens only after the first touch or the first few touches.

r1917 09 05, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Tivra seems to have gone slightly back, but this is only the Emergence of tendencies which had been held down by the energy of the tapas, not quite eliminated, though diminished and depressed. The habit of fluctuation from greater to less and from less to greater response has to be got rid of. Moreover the intimacy of the response has to be secured, that is to say, the inherent excitability of the physical system responding immediately to the sparsha by an intimate and intense thrill. At present this excitability is lost by prolonged excitation and replaced by an unsteady communicated excitability. Moreover the necessity of tapas has to be eliminated and smarana made sufficient. In kamananda this necessity is already recognised, and the advance is therefore retarded in order to get it satisfied
   ***

r1918 05 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   (2) T, Emergence of pure trikaldrishti, enlarging of the tapas element
   (3) Ideality; revelatory thought in the speech; farther conversion in the ideation.

r1919 08 03, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   The movement to inspired revelation continues and all the thought and T is of this character, revelation always present, inspiration predominating and sometimes swallowing it up, but on all levels, so that there is little certitude of a final character. Mostly the thought of T on the idealised mental level. Some recurrence of intuitive forms. Later Emergence of thought of inspired revelation and revelation permeated with inspiration. Invasion from outside failed to bring in any relapse or any element of intellectuality.
   The roga made many fresh attacks, but was increasingly overpowered by Tapas; it is being reduced to the fragmentary character. No actual watering except early in the morning, very slightly, but still a disposition to watering and occasional attempts at heat. The causes of increased affection, strain of the eye, glare etc are being got to increase instead the force of the arogya. Arogya Tapas is changing to the ideal character. The thick obstacle of the most physical prana with its sanskara of roga is being pierced and broken up by the light of ideal tapas. The movement is [one]1 of strong prevalence, not yet of absolute finality. In the central rogas Tapas is resuming its operation, but not yet effective for sensible progress.

r1920 06 07, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Brahma. All is now fixed in the vijnana brahma darshana with an occasional Emergence of the undertone of intuitive manasa which is [immediately]1 penetrated by and taken up into vijnana. In the V.B. [Vijnana Brahma] Ananda is organising itself, vijnana Ananda informed with the Ahaituka and manifesting in its own kind the Prema and Kama Ananda darshana. These two in the vision of the object are now vijnanamaya (fusion of intuitive + higher logistis or only the latter), in the subject, the chitta, twofold without sufficient fusion of the two simultaneous forms, but the higher logistis is growing on the chitta..
   ***

Talks 001-025, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
    M.: Brahmacharya is living in Brahman. It has no connection with celibacy as commonly understood. A real brahmachari, that is one who lives in Brahman, finds bliss in the Brahman which is the same as the Self. Why then should you look for other sources of happiness? In fact the Emergence from the Self has been the cause of all the misery.
    D.: Celibacy is a sine qua non for Yoga?
  --
    Hence reality of the world may be created by the ego by its act of Emergence from sleep; and that reality may be swallowed up or disappear by the soul resuming its nature in sleep. The Emergence and disappearance of the world are like the spider producing a gossamer web and then withdrawing it. The spider here underlies all the three states - waking, dreaming, and sleep; such a spider in the person is called Atman (Self), whereas the same with reference to the world (which is considered to issue from the sun) is called
    Brahman (Supreme Spirit). He that is in man is the same as He that is in the sun. (Sa yaschayam purushe yaschasavaditye sa ekah).

Talks 076-099, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body which is born resolves itself into thought and that the Emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find wherefrom thoughts emerge. Then you will abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death.
  A disciple asked how to do it.
  --
  There is no change in the one who slept and the one who is now awake. In deep sleep he was not aware of his body; there was no body-consciousness. In the wakeful state he is aware of his body; there is body-consciousness. Therefore the difference lies in the Emergence of body-consciousness and not in any change in the Real Consciousness. The body and body-consciousness arise together and sink together. All this amounts to saying that there are no limitations in deep sleep, whereas there are limitations in the waking state. These limitations are the bondage; the feeling The body is I is the error. This false sense of I must go. The real I is always there. It is here and now. It never appears anew and disappears again. That which is must also persist for ever. That which appears anew will also be lost. Compare deep sleep and waking. The body appears in one state but not in the other. Therefore the body will be lost. The consciousness was pre-existent and will survive the body. In fact, there is no one who does not say I am. The wrong knowledge of I am the body is the cause of all the mischief.
  This wrong knowledge must go. That is Realisation. Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor it is a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.

Talks 225-239, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  There is no entity by name mind. Because of the Emergence of thoughts we surmise something from which they start. That we term mind. When we probe to see what it is, there is nothing like it. After it has vanished, Peace will be found to remain eternal.
  D.: What is buddhi (intellect)?

The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
  social and scholastic barriers which hide or hinder the Emergence of
  creative talent? Educational psychologists have of late woken up to
  --
  recurrent phenomenon of multiple discovery, and in the Emergence
  of similar forms of art, handicrafts, and social institutions in diverse
  --
  For many years this nocturnal Emergence of the design of the
  crucial experiment to check the validity of a hypothesis uttered
  --
  the sudden Emergence, during a conversation in 1903, of the hunch that
  his problem could be solved by switching from a 'spark theory' to a
  --
  The moment of truth, the sudden Emergence of a new insight, is an
  act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous
  --
  individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the Emergence, out
  of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a
  --
  the period of incubation; the Emergence of the new synthesis to the
  bisociative act. It may emerge suddenly, sparked off by a single
  --
  social, and mental evolution in uniform terms as the Emergence of more
  differentiated and specialized structures, balanced by more complex
  --
  exposure to the whims of incomprehensible forces. The Emergence or
  order from chaos is a leitmotif of all mythologies; even the blood-
  --
  the Emergence of life means the Emergence of spontaneous, organized
  exertion to maintain and reproduce originally unstable forms of
  --
  the Emergence of human speech was not the development of the ear,
  but of the vocal organs and of the speech area in the motor cortex.
  --
  With the Emergence of language, we have attained a new level of
  the cognitive hierarchy, which represents a sharp break in the con-
  --
  to shifts in motivation and interest leading to the Emergence of new
  criteria of relevance until the final, more rigid but not always more
  --
  There seem to be three stages in the Emergence of the 'law of con-
  tradiction. The first is training the child to respond to the commands

The Logomachy of Zos, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  etc. Constant multiplicity is the law; amalgamation and Emergence to
  produce the greater individual.

The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
  the Emergence into a new unprecedented Day was also a certitude, and
  that only so could a certain manifestation of the Supreme Truth be
  --
  transforming Emergence. In this acquiescence was embraced too the
  will of the great Sacrifice, the descent of the Divine itself into the

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun emergence

The noun emergence has 4 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
                  
1. (1) emergence, outgrowth, growth ::: (the gradual beginning or coming forth; "figurines presage the emergence of sculpture in Greece")
2. (1) emergence, egress, issue ::: (the becoming visible; "not a day's difference between the emergence of the andrenas and the opening of the willow catkins")
3. emergence, emersion ::: (the act of emerging)
4. egress, egression, emergence ::: (the act of coming (or going) out; becoming apparent)


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

4 senses of emergence                        

Sense 1
emergence, outgrowth, growth
   => beginning
     => happening, occurrence, occurrent, natural event
       => event
         => psychological feature
           => abstraction, abstract entity
             => entity

Sense 2
emergence, egress, issue
   => beginning
     => happening, occurrence, occurrent, natural event
       => event
         => psychological feature
           => abstraction, abstract entity
             => entity

Sense 3
emergence, emersion
   => appearance
     => arrival
       => action
         => act, deed, human action, human activity
           => event
             => psychological feature
               => abstraction, abstract entity
                 => entity

Sense 4
egress, egression, emergence
   => act, deed, human action, human activity
     => event
       => psychological feature
         => abstraction, abstract entity
           => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun emergence

3 of 4 senses of emergence                      

Sense 1
emergence, outgrowth, growth
   => rise

Sense 2
emergence, egress, issue
   => eruption
   => dissilience

Sense 4
egress, egression, emergence
   => surfacing
   => emission, emanation


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

4 senses of emergence                        

Sense 1
emergence, outgrowth, growth
   => beginning

Sense 2
emergence, egress, issue
   => beginning

Sense 3
emergence, emersion
   => appearance

Sense 4
egress, egression, emergence
   => act, deed, human action, human activity




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun emergence

4 senses of emergence                        

Sense 1
emergence, outgrowth, growth
  -> beginning
   => casus belli
   => emergence, egress, issue
   => origin, origination, inception
   => genesis, generation
   => ground floor
   => emergence, outgrowth, growth
   => start
   => creation, conception

Sense 2
emergence, egress, issue
  -> beginning
   => casus belli
   => emergence, egress, issue
   => origin, origination, inception
   => genesis, generation
   => ground floor
   => emergence, outgrowth, growth
   => start
   => creation, conception

Sense 3
emergence, emersion
  -> appearance
   => apparition
   => emergence, emersion
   => reappearance, return

Sense 4
egress, egression, emergence
  -> act, deed, human action, human activity
   => action
   => acquiring, getting
   => causing, causation
   => delivery, obstetrical delivery
   => departure, going, going away, leaving
   => discovery, find, uncovering
   => disposal, disposition
   => implementation, effectuation
   => egress, egression, emergence
   => equalization, equalisation, leveling
   => exhumation, disinterment, digging up
   => mitzvah, mitsvah
   => propulsion, actuation
   => recovery, retrieval
   => running away
   => touch, touching
   => nonaccomplishment, nonachievement
   => leaning
   => motivation, motivating
   => assumption
   => rejection
   => forfeit, forfeiture, sacrifice
   => derivation
   => activity
   => hire
   => wear, wearing
   => judgment, judgement, assessment
   => production
   => stay
   => residency, residence, abidance
   => inactivity
   => hindrance, hinderance, interference
   => stop, stoppage
   => group action
   => distribution
   => legitimation
   => waste, permissive waste
   => proclamation, promulgation
   => communication, communicating
   => speech act




--- Grep of noun emergence
emergence



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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Creation_myth#Emergence
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Emergence_of_the_Vajrayana_.285th_century.29
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_theology#Emergence_of_Christian_theology
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Integral World - The Self-Creating Universe, The Emergence of a New Worldview, John Clarke
Integral World - Ken Wilber and "Moronic" Evolution, The Religion of Tomorrow and the misunderstanding of Emergence, David Lane
Integral World - Buddha Nature, Inner Illumination and Evolutionary Emergence, Barclay Powers
Integral World - Ken Wilber's Evolutionary View Gets a Trim With Ockham's Razor, Part III: The Emergence of Consciousness Over the Course of Evolution, Don Salmon
Integral World - Ken Wilber's Evolutionary View Gets a Trim With Ockham's Razor, Part IV: The emergence of consciousness in birds, mammals and primates, Don Salmon
Integral World - Over the Rainbow: Civilizations, Spiral Dynamics, and the Emergence of a Global Holon
Integral World - An absolutely obvious look at how evolution actually operates, Wilber and Whitehead on the emergence of novelty, Frank Visser
Integral World - Demystifying Emergence, A Comparison of Harold Morowitz and Ken Wilber, Frank Visser
Integral World - "Entire populations simply show up", Ken Wilber on Emergence and Speciation, Frank Visser
Integral World - "It is Part of this Miracle of Emergence", Ken Wilber Argues for his Mysterianism, Frank Visser
Integral World - The Emergence of Integral Consciousness in Europe, Dennis Wittrock
The Emergence of a New Activism
Themes of Emergence: Awareness, Responsibility, and Mutuality
selforum - emergence of integral yoga
selforum - emergence of matter life thought
selforum - emergence is central to hayekian
wiki.auroville - Stewardship_for_New_Emergence
Psychology Wiki - Emergence
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - logic-firstorder-emergence
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/EmergenceRWBY
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emergence
World Ninja War Jiraiya (1988 - 1989) - The only non-armored hero of this era of shows, this program features an actual ninja master from a historically known ninja clan preparing his son, daughter, and youngest child, along with a family relative and a police officer with ninja roots to combat the re-emergence of a centuries-old demon sa...
Adventure, Fantasy | TV Series ::: Connections -- 9 episodes -- Epic drama set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. Creators: Patrick McKay, John D. Payne Stars: Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Maxim Baldry, Ian Blackburn
Emergence ::: TV-14 | 43min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi | TV Series (20192020) -- A police chief investigates a case involving a young child found near the site of a mysterious accident. Creators: Tara Butters, Michele Fazekas
Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron (2007) ::: 6.7/10 -- Unrated | 1h 15min | Animation, Action, Adventure | TV Movie 10 March -- Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron Poster Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his team face off against a new supernatural threat, while Professor Bruttenholm (Sir John Hurt) must investigate the possible reemergence of a vampire he had slain decades prior. Directors: Victor Cook, Tad Stones Writers: Mike Mignola (based on the Dark Horse comic book "Hellboy" created by), Mike Mignola (story by) | 2 more credits
Longtime Companion (1989) ::: 7.6/10 -- R | 1h 36min | Drama, Romance | 1 May 1990 (Portugal) -- The emergence and devastation of the AIDS epidemic is chronicled in the lives of several gay men living during the 1980s. Director: Norman Ren Writer: Craig Lucas
Next ::: TV-14 | Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi | TV Series (2020) -- A former tech CEO joins an FBI Cybersecurity Agent to stop the emergence of a rogue Artificial Intelligence. Creator: Manny Coto
Split (2016) ::: 7.3/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 57min | Horror, Thriller | 20 January 2017 (USA) -- Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities. They must try to escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th. Director: M. Night Shyamalan Writer:
Surface ::: TV-14 | 1h | Adventure, Drama, Mystery | TV Series (20052006) -- A marine biologist, an insurance salesman and a teen-aged boy find their lives fundamentally changed by the emergence of a new, and often dangerous, species of sea life, while government agents work to keep the affair under wraps. Creators:
Temple Grandin (2010) ::: 8.3/10 -- TV-PG | 1h 47min | Biography, Drama | TV Movie 6 February 2010 -- A biopic of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has become one of the top scientists in the humane livestock handling industry. Director: Mick Jackson Writers: Temple Grandin (based on the book: "Emergence"), Margaret Scariano (based on the book: "Emergence") | 3 more credits Stars:
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/The_Footsteps_of_Dartain:_Emergence
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Date A Live Movie: Mayuri Judgment -- -- Production IMS -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Harem Romance Sci-Fi -- Date A Live Movie: Mayuri Judgment Date A Live Movie: Mayuri Judgment -- War(Date), resumes. -- The peaceful days of Itsuka Shidou returned without having to save the Spirits from the relentless battle days. But, the peaceful days were interrupted by the emergence of a mysterious sphere emitting spiritual wave――as well as a mysterious girl who showed herself at the same time. What is her purpose of keeping an eye on Shidou……? The mission that had been entrusted to Shidou under the tense situation was, -- -- “Date all of the Spirits, and make them fall in love?!” -- -- ――With the fate of humanity at stake, the war(date) resumes! -- -- (Source: Date A Live Wiki) -- Movie - Aug 22, 2015 -- 148,796 7.35
Gakusen Toshi Asterisk -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Comedy Ecchi Fantasy Harem Romance School Sci-Fi Supernatural -- Gakusen Toshi Asterisk Gakusen Toshi Asterisk -- In the previous century, an unprecedented disaster known as the Invertia drastically reformed the world. The powers of existing nations declined significantly, paving the way for a conglomerate called the Integrated Empire Foundation to assume control. But more importantly, the Invertia led to the emergence of a new species of humans who are born with phenomenal physical capabilities—the Genestella. Its elite are hand-picked across the globe to attend the top six schools, and they duel amongst themselves in entertainment battles called Festas. -- -- Ayato Amagiri is a scholarship transfer student at the prestigious Seidoukan Academy, which has recently been suffering from declining performances. Through a series of events, he accidentally sees the popular Witch of Resplendent Flames, Julis-Alexia von Riessfeld, half-dressed! Enraged, Julis challenges him to a duel for intruding on her privacy. After said duel is voided by the student council president, Ayato reveals that he has no interest in Festas. Instead, he has enrolled in the academy to investigate the whereabouts of his missing elder sister. But when a more devious plot unravels, Ayato sets out to achieve victory, while being surrounded by some of the most talented Genestella on the planet. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 507,111 6.88
God Eater -- -- ufotable -- 13 eps -- Game -- Action Fantasy Military Sci-Fi -- God Eater God Eater -- The year is 2071. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction following the emergence of man-eating monsters called "Aragami" that boast an immunity to conventional weaponry. They ravaged the land, consuming almost everything in their path and leaving nothing in their wake. To combat them, an organization named Fenrir was formed as a last-ditch effort to save humanity through the use of "God Eaters"—special humans infused with Oracle cells, allowing them to wield the God Arc, the only known weapon capable of killing an Aragami. One such God Eater is Lenka Utsugi, a New-Type whose God Arc takes the form of both blade and gun. -- -- Now, as one of Fenrir's greatest weapons, Lenka must master his God Arc if he is to fulfill his desire of wiping out the Aragami once and for all. The monsters continue to be born en masse while the remnants of humanity struggle to survive the night. Only God Eaters stand between the Aragami and complete and total annihilation of the human race. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 443,037 7.27
Koukaku Kidoutai: SAC_2045 -- -- Production I.G, Sola Digital Arts -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Military Sci-Fi Police Mecha Seinen -- Koukaku Kidoutai: SAC_2045 Koukaku Kidoutai: SAC_2045 -- The year is 2045, and artificial intelligence has undergone tremendous developments. Governments use them as weapons, engaging in never-ending warfare to sustain their economies. The mercenary group GHOST, headed by Major Motoko Kusanagi, is no stranger to this landscape. However, the rapid innovation of this technology causes a new threat to loom over the horizon. -- -- Having left Public Security Section 9, Kusanagi and her group are involved in many operations worldwide related to these proxy wars. But a seemingly simple job of locating an arms dealer drags GHOST into a hidden conflict against cybernetically enhanced individuals, who have inexplicably gained extreme intelligence and physical abilities. Dubbed "post-humans," their emergence sets off a chain of events leading to the reunion of Section 9. Armed with a new mission, it is up to Kusanagi and her reestablished team to prevent global chaos at the hands of these post-humans. -- -- ONA - Apr 23, 2020 -- 26,133 6.67
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz -- -- Sunrise -- 3 eps -- Original -- Action Drama Mecha Military Sci-Fi Space -- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz -- In the year After Colony 196, one year after the conclusion of the intergalactic civil war, a state of stasis prevails over the Earth and its colonies. Seeing no further use for their Gundam mobile suits, war heroes Duo Maxwell, Heero Yuy, Trowa Barton, and Quatre Raberba Winner decide to destroy these weapons by launching them into the sun's surface. -- -- Before the Gundam reach their destination, the universal peace is shattered by the emergence of Mariemaia Khushrenada—the only child of the former tyrannical aristocrat Treize. Mariemaia abducts diplomat Relena Peacecraft and announces plans to launch "Operation Meteor," with the intention of posthumously fulfilling Treize's world domination plot. -- -- With the help of former enemy Zechs Marquise and his mobile suit Tallgeese, the heroic pilots must reacquire their mobile suits to wage one final battle against the Khushrenada dynasty, including fighting against their former ally Wufei Chang, now aligning himself with Mariemaia's ambitions. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- OVA - Jan 25, 1997 -- 41,721 7.76
Sky Girls -- -- J.C.Staff -- 26 eps -- Original -- Mecha Military Sci-Fi -- Sky Girls Sky Girls -- In the near future, Earth is at war with aliens called Worms. The war leaves the population of Earth decimated, with young men the main casualties. The Worms were beaten back but their re-emergence heralds the creation of a mecha unit called the Sonic Divers, piloted by 3 young girls to counter this threat. -- TV - Jul 6, 2007 -- 21,726 7.02
Sky Girls OVA -- -- J.C.Staff -- 1 ep -- - -- Mecha Military Sci-Fi -- Sky Girls OVA Sky Girls OVA -- In the near future, Earth is at war with aliens called Worms. The war leaves the population of Earth decimated, with young men the main casualties. The Worms were beaten back but their re-emergence heralds the creation of a mecha unit called the Sonic Divers, piloted by 3 young girls to counter this threat. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- OVA - Aug 25, 2006 -- 6,733 6.63
SSSS.Gridman -- -- Trigger -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- SSSS.Gridman SSSS.Gridman -- Yuuta Hibiki wakes up in the room of Rikka Takarada and notices two things: he has no memories, and he can hear a mysterious voice calling his name from a nearby room. On further inspection, he finds a robot—which introduces itself as Hyper Agent Gridman—behind the screen of an old computer. Much to Yuuta's surprise, Rikka cannot hear Gridman, nor can she see the ominous monsters looming over a thick fog as it envelopes the town outside. -- -- Another giant monster materializes in the city and proceeds to wreak havoc. Amidst the confusion, Yuuta is once again drawn to the old computer and merges with Gridman. Suddenly, he appears in the middle of the battle and is forced to fight the monster. Together with Rikka and fellow classmate Shou Utsumi, Yuuta forms the "Gridman Alliance" to defeat the monsters plaguing the city and find whoever is responsible for their emergence. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 213,180 7.17
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_Emergence_-_Michael_David_Crawford_-_Geometric_Visions_1994_-_Ogg_Frog_q6.ogg
Alliance of Movements for the Emergence of Niger
Emergence
Emergence delirium
Emergence (disambiguation)
Emergence (Neil Sedaka album)
Emergence of agriculture in the Philippines
Emergence (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Emergence (Symphony Number One album)
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Impact Wrestling Emergence
KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act, 2007
The Emergence of Modern Turkey
The Emergence of the American University



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