TERMS STARTING WITH
energies ::: pl. --> of Energy
ENERGIES. ::: All energies put info activity — thought, speech, feeling, act — go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or Another, and the nature and Us actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward ::: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their elTccts. It Is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act ::: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed w-ill arc also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reac- tions.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Power; source of power; intensity or vitality of action or expression; force. **Energy, energy"s, Energies, energies", world-energy, World-Energy, world-energies.
3. channels and their energies: animate the networks and centers (rtsa rlung drwa mig 'khor lo bskor)
A capital mistake made by modern science and philosophy, producing momentous consequences in theory, has been the arbitrary division of natural forces into disjunct and unrelated energies. All forces of nature originally spring from a common source, a cosmic spiritual unit, which is the heart of nature itself, and hence it is no more possible to divorce attraction from its alter ego repulsion than it would be to have a stick which has only one end. This principle applies directly to such forces as gravitation, which is bipolar exactly as electricity is recognized to be, its two forms being attraction and repulsion, though the last has been ignored in scientific experimentation and deduction. Just as human beings, because of the bipolarity in their vital auras feel attracted to, repelled by, or both from other human beings, producing the strong sympathies and antipathies which are so well known, so does gravity operate. Celestial bodies are not only strongly or weakly attracted to each other, but are likewise strongly or weakly repelled by each other.
"Action is a resultant of the energy of the being, but this energy is not of one sole kind; the Consciousness-Force of the Spirit manifests itself in many kinds of energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of desire, passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the body, a pursuit of truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit of ethical good or evil, a pursuit of power, love, joy, happiness, fortune, success, pleasure, life-satisfactions of all kinds, life-enlargement, a pursuit of individual or collective objects, a pursuit of the health, strength, capacity, satisfaction of the body.” The Life Divine*
“Action is a resultant of the energy of the being, but this energy is not of one sole kind; the Consciousness-Force of the Spirit manifests itself in many kinds of energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of desire, passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the body, a pursuit of truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit of ethical good or evil, a pursuit of power, love, joy, happiness, fortune, success, pleasure, life-satisfactions of all kinds, life-enlargement, a pursuit of individual or collective objects, a pursuit of the health, strength, capacity, satisfaction of the body.” The Life Divine
address ::: v. --> To aim; to direct.
To prepare or make ready.
Reflexively: To prepare one&
Aerial Fire Every element being dual in nature, there is a celestial and a terrestrial fire; while between them is what may be called aerial fire, which is the intermediate stage through which celestial fire pours forth its energies on the physical plane, producing the terrestrial fire. Aerial fire is a lower kabir (creative power).
Aether, Ether (Greek) [from aitho shining, fire] The upper or purer air as opposed to aer, the lower air; the clear sky; the abode of the gods. In Classical antiquity it denoted primordial substance, Proteus or protyle, the unitary source both of all substances and energies, the mask of all kosmic phenomena. Often used loosely to embrace a domain which extends from the All-Father himself down to the atmosphere of our earth. Vergil speaks of “Jupiter omnipotens aether,” and Cicero describes aether as the ultimate zone of heaven encircling, embracing, and permeating all things. At one time a member of the pantheon and object of veneration, at another the quest of the alchemist in search of the “absolute element” which would give him power over nature, and finally a hypothetical medium of science for conveying light waves.
Agnishvatta(s) ::: (Sanskrit) ::: A compound of two words: agni, "fire"; shvatta, "tasted" or "sweetened," from svad, verb-rootmeaning "to taste" or "to sweeten." Therefore, literally one who has been delighted or sweetened by fire.A class of pitris: our solar ancestors as contrasted with the barhishads, our lunar ancestors.The kumaras, agnishvattas, and manasaputras are three groups or aspects of the same beings: thekumaras represent the aspect of original spiritual purity untouched by gross elements of matter. Theagnishvattas represent the aspect of their connection with the sun or solar spiritual fire. Having tasted orbeen "sweetened" by the spiritual fire -- the fire of intellectuality and spirituality -- they have beenpurified thereby. The manasaputras represent the aspect of intellectuality -- the functions of higherintellect.The agnishvattas and manasaputras are two names for the same class or host of beings, and set forth orsignify or represent two different aspects or activities of this one class of beings. Thus, for instance, aman may be said to be a kumara in his spiritual parts, an agnishvatta in his buddhic-manasic parts, and amanasaputra in his purely manasic aspect. Other beings could be called kumaras in their highest aspects,as for instance the beasts, but they are not imbodied agnishvattas or manasaputras.The agnishvattas are the solar spiritual-intellectual parts of us, and therefore are our inner teachers. Inpreceding manvantaras, they had completed their evolution in the realms of physical matter, and whenthe evolution of lower beings had brought these latter to the proper state, the agnishvattas came to therescue of these who had only the physical "creative fire," thus inspiring and enlightening these lowerlunar pitris with spiritual and intellectual energies or "fires."When this earth's planetary chain shall have reached the end of its seventh round, we, as then havingcompleted the evolutionary course for this planetary chain, will leave this planetary chain asdhyan-chohans, agnishvattas; but the others now trailing along behind us -- the present beasts -- will bethe lunar pitris of the next planetary chain to come.While it is correct to say that these three names appertain to the same class of beings, nevertheless eachname has its own significance in the occult teaching, which is why the three names are used with threedistinct meanings. Imagine an unconscious god-spark beginning its evolution in any one solar ormaha-manvantara. We may call it a kumara, a being of original spiritual purity, but with a destinythrough karmic evolution connected with the realms of matter.At the other end of the line, at the consummation of the evolution in this maha-manvantara, when theevolving entity has become a fully self-conscious god or divinity, its proper appellation then isagnishvatta, for it has been "sweetened" or purified by means of the working through it of the spiritualfires inherent in itself.Now then, when such an agnishvatta assumes the role of a bringer of mind or of intellectual light to alunar pitri which it overshadows and in which a ray from it incarnates, it then, although in its own realman agnishvatta, functions as a manasaputra or child of mind or mahat. A brief analysis of the compoundelements of these three names may be useful.Kumara is from ku meaning "with difficulty" and mara meaning "mortal." The significance of the wordtherefore can be paraphrased as "mortal with difficulty," and the meaning usually given to it by Sanskritscholars as "easily dying" is wholly exoteric and amusing, and doubtless arose from the fact that kumarais a word frequently used for child or boy, everybody knowing that young children "die easily." The ideatherefore is that purely spiritual beings, although ultimately destined by evolution to pass through therealms of matter, become mortal, i.e., material, only with difficulty.Agnishvatta has the meaning stated above, "delighted" or "pleased" or "sweetened," i.e., "purified" byfire -- which we may render in two ways: either as the fire of suffering and pain in material existenceproducing great fiber and strength of character, i.e., spirituality; or, perhaps still better from thestandpoint of occultism, as signifying an entity or entities who have become one in essence throughevolution with the aethery fire of spirit.Manasaputra is a compound of two words: manasa, "mental" or "intellectual," from the word manas,"mind," and putra, "son" or "child," therefore a child of the cosmic mind -- a "mind-born son" as H. P.Blavatsky phrases it. (See also Pitris, Lunar Pitris)
ahaṅkara ::: the ego; the subjective principle by which the purus.a is induced to identify himself with prakr.ti and her activities; "the limited ‘I" in us", freedom from which is part of the mukti or liberation of the nature: the egoistic consciousness, including the "ego-sense in the life stuff" and the "ego-idea in the mind" which "maintain a constructed symbol of self, the separative ego, which does duty for the hidden real self, the spirit or true being" and whose nature "is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies". aha ahankara-mukti-siddhi
’Ahath (Hebrew) ’Aḥath The femine form of the cardinal numberal one, signifying at times single, alone, sole; applied to the feminine aspect of the Logos or head of a hierarchy. In Hebrew occultism ’ahath or achath represents, together with the masculine form achod (’ehad) “the collective aggregate, or totality, of the principal Creators or Architects of this visible universe” (SD 1:129). Incorrectly applied to the Sephiroth-’elohim as Sephiroth, since these last are only vehicles or manifestations of the Logos. Achath-Achod (’ahath-’ehad) corresponds to the Sanskrit adi (first, primeval) or eka (One), meaning crown or hyparxis, and therefore the originant or cosmic hierarch, which divides into the many when its spiritual and substantial energies stream downwards into the planes of illusion and matter — which indeed these energies themselves compose. See also ’AHATH-RUAH-’ELOHIM-HAYYIM; ’EHAD
ah. (sapta hotráh) ::: the seven sacrificial energies or "Ladies of the offering", the powers of "the human sacrifice which has a sevenfold energy of its action because there is a sevenfold principle in our being which has to be fulfilled in its integral perfection".
ah. ::: unmanifested energies of the sacrifice. [R . g Veda 4.48.1]
Ajahn Chah BodhiNAna. (1918-1992). A prominent Thai monk who was one of the most influential Thai forest-meditation masters (PHRA PA) of the twentieth century. Born in the village of Baan Gor in the northeastern Thai province of Ubon Ratchathani, he was ordained as a novice at his local temple, where he received his basic education and studied the Buddhist teachings. After several years of training, he returned to lay life to attend to the needs of his parents, but motivated by his religious calling, at the age of twenty, he took higher ordination (UPASAMPADA) as a BHIKsU and continued his studies of PAli scripture. His father's death prompted him to travel to other monasteries in an effort to acquire a deeper understanding of Buddhist teaching and discipline under the guidance of different teachers. During his pilgrimage, he met AJAHN MUN BHuRIDATTA, the premier meditation master of the Thai forest-dwelling (ARANNAVASI) tradition. After that encounter, Ajahn Chah traveled extensively throughout the country, devoting his energies to meditation in forests and charnel grounds (sMAsANA). As his reputation grew, he was invited to establish a monastery near his native village, which became known as Wat Pa Pong after the name of the forest (reputed to be inhabited by ghosts) in which it was located. Ajahn Chah's austere lifestyle, simple method of mindfulness meditation, and straightforward style of teaching attracted a large following of monks and lay supporters, including many foreigners. In 1966, he established Wat Pa Nanachat, a branch monastery specifically for Western and other non-Thai nationals, next to Wat Pa Pong. In 1976, he was invited to England, which led to the establishment of the first branch monastery of Wat Pa Pong there, followed by others in Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Italy. He also visited the United States, where he spoke at retreats at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. Ajahn Chah died in 1992, after several years in a coma.
alignment ::: Alignment The practice of synchronising mental and spiritual energies with either a deity or an astronomical body. The complete balance and centring of the chakras is often called an alignment. -->
Alkahest First used by Paracelsus to denote the Menstruum or universal solvent which, according to Paracelsus and Van Helmont, can reduce all bodies, simple or compound, to the primum ens. In one sense it is akasa, which in its lower form is the anima mundi or astral light. Van Helmont believed that such a general solvent is obtainable by chemical means, so far as it applies to physical things. But psychologically it signifies that the multiform and changing elements which rule our actions can be brought under control of the enlightened will by reducing them to the essence from which they all spring. The alkahest from its metaphysical, psychological, and mystical aspect is therefore the higher self which by its intrinsic energies, working upon matter or “lead,” produces in time the “pure gold,” or in other words brings the entire human constitution into perfect harmony and spiritual sympathy with the alkahest, monadic essence, or higher self.
::: "All energies put into activity — thought, speech, feeling, act — go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or another, and the nature and its actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed will are also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reactions.” Letters on Yoga*
“All energies put into activity—thought, speech, feeling, act—go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or another, and the nature and its actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed will are also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reactions.” Letters on Yoga
Altar ::: A power spot designed and decorated to attune the mind to and to call forth specific archetypes, energies, and deities.
Although in Greek mythology the gods are said to dwell on Olympus, three of the main Olympian divinities, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades (or Pluto), had their habitats respectively in what may be called heaven or the inmost world of spirit, the cosmic spaces or the waters of space, and the underworld of the universe. Yet these three same divinities, because of their permeant cosmic forces or energies, and strictly on the law of analogical reasoning, had the same functions and occupy the same relative places in the minor forms of their respective manifestations: as, Zeus in the sky, Poseidon in the oceans of the globe, and Hades or Pluto in the underworld of our earth. Or again, the twelve great gods of the Mediterranean peoples may be considered to be the twelve main cosmic and intelligent powers whose all-permeant nature and activity is as apparent in the universe itself as in every atom or minor division thereof.
Although our senses tell us nothing of these innumerable other planes, yet the inner and invisible higher spheres are inexpressibly important because they are the causal realms of which our physical universe is but the phenomenal production. But while these higher planes are the fountainhead, ultimately, of all the energies and matters of the whole physical world, yet to an entity inhabiting these inner and invisible worlds, these latter are as substantial and real to that entity as our physical world is to us. Just as we know in our physical world various grades or conditions of energy and matter, from the grossest to the most ethereal, so do the inhabitants of these other worlds know and cognize their own grossest and also most ethereal substances and energies.
"Always keep in touch with the Divine Force. The best thing for you is to do that simply and allow it to do its own work; wherever necessary, it will take hold of the inferior energies and purify them; at other times it will empty you of them and fill you with itself. But if you let your mind take the lead and discuss and decide what is to be done, you will lose touch with the Divine Force and the lower energies will begin to act for themselves and all go into confusion and a wrong movement.” Letters on Yoga
“Always keep in touch with the Divine Force. The best thing for you is to do that simply and allow it to do its own work; wherever necessary, it will take hold of the inferior energies and purify them; at other times it will empty you of them and fill you with itself. But if you let your mind take the lead and discuss and decide what is to be done, you will lose touch with the Divine Force and the lower energies will begin to act for themselves and all go into confusion and a wrong movement.” Letters on Yoga
Amrita ::: The nectar of immortality. In various traditions, especially Buddhist, there is an alchemical process that the mind and body engage in to clarify awareness and to transform perceptions of reality and encourage realization. This refers to the result of such practices. Amrita is not just a metaphor though: there are shifts in the mind-body complex that occur through practices that unlock and allow certain energies to flow and certain patterning to fall away.
amulet ::: Amulet From the Latin 'amuletum', meaning an object that protects a person from trouble, an amulet is generally an object worn around the neck, which has been charged with the magician's personal energies through ritual or meditation, often used to ward off a particular evil force. See also Talisman.
CENTRES OF AGGREGATE
ENVELOPES (= CHAKRAS) All higher envelopes, like the organism, have their special organs (made of atoms), which are the seats of the different kinds of functions of consciousness and of motion. These atomic organs in the etheric, emotional, mental, and causal envelopes are in contact with each other. K 1.14.6
Each molecular kind has its own characteristic kind of consciousness, which in man&
::: "An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga —**cosmic forces.**
“An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Another view of the mystical significance of a point describes it as an emanative center, a spot where energies from one plane enter another plane, a symbol of unity and homogeneity, representing the phase before polarity has set in — a logos, an indivisible, a monad. See also LAYA-CENTER; PRIMORDIAL POINT
Ardhanarisa or Ardhanarisvara (Sanskrit) Ardhanārīśa, Ardhanārīśvara [from ardha half + nārī woman + īśvara, īśa lord] Half-feminine lord; a form of Siva, also applied to the first cosmic androgyne, equivalent to the mystically androgynous Sephirah-’Adam Qadmon of the Qabbalah. Cosmic entities are not sexual or sexed in the human sense, for sex as known in the human and animal kingdoms is a transitory phase of evolution. The application of terms such as androgyne, masculine, or feminine to cosmic divinities has reference to states of cosmic force or energy and substance which may be polarized or unpolarized. Human energies and substances in our present evolutionary stage — and this applies likewise to the animal kingdom, and to a degree to the vegetable kingdom — are divided into opposites which bring about sex conditions. When the forces are partially polarized, the androgynous or hermaphroditic condition results. When the forces or substances are unpolarized during pralayas and at the beginnings and endings of manvantaras, then each entity contains within itself and manifests a state of undivided unity — a complete and perfect individual.
Asava (Sanskrit, Pali) Āsava [from the verbal root su to distill, make a decoction] A distilling or a decoction; a Buddhist term, difficult to render in European languages, signifying the distillation or decoction which the mind makes or produces from the impact upon it of outside energies or substances, whether these latter be thoughts or suggestions automatically arising and acting from outside upon us, or such as impinge upon the human consciousness from another consciousness striving to affect the former. Thus it corresponds in some respects to the Christian idea of temptation. Asava signifies attachments rising in the mind from the impact upon it of outside influences, and the ideas born of outside influences which intoxicate the mind, born in the mind or flowing into it and preventing its being held upon higher lines. Freedom from the asavas constitutes the essential of arhatship, which involves self-mastery in all its phases. The four asavas are enumerated in Southern Buddhism as 1) sensuousness and sensuality (kama); 2) hunger for life (bhava); 3) dreamy speculation (dittha); and 4) nescience (avijja).
As creative spirit Odin and his brother creators, Vili and Vi (will and awe), give rise to the worlds in manifestation. At the creation of humanity, Odin again participates with two creative energies on a lower level, Honer and Lodur (water and fire). Odin gives the breath of spirit, Honer mind, and Lodur vitality to the incipient humans.
ASHRAM (Skt, T.B.) That group which a member of the planetary hierarchy
(at least a 46-self) forms of his disciples and with himself as the focus in the
power house. The planetary hierarchy consists of seven greater ashrams led by
44-selves and representing the seven departments, and 42 lesser ones led by 45- and
46-selves. The type energies these collective beings emit encompass the planet.
“a state or condition of cosmic consciousness-substance, where spirit and matter, which are fundamentally one, no longer are dual as in manifestation, but one: that which is neither manifested matter, nor manifested spirit, alone, but both are the primeval Unity; spiritual Akasa; where matter merges into spirit, and both now being really one, are called ‘Father-Mother’ — spirit-substance. Swabhavat never descends from its own state or condition, or from its own plane, but is the cosmic reservoir of Being, as well as of beings, therefore of consciousness, of intellectual light, of life; and it is the ultimate source of what science . . . calls the ‘energies’ of Nature Universal. . . .
As the human being, then, is a dynamo of balanced forces, some disorder in their operation is the basic wrong in human diseases. Moreover, as all matter is alive, conscious in some degree, and vibrationally responsive to the laws of nature, the same general principle applies also to disease in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. In mankind, the organic vital fluid of the reimbodying ego is the cohering factor for the entire constitution, dominating over all minor vital expressions of the life-atoms. The intense and ceaseless activity of these life-atoms builds and composes the body, and as age comes on, and the physical vehicle naturally and normally weakens, the uninterrupted activity of the vital power becomes too strong to be held in check by the gripping influence of the vital-electrical field. Thus the atomic forces, really the vital energies, continuing unabated within the body structure, slowly weaken it and finally destroy it, and this is death.
As to the problem of making a machine which will keep running of itself, or in addition will do useful work, scientists declare it impossible because it contravenes the law of conservation of energy. The equation of energies in seeming cases of perpetual motion, however, can always be made to balance by the introduction of outside factors, such as the earth’s rotation. If we regard thought and volition as forms of energy, the scope of the problem is greatly altered and enlarged; so that perpetual motion is possible or not according to the way in which we define it.
Astral Body ::: This is the popular term for the model-body, the linga-sarira. It is but slightly less material than is thephysical body, and is in fact the model or framework around which the physical body is builded, andfrom which, in a sense, the physical body flows or develops as growth proceeds. It is the vehicle of pranaor life-energy, and is, therefore, the container of all the energies descending from the higher parts of thehuman constitution by means of the pranic stream. The astral body precedes in time the physical body,and is the pattern around which the physical body is slavishly molded, atom by atom. In one sense thephysical body may be called the deposit or dregs or lees of the astral body; the astral body likewise in its turn is but a deposit from the auric egg.
Astral Light ::: The astral light corresponds in the case of our globe, and analogically in the case of our solar system, towhat the linga-sarira is in the case of an individual man. Just as in man the linga-sarira or astral body is the vehicle or carrier of prana or life-energy, so is the astral light the carrier of the cosmic jiva or cosmic life-energy. To us humans it is an invisible region surrounding our earth, as H. P. Blavatsky expresses it,as indeed it surrounds every other physical globe; and among the seven kosmic principles it is the mostmaterial excepting one, our physical universe.The astral light therefore is, on the one hand, the storehouse or repository of all the energies of thekosmos on their way downwards to manifest in the material spheres -- of our solar system in general aswell as of our globe in particular; and, on the other hand, it is the receptacle or magazine of whateverpasses out of the physical sphere on its upward way.Thirdly, it is a kosmic "picture-gallery" or indelible record of whatever takes place on the astral andphysical planes; however, this last phase of the functions of the astral light is the least in importance andreal interest.The astral light of our own globe, and analogically of any other physical globe, is the region of thekama-loka, at least as concerns the intermediate and lower parts of the kama-loka; and all entities that diepass through the astral light on their way upwards, and in the astral light throw off or shed the kama-rupaat the time of the second death.The solar system has its own astral light in general, just as every globe in the universal solar system hasits astral light in particular, in each of these last cases being a thickening or materializing or concretingaround the globe of the general astral substance forming the astral light of the solar system. The astrallight, strictly speaking, is simply the lees or dregs of akasa and exists in steps or stages of increasingethereality. The more closely it surrounds any globe, the grosser and more material it is. It is thereceptacle of all the vile and horrible emanations from earth and earth beings, and is therefore in partsfilled with earthly pollutions. There is a constant interchange, unceasing throughout the solarmanvantara, between the astral light on the one hand, and our globe earth on the other, each giving andreturning to the other.Finally, the astral light is with regard to the material realms of the solar system the copy or reflection ofwhat the akasa is in the spiritual realms. The astral light is the mother of the physical, just as the spirit isthe mother of the akasa; or, inversely, the physical is merely the concretion of the astral, just as the akasais the veil or concretion of the highest spiritual. Indeed, the astral and physical are one, just as the akasicand the spiritual are one.
Astral Light This is the next cosmic plane above the physical, which is to the physical globes of our earth or of the other bodies of our solar system what the linga-sarira is to the human physical body. As such, it is the carrier of life-forces — jiva cosmically, and prana individually — and the storehouse of cosmic energies on their way to or from physical manifestation. It preserves an indelible record of all events on the astral and physical planes, there being continual interaction between the two planes. No natural phenomenon, whether mental, psychic, or physical, can be explained without it; without it, the physical world would crumble to impalpable dust.
ASTROLOGY, ESOTERIC The knowledge of the relations of our solar system and our planet to other solar systems, of the exchange of interstellar and interplanetary energies, once was one of the most important sciences in mankind's possession. The people that got farthest in this respect were the Chaldeans of some 30 000 years ago. Fortunately, we can look forward to the time when the individuals who acquired this knowledge in Chaldea will incarnate again and once more present mankind with the esoteric &
asvah. ::: horses; nervous energies. asvah
asva(h.) patvabhih. saphanam (aswá patwabhih saphánám) ::: horses asva(h)(symbolic of vital energies) with tramplings of their hooves. [Cf. R .g Veda 5.6.7]
asya ::: same as primary / simple dasya, also called egoistic dasya, the form of dasya in which one "learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence".
ATOMIC ENERGIES The effect of dynamis through the 49 atomic kinds.
The atomic energies act from world to world through the atomic kinds K 1.29.3
::: ". . . a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
“… a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies,—all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic,—for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
A true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies,—all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain, which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic,—for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 678
attend ::: to listen to, pay attention to, give heed to; direct one"s energies toward.
Aura ::: An extremely subtle and therefore invisible essence or fluid that emanates from and surrounds not onlyhuman beings and beasts, but as a matter of fact plants and minerals also. It is one of the aspects of theauric egg and therefore the human aura partakes of all the qualities that the human constitution contains.It is at once magneto-mental and electrovital, suffused with the energies of mind and spirit -- the qualityin each case coming from an organ or center of the human constitution whence it flows. It is the sourceof the sympathies and antipathies that we are conscious of. Under the control of the human will it can beboth life-giving and healing, or death-dealing; and when the human will is passive the aura has an actionof its own which is automatic and follows the laws of character and latent impulses of the being fromwhom it emanates. Sensitives have frequently described it in more or less vague terms as a light flowingfrom the eyes or the heart or the tips of the fingers or from other parts of the body. Sometimes this fluid,instead of being colorless light, manifests itself by flashing and scintillating changes of color -- the coloror colors in each case depending not only upon the varying moods of the human individual, but alsopossessing a background equivalent to the character or nature of the individual. Animals are extremelysensitive to auras, and some beasts even descry the human being surrounded with the aura as with acloud or veil. In fact, everything has its aura surrounding it with a light or play of color, and especially isthis the case with so-called animated beings.The essential nature of the aura usually seen is astral and electrovital. The magnificent phenomena ofradiation that astronomers can discern at times of eclipse, long streamers with rosy and other coloredlight flashing forth from the body of the sun, are not flames nor anything of the sort, but are simply theelectrovital aura of the solar body -- a manifestation of solar vitality, for the sun in occultism is a livingbeing, as indeed everything else is.
Aura [from Greek, Latin aura air] A subtle invisible essence or fluid emanating from and surrounding beings, both those classed as animate and inanimate. To the eyes of clairvoyants the human aura appears as a halo of light, variously colored according to the momentary psychic and mental condition of the individual. Since everything in the universe is a center of living energies of one kind or another, it must necessarily be surrounded by a field of force, representing its radiations into the surrounding space and upon all objects within its sphere of influence. The human being is of a composite nature, and his aura will, therefore, be composite, including astral-vital, psychomental, and spiritual emanations, and any of these may be perceptible according to the plane on which the perceiver is able to function. But the aura, even though not commonly visible to our eyes, is nevertheless perceptible by the effects which it produces upon those subtle senses which all possess in addition to the conventional five. By the auras of persons we are affected, both consciously and unconsciously, and thus is explained the influence which people exercise on each other. Animals are in some ways far more sensitive to auras than we are.
Auric Egg ::: A term which appertains solely to the more recondite teachings of occultism, of the esoteric philosophy.Little can be said here about it except to state that it is the source of the human aura as well as ofeverything else that the human septenary constitution contains. It is usually of an oviform or egg-shapedappearance, whence its name. It ranges from the divine to the astral-physical, and is the seat of all themonadic, spiritual, intellectual, mental, passional, and vital energies and faculties of the human septiformconstitution. In its essence it is eternal, and endures throughout the pralayas as well as during themanvantaras, but necessarily in greatly varying fashion in these two great periods of kosmic life.
Auric Egg or Envelope The source of the human aura, taking its name from its shape. It ranges from the divine to the astral-physical, and is the seat of all the monadic, spiritual, intellectual, mental, passional, and vital energies and faculties. In its essence it is eternal and endures throughout the pralayas as well as during the manvantaras.
AUSTERITY. ::: A premature and excessive physical austerity, tapasyā, may endanger the process of the sadhana by establishing a disturbance and abnormality of the forces in the different parts of the system. A great energy may pour into the mental and vital parts, but the nerves and the body may be overstrained and lose the strength to support the play of these higher energies.
avadhutī. (T. rtsa dbu ma; C. afudi; J. abatei; K. abujo 阿嚩底). In Sanskrit, "channel," "vein," or "canal." According to various systems of tantric physiognomy, the avadhutī refers to the central channel that runs from either the tip of the genitals or the base of the spine to either the crown of the head or the point between the eyebrows, with a number of "wheels" (CAKRA) along its course. To its left and right are two channels, both smaller in diameter, the RASANA (the left channel in males and the right channel in females) and the LALANA (the right channel in males and the left channel in females). Much tantric practice is devoted to techniques for causing the winds or energies that course through the other channels to enter into this central channel.
Avatara(Sanskrit) ::: The noun-form derived from a compound of two words: ava, prepositional prefix meaning"down," and tri, verb-root meaning to "cross over," to "pass"; thus, avatri -- to "pass down," or to"descend." Hence the word signifies the passing down of a celestial energy or of an individualizedcomplex of celestial energies, which is equivalent to saying a celestial being, in order to overshadow andilluminate some human being -- but a human being who, at the time of such connection of "heaven withearth," of divinity with matter, possesses no karmically intermediate or connecting link between theovershadowing entity and the physical body: in other words, no human soul karmically destined to be theinner master of the body thus born.The intermediate link necessary, so that the human being-to-be may have the human intermediate orpsychological apparatus fit to express the invisible splendor of this celestial descent, is supplied by thedeliberate and voluntary entrance into the unborn child -- and coincidently with the overshadowing of thecelestial power -- of the psychological or intermediate principle of one of the Greater Ones, who thus"completes" what is to be the pure and lofty human channel through which the "descending" divinitymay manifest, this divinity finding in this high psychological principle a sufficiently evolved linkenabling it to express itself in human form upon earth.Hence an avatara is one who has a combination of three elements in his being: an inspiring divinity; ahighly evolved intermediate nature or soul, which is loaned to him and is the channel of that inspiringdivinity; and a pure, clean, physical body.
Avatar, Avatara (Sanskrit) Avatāra [from ava down + the verbal root tṛ to cross over, pass] That which passes down or descends; the passing down of a celestial energy or an individualized complex of celestial energies — a celestial being — in order to overshadow and illuminate a human being who, at the time of such connection of divinity with matter, possesses no human soul karmically destined to be the inner master of the body thus born. “Hence an Avatara is one who has a combination of three elements in his being: an inspiring divinity; a highly evolved intermediate nature or soul, which is loaned to him and is the channel of that inspiring divinity; and a pure, clean, physical body” (OG 16).
Axieros, Axiokersa, Axiokersos, (Greek) Also Aschieros, Achiosera, Achiochersus. In ancient Greek mythology, three divinities whose Mysteries and worship were mainly centered in Samothrace. With Kadmilos, often said to be their parent, they were the kabiri [cf Chaldean gibbor, Hebrew geber beings of power or might, the great ones]. Frequently Axieros, Axiokersa, and Axiokersos are stated to be the offspring of Hephaestus or Vulcan, the fiery flame of creative cosmic intellect or mahat. The kabiri are equivalent to the four kumaras of Hindu literature — Sanat-kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana. The functions of both groups was as guardians, guides, inspirers, bringers of illumination and prosperity; and, in the kosmic sense, as divinities intimately involved in the intelligent productive energies of nature. Their number is the same as that of the kosmic elements — four, occasionally five, and in reality seven or ten. The four named above are the lower quaternary of the kosmic septenary — those divinities most closely involved in the intelligent building and architectural construction and therefore government of the four lower cosmic planes.
Bala (Sanskrit) Bala Power, strength, might, vigor (cf Latin valor); one of the six functions of action, similar to the ten karmendriya (karmic energies) of Buddhism. In yoga practice the five powers (panchabalani) to be acquired are: complete trust or faith, energy, memory, meditation, and wisdom.
Conduction Band - Energies of charge carries in a solid such that the carries are free to move.
Because nature is repetitive throughout, these Grand Masters are correspondentially related to the highest three of the four lower manifested planes of the seven planes of cosmic consciousness, in which exist the sevenfold manifested cosmos, the solar system, and the seven sacred planets. Specifically with reference to the seven globes of our earth-chain, Blavatsky gives these in the Chaldean Qabbalistic system as: 1) Archetypal World; 2) Intellectual or Creative World; and 3) Substantial or Formative World (SD 1:200). The lowest of the seven cosmic planes is the plane of our physical earth, which is the focus, result, and outermost expression of the energies and forces of the three higher planes. Thus our physical earth, as also physical man, are each the Temple, planned and built by the Three Grand Masters, according to the pattern which David has “by the spirit,” the divine plan which is hidden in the heart of everything that is. In accordance with this divine plan all evolution proceeds by the progressive manifestation of the divine life and the cosmic and human spiritual energies, powers, and faculties, evolving and unfolding from within, until at last the building of the Temple shall be completed and adorned as a fit and worthy habitation of the inner god.
beltane ::: Besom A witch's broomstick (upon which she apparently 'flew' to Sabbats with her familiar - normally a cat), which is used to sweep away any negative energies from a 'sacred space' prior to the casting of a circle there. See also magical Rite for 'casting a circle'.
energies ::: pl. --> of Energy
Hadron - The attraction of mass to all other mass. Gravity is the weakest known force in nature at normal energies.
Heavy ion - The nucleus of a large atom, such as gold, with more or fewer electrons than usual, or no electrons at all.
bindu. (T. thig le). In Sanskrit, "drop," as in the title of Buddhist texts like DHARMAKĪRTI's NYAYABINDU ("Drop of Reasoning"). In Buddhist tantra, bindu is BODHICITTA, seminal fluids in the ordinary sense, and in an extraordinary sense the seed of the illusory world and enlightenment; in this tantric sense, bindu is either red (from the female) or white (from the male). A second meaning of bindu found widely in tantric literature in Tibet, and in the RNYING MA sect in particular, is in words like thig le chen po (great circle) and thig le nyag chig (single circle, single sphere), words for the primordial basis: the natural state of the mind as empty, creative, and a state of great bliss both in ordinary beings, and as the DHARMAKAYA at the time of enlightenment. This bindu is understood as including all phenomena, in a causal sense, and as their essence. According to tantric physiology, the bindu resides in the channels (NAdĪ) and is the source of bliss when manipulated in meditation practice through the control of the energies (PRAnA). Iconographically, it is represented as a curved line on the top of the circular symbol placed on the top of letters to represent the nasalization of vowels (anusvAra).
bird ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Bird in the Veda is the symbol, very frequently, of the soul liberated and upsoaring, at other times of energies so liberated and upsoaring, winging upwards towards the heights of our being, winging widely with a free flight, no longer involved in the ordinary limited movement or labouring gallop of the Life-energy, the Horse, Ashwa.” *The Secret of the Veda
bird ::: “The Bird in the Veda is the symbol, very frequently, of the soul liberated and upsoaring, at other times of energies so liberated and upsoaring, winging upwards towards the heights of our being, winging widely with a free flight, no longer involved in the ordinary limited movement or labouring gallop of the Life-energy, the Horse, Ashwa.” The Secret of the Veda
Brahmacharya, the transformation of retas into oJas and the raising of its energies upward so that they change into a spiritual force.
Brahmadevas (Sanskrit) Brahmadeva-s [from brahman cosmic spirit + deva god, spiritual being] Spiritual beings who act as guardians of the human race, entities directly emanating from Brahman as spiritual-intellectual energies. See also DHYANI-CHOHANS
TeV - Trillion electron volts (1012)
Thermal Gas - A collection of particles that collide with each other and exchange energy frequently, giving a distribution of particle energies that can be characterized by a single temperature.
Burn, the: An explosion of Paradox energies.
cakra. (P. cakka; T. 'khor lo; C. lun; J. rin; K. yun 輪). In Sanskrit, "wheel," "disc," or "circle"; a frequent symbol used to represent various aspects of Buddhism, from the Buddha, to the DHARMA, to Buddhist notions of kingship. When the Buddha first taught his new religion, it is said that he "turned the wheel of dharma" (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA) and the eight-spoked "wheel of dharma" (DHARMACAKRA) is subsequently used as a symbol for both the teachings as well as the person who rediscovered and enunciated those teachings. The ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA explains that the noble eightfold path (ARYAstAnGAMARGA) is like a wheel because it is similar in terms of the hub that is the support of the wheel, the spokes, and the containment rim. Right speech, action, and livelihood are like the hub, because they are the training in morality that provides support for concentration (DHYANA) and wisdom (PRAJNA). Right view, thought, and effort are like spokes, because they are the training in wisdom. Right mindfulness and concentration are like the rim because the spokes of right view and so forth provide the objective support (ALAMBANA) in a one-pointed manner in dependence on them. The dharmacakra appears in some of the earliest Buddhist art, often as an iconographic symbol standing in for the Buddha himself. The sign of a thousand-spoked wheel on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet is one of the thirty-two major marks of a great man (MAHAPURUsALAKsAnA), which is said to adorn the body of both a Buddha and a "wheel-turning emperor" (CAKRAVARTIN), his secular counterpart. A cakravartin's power is said to derive from his wheel of divine attributes, which rolls across different realms of the earth, bringing them under his dominion. The realm of SAMSARA is sometimes depicted iconographically in the form of a wheel, known as the "wheel of existence" (BHAVACAKRA), with a large circle divided into the six realms of existence (sAdGATI), surrounded by an outer ring representing the twelve links of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA). ¶ The term cakra is also important in Buddhist TANTRA, especially in ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA. According to various systems of tantric physiognomy, a central channel (AVADHuTĪ) runs from either the tip of the genitals or the base of the spine to either the crown of the head or the point between the eyebrows, with a number of "wheels" (cakra) along its course. In one of the systems, these wheels are located at the point between the eyebrows, the crown of the head, the throat, the heart, the navel, the base of the spine, and the opening of the sexual organ. Running parallel to the central channel to the right and left are two channels, both smaller in diameter, the LALANA and the RASANA. It is said that the right and left channels wrap around the central channel, forming knots at the cakras. Much tantric practice is devoted to techniques for loosening these knots in order to allow the winds (PRAnA) or energies that course through the other channels to flow freely and enter into the central channel. The cakras themselves are essential elements in this practice and other tantric meditative practices, with seed syllables (BĪJA), spells (MANTRA), deities, and diagrams (MAndALA) visualized at their center. The cakras themselves are often described as open lotus blossoms, with varying numbers of petals in different colors.
carita. (T. spyod pa; C. xing; J. gyo; K. haeng 行). In Sanskrit and PAli, "conduct," "behavior," or "temperament"; an alternative form is Sanskrit caryA (P. cariyA). As "behavior," carita is typically bifurcated into either good (sucarita) or bad (S. duscarita; P. duccarita) conduct. As "temperament," carita is used to indicate six general character types, which are predominantly biased toward the negative temperaments of greedy (RAGA), hateful (S. DVEsA; P. dosa), and deluded (MOHA), or the more positive temperaments of faithful (S. sRADDHA; P. saddhA), intelligent (BUDDHI), and discursive (S. VITARKA; P. vitakka), a taxonomy found in the VISUDDHIMAGGA. The first three types of temperaments are negative and thus need to be corrected. (1) A greedy temperament is constantly searching out new sensory experiences and clings to things that are not beneficial. (2) A hateful temperament is disaffected, always finding imaginary faults in others; along with the intelligent temperament, he is less prone to clinging than the other character types. (3) A deluded temperament is agitated and restless, because he is unable to make up his mind about anything and follows along with others' decisions. The latter three types of temperaments are positive and thus need to be enhanced. (4) A faithful temperament is like a greedy type who instead cultivates wholesome actions and clings to what is beneficial. (5) An intelligent temperament is like a hateful type who performs salutary actions and points out real faults; along with the hateful temperament, he is less prone to clinging than the other character types. (6) A discursive temperament is characterized by a restlessness of mind that constantly flits from topic to topic and vacillates due to his constant conjecturing; if these discursive energies can be harnessed, however, that knowledge may lead to wisdom. The Visuddhimagga also provides detailed guidelines for determining a person's temperament by observing their posture, their preferences in food, and the sort of mental concomitants with which they are typically associated. This knowledge of temperaments is important as a tool of practice (BHAVANA), because in the Visuddhimagga's account of visualization (P. KASInA) exercises, the practitioner is taught to use an appropriate kasina device or meditation topic (P. KAMMAttHANA) either to mitigate the influence of the negative temperaments or enhance the influence of the positive ones. Thus, a practitioner with a greedy temperament is advised to emphasize the cemetery contemplations on foulness (S. AsUBHABHAVANA; P. asubhabhAvanA) and mindfulness of the body (S. KAYANUPAsYANA; P. kAyAnupassanA; see also SMṚTYUPASTHANA); the hateful temperament, the four divine abidings (BRAHMAVIHARA) and the four color kasinas (of blue, yellow, red, white); the deluded temperament, mindfulness of breathing (S. ANAPANASMṚTI; P. AnApAnasati); the discursive temperament, also mindfulness of breathing; the faithful temperament, the first six recollections (S. ANUSMṚTI; P. anussati), viz., of the Buddha, the DHARMA, the SAMGHA, morality, generosity, and the divinities; and the intelligent temperament, the recollections of death and peace, the analysis of the four elements, and the loathsomeness of food. Suitable to all six temperaments are the other six kasinas (viz., of earth, water, fire, air, light, and empty space) and the immaterial absorptions (S. ARuPYAVACARADHYANA; P. arupAvacarajhAna). ¶ In the MAHAYANA, caryA, carita, and related terms (e.g., Sanskrit compounds such as duscara) refer specifically to the difficult course of action that a BODHISATTVA pursues in order to reach the goal of enlightenment. These actions include the unending search or pilgrimage for a teacher, the sacrifices required to meet with an authentic teacher who can teach MahAyAna doctrines (see SADAPRARUDITA, SUDHANA), and the difficult practices of charity, such as giving away all possessions, including family members and even one's body (see DEHADANA; SHESHEN). The JATAKAMALA of sura, the BODHICARYAVATARA of sANTIDEVA, and to a certain extent the BUDDHACARITA of AsVAGHOsA set forth a model of the authentic bodhisattva's behavior for aspirants to emulate. In Buddhist TANTRA, caryA refers to a code of ritual purity, and to an esoteric practice called "yoga with signs" (SANIMITTAYOGA) followed by CARYATANTRA practitioners.
Chakra(Cakra, Sanskrit) ::: A word signifying in general a "wheel," and from this simple original meaning therewere often taken for occult and esoteric purposes a great many subordinate, very interesting, and in somecases highly mystical and profound derivatives. Chakra also means a cycle, a period of duration, inwhich the wheel of time turns once. It also means the horizon, as being circular or of a wheel-form. Itlikewise means certain centers or pranic spherical loci of the body in which are supposed to collectstreams of pranic energy of differing qualities, or pranic energies of different kinds. These physiologicalchakras, which are actually connected with the pranic circulations and ganglia of the auric egg, andtherefore function in the physical body through the intermediary of the linga-sarira or astral model-body,are located in different parts of the physical frame, reaching from the parts about the top of the skull tothe parts about the pubis. It would be highly improper, having at heart the best interests of humanity, togive the occult or esoteric teaching concerning the exact location, functions, and means of controlling thephysiological chakras of the human body; for it is a foregone conclusion that were this mysticalknowledge broadcast, it would be sadly misused, leading not only in many cases to death or insanity, butto the violation of every moral instinct. Alone the high initiates, who as a matter of fact have risen abovethe need of employing the physiological chakras, can use them at will, and for holy purposes -- which infact is something that they rarely, if indeed they ever do.
Chakra (Skt.): Wheel, disc, lotus; anything circular that whirls or flowers. It usually denotes one of the seven main power-zones in the occult anatomy of man. The chakras concentrate occult energies that work through the glands of the endocrine system (See, in particular, Chapter 4.)
Co7 ::: Shorthand for the preliminary rite, "The Calling of the Sevenths to Induce Equilibrium". This is a rite initially found in the P.G.M. that balances the planetary energies within the psyche, centers the mind, and establishes the beginning of the authority to start on a more intricate ritual or working (e.g. a planetary invocation).
Compacting ::: The process of using visualization and/or breath to move certain energies in order to load an object or part of the body with them.
CONSCIOUSNESS—All forms of sensation, feeling, perception, planning and thought; a comprehensive tern for the complement of all our cognitive energies.
Conservation of Energy A scientific theory that the total energy of any material system is a quantity which cannot be increased or decreased by any action among the parts, and that when energy seems to disappear it is merely transformed into an equivalent quantity of another mode of energy. The theory, interpreted in its widest sense, means no more than an affirmation that something cannot be created out of nothing or resolved into nothing, and so would seem a perfectly harmless generalization. However, theosophy teaches that there is a constant inflow of force into any such physical or material system, which in the scientific view is from sources exterior to a “closed material system.” Theosophy does not regard such forces as exterior but looks upon closed material systems as merely phenomena on the physical plane of inner and powerful forces which produce such physical systems as an appearance — real enough for the entities within it while it lasts, but vanishing once the inner, controlling forces are withdrawn. Then the atoms simply vanish because the cohering energies which make them are likewise withdrawn.
Correlation of forces, used by Sir William Grove (1842), is equivalent to the conservation of energy. It states that physical energies, such as light, heat, and mechanical energy, are convertible one into another, in equivalent quantities.
Cosmic kama or desire, equivalent to the Greek eros, is the source of fohat, the driving intelligent energies of the universe. It is impersonal compassion and sympathy.
cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine
"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*
Cycles or Law of Cycles ::: An exceedingly interesting branch of theosophical study, and one dealing with a fact which is soobviously manifest in the worlds surrounding us that its existence can hardly be denied, except by thewillfully blind, is what may be called the law of cycles, or nature's repetitive operations.We find nature repeating herself everywhere, although such repetition of course is not merely a runningin the same old ruts on each recurrence of the cyclic activity; for each recurrence is of course theexpression of a modification, more or less great, of what has preceded. Day succeeds night, wintersucceeds summer, the planets circulate around the suns in regular and periodical courses; and these arebut familiar examples of cyclical activity.Cycles in nature show the time periods of periodic recurrence along and in which any evolving entity orthing expresses the energies and powers which are itself, so that cycles and evolution are like the twosides of a coin: the one shows the time periods or cycles, and the other side manifests the energic orsubstantial qualities appearing in manifestation according to these cyclical time-periods; but back of thisapparently double but actually single process always lie profound karmic causes.
daath">Da'ath Da'ath (meaning 'reason') is considered by Kabbalists to be a 'quasi-emanation' combining the energies of Chokmah and Binah. Da'ath is often referred to as the eleventh Sephirah or the Sphere without a number. See also The Sephiroth.
daksinamarga (Dakshinamarga) ::: [in the Tantra]: the righthand path: the way of Knowledge; Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies.
daya ::: compassion; "oneness, a participating sympathy, a free idendaya tity, with all energies in all beings and therefore a spontaneous and fruitful harmony with all the divine will in the universe", a quality common to the four aspects of daivi prakr.ti. daya isvarabhavah. karmasamarthyam (daya ishwarabhavah kardaya
deosil">Deosil A clockwise movement, symbolic of life, positive energies and good. The majority of rituals, ceremonies and spells, normally call for deosil movement at some point in their construction. See also Widdershins.
destiny ::: “Destiny in the rigid sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One’s spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.” Letters on Yoga
DESTINY. ::: Destiny in the ripd sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and detenmning the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiri- tual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher
Devachan[Tibetan, bde-ba-can, pronounced de-wa-chen] ::: A translation of the Sanskrit sukhavati, the "happy place"or god-land. It is the state between earth-lives into which the human entity, the human monad, enters andthere rests in bliss and repose.When the second death after that of the physical body takes place -- and there are many deaths, that is tosay many changes of the vehicles of the ego -- the higher part of the human entity withdraws into itselfall that aspires towards it, and takes that "all" with it into the devachan; and the atman, with the buddhiand with the higher part of the manas, become thereupon the spiritual monad of man. Devachan as a stateapplies not to the highest or heavenly or divine monad, but only to the middle principles of man, to thepersonal ego or the personal soul in man, overshadowed by atma-buddhi. There are many degrees indevachan: the highest, the intermediate, and the lowest. Yet devachan is not a locality, it is a state, a stateof the beings in that spiritual condition.Devachan is the fulfilling of all the unfulfilled spiritual hopes of the past incarnation, and anefflorescence of all the spiritual and intellectual yearnings of the past incarnation which in that pastincarnation have not had an opportunity for fulfillment. It is a period of unspeakable bliss and peace forthe human soul, until it has finished its rest time and stage of recuperation of its own energies.In the devachanic state, the reincarnating ego remains in the bosom of the monad (or of the monadicessence) in a state of the most perfect and utter bliss and peace, reviewing and constantly reviewing, andimproving upon in its own blissful imagination, all the unfulfilled spiritual and intellectual possibilitiesof the life just closed that its naturally creative faculties automatically suggest to the devachanic entity.Man here is no longer a quaternary of substance-principles (for the second death has taken place), but isnow reduced to the monad with the reincarnating ego sleeping in its bosom, and is therefore a spiritualtriad. (See also Death, Reincarnating Ego)
Dimensional Science: Technocratic version of the Spirit Sphere, based upon exploring and controlling alternate dimensions and their associated energies.
Divine Love ::: 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.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 167
".. . 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; . . . . ” The Synthesis of Yoga
“.. . 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; …” The Synthesis of Yoga
“ . . . 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. The Synthesis of Yoga
dragon ::: “the black dragon of the Inconscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole structure of the material universe; its energies unroll the flux of things, its obscure intimations seem to be the starting-point of consciousness itself and the source of all life-impulse.” The Life Divine
Dweller on the Threshold (Dweller of the Threshold) Coined by Bulwer-Lytton in his romance Zanoni, where it represents a malevolent entity of awful and terrifying aspect awaiting to menace and tempt the aspirant to occultism. The author, by means of this vivid portrayal, has expressed the mystical fact that when one has taken a stand to overcome a certain weakness in one’s nature, or even a habit, such resolution seems to array all the opposing forces against the aspirant. Thus it may readily be understood that when one seeks to enter the domain of the occult, a similar experience awaits the candidate; but the forces or energies thus aroused are of one’s own making, and they must be met and conquered by their originator before progress may be successfully made. “The real Dweller on the Threshold is formed of the despair and despondency of the neophyte, who is called upon to give up all his old affections for kindred, parents and children, as well as his aspirations for objects of worldly ambition, which have perhaps been his associates for many incarnations. When called upon to give up these things, the neophyte feels a kind of blank, before he realizes his higher possibilities.” (Subba Row, Theos 7:284).
Earth-chain Our planet, like every visible cosmic body, is one of a composite chain or coadunated group formed of seven or twelve energies and substances, the ones on our plane alone visible to our physical senses. These septenary or duodenary groups are called planetary chains, and the earth-chain is the one whose visible component is what we call the planet earth. The words and diagrams describing the idea are merely representations, not photographic. The components are distinctly separate spheres in each chain, but nevertheless form a coadunated unit, but no two globes are of the same substance.
Elementaries ::: "Properly, the disembodied souls of the depraved; these souls having at some time prior to deathseparated from themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for immortality" (TheosophicalGlossary, H. P. Blavatsky).Strictly speaking, the word "elementaries" should be used as H. P. Blavatsky defines it in this quotationfrom her. But in modern theosophical literature the word has come to signify more particularly thephantoms or eidola of disembodied persons, these phantoms or eidola really being the kama-rupicshades, with especial application to the cases of grossly materialistic ex-humans whose evil impulses andappetites still inhering in the kama-rupic phantom draw these phantoms to physical spheres congenial tothem. They are a real danger to psychical health and sanity, and literally haunt living human beingspossessing tendencies akin to their own. They are soulless shells, but still filled with energies of adepraved and ignoble type. Their destiny of course is like that of all other pretas or bhutas -- ultimatedisintegration; for the gross astral atoms composing them slowly dissolve through the years after themanner of a dissolving column of smoke or a wisp of dark cloud on a mountainside.
Elon or Elion (Phoenician) A name of the sun, recognized as one of the highest active deities or cosmic energies by the Phoenicians; rendered in Greek as ’Elioun. The Hebrew form of this word is found in the Bible in the phrase ’El ‘elyon, “the God or Divinity on high.”
employ ::: v. t. --> To inclose; to infold.
To use; to have in service; to cause to be engaged in doing something; -- often followed by in, about, on, or upon, and sometimes by to; as: (a) To make use of, as an instrument, a means, a material, etc., for a specific purpose; to apply; as, to employ the pen in writing, bricks in building, words and phrases in speaking; to employ the mind; to employ one&
energetical ::: a. --> Having energy or energies; possessing a capacity for vigorous action or for exerting force; active.
Exhibiting energy; operating with force, vigor, and effect; forcible; powerful; efficacious; as, energetic measures; energetic laws.
ENERGIES. ::: All energies put info activity — thought, speech, feeling, act — go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or Another, and the nature and Us actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward ::: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their elTccts. It Is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act ::: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed w-ill arc also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reac- tions.
ENERGY, EXCHANGE OF All atoms in all material aggregates receive and in their turn emit energies.
The energies coming in from without have their own types and individual characters.
The energies transmitted further always have their individual characters coloured to a certain degree in the new aggregates they flow through. K 2.13.10
ENERGY In the scientific sense of the word, energy is matter in motion. All higher kinds of matter (atomic kinds, molecular kinds) are energy in relation to all lower kinds.
Matter in not dissolved into energy, but into higher matter.
When matter ceases to move, its quality of being energy ceases.
All forces of nature are matter. K 1.26.1ff
The energies that become manifest are the effects of the next higher molecular kinds upon the next lower ones in each world. K 1.29.3
energy ::: n. --> Internal or inherent power; capacity of acting, operating, or producing an effect, whether exerted or not; as, men possessing energies may suffer them to lie inactive.
Power efficiently and forcibly exerted; vigorous or effectual operation; as, the energy of a magistrate.
Strength of expression; force of utterance; power to impress the mind and arouse the feelings; life; spirit; -- said of speech, language, words, style; as, a style full of energy.
Esoterically, Silenus is represented as the chief of these lower productive powers of nature, usually connected with the fertilizing effect of water, which connects them immediately with the generative powers of the moon. Bacchus or Dionysos, on the other hand, in his higher aspect is representative of the spiritual fructifying and stimulating powers of the solar energies.
Eternal recurrence: The view that as the dynamic energies of nature are finite, whereas time is infinite, only a limited number of combinations is possible, which results in the cyclical recurrence of every situation in infinitely numerous times. The view which assumes that the initial combination of the forces of existence will recur again and again. (Nietzsche.) -- H.H.
ETHERIC ENVELOPE, ETHERIC BODY The monad&
FINALITY It is not true, as the physicalists believe, that finality in nature is a special case of forces of unconscious matter acting mechanically.
The exact opposite of this is the case: the energies that act mechanically in the solar system are special cases of those acting purposefully: automatized consciousness robots achieving the missions suited to them with unerring precision. K 2.16.5
Fluid Condensor ::: A container filled with a materia-imbued fluid that is used to amplify or gather certain energies or helps to attune to certain currents.
FOHAT Material energies in worlds 43-49.
Furthermore, because it is an expression of energy, all vibration is force and energy itself, and hence capable of arousing energies or forces of exactly the same quality or rate of intensity in other beings which they affect — this being the reason behind sympathetic vibration. When vibrations thus interlock and synchronize in rate, intensity, and quality, we have what is called sympathy, love, or attraction, and such sympathetic vibration is operative on all the planes of universal nature. Not only is this the case in all relations of humans with each other, but likewise sympathetic vibration plays an enormous part in such matters as mob psychology, quick electrical sympathies affecting audiences, hates and rebellions — even what is known as health and disease are communicated by means of vibrations, the one first affected being able to communicate his “affection” of whatever kind to others who are at the time negative to the vibrational impact and in time vibrating synchronously with the impacting energy. There is, of course, such a thing as resistance, which expresses itself in manifold ways, such as being able to throw off the vibration affecting it, and even to return it upon the sender, consciously or unconsciously; and herein lies the secret of the old medieval saying that curses come home to roost, or that if the magician is not stronger than the elementals or nature spirits he attempts to control, he is almost invariably destined to become their victim.
ganying. (J. kanno; K. kamŭng 感應). In Chinese, "sympathetic resonance," or "stimulus and response," a seminal concept in traditional Chinese philosophy, which is appropriated in early Chinese Buddhism to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Ganying is a mode of seemingly spontaneous (although not "uncaused") response that occurs naturally in a universe conceived holistically in terms of pattern or "principle" (LI) and interdependent order. The notion itself is deceptively simple: objects belonging to the same category or class are conceived as resonating spontaneously with each other, just as would two identically tuned strings on a pair of zithers. The notion of resonance was used in traditional Chinese philosophy to explain or rationalize the mechanism behind the elaborate system of correlated categories generally known as five-phase (wuxing) thought-viz., the primary elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and soil. According to early Chinese cosmology, the underlying principles and patterns of the universe seemingly give rise to, or resonate spontaneously with, correlative manifestations in the physical world. The Chinese conception of the universe as an interconnected harmonious whole finds expression in theories concerning the cyclic progression of the five phases and yin (dark) and yang (light), as well as in elaborate prescriptions pertaining to the ritual life of the court. The universe, according to this view, is in a state of continual motion and flux. The patterns of change are the result of the cyclic interactions between the five phases and the forces (or vital energies, C. qi) of yin and yang, which tend naturally in the direction of rhythmic balance and harmony. Humans do not stand apart from the natural universe but rather constitute a fundamental and integral part of this whole. Early Buddhist thinkers in China adapted the mechanism of sympathetic resonance to explain in Chinese terms how an action (karman) performed in one time period could evoke a corresponding response, or fruition (VIPĀKA), in another. In addition, sympathetic resonance was used by early Chinese Buddhist thinkers to make sense of the notion of grace. In this later sense, sentient beings' faith (sRADDHĀ) and/or roots of virtue (KUsALAMuLA) would invoke a "sympathetic response" in the minds of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, which prompts them to respond accordingly with salvific grace. In the PURE LAND traditions, sentient beings' recitation of the name of AMITĀBHA (see NIANFO) creates a sympathetic response in the mind of that buddha, which prompts him in turn to bring them to his pure land, where they may become enlightened. The rubric of ganying is just as prevalent in popular religious tracts in China, where it refers to the principle of moral retribution-the belief that one's good and evil deeds will result in corresponding rewards and punishments. While the Chinese notion of moral retribution (bao) meted out in this life or the next was indebted to Buddhist notions of karman and rebirth, in the premodern period, such retribution emerged as a fundamental principle of Chinese popular religious belief and practice, irrespective of one's specific religious affiliation. This doctrine was propagated through innumerable tales of miraculous retribution-such as "numinous attestation" (lingyan), "responsive attestation" (yingyan), or "numinous response" (lingying), and so on-that "attested" (yan) to the reality of the "numinous" or "supernatural" (ling) and the inevitability of divine justice.
gaya. ::: vital energies
gnah. ::: (in the Veda) the female powers who are "the energies of gnah Nature".
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
Griffin, Grypes (Latin) [plural of gryps; cf Greek gryph] A creature supposed to have the fore parts and wings of an eagle and the hind parts of a lion, with either the head of a lion or an eagle; in some forms there is also a serpent’s tail. It belongs to the general class of dragons, chimeras, etc., which may be symbolic representations of abstractions, reminiscences of extinct animals, or the actual forms presented to the eye of a seer by certain cosmic powers — a familiar ancient Greek idea. Assyrian, Persian, and Greek griffins were generally represented as savage guardians of treasure, which shows them to be some of the natural energies which the individual has to defy in order to obtain such treasure. They are one way of representing the powers that guard and govern the lower kingdoms of nature, and which resist and menace whoever challenges their power and treasure; whence they appear as horrific monsters.
GUNA (Skt &
Guru (Sanskrit) Guru Teacher, preceptor; applied not only to a chela’s spiritual teacher, but to spiritual and metaphysical teachers of many kinds. The spiritual fire within each person, the higher self or atma-buddhi, is also called a guru, a divine instructor; and this higher self within each individual is, when all is said, the supreme guru for that person. The Master outside of the disciple’s own spiritual guide is a very necessary element in genuine occult instruction; but the outer guru, the Master who teaches and leads the disciple, has always in view the evocation and development of the guru within the disciple — the bringing to birth of the chela’s own inner divine and intellectual energies and powers.
Hay-Yashar (Hebrew) Hay-yāshār Blavatsky spelled Hayasscher. The straight, upright, or righteous, the light-forces; used in the Qabbalah for a group or minor hierarchy of forces or energies of an inferior grade, but still belonging to the powers of light.
Heracles (Greek) Herakles Hercules (Latin) [probably from heros free man, cf Latin herus lord of a household; or “renowned through Hera”] Son of Zeus and Alcmene, greatest of the Greek heroes. He delivers Prometheus from Zeus, and slays the two serpents representing the nodes of the moon. The passage of the sun through the zodiacal signs typifies the twelve labors of Heracles, in this case denoting the energies of the cosmic Logos working on various planes, and also in the microcosmic sphere the trials through which an initiant must pass before reaching adeptship. In one of his highest aspects he is a solar entity, self-born, and possibly equivalent to Thor of Scandinavia (SD 1:131-2). He is the first-begotten, in some ways equivalent to Bel of Asia Minor and to Siva in India (SD 2:492). He is one of the minor logoi who strive to endow humankind with higher faculties. Again, he appears as the sun god who descends to Hades (cave of initiation) in order to deliver the denizens there from their bonds, thus being equivalent to Mahasura and Lucifer.
HOROSCOPE By horoscope is understood the sum total of ascertainable celestial relationships to exact time, exact longitude and latitude on our planet at the &
“If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities, throws up a multiplicity of divergent viewpoints, divergent lines of action and lets them work themselves out side by side or in collision or in a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle. …
In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
In Norse mythology giants represent ages of manifest existence and each giant exhibits traits belonging to his particular eon. The giantesses who are his daughters represent lesser cycles of time within his longer age. Thurses are the gross, inert aspects of the elements which serve as vehicles for the imbodiments of conscious energies in worlds. They are represented as evil in most myths because their nature is opposed to the dynamism of the gods. Hence the gods and thurses or giants are constantly at war.
In popular modern theosophical literature, the word has also been applied to the phantoms or kama-rupic shades of disimbodied persons in general, especially to the case of grossly materialistic humans whose evil impulses and appetites, still inhering in the kama-rupic phantom, draw these phantoms to physical spheres congenial to them. Even these last are a real danger to the psychological health and sanity of imbodied humans, and literally haunt living human beings possessing tendencies akin to their own. Such soulless astral shells are less dangerous than actual elementaries because far less conscious, but are still filled with energies of a depraved and ignoble type. Their destiny is like that of all other pretas or bhutas — ultimate disintegration; for the gross astral atoms composing them slowly dissolve after the manner of a dissolving column of smoke.
In theosophy, so far as our own solar universe is concerned, the supporting spiritual powers involved in the carpentry of the universe, referring to the rectors of the planets. Just as a human community is formed by individuals, just so is a solar system formed by the solar chief and the planetary individuals which not only by their life and energies and substances make such solar system, but continuously support it and keep it going as a cosmic individual throughout its entire life term.
In this connection, the Kalki-avatara — stated to be the final incarnation of Vishnu in Hinduism or the incarnation of Maitreya-Buddha in Northern Buddhism — and the final great hero and savior of mankind of the Zoroastrians called Sosiosh, as well as the Faithful and True one of the Christian book of Revelation, all appear on a white horse. All these heroes or saviors are connected emblematically with horses of power because the horse has been from immemorial time a representation of solar, spiritual, and intellectual energies. See also ASVAMEDHA
In this impersonal and abstract manner of representation did the ancients symbolize the formative, creative, or procreative forces or energies of nature under appropriate emblems drawn from the animal kingdom, and most commonly from man himself. Thus it was that the phallus in Classical antiquity stood as the emblem of the abstract creative forces of the universe, as well as the solar system, and even of earth; precisely as the linga in India has always expressed the identic cycle of thought. Likewise the female organ has frequently been used to express the generative and maternally productive powers of nature. Modern European sophistication unwillingly recognizes this truth, and insists in giving to these symbols the most offensive of constructions. Yet even Western religious iconology has followed the same line of thought, and whether we refer to the lamb, or to the serpent or dove, we ascertain exactly the same thing.
Invisible Worlds ::: The ancient wisdom teaches that the universe is not only a living organism, but that physical humanbeings live in intimate connection, in intimate contact, with invisible spheres, with invisible andintangible realms, unknown to man because the physical senses are so imperfectly evolved that weneither see these invisible realms nor feel nor hear nor smell nor taste them, nor cognize them except bythat much more highly evolved and subtle sensorium which men call the mind. These inner realmsinterpenetrate our physical sphere, permeate it, so that in our daily affairs as we go about our duties weactually pass through the dwellings, through the mountains, through the lakes, through the very beings,mayhap, of the entities of and dwelling in these invisible realms. These invisible realms are built ofmatter just as this our physical world is, but of a more ethereal matter than ours is; but we cognize themnot at all with our physical senses. The explanation is that it is all a matter of differing rates of vibrationof substances.The reader must be careful not to confuse this theosophical teaching of inner worlds and spheres withwhat the modern Spiritism of the Occident has to say on the matter. The "Summerland" of the Spiritistsin no wise resembles the actuality which the theosophical philosophy teaches of, the doctrine concerningthe structure and operations of the visible and invisible kosmos. The warning seems necessary lest anunwary reader may imagine that the invisible worlds and spheres of the theosophical teachings areidentic with the Summerland of the Spiritists, for it is not so.Our senses tell us absolutely nothing of the far-flung planes and spheres which belong to the ranges andfunctionings of the invisible substances and energies of the universe; yet those inner and invisible planesand spheres are actually inexpressibly more important than what our physical senses tell us of thephysical world, because these invisible planes are the causal realms, of which our physical world oruniverse, however far extended in space, is but the effectual or phenomenal or resultant production.But while these inner and invisible worlds or planes or spheres are the fountainhead, ultimately, of all theenergies and matters of the whole physical world, yet to an entity inhabiting these inner and invisibleworlds or planes, these latter are as substantial and "real" -- using the popular word -- to that entity as ourgross physical world is to us. Just as we know in our physical world various grades or conditions ofenergy and matter, from the physically grossest to the most ethereal, precisely after the same general plando the inhabitants of these invisible and inner and to us superior worlds know and cognize their owngrossest and also most ethereal substances and energies.Man as well as all the other entities of the universe is inseparably connected with these worlds invisible.
Involution ::: The reverse process or procedure of evolution. As evolution means the unfolding, the unwrapping, therolling forth, of what already exists and is latent, so involution means the inwrapping, the infolding, theingoing of what previously exists or has been unfolded, etc. Involution and evolution never in anycircumstances can be even conceived of properly as operative the one apart from the other: every act ofevolution is an act of involution, and vice versa. To illustrate, as spirit and matter are fundamentally oneand yet eternally coactive and interactive, so involution and evolution are two names for two phases ofthe same procedure of growth, and are eternally coactive and interactive. As an example, the so-calleddescent of the monads into matter means an involution or involving or infolding of spiritual potenciesinto material vehicles which coincidently and contemporaneously, through the compelling urge of theinfolding energies, unfold their own latent capacities, unwrap them, roll them forth; and this is theevolution of matter. Thus what is the involution of spirit is contemporaneously and pari passu theevolution of matter. Contrariwise, on the ascending or luminous arc when the involved monadic essencesbegin to rise towards their primordial spiritual source they begin to unfold or unwrap themselves aspreviously on the descending arc they had infolded or inwrapped themselves. But this process ofunfolding or evolution of the monadic essences is contemporaneous with and pari passu with theinfolding and inwrapping, the involution, of the material energies and powers.Human birth and death are outstanding illustrations or examples of the same thing. The child is born, andas it grows to its full efflorescence of power it evolves or rolls forth certain inherent characteristics orenergies or faculties, all derived from the human being's svabhava or ego. Contrariwise, when the declineof human life begins, there is a slow infolding or inwrapping of these same facilities which thus seemgradually to diminish. These facilities and energies thus evolved forth in earth-life are the working of theinnate spiritual and intellectual and psychical characteristics impelling and compelling the vehicular orbody sides of the human constitution to express themselves as organs becoming more and more perfectas the child grows to maturity.After death the process is exactly the reverse. The material or vehicular side of the being grows less andless strong and powerful, more and more involved, and becoming with every step in the process moredormant. But contemporaneously and coincidently the distinctly spiritual and intellectual powers andfaculties themselves become released from the vehicles and begin to expand into ever largerefflorescence, attaining their maximum in the devachan. It is only the usual carelessness in accuratethinking that induces the idea that evolution is one distinct process acting alone, and that involution -about which by the way very little is heard -- is another process acting alone. The two, as said above, arethe two phases of activity of the evolving monads, and these phases exist contemporaneously at anymoment, each of the two phases continually acting and interacting with the other phase. They areinseparable.Just so with spirit and matter. Spirit is not something radically distinct from and utterly separate frommatter. The two are fundamentally one, and the two are eternally coactive and interactive.There are several terms in Sanskrit which correspond to what the theosophist means by evolution, butperhaps the best general term is pravritti, meaning to "revolve" or to "roll forwards," to unroll or tounwrap. Again, the reverse procedure or involution can probably best be expressed in Sanskrit by theterm nivritti, meaning "rolling backwards" or "inwrapping" or "infolding." A term which is frequentlyinterchangeable with evolution is emanation. (See also Evolution)
“ . . . It is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ be made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen, . . . then every one would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second — due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood” (SD 1:541-2). The sunspots serve not only as vents for egress and ingress of the steams of lives in constant circulation throughout this solar system, but such solar pulsations are cosmically rhythmic and the well-being of the entire solar system is controlled by the vital and intellectual energies constantly active in and through the sun, and whose functional operations are physically expressed by the appearance and disappearance of the sunspots.
Jing ::: One of the Three Treasures of Qi Gong. Associated with the life force and vital energy of the Lower Dantian (roughly the energies of the Muladhara and Svasthithana Chakras).
Kali Yuga (Sanskrit) Kali Yuga Iron age or black age; the fourth and last of the four great yugas constituting a mahayuga (great age), the other three being the krita or satya yuga, treta yuga, and dvapara yuga. The kali yuga is the most material phase of a being’s or group’s evolutionary cycle. The fifth root-race is at present in its kali yuga, which is stated to have commenced at the moment of Krishna’s death, usually given as 3102 BC. The Hindus also assert that at the first moment of kali yuga there was a conjunction of all the planets. Although the kali yuga is our present profoundly materialistic age, in which only one fourth of truth prevails among humanity, making a period often called an age black with horrors, its swift momentum permits one to do more with his energies, good or bad, in a shorter time than in any other yuga. This period will be followed by the krita yuga of the next root-race.
Kama-Rupa(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word signifying "desire body." It is that part of man's inner constitution in whichdwell or inhere the various desires, affections, hates, loves -- in short, the various mental and psychicalenergies. After death it becomes the vehicle in the astral worlds of the higher principles of the man thatwas. But these higher principles are nevertheless scarcely conscious of the fact, because the rupture ofthe golden cord of life at the moment of the physical death plunges the cognizing personal entity into amerciful stupor of unconsciousness, in which stupor it remains a longer or shorter period depending uponits qualities of spirituality or materiality. The more spiritual the man was the longer the period ofmerciful unconsciousness lasts, and vice versa.After death, as has been frequently stated elsewhere, there occurs what is called the second death, whichis the separation of the immortal part of the second or intermediate duad from the lower portions of thisduad, which lower portions remain as the kama-rupa in the etheric or higher astral spheres which areintermediate between the devachanic and the earthly spheres. In time this kama-rupa gradually fades outin its turn, its life-atoms at such dissolution passing on to their various and unceasing peregrinations.It is this kama-rupa which legend and story in the various ancient world religions or philosophies speakof as the shade, and which it has been customary in the Occident to call the spook or ghost. It is, in short,all the mortal elements of the human soul that was. The kama-rupa is an exact astral duplicate, inappearance and mannerism, of the man who died; it is his eidolon or "image." (See also Second Death)
Kama-rupa (Sanskrit) Kāma-rūpa [from kāma desire + rūpa body, form] The desire body; the portion of the human inner constitution in which inhere the various mental and psychic energies. After death it becomes the vehicle in the kama-loka of the usually unconscious higher principles of the person that was.
Karma(Karman, Sanskrit) ::: This is a noun-form coming from the root kri meaning "to do," "to make." Literallykarma means "doing," "making," action. But when used in a philosophical sense, it has a technicalmeaning, and this technical meaning can best be translated into English by the word consequence. Theidea is this: When an entity acts, he acts from within; he acts through an expenditure in greater or lessdegree of his own native energy. This expenditure of energy, this outflowing of energy, as it impactsupon the surrounding milieu, the nature around us, brings forth from the latter perhaps an instantaneousor perhaps a delayed reaction or rebound. Nature, in other words, reacts against the impact; and thecombination of these two -- of energy acting upon nature and nature reacting against the impact of thatenergy -- is what is called karma, being a combination of the two factors. Karma is, in other words,essentially a chain of causation, stretching back into the infinity of the past and therefore necessarilydestined to stretch into the infinity of the future. It is unescapable, because it is in universal nature, whichis infinite and therefore everywhere and timeless; and sooner or later the reaction will inevitably be feltby the entity which aroused it.It is a very old doctrine, known to all religions and philosophies, and since the renascence of scientificstudy in the Occident has become one of the fundamental postulates of modern coordinated knowledge.If you toss a pebble into a pool, it causes ripples in the water, and these ripples spread and finally impactupon the bank surrounding the pool; and, so modern science tells us, the ripples are translated intovibrations, which are carried outward into infinity. But at every step of this natural process there is acorresponding reaction from every one and from all of the myriads of atomic particles affected by thespreading energy.Karma is in no sense of the word fatalism on the one hand, nor what is popularly known as chance, onthe other hand. It is essentially a doctrine of free will, for naturally the entity which initiates a movementor action -- spiritual, mental, psychological, physical, or other -- is responsible thereafter in the shape ofconsequences and effects that flow therefrom, and sooner or later recoil upon the actor or prime mover.Since everything is interlocked and interlinked and interblended with everything else, and no thing andno being can live unto itself alone, other entities are of necessity, in smaller or larger degree, affected bythe causes or motions initiated by any individual entity; but such effects or consequences on entities,other than the prime mover, are only indirectly a morally compelling power, in the true sense of the wordmoral.An example of this is seen in what the theosophist means when he speaks of family karma as contrastedwith one's own individual karma; or national karma, the series of consequences pertaining to the nationof which he is an individual; or again, the racial karma pertaining to the race of which the individual is anintegral member. Karma cannot be said either to punish or to reward in the ordinary meaning of theseterms. Its action is unerringly just, for being a part of nature's own operations, all karmic actionultimately can be traced back to the kosmic heart of harmony which is the same thing as saying pureconsciousness-spirit. The doctrine is extremely comforting to human minds, inasmuch as man may carvehis own destiny and indeed must do so. He can form it or deform it, shape it or misshape it, as he wills;and by acting with nature's own great and underlying energies, he puts himself in unison or harmonytherewith and therefore becomes a co-worker with nature as the gods are.
Karma Yoga ::: Aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 39-40
KARMA YOGA. ::: It alms at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Wilt. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an inter- ested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renuncia- tion it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre^ of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To that our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoislic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the
Kelim (Hebrew) Kēlīm Vessels, utensils; in space the Qabbalists depicted a great source or fountain of life, which becomes the beginning of a number of cosmic vases or vessels — the kelim — which are the ten Sephiroth; through which all the energies, forms, and innumerable manifested objects come into being. This source of lives, the Crown or Kether, corresponds to the productive or generative Brahma, which just before the beginning of manvantaric manifestation was nonmanifest in the bosom of its higher essence, Brahman or parabrahman. When Brahma awakens to new activity and thus becomes what Western religion and philosophy call the Creator, the cosmic demiurge or former, then the various vessels or vases spring into being, and flow forth from Brahma, the Father-Mother. Being termed vessels simply signifies that the cosmic Sephiroth are the holders or containers of all the powers, faculties, forces, attributes, etc., which bring about the building of the manifested universe, enshrining as the Sephiroth do the unfolding of the energies of the Divine in the latter’s activity during manifestation.
Kosmic Life ::: All the great religions and philosophies of past times, all the ancient sciences likewise, taught the fact ofthe existence of inner, invisible, intangible, but causal realms, as the foundation and background of thesevarious systems. According to them all, our physical world is but the outer shell or garment or veil ofother worlds which are inner, vital, alive, and causal, which in their aggregate imbody the kosmic life.This kosmic life is not a person, not an individualized entity. It is far, far different from any such merelyhuman conception, because it is infinite, boundless, beginningless, endless, coextensive with infinity,coextensive with eternity. The kosmic life is in very truth the ultimate reality behind and within all thatis.All the energies and matters in our world are really only various and innumerable manifestations of thekosmic life existing in truly infinitely large variety. The kosmic life, therefore, is, as said, the realitybehind all the infinitely varied hosts of entities and things. But this reality is no personal orindividualized Deity. It is precisely what theosophy calls it: the boundless and, in its totality,incomprehensible life-substance-consciousness.
Kotani Kimi. (小谷喜美) (1901-1971). Cofounder along with KUBO KAKUTARo (1892-1944) of the REIYuKAI school of modern Japanese Buddhism, which derives from the teachings of the NICHIRENSHu school of Buddhism. Kotani Kimi was the wife of Kotani Yasukichi, Kubo's elder brother. She and her husband became two of the earliest and most active proponents of Reiyukai. After her husband died, she became the first official president of the group in 1930, and after Kubo's death in 1944, she ran the organization successfully on her own, although many splinter groups formed in reaction to her leadership. Kotani focused on the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra"), but because ancestor worship was her primary religious practice, she used the sutra rather idiosyncratically as a path to the spiritual realm. Kotani also focused the group's energies on social welfare programs, and especially youth education, for she felt that Japan's rapid modernization was neglecting the needs of the youth.
Kriyasakti, one of the innate human powers, is the power which thought has of expressing itself analogically in action. Thoughts are imbodied elemental energies. The human brain does not create them, it only transmits them, because the human brain is but the vehicle transmitting intellectual, mental, and emotional energy from the monadic center within, and this monadic center itself originates thought.
Kr.s.n.anr.tya (Krishnanritya) ::: the dance of Kr.s.n.a, "a whirl of mighty Krsnanrtya energies, but the Master of the dance holds the hands of His energies and keeps them to the rhythmic order".
Kundalini, Kundalini-sakti (Sanskrit) Kuṇḍalinī, Kuṇḍalinī-śakti [from kuṇḍalinī circular, spiral + śakti power, force] The circular power; one of the mystic, recondite powers in the human constitution. It “is called the ‘Serpentine’ or the annular power on account of its spiral-like working or progress in the body of the ascetic developing the power in himself. It is an electric fiery occult or Fohatic power, the great pristine force, which underlies all organic and inorganic matter”; “it is Buddhi considered as an active instead of a passive principle (which it is generally, when regarded only as the vehicle, or casket of the Supreme Spirit Atma). It is an electro-spiritual force, a creative power which when aroused into action can as easily kill as it can create” (VS 77-8, 76-7). Kundalini works in and through the human auric egg on all levels: “In its higher aspect Kundalini is a power or force following winding or circular pathways carrying or conveying thought and force originating in the Higher Triad. Abstractly, in the case of man it is of course one of the fundamental energies or qualities of the Pranas. Unskilled or unwise attempts to interfere with its normal working in the human body may readily result in insanity or malignant or enfeebling disease” (OG 83).
Kundalini or Kundalini-Sakti(Sanskrit) ::: A term whose essential meaning is "circular" or "winding" or "spiral" or "coiling" action, orrather energy, and signifies a recondite power in the human constitution. Kundalini-sakti is derivative ofone of the elemental forces of nature. It works in and through, in the case of man, his auric egg, andexpresses itself in continuous action in many of the most familiar phenomena of existence even whenman himself is unconscious of it. In its higher aspect Kundalini is a power or force following winding orcircular pathways carrying or conveying thought and force originating in the higher triad. Abstractly, inthe case of man it is of course one of the fundamental energies or qualities of the pranas. Unskilled orunwise attempts to interfere with its normal working in the human body may readily result in insanity ormalignant or enfeebling disease.
lalanā. (T. brkyang ma). In tantric physiology, the channel (NĀdĪ) that runs in males from the right nostril to the base of the spine and in females from the left nostril to the base of the spine. It is one of the three main channels, together with the central channel (AVADHuTĪ), and the right channel in females and the left channel in males (RASANĀ). According to some systems, 72,000 channels are found in the body, serving as the conduits for subtle energies or winds (PRĀnA). The most important of these channels are the central channel (avadhutī), the lalanā, and the rasanā. The central channel runs from the place between the eyebrows to the crown of the head and down in front of the spinal column, ending at the genitals. The right and left channels run parallel to the central channel on either side. These two channels wrap around the central channel at various points, of which as many as seven are enumerated. These points, called wheels or CAKRAs, are located between the eyes, at the crown of the head, at the throat, at the heart, at the solar plexus, at the base of the spine, and at the tip of sexual organ. In highest yoga tantra (ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA), especially in practices associated with the "stage of completion" (NIsPANNAKRAMA), much emphasis is placed on loosening these knots in order to cause the winds to flow freely through the central channel.
::: "Liberty in one shape or another ranks among the most ancient and certainly among the most difficult aspirations of our race: it arises from a radical instinct of our being and is yet opposed to all our circumstances, it is our eternal good and our condition of perfection, but our temporal being has failed to find its key. That perhaps is because true freedom is only possible if we live in the infinite, live, as the Vedanta bids us, in and from our self-existent being; but our natural and temporal energies seek for it first not in ourselves, but in our external conditions. This great indefinable thing, liberty, is in its highest and ultimate sense a state of being; it is self living in itself and determining by its own energy what is shall be inwardly and, eventually, by the growth of a divine spiritual power within determining too what it shall make of its external circumstances and environment." War and Self-Determination
“Liberty in one shape or another ranks among the most ancient and certainly among the most difficult aspirations of our race: it arises from a radical instinct of our being and is yet opposed to all our circumstances, it is our eternal good and our condition of perfection, but our temporal being has failed to find its key. That perhaps is because true freedom is only possible if we live in the infinite, live, as the Vedanta bids us, in and from our self-existent being; but our natural and temporal energies seek for it first not in ourselves, but in our external conditions. This great indefinable thing, liberty, is in its highest and ultimate sense a state of being; it is self living in itself and determining by its own energy what is shall be inwardly and, eventually, by the growth of a divine spiritual power within determining too what it shall make of its external circumstances and environment.” War and Self-Determination
Life as an entity or process is all that is, the basis or essence of all that is — beginningless and endless. It is the spiritual electricity, or the vital svabhava, of the monad, which it pours forth out of itself and thus produces the individual characteristics of every entity, celestial or terrestrial. As the divine monad is a breath of pure spirit, pure consciousness, life may be called the innumerable manifold phases of consciousness in time and space. “Consciousness is the Originant, and this Originant by its own inherent powers and energies, faculties and attributes, produces life out of itself: not at any one time specifically, but continuously forever, and coincidentally with its own existing duration. Consciousness and life together originate and produce thereafter from themselves what men call the manifestations of force or energy, which in its turn deposits or lays down, so to say, the matters and substances of the Universe, much as wine will deposit its lees” (ET 399 3rd & rev ed).
Life-Atoms ::: The physical body is composed essentially of energy, of energies rather, in the forms that are spoken ofin modern physical science as electrons and protons. These are in constant movement; they areincessantly active, and are what theosophists call the imbodiments or manifestations of life-atoms. Theselife-atoms are inbuilt into man's body during the physical life which he leads on earth, although they arenot derivative from outside, but spring forth from within himself -- at least a great majority of them aresuch. This is equivalent to saying that they compose both his physical as well as his intermediate nature,which latter is obviously higher than the physical.When the man dies -- that is to say, when the physical body dies -- its elements pass, each and all, intotheir respective and appropriate spheres: some into the soil, to which those that go there are drawn bymagnetic affinity, an affinity impressed upon their life-energies by the man when alive, whoseovershadowing will and desires, whose overlordship and power, gave them that direction. Others passinto the vegetation from the same reason that the former are impelled to the mineral kingdom; others passinto the various beasts with which they have, at the man's death, magnetic affinity, psychic affinity moreaccurately, an affinity which the man has impressed upon them by his desires and various impulses; andthose which take this path go to form the interior or intermediate apparatus of the beasts into which theypass. So much for the course pursued by the life-atoms of the man's lowest principles.But there are other life-atoms belonging to him. There are life-atoms, in fact, belonging to the sphere ofeach one of the seven principles of man's constitution. This means that there are life-atoms belonging tohis intermediate nature and to his spiritual nature and to all grades intermediate between these two higherparts of him. And in all cases, as the monad "ascends" or "rises" through the spheres, as he goes step bystep higher on his wonderful postmortem journey, on each such step he discards or casts off thelife-atoms belonging to each one of these steps or stages of the journey. With each step, he leaves behindthe more material of these life-atoms until, when he has reached the culmination of his wonderfulpostmortem peregrination, he is, as Paul of the Christians said, living in "a spiritual body" -- that is tosay, he has become a spiritual energy, a monad.Nature permits no absolute standing still for anything, anywhere. All things are full of life, full of energy,full of movement; they are both energy and matter, both spirit and substance; and these two arefundamentally one -- phases of the underlying reality, of which we see but the maya or illusory forms.The life-atoms are actually the offspring or the off-throwings of the interior principles of man'sconstitution. It is obvious that the life-atoms which ensoul the physical atoms in man's body are asnumerous as the atoms which they ensoul; and there are almost countless hosts of them, decillions upondecillions of them, in practically incomputable numbers. Each one of these life-atoms is a being which isliving, moving, growing, never standing still -- evolving towards a sublime destiny which ultimatelybecomes divinity.
Lipika(s)(Sanskrit) ::: This word comes from the verb-root lip, meaning "to write"; hence the word lipikas means the"scribes." Mystically, they are the celestial recorders, and are intimately connected with the working ofkarma, of which they are the agents. They are the karmic "Recorders or Annalists, who impress on the (tous) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, 'the great picture-gallery of eternity,' a faithful record of everyact, and even thought, of man [and indeed of all other entities and things], of all that was, is, or ever willbe, in the phenomenal Universe" (The Secret Doctrine 1:104).Their action although governed strictly by kosmic consciousness is nevertheless rigidly automatic, fortheir work is as automatic as is the action of karma itself. They are entities as a matter of fact, but entitieswhich work and act with the rigid automatism of the kosmic machinery, rather than like the engineer whosupervises and changes the running of his engines. In one sense they may perhaps better be called kosmicenergies -- a most difficult matter to describe.
lotus (as chakra) ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This arrangement of the psychic body is reproduced in the physical with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic centres as the chakras which rise up from the bottom of the column, where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their summit in the brahmarandhra at the top of the skull. These chakras or lotuses, however, are in physical man closed or only partly open, with the consequence that only such powers and only so much of them are active in him as are sufficient for his ordinary physical life, and so much mind and soul only is at play as will accord with its need. This is the real reason, looked at from the mechanical point of view, why the embodied soul seems so dependent on the bodily and nervous life, — though the dependence is neither so complete nor so real as it seems. The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake, — therefore it is called the kundalinî sakti, — in the lowest of the chakras, in the mûlâdhâra.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
MAGIC The expressions of active consciousness affect matter to act as energy. Magic consists in using the knowledge of the pertaining laws of nature and the method of their application affecting physical-etheric material energies by means of mental material energy to bring about changes in the visible molecular kinds. (K 1.3.9,
1.28.3)
Man ::: Man is in his essence a spark of the central kosmic spiritual fire. Man being an inseparable part of theuniverse of which he is the child -- the organism of graded consciousness and substance which thehuman constitution contains or rather is -- is a copy of the graded organism of consciousnesses andsubstances of the universe in its various planes of being, inner and outer, especially inner as being by farthe more important and larger, because causal.Human beings are one class of "young gods" incarnated in bodies of flesh at the present stage of theirown particular evolutionary journey. The human stage of evolution is about halfway between theundeveloped life-atom and the fully developed kosmic spirit or god.From another point of view, man is a sheaf or bundle of forces or energies. Force and matter, or spiritand substance being fundamentally one, hence, man is de facto a sheaf or bundle of matters of variousand differing grades of ethereality, or of substantiality; and so are all other entities and thingseverywhere.Man's nature, and the nature of the universe likewise, of which man is a reflection or microcosm or "littleworld," is composite of seven stages or grades or degrees of ethereality or of substantiality; or,kosmically speaking, of three generally inclusive degrees: gods, monads, and atoms. And so far as man isconcerned, we may take the New Testament division of the Christians, which gives the same triformconception of man, that he is composed of spirit, soul, body -- remembering, however, that all these threewords are generalizing terms.Man stands at the midway point of the evolutionary ladder of life: below him are the hosts of beings lessthan he is; above him are other hosts greater than he is only because older in experience, riper in wisdom,stronger in spiritual and in intellectual fiber and power. And these beings are such as they are because ofthe evolutionary unfoldment of the inherent faculties and powers immanent in the individuality of theinner god -- the ever-living, inner, individualized spirit.Man, then, like everything else -- entity or what is called "thing" -- is, to use the modern terminology ofphilosophical scientists, an "event," that is to say, the expression of a central consciousness-center ormonad passing through one or another particular phase of its long, long pilgrimage over and throughinfinity, and through eternity. This, therefore, is the reason why the theosophist often speaks of themonadic consciousness-center as the pilgrim of eternity.Man can be considered as a being composed of three essential upadhis or bases: first, the monadic ordivine-spiritual; second, that which is supplied by the Lords of Light, the so-called manasa-dhyanis,meaning the intellectual and intuitive side of man, the element-principle that makes man Man; and thethird upadhi we may call the vital-astral-physical.These three bases spring from three different lines of evolution, from three different and separatehierarchies of being. This is the reason why man is composite. He is not one sole and unmixed entity; heis a composite entity, a "thing" built up of various elements, and hence his principles are to a certainextent separable. Any one of these three bases can be temporarily separated from the two others withoutbringing about the death of the man physically. But the elements that go to form any one of these basescannot be separated without bringing about physical dissolution or inner dissolution.These three lines of evolution, these three aspects or qualities of man, come from three differenthierarchies or states, often spoken of as three different planes of being. The lowest comes from thevital-astral-physical earth, ultimately from the moon, our cosmogonic mother. The middle, the manasicor intellectualintuitional, from the sun. The monadic from the monad of monads, the supreme flower oracme, or rather the supreme seed of the universal hierarchy which forms our kosmical universe oruniversal kosmos.
Maruts ::: the Thought-Forces; the Life-Powers that support by their nervous and vital energies the action of the thought in the attempt of the mortal consciousness to grow or expand itself into the immortality of the Truth and Bliss; (to the uninstructed Aryan worshipper): powers of storm, wind and rain.
Matris (Sanskrit) Mātṛ-s The divine mothers or personified spiritual energies of the principle gods of the Hindu pantheon. Their number is reckoned as seven, ten, or twelve, and they bear the same relation, each one to her respective consort or god, as prakriti does to Brahma, pradhana to Brahman, and on a still vaster scale as mulaprakriti does to parabrahman. They are the respective wombs of beings bringing to birth or pouring forth the cosmogonical hierarchies. When these matris are by analogy mentioned in minor cases, their functions and attributes correspond with the cosmic sense. The sakti are the personifications or analogical reproductions of the matris on lower planes of being.
Matter ::: What men call matter or substance is the existent but illusory aggregate of veils surrounding thefundamental essence of the universe which is consciousness-life-substance. From another point of view,matter or substance is in one sense the most evolved form of expression of manifested spirit in anyparticular hierarchy. This is but another way of saying that matter is but inherent energies or powers orfaculties of kosmical beings, unfolded, rolled out, and self-expressed. It is the nether and lowest pole ofwhat the original and originating spirit is; for spirit is the primal or original pole of the evolutionaryactivity which brought forth through its own inherent energies the appearance or manifestation in thekosmic spaces of the vast aggregate of hierarchies. Between the originant or spirit and the resultant ormatter, there is all the vast range of hierarchical stages or steps, thus forming the ladder of life or theladder of being of any one such hierarchy.When theosophists speak of spirit and substance, of which latter, matter and energy or force are thephysicalized expressions, we must remember that all these terms are abstractions -- generalizedexpressions for hosts of entities manifesting aggregatively. The whole process of evolution is the raisingof units of essential matter, life-atoms, into becoming at one with their spiritual and inmost essence. Asthe kosmic aeons slowly drop one after the other into the ocean of the past, matter pari passu is resolvedback into the brilliant realms of spirit from which it originally came forth. All the sheaths ofconsciousness, all the blinding veils around it, arise from the matter side or dark side or night side ofnature, which is matter -- the nether pole of spirit.
māyādeha. (T. sgyu lus; C. huanshen; J. genshin; K. hwansin 幻身). In Sanskrit, "illusory body"; a polysemous term that, in its most general sense, refers to the fact that the body is insubstantial and thus like an illusion. The term is also the name of one of the so-called SIX YOGAS OF NĀROPA, where it encompasses a range of practices, including the contemplation of one's own reflection in a mirror and expressing praise and blame to the reflection as a means of overcoming attachment to one's body. In a more technical sense, the term refers to a body achieved through the practice of ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA, in which as a result of insight into the nature of reality and the control of the subtle energies that course through the CAKRAs, the yogin creates a subtle body created from the subtle wind (PRĀnA) that serves as the conduit of the mind of clear light (PRABHĀSVARACITTA); this body appears in the form of the buddha that one will become.
Microcosm(Greek) ::: A compound meaning "little arrangement," "little world," a term applied by ancient and modernmystics to man when considering the seven, ten, and even twelve aspects or phases or organic parts of hisconstitution, from the superdivine down to and even below the physical body.Just as throughout the macrocosm there runs one law, one fundamental consciousness, one essentialorderly arrangement and habitude to which everything contained within the encompassing macrocosm ofnecessity conforms, just so does every such contained entity or thing, because it is an inseparable part ofthe macrocosm, contain in itself, evolved or unevolved, implicit or explicit, active or latent, everythingthat the macrocosm contains -- whether energy, power, substance, matter, faculty, or what not. Themicrocosm, therefore, considered as man or indeed any other organic entity, is correctly viewed as areflection or copy in miniature of the great macrocosm, the former being contained, with hosts of otherslike it, within the encircling frontiers of the macrocosm. Thus it was stated by the ancient mystics that thedestiny of man, the microcosm, is coeval with the universe or macrocosm. Their origin is the same, theirenergies and substances are the same, and their future is the same, of course mutatis mutandis. It was novain figment of imagination and no idle figure of speech which brought the ancient mystics to declareman to be a son of the Boundless.The teaching is one of the most suggestive and beautiful in the entire range of the esoteric philosophy,and the deductions that the intuitive student will immediately draw from this teaching themselvesbecome keys opening even larger portals of understanding. The universe, the macrocosm, is thus seen tobe the home of the microcosm or man, in the former of which the latter is at home everywhere.
misdirect ::: v. t. --> To give a wrong direction to; as, to misdirect a passenger, or a letter; to misdirect one&
Mjotudr (Icelandic) [from mjot measure + udr out of, exhausting] In Norse mythology, the dying phase of a Tree of Life, the second half of its existence when the energies are retreating from the material back toward the spiritual realm. Applies to any world tree, large or small. See also MJOTVIDR
Mjotvidr (Icelandic) [from mjot measure + vidr growing, expanding] In Norse myths, the first half of a life cycle of any Tree of Life, during which the energies are flowing into the material worlds and organizing forms for its component consciousnesses. See also MJOTUDR
Nā ro chos drug. (Naro chodruk). The Tibetan name for a series of tantric practices, often translated into English as "the six yogas (or dharmas) of Nāropa," which are attributed to the eleventh-century Indian adept NĀROPA. These practices spread widely throughout Tibet, where they were transmitted among various Tibetan Buddhist traditions, including those of the SA SKYA and DGE LUGS. However, the Nā ro chos drug became a fundamental component in the meditation training of BKA' BRGYUD practitioners and continue to be practiced especially in the context of the traditional three-year retreat. Nāropa received several streams of tantric instruction from his GURU, the Indian SIDDHA TILOPA, including the BKA' BABS BZHI (four transmissions). According to tradition, he later codified these instructions and transmitted them to his Tibetan disciple MAR PA CHOS KYI BLO GROS, although Nāropa had died before Mar pa's first journey to India. However, Mar pa received these teachings from Nāropa's disciples and taught them in Tibet as the Nā ro chos drug. There are several slight variations in their presentation, but the most common enumeration of the Nā ro chos drug are (1) GTUM MO (tummo), literally "fierce woman," referring to the inner heat produced as an effect of manipulating the body's subtle energies; (2) sgyu lus (gyulu), "illusory body" (see MĀYĀDEHA), in which the meditator realizes the illusory nature of ordinary experiences; (3) rmi lam (milam), "dreams," referring to the practice of developing conscious awareness during dream states; (4) 'od gsal (osel), "clear light" (see PRABHĀSVARA), referring to the luminous aspect of mind and its recognition; (5) BAR DO, "intermediate state," referring to the practice of mental control during the disorienting period between death in one lifetime and rebirth into another; (6) 'PHO BA (powa), "transference," which is the practice of ejecting the consciousness out of the body at the moment of death to take rebirth in a pure realm. The first four are generally believed to facilitate liberation in the present life, the last two at the time of death.
Nidana is also a title of Brahma, considered as the first cause, being the kosmic living aggregate of vital bonds forming the universe into an organic whole; reproduced through its own internal energies from the preceding manvantara.
NIRMANAKAYA (Skt) Particular category of second selves who have kept their first triads. Their task is to accumulate higher energies and transform them for use in worlds 47-49.
nr̄.h. (nrih) ::: (apparently the plural of nr., whose more regular forms nrh are narah. [nominative] or nr̄.n [accusative]) literally "men", a term used in the Veda for "the gods as the male powers or Purushas presiding over the energies of Nature".
Obscuration: A theosophical term, originated by A. P. Sinnett, for the state of dormancy or latency of life-energies.
of its own particular system of psychological powers, energies and operations, ::: each system corresponding to a plane of our psychological existence"; these centres or "lotuses", connected with certain centres in the physical nervous system and arranged "in a line corresponding to the spinal cord", are called (from the highest to the lowest) sahasradala, ajñacakra, visuddha, anahata, man.ipura, svadhis.t.hana and mūladhara, of which man.ipura (the nabhicakra or "navel centre") and especially svadhis.t.hana (the "penultimate chakra" or, counting from the bottom, the "second chakra", also called the kamacakra or simply "the chakra") are often mentioned in the Record of Yoga in connection with arogya and kamananda.
ojas ::: a primal physical energy supporting the other energies in the body.
’Ophanim or ’Ophannim (Hebrew) ’Ōfannīm [plural of ’ōfān wheel from ’āfan to revolve, turn] The “wheels” seen by Ezekiel, and by John in Revelation, meaning world-spheres; also used in the Sepher Yetsirah (book of creation). The ’ophanim signify the turning or revolving celestial bodies, especially the planets, with a constant eye upon the indwelling angelic hosts which give to the celestial bodies their respective individualities, their characteristic energies and substances, and which produce and control their various cyclical movements in both space and time. In this connection four of the constellations of the zodiac — Taurus the Bull, Leo the Lion, Scorpio the “Eagle,” and Aquarius the Man — have been from earliest Christian times attached to the four canonical Evangelists. In the Zohar (ii 43a) the ’ophanim are one of the ten classes of the angelic hosts comprising the yetsiratic world.
panergy ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ‘Panergy" suggested is a self-existent total power which may carry the cosmic energies in it and is their cause but is not constituted by them.” Letters on Savitri.
Panergy ::: “The ‘Panergy’ suggested is a self-existent total power which may carry the cosmic energies in it and is their cause but is not constituted by them.” Letters on Savitri.
Parasakti (Sanskrit) Parāśakti The supreme force or great power. The entire universe is built of seven or ten prakritis, with their corresponding seven or ten purushas or cosmic energies. Parasakti, which in one sense is the highest of these seven forces, acts, like all the other saktis, not only on its own plane or in its own specific prakriti, but likewise extends itself throughout all the other six saktis or prakritis. For this reason every kosmic plane has its own dominant energy or prakriti or sakti; and yet at the same time contains those above it, and in undeveloped form those below it which flow forth from it in the procession of unfolding powers as evolution continues through the manvantara. Thus parasakti, which includes on the physical plane what we call light and heat, on its own primordial plane likewise produces the metaphysical origins of light and heat — the intelligent activity of the buddhi principle, signifying light combined with the vital warmth of kama or cosmic love (the Greek Eros).
PERIODICITY, LAW OF The cosmic energies are uninterruptedly active. But in the solar systems their activity is increased and decreased in accordance with a periodicity inevitable for the pertaining material processes (the so-called law of periodicity), the rhythm of which varies with every world, every kind of matter, every kind of material envelopes.
This law of periodicity is what makes everything within the solar systems and in the relations of the systems to each other proceed in regularly recurring periods, or cycles, that can be determined mathematically. K 2.12.4f
Philosophically, it is a mere matter of choice whether to regard light as primordial and rudimentary and deduce other phenomena from it, or to consider luminosity as a result of the vibration of molecules — since light is both. But theosophy agrees with archaic thought in placing light as the first of all manifested things, regarding light as the very essence of matter, not as a decoration of it. Nor is light necessarily associated with heat, as even the humble glow worm attests. Theosophy teaches that self-luminosity, with or without heat, is of natural necessity a characteristic of everything that is, although this self-luminosity is by no means always visible to our human physical senses. Every entity anywhere, great or small, as well as every aggregate of atoms, is continuously and uninterruptedly self-luminous, continually emanating forth because of the energies ever active within itself an unceasing stream of radiation; and this radiation is of several different kinds, usually enumerated as sevenfold, of which ordinary or physical light is but one manifestation. Everything is radiant, radiating; radiant here meaning not only luminous, but self-luminous, generating radiation of many kinds from within itself. It is the imperfect ability of our organ of vision to see these many forms of radiation that causes us to be unconscious of them; our eyes have been evolved to sense only one small gamut in the great scale of radiation of the universe surrounding us. Science, with its various kinds of radiation, is becoming keenly cognizant of this ancient fact and scientists are pointing out that not only is visible light but a short stretch of the scale of radiation, but are envisaging the high probability that matter itself in all its forms is but concreted radiation or crystallized light.
physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visi- ble operation on the surface ; It pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain, which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplift- ing, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiri- tual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in Its own way an occultism ; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supra- physical knowledge Is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.
In a solid, the range of energies of electrons that are bound to atoms.
Pitri(s)(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning "father." There are seven (or ten) classes of pitris. They are called "fathers"because they are more particularly the actual progenitors of our lower principles; whereas thedhyani-chohans are actually, in one most important sense, our own selves. We were born from them; wewere the monads, we were the atoms, the souls, projected, sent forth, emanated, by the dhyanis.The pitris, for easy understanding, may be divided into two great groups, the solar and lunar. The lunarpitris or barhishads, as the name implies, came from the moon-chain; while the solar pitris whom we maygroup under the expressive name agnishvatta-pitris are those dhyan-chohans which have not the physical"creative fire," because they belong to a much superior sphere of being, but they have all the fires of thespiritual-intellectual realms active or latent within them as the case may be. In preceding manvantarasthey had finished their evolution so far as the realms of astral and physical matter were concerned, andwhen the proper time came in the cycling ages, the agnishvatta-pitris came to the rescue of those whohad only the physical creative fire, or barhishad-pitris, the lunar pitris, inspiring and enlightening theselower pitris with the spiritual and intellectual energies or "fires."In other words, the lunar pitris may briefly be said to be those consciousness-centers in the humanconstitution which feel humanly, which feel instinctually, and which possess the brain-mind mentality.The agnishvatta-pitris are those monadic centers of the human constitution which are of a purely spiritualtype. (See also Agnishvatas, Lunar Pitris)
Planetary Chain Every kosmic body or globe, be it sun or planet, nebula or comet, atom or electron, is a composite entity comprised of inner and invisible energies and substances, and of an outer and often visible physical body. These elements all together, whether enumerated as seven or twelve, are the principles or elements of every self-contained entity or individual life-center. What theosophy calls a planetary chain is an entity composed of seven or twelve such multiprincipled globes, and which taken as a unit form one planetary chain. All celestial bodies are multiprincipled entities as man is, who is a copy in the small of what the universe is in the great, there being one life and one system of laws in that universe. Every entity in the universe is an inseparable part of it, therefore whatsoever the whole contains, is found in miniature in every part.
Planetary Chain ::: Every kosmic body or globe, be it sun or planet, nebula or comet, atom or electron, is a composite entityformed of or comprised of inner and invisible energies and substances and of an outer, to us, and oftenvisible, to us, physical vehicle or body. These elements all together number seven (or twelve), being whatis called in theosophy the seven principles or elements of every self-contained entity; in other words, ofevery individual life-center.Thus every one of the physical globes that we see scattered over the fields of space is accompanied bysix invisible and superior globes, forming what in theosophy is called a chain. This is the case with everysun or star, with every planet, and with every moon of every planet. It is likewise the case with thenebulae and the comets as above stated: all are septiform entities, all have a sevenfold constitution, evenas man has, who is a copy in the little of what the universe is in the great, there being for us one life inthat universe, one natural system of "laws" in that universe. Every entity in the universe is an inseparablepart of it; therefore what is in the whole is in every part, because the part cannot contain anything that thewhole does not contain, the part cannot be greater than the whole.Our own earth-chain is composed of seven (or twelve) globes, of which only one, our earth, is visible onthis our earth plane to our physical sense apparatus, because that apparatus is builded or rather evolved tocognize this earth plane and none other. But the populations of all the seven (or twelve) globes of thisearth-chain pass in succession, and following each other, from globe to globe, thus gaining experience ofenergy and matter and consciousness on all the various planes and spheres that this chain comprises.The other six (or eleven) globes of our earth-chain are invisible to our physical sense, of course; and,limiting our explanation only to the manifest seven globes of the complete chain of twelve globes, the sixglobes other and higher than the earth exist two by two, on three planes of the solar system superior toour physical plane where our earth-globe is -- this our earth. These three superior planes or worlds areeach one superior to the world or plane immediately beneath or inferior to it.Our earth-globe is the fourth and lowest of all the manifest seven globes of our earth-chain. Three globesprecede it on the descending or shadowy arc, and three globes follow it on the ascending or luminous arcof evolution. The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky and the more recent work, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy (1932), contain most suggestive material for the student interested in this phase ofthe esoteric philosophy. (See also Ascending Arc)
PLANETARY ENERGIES The planets receive energies from each other. Each planet represents predominantly someone of the seven cosmic types.
Pratyeka Buddha(Sanskrit) ::: Pratyeka is a compound of two words: prati, prepositional prefix meaning "towards" or "for";eka, the numeral "one"; thus we can translate the compound by the paraphrase "each one for himself."The Pratyeka Buddha, he who achieves buddhahood for himself, instead of feeling the call of almightylove to return and help those who have gone less far, goes ahead into the supernal light -- passes onwardsand enters the unspeakable bliss of nirvana -- and leaves mankind behind. Though exalted, neverthelesshe does not rank with the unutterable sublimity of the Buddha of Compassion.The Pratyeka Buddha concentrates his energies on the one objective -- spiritual self-advancement: heraises himself to the spiritual realm of his own inner being, enwraps himself therein and, so to speak,goes to sleep. The Buddha of Compassion raises himself, as does the Pratyeka Buddha, to the spiritualrealms of his own inner being, but does not stop there, because he expands continuously, becomes onewith All, or tries to, and in fact does so in time. When the Pratyeka Buddha in due course emerges fromthe nirvanic state in order to take up his evolutionary journey again, he will find himself far in the rear ofthe Buddha of Compassion.
Precisely as all other cosmic forces or energies, then, Samael is dual, possessing in its higher aspects divine attributes, and in its lower aspects material or infernal attributes. Similarly, kama not only in nature but in man is in itself an abstract and impersonal natural principle, with its divine side as well as its material side, and therefore is per se neither good nor bad in the human sense, but becomes either when used or misused by the human mind. See also SHEMAL
Prime, Primal Force: The essential energy of Creation; also the name of the Sphere that employs those energies. (See Quintessence.)
psychic ::: Psychic This widely used word, which can be both an adjective and a noun, means of the soul or mind. It is the quality of being attuned to or adept at interpreting the more subtle psychic, or soul, faculties and energies. One who is so attuned, such as a medium or an accomplished Yogi. Psychic faculties include such extra-sensory perception as clairvoyance, clairaudience, retrocognition and psychometry (see below) amongst others.
Qi ::: One of the Three Treasures of Qi Gong. Associated with the pervading, animating energy of the Universe and associated with the Middle Dantian (roughly the energies of the Manipura and Anahata Chakras).
Radiation Generally, the emission of life energies, or various kinds of energic outflowings or productions radially outward from a center. Thus it is a name for the entire cosmic process of formation of worlds; the production of many out of one, the passing from unity to measureless diversity and multiplicity. The radiations of the ten or twelve solar logoi from the heart of the solar chain, streaming through and permeating the entire extent of the sun’s kingdom and becoming focalized in the different planetary bodies, illustrate the modus of the general principle of radiation.
rasanā. (T. ro ma). In tantric physiology, the channel (NĀdĪ) that runs from the left nostril to the base of the spine in males and from the right nostril to the base of the spine in females. It is one of three main channels, together with the central channel (AVADHuTĪ) and the LALANĀ, the left channel in females and the right channel in males. According to some systems, seventy-two thousand channels are found in the body, serving as the conduits for subtle energies or winds (PRĀnA). The most important of these channels are the avadhuti, the lalanā, and the rasanā. The central channel runs from the place between the eyebrows to the crown of the head and down in front of the spinal column, ending at the genitals. The right and left channels run parallel to the central channel on either side. These two channels wrap around the central channel at various points, of which as many as seven are enumerated. These points, called wheels (CAKRA), are located between the eyes, at the crown of the head, at the throat, at the heart, at the solar plexus, at the base of the spine, and at the tip of sexual organ. In ANUTTARAYOGATANTRA, especially in practices associated with the "stage of completion" (NIsPANNAKRAMA), much emphasis is placed on loosening these knots in order to cause the winds to flow freely through the central channel.
R.bhus (Ribhus) ::: the name of three Vedic gods or demigods, the "arRbhus tisans of Immortality"; they "are represented as human beings who have attained to the condition of godhead by power of knowledge and perfection in their works" and act as "energies of formation and upward progress who assist the gods in the divinising of man".
Root-race The main serial divisions of the human life-wave on any globe of a planetary chain; for instance, the root-races on our globe D include the third or Lemurian, the fourth or Atlantean, and the present fifth. Each such root-race contains many and various races as the word is commonly understood. All the human beings alive today are part of the fifth root-race. Each life-wave when it has completed its cycle of seven root-races on one globe, transfers its life-energies to the next globe, whereupon begins the same sequence of seven root-races on that next globe. Thus each globe of a planetary chain has its seven root-races, which together constitute one globe-round, the whole set of seven globe-rounds completing one planetary round. See also RACE(S)
rudras. ::: vedic deities of destruction for renewal, the chief of which is Shiva; associated with the ten vital energies &
Sakti(Sanskrit) ::: A term which may be briefly defined to mean one of what in modern Occultism are called theseven forces of nature, of which six are manifest and the seventh unmanifest, or only partly manifest.Sakti in general may be described as universal energy, and is, as it were, the feminine aspect of fohat. Inpopular Hinduism the various saktis are the wives or consorts of the gods, in other words, the energies oractive powers of the deities represented as feminine influences or energies.These anthropomorphic definitions are unfortunate, because misleading. The saktis of nature are reallythe veils, or sheaths, or vehicular carriers, through which work the inner and ever-active energies. Assubstance and energy, or force and matter, are fundamentally one, as modern science in its researches hasbegun to discover, it becomes apparent that even these saktis or sheaths or veils are themselves energic tolower spheres or realms through which they themselves work.The crown of the astral light, as H. P. Blavatsky puts it, is the generalized sakti of universal nature in so far as our solar system is concerned.
Sakti (Sanskrit) Śakti [from the verbal root sak to be powerful, energetic, have force] Universal energy, the feminine aspect of fohat; one of the seven forces of nature, of which six are manifest and the seventh partly manifest. It is energy that proceeds through itself, not being due to the active or conscious will of the one that produces it. Popularly, the wives or consorts of the gods — the energies or active powers of these deities represented as feminine influences.
Samvriti (Sanskrit) Saṃvṛti [prefix sam + the verbal root vṛt to enclose; to cover, to involve] The holding of “false conception,” because the percipient ego is enclosed or covered or involved with material energies and powers. Samvriti hence may be called the origin of all illusion or maya. “One has to acquire true Self-Consciousness in order to understand Samvriti or the ‘origin of delusion’.” (SD 1:44n)
Scorpions ::: Symbols of harmful energies.
Self ::: Man is a sheaf or bundle of forces or energies and material elements combined; and the powercontrolling all and holding them together, making out of the composite aggregate a unity, is whattheosophists call the Self -- not the mere ego, but the Self, a purely spiritual unit, in its essence divine,which is the same in every man and woman on earth, the same in every entity everywhere in all theboundless fields of limitless space, as we understand space. If one closely examine his ownconsciousness, he will very soon know that this is the pure consciousness expressed in the words, "I am"-- and this is the Self; whereas the ego is the cognition of the "I am I."Consider the hierarchy of the human being growing from the Self as its seed -- ten stages: three on thearupa or immaterial plane; and seven (or perhaps better, six) on the planes of matter or manifestation. Oneach one of these seven planes (or six planes), the Self or paramatman develops a sheath or garment, theupper ones spun of spirit, or light if you will, and the lower ones spun of shadow or matter; and eachsuch sheath or garment is a soul; and between the Self and a soul -- any soul -- is an ego.
Serpent One of the most fundamental and prolific symbols of the mystery-language. Its most basic meaning is of the eternal, alternating, cyclic motion during cosmic manifestation. For motion, which to the physicist and the philosopher alike seems an abstraction, is for the ancient wisdom a primordial principle or axiom, of the same order as space and time, existing per se. Never does motion cease utterly even during kosmic pralaya. And motion is essentially circular: where physics would derive circular motion from a composition of rectilinear motions, the opposite procedure would be that of the ancient wisdom. This circular motion, compounding itself into spirals, helixes, and vortices, is the builder of worlds, bringing together the scattered elements of chaos; motion per se is essential cosmic intelligence. This circular motion, returning upon itself like a serpent swallowing its tail, represents the cycles of time. This conscious energy in spirals whirls through all the planes of cosmos as fohat and his innumerable sons — the cosmic energies and forces, fundamentally intelligent, operating in every scale or grade of matter. The caduceus of Hermes, twin serpents wound about a staff, represents cosmically the mighty drama of evolution, in its twin aspects, the staff or tree standing for the structural aspect, the serpent for the fohatic forces that animate the structure.
". . . serpents indicate always energies of Nature and very often bad energies of the vital plane; but they can also indicate luminous or divine energies like the snake of Vishnu.” Letters on Yoga
“… serpents indicate always energies of Nature and very often bad energies of the vital plane; but they can also indicate luminous or divine energies like the snake of Vishnu.” Letters on Yoga
SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL ENERGIES From the seven highest cosmic worlds (1-7)
emanate all the material energies which form matter and the worlds and make the cosmos a living whole constantly changing. K 2.11.7
Sexual abstinence, if it is genuine, is beneficial *, for the ele- ment In the retas which serves the sexual act is then changed into its other element which feeds the energies of the system, mental, vital and physical — and that justifies the Indian idea of
shana; Krishnadarshan) ::: the vision of Kr.s.n.a, the para purus.a or purus.ottama, seen in relation to the world as the transcendent and universal anandamaya purus.a and isvara who is "not only the origin and spiritual container, but the spiritual inhabitant in all forces, in all things and in all beings, and not only the inhabitant but . . . himself all energies and forces, all things and all beings", a form of darsana regarded as the highest bhava of brahmadarsana or as . a distinct darsana related to isvaradarsana. The three intensities of Kr.s.n.adarsana in human beings (applicable with modifications to all things and beings) are described in the entry of 30 May 1915 as (1) "Krishna seen behind the human mask" (distinguished from the preliminary stage, "Krishna sensed behind the disguise"), (2)"Krishna seen in the human being", and (3) "The human being seen in Krishna" (with three degrees of the third intensity, the vision of sarvamaya, anantagun.amaya and anandamaya Kr.s.n.a), leading to the consummation: "The human being = Krishna".
Shwegyin Sayadaw. (1822-1893). In Burmese, "Senior Monk from Shwegyin," honorific title of U Zagara (P. Jāgara), a prominent nineteenth-century reformist scholar-monk and founder of the SHWEGYIN GAING, which today is the second largest monastic fraternity (B. GAING; P. GAnA) in the Burmese sangha (S. SAMGHA). U Zagara was born in Shwegyin village near Shwebo in Upper Burma. As a novice (P. sāmanera; S. sRĀMAnERA) and as a young monk (P. BHIKKHU; S. BHIKsU) he studied under many of the prominent abbots of his time, and according to some sources was a colleague of the learned and ultra-orthodox Okpo Sayadaw, U Okkamwuntha (P. OkkaMvaMsa), founder of the DWAYA GAING, in British-occupied Lower Burma. Like the Okpo Sayadaw, U Zagara emphasized Pāli scholarship and scrupulous attention to monastic discipline (P. VINAYA) as the foundation of the Buddha's religion (P. sāsana; S. sĀSANA), qualities which brought him to the attention of the Burmese king, MINDON (r. 1853-1878). King Mindon, who had inaugurated a revival and reform of Buddhism throughout his kingdom, appointed U Zagara as a royal preceptor (B. SAYADAW) and built for him an elaborate monastic complex at the foot of Mandalay Hill. This attention soon brought U Zagara into conflict with the powerful THUDHAMMA Council, a royally appointed ecclesiastical body charged with governing the Burmese sangha of the kingdom. After a falling out with the Thudhamma patriarch (B. thathanabaing; P. SAnGHARĀJĀ), U Zagara petitioned the king for autonomy (P. ganavimutti) from Thudhamma control, which the king granted. He and his disciples thus formed the nucleus of the new Shwegyin gaing. Some years after the death of the Thudhamma patriarch, during the reign of Burma's last king, Thibaw (1878-1885), U Zagara was invited along with another senior monk to jointly head the Thudhamma Council. U Zagara declined the offer, focusing his energies instead on expanding the reach of the Shwegyin gaing throughout Upper and Lower Burma. The strong emphasis placed by U Zagara and his successors on Buddhist scholarship, monastic discipline, and strict institutional organization of member monasteries allowed the Shwegyin gaing to successfully weather the tumultuous years following the British conquest of the Burmese kingdom in 1885, which saw the dissolution of the Thudhamma Council and disestablishment of Buddhism as the state religion.
SOLAR SYSTEMIC ENERGIES The solar systems make up a widely branched-out network for distribution of cosmic energies, which are coming in from worlds 36-42. (K
2.13.1f)
The solar systems of higher degrees transmit the cosmic energies to those of lower degrees. Our solar system is of the second degree. The energies from other solar systems reach the planets via the sun, which has the task, among others, of transforming the atomic energies into molecular energies. K 2.13.5
Soulless Beings ::: "We elbow soulless men in the streets at every turn," wrote H. P. Blavatsky. This is an actual fact. Thestatement does not mean that those whom we thus elbow have no soul. The significance is that thespiritual part of these human beings is sleeping, not awake. They are animate humans with an animateworking brain-mind, an animal mind, but otherwise "soulless" in the sense that the soul is inactive,sleeping; and this is also just what Pythagoras meant when he spoke of the "living dead." They areeverywhere, these people. We elbow them, just as H. P. Blavatsky says, at every turn. The eyes may bephysically bright, and filled with the vital physical fire, but they lack soul; they lack tenderness, thefervid yet gentle warmth of the living flame of inspiration within. Sometimes impersonal love willawaken the soul in a man or in a woman; sometimes it will kill it if the love become selfish and gross.The streets are filled with such "soulless" people; but the phrase soulless people does not mean "lostsouls." The latter is again something else. The term soulless people therefore is a technical term. It meansmen and women who are still connected, but usually quite unconsciously, with the monad, the spiritualessence within them, but who are not self-consciously so connected. They live very largely in thebrain-mind and in the fields of sensuous consciousness. They turn with pleasure to the frivolities of life.They have the ordinary feelings of honor, etc., because it is conventional and good breeding so to havethem; but the deep inner fire of yearning, the living warmth that comes from being more or less at onewith the god within, they know not. Hence, they are "soulless," because the soul is not working with fieryenergy in and through them.A lost soul, on the other hand, means an entity who through various rebirths, it may be a dozen, or moreor less, has been slowly following the "easy descent to Avernus," and in whom the threads ofcommunication with the spirit within have been snapped one after the other. Vice will do this, continuousvice. Hate snaps these spiritual threads more quickly than anything else perhaps. Selfishness, the parentof hate, is the root of all human evil; and therefore a lost soul is one who is not merely soulless in theordinary theosophical usage of the word, but is one who has lost the last link, the last delicate thread ofconsciousness, connecting him with his inner god. He will continue "the easy descent," passing fromhuman birth to an inferior human birth, and then to one still more inferior, until finally the degenerateastral monad -- all that remains of the human being that once was -- may even enter the body of somebeast to which it feels attracted (and this is one side of the teaching of transmigration, which has been sobadly misunderstood in the Occident); some finally go even to plants perhaps, at the last, and willultimately vanish. The astral monad will then have faded out. Such lost souls are exceedingly rare,fortunately; but they are not what we call soulless people.If the student will remember the fact that when a human being is filled with the living spiritual andintellectual fiery energies flowing into his brain-mind from his inner god, he is then an insouled being, hewill readily understand that when these fiery energies can no longer reach the brain-mind and manifest ina man's life, there is thus produced what is called a soulless being. A good man, honorable, loyal,compassionate, aspiring, gentle, and true-hearted, and a student of wisdom, is an "insouled" man; abuddha is one who is fully, completely insouled; and there are all the intermediate grades between.
Sparsa (Sanskrit) Sparśa [from the verbal root spṛś to touch] The sense of touch; as one of the active energies or seats of action or sense in the human constitution, the seventh nidana; looked upon distributively and as a thing in itself, it is also one of the tanmatras or essential senses.
Sphere Conventionally, the geometrical representative of the manifested one All, combining unity, comprehensiveness, simplicity, and symmetry; whereas the ever-unknown frontierless womb of boundless space is conventionally represented by the zero. All the sections of a sphere are circles; its surface is an infinite plane, having neither boundaries nor parts and therefore measurable perhaps solely by the rules of geometry. A balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces produces the sphere, as in a soap bubble. Its center and its surface represent opposite poles, between which radiate expansive and contractive energies. The earth is virtually a sphere. The heavens, the limits of our vision, form the surface of an ideal sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose periphery is nowhere.
spirit: In lower case form, an entity or force from outside material reality; sometimes considered the fifth element, soul essence, or the immaterial energy behind passion and emotion. Capitalized, the Sphere that deals with such energies and entities.
Spiritual effort by concentration of the energies in a spiritual discipline or process.
Sri Aurobindo: "Destiny in the rigid sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One"s spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: " . . . 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. The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "the black dragon of the Inconscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole structure of the material universe; its energies unroll the flux of things, its obscure intimations seem to be the starting-point of consciousness itself and the source of all life-impulse.” The Life Divine ::: **Unused, guarded beneath Night"s dragon paws,**
Sri Aurobindo: "Vitality means life-force — wherever there is life, in plant or animal or man, there is life-force — without the vital there can be no life in matter and no living action. The vital is a necessary force and nothing can be done or created in the bodily existence, if the vital is not there as an instrument.” *Letters on Yoga
"The vital proper is the life-force acting in its own nature, impulses, emotions, feelings, desires, ambitions, etc., having as their highest centre what we may call the outer heart of emotion, while there is an inner heart where are the higher or psychic feelings and sensibilities, the emotions or intuitive yearnings and impulses of the soul. The vital part of us is, of course, necessary to our completeness, but it is a true instrument only when its feelings and tendencies have been purified by the psychic touch and taken up and governed by the spiritual light and power.” *Letters on Yoga
". . . the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Letters on Yoga
The Mother: "The vital is the dynamism of action. It is the seat of the will, of impulses, desires, revolts, etc.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15*.
Sri Aurobindo: "Weakness puts the same test and question to the strengths and energies and greatnesses in which we glory. Power is the play of life, shows its degree, finds the value of its expression; weakness is the play of death pursuing life in its movement and stressing the limit of its acquired energy.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Subtle body: In the terminology of Yoga, that essential part of the human individuality which survives physical death and continues to be reborn in the wheel of life (q.v.). It is considered to be composed of seventeen elements: five senses of perception, five senses of action, five vital energies, mind (manas) and intellect (buddhi). It is in general identical with the term etheric double (q.v.) of other schools of occultism.
SUNS The suns are transformers that convert atomic matter into molecular matter. What we see is just an external physical gaseous envelope. K 1.9.2
The energies from other solar systems reach the planets via the sun, which has the task, among others, of transforming the atomic energies into molecular energies. These seven main kinds of molecular energies, like all septenaries, can be divided into three higher and four lower. The three circulate interplanetarily; the four are distributes to the planets, in which process the principle of circulation is also employed, so that the planets receive energy from each other. K 2.13.5
The sun as an esoteric symbols has reference to the second triad, its kinds of consciousness and energy. Solar Lords, Solar Angels, etc. refer to such devas as are self-conscious in 45 or 46.
SUTRATMA (Skt, thread-soul) The current of energy connecting the three triads with each other and conveying those higher energies without which lower envelopes would not be able to exist. The sutratma has its lowest anchorage in the heart centre of the etheric envelope. When this anchorage is loosened at the end of incarnation, physical death is definitive.
Svabhavat(Sanskrit) ::: The neuter present participle of a compound word derived from the verb-root bhu, meaning "tobecome," from which is derived a secondary meaning "to be," in the sense of growth.Svabhavat is a state or condition of cosmic consciousnesssubstance, where spirit and matter, which arefundamentally one, no longer are dual as in manifestation, but one: that which is neither manifestedmatter nor manifested spirit alone, but both are the primeval unity -- spiritual akasa -- where mattermerges into spirit, and both now being really one, are called "Father-Mother," spirit-substance.Svabhavat never descends from its own state or condition, or from its own plane, but is the cosmicreservoir of being, as well as of beings, therefore of consciousness, of intellectual light, of life; and it isthe ultimate source of what science, in our day, so quaintly calls the energies of nature universal.The northern Buddhists call svabhavat by a more mystical term, Adi-buddhi, "primeval buddhi"; theBrahmanical scriptures call it akasa; and the Hebrew Old Testament refers to it as the cosmic "waters."The difference in meaning between svabhavat and svabhava is very great and is not generallyunderstood; the two words often have been confused. Svabhava is the characteristic nature, thetype-essence, the individuality, of svabhavat -- of any svabhavat, each such svabhavat having its ownsvabhava. Svabhavat, therefore, is really the world-substance or stuff, or still more accurately that whichis causal of the world-substance, and this causal principle or element is the spirit and essence of cosmicsubstance. It is the plastic essence of matter, both manifest and unmanifest. (See also Akasa)
Taijasa-tattva (Sanskrit) Taijasa-tattva [from taijasa sparkling + tattva thatness, reality] The fiery, sparkling principle of nature — the fire principle which contains in itself both intellectual energies or seeds and the roots of kama; the fourth in the descending scale of the seven tattvas. See also ASURA
Tala(Sanskrit) ::: A word which is largely used in the metaphysical systems of India, both in contrast and at thesame time in conjunction with loka. As the general meaning of loka is "place" or rather "world," so thegeneral meaning of tala is "inferior world." Every loka has as its twin or counterpart a corresponding tala.Wherever there is a loka there is an exactly correspondential tala, and in fact the tala is the nether pole ofits corresponding loka. Lokas and talas, therefore, in a way of speaking, may be considered to be thespiritual and the material aspects or substance-principles of the different worlds which compose and infact are the kosmic universe. It is impossible to separate a tala from its corresponding loka -- quite asimpossible as it would be to separate the two poles of electricity.The number of talas as generally outlined in the exoteric philosophies of Hindustan is usually given asseven, there being thus seven lokas and seven talas; but, as a matter of fact, this number varies. If we mayspeak of a loka as the spiritual pole, we may likewise call it the principle of any world; andcorrespondentially when we speak of the tala as being the negative or inferior pole, it is quite proper alsoto refer to it as the element of its corresponding loka or principle. Hence, the lokas of a hierarchy may becalled the principles of a hierarchy, and the talas, in exactly the same way, may be called the elements orsubstantial or material aspects of the hierarchy.It should likewise be remembered that all the seven lokas and all the seven talas are continuously andinextricably interblended and interworking; and that the lokas and the talas working together form theuniverse and its various subordinate hierarchies that encompass us around. The higher lokas with thehigher talas are the forces or energies and substantial parts of the spiritual and ethereal worlds; the lowestlokas and their corresponding talas form the forces or energies and substantial parts of the physical worldsurrounding us; and the intermediate lokas with their corresponding talas form the respective energiesand substantial parts of the intermediate or ethereal realms.Briefly, therefore, we may speak of a tala as the material aspect of the world where it predominates, justas when speaking of a loka we may consider it to be the spiritual aspect of the world where itpredominates. Every loka, it should be always remembered, is coexistent with and cannot be separatedfrom its corresponding tala on the same plane.As an important deduction from the preceding observations, be it carefully noted that man's ownconstitution as an individual from the highest to the lowest is a hierarchy of its own kind, and thereforeman himself as such a subordinate hierarchy is a composite entity formed of lokas and talas inextricablyinterworking and intermingled. In this subordinate hierarchy called man live and evolve vast armies,hosts, multitudes, of living entities, monads in this inferior stage of their long evolutionary peregrination,and which for convenience and brevity of expression we may class under the general term of life-atoms.
tanmatras ::: the five subtle properties of Energy or Matter; the five subtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness in relation to the gross forms of matter: sound, touch, form, taste and smell; [sometimes considered to be the five elemental states of substance (pancabhuta) ].
Temple [from Latin templum, tempulum a small division from Greek, Latin tem to cut off, mark out] Templum was a spot marked off for sacred purposes by the augur with his staff, and might be on the ground or in the sky, where it was a region designated for the observation of omens. This connects the idea with that of the celestial mansions or zodiacal signs. From being a mere marked-off spot, it gradually evolved into elaborate edifices, and it has also a figurative use, as when the body is called the temple of God or the earth is described as a temple. When a temple in ancient days was constructed by adepts for specific purposes, it became a center or receptacle of spiritual energies attracted and focused there; and from this arose the merely exoteric ideas, true in their origin but absurdly untrue today, that a consecrated portion of a temple or church was the Holy of Holies or the Seat of God, etc.
The agnishvattas, our solar spiritual-intellectual parts, are those who in preceding manvantaras completed their evolution in the realms of matter; and when evolution had brought the nascent human stock to the state where they had only the physical creative fire, the agnishvattas came to their rescue by inspiring and enlightening these lower lunar pitris with spiritual and intellectual energies or fires (OG 14-15; SD 2:91-2).
The astral light is virtually the same as the sidereal light of Paracelsus and other medieval mystic philosophers who followed him. The reason for calling this kosmic plane astral or sidereal is that all nature being a vast and intricately interwoven organism, the stars and planets emanate into each other their respective celestial energies and substances. Thus, because there is this constant interchange of starry fluids emanating from the different celestial bodies, the term astral light has a foundation of esoteric scientific fact. It is applied specifically to the second kosmic plane only because it is nearest to the physical and beings living on the physical plane at times become sensible of the existence of the second kosmic plane by means of flashes of starry light or sensations of luminosity. Hence the ancient initiates, knowing the source of this starry substance, properly called it the astral or sidereal light, or by some similar expression. The astral light, finally, is the very dregs of akasa, and is virtually the same as the hypothetical ether of science.
The blood is actively protean in representing on this plane the streams of higher vitality manifesting in body, soul, and spirit. Thus, its pranic oxygen is the agent of the solar fire; its white and red corpuscles represent the psychic life-force and the red kamic energies, all acting together in their material forms. The leucocytes or white corpuscles are formed in the lymphatic glands, in the spleen, and in bone marrow. They correspond in a sense to the lunar chhayas or builders of the ethereal forms of the second and early third root-races which “needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no feeding” (SD 1:609). These spherical ameboid cells have both the primordial, changeable pudding-bag form and the autogenerative type of propagation. Their relation to the formation of the red cells typifies that of the early astral forms which, gradually becoming physicalized, evolved into the red-blooded, bisexual, manas-endowed beings of the later third root-race. The red cells, without autogenerative nuclei, are born in special leucocyte cells of red bone marrow, where they are produced at the rate the effete red cells are destroyed.
"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*
“The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one’s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one’s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one’s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces—for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness—and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in—the nature.” Letters on Yoga
The Divine appears to us here in one view as an equal, inactive and impersonal Witness Spirit, an immobile consenting Purusha not bound by quality or Space or Time, whose support or sanction is given impartially to the play of all action and energies which the transcendent Will has once permitted and authorised to fulfil themselves in the cosmos. This Witness Spirit, this immobile Self in things, seems to will nothing and determine nothing; yet we become aware that his very passivity, his silent presence compels all things to travel even in their ignorance towards a divine goal and attracts through division towards a yet unrealised oneness. Yet no supreme infallible Divine Will seems to be there, only a widely deployed Cosmic Energy or a mechanical executive Process, Prakriti.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 432
"The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The individuals in these archaic genealogies are at one time to be considered as men, at another time as races or subdivisions of races, while on a cosmic scale they stand for various spiritual powers or celestial energies imbodied in constellations of the zodiac; whereas their wives or consorts are equivalent to the Hindu saktis, their manifested powers, attributes, or faculties in, by, and through which they express themselves. Thus the wife of such an individual is not only his companion, but the veil, sheath, or garment which encloses him.
“The Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of her revealing substance; on the other, by the reascending current of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put on its divine character.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The last stage of this perfection will come when you are com* pletely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself to be no longer another and separate being, hstwmeM, sen'ani or worker but truly a child and eternal portion of her conscious- ness and force. Always she will be in you and you in her ; it will be your constant, simple and natural experience that all your thought and seeing and action, your very breathing or moving come from her and are here. You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, ananda of her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental energies can freely move you then you will be perfect in divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine movement of the Eternal.
The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences.
The Mother: "The snake is not the symbol of power but of energy, and just as there are obscure and perverted energies, so too the snake can be the symbol of unregenerate and anti-divine forces.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.*
The Mother: “The snake is not the symbol of power but of energy, and just as there are obscure and perverted energies, so too the snake can be the symbol of unregenerate and anti-divine forces.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.
There are profound, highly mystical differences which distinguish the Maharajas from the lipikas. The Maharajas, who are both the protectors of mankind on earth and the agents of karma, are those highly evolved spiritual powers or individualized cosmic beings who belong to the light-side of universal nature, to the hierarchies of compassion representing beings of unfolded evolutionary development who by the very nature of their essence become almost the automatic guardians of light and cosmic order which the semi-intelligent and so-called unintelligent forces and energies of nature automatically obey.
There are two classes of siddhis: those pertaining to the lower psychic and mental energies, and those pertaining to the intellectual, spiritual, and divine powers — both possessed by the spiritual initiate. These siddhis should never be used for purposes of self, but always for the benefit of mankind and all creatures.
“These anthropomorphic definitions are unfortunate, because misleading. The Saktis of Nature are really the veils, or sheaths, or vehicular carriers, through which work the inner and ever-active energies. As substance and energy, or force and matter, are fundamentally one, . . . it becomes apparent that even these Saktis, or sheaths, or veils, are themselves energic to lower spheres or realms through which they themselves work.
These extremely occult and important beings are connected with the kabeiroi because they are the intellectual offspring of these planetary deities; identical also with the ’elohim. Sometimes they are called in the ancient writings tushitas, jayas, adityas, asuras, vasus, rishis, kumaras, manus, and the spiritual rebels. They are even referred to as the ten vital breaths or pranas because these ten vital breaths are the ten varieties of intellectual energies or forces flowing from them, and which on the intellectual plane may be spoken of as the mental pranas.
These five- or seven-voweled voices, sounds, or breathings also represent the seven fundamental fires or energies of the human constitution. All ancient mystical schools had their own way of viewing and explaining these vowels.
These five vowels have the same essential meaning as the Oeaohoo of The Secret Doctrine. They are symbolic of the seven kosmic breathings of the universal spirit or primal logos; in other words, of the seven kosmic original fires or energies whose breathings throughout the universe are the life or streams of lives which form the background of the universe. Consonants were mystically considered to be the vehicles of sounds or breathings or “voices” which were the vowels. Consonants gave the vowels body, in the same way as spirit expresses itself through the rigid structural framework of entities. “The manner of pronunciation depends on the accent. This is an esoteric term for the six in one or the mystic seven. The occult name for the ‘seven-vowelled’ ever-present manifestation of the Universal Principle” (TG 239).
“the seven principles of our globe are the seven lokas and seven talas belonging especially to earth; and the seven principles of each one of the other six globes of our planetary chain, are the respective lokas and talas belonging to each one of them. Now the two other globes on each plane of the three planes above ours, making thus the other six globes of our planetary chain, receive their respective life force, recieve their respective inflow of intellectual and spiritual energies and beings, from the respective lokas and talas of the sun. There are seven suns, but only one sun on this plane, as our globe is but one on this plane, the lowest of the seven kosmical planes.”
The sex-crergy utilised by Nature for the purpose of repro- duction is in its real nature a fundamental energy of life. It can be used not for the heightening but for a certain intensification of the vital-emotional life ; it can be controlled and diverted from the sex-purpose and used for aesthetic and artistic or other crea- tion and productiveness or preserved for heightening of the intel- lectual or other energies. Entirely controlled it can be turned into a force of spiritual energy also. This was well-known tn ancient India and was described as the conversation of retas into ojas by brahmacarya. Sex-energy misused turns to disorder and disintegration of the life-energy and its powers.
The sex-energy is a great power with two components in its physical basis, one ntcant for procreation and the process neces- sary for it, the other for feeding the general energies of the body, mind and vital, — also of the spiritual energies of the body.
::: "The spiritual law of Karma is that the nature of each being can be only the result of his past energies; . . . .” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“The spiritual law of Karma is that the nature of each being can be only the result of his past energies; …” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
The three kingdoms of elementals actually build and form every new planet or world, beginning in serial order with the lowest of the three kingdoms, preparing the globe for the advent of the mineral kingdom, to be followed in turn by the vegetable and higher kingdoms in regular succession. The elementals are not only the matters of nature, but when acting together and used by higher intelligences become the forces or energies of nature, such as electricity, magnetism, light, vitality, etc. Unconsciously, human and other beings use them in the carrying on of all their bodily functions. For example, our bodies cohere through the automatic aid of the elementals of earth; and the elementals of fire give us our bodily heat.
The titans with their false gifts symbolize the pursuing energies of the personal, material life, which enchain and delude the soul. They are earth powers which lead the soul from the path by the lure of things of sense. The dismembered body is first boiled in water — symbol of the astral world; then roasted, “as gold is tried by fire,” symbol of suffering and purification and the reascent of the victorious soul to bliss.
The universal life principle which manifests everywhere in nature, and which under one of its forms is called kundalini-sakti, of necessity includes the two great forces of attraction and repulsion. Attraction and repulsion being of cosmic origin are therefore of necessity likewise manifest in the manifold conditions of human life; but this does not imply that the individual should passively or negatively accept disturbances caused by inharmony when it is within his power as an offspring of the higher divinities to restore it — insofar as his energies and knowledge permit — to the harmony or cosmic unity from which these cosmic energies themselves spring. Hence the teaching of the greatest sages and seers of history has been to rise above the elements of personal attraction or repulsion, and to blend the two into the compassionate mastery which the indomitable human will, when trained and practiced, can acquire over not merely moods but all conditions in life. Thus he becomes a friend to all, and an enemy to none, repelling evil and attracting good, until these by association may themselves blend or marry into that mystic unity which is the achievement or culmination of evolution, whether human or cosmic.
“The Unknown Absolute, above all number, manifested Itself through an emanation in which it was immanent yet as to which it was transcendental. It first withdrew Itself into Itself, to form an infinite Space, the Abyss; which It then filled with a modified and gradually diminishing Light or Vitalization, first appearing in the Abyss, as the centre of a mathematical point which gradually spread Its Life-giving energy or force throughout all Space. This concentration or contraction and its expansion, being the centripetal and centrifugal energies of creation and existence, the Qabbalists called Tzimtzum. The Will of Ain Soph then manifests Itself through the Ideal Perfect Model or Vitalizing Form, first principle and perfect prototype in idea, of all the to be created, whether spiritual or material. This is the Mikrokosm to the Ain Soph, the Makrokosm as to all the created. It is called the Son of Elohim, i.e., God, and the Adam Illa-ah or Adam Qadmon, the Man of the East or Heavenly Adam” (Myer, Qabbalah p. 231).
“… the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Letters on Yoga
"The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake, — therefore it is called the kundalinî sakti, — in the lowest of the chakras, in the mûlâdhâra. When by Pranayama the division between the upper and lower prana currents in the body is dissolved, this Kundalini is struck and awakened, it uncoils itself and begins to rise upward like a fiery serpent breaking open each lotus as it ascends until the Shakti meets the Purusha in the brahmarandhra in a deep samadhi of union.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake,—therefore it is called the kundalinî sakti,—in the lowest of the chakras, in the mûlâdhâra. When by Pranayama the division between the upper and lower prana currents in the body is dissolved, this Kundalini is struck and awakened, it uncoils itself and begins to rise upward like a fiery serpent breaking open each lotus as it ascends until the Shakti meets the Purusha in the brahmarandhra in a deep samadhi of union.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“This arrangement of the psychic body is reproduced in the physical with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic centres as the chakras which rise up from the bottom of the column, where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their summit in the brahmarandhra at the top of the skull. These chakras or lotuses, however, are in physical man closed or only partly open, with the consequence that only such powers and only so much of them are active in him as are sufficient for his ordinary physical life, and so much mind and soul only is at play as will accord with its need. This is the real reason, looked at from the mechanical point of view, why the embodied soul seems so dependent on the bodily and nervous life,—though the dependence is neither so complete nor so real as it seems. The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake,—therefore it is called the kundalinî sakti,—in the lowest of the chakras, in the mûlâdhâra.” The Synthesis of Yoga
This movement as it proceeds opens up the six centres of the subtle nervous system and by the opening one escapes from the limitations of the surface consciousness bound to the gross body and great ranges of experiences proper to the subliminal self, mental, vitalj subtle physical, are shown to the sadhaka. When the Kundalini meets the higher Consciousness as it ascends through the summit of the head, there is an opening of the higher superconscient reaches above the normal mind. It is by ascend- ing through these in our consciousness and receiring a descent of their energies that it is possible ultimately to reach the Super- mind. This is the method of the Tantra. In our Yoga it is not necessary to go through the sysiemaihed method. It takes place spontaneously according to the need by the force of the aspira- tion. As soon as (here is an openmg the Divine Power descends and conducts the necessary working, does what is needed, each thing in its time and the Consciousness begins to be bom
Though the distinction of sex is biologically regarded as a profound and nearly universal attribute of organized beings, yet knowledge of composite human nature shows that it does not reach into the roots of the human constitution. Its causes go no deeper than the lower part of the human ego or soul, the psychophysiological nature. It is an evolutionary condition or cycle of the reincarnating ego’s development in this present stage of materiality. Therefore, it is a transitory event in its bipolar earthly experience. As sex has been nature’s plan for the race for some 18 million years, it will continue to be the natural plan for some ages to come. Some ages hence, sex differentiation will have given way to the activities of impersonal, spiritual creative energies.
"Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed will are also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reactions.” Letters on Yoga
“Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed will are also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reactions.” Letters on Yoga
Through and from Brahman derive the various cosmic Brahmas, the expansion of the One into the many. Brahman does not put forth evolution itself nor create, but exhibits various aspects of itself by means of emanative evolution. The Hindu Puranas say that Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are the primordial energies of Brahman, the divine neuter. There is a clear distinction between the impersonal, supreme, all-pervading, immanent, beginningless, and endless cosmic principle, whose essence is consciousness-life-substance, and the various Brahmas; for these latter are the periodic manifestations of the highest energies flowing forth at the beginning of each manvantara from the neuter Brahman, and into which these various Brahmas are ingathered again when the cosmic cycle reaches its close and pralaya ensues.
TYPE ACTIVITY The solar systemic and planetary energies are always type energies, and the effects they have on the different types in the different kinds of matter and consciousness differ accordingly. When activity of one type dominates, it sets it mark on individuals and collectivities in their individual characters. The result is that every process is to some extent individual and can never again produce anything exactly similar, never achieve exactly the same result. K 2.13.8
vamamarga ::: the "left-hand path" of Tantra; the way of ananda: vamamarga "Nature in man liberating itself by joyous acceptance . . . of its own energies". vvamih amih. suvir suvira a is isah
vamamarga ::: the left-hand path (of the tantra) , "the way of ananda", nature in man liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities.
vāsanā. (T. bag chags; C. xunxi/xiqi; J. kunju/jikke; K. hunsŭp/sŭpki 薰習/習氣). In Sanskrit, literally, "perfumings," hence "predispositions," "habituations," "latent tendencies," or "residual impressions" (and sometimes seen translated overliterally from the Chinese as "habit energies"); subtle tendencies created in the mind as a result of repeated exposure to positive or negative objects. Vāsanā are described as subtle forms of the afflictions (KLEsA), which hinder the attainment of buddhahood. According to the DAZHIDU LUN (*MahāprajNāpāramitāsāstra), ARHATs remain subject to the influence of the vāsanā-for example, sĀRIPUTRA's anger and NANDA's staring at beautiful women-just as the scent of incense remains behind in a censer even after all the incense has burned away. Thus, only the buddhas have removed all such latent tendencies. In the YOGĀCĀRA system, the vāsanā "perfume" the "seeds" (BĪJA) of wholesome and unwholesome actions that are implanted in the storehouse consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA). The CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi) lists the following three types of vāsanā: (1) linguistic predispositions (C. mingyan xiqi), the impressions created by concepts and expressions through which one evaluates his experience; (2) grasping-at-self predispositions (C. wozhi xiqi), impressions fostered by grasping at false notions of a perduring self (ĀTMAGRĀHA), which create an attachment to I and mine; and (3) cause-of-existence predispositions (C. youzhi xiqi), impressions that engender wholesome and unwholesome karmic retributions, which lead to continued rebirth in SAMSĀRA.
vibhuti ::: divine power, efflorescence of the Divine's powers, energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being; a power of God in man, embodied World-Force or human leader. ::: vibhuitayah [plural], master powers of the becoming.
viravati ::: [heroic]; attended by conquering energies. [Ved.]
Vishnu as the supporter of life is the source of one line of avataras so often spoken of in Hindu legends. These ten avataras of Vishnu are: 1) Matsya the fish; 2) Kurma the tortoise; 3) Varaha the boar; 4) Narasimha the man-lion (last of animal stage); 5) Vamana the dwarf (first step toward the human form); 6) Parasu-Rama, Rama with the axe (a hero); 7) Rama-chandra, the hero of the Ramayana; 8) Krishna, son of Devaki; 9) Gautama Buddha; and 10) Kalki, the avatara who is to appear at the end of the kali yuga mounted on a white horse, inaugurating a new reign of righteousness on earth. A horse has from immemorial time been a symbol of the spiritual as well as vital energies of the inner solar orb. Hence, when the next avatara is said to come riding a white horse, the meaning is that he comes infilled with the solar light or splendor — an avatara or manifestation of a spiritual and intellectual solar energy which will carry all before it on earth.
vital ::: a. --> Belonging or relating to life, either animal or vegetable; as, vital energies; vital functions; vital actions.
Contributing to life; necessary to, or supporting, life; as, vital blood.
Containing life; living.
Being the seat of life; being that on which life depends; mortal.
Very necessary; highly important; essential.
VITAL FORCE in the organism depends on five different kinds of etheric energies replacing one another at twenty-four minute intervals, thus recurring periodically at intervals of two hours. K 2.12.7
vital (the) ::: the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul of man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of nature. The vital part of man is a true instrument only when its feelings and tendencies have been purified by the psychic touch and governed by the spiritual light and power. The vital has three main parts:
higher vital ::: the mental vital and emotional vital taken together. The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest.
central vital or vital proper ::: dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, such as ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passion of various kinds and the field of many vital energies.
lower vital ::: made up of the smaller movements of human life-desire and life-reactions, it is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds, etc. The material vital is that part of the lower vital turned entirely upon physical things, full of desires and greeds and seekings for pleasure on the physical plane.
VYANA. ::: Life-current which is pervasive, distributes the vital energies throughout the body.
vyana ::: [one of the five pranas]: it pervades the whole body and distributes the vital energies throughout the body; on it depend the circulation of the blood and the distribution of the essential part of the food eaten and digested throughout the body.
vyana ::: one of the five workings of the life-force (pañcapran.a), that which "distributes the vital energies throughout the body".
vyaya-laks.mi (vyaya-lakshmi) ::: success and prosperity resulting from vyaya-laksmi expenditure of energies.
weakness ::: “Weakness puts the same test and question to the strengths and energies and greatnesses in which we glory. Power is the play of life, shows its degree, finds the value of its expression; weakness is the play of death pursuing life in its movement and stressing the limit of its acquired energy.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance….
witchcraft ::: Witchcraft Often referred to as sorcery, it is the craft or workings of a witch, i.e. magick or healing through the use of personal power and the latent energies found in candles, stones, herbs, and other natural items, combined with spells.
world ::: 1. Everything that exists; the universe; the macrocosm. 2. The earth with its inhabitants. 3. Any sphere, realm, or domain, with all pertaining to it. 4. Any period, state, or sphere of existence. world"s, worlds, wonder-world, wonder-worlds, world-adventure, world-adventure"s, world-being"s, World-Bliss, world-cloak, world-conjecture"s, world-creating, world-creators, world-delight, World-Delight, world-destiny, world-destroying, world-disillusion"s, world-dream, world-drowse, world-egos, world-energies, world-energy, World-Energy, world-force, world-experience, world-fact, world-failure"s, world-fate, World-Force, world-forces, World-free, World-Geometer"s, world-heart, world-idea, world-ignorance, World-Ignorance, World-maker"s, world-indifference, world-interpreting, world-kindergarten, world-knowledge, world-law, world-laws, world-libido"s, world-making"s, World-Matter"s, World-naked, world-need, world-ocean"s, world-outline, world-pain, world-passion, World-personality, world-pile, world-plan, world-power, World-Power, World-Power"s, World-Puissance, world-rapture, world-redeemer"s, world-rhyme, world-rhythms, world-scene, world-scheme, world-sea, World-Self, world-shape, world-shapes, world-space, world-stuff, world-symbol, World-symbols, World-task, world-time, World-Time‘s, world-tree, world-ways, world-whim, dream-world, heaven-world, mid-world.
world-Mother ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of her revealing substance; on the other, by the reascending current of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put on its divine character.” The Synthesis of Yoga
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30 Sri Aurobindo
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2 Joseph Campbell
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2 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
2 Aleister Crowley
1 Venerable Bede
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
1 Saint Padre Pio
1 Pope Pius XII
1 Nisargadatta Maharaj
1 Nido Qubein
1 Jean Gebser
1 Integral Yoga; Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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16 Anonymous
15 Thich Nhat Hanh
15 Joseph Campbell
15 Frederick Lenz
11 Sadhguru
10 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
9 Jon Kabat Zinn
9 Elena Ferrante
9 Deepak Chopra
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson
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7 William James
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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1:Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.
~ Nido Qubein,#KEYS
2:Everything is a poise of contrary energies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - IV, #KEYS
3:Don't spend your energies on things that generate worry, anxiety and anguish. Only one thing is necessary: Lift up your spirit, and love God." ~ Saint Padre Pio, #KEYS
4:A once living story has prepared and made
Our present fate, child of past energies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue,#KEYS
5:Don't waste your energies on things that cause worry, disturbance and anxiety. Only one thing is necessary: to lift the spirit and love God. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
6:If you desire to be pure, do not waste your energies in useless scriptural arguments, but slowly go on with your devotional practices. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
7:Try to gain mastery over your sexual instincts. If one succeeds, the lower energies are transmuted to the higher Self by the Medha nerve. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
8:Keep quiet and turn your energies within; you'll find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
9:Our life is affected not only by its own energies but by the energies of others and by universal Forces. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #KEYS
10:When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. 13 Jan 1951 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #KEYS
11:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#KEYS
12:A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
13:The joy of life consists in the exercise of ones energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
~ Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autobiography,#KEYS
14:Kama (Desire)
Delight and laughter walking hand in hand
Go with Me, and I play with grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Kama
Kama (Desire)
All energies put into activity—thought, speech, feeling, act—go to constitute Karma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Karma and Heredity,#KEYS
15:The crisis we are experiencing is unique in history. It is a world which must burst out of a crucible in which so many different energies are working. Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems... it is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre. All men have the imperative duty to remember that they have a mission to fulfill, that of doing the impossible. ~ Pope Pius XII, #KEYS
16:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, #KEYS
17:The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.03, #KEYS
18:for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee. Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
19:O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy Benediction may fill men's hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
20:We have in this figure of various psychological levels, each considered as a world in itself, a key to the conceptions of the Vedic Rishis.
And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract, but real and dynamic,—that originates the law, the energies, the formations of things and the working out of their potentialities in determined forms by determined processes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Selected Hymns, Surya Savitri - Creator and Increaser,#KEYS
21:I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight . . . The ultimate Mystery of being, the ultimate Truth, is Love. This is the essential structure of reality. When Dante spoke of the 'love which moves the sun and the other stars', he was not using a metaphor, but was describing the nature of reality. There is in Being an infinite desire to give itself in love and this gift of Self in love is for ever answered by a return of love....and so the rhythm of the universe is created. ~ Venerable Bede, #KEYS
22:What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, [T1],#KEYS
23:There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 61, [T0],#KEYS
24:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,#KEYS
25:A talisman is a storehouse of some particular kind of energy, the kind that is needed to accomplish the task for which you have constructed it...The decisive advantage of this system is not that its variety makes it so adaptable to our needs, but that we already posses the Invocations necessary to call forth the Energies required...You must lay most closely to your heart the theory of the Magical Link and see well to it that it rings true; for without this your talisman is worse than useless. It is dangerous; for all that Energy is bound to expend itself somehow; it will make its own links with anything handy that takes its fancy; and you can get into any sort of the most serious kind of trouble...Most of my Talismans, like my Invocations, have been poems. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #KEYS
26:But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions Of The Synthesis, The Threefold Life, 29,#KEYS
27:The condition of today's world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex.
Nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.
We have only one option: in examining the manifestations of our age, we must penetrate them with sufficient breadth and depth that we do not come under the demonic and destructive spell.
We must not focus our view merely on these phenomena, but rather on the humus of the decaying world beneath, where the seedlings of the future are growing, immeasurable in their potential and vigor.
Since our insight into the energies pressing toward development aids their unfolding, the seedlings and inceptive beginnings must be made visible and comprehensible." ~ Jean Gebser,#KEYS
28: There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distri bute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, 1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #KEYS
29:The personal will of the sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf or distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the process, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #KEYS
30:But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the ascetic? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnipotence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becomings of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the immutable Being, its consent to this infinite fecundity of its own dynamic Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality Omnipresent, #KEYS
31:It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 23,#KEYS
32:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensation s and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs.
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,#KEYS
33:It is always better to try to concentrate in a centre, the centre of aspiration, one might say, the place where the flame of aspiration burns, to gather in all the energies there, at the solar plexus centre and, if possible, to obtain an attentive silence as though one wanted to listen to something extremely subtle, something that demands a complete attention, a complete concentration and a total silence. And then not to move at all. Not to think, not to stir, and make that movement of opening so as to receive all that can be received, but taking good care not to try to know what is happening while it is happening, for it one wants to understand or even to observe actively, it keeps up a sort of cerebral activity which is unfavourable to the fullness of the receptivity - to be silent, as totally silent as possible, in an attentive concentration, and then be still. If one succeeds in this, then, when everything is over, when one comes out of meditation, some time later - usually not immediately - from within the being something new emerges in the consciousness: a new understanding, a new appreciation of things, a new attitude in life - in short, a new way of being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, [where to concentrate?],#KEYS
34:the first necessity; :::
The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part and every movement to that which seems to the unregenerated sensemind so much less real than the material world and its objects. Our whole being - soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life, body - must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore. Every vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 72,#KEYS
35:[the value of sublimation:]
And since Yoga is in its essence a turning away from the ordinary material and animal life led by most men or from the more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication. On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from the powers that oppose our progress. It is the difficulty of this wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in the path of Yoga. For our entire nature and its environment, all our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth and work against the whole-heartedness of our endeavour.
In a certain sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations, - an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations. What we propose in our Yoga is nothing less than to break up the whole formation of our past and present which makes up the ordinary material and mental man and to create a new centre of vision and a new universe of activities in ourselves which shall constitute a divine humanity or a superhuman nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, [71] [T1],#KEYS
36:the vital
the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul of man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of nature. The vital part of man is a true instrument only when its feelings and tendencies have been purified by the psychic touch and governed by the spiritual light and power. The vital has three main parts:
higher vital
the mental vital and emotional vital taken together. The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest.
central vital or vital proper
dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, such as ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passion of various kinds and the field of many vital energies.
lower vital
made up of the smaller movements of human life-desire and life-reactions, it is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds, etc. The material vital is that part of the lower vital turned entirely upon physical things, full of desires and greeds and seekings for pleasure on the physical plane. ~ Integral Yoga; Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice,#KEYS
37:Karma Yoga, the Path of Works; :::
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga, 39,#KEYS
38:This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. All that we externally and superficiallyare and do is not ego but Nature. An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed. The Sadhaka in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical, "I" that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only worker in him and in all things and creatures.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 214,#KEYS
39:scope and aim of the works of sacrifice :::
Into the third and last category of the works of sacrifice can be gathered all that is directly proper to the Yoga of works; for here is its field of effectuation and major province. It covers the entire range of lifes more visible activities; under it fall the multiform energies of the Will-to-Life throwing itself outward to make the most of material existence. It is here that an ascetic or other-worldly spirituality feels an insurmountable denial of the Truth which it seeks after and is compelled to turn away from terrestrial existence, rejecting it as for ever the dark playground of an incurable Ignorance. Yet it is precisely these activities that are claimed for a spiritual conquest and divine transformation by the integral Yoga. Abandoned altogether by the more ascetic disciplines, accepted by others only as a field of temporary ordeal or a momentary, superficial and ambiguous play of the concealed spirit, this existence is fully embraced and welcomed by the integral seeker as a field of fulfilment, a field for divine works, a field of the total self-discovery of the concealed and indwelling Spirit. A discovery of the Divinity in oneself is his first object, but a total discovery too of the Divinity in the world behind the apparent denial offered by its scheme and figures and, last, a total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal; for by its descent this world and self-will be empowered to break their disguising envelopes and become divine in revealing form and manifesting process as they now are secretly in their hidden essence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 169,#KEYS
40:Received him in their deathless harmonies.
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
Beauty was there creation's native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
Dream walked along the highways of the stars;
Sweet common things turned into miracles:
Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,
Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,
Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.
All life's high visions are embodied there,
Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs
Caught by the honey-eater's darting tongue,
Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,
Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm
And liberated her immense desires.
In that paradise of perfect heart and sense
No lower note could break the endless charm
Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;
Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.
After the anguish of the soul's long strife
At length were found calm and celestial rest
And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,
Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs
In the encircling arms of Energies
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense
Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues
He met the forms that divinise the sight,
To music that can immortalise the mind
And make the heart wide as infinity
Listened, and captured the inaudible
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#KEYS
41:If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya, 293, #KEYS
42:To analyse the classes of life we have to consider two very different kinds of phenomena: the one embraced under the collective name-Inorganic chemistry-the other under the collective nameOrganic chemistry, or the chemistry of hydro-carbons. These divisions are made because of the peculiar properties of the elements chiefly involved in the second class. The properties of matter are so distributed among the elements that three of them- Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon-possess an ensemble of unique characteristics. The number of reactions in inorganic chemistry are relatively few, but in organic chemistry-in the chemistry of these three elements the number of different compounds is practically unlimited. Up to 1910, we knew of more than 79 elements of which the whole number of reactions amounted to only a few hundreds, but among the remaining three elements-Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen-the reactions were known to be practically unlimited in number and possibilities; this fact must have very far reaching consequences. As far as energies are concerned, we have to take them as nature reveals them to us. Here more than ever, mathematical thinking is essential and will help enormously. The reactions in inorganic chemistry always involve the phenomenon of heat, sometimes light, and in some instances an unusual energy is produced called electricity. Until now, the radioactive elements represent a group too insufficiently known for an enlargement here upon this subject.
The organic compounds being unlimited in number and possibilities and with their unique characteristics, represent of course, a different class of phenomena, but being, at the same time, chemical they include the basic chemical phenomena involved in all chemical reactions, but being unique in many other respects, they also have an infinitely vast field of unique characteristics. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 53,#KEYS
43:
Sweet Mother, here it is written: "There is a Yoga-Shakti lying coiled or asleep..." How can it be awakened?
I think it awakens quite naturally the moment one takes the resolution to do the yoga. If the resolution is sincere and one has an aspiration, it wakes up by itself.
In fact, it is perhaps its awakening which gives the aspiration to do yoga.
It is possible that it is a result of the Grace... or after some conversation or reading, something that has suddenly given you the idea and aspiration to know what yoga is and to practise it. Sometimes just a simple conversation with someone is enough or a passage one reads from a book; well, it awakens this Yoga-Shakti and it is this which makes you do your yoga.
One is not aware of it at first - except that something has changed in our life, a new decision is taken, a turning.
What is it, this Yoga-Shakti, Sweet Mother?
It is the energy of progress. It is the energy which makes you do the yoga, precisely, makes you progress - consciously. It is a conscious energy.
In fact, the Yoga-Shakti is the power to do yoga.
Sweet Mother, isn't it more difficult to draw the divine forces from below?
I think it is absolutely useless.
Some people think that there are more reserves of energy - I have heard this very often: a great reserve of energy - in the earth, and that if they draw this energy into themselves they will be able to do things; but it is always mixed.
The divine Presence is everywhere, that's well understood. And in fact, there is neither above nor below. What is called above and below, I think that is rather the expression of a degree of consciousness or a degree of materiality; there is the more unconscious and the less unconscious, there is what is subconscious and what is superconscious, and so we say above and below for the facility of speech.
But in fact, the idea is to draw from the energies of the earth which, when you are standing up, are under your feet, that is, below in relation to you. But these energies are always mixed, and mostly they are terribly dark.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955,#KEYS
44:The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us -- intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body-has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order. Moreover, we find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude. Our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use offer the manifestation of their forms and forces. The difficulty of our separate salvation is immensely increased by this complexity and manifold openness and subjection to tile in-streaming energies of the universe. Of all this we have to take account, to deal with it, to know what is the secret stuff of our nature and its constituent and resultant motions and to create in it all a divine centre and a true harmony and luminous order. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 1.02, #KEYS
45:root of the falsification and withdrawl of divine love :::
At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,#KEYS
46:What do we understand by the term "chance"? Chance can only be the opposite of order and harmony. There is only one true harmony and that is the supramental - the reign of Truth, the expression of the Divine Law. In the Supermind, therefore, chance has no place. But in the lower Nature the supreme Truth is obscured: hence there is an absence of that divine unity of purpose and action which alone can constitute order. Lacking this unity, the domain of lower Nature is governed by what we may call chance - that is to say, it is a field in which various conflicting forces intermix, having no single definite aim. Whatever arises out of such a rushing together of forces is a result of confusion, dissonance and falsehood - a product of chance. Chance is not merely a conception to cover our ignorance of the causes at work; it is a description of the uncertain mele ́e of the lower Nature which lacks the calm one-pointedness of the divine Truth. The world has forgotten its divine origin and become an arena of egoistic energies; but it is still possible for it to open to the Truth, call it down by its aspiration and bring about a change in the whirl of chance. What men regard as a mechanical sequence of events, owing to their own mental associations, experiences and generalisations, is really manipulated by subtle agencies each of which tries to get its own will done. The world has got so subjected to these undivine agencies that the victory of the Truth cannot be won except by fighting for it. It has no right to it: it has to gain it by disowning the falsehood and the perversion, an important part of which is the facile notion that, since all things owe their final origin to the Divine, all their immediate activities also proceed directly from it. The fact is that here in the lower Nature the Divine is veiled by a cosmic Ignorance and what takes place does not proceed directly from the divine knowledge. That everything is equally the will of God is a very convenient suggestion of the hostile influences which would have the creation stick as tightly as possible to the disorder and ugliness to which it has been reduced. So what is to be done, you ask? Well, call down the Light, open yourselves to the power of Transformation. Innumerable times the divine peace has been given to you and as often you have lost it - because something in you refuses to surrender its petty egoistic routine. If you are not always vigilant, your nature will return to its old unregenerate habits even after it has been filled with the descending Truth. It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #KEYS
47:An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But mans present nature is limited, divided, unequal, -- it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the minds one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Supermind and the Yoga of Works [279-280],#KEYS
48:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#KEYS
49:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],#KEYS
50:The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. "I see" he cries "all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and the Siddhas crying "May there be peace and weal" praise it with many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, "Declare to me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of thy workings." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita, 2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer,#KEYS
51::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#KEYS
52:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#KEYS
53:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.
Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.
Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.
Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,#KEYS
54:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:I believe in divine forces and energies. ~ richard-pryor, @wisdomtrove 2:Aggression and violence are the shadow energies of fear and impotence. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 3:We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 4:Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 5:As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 6:Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 7:Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 8:Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 9:Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 10:Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 11:Yoga is not just repetation of few postures - it is more about the exploration and discovery of the subtle energies of life. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 12:Yoga is not just repetition of few postures - it is more about the exploration and discovery of the subtle energies of life. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 13:Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 14:Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 15:Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 16:Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 17:Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 18:When we're able to resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true, there can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we CAN do. ~ fred-rogers, @wisdomtrove 19:Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 20:Your genius will shine through, and happiness will fill your life, the instant you discover your higher purpose and direct all your energies towards it. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 21:The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 22:Action is a high road to self-confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 23:Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule‚Äîand both commonly succeed, and are right. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 24:Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 25:All living things have an aura, a rapidly vibrating, invisible psychic energy field that protects them from toxic, non-physical energies that would otherwise be detrimental to them. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 26:Life wears us down. We all die here. Depending upon the way you expose yourself to energies and powers and forces will determine whether you have a lot of energy or you lose energy. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 27:An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child's energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 28:There are billions of people on earth. They are all transmitting thoughts and impressions, most of which are not directed towards enlightenment. If you are not focused, you will pick up these energies. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 29:The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 30:It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do a thing. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 31:You have to be very, very careful not to pick up too much of the lower energies, the toxic energies, because they'll make you very ill. They can kill you. They can cause cancer, debilitative diseases of all types. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 32:Change is in the air, as old patterns fall away and new energies are emerging. Consciously release what needs to be released, and welcome with a full embrace the newness you've prayed for and so richly deserve. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 33:Until a man selects a DEFINITE PURPOSE IN LIFE, he dissipates his energies and spreads his thoughts over so many subjects and in so many different directions that they lead not to power, but to indecision and weakness. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 34:Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 35:As the prana current, kundalini and different energies begin to move through you, you will feel yourself moving and rocking. Keep the body still, otherwise that energy will be lost as it expresses itself through the physical. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 36:I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds of energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 37:Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 38:In the psychic process we are trying to eliminate everyone else from our minds, their effects, their energies, their influences: "To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou cans't be false to any man." ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 39:Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the Divine inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 40:Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enmity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike. ~ adi-shankara, @wisdomtrove 41:Greed, fear, lust, hate, jealousy, these are part of reality too ... bundles of consciousness wrapped tightly, barbs on which you can injure yourself, volatile energies that serve as separations between yourself and perfect stillness. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 42:Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 43:Every living being is psychic. Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we feel vibrations and energies coming to us from other people all the time. The vast majority of the thoughts you think and the emotions you feel aren't your own. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 44:It is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 45:When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 46:It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 47:The greatest trouble with most of us is that our demands upon ourselves are so feeble, the call upon the great within of us so weak and intermittent that it makes no impression upon the creative energies; it lacks the force that transmutes desires into realities. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 48:The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 49:It's very important where you live. Because where you live, the energies make it easier or more difficult to dream. In certain places dreams are very manifest and very strong. So you should always pick a place to live that's good to dream in. One of the best places to dream is by the ocean. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 50:Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 51:Distracting ourselves from toxic comparisons, concentrating on our own internal standards, and focusing on the journey in pursuit of our dreams, rather than on the end result, will redirect our attention and energies from the ‘I’ll be happy when ____’ mentality and toward more fruitful horizons. ~ sonja-lyubomirsky, @wisdomtrove 52:Fear, anger, stubbornness, and distrust portray themselves as your rescuers. Actually, these energies only make you more closed off. Tell yourself: Nobody ever solved a situation by panicking; no one ever solved a situation by refusing to hear new answers; no one solved a situation by shutting down... ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 53:Our joy, peace and happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, and negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 54:The aim of education should not be to teach how to use human energies to improve the environment, for we are finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of education is the development of the human personality, and that in this regard education is of immediate importance for the salvation of mankind. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 55:A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 56:All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 57:Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 58:The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 59:Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion... . Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 60:In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 61:Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, family, invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgies, I don't know - Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 62:We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 63:Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us. This process doesn’t magically happen by itself. It takes energy. We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment “practice” or “meditation practice." ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 64:The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in—no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be—and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 65:In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 66:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 67:Karma is only a store of unspent energies, of unfulfilled desires and fears not understood. The store is being constantly replenished by new desires and fears. It need not be so for ever. Understand the root cause of your fears - estrangement from yourself: and of desires - the longing for the self, and your karma will dissolve like a dream. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 68:Q: How does one reach the Supreme State? M: By renouncing all lesser desires. As long as you are pleased with the lesser, you cannot have the highest. Whatever pleases you, keeps you back. Until you realise the unsatisfactoriness of everything, its transiency and limitation, and collect your energies in one great longing, even the first step is not made. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 69:Scientists tell us that we have enough technology to save our planet. . . . Yet we don't take advantage of this new technology. . . . The technological has to work hand-in-hand with the spiritual. Our spiritual life is the element that can bring about the energies of peace, calm, brotherhood, understanding, and compassion. Without that, our planet doesn't stand a chance. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 70:Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen! ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 71:No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 72:You know, by the time you reach my age, you've made plenty of mistakes if you've lived your life properly. So you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward. My fellow Americans, I have a great deal that I want to accomplish with you and for you over the next two years. And, the Lord willing, that's exactly what I intend to do. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 73:It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 74:I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 75:If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves? ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 76:Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything shall be added unto you. This is the one great duty, this is renunciation. Live for an ideal, and leave no place in the mind for anything else. Let us put forth all our energies to acquire that which never fails-our spiritual perfection. If we have true yearning for realization, we must struggle, and through struggle growth will come. We shall make mistakes, but they may be angels unawares. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 77:Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 78:I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 79:The great constructive energies of the child ... have hitherto been concealed beneath an accumulation of ideas concerning motherhood. We used to say it was the mother who formed the child; for it is she who teaches him to walk, talk, and so on. But none of this is really done by the mother. It is an achievement of the child. What the mother brings forth is the baby, but it is the baby who produces the man. Should the mother die, the baby still grows up and completes his work of making the man. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 80:Question: Presuming that the striving goes on no matter what, how can one know how to live — in relation both to human beings and one's own creative energies? Ma: A man who is after worldly things and is occupied with the business of this world gets satisfaction out of what he does, for otherwise why should he do it? He feels he is doing well, he gets praise and fame, money and position and his mind is always occupied with his affairs. If someone is opposed to him and puts obstacles in his way, he gets angry and hostile. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 81:“Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him or her which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his or her limits. ” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 82:A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 83:A lobster, when left high and dry among the rock, does not have the sense enough to work his way back to the sea, but waits for the sea to come to him. If it does not come, he remains where he is and dies, although the slightest effort would enable him to reach the waves, which are perhaps within a yard of him. The world is full of human lobsters; people stranded on the rocks of indecision and procrastination, who, instead of putting forth their own energies, are waiting for some grand billow of good fortune to set them afloat. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 84:.. is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 85:.. is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 86:Q: How can I set right a tangle which is entirely below the level of my consciousness? M: By being with yourself, the & 87:Do Opposites Repel or Attract? The people in our lives who make us uncomfortable, who annoy us, who we feel judgmental or even combative toward, reflect parts of ourselves that we reject - usually aspects of our disowned selves, the shadow side of our personality. If you are a gentle, soft-spoken person, you may be very irritated by a person who seems loud and pushy. Or if you are a direct, outspoken person you may feel uncomfortable with those who hold back and seem overly timid. The fact is that in both cases you are mirroring each other's disowned energies. The quiet person is being shown their undeveloped assertive side, and the aggressive person is being shown their undeveloped reflective side. ~ shakti-gawain, @wisdomtrove 88:Spirit, considered in terms of Universal Mind, may be thought of as (1) manifesting Ideation and Will; (2) forming ideative and creative ideas, mental images, pictures, or appearances by the exercise of Ideation and Will; (3) manifesting Law and Order, or Pure Logic, in its ideative, creative activities and manifestations; (4) manifesting its ideative, creative activities and manifestations that it may express consciousness, as otherwise it would be unconscious save only in its consciousness of its own existence; (5) manifesting constant change in its ideative and creative activities that consciousness may be maintained; (6) manifesting subconscious activities and energies, in various degrees, as well as those of actual consciousness; and (7) manifesting the activities of consciousness in order that it may express its "lifeness," for consciousness is the "lifeness" of Life. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:I believe in divine forces and energies. ~ Richard Pryor, #NFDB
2:When you meditate, you activate cosmic energies. ~ James Van Praagh, #NFDB
3:I focus my energies more so on staying original. ~ Waka Flocka Flame, #NFDB
4:On film you put all your energies into a single glance. ~ Alan Rickman, #NFDB
5:My plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies ~ C Wright Mills, #NFDB
6:If you have a dream , don't waste your energies explaining why. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
7:You express different energies at different times in your life. ~ Marisa Tomei, #NFDB
8:One of the most powerful energies you can ever experience is gratitude. ~ Joe Vitale, #NFDB
9:Magic is the projection of natural energies to produce needed effects. ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
10:Negative energies can't touch you if you are in a state of meditativeness. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
11:My energies have been drained.
Masturbating too much will do that. ~ Michelle M Pillow,#NFDB
12:I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
13:I need different people to tap into different energies for different things. ~ Nico Tortorella, #NFDB
14:There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
15:The spring which moved my energies lay far away beyond seas, in an Indian isle. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
16:The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops ~ Teju Cole, #NFDB
17:We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
18:Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
19:Gratitude conserves the vital energies of a person more than any other attitude tested. ~ Hans Selye, #NFDB
20:If you have a dream to fulfill,
don't waste your energies explaining how and why. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
21:Dad had crossed the desert of his exhaustion, had found new springs and oases of energies. ~ Ben Okri, #NFDB
22:Each person is a really a great treasure house of capacities, possibilities, energies. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
23:Love wasn’t everything. Women weren’t everything. A writer had to conserve his energies. ~ John Fante, #NFDB
24:It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies? ~ Marilyn French, #NFDB
25:If you are committed to your highest potential, existence will support you with new energies. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
26:Sleep's what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow. ~ John Cage, #NFDB
27:As breath stills our mind, our energies are free to unhook from the senses and bend inward. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
28:Everything is a poise of contrary energies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - IV, #NFDB
29:I have lived to know that the secret of happiness is never to allow your energies to stagnate. ~ Adam Clarke, #NFDB
30:Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind has built around you. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
31:There are men whose energies hardly ever carry them beyond looking for the thing they want. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
32:What we call matter is only a complex of energies which we find together in the same place. ~ Wolfgang Ostwald, #NFDB
33:I'm actually very sensitive to energies, and when people are not aligned, I can feel that. ~ Emmanuelle Chriqui, #NFDB
34:It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
35:I want to see a UN that enables a gathering of energies in which business plays its proper role. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
36:The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
37:The union of feminine and masculine energies within the individual is the basis of all creation. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
38:The whole business of marshaling ones energies becomes more and more important as one grows older. ~ Hume Cronyn, #NFDB
39:Good theatre draws the energies out of the place where it is and gives it back as joie de vivre. ~ Joan Littlewood, #NFDB
40:Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
41:The power is neutral. It cannot be divided into positive and negative energies. Power is power. ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
42:I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers. ~ John Cheever, #NFDB
43:To make progress we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
44:I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build. ~ Julia Ward Howe, #NFDB
45:Topping, like bottoming, gives us permission to explore energies that are not OK in the outside world ~ Dossie Easton, #NFDB
46:Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
47:No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
48:Simply be present with your own shifting energies and with the unpredictabilit y of life as it unfolds. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
49:When you focus on a chakra, it's very easy to bring subtle physical energies into your consciousness. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
50:Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
51:Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
52:They couldn’t prove themselves right, so they channeled their energies into proving the other side wrong. ~ Scott Meyer, #NFDB
53:Those who don't have a wife should sublimate their sexual energies with outdoor sports or long walks. ~ Samael Aun Weor, #NFDB
54:Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
55:Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
56:Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.
~ Nido Qubein,#NFDB
57:The greatest happiness comes from being vitally interested in something that excites all your energies. ~ Walter Annenberg, #NFDB
58:The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
59:What we refer to as yoga is just a technology to make your energies function by choice, not by compulsion. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
60:A once living story has prepared and made
Our present fate, child of past energies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue,#NFDB
61:No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies. After ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
62:Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
63:So that's what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
64:Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
65:Learn to take responsibility for emotions, and to manage energies, always working within present resources. ~ Lillian Russell, #NFDB
66:The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
67:We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. ~ Etty Hillesum, #NFDB
68:It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it. ~ P D James, #NFDB
69:Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
70:Are you bringing antimatter to Hearth? You play with star-fire energies as casually as you put edges on furniture! ~ Larry Niven, #NFDB
71:Colors are forces, radiant energies that affect us positively or negatively, whether we are aware of it or not. ~ Johannes Itten, #NFDB
72:Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
73:I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
74:The body's a mirror of heaven: Its energies make angels jealous. Our purity astounds seraphim. Devils shiver at our nerve. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
75:All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies. ~ Anne Carson, #NFDB
76:If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help - we need not waste our energies in his defense. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
77:Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
78:Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
79:Lust is the base of most physical ills, and like a tapeworm in the system, it feeds on our best energies and vitality. ~ James Ussher, #NFDB
80:the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically, rather than physiologically. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
81:A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims and energies. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
82:Magic is natural. It is a harmonious movement of energies to create a needed change. If you wish to practice magic, ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
83:I need to start honing in on projects that I want to devote my time to and not put my energies into the unattainable ones. ~ Dan Deacon, #NFDB
84:Yoga is not just repetation of few postures - it is more about the exploration and discovery of the subtle energies of life. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
85:Yoga is not just repetition of few postures - it is more about the exploration and discovery of the subtle energies of life. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
86:All of us have far too much to do to waste our time and energies in criticism, faultfinding, or the abuse of others. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
87:I was not a studious kid, and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies. ~ Kevin Spacey, #NFDB
88:How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose? ~ Alfie Kohn, #NFDB
89:If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty. ~ Sidney Poitier, #NFDB
90:I think that artworks are like these spiritual objects: I think that they have energies and powers beyond what the eye can see. ~ Dan Colen, #NFDB
91:Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB
92:Renunciation is transforming all negative and positive energies of life into unconditional love for every being in the universe. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
93:Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for good the energies of love. ~ Kathy Reichs, #NFDB
94:You can’t photograph anything really supernatural,” I pointed out. “The energies around things like that will mess up cameras. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
95:The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
96:The colors of an atom's spectral light encode the energies of its stationary states, providing a visible Music of the Spheres. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
97:We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears, endlessly seeking security. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
98:If you cultivate your body, your mind, your emotions, and your energies to a certain level of maturity, meditation will blossom. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
99:inner sanctuary to which the beleaguered ego repairs in time of crisis is also a world that opens onto transpersonal energies. ~ Donald Kalsched, #NFDB
100:The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
101:Chile is not a rich country in terms of gas, or oil or coal, but we are extremely rich in terms of the energies of the future. ~ Sebastian Pinera, #NFDB
102:Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
103:Your energy and your awareness are directly connected. If your energies are intense, your awareness naturally grows and sharpens. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
104:Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
105:The sexual energies returned, when they're not evolved, are still linked with violence and the fear of power - the fear of women. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
106:Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer. ~ Denis Waitley, #NFDB
107:I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence. ~ Alan Rickman, #NFDB
108:I think we close our psychic field so that we can protect ourselves from the vast and unpredictable energies of the universe. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
109:In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
110:Take care of each other. Share your energies with the group. No one must feel alone, cut off, for that is when you do not make it. ~ Willi Unsoeld, #NFDB
111:These energies when directed towards the subtle physical body cause the subtle physical body to break down, to lose its lumonisity. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
112:A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there. ~ David Gergen, #NFDB
113:With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. ~ Peter Weiss, #NFDB
114:After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin. ~ Barbara Steele, #NFDB
115:Joining the Sangha and renouncing worldly life is necessary in order to devote your whole life and all your energies toward the Dharma. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
116:They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
117:We are selling ourselves very short by funneling our energies into what the traditional perception is of academic and monetary success. ~ Gunter Pauli, #NFDB
118:Each day is a day to live and in which to keep from dying, and a man’s energies are directed out from himself and his thoughts as well. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
119:Rather than starting a new inferno in Iraq, our energies would have been better spent in extinguishing the existing fire in Palestine. ~ Iqbal Sacranie, #NFDB
120:Who would seriously want to listen to anything emanating from a quasi-chimpanzee's irrational bundle of mental accidents and energies? ~ David A Noebel, #NFDB
121:that office was my manuscript The Long Lost Hills. Love wasn’t everything. Women weren’t everything. A writer had to conserve his energies. ~ John Fante, #NFDB
122:The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
123:They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
124:Opening your chakras and allowing cosmic energies to flow through your body will ultimately refresh your spirit and empower your life. ~ Barbara Marciniak, #NFDB
125:They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
126:When the mind is silent and quiet, then inner energies wake up and work miracles on your behalf without any conscious effort on your part. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
127:Constellations of thought hard wired to the universal energies between us resonate as a familiar hum that gently vibrates to caress my soul. ~ Truth Devour, #NFDB
128:They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
129:Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
130:Each one of us needs to discover the proper balance between the masculine and feminine energies, between the active and the receptive. (104) ~ Ravi Ravindra, #NFDB
131:...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly. ~ Russell Kirk, #NFDB
132:There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted. ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
133:We have many kinds of energies in us, including the energies of anger, violence, and craving. But compassion is also a very strong energy. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
134:The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
135:Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress and thus tones the spirit just as exercise conditions the body. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
136:Okay. Fine. Just be careful, okay? Whatever. I'm going to go get a drink."
And just like that, her parental energies were expended. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB
137:We must struggle for our dreams, but when certain paths prove impossible, it would be best to save our energies in order to travel other roads. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
138:What the gods most ask of us is that we attend them-bear conscious witness to their energies, of which their forms are but their material husk. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
139:A simple tale, told at the right moment, transforms a person's life with the order its pattern brings to incoherent energies. (Myth and Education) ~ Ted Hughes, #NFDB
140:God should be as clear and transparent as a pane of glass and not go wasting his energies on creating an atmosphere of constant terror and fear. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
141:Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
142:The energies represented by the four # elements are ulitimately the fundamental realities of life that are being analysed with # astrology ~ Stephen Arroyo, #NFDB
143:In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
144:...I think it's some kind of meeting of energies that causes what we see, and that part of those energies emanate from our lifeforces, our minds. ~ Walter Mosley, #NFDB
145:Oppression does not know the meaning of provincial boundaries. Aren't our energies better spent fighting the common enemy instead of each other? ~ Benazir Bhutto, #NFDB
146:Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
147:Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
148:Carol once told me that most people put all their energies into trying to change other people when the only person you can really change is yourself, ~ J P Delaney, #NFDB
149:How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the earth were it not for misgovernment and a diversion of his energies to selfish interests. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
150:The moment you say, or , the skies will open for you and the non- physical energies begin instantly to orchestrate the manifestation of your desire. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
151:To spend the full force of our energies advancing toward a Personal Freedom—the genuine life full of vibrancy and meaning—this shall be our aim. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
152:I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
153:If we can directly address our problem and focus our energies on finding a solution, for instance, the problem can be transformed into a challenge. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
154:Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth. ~ Lynn Margulis, #NFDB
155:This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don’t really give a shit. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
156:War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it. ~ Benito Mussolini, #NFDB
157:Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
158:Your genius will shine through, and happiness will fill your life, the instant you discover your higher purpose and direct all your energies towards it. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
159:for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty. ~ Fay Weldon, #NFDB
160:Through pop music ideas, energies and resources can emerge that can help the audience release themselves from the unrelieving confinements of environment. ~ Paul Morley, #NFDB
161:To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them. ~ Warren G Bennis, #NFDB
162:WHEN A RESTLESS spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and faithfully applied. ~ Eleanor Catton, #NFDB
163:We create in people through our actions and example. In this way people around us become reflections of our own behavioral patterns and internal energies ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
164:Intelligence and the spirit of adventure can be combined to create new energies, and out of these energies may come exciting and rewarding new prospects. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
165:The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence—even distinct personalities—that live within us. ~ Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work, #NFDB
166:To be authentic is literally to be your own author... to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them. ~ Warren G Bennis, #NFDB
167:Devote your entire will power to mastering one thing at a time; do not scatter your energies, nor leave something half done to begin a new venture. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
168:The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
169:Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
170:We create in people through our actions and example. In this way people around us become reflections of our own behavioral patterns and internal energies. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
171:The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
172:Action is a high road to self-confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
173:[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
174:I have known it to be a sacred and beautiful place, hallowed by human endeavor and energies, crossed with love and the continual weave of human circumstance. ~ Mike McCormack, #NFDB
175:A wild animal that feels that it no longer has any reason to live reaches in the end a point when its remaining energies may actually be directed toward dying. ~ Richard Adams, #NFDB
176:taking the scattered and reactive energies of your mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, for problem solving, for healing. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
177:There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
178:A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
179:It's got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that's what's responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not. ~ Garry Winogrand, #NFDB
180:It was best not to spend too much time in the Corridors. Nightmares lurked there, forces and energies that the living and the dead could not quite explain. ~ Leanna Renee Hieber, #NFDB
181:Most people put all their energies into trying to change other people when the only person you can really change is yourself, and even that's incredibly difficult. ~ J P Delaney, #NFDB
182:Without being acknowledged, they are often used as batteries by their families and friends, who feel free to both use their creative energies and disparage them. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
183:The hero archetype is present in us all. It is the inherent capacity to mobilize the energies which serve life, to overthrown the demons of despair and depression. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
184:To achieve excellence, we must also consider and work with what is not apparent, with what cannot be seen. We must journey into the complex world of subtle energies. ~ Cyndi Dale, #NFDB
185:We can learn to work with them, understand them, find meaning in them, make critical choices, and use their energies to grow in strength, wisdom, and compassion. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
186:Cards! Me sit down to whist with you! Is it consistent? Who is responsible for it? Who has shattered my energies and turned them to whist? Ah, perish, Russia! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
187:The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
188:A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
189:We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
190:social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
191:The planes of light exist. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, the mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, the planes of light. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
192:If you spend your energies looking for and analysing situations not closely followed by other informed investors, your chance of finding bargains greatly increases. ~ Joel Greenblatt, #NFDB
193:I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus-that one cann apply one's fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
194:Such, then, is our God: unknowable in his essence, yet known in his energies; beyond and above all that we can think or express, yet closer to us than our own heart. ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
195:Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
196:I had to learn, really, how to rein in my energies and discipline myself. And I found it very very useful. I rebelled against it at first, but it's a good thing to have. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
197:The law of the Conservation of Energy is already known — viz., that the sum of all the energies of the universe, actual and potential, is unchangeable. ~ William John Macquorn Rankine, #NFDB
198:We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters. ~ Robert E Lee, #NFDB
199:Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
200:I don't see myself as a different guy than I was ten years ago. I don't have aspirations to be. It's really about where you're putting your energies. That's changing a lot. ~ Sean Penn, #NFDB
201:Release old concepts and energies that keep you in self-punishment patterns. Release old stories and create from a place of love and self-validation. You are worth it! ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
202:The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
203:To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made. ~ Theodore Parker, #NFDB
204:When you hear bad things about yourself, just put your energies into something else; it's no good crying about it. Just put it into your music - it'll make you stronger. ~ Janet Jackson, #NFDB
205:If white and black and red and brown can come together to focus our energies on overcoming the racial malaise that persists, then this will have been a great moment. ~ Michael Eric Dyson, #NFDB
206:Let us not consume all our energies arguing about the Word of God; let’s start using it. It will prove its divine origin by its divine power. Let’s let it loose in the world! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
207:Ronald Steel noted, “Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies. ~ Chalmers Johnson, #NFDB
208:Since our insight into the energies pressing toward development aids their unfolding, the seedlings and inceptive beginnings must be made visible and comprehensible." ~ Jean Gebser, [5/5], #NFDB
209:One of my favorite things to do is to craft and to write songs and tell stories, and another thing is to really just flip out basically, and release kind of my unruly energies. ~ Eugene Hutz, #NFDB
210:The seven Bogs of Octava.” “Seven too? One for each genre Mr. Poe?” “Now you’re catching on. The realms recyclable. The energies of characters go there after their life is over. ~ Lucian Bane, #NFDB
211:The first law of success is concentration – to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right or to the left.” (William Mathews) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
212:Listen to your inner callings, ignore how others might want to direct your life energies, and allow yourself to radiate outward what you feel so profoundly and deeply within you. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
213:Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
214:Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual. ~ Georg Simmel, #NFDB
215:Our entire precarious life is submitted to this one imperative: competition. All of our collective energies are enlisted to one goal: to fight against all others in order to survive. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
216:Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. ~ Peter Senge, #NFDB
217:Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
218:The moment you say , , or , the skies will open for you and the non- physical energies begin instantly to orchestrate the manifestation of your desire. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
219:If I didn't have children I'd be a much better actress. I wouldn't be so distracted. I could pour 100 percent of my energies into it, to promote the investigation which acting is. ~ Jessica Lange, #NFDB
220:Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
221:Over my tenure as governor, I have come not only to respect the political muscle of the Federation; I've come to respect the brains. All of us depend on your efforts and energies. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
222:Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh, #NFDB
223:The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking). ~ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, #NFDB
224:Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
225:Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
226:Our life is affected not only by its own energies but by the energies of others and by universal Forces. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #NFDB
227:All living things have an aura, a rapidly vibrating, invisible psychic energy field that protects them from toxic, non-physical energies that would otherwise be detrimental to them. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
228:Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe. ~ Robert W Service, #NFDB
229:Life wears us down. We all die here. Depending upon the way you expose yourself to energies and powers and forces will determine whether you have a lot of energy or you lose energy. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
230:One of the most important factors, not only in military matters but in life as a whole, is ... the ability to direct one's whole energies towards the fulfillment of a particular task. ~ Erwin Rommel, #NFDB
231:Avoid taking a definite stand on great public issues either in the Senate or before the people. Bend your energies towards making friends of key men in all classes of voters. ~ Quintus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
232:it is only depth of character that determines the profundity with which we face life. We can either add to our character each day, or we can fritter away our energies in distractions. ~ Ming Dao Deng, #NFDB
233:The harnessing to a rational pursuit of the immense psychic energies derived from an irrational obsession seems to be another secret of genius, at least of genius of a certain type. ~ Johannes Kepler, #NFDB
234:I actually think we need to put our energies, as entrepreneurs, as technology inventors, as government, to being much more inclusive. I think the key thing is actually working together. ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
235:Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them. ~ Sarah Churchwell, #NFDB
236:The subtle physical body is made up of strands of luminous energy, and the energies are flowing through them constantly in the etheric plane. Above the subtle body is the causal body. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
237:In order to grow stronger, we need a container for our energies. That container is best built by ongoing practice, self-observation, and learning how to connect outward from our center. ~ T Thorn Coyle, #NFDB
238:Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate. ~ Richard P Bland, #NFDB
239:The forward movement necessary to occupy enemy territory taxed the attacker’s energies and resources, while the defender was able to use this time to prepare to receive the attacker. ~ Lawrence Freedman, #NFDB
240:Magic is natural. It is a harmonious movement of energies to create needed change. If you wish to practice magic, all thoughts of it being paranormal or supernatural must be forgotten. ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
241:The Jedi Order’s homespun cloaks announced: I want for nothing, because I am clothed in the Force; the cloaks of the Sith: I am the light in the dark, the convergence of opposing energies. ~ James Luceno, #NFDB
242:Custodial education does not have as its objective the education of youth but rather social control over them. It suppresses rather than stimulates their intellectual and physical energies. ~ John Conyers, #NFDB
243:Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart. ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
244:I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do. ~ Andrew Cohen, #NFDB
245:People who are empathic definitely will have some difficulties distinguishing their own feelings from other people's feelings and they tend to take on other people's energies quite easily. ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
246:The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
247:The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
248:Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
249:I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight. ~ Venerable Bede, #NFDB
250:It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
251:It's always good I think in general to have different energies on screen, like it's nice to have different characters go at different speeds, just like different people work at different speeds. ~ Jim Carrey, #NFDB
252:The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
253:If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
254:Do not direct all your energies towards seeking pleasure but rather towards a sublime ideal. Your energies will then serve you and contribute to the realisation of your goal or ideal. ~ Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, #NFDB
255:Do not direct all your energies towards seeking pleasure but rather towards a sublime ideal. Your energies will then serve you and contribute to the realisation of your goal or ideal. ~ Omraam Mikha l A vanhov, #NFDB
256:And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities. ~ G Edward Griffin, #NFDB
257:In trying to commit my life to finding and participating in some of the purposes of Christ, as I can determine them, my energies and abilities are gradually being focused and are working together. ~ Keith Miller, #NFDB
258:Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
259:Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
260:Personal healing on all levels - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual comes when we get in touch with our disowned energies.... Through integrating all aspects of ourselves, we become whole. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
261:By learning to open your heart and body while embracing and trusting all energies, from rough ravishment to sublime gentleness, you can open to be lived by the mystery that lives the entire universe. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
262:In a universe animated by the interaction of yin (female) and yang (male) energies, the moon was literally yin visible. Indeed, it was the very germ or source of yin, and the sun was its yang counterpart. ~ Li Bai, #NFDB
263:Philanthropists should find innovations that release the energies of people. Individuals don't want to be taken care of --they need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential. (142) ~ Jacqueline Novogratz, #NFDB
264:To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
265:To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
266:Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art. ~ Alma Gluck, #NFDB
267:An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child's energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
268:Energy healing is based on the supposition that illness results from disturbances in the body's energies and energy fields and can be addressed via interventions into those energies and energy fields. ~ Jed Diamond, #NFDB
269:The war consciousness is purposely cultivated to guide the male away from the natural, healthy balances between masculine and feminine energies, and toward more unbalanced and detached psychologies. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
270:Nature is not dumb. Humanity is dumb when we can't hear or when we forget how to communicate with nature. Nature is very much alive. Intelligent living beings and vibrant energies are all over the planet. ~ Sun Bear, #NFDB
271:The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits. ~ Dinesh D Souza, #NFDB
272:Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use. ~ Rose Wilder Lane, #NFDB
273:That's what being young is all about. You have the courage and the daring to think that you can make a difference. You're not prone to measure your energies in time. You're not likely to live by equations. ~ Ruby Dee, #NFDB
274:Always be alert, never get hooked into anything negative. Many people go on studying negative things; their energies are simply wasted. There is no art of dying. Or, the art of living is the art of dying. Live! ~ Osho, #NFDB
275:Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. ~ Johann Georg Hamann, #NFDB
276:All of life is revealed to be a pulsating symphony of interplaying energies: “The mutual dependence and interpenetration of all things is observable as one leaves duality. Oneness is central to all of ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
277:For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
278:There are billions of people on earth. They are all transmitting thoughts and impressions, most of which are not directed towards enlightenment. If you are not focused, you will pick up these energies. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
279:The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
280:The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears. ~ Robert Heilbroner, #NFDB
281:...although divided in His various powers and energies, in each of His works the Holy Spirit is wholly present and active, undividedly divided, partaken of while remaining complete, like the sun's ray. ~ Gregory Palamas, #NFDB
282:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness . . . the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Brian L Weiss, #NFDB
283:The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
284:The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
285:You're composed of an aggregate of different forms and energies, the samskaras. These are lines within your own being. When you go into samadhi, these lines dissolve gradually so you become less formed. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
286:I mean “God” as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
287:It was too easy to lose focus, to scatter my energies, to fragment—perhaps (and this was the hard part) because I lacked the sense of purpose that would bind all the loose pieces of myself together. ~ Susan Wittig Albert, #NFDB
288:When you see sparkling lights with no physical origin and no medical eye issues, it means that you are seeing Angel Lights, which are the energies of your Guardian Angels and Archangels moving around you. ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
289:Creativity is the mother of all energies, nurturer of your most alive self. It charges up every part of you. When you're plugged in, a spontaneous combustion occurs that 'artists' don't have a monopoly on. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
290:My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
291:My purpose... to go on with my heart and soul, devoting all my energies to Girl Scouts, and heart and hand with them, we will make our lives and the lives of the future girls happy, healthy and holy. ~ Juliette Gordon Low, #NFDB
292:Social organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energetic input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment. ~ Daniel Katz, #NFDB
293:The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind -- these are right and proper ideals for life. ~ Michael Dirda, #NFDB
294:what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
295:This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
296:Barry was born clever enough at gaining a fortune, but incapable of keeping one. For the qualities and energies which lead a man to achieve the first are often the very cause of his ruin in the latter case. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #NFDB
297:I've come to realise that the most precious commodity in life is not money, time, or even health as such, but mental energy. We should take great care in nurturing, protecting, and directing our mental energies. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
298:Punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it. ~ Iggy Pop, #NFDB
299:The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
300:The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
301:Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
302:Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
303:Until a man selects a DEFINITE PURPOSE IN LIFE, he dissipates his energies & spreads his thoughts over so many subjects & in so many different directions that they lead not to power, but to indecision & weakness. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
304:It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do a thing. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
305:Not every man in the Senate is some kind of masterful schemer, exerting all his energies to acquire more power and influence at the expense of all others.” “No,” Isana agreed. “Some of them are incompetent schemers. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
306:The practice of imagination, on an everyday basis, involves clearing unhelpful images that block or misdirect our energies, and choosing to focus on positive, mobilizing imagery that gives us courage and confidence. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
307:Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought to terms with one`s darker side ad one`s darker energies ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
308:He wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Jacob Nordby, #NFDB
309:I care not what your education is, elaborate or nothing, what your mental calibre is, great or small, that man who concentrates all his energies of body, mind and soul in one direction is a tremendous man. ~ Thomas De Witt Talmage, #NFDB
310:Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think. ~ Michael Moorcock, #NFDB
311:The enemy is not individuals, churches, 'ex-gay' organisations or political parties; the enemy is ignorance. Change is created by focusing our energies on overcoming the latter instead of attacking the former. ~ Anthony Venn Brown, #NFDB
312:You have to be very, very careful not to pick up too much of the lower energies, the toxic energies, because they'll make you very ill. They can kill you. They can cause cancer, debilitative diseases of all types. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
313:Change is in the air, as old patterns fall away and new energies are emerging. Consciously release what needs to be released, and welcome with a full embrace the newness you've prayed for and so richly deserve. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
314:Maturity is the ability to harness your abilities and your energies and do more than is expected. The mature person refuses to settle for mediocrity. He/she would rather aim high and miss the mark than low-and make it. ~ Ann Landers, #NFDB
315:Philanthropy is loving, and ameliorative, revolutionary; it wakens lofty desires, new possibilities, achievements, and energies; ... it touches thought to spiritual issues, systematizes action, and insures success. ~ Mary Baker Eddy, #NFDB
316:90% of the stuff in your head belongs to other people!"
Learn how to return those thoughts and energies to their original owner in my new book, "My Haunted Reality" as we explore the energies and entities around us. ~ Tony Robbins,#NFDB
317:A good manager doesn't try to eliminate conflict; he tries to keep it from wasting the energies of his people. If you're the boss and your people fight you openly when they think that you are wrong - that's healthy. ~ Robert Townsend, #NFDB
318:A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. ~ William Morris, #NFDB
319:It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said, ‘The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.’ ~ E L James, #NFDB
320:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
321:I sense that the moment has come to commit all of the Church's energies to a new evangelization... No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
322:I would say a lot of the emotion in what I do is a sort of a thankfulness for those energies being around, because there's been points in my life when they weren't around, and it's a real sort of miserable existence. ~ John Frusciante, #NFDB
323:One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
324:If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”14 ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
325:The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
326:Whoever you are, you're like no one else, and you can do magick like no one else, too. Each and every one of us is a one-of-a-kind pattern of energies and essence, each with our own affinities, abilities, and purpose. ~ Melanie Marquis, #NFDB
327:As we cannot revivify myths that once moved generations, so we cannot afford the potential disasters of projecting those energies unconsciously. Through the projection of the shadow onto a Fuerher, a whole world may burn. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
328:I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next that counts most. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
329:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#NFDB
330:Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
331:Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
332:I think on some level, all of us have a little bit of belief in the possibility of different energies and forces and things like that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be afraid of them. Or there wouldn't be so many movies about them. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
333:Out of infinite longings rise
finite deeds like weak fountains,
falling back just in time and trembling.
And yet, what otherwise remains silent,
our happy energies—show themselves
in these dancing tears. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,#NFDB
334:All direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
335:I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
336:I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex! She had named and claimed her calling. Here is concentration of purpose. This declaration, as we shall see, unified her energy in extraordinary ways. ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
337:Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine. ~ M F K Fisher, #NFDB
338:Anything that you fight with or struggle against grows larger. You give power to lower energies by focusing upon them. You don't eliminate darkness by arguing with it. The only way to eliminate darkness is to turn on a light. ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
339:Until a man learns to deal with the fact that life is hard, he will spend his days chasing the wrong thing, using all his energies trying to make life comfortable, soft, nice, and that is no way for any man to spend his life. ~ John Eldredge, #NFDB
340:When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud. ~ Fatema Mernissi, #NFDB
341:As the prana current, kundalini and different energies begin to move through you, you will feel yourself moving and rocking. Keep the body still, otherwise that energy will be lost as it expresses itself through the physical. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
342:Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
343:True healing comes from owning and accepting all of life's energies within ourselves....When they are allowed to be expressed, they take their places as important facets of our nature. There is no split between 'good' and 'bad.' ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
344:When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. 13 Jan 1951 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #NFDB
345:So long as our psychic energies find an outlet in adequate & well-regulated ways, we are disturbed by nothing from within. But no sooner are one or two channels of psychic activity blocked up than phenomena of obstruction appear. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
346:Suppression means only trying to hide certain energies that are there, not allowing them to have their being, not allowing them to have their manifestation. Transformation means changing energies, moving them toward a new dimension. There ~ Osho, #NFDB
347:I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds of energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
348:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness . . . the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ~ Brian L Weiss, #NFDB
349:The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
350:We all need a friend to help remind us from time to time. If no one else is there, the sound of the bell can be that friend, reminding us to recognize and smile at our old habit energies. In that way, we can become free of them. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
351:In the psychic process we are trying to eliminate everyone else from our minds, their effects, their energies, their influences: "To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou cans't be false to any man." ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
352:tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life, one ought to be on good terms with one’s darker side and one’s darker energies. ~ Therese J Borchard, #NFDB
353:It is a struggle; for though the white man of the South may be too proud to admit it, he is, nevertheless, using in the contest his best energies; he is devoting to it the greater part of his thought and much of his endeavor. ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
354:[T]he revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. ~ Joseph J Ellis, #NFDB
355:Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
356:I am certain that the United States next year, under a new president - regardless whether it's Obama or McCain - will present an ambitious program promoting renewable energies and energy efficiency. Europe could quickly fall behind. ~ Sigmar Gabriel, #NFDB
357:In the presence of this blood banner which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God. ~ Baldur von Schirach, #NFDB
358:Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images, of the energies within us, moved by the organs of the body, in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, this organ wants this: the brain is one of the organs. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
359:Tempered, gradual animation, the methodical restrain of sensations and energies, the equilibrium of sickness and health in each creature--this is nature's essence, its immutable law, this is what it's based on and what it adheres to. ~ Ivan Turgenev, #NFDB
360:There are only two energies at the core of the human experience: love and fear. Love grants freedom, fear takes it away. Love invites full expression, fear punishes it. Love invites you, always, to break the bonds of ignorance. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
361:Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the Divine inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
362:The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
363:Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enmity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike. ~ Adi Shankara, #NFDB
364:Greed, fear, lust, hate, jealousy, these are part of reality too ... bundles of consciousness wrapped tightly, barbs on which you can injure yourself, volatile energies that serve as separations between yourself and perfect stillness. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
365:I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don’t let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
366:As we are now engaged in this contest, all my wishes, all my desires and all the energies of my hand and heart will be given to the cause of my state. Whether we have the right of secession or revolution, I want to see my state triumphant. ~ Jubal Early, #NFDB
367:If you attach yourself to gross energies - loving this person, hating that clan, rejecting one experience or habitually indulging in another - then you will lead a series of heavy, attached lives. This can go on for a very long and tedious time. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
368:The highest reputation in every department of human exertion is reserved for minds of one faculty, where no rival powers divide the empire of the soul, and where there is no variety of pursuits to distract and perplex its energies. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
369:The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world. ~ Leonard Bernstein, #NFDB
370:If you're in America a lot, it's easy to get into playing American. All of it, the sounds, the energies, all very different. But it's really hard to do the accent. I tend to try and stay in it all day, which is the only way I can manage it. ~ Emily Blunt, #NFDB
371:Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
372:Here I am, back in Mecca. I am still traveling, trying to broaden my mind, for I've seen too much of the damage narrow-mindedness can make of things, and when I return home to America, I will devote what energies I have to repairing the damage. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
373:If we spend most of our time concerned about things we cannot truly directly influence, what we can influence will be reduced. If we spend our energies on those things over which we can expect positive results, we will expand our influence. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
374:The forces, movements, and energies that today we call religious, spiritual, or faith-based have related through the ages in diverse ways to the spheres of life that today we call economic and that we see embodied in business and commerce. ~ Martin E Marty, #NFDB
375:The stranded Daoine Sidhe knights of the Dark Court gathered at the ring of ancient standing stones under the pale light of the harvest moon.
Whenever the Daoine Sidhe gathered, they raised the natural energies of the world around them. ~ Thea Harrison,#NFDB
376:What is most important is that these individual’s visions became genuinely shared among people throughout all levels of their companies—focusing the energies of thousands and creating a common identity among enormously diverse people.”12 ~ Richard P Rumelt, #NFDB
377:The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
378:All of us emanate from a source of well-being. If you do not have well-being in your life, physically or emotionally, then you have to look at what kind of energies, thoughts, and spirituality you have chosen that take you away from your source. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
379:...A thought robot activated by the tremendous energies unleashed during collisions of fundamental opposing qualities. A new fusion process powered by... 'dualites'? No. There are no dualities. Only symmetries." Final Crisis: Superman Beyond ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
380:Every living being is psychic. Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we feel vibrations and energies coming to us from other people all the time. The vast majority of the thoughts you think and the emotions you feel aren't your own. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
381:If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits. ~ Hector Hugh Munro, #NFDB
382:It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
383:Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits. ~ William James, #NFDB
384:The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
385:Mermaids are the intermediaries between the human world and the great, deep energies of grandmother ocean. They keep the song of the waters, and they call out to us, to remind us that the great ocean is our true mother and the home of all life. ~ Lucy Cavendish, #NFDB
386:Power is just using energy in a wise way to get things done. Power has been misinterpreted to mean getting my way on the backs of other people. Getting whatever I want, forgetting that there are other beings and species and energies involved. ~ Elizabeth Lesser, #NFDB
387:In the Atlantean period there were many energies being used and information and knowledge being used which were, for particular reasons of safety, withdrawn, shall we say, to prevent complete catastrophe, to prevent total destruction of your planet. ~ David Icke, #NFDB
388:delegation—either to time or to other people.… Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organizations. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
389:I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
390:It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
391:New Orleans' rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place- its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity- are likely to live on. ~ Gary Krist, #NFDB
392:Some young women confuse their self-worth with their ability to attract the attention of men, and so pour all their energies into makeup, clothing, and jewelry. If only they realized that virtue, honor, and self-respect are the marks of a true beauty. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
393:There has never been an escape from Tenebrus because escape literally is not possible." "Good to know," I said. "Now instead of wasting time trying to escape, I can devote my energies to my favorite pastime: mentally composing pornographic haiku. ~ Tim Waggoner, #NFDB
394:Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
395:To me non-violence has come to represent a panacea for all the evils that surround my people, and, therefore, I am devoting all my energies towards the establishment of a society that should be based on its principles of truth and peace. ~ Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, #NFDB
396:While Einstein’s theory of relativity may one day put Earth on the intergalactic map, it will always run a distant second to the Lord’s Prayer, whose harnessing of energies in their proper, life-giving direction surpasses even the discovery of fire. ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
397:So long as we fail to acknowledge the two complementary energies within (feminine and masculine) we cannot acknowledge them without. Their conscious differentiation both within and without is essential in order for their integration to take place. ~ Marion Woodman, #NFDB
398:I have a specific set of, I have a specific sort of negative energies to deal with that might be specific to me, but it definitely something that all artists have to deal with at one point or another. But I think for me, it's just maybe more specific. ~ Sean Lennon, #NFDB
399:The day will come when,
after harnessing the winds, the tides and graviation,
we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And on that day,
for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#NFDB
400:It would be easy to become a victim of our circumstances and continue feeling sad, scared or angry; or instead, we could choose to deal with injustice humanely and break the chains of negative thoughts and energies, and not let ourselves sink into it. ~ Erin Gruwell, #NFDB
401:While Einstein’s theory of relativity may one day put Earth on the intergalactic map, it will always run a distant second to the Lord’s Prayer, whose harnessing of energies in their proper, life-giving direction surpasses even the discovery of fire.[2] ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
402:Charles Evans Hughes, former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said: “Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry.” Yes, from dissipation of their energies—and worry because they never seem to get their work done. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
403:it is quite impossible for us men clothed about with this dense covering of flesh to understand or speak of the divine and lofty and immaterial energies of the Godhead, except by the use of images and types and symbols derived from our own life(7). ~ John of Damascus, #NFDB
404:Many people in therapy have learned that the way out of a depression is through it, asking not what I, the ego consciousness, want, but what the soul wants. Only the reorienting of conscious energies in service to other values will lift the depression. ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
405:Ultimately, all characters have some negative and positive energies. That's just how I see it. I didn't go out looking for negative characters; I went out looking for people who have a struggle and a fight to tackle. That's what interests me. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman, #NFDB
406:Be with your fear, seeing it as a bodily sensation. Think of this sensation as rooted in old energies that have been stored up. Ask that pent-up energy to flow out of your body. Assist this flow until you have released what is ready to leave right now. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
407:Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. ~ J Irwin Miller, #NFDB
408:There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe. ~ James Anthony Froude, #NFDB
409:When all your energies are brought into harmony, your body flourishes. And when your body flourishes, your soul has a soil in which it can blossom in the world. These are the ultimate reasons for energy medicine—to prepare the soil and nurture the blossom. ~ Donna Eden, #NFDB
410:Judging by opinion polls, Israel has bigger problems than me. It is among the most hated countries on the planet. It should stop acting like a lunatic state. Once it carries on like a normal country, I will be happily redirect my energies elsewhere. ~ Norman Finkelstein, #NFDB
411:Some say that that moment during sex when you both have an orgasm your auras drop, you blend your energies, yourselves together. You share so much more than just your body during sex, it’s one of the reasons you should be careful who you do it with. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
412:Thus we see that the quantisation of atomic energies into a ladder of seperate values, rather than allowing them to take on the entire continuum of possible values, lies at the heart of the life-supporting stability and uniformity of the world around us. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
413:I believe in energy like dark energies. I believe that when a family moves into a house where six murders took place, there's going to be some bad juju in that house. But then again what the hell is wrong with you to be moving in that house to begin with? ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
414:Modern depth psychology had to be invented, Jung noted, because received authorities had progressively lost their power to connect individuals, or even the tribe, to the transpersonal energies. This transition of “authority” is still going on in our era... ~ James Hollis, #NFDB
415:I love the chemistry that can be created onstage between the actors and the audience. It's molecular even, the energies that can go back and forth. I started in theater and when I first went into movies I felt that my energy was going to blow out the camera. ~ Glenn Close, #NFDB
416:Yoga is the technology of upgrading, activating, and refining these inner energies for the highest possibilities. Suddenly, your capabilities reach a level of brilliance that you never imagined possible. An accidental and limited life turns near-miraculous. But ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
417:All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started! ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
418:We can't automatically think about young women in makeup negatively. Sometimes a woman engages in these new forces and energies of beauty coming into her world. They can become tools. She's trying to express her femininity outwardly. I'm still learning too. ~ Nelly Furtado, #NFDB
419:You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over. ~ Leonard Bernstein, #NFDB
420:You only need to breathe mindfully and smile to your habit energy: “Oh, I got pulled away by that again.” When you can recognize habit energies this way, they lose their hold on you, and you’re free once again to live peacefully and happily in the present. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
421:When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
422:the end, if you dedicate your energies to detaching from struggle, giving up fear, taking right action, and practicing true patience within yourself, you will find that all the pieces of your life begin to radiate with the luminosity of whole and true health. ~ Baron Baptiste, #NFDB
423:I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull. ~ Caitlin Rose, #NFDB
424:Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
425:I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [...] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [...] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters. ~ Dick Gregory, #NFDB
426:In Germany, a gas- or coal-fired power plant that might cost $1 billion to build, but that will no longer run at full capacity because of the onslaught of renewable energies into the grid, can only pay for itself on days when there is no wind or heavy cloud cover. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
427:To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
428:Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it. ~ Russell Baker, #NFDB
429:The shift to Evolutionary-Teal structures, practices, and cultures liberates tremendous energies that previously were bottled up, unavailable. And with the shift to Teal, these energies get harnessed and directed with more clarity and wisdom toward productive ends. ~ Frederic Laloux, #NFDB
430:Our country demands all our strength, all our energies. To resist the powerful combination now forming against us will require every man at his place. If victorious, we will have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for. ~ Robert E Lee, #NFDB
431:The greatest trouble with most of us is that our demands upon ourselves are so feeble, the call upon the great within of us so weak and intermittent that it makes no impression upon the creative energies; it lacks the force that transmutes desires into realities. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
432:Until I was about eighteen, yes [I didn't want to get married]. But not because I felt like a suffragette, but because I wanted to devote all my energies to the struggle to free India. Marriage, I thought, would have distracted me from the duties I'd imposed on myself. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
433:No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
434:Deepen you knowledge of Jesus which ends loneliness, overcomes sadness and uncertainty, gives real meaning to life, curbs passions, exalts ideals, expands energies in charity, brings light into decisive choices. Let Christ be for you the Way, the Truth, and the Life. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
435:Dexter's a unique killer in that his father saw his dark impulses, shined a light on them, and told Dexter that he saw them, he accepted them, that Dexter is good and that he is worthy of love. And I think that's what enables him to focus his energies in this unique way. ~ Michael C Hall, #NFDB
436:If your body goes in search of a relationship, we call this sexuality. If your mind goes in search of relationships, we call this companionship. If your emotion goes in search of relationships, we call this love. If your energies go in search of relationship, we call this yoga. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
437:Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn't end after a year, that's a false fantasy. It usually ends when people realize that they can live again, that they can concentrate their energies on their lives as a whole, and not on their hurt, and guilt and pain. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross, #NFDB
438:The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy. ~ Hunter S Thompson, #NFDB
439:With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom. ~ Alan Rickman, #NFDB
440:The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
441:And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that's the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integrating and laying people off. ~ Kevin B Rollins, #NFDB
442:The point here is simply that it is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don’t know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing this makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
443:Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
444:Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
445:If one develops good habits and routines, it is possible to be a responsible educator most of the time; and to marshal the special energies and reflection for those times, when the correct course of action is not clear, or when one is weighing one wrong against another wrong. ~ Howard Gardner, #NFDB
446:...if we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
447:If you're blaming something or someone else for the way you are, then that person, those people, those circumstances or those energies, are going to have to change in order for you to get better; that's most likely never going to happen. It's also a way to manipulate other people. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
448:The technology of making this happen was what was known as tantric methods. That is, learning to use your body, your mind, and your energies just as instruments of life, so that you become available to a much higher possibility, an intelligence which is way beyond human capabilities. ~ Sadguru, #NFDB
449:work at what you are for rather than what you are against. If you’re against violence and hatred, you’ll fight it with your own brand of violence and hatred. If you’re for love and peace, you’ll bring those energies to the presence of violence, and ultimately dissolve the hatred. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
450:The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
451:see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which gain have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
452:I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
453:What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation...Our task at this critical moment is to awaken the energies needed to create the new world and to evoke a universal communion of all parts of life. ~ Thomas Berry, #NFDB
454:The past's sterile science led to nothing but the exhaustion of the planet and the destruction of its races. It was founded in the mere desire to exploit the gross energies and material substances of the universe, without regard to their attractions, antipathies, and eventual destinies. ~ Gene Wolfe, #NFDB
455:Every day, think as you wake up, ‘Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’ —DALAI LAMA ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
456:The joy of life consists in the exercise of ones energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
~ Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autobiography,#NFDB
457:25 Wherefore, I, Nephi, did exhort them to give heed unto the word of the Lord; yea, I did exhort them with all the energies of my soul, and with all the faculty which I possessed, that they would give heed to the word of God and remember to keep his commandments always in all things. ~ Joseph Smith Jr, #NFDB
458:Every day, think as you wake up, ‘Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’
—DALAI LAMA ~ Hal Elrod,#NFDB
459:or The Last Exorcism, I researched a lot of real exorcisms. I watched videos of exorcisms, I listened to tapes, and I read actual accounts of priests' logs. I also looked at a lot of the physicality. I would look into fits of hysteria and look at energies of people in manic, hysteric fits. ~ Ashley Bell, #NFDB
460:Some powers come more easily to others, but Matthew rocks at reading energies.”
“What?” I set my fork back down. “Our biology teacher is an alien? Holy crap…all I can think of is that movie The Faculty.” Dee choked on her orange juice. “We don’t snatch bodies.”
I hoped not. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
461:She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of ‘the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left’. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
462:Archangel Michael, please sever and release any cords of fear. I am willing to let go of this unhealthy, unbalanced energy. I choose instead to align myself with love and light. I ask you to remove any negative energies from my body. Please release all effects of these cords now. Thank you. ~ Robert Reeves, #NFDB
463:Kama (Desire)
Delight and laughter walking hand in hand
Go with Me, and I play with grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Kama
Kama (Desire)
All energies put into activity—thought, speech, feeling, act—go to constitute Karma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Karma and Heredity,#NFDB
464:Millions of men give all their energies, as well as their very souls, for the acquisition of gold. And this will continue as long as society is ignorant enough and hypocritical enough to hold in high esteem the man of wealth without the slightest regard to the character of the man. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
465:No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation's heart and leaves to Ireland not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream. ~ Daniel O Connell, #NFDB
466:It is only the depth of character that determines the profundity with which we face life. We can either add to our character each day or we can fritter away our energies in distractions. Those who learn how to accumulate character each day achieve a depth that cannot be successfully opposed. ~ Ming Dao Deng, #NFDB
467:It's very important where you live. Because where you live, the energies make it easier or more difficult to dream. In certain places dreams are very manifest and very strong. So you should always pick a place to live that's good to dream in. One of the best places to dream is by the ocean. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
468:Because they are human beings, addicts long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God. Like all idolatries, addiction taps this vital spiritual force and draws off its energies to objects and processes that drain the addict instead of fulfilling him. ~ Cornelius Plantinga, #NFDB
469:...they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes. ...If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
470:What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
471:Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), French novelist, essayist, and critic. He devoted much of his life to writing his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Its central theme is the recovery of the lost past and the releasing of its creative energies through the stimulation of unconscious memory. ~ Erin McKean, #NFDB
472:To manage our emotions is not to drug them or suppress them, but to understand them so that we can intelligently direct our emotional energies and intentions.... It's time for human beings to grow up emotionally, to mature into emotionally managed and responsible citizens. No magic pill will do it. ~ Doc Childre, #NFDB
473:Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
474:Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
475:Fear, anger, stubbornness, and distrust portray themselves as your rescuers. Actually these energies only make you more closed off. Tell yourself: Nobody ever solved a situation by panicking; no one ever solved a situation by refusing to hear new answers; no one solved a situation by shutting down. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
476:Let one concentrate all his energies in one single great effort, let him perceive a single truth, even though he be consumed by the sacred fire, then millions of less gifted men can easily follow. Therefore it is not as much quantity as quality of work which determines the magnitude of the progress. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
477:Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
478:Sometimes, it’s difficult to know if it’s your own feelings or someone else’s. Indigos also feel bombarded with painfully negative energy whenever a world tragedy occurs. Whether it’s shock, anger, or sadness over the event, the Indigo feels it deeply. Not only do Indigos feel all of these energies, ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
479:Getting to know the feel of both emotional energies, fear and courage, will enable you to choose courage more consciously. You don't want fear's energy running rampant in your beautiful self, even if you know its root. Whenever you're afraid, invoke courage to transform fear, the formula for freedom. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
480:Our joy, peace and happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, and negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
481:I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
482:I would like to see whoever is our next president dedicate a significant part of their inaugural address to this challenge. We have to ignite the nation's energies and passions on this to make this happen. I think we do need the same kind of inspiration we had from Kennedy in his inaugural address in 1961. ~ Jay Inslee, #NFDB
483:I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
484:There are at bottom but two possible religions — that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe. ~ James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. Calvinism, p. 20, #NFDB
485:Expressing thankfulness in advance is the way of all Masters. So do not wait for a thing to happen and then give thanks. Give thanks before it happens, and watch energies swirl! To thank God before something occurs is an act of extraordinary faith. And that, of course, is where the power comes from. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
486:We must pay close attention to the signals our body sends - the aches and pains, digestions and indigestions, increased energies and exhaustions. Our body sends us signals about the correct 'spelling' of our lives. These sensations are the sum of complex inner computations that we must learn to interpret. ~ Susan Collins, #NFDB
487:Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
488:He drew attention to the vast amount of money (£194 million in banks and £14 million post office deposits) ‘lying idle in banks’, the huge capital outflows and forecast ‘with scope for our energies, with restoration of confidence, the inevitable tendency will be towards a return of this capital to Ireland ~ Tim Pat Coogan, #NFDB
489:He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. ~ John Williams, #NFDB
490:Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
491:Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drug use will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combating other forms of crime. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
492:But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart’s energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
493:While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
494:As President, I'll invest in renewable energies like wind power, solar power, and the next generation of homegrown biofuels. That's how America is going to free itself from our dependence on foreign oil not through short-term gimmicks, but through a real, long-term commitment to transform our energy sector. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
495:At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
496:Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?..."I will do my best with what is here. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
497:If more of those who had set themselves to explain God’s ways through the years had devoted a greater portion of their energies to obey what He has told them to do rather than theorize concerning His work, the world would doubtless be much further along toward its ultimate salvation than it presently is. ~ Michael R Phillips, #NFDB
498:I love Osho. I don't know if you would call him a philosopher; I would just call him a really cool dude. Osho really changed my life. Because the way that he spoke about emotion and the male and female energies in the world and how people react to the world around them, it's so simple, yet it has such a depth. ~ Willow Smith, #NFDB
499:The aim of education should not be to teach how to use human energies to improve the environment, for we are finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of education is the development of the human personality, and that in this regard education is of immediate importance for the salvation of mankind. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
500:He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
501:Another way to strengthen connection to intuition is to refuse to allow anyone to repress your vivid energies... that means your opinions, your thoughts, your ideas, your values, your morals, your ideals. There is very little right/wrong or good/bad in this world. There is, however, use and not useful. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Est s, #NFDB
502:A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
503:I don’t subscribe to luck or chance, Miss Steele. The harder I work the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said ‘the growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. ~ E L James, #NFDB
504:Right now, however, we're in the middle of a jobs crisis, a border crisis and a terrorism crisis like never before. All energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focused on immigration security. That is the only conversation we should be having at this time, immigration security. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
505:Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
506:What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within.
-This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play. ~ Nuala O Faolain,#NFDB
507:I don’t subscribe to luck or chance, Miss Steele. The harder I work the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said, ‘The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. ~ E L James, #NFDB
508:Let yourself be loved, O Beloved, in the One. And from this One move out into the world, carrying within you the great potent energies of life to green your world, to create planets, suns, stars, stones, waves, oceans, to create new forms of life and expression - whether a friendship, a feeling or a new form of vocation. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
509:the lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
510:At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn't anticipated about the 'home office' was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new calling (worrying about money, which substituted neatly for earning it) and not stuffing his face. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
511:Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
512:If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.” “What’s the crime?” “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
513:Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion.... Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
514:Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden. ~ Margaret Sanger, #NFDB
515:If we want to make progress in key areas now, we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies. So not only the politicians but also business, the wider civil society, and the trade union movement all have a contribution to make, whether it is at national or at international level. ~ Mary Robinson, #NFDB
516:The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
517:Find your myth. As Joseph Campbell observed, "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.' A myth we requicken in our minds and our lives brings creative juice, for every living myth "bears within it, undamaged, the seed power of its source. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
518:In the present state of the world, it is evident that the control we have gained of physical energies, heat, light, electricity, etc., without having first secured control of our use of ourselves is a perilous affair. Without the control of our use of ourselves, our use of other things is blind; it may lead to anything. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
519:She’s made up her mind about missing him, like she’s made up her mind about giving up her course. She won’t let herself despair about things she can’t have, and doesn’t waste her energies longing for things like I do. She thinks before she feels, Ma, you know she does. I expect she does sort of miss Ed, in her way. ~ Joanna Trollope, #NFDB
520:What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #NFDB
521:All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among them. The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
522:A miasma of the hate and fear which had fueled the desperation permeated the air and enveloped the lone machine. Caressing the scorched outside, the haze seeped into the ruined surface. The zeal of Thimonnier’s devotion warred with the malignant energies of its persecutors, leaving their imprint in the wood and metal. ~ Stuart Conover, #NFDB
523:But when you make action the cornerstone of your Creative Process without considering the vibrational basis of your Being as you are taking the action, you are working under a distinct handicap, for there simply is not enough power in the action itself to compensate for the competing Energies of your misaligned thought. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
524:It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
525:Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture. ~ Christopher Ryan, #NFDB
526:People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. ~ J P Morgan, #NFDB
527:the desperate need to get back to normal housing and other living conditions stimulated increased efforts. But this does not mean that property destruction is an advantage to the person whose property has been destroyed. No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
528:There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. ~ Saki, #NFDB
529:A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your
mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does
self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and
steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles
without any effort on your part ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj,#NFDB
530:One's worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures they will not succeed as individuals. ~ William A Henry III, #NFDB
531:The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
532:the law is this: That everything entering subjective consciousness will impress itself there and become a pattern for the creative energies of the mind. These energies will proceed to create thoughts and conditions just like the impression formed, which will carry their own conditions to every part of the human system. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
533:Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness...we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, #NFDB
534:If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
535:If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
536:I'll force myself to sit down and read a couple of chapters of a great book or I'll force myself to sit and listen to some amazing music or I'll go see a play. I find that watching or experiencing other forms of art gets my brain in action. It makes me feel connected to the creative energies and then that tends to get things going. ~ Dan Mangan, #NFDB
537:'Nature is conquered by obedience' - and her resistless energies are at our bidding, as soon as we, by knowledge, work with them and not against them. We can choose out of her boundless stores the forces that serve our purpose in momentum, in direction, and so on, and their very invariability becomes the guarantee of our success. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
538:Positive energy is your priceless life force. Protect it. Don't allow people to draw from your reserves; select friends who recharge your energies . . . I'm not asking you to cut people out of your life, but I am asking you to invest your time with people who will push you to be your best. Winners love to see other people win. ~ Chalene Johnson, #NFDB
539:The present dominant values (xenophilia, cosmopolitanism, narcissistic individualism, humanitarianism, bourgeois economism, hedonism, homophilia, permissivenes, etc.) are actually anti-values - values of devirilising weakness, since they deplete a civilization's vital energies and weaken its defensive or affirmative capacities. ~ Guillaume Faye, #NFDB
540:What undermines my heart is the devouring force which lies hidden in the universe of nature and which creates nothing that does not destroy its neighbour and itself. And so I reel in fear, the energies of heaven and earth weaving around me. And all I see is an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster. 21 ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
541:Globally, you're seeing a big, big trend towards large installations of renewable energies across the world. You are going to see huge installations of wind and solar in places like Africa. These things are going to happen no matter what. They're going to happen for largely non-policy free market reasons even in the United States. ~ Chris Mooney, #NFDB
542:In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
543:When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
544:Often, during combat, the warrior of light receives blows that he was not expecting. And he realizes that, during a war, his enemy is bound to win some of the battles. When this happens, the warrior of light weeps bitter tears and rests in order to recover his energies a little. But he immediately resumes the battle for his dreams. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
545:This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured! ~ Richard Wright, #NFDB
546:The cards do not predict the future. All thy can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer....We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path. ~ Ruth Ware, #NFDB
547:The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
548:I settled deeper into the pillow and tried to relax. It was hard when I knew I was about to be flooded with memories of a life I hadn’t lived yet. Really, two lives I hadn’t lived yet. It would only seem like five minutes to Laila, but to me it would feel like a month. I concentrated on the energies around me, and everything went hazy. ~ Kasie West, #NFDB
549:The next chapter is about belonging: the essential need we have to be and to share with others. The human heart is a place of freedom. We can be obliged to follow the law but not to love, because “true love casts out fear.” Our society grows in justice and peace as we allow energies of love and concern for all to rise up in ourselves. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
550:What is fascinating about a place like Los Angeles airport is that it is lots and lots of people, many of whom have saved up all their lives and channeled all of their energies toward coming to the promised land of abundance and plenty - the American Dream. But as soon as they arrive here they get a crash course in the American reality. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
551:By being with yourself, the 'I am', by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface, and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
552:He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
553:Often, people with a Scarcity Mentality harbor secret hopes that others might suffer misfortune—not terrible misfortune, but acceptable misfortune that would keep them “in their place.” They’re always comparing, always competing. They give their energies to possessing things or other people in order to increase their sense of worth. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
554:The effort to put down Christian Science by law is one of the craziest enterprises upon which medical men waste their energies. It is based upon a superstition even sillier than that behind Christian Science itself: to wit, the superstition that, when an evil shows itself, all that is needed to dispose of it is to pass a law against it. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
555:There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. ~ Hector Hugh Munro, #NFDB
556:The United Nations has long recognised that the imagination, ideals and energies of young men and women are vital for the continuing development of the societies in which they live. And since its inception in 1948, AIESEC has contributed to this development by serving as an agent of positive change trough education and cultural exchange. ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
557:A free people, forgetting that it has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly. ~ Albert Pike, #NFDB
558:Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
559:Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul. ~ William Wilberforce, #NFDB
560:If we practice meditation, we can generate the energies of mindfulness and concentration. These energies will lead us to the insight that there is no birth and no death. We can truly remove our fear of death. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. Non-fear is the ultimate joy. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
561:t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
562:We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
563:Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, family, invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgies, I don't know - Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
564:A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
565:Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right. the United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.It's history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
566:Practicing meditation, we can generate the energies of mindfulness and concentration. These energies will lead us back to the insight that nothing is really born or dies. We can truly remove our fear of death. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. Nonfear is the ultimate joy. If ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
567:Theurgy is ritual magic - but magic that enacts the will of God, not of the magician. It brings divine energies down to earth, elevating and spiritualizing the world of matter, including the very being and substance of the participants. Each time the believer takes part with attention and devotion, he or she becomes more attuned to God. ~ Richard Smoley, #NFDB
568:My message, my key, my golden key to transform your energies, is creativity. Be more and more creative, and slowly slowly you will see a transformation happening of its own accord. Your mind will disappear, your body will have a totally different feel to it, and constantly you will remain aware that you are separate, that you are a pure witness. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
569:Nothing is ever born out of fear. Love gives birth, love is creative; fear is impotent. It has never created anything. It cannot create anything because it has no substance. But it can destroy your whole life, it can surround you like a dark cloud, it can exploit all of your energies. It will not allow you to move into any deep experience of beauty. ~ Osho, #NFDB
570:When desirous of a life change, or any kind of a change, it’s wiser to start from a place of, “I am who I am today, where I am today, because this was my choice and it has served me well. However, it no longer serves me. My choices have changed, and I give thanks for the amazing transformational energies that now sweep through my amazing life. ~ Mike Dooley, #NFDB
571:An exuberant temperature by no means leads inevitably, or even usually, to shallowness, but the potential is there. Subtleties and sustained thought can be lost in a swirl of vivacious moods and energies, just as monomaniacal enthusiasm can limit awareness of and sensitivity to the perspective, needs, and contributions of other people. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
572:It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
573:These are necessary, though painful, side effects of choosing to place your fucks elsewhere, in a place far more important and more worthy of your energies. As you reassess your values, you will be met with internal and external resistance along the way. More than anything, you will feel uncertain; you will wonder if what you’re doing is wrong. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
574:I hate to lose, and if anybody gets used to losing they are going to be a loser. I'd like to tell you losing is part of the game, and it is, but I hated it. I still hate to lose. And that will never change. By the way, just because I turned the page and poured all my energies into business does not mean that I don't miss organized sports. I do. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
575:Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
576:There are always advantages to having reached a certain time in one's life. I am most pleased that I did not come to politics until I was thirty, an age when a man finds his peace physically and sexually, and thus can focus all his energies on his actual goals, without his time and steel forever being purloined by the impulses of physical love. ~ Timur Vermes, #NFDB
577:As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
578:From birth to death you go on living, groping in darkness with no light - and you could have created the light. You cannot find it in the scriptures; nobody can hand it to you. It is not purchased or sold; it is nontransferable. But you can create it - you can put all your energies together. You can start living consciously from this very moment. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
579:It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It’s how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It’s how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It’s the language we use. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
580:The supreme torture was to come. He discovered that it required the united energies of the three men to coax him into his coat. When at last it was on he assured them it would split across the shoulders if her so much as moved a finger.
"Forget it, little fool!"
"Forget it?" cried Philip." How can I forget it when it prevents my moving? ~ Georgette Heyer,#NFDB
581:We need to help others in order to make ourselves happy and create a better world. When we are only taking from the world and not giving anything in return, we are creating an imbalance in our spiritual energies. If we develop the habit of giving back to the world as much as we are taking from it, we feed our souls and lead a more vibrant life. ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
582:Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
583:When you are ready, guidance will come. Rely on the people who are in your life now; face your dark energies as honestly as you can; respect your boundaries and those of everyone around you. As you peel back each layer of the onion, the teacher who can lead you on will show up, almost miraculously matching the very moment when guidance is needed. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
584:How energy changes energy depends upon the energies that are interacting. It is all about which energies are mixing. This is the best news you could ever receive, because this is something you can control. You cannot totally control the energies outside of you, but you can totally control the energy within you—and that is where the power is. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
585:What we experience in our childhoods that comes to seem normal, or even inevitable, is that if you are placed in a hierarchy, you probably are immediately anxious about going further down and you're striving to go further up, so your energies get placed into becoming "more than," or at least not becoming "less than," instead of becoming "part of." ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
586:Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India had begun aligning themselves closer to al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was the very reason why Raymond Davis and a CIA team had set up operations from a safe house in the city. ~ Mark Mazzetti, #NFDB
587:It’s necessary that everyone does his duty and works in his place - devotes himself to constructing a body of fundamental values - against the common enemy - in a network of active, supple, inderdependent, and confederated resistance - present on every front, at the level of Europe - with the aim of concentrating all the energies of the combatants. ~ Guillaume Faye, #NFDB
588:The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in—no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be—and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
589:Often, conducting a dialogue with inner “opponents”—usually forms of the immature masculine energies—will defuse much of their power. What they—like all children—really want is to be noticed, honored, and taken seriously. And they have a right to be. Once they are honored, and their feelings validated, they no longer need to act out through our lives. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
590:Since we have been out of balance so heavily towards the male, it is going to be the feminine energy which will now move into a place of enormous influence and enormous impact, as that energy creates a confluence of all the energies surrounding our experience of deities, of the Tao of God, and our expression of that experience in our daily lives. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
591:The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
592:The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today. ~ Thorstein Veblen, #NFDB
593:Your atom, I think it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore. That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and those rarely get lost. ~ Elif Batuman, #NFDB
594:Let Today Be The Day You Give Up Who You’ve Been For Who You Can Become Every day, think as you wake up, ‘Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’ —DALAI LAMA ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
595:The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today. ~ Thorstein Veblen, #NFDB
596:These are moments when the intense enlightened energies of the Sages, as consciousness, reach each of us in ease.
My purpose is to be the joyful instrument that can uplift humanity to amazing possibilities of consciousness. Imagine a million Mahatma Gandhis, Rumis and Einsteins! This is a possibility in our times. We are the realities of this consciousness. ~ Nandhiji,#NFDB
597:We have in us a divine spark that you can see. It's a Light that shines in the human being. It's our direct access to truth, our direct access to God. The purpose of all the spiritual practices that exist are to awaken that sparkto give it life, to give it energy, so that it can transform you. One of the energies that comes from that spark is Love. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, #NFDB
598:There are surely other worlds than this - other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude - other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies? ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
599:Meditation consists of generating three kinds of energy: mindfulness, concentration, and insight. These three energies give us power to nourish happiness and take care of our suffering. Suffering may be there. But with the energy of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, we can embrace and take care of that suffering and nourish happiness at the same time. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
600:one can let go of the egoistic illusion that spiritual progress is difficult and that one has to do it all alone. On the contrary, illusions of lack disappear and powerful energies now help to sustain one’s progress, which is now accompanied by the pleasure of increased self-esteem, and the world magically begins to appear to be a friendly and helpful place. ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
601:In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
602:The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
603:becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they become very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking: pleasantness within and without ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
604:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
605:The meditative person can transform his sexuality without any antagonism. without any conflict. He is in deep friendship with all his energies, sexual or others; he is not in any fight. Why fight with your own energies? Love them, rejoice in them, and help them to transcend the lower forms, the animal forms. Let them move from the body towards the turiya, the fourth. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
606:The different sensory stimuli to which man reacts — tactual, visual, gustatory, auditory, and olfactory — are produced by vibratory variations in electrons and protons. The vibrations in turn are regulated by prana, “lifetrons,” subtle life forces or finer-than-atomic energies intelligently charged with the five distinctive sensory idea-substances. Gandha ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
607:Why do you suppose they made you king in the first place?' I ask him. 'Not for your benefit, but for theirs. They meant you to devote your energies to making their lives more comfortable, and protecting them from injustice. So your job is to see that they're all right, not that you are - just as a shepherd's job, strictly speaking, is to feed his sheep, not himself. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
608:I don't like getting hit for one, although you know I did take Aikido for many years, but Aikido is a different kind of martial art, maybe even a more cerebral art because it's all about redirecting the energies of your opponent instead of trying to bash your opponent's head in effectively, so it's a much more loving art, so I guess I tend that way normally anyway. ~ Maurice Ashley, #NFDB
609:Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty. ~ Shirley Hazzard, #NFDB
610:Scientists tell us that we have enough technology to save our planet. . . . Yet we don't take advantage of this new technology. . . . The technological has to work hand-in-hand with the spiritual. Our spiritual life is the element that can bring about the energies of peace, calm, brotherhood, understanding, and compassion. Without that, our planet doesn't stand a chance. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
611:Think about every single person who has ever harmed you, cheated you, defrauded you, or said unkind things about you. Your experience of them is nothing more than a thought that you carry around with you. These thoughts of resentment, anger, and hatred represent slow, debilitating energies that will disempower you. If you could release them, you would know more peace. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
612:I think there came a time - probably when I was about 13 - when I started to struggle with an increasing volume of schoolwork and the demands from my golfing schedule and aspirations. I'm not sure if the decision to leave school was very clear in my mind then but I did know that in the juggling between the two, my energies were most definitely in the golfing direction. ~ Rory McIlroy, #NFDB
613:Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions. We must transmit our intelligence, travel, transport the materials and transfer the energies necessary for our existence. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
614:People need to learn how to respond to each other's hatreds with love - which is what Jesus taught us, which is what Buddha came here to teach us, which is what Muhammad taught us, which is what all of the great spiritual masters who have ever walked among us who live at those highest energies taught us - responding to force with more force will just create more problems. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
615:The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
616:Warfare is light. Warfare and conflict are the energies with which this world functions. To claim otherwise is to claim your very veins are not filled with blood, to claim that your heart is still and silent. You knew this once. Once in the hills of this country you understood that to wage war was to be alive, to shed blood was to bask in the light of the sun. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett, #NFDB
617:The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
618:They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
619:There are 60 million generators in Nigeria. The generator owners and distributors have a strong incentive to not encourage the distribution of solar and other alternative energies, even though it's better for the country, it's better for people. As a world, we've got to get more serious about confronting those obstacles. This knows no culture, no race, no ethnicity. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz, #NFDB
620:There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
621:The sun's rays have vision and give us vision. However, it is the birds' eyes and the two invisible angels by your side that record everything. Nothing goes unnoticed throughout the universe. Wherever there is a vibration, there are eyes and ears. Some energies don't need ears or vision to see or hear, they can feel what is in your heart and tap into all your sins and fears. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
622:To each living thing the Mother gave a temporary form that would eventually dissolve, back once more into the infinite churning a cauldron of potential, where matters and energies are constantly exchanger and recombined. She made the world an image of that uterine cauldron, so that every life form sustains itself by absorbing, decomposing , and assimilating other forms. ~ Barbara G Walker, #NFDB
623:Where those two energies [male and female energies] intersect, all creativity is possible. We already have divine creative energy within us. And what is the most powerful of these energies? The energy that patriarchy and misogyny constantly try to repress. The divine female sexual energy. The creative energy of the female. That is why I worship divine sexual female energy. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
624:Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
625:The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
626:Whether this mysterious sanctuary hidden amid Pemako’s mist-shrouded mountains can ever be located geographically is of secondary importance to the journey itself. In the Buddhist tradition, the goal of pilgrimage is not so much to reach a particular destination as to awaken within oneself the qualities and energies of the sacred site, which ultimately lie within our own minds. ~ Ian Baker, #NFDB
627:Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering. ~ Nick Flynn, #NFDB
628:In the scales of the gigantic balance-pan in Nijinsky’s brain, the world’s misery bulked heavy on one side. But the other? First, there was dancing, the rhythmic, violent Dionysian upsurge of the vital energies; while he could dance regularly, every day, and restore contact with the vital, instinctive parts of his own being, Nijinsky could not go insane. Sanity lay in creation. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
629:Receiving and giving are opposite energies that are inextricably linked together in the natural flow of life, like inhaling and exhaling. If one aspect of that cycle doesn't function, the entire cycle ceases to function and the life force cannot move freely. If you can't inhale, you will soon have nothing to exhale, and before long, your body will be unable to continue living. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
630:If you do drink, surround yourself with loving individuals. Your weakened aura loses strength as negativity from others attaches itself to you. You may feel emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, depression, or hate. Clearly, clubs, pubs, and bars are not good places. They’re filled with lower energies and earthbound spirits who are trying to continue their addictive behaviors. ~ Robert Reeves, #NFDB
631:We need to consider ancestral cleansing. If we're willing to clear our energy fields of the ancestral energies we don't want, then we are ready to do something really interesting and beautiful which is to claim a connection with the wisdom of the kinds of ancestors we do want to be in contact with. But we can't do this until we've cleaned out the lower stuff that is hindering us. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
632:The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
633:Those who do surya namaskars regularly find that their batteries last longer, with less need for recharge or replenishment. Additionally, the surya namaskar aids the balance or reorganization of inner energies, in terms of right and left, or lunar and solar dimensions. This produces an innate physical and psychological equilibrium that can be an enormous asset in one’s daily life. As ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
634:Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
635:Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen! ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
636:A man who is morally clean, other things being equal, has in every instance, greater agility, greater capacity, and greater endurance by far than the man who is not. While the latter is wasting his creative energies in useless pleasures, as well as in disease producing habits, the former is turning all of his creative energy into ability and genius, and the result is evident. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
637:Most people think they need to say “thank you” to the world. But the world is constantly saying “thank you” to you for being alive, for creating new things, new energies, new experiences. Every day give the world at least one more reason to whisper “thank you” to you. If you can hear that whisper, everything else, every gift in life, becomes expected. You earned it. Just take it. ~ James Altucher, #NFDB
638:No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
639:If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
640:On a psychic level, we could be carrying energies and entities and cravings and habits and confusion and patterns of behavior from generation to generation that we don't want. We could also have picked up loose energies or entities from places we visit or live, and this could be very confusing. It could reinforce or even produce addictions and cravings that don't really belong to us. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
641:The crisis we are experiencing is unique in history. It is a world which must burst out of a crucible in which so many different energies are working. Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems... it is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre. All men have the imperative duty to remember that they have a mission to fulfill, that of doing the impossible. ~ Pope Pius XII, #NFDB
642:You know, by the time you reach my age, you've made plenty of mistakes if you've lived your life properly. So you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward. My fellow Americans, I have a great deal that I want to accomplish with you and for you over the next two years. And, the Lord willing, that's exactly what I intend to do. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
643:Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus. So ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
644:Never let your love for your profession overshadow your religious feeling. Depend on it that religion will strengthen, not weaken, your energies, and will not only make you a better sailor, but a superior man. Professional studies are not to be neglected; but, on the other hand, take care how you fall into the common error of believing they are the remedy for all the ills of life. ~ Benjamin Haydon, #NFDB
645:To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: “Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a laborer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
646:In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt--a wind to freeze; Sad patience--joyous energies; Humility--yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity--reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel--Art. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
647:One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
648:The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."
Joseph Campbell, 1991, The Power of Myth, pp.68-69 ~ Joseph Campbell,#NFDB
649:But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
650:Earning Money Is Moral “For better or worse, humans are holistic. Even the human body does best when its spiritual and physical sides are synchronized… People’s bodies perform best when their brains are on board with the program… Helping your mind to believe what you do is good, noble, and worthwhile in itself helps to fuel your energies and propel your efforts.” — Rabbi Daniel Lapin ~ Benjamin P Hardy, #NFDB
651:I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in the machinery of civilized life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work? ~ William Allingham, #NFDB
652:Inspiration is not inside of us. Inspiration comes from outside. It comes from our spiritual guides and from different energies that are in the universe. If we keep in touch with god and our spiritual guides, just knowing that they exist and they are there for us, gives us the strength to say well this is a bad phase but it's going to end and when it ends I'm going to do something good. ~ Airto Moreira, #NFDB
653:Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy. ~ Frederick Salomon Perls, #NFDB
654:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. (...) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
655:I have met countless patients who told me that they “are” bipolar or borderline or that they “have” PTSD, as if they had been sentenced to remain in an underground dungeon for the rest of their lives, like the Count of Monte Cristo. None of these diagnoses takes into account the unusual talents that many of our patients develop or the creative energies they have mustered to survive. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
656:We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provisions for the days to come, and everything turns out differently, quite differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries. ~ Etty Hillesum, #NFDB
657:Can you then respond to the moon? You can. Your body and life energies certainly do. When entire oceans rise in response to the cycles of the moon, do you think the water content in your own system doesn’t rise as well? Maybe you aren’t an astronaut; maybe you can never walk on the moon. But you can respond to the moon. In fact, you already do. You can just choose to do it—willingly, consciously. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
658:When San Pedro begins to affect your consciousness, it first feels as though a subtle wave of change occurs, and can best be described as a vibration of sunlight penetrating your energetic field. The medicine’s spiritual correspondence relates to masculine energies, the energy of the sun, and (in my personal experience) serves as a vehicle for remembering light through a presence of warmth. ~ Jennifer Sodini, #NFDB
659:Considering all the different ways in which China has interacted with the world in the last 50 years, considering all the challenges ordinary Chinese people have to put up with, it's beneficial and, and, by any rational standard, non-threatening to have national energies channeled into this kind of competition. It's touching to see so many ordinary Chinese crowds cheering for their new heroes. ~ James Fallows, #NFDB
660:I think that the first responsibility of an artist is to follow truth, and the innate original forces and energies that are within them. At the same time, I also think, collectively, that there has to be a place for artists to reflect and deal with the society they're living in. I think that great art inevitably reflects some of the drama and trauma and conflicts that exist in the outer world. ~ Tony Shafrazi, #NFDB
661:The strange thing is that the moment people start looking at you less is when you start being able to see through people more. You get better at understanding what people mean and how it can be different from what they say. Finally the phrase “actions speak louder than words” starts to make sense. You can read people’s energies better, and this hopefully means you get stuck talking to less duds. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
662:A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
663:Can you imagine," he went on to say, "what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions. ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
664:People have been trying to destroy fear, trying to destroy anger, trying to destroy sexuality, trying to destroy greed, this and that. The whole world has been working to destroy your energies, and what is the result? Man has become a mess. Nothing is destroyed, all is still there; only things have become confused. There is no need to destroy anything because nothing can be destroyed in the first place. ~ Osho, #NFDB
665:The degree to which my family members wish me to be separate from the life of the city is matched only by my desire to know that life. The danfo, carrier of the masses, is the perfect symbol of our contest. The energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—converge at the bus stops. There is no better place to make an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home. ~ Teju Cole, #NFDB
666:It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics. ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
667:I need some advice I can use."
"Advice? Don't use your energies fretting. The morning is wiser than the night, my ducky. The train will be back in the station by dawn. If it's not, you're welcome to starve with the rest of us. But don't worry. If it gets too much for you, just outside this cottage is a convenient well. A more efficient method to drown yourself is hard to find. Splish splash. ~ Gregory Maguire,#NFDB
668:It seems to me that we spend most of our spiritual energies trying to explain why the God of Elijah, Samson, David, and Paul seems to have lost His muscle in our modern age. Did He grow tired of performing heroics? Did He wax feeble after all these years of running this whole universal show? Could it be true that God has really lost His muscle? Maybe it would be more accurate to say God lost His men. ~ Eric Ludy, #NFDB
669:I mean “God” as Jane Kenyon described God: “I am food on the prisoner’s plate . . . / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden . . . / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge.” I mean “God” as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
670:Danny Boyle has been a huge, has had a huge effect on me. His movies, early movies like Trainspotting and those movies. So I've always loved the energies of those movies. But also, that they are very focused on the characters. Cause it's not only gimmickery, it's not only about visuals. You feel a real need, a love for the main characters. So that's what I've always loved about watching movies myself. ~ Fredrik Bond, #NFDB
671:I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
672:Look deeply at your anger, as you would look at your own child. Don’t reject it or hate it. The point of meditation is not to turn yourself into a battlefield, one side opposing the other. Conscious breathing soothes and calms the anger, and mindfulness penetrates it. Anger is just an energy, and all energies can be transformed. Meditation is the art of using one kind of energy to transform another. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
673:The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.03, #NFDB
674:We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, #NFDB
675:When I make films I'm very intuitive; I'm instinctive. When you are shooting there's little time to think about abstract ideas, it's about getting things done, getting them right, and trying to channel the energies and get the best of whatever you have on your set. It's only once the film is finished that it's like, "Okay, let's try to figure out what happened." Try to figure out exactly what I did. ~ Olivier Assayas, #NFDB
676:When we look deeply and honestly at our own suffering, energies, and views, we find a peace that comes from being comfortable in our own bodies. But our true home is not only inside us. Once we have become comfortable in ourselves, then we can begin listening deeply to the suffering of our loved ones, and begin understanding their experiences and views. Then we can become a true home for each other. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
677:For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations? ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
678:If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
679:There's a limit to the power of a spring, no matter how tightly one winds it.'
'Oh, yes. Yes. And you hope that if you wind a spring one way, all its energies will unwind the other way. And sometimes you have to wind the spring as tight as it will go,' said Vetinari, 'and pray it doesn't break.'
His expression changed.
'Oh dear,' he said. 'He didn't thump the wall. I may have gone too far. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
680:A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
681:Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
682:I am Shiva-this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Hea ven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
683:The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. Practicing conscious breathing, aware of each thought and each act, we are reborn, fully alive, in the present moment. We needn’t abandon our hope entirely, but unless we channel our energies toward being aware of what is going on in the present moment, we might not discover the peace and happiness that are available right now. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
684:Instead of developing the child's own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
685:Self-love grows when you trust that the universe is on your side, form your desires from the heart and watch the higher Self carry them out, believe that you are enough in and of yourself, heed the tenderness and sweetness of your love for others, put your attention on positive energies in every situation, honor your own needs without having to seek outside approval, and cultivate the peace of inner silence. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
686:But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart’s energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. I can’t be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
687:the leader releases energy, unites energies, and all with the object not only of carrying out a purpose, but of creating further and larger purposes. And I do not mean here by larger purposes mergers or more branches; I speak of larger in the qualitative rather than the quantitative sense. I mean purposes which will include more of those fundamental values for which most of us agree we are really living. ~ Mary Parker Follett, #NFDB
688:the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another? ~ Lisa Halliday, #NFDB
689:On those days Lucinda kept as much as she could out of Sir Griffin’s way, and almost snapped at the baronet when he spoke to her. Sir Griffin swore to himself that he wasn’t going to be treated that way. He’d have her, by George! There are men in whose love a good deal of hatred is mixed; — who love as the huntsman loves the fox, towards the killing of which he intends to use all his energies and intellects. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
690:The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. ~ William James, #NFDB
691:I am thoroughly convinced that there are people who cross our paths every day that do nothing but discourage us and make us lose focus on the big picture of what God has called us to do. If we allow them, they will steal our joy, our enthusiasm, and our calling. When you come across people like that, give them no time or opportunity. God is the source of our joy, and we must spend our energies focused on Him alone. ~ Ron Lambros, #NFDB
692:If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ⎯ is it not the age of Revolution; when
the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
693:Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
694:My young friends, I look forward to you as the real makers of Pakistan, do not be exploited and do not be misled. Create amongst yourselves complete unity and solidarity. Set an example of what youth can do. Your main occupation should be in fairness to yourself, to your parents, in fairness to the State, to devote your attention to your studies. If you fritter away your energies now, you will always regret. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
695:Our physical senses and our embodied brains allow us to perceive only a small fraction of reality. We cannot see microbes or untraviolet light, for example. We can hear only a small range of sounds. When we try to describe the otherworld of energies and spirits, we are limited not only by our bodily constraints but by the expectations, assumptions, and language patterns ingrained in us by the culture we were raised in. ~ Starhawk, #NFDB
696:We're never quite so powerful as we feel, in this free state," she whispered in the rushing wind. "Because our usual bodies are left behind, and our moving mind complexes can draw only upon the chance energies that they happen to grasp from the atoms of the air or other substances we possess, by the linkage of probability. All our power lies in that control of probability, and we must strike where it will serve. ~ Jack Williamson, #NFDB
697:I believe that prayer focuses our human thoughts and energies, sends them to the people we're praying for. I believe that helps, in ways we can't yet understand. I believe that God hears our prayers, and cherishes them. I believe He answers by sending us His spirit, giving us strength, and peace, and insight. I don't think he responds by turning away bullets and curing cancer. Though sometimes that happens. ~ Julia Spencer Fleming, #NFDB
698:Demons frighten us because we set ourselves up to be frightened. We are overly attached to our reputations and possessions. When we love and desire what we should be rejecting, we are in conflict with our true selves. That's when the negative energies catch us and use our weapons against us. Instead of taking up what we have to defend ourselves, we put our swords in the hands of our enemies and make them attack us. ~ Teresa Giudice, #NFDB
699:I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
700:We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction. There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concert of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our own ungoverned, undirected energies and do many things, but nothing long. It is our duty to find ourselves. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
701:All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind.
This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind. ~ Jane Hirshfield,#NFDB
702:Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
703:The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy... The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
704:It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization.
Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies. ~ Andrew Sullivan,#NFDB
705:But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don't possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It's as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed. ~ Thomas M Disch, #NFDB
706:Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
707:Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
708:There is a natural rhythm to the active and receptive energies within us. At times our energy is strong and outgoing - it is time to pursue our goals, take risks, get things accomplished. At other times, our energy is quiet and sensitive, and we need to take time to nurture ourselves, relax, and just 'be' for a while. As we trust and follow this rhythm, we attract everything we need and create everything we truly desire. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
709:We do, then, most solemnly before God and the world declare that regardless of every consequence, at the risk of every distress, the arms we have been compelled to assume we will use with perseverance, exerting to their utmost energies all those powers which our Creator hath given us to preserve that liberty which he committed to us in sacred deposit and to protect from every hostile hand our lives and our properties. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
710:The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it. If those assertions sound familiar, that’s because I used them to ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
711:Each day we go to our work in the hope of discovering,—in the hope that some one, no matter who, may find a solution of one of the pending great problems,—and each succeeding day we return to our task with renewed ardor; and even if we are unsuccessful, our work has not been in vain, for in these strivings, in these efforts, we have found hours of untold pleasure, and we have directed our energies to the benefit of mankind. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
712:We have weathered the worst storms and the safety of the shore, though distant, is in sight. We can look to the future with robust confidence provided we do not relax and fritter away our energies in internal dissensions. There never was greater need for discipline and unity in our ranks. It is only with united effort and faith in our destiny that we shall be able to translate the Pakistan of our dreams into reality. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, #NFDB
713:If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves? ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
714:Low states are a like a poison to the psyche. Millions of people throughout the world take tranquillizers each day to combat depression, but this does not tackle its root cause, which is found in the basic state of the internal energies of the psyche.
Basically the energy of the psyche needs to change, from low states to spiritual ones. It requires inner observation, the destruction of the egos, and alchemical transformation. ~ Belsebuub,#NFDB
715:When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
716:Imagination can do miraculous things. If you have enough control over your life energies and can empower your imagination, it will become a reality. There are many yogis who live in their own worlds with their own kind of planets, earth, everything. They live in a cave, but they have used their imagination and their life energies to create a whole new dimension of life. He lives there happily. A universe is contained inside the cave. ~ Sadguru, #NFDB
717:Anybody who does not know how to manage his own body, his own mind, his own emotion and his energies, if he is managing outside situations, he is only managing them by accident, not by intent the way he wants it. When you manage situations by accident, you exist as an accident. When you exist as an accident, you are a potential calamity. When you exist as a potential calamity, being anxious all the time becomes a natural part of life. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
718:Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
719:Men seized of the urge to have a knowledge of God and to be pure in mind devote all their gathered energies to this one task. While they still live in the corruption of the flesh they give themselves to that service in which they will persevere when the corruption has been laid aside. And already they come in sight of what the Lord and Savior held out when He said, 'Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God' (Mt. 5:8). ~ John Cassian, #NFDB
720:Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations. ~ Steve Allen, #NFDB
721:I know, that since life is our most precious gift, and as far as we can be absolutely certain, it's given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity, and ignorance, and in our last moments we can say: 'All my life, all my conscious energies, have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit - beginning with my own'. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
722:The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
723:Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted. ~ Lewis H Lapham, #NFDB
724:Factfulness and the Fact-Based Worldview This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people’s ways of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive activities. In my previous battles I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic lecturing style, and a Swedish ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
725:As Heinz Pagels has said, The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
726:Some women tend naturally to be Warriors and Seekers, and some men to be Caregivers and Lovers in spite of their cultural conditioning. The point is for both to take their journeys in such a way as to find their own way to be male or female, and eventually to achieve a positive kind of androgyny, which is not at all about unisex, neutered behavior, but is about gaining the gifts both gender energies and experiences have to offer us. ~ Carol S Pearson, #NFDB
727:Divine creator, father, mother, son as one . . . If I, my family, relatives, and ancestors have offended you, your family, relatives, and ancestors in thoughts, words, deeds, and actions from the beginning of our creation to the present, we ask your forgiveness. . . . Let this cleanse, purify, release, cut all the negative memories, blocks, energies, and vibrations and transmute these unwanted energies to pure light. . . . And it is done. ~ Joe Vitale, #NFDB
728:All things are permeated and maintained in being by the uncreated energies of God, and so all things are a theophany that mediates his presence (pp. 21-23). At the heart of each thing is its inner principle or logos, implanted within it by the Creator Logos; and so through the logoi we enter into communion with the Logos (p. 33). God is above and beyond all things, yet as Creator he is also within all things—“panentheism”, not pantheism ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
729:Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
730:You!’ said the old man contemptuously. ‘What do you know of the time when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read and read, hour after hour, and night after night, till their reason wandered beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were exhausted; till morning’s light brought no freshness or health to them; and they sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies to their dry old books? ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
731:All pictorial form begins with the point that sets itself in motion… The point moves … and the line comes into being—the first dimension. If the line shifts to form a plane, we obtain a two-dimensional element. In the movement from plane to spaces, the clash of planes gives rise to body (three-dimensional) … A summary of the kinetic energies which move the point into a line, the line into a plane, and the plane into a spatial dimension. ~ Francis D K Ching, #NFDB
732:As Heinz Pagels has said,
The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuels the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion. ~ Michio Kaku,#NFDB
733:Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
734:People sometimes focus on the red button hot topic issues and I'm, like, you know, who cares about priestly celibacy? I'm thinking about how am I forgiving my enemies? How am I turning the other cheek? How am I loving my neighbor as myself? To me that's 10,000 times more difficult than to say should priests be married or not be married? I'm, like, I think we're wasting all out energies on the wrong thing. Let's work on the most difficult stuff. ~ Lino Rulli, #NFDB
735:Leannán sídhe meant “fairy lover,” but they were anything but. That kind were a sort of psychic vampire, similar to succubi. Their magic caused humans to fall madly and deeply in love with them, at which point the leannán sídhe would drain their life energies bit by bit, until their lover withered away and died of seemingly natural causes. In some cases, they’d even abandon their lovers out of spite, just to see them die of grief and loneliness. ~ M D Massey, #NFDB
736:Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything shall be added unto you. This is the one great duty, this is renunciation. Live for an ideal, and leave no place in the mind for anything else. Let us put forth all our energies to acquire that which never fails-our spiritual perfection. If we have true yearning for realization, we must struggle, and through struggle growth will come. We shall make mistakes, but they may be angels unawares. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
737:We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect... Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
738:Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization - the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
739:In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is. ~ Robert Musil, #NFDB
740:Only when a person begins to experience a dimension beyond the physical within himself, then he can play with the physical world whichever way he wants, he can do the best that he can do in the outside world, but the interiority is undisturbed. If your body, if your mind, if your emotions, if your energies are not functioning the way you want them to, then this is the worst kind of slavery, because somebody else decides what should happen within you. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
741:We can sense subtle energy, which is called shakti or prana in Eastern healing traditions, and we absorb this energy into our own bodies. Highly sensitive people don’t typically do that. This capacity allows us to experience the energies around us in extremely deep ways. Since everything is made of subtle energy, including emotions and physical sensations, we energetically internalize the feelings, pain, and various physical sensations of others. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
742:But our energies are directed far more toward war. Hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the species or the planet, the nations prepare for death. And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much. But what we do not consider we are unlikely to put right.
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
743:When you make sex to a person, woman or man, you think it unites you. For a moment it gives you the illusion of unity, and then a vast division suddenly comes in. That's why after every sex act, a frustration, a depression sets in. One feels that one is so far away from the beloved. Sex divides, and when love goes deeper and deeper and unites more and more, there is no need for sex. Your inner energies can meet without sex, and you live in such a unity. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
744:Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
745:not until he has recognized and organized his own energies as social energies (and we shall presently see the exact meaning of these terms), i.e., when the political form and power (the state) no longer exist outside him, above him—not until then is human (as distinguished from political) emancipation achieved. The road leading to freedom is full of obstacles and accidents, especially the political emancipations that are mistaken for true liberations. ~ Henri Lefebvre, #NFDB
746:Eclipses tend to be strong and last for several seasons. Those were particularly ominous because there were two of them, both in unfortunate locations. The occultation will direct those energies on the conscious and subconscious level promoting power grabs as well as mass deception and illusions. When a celestial event only occurs every thousands years or so it usually means something significant, usually a new cycle, and in this case potentially violent. ~ Marcha A Fox, #NFDB
747:Wilson argued that “the wealth of America” lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. “Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago,” he asserted; “it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin, #NFDB
748:Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,' people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and 'he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.' Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
749:The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will: standing back, as it were, from the vague and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it: can discern too, if you be at all inclined to mystical adventure, the stages of the road along which you must pass on your way towards harmony with the Real. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
750:If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
751:In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
752:The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
753:If we deny the wishes of the soul, then soul will become disgusted and withdraw vital energy from our lives. We'll become prone to illness and misfortune. Following the secret wishes of the soul, on the other hand, can return us to the natural path of our energies and restore vitality, good health and good fortune. The process can begin right away, in a round of dream- sharing, when we make room to move with the energy of a dream instead of just talking about it. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
754:When we’re still young, many of us are determined to be different from our parents. We say we’ll never make our children suffer. But when we grow up we tend to behave just like our parents, and we make others suffer because, like our ancestors, we don’t know how to handle the energies we’ve inherited. We’ve received many positive and negative seeds from our parents and ancestors. They transmitted their habit to us because they didn’t know how to transform it. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
755:What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
756:For we have every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the bygone, and so change the aspect of the coming time that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims and energies. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
757:When man penetrates the mysteries of Nature, the "facts of Nature" become transparent symbols, revealing the "divine energies" and the "angelic" state which fallen man has lost, and which he may recover only for a moment, as when he is enraptured by the beauty of music or of a lovely face. At such moments man forgets his limited self, his individualistic dream, and participates in the cosmic dream, thus becoming freed from the prison of his own carnal soul. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
758:For we have every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the by-gone, and so change the aspect of the coming time that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims and energies. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
759:No man need fear that by making himself rational he will make his life dull. On the contrary, since rationality consists in the main of internal harmony, the man who achieves it is freer in his contemplation of the world and in the use of his energies to achieve external purposes that is the man who is perpetually hampered by inward conflicts. Nothing is so dull as to be encased in self, nothing so exhilarating as to have attention and energy directed outwards. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
760:Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. ~ Susan Cain, #NFDB
761:I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness. ~ Pankaj Mishra, #NFDB
762:For we have everyone one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the bygone, and so change the aspect of the coming time, that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims and energies. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
763:Hamra Dom, in Upper Egypt. Instead of telling the local authorities –as the law demanded –they decided to sell them singly in the market for antiquities, thus avoiding attracting the government’s attention. The boys’ mother, fearing ‘negative energies’, burned several of the newly discovered papyruses. The following year, for reasons history does not record, the brothers quarrelled. Attributing this quarrel to those supposed ‘negative energies’, the mother handed over ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
764:It is important to understand that most people have narcissistic pathology, so this is not to dismiss Jung. We all have narcissistic problems. Someone has suggested that we need a “Humans Anonymous Twelve Step Program,” to help everyday people deal with their residual narcissistic pathology, and I agree. It's another way of saying that we need a more practical approach to our spirituality if we are to be effective in containing and channeling our grandiose energies. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
765:In fact, as we have seen, every subatomic particle in your body is responding in a limitless way to the great dance of energies that is the cosmos. The only reason you are not experiencing the life process in all its majesty and profundity is your current state of mental resistance. Your psychological structure is a stone wall. If you are willing, every moment of your life can be a fantastic experience. Just the act of inhaling and exhaling can be a tremendous love affair. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
766:You can open to God through sex. By learning to open your heart and body while embracing and trusting all energies from rough ravishment to sublime gentleness, you can open to be lived by the mystery that lives the entire universe. You can open to be lived by love with no limits, so you are alive as love, offering the deepest gifts of your heart spontaneously and without hesitation, in every moment, at work, with your family and friends, as well as in bed with your lover. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
767:It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth-this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
768:Because God is a mystery beyond our understanding, we shall never know his essence or inner being, either in this life or in the Age to come. If we knew the divine essence, it would follow that we knew God in the same way as he knows himself; and this we cannot ever do, since he is Creator and we are created. But, while God's inner essence is for ever beyond our comprehension, his energies, grace, life and power fill the whole universe, and are directly accessible to us. ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
769:[...] it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. ~ John Williams, #NFDB
770:It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. ~ William James, #NFDB
771:Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
772:He who prohibited the making of a graven image would never himself have made an image in the likeness of holy things [i.e., by creating an image of them here on earth]. Nor is there at all any composite thing or creature endowed with sensation [made by God here on earth] like those in heaven. But the face is a symbol of the rational soul, the wings are the lofty ministers and energies of powers right and left, and the voice is delightful glory in endless contemplation. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
773:And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my design! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me, against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born, I was countermining them. ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
774:Mevr. Cadzand feared for her son who, with his responsive nature, as sensitive as a hothouse plant, was more exposed. Fortunately religion is a means of protection, of diverting energies into other channels. Hans's mother was glad that they had cultivated his piety at the college and that she herself, with altars in the month of Mary, novenas, candles lit, rosaries recited and pilgrimages made, had further developed this faith, which keeps men safe through the fear of Hell. ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
775:The person suffering from depression feels guilty because s/he is unable to compete and to win, in an environment saturated with incitements to act, to mobilize energies. A violent break from the thread of depressive paralysis can sometimes seem to be the only way out – an action separated from reflection, an action that does not imply any future, a visible sign of existence, of mobilization, of energy. A violent acting out, as disconnected from a conscious elaboration: just do it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
776:If you can remain indifferent to other’s opinions by thinking they are merely joining letters from the alphabet and offering you a garland, majority of your reactions will disappear. This can only be done with a certain sense of mindfulness as well as stillness of the energies in the body. When your energies are still, others can’t provoke you and if they can’t provoke you, you get the time to think through and choose your verbal and mental responses – both internal and external. The ~ Om Swami, #NFDB
777:In America, we hurry-which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges! ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
778:Presumably there are energies, to which each human is sensitive, that we cannot yet detect by means of our instruments. Built into our brains and our bodies are very sensitive tuneable receivers for energies that we do not yet know about in our science but that each one of us can detect under the proper circumstances and the proper state of mind. We can tune our nervous systems and bodies to receive these energies. We can also tune our brains and bodies to transmit these energies. ~ John C Lilly, #NFDB
779:The moment I realized that I wasn't actually responsible for other’s well-being, I felt completely liberated and my whole perception of responsibility and helping others was changed. There's this great saying that goes, ‘You can lead the horse to the river but you can't force it to drink.’ I always keep this in mind now because I don't want to waste my energies trying to help people who aren't willing to help themselves. This has been one of the most important lessons of my life. ~ Aletheia Luna, #NFDB
780:By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it. ~ Etty Hillesum, #NFDB
781:The moon changes each night but she does so in an understandable rhythm. And just as the tides ebb and flow and the moon waxes and wanes, our bodies’ hormones ebb and flow and our energies wax and wane. Our bodies are more like the rivers than like the rocks, more like the oceans than like machines. The more we can respect the cycles and changes and needs of our bodies, the more we can move with the flow of our lives.
In other words, swear by the moon. Or, trust your body. ~ Golda Poretsky,#NFDB
782:Stone tape theory is almost the same as imprint theory. It says that certain natural materials can act like tape recordings and store the energies of the living. According to this theory, an event, usually one that involves a great deal of emotion, can somehow be captured in the stonework surrounding it and then replay like a tape recording in the future. The circumstances of release are usually inconsistent, meaning the stone lets go of the event at certain times and to certain people ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
783:... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing; or, like the uncultivated soil, brings forth thorns and thistles. Again, continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system become worn out with toil and fatigue; nature herself becomes almost exhausted, and we care but little whether we live or die. ~ Maria W Stewart, #NFDB
784:This is the human predicament. Events have happened and we continue to hold their energy inside of us by resisting them. Now, when we face today’s events, we are neither prepared to receive them nor capable of digesting them. This is because we’re still struggling with past energies. Over time, the energies can build up to the point that a person becomes so blocked that they either blow up or shut down completely. This is what it means to get stressed-out or even totally burned-out. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
785:With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
786:But the main trouble with human beings is their tendency to become trapped in the ‘triviality of everydayness’ (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase), in the suffocating world of their personal preoccupations. And every time they do this, they forget the immense world of broader significance that stretches around them. And since man needs a sense of meaning to release his hidden energies, this forgetfulness pushes him deeper into depression and boredom, the sense that nothing is worth the effort. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
787:When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature - when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all. ~ Michael Faraday, #NFDB
788:Habit energy is there in all of us in the form of seeds transmitted from our ancestors, our grandparents, and our parents, as well as seeds created by the difficulties we ourselves have experienced. Often we’re unaware of these energies operating in us. We may want to be in a committed relationship but our habit energies can color our perceptions, direct our behaviors, and make our lives difficult. With mindfulness, we can become aware of the habit energy that has been passed down to us. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
789:Like many British towns, Eastleigh has closed its factories and workshops, and instead is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops. Some of the empty shops, according to signs in their windows, were in the process of being converted into coffee shops, and many of the coffee shops, judging by their level of custom, looked as if they weren’t far from becoming empty shops again. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
790:If your body, if your mind, if your emotions, if your energies are not functioning the way you want them to, then this is the worst kind of slavery, because somebody else decides what should happen within you. If somebody else decides what should happen around you, that itself you call as slavery. But if someone decides what should happen within you, is it not a more horrible way of being a slave? But please see, the whole world is in this slavery. The only consolation is everybody is like this. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
791:One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
792:moment you see the energy getting imbalanced inside, the moment you see the heart starting to tense and get defensive, you just stop. What exactly does it mean “to stop”? It’s something you do inside. It’s called letting go. When you let go, you are falling behind the energy that is trying to pull you into it. Your energies inside have power. They are very strong, and they draw your awareness into them. If a hammer falls on your toe, all your awareness will focus there. If there’s a sudden ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
793:An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment. And yet the bigger and apparently more successful an organization gets to be, the more will inside events tend to engage the interests, the energies, and the abilities of the executive to the exclusion of his real tasks and his real effectiveness in the outside. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
794:Every inanimate object—every home, building, piece of furniture, and article of clothing—carries traces of the “energy” of the animate beings to which it has been exposed. The “energies” of those who made the object, who sold it, and those who previously owned it are impregnated into the spiritual fabric (spiritual body) of everything that exists. The spiritual body of the incarnate human being interacts with the spiritual energy field of its surroundings, both in terms of people and places. ~ Draja Mickaharic, #NFDB
795:Factfulness and the Fact-Based Worldview This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people’s ways of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive activities. In my previous battles I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic lecturing style, and a Swedish bayonet. It wasn’t enough. But I hope that this book will be. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
796:Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB
797:I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
798:Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
799:My energies knew no bounds and I became more and more interested in civic causes, the first of which was The Tailwaggers. It was an organization that cared for abandoned and lost dogs. Its English progenitor had been started by the Duke of Windsor—now married to the lady at King’s Bench. A lifelong dog lover, I became president of the group and during my tenure of office we trained dogs for the blind. The work became infinitely satisfying and accomplished a twofold purpose. In order to raise money, ~ Bette Davis, #NFDB
800:The great constructive energies of the child ... have hitherto been concealed beneath an accumulation of ideas concerning motherhood. We used to say it was the mother who formed the child; for it is she who teaches him to walk, talk, and so on. But none of this is really done by the mother. It is an achievement of the child. What the mother brings forth is the baby, but it is the baby who produces the man. Should the mother die, the baby still grows up and completes his work of making the man. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
801:I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
802:Yoga tells us there are a few fundamental ways. If you employ your physical body to reach this ultimate union, we call this karma yoga, or the yoga of action. If you employ your intelligence to reach your ultimate nature, we call this gnana yoga, the yoga of intelligence. If you employ your emotions to reach your ultimate nature, we call this bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. And if you use your energies to reach the supreme experience, we call this kriya yoga, the yoga of transforming energies. Every ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
803:All the real money in investment will have to be made as most of it has been in the past not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
804:God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get—when our will strains after a path we may not follow—we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste—and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
805:Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. ~ William James, #NFDB
806:Ultimately, no amount of opposition could stifle Tesla’s creative powers. Enthused by his discoveries with X-rays, he devoted his energies to the realm of high-frequency electricity. Two decades earlier, James Clerk Maxwell had proven mathematically that light was electromagnetic radiation—electricity that was vibrating at an extremely high frequency. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz had confirmed that an electric spark emits electromagnetic waves. Tesla knew that this unexplored territory would yield astounding ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
807:Discrimination is a quality that is always hidden in a person. Don’t you see that an insane person possesses hands and feet but lacks discrimination? Discrimination is a subtle essence within you.
Yet, day and night you have been occupied with nurturing the physical form that does not know right from wrong. Why have you devoted all your energies to looking after the physical, entirely neglecting that subtle essence? The physical exists through that essence, but that essence in no way depends on the physical. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
808:Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment bioloical or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
809:[I]t is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. [...] [G]etting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to ans impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
810:Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits. ~ William James, #NFDB
811:When I observe people channeling, I see a real difference in their energy fields as they shift out of what they call their "intuitive" selves —which I see as a harmonizing and smoothing of their energies —and into the guides' space, pulling information and a boost of energy from somewhere outside of themselves. When I talk to people and point out to them when I see the shift, they can usually identify a change at the same time in their physical sensations, in their thoughts, or in the messages they are receiving. ~ Sanaya Roman, #NFDB
812:Imperishable moments and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed and the earth tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for the moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. ~ Arthur Balfour, #NFDB
813:Just in this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe—comfort. In America, we hurry—which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe. When ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
814:The expressive coherence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy between our all-too-human selves and our socialized selves. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subjects to ups or downs. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogenous performance at every appointed time. ~ Erving Goffman, #NFDB
815:To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
816:for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee. Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
817:Strip away all the assumptions about what competition is supposed to do, all the claims in its behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively. What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment (MEGA). One person succeeds only if another does not. From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose--and fearing that they will make us lose? ~ Alfie Kohn, #NFDB
818:By being with yourself…by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
819:They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organized to enrich a small group of businesses and their owners. The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort—and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterized by frenetic production and consumption— ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
820:I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
821:Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
822:The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
823:The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around -everything- we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, "I am -all- of the above." If we can't embrace the whole of who we are--embrace it with transformative love--we'll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world's complex mix of shadow and light. ~ Parker J Palmer, #NFDB
824:I examined into the mysteries of the science which has arisen in these later days to give the lie to the wisdom of the past, to reduce into the simplicity of problems the intricacies of political knowledge, to teach us the fallacy of the system which had governed by restriction, and imagined that the happiness of nations depended upon the perpetual interference of its rulers, and to prove to us that the only unerring policy of art is to leave a free and unobstructed progress to the hidden energies and province of Nature. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
825:When everything starts breaking down, the Taos Indians say, go into your house, and pull the drapes so you don't see all the craziness going on, which could cause fear. And just stay in your heart and let Mother Earth and all the energies that you are intimately part of do their job and stay in trust. It is easy to say and harder to do. It is just like when you get cancer or something like that and people are told that they are going to die, and then they get really worried. But we are immortal. We've always been alive . ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
826:Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
827:TURN ON. to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. TUNE IN. to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. DROP OUT. detach yourself from the tribal game. current models of social adjustement - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill. ~ Timothy Leary, #NFDB
828:I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion & adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife & a prostitute, both of us living in the same body & doing battle with each other. The meeting of these two women is a game with serious risks. A divine dance. When we meet, we are two divine energies, two universes colliding. If the meeting is not carried out with due reverence, one universe destroys the other. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
829:There is no energy more powerful than love. Love creates miracles, heals all wounds, and purifies all lower energies. You cannot give love away, for the more you give, the more you will receive in return. When you choose love you bring about the highest good for yourself and others. Offering love is always the right choice. With love you can transform or be transparent to people's emotions and thoughts, neutralize "negative" energy, and harmonize with all life in the universe. All energy in the universe responds positively to love. ~ Sanaya Roman, #NFDB
830:At a certain stage of our progressive attainment, every Initiate undergoes an "Illumination by Sound" in which the Music of the Spheres becomes to us a living reality. When the magical powers of sound are rediscovered and scientifically directed to the specific purpose of healing... and when man has learned how to release the mantraic powers embodied in such inspired utterances, he will master the energies transcending even those unleashed by the atomic physicist of today. They will be energies of yet another and higher dimension. ~ Corinne Heline, #NFDB
831:A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
832:A lobster, when left high and dry among the rock, does not have the sense enough to work his way back to the sea, but waits for the sea to come to him. If it does not come, he remains where he is and dies, although the slightest effort would enable him to reach the waves, which are perhaps within a yard of him. The world is full of human lobsters; people stranded on the rocks of indecision and procrastination, who, instead of putting forth their own energies, are waiting for some grand billow of good fortune to set them afloat. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
833:I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat. I decided to kill myself. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
834:Put your energies into creativity. Forget about anger as a problem, ignore it. Channelise your energy towards more creativity. Pour yourself into something that you love. Rather than making anger your problem, let creativity be your object of meditation. Shift from anger to creativity and immediately you will see a great change arising in you. And tomorrow the same things will not feel like excuses for being angry because now energy is moving, is channelised, is being sublimated, is enjoying itself, its dance. Who cares about small things? ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
835:Space battles in movies and holies had always bored me, but watching the real thing held a certain fascination: rather like seeing live coverage of a series of traffic accidents. Actually, the production values for reality – as had doubtless been the case for centuries – were much lower than for even a moderate-budget holodrama. Even with the tremendous energies involved, the overwhelming reaction one had to an actual battle in space was that space was so large and humanity’s fleets and ships and dreadnoughts and whatnots were so small. Or ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
836:The whole thing seems very logical, factual, and true to nature: man peels away his armor and unfolds his inner self, primal energies from the ground of his being in which he takes root. The person is, after all, not his own creator; he is sustained at all times by the workings of his physiochemistry-and, beneath that, of his atomic and subatomic structure. These structures contain within themselves the immense powers of nature, and so it seems logical to say that we are being constantly "created and sustained" out of the "invisible void. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
837:We don’t need an invitation to be real. The truth is: we don’t need permission to own the power of what makes us unique, what makes us female. Your emotions, your tears or temper, your love and passion. Our emotions can be wild, untamed, and raging, as it can be loving, nurturing, and consoling. All are powerful feminine energies—that when harnessed and directed towards conscious action can be an unstoppable force. So this is your official authorization to awaken into your full-bodied, emotionally activated self. Passion and power included. ~ Emma Mildon, #NFDB
838:As a kid, I used to fear that my life would be wasted. I would agonize over how I was going to live this finite life. We only have so much time, after all, and I didn't want my only experiences with different cultures to be on TV or in the pages of National Geographic. I wanted to visit the Kansas plains, the Virginia battlefields, and the California coast. I wanted to see the world instead of being stuck in just one part of it. I wanted to feel the energies of new places and different people, and I wanted to experience the glories of history. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
839:It would mean,” he told the editor of the New York World, “that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction . . . Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty . . . Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . . If there is any alternative for God’s sake let’s take it. ~ John Dos Passos, #NFDB
840:The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired authorities, which was then beginning to absorb the energies of the Greek intellect, is the grandest movement in the profane annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy and far the better part of the political knowledge we possess. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
841:But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
842:Keynes believed that “a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these [economic] needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.”8 He looked expectantly to a future in which machines would produce an abundance of nearly free goods and services, liberating the human race from toil and hardships and freeing the human mind from a preoccupation with strictly pecuniary interests to focus more on the “arts for life” and the quest for transcendence. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
843:But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor. We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
844:Just as twilight is neither light nor dark, but a bit of each, so is the middle head, face, or person representative of that magical blend of two opposing energies. The shaman is the twilight child, born from the union of the masculine world of light and conscious awareness and the feminine world of darkness and unconscious awareness. Shamans are at home in both worlds: in that magical space and time shimmering between these worlds, that point of consciousness 'betwixt and between' and 'neither this, nor that,' flickering at the edge of twilight. ~ Tom Cowan, #NFDB
845:Trauma evokes a biological response that needs to remain fluid and adaptive, not stuck and maladaptive. A maladaptive response is not necessarily a disease, but a dis-ease—a discomfort that can range from mild uneasiness to downright debilitation. The potential for fluidity still exists in maladaption, and must be tapped for the restoration of ease and full functioning. If these trapped energies are not allowed to move, and trauma becomes chronic, it can take a great deal of time and/or energy to restore the person to equilibrium and health. ~ Peter A Levine, #NFDB
846:You have to fight with your anger, your greed, your sex, because you are weak. So really, anger, greed, and sex are not the problems, weakness is the problem. Once you begin to be stronger inside, with a feeling of inner presence—that you are—your energies become concentrated, crystallized on a single point, and a self is born. Remember, not an ego but a self is born. Ego is a false sense of self. Without having any self you go on believing that you have a self—that is ego. Ego means a false self—you are not a self, still you believe that you are a self. ~ Osho, #NFDB
847:Healing... is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
848:A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do ... Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all ... If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB
849:Even today, only a small part of the total energies of the community go into education and expression: we sacrifice far more to the arts of destruction and extermination than to the arts of creation. But it is through the performance of creative acts, in art, in thought, in personal relationships, that the city can be identified as something more than a purely functional organization of factories and warehouses, barracks, courts, prisons, and control centers. The towers and domes of the historic city are reminders of that still unfulfilled promise. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
850:We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
851:If you are asking for a big thing - something about marriage, moving, or health, for example - that's when you need the angels the most, but paradoxically that's also when it is the most difficult for you to hear them. When you get stressed and uptight, your communication energies shut down. So, what I like to do is ask the angels for a sign that I'm getting the message right. The prayer I use is, "Angels, let me know whether or not this is true divine guidance. Please give me a clear sign in the physical world that I can easily notice and understand." ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
852:Never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are- they're yours to uncover and stand behind-so long as, at the very least, there is courage. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
853:There is nothing wrong with feeling the energies of fear, jealousy, or attraction. It’s not your fault that such energies exist. All the attractions, repulsions, thoughts, and feelings don’t make any difference. They don’t make you pure or impure. They are not you. You are the one who’s watching, and that one is pure consciousness. Don’t think you’d be free if you just didn’t have these kinds of feelings. It’s not true. If you can be free even though you’re having these kinds of feelings, then you’re really free—because there will always be something. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
854:In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
855:The suggestion had been made by some of my colleagues that I should participate in the marking of the summer examinations which in Oxford we refer to as Schools. Much as I was honoured by the proposal, I had felt obliged to decline: who am I to sit in judgement on the young? Moreover, the marking of examination scripts is among the most tedious of occupations. I had accordingly explained that the demands of scholarship – that is to say, of my researches into the concept of causa in the early Common Law – precluded any other commitment of my time and energies. ~ Sarah Caudwell, #NFDB
856:Those who keep careful watch over their conscience are not often liable to form rash judgments, for just as when the clouds lower the bees make for the shelter of their hive, so really good people shrink back into themselves, and refuse to be mixed up with the clouds and fogs of their neighbour’s questionable doings, and rather than meddle with others, they consecrate their energies on their own improvement and good resolutions. No surer sign of an unprofitable life than when people give way to censoriousness and inquisitiveness into the lives of other men. ~ Francis de Sales, #NFDB
857:Deprived of bread or the equal benefits of the commonwealth, the person shrivels. Obviously. And that is a clear line to fight on. But when the transcendent energies waste away, then too the person shrivels--though far less obviously. Their loss is suffered in privacy and bewildered silence; it is easily submerged in affluence, entertaining diversions, and adjustive therapy. Well fed and fashionably dressed, surrounded by every manner of mechanical convenience and with our credit rating in good order, we may even be ashamed to feel we have any problem at all. ~ Theodore Roszak, #NFDB
858:GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
859:The world state must begin; it can only begin, as a propaganda cult, or as a group of propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and their energies, regardless of the consequence to themselves The activities of a cult which sets itself to bring about the world-state would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the teaching of the young. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
860:Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
861:How easy it would have been to take control, to treat the body like a cart or chariot—a humble vehicle to be ridden where I pleased! The faintest of temptations ran through me … Without a second’s pause, I could have closed in upon the brain and damped down its little energies, set myself to pull the levers to keep the mechanism going…. No doubt Nouda and Faquarl and Naeryan and all the rest had been pleased to do this. It was their revenge in microcosm, their triumph over humanity carried out in miniature. But that was not for me. Not that it wasn’t tempting, mind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
862:Reaction against the machine-culture. - The machine, itself a product of the highest intellectual energies, sets in motion in those who server it almost nothing but the lower, non-intellectual energies. It thereby releases a vast quantity of energy in general that would otherwise lie dormant, it is true; but it provides no instigation to enhancement, to improvement, to becoming an artist. It makes men active and uniform - but in the long run this engenders a counter-effect, a despairing boredom of soul, which teaches to long for idleness in all it varieties. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
863:I always take an aspect between the ruling planets (i.e., the rulers of their Ascendants) as a testimony to the fact that the two people are likely to have a relationship of extraordinary intensity and importance… The close interaction of the ruling planets’ energies can be seen as indicative of a particularly specific symbol of how the two people interact with each other… in the vast majority of such cases, all of the other levels of interaction shown in a comparison will be secondary to the intense type of interchange symbolized by the aspect between the rulers. ~ Stephen Arroyo, #NFDB
864:O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy Benediction may fill men's hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#NFDB
865:Those who keep careful watch over their conscience are not often liable to form rash judgments, for just as when the clouds lower the bees make for the shelter of their hive, so really good people shrink back into themselves, and refuse to be mixed up with the clouds and fogs of their neighbour’s questionable doings, and rather than meddle with others, they consecrate their energies on their own improvement and good resolutions. No surer sign of an unprofitable life than when people give way to censoriousness and inquisitiveness into the lives of other men. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #NFDB
866:The ear participates, and helps arrange marriages; the eye has already made love with what it sees. The eye knows pleasure, delights in the body's shape: the ear hears words that talk about all this. When hearing takes place, character areas change; but when you see, inner areas change. If all you know about fire is what you have heard see if the fire will agree to cook you! Certain energies come only when you burn. If you long for belief, sit down in the fire! When the ear receives subtly; it turns into an eye. But if words do not reach the ear in the chest, nothing happens. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
867:Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
868:It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. ~ Joyce Appleby, #NFDB
869:If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, - I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
870:Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the 'right' of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the 'property rights' of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
871:… May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine … By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine— This is the very thing in which consists poetry …” —JOHN KEATS, in a letter to his brother “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” —JOHN KEATS, in a letter to a friend ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
872:An effective leader is willing to think about what's happening and how to understand what's going on. Facilitating flow and making others more conscious of it, the leader communicates an awareness of process to the group, making them more aware of their energies and options. One important principle is to keep track of who has not spoken. ... It's also important to notice when people do speak out but are not heard. Effective leaders practice patience, reminding themselves to wait and observe, remembering that there's always more going on in a group than we're consciously aware of. ~ Diane Dreher, #NFDB
873:If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, — I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
874:The universe must be experienced as the Great Self. Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries. New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself. ~ Thomas Berry, #NFDB
875:O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each. ~ Lise Meitner, #NFDB
876:The man who is alone, who stands on his own feet, who is stripped bare, who asks for nothing and wants nothing, who has reached the apex of disinterestedness not through blind renunciation but through excess of clear vision, turns to the world which stretches out before him as a burned prairie, as a devastated city —a world in which no churches, asylums, refuges, ideals, are left—and says: “Though you promise me nothing I am still with you, I am still an atom of your energies, my work is part of your work; I am your companion and your mirror as you march on your merciless way. ~ Giovanni Papini, #NFDB
877:• Take a deep breath, sit quietly, and feel the sensation in your body. • Feel the sensation without judgment. Just be with it. • Let any feelings, thoughts, or energies that want to come up do so—this often means listening to the voice of anxiety, anger, fear, or woundedness. Let the voices say what they want to say. Listen and understand what is going on. • Watch the energy disperse as much as it can. Don’t demand complete discharge. Take the attitude that your body will let go of as much stored energy as it is able to. • After a few hours or the next day, repeat this whole process. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
878:Henceforth, whilst there are a great many theories and models proposed as to how, or why, magic works (based on subtle energies, animal magnetism, psychological concepts, quantum theory, mathematics or the so-called anthropomorphic principle) it is not a case that one of them is more 'true' than others, but a case of which theory or model you choose to believe in, or which theory you find most attractive. Indeed, from a Chaos Magic perspective, you can selectively believe that a particular theory or model of magical action is true only for the duration of a particular ritual or phase of work. ~ Phil Hine, #NFDB
879:Seeking marriage is not wrong, but don’t let that search dominate your life. We must not make finding a marriage partner the supreme goal of our lives by putting all our energies into searching for a mate. We must learn to be in God’s will. A very wise person said, “There is something far worse than single loneliness, and that is marital misery.” Learn contentment, for it is great gain. If God has a mate for you, He knows how to bring the two of you together. Don’t take things into your own hands. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, use the time to grow both mentally and spiritually. ~ David Jeremiah, #NFDB
880:we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever-"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy: is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
881:When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach, people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t just process and understand the actions and words of others but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconscious level, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling. ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
882:When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach, people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t just process and understand the actions and words of others but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconscious level, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling. Think ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
883:The energy from that event is stored and released at any given moment, resulting in a playback just like a tape recording. The spirit usually acts out the event with no regard to the living in its presence. It’s similar to imprint theory in that it explains residual hauntings, but differs in the material that stores the energy. Imprint theory states our energies are stored on the fabric of the universe, which is composed of time and space by a process that we have yet to figure out. Stone tape theory states that certain types of rock store the energy of significant emotional and traumatic events inside them. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
884:The name of Solomon may be divided into three syllables. Sol-Om-On. Each of these syllables is the name of a Sun God, or a Divine Principle. Sol means Sun; Om is the sacred syllable of the Vedas, the most magical of all intonations among the Hindus; and On is the name of a Supreme Being in Persia. The building of the Temple was supervised by three men. Solomon of the Sun, the source of all life and power; Hiram of Tyre, the earth, who supplied the materials; and a cunning workman, Hiram Abiff, the energies of space, the ethers, the dancing power of Fohat, the law of the atoms. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
885:If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
886:We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical construction of victory over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science. Even more, it comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation-and it is not even in man's hands to program. Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something-an object or ourselves-and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
887:I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight . . . The ultimate Mystery of being, the ultimate Truth, is Love. This is the essential structure of reality. When Dante spoke of the 'love which moves the sun and the other stars', he was not using a metaphor, but was describing the nature of reality. There is in Being an infinite desire to give itself in love and this gift of Self in love is for ever answered by a return of love....and so the rhythm of the universe is created. ~ Venerable Bede, #NFDB
888:What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, [T1],#NFDB
889:by considering what has happened in East Timor since 1975, we can learn some important things about ourselves, our society, and our institutions. If we do not like what we find when we look at the facts—and few will fail to be appalled if they take an honest look—we can work to bring about changes in the practices and structure of institutions that cause terrible suffering and slaughter. To the extent that we see ourselves as citizens in a democratic community, we have a responsibility to devote our energies to these ends. The recent history of Timor provides a revealing insight into the policies of the U.S. government, ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
890:The ear participates, and helps arrange marriages;
the eye has already made love with what it sees.
The eye knows pleasure, delights in the body's shape:
the ear hears words that talk about all this.
When hearing takes place, character areas change;
but when you see, inner areas change.
If all you know about fire is what you have heard
see if the fire will agree to cook you!
Certain energies come only when you burn.
If you long for belief, sit down in the fire!
When the ear receives subtly; it turns into an eye.
But if words do not reach the ear in the chest, nothing happens. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
891:But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe - that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
892:Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth—they’re now millions of members strong without any superfluous “buzz.” They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
893:Bohr's atom seemed to me ineffably, transcendently beautiful-electrons spinning, trillions of times a second, spinning forever in predestined orbits, a true perpetual-motion machine made possible by the irreducibility of the quantum, and the fact that the spinning electron expended no energy, did no work. And more complex atoms were more beautiful still, for they had dozens of electrons weaving separate paths, but organized, like tiny onions, in shells and subshells. They seemed to me not merely beautiful, these gossamer but indestructible things, but perfect...in their balancing of numbers and forces and shieldings and energies. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
894:It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate: and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get--when our will strains after a path we may not follow--we need neither starve from inanition, not stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden fruit it longed to taste--and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
895:Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose conciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see 'the complete consort dancing together' contrapuntally. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
896:We have implied that asceticism, when considered as a whole, can assume various meanings at successive spiritual levels. Simply defined, that is to say as “training” or discipline, an ascesis aims at placing all the energies of the human being under the control of a central principle. In this respect we can, properly speaking, talk of a technique that has, in common with that of modern scientific achievements, the characteristics of objectivity and impersonality. Thus an eye, trained to distinguish the accessory from the essential, can easily recognize a “constant” beyond the multiple variety of ascetic forms adopted by this or that tradition. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
897:Here was a small corner of the Greek archipelago; sky-blue, caressing waves, islands and rocks, a flowering strip of coastline, a magical panorama in the distance, an inviting sunset — you can’t describe it in words. This is what the peoples of Europe remembered as their cradle; here unfolded the first scenes of mythology, here was their earthly paradise. Here lived beautiful people! They got up and went to sleep happy and innocent; the groves were filled with their joyous songs, their great excess of untapped energies went into love and artless joy. The sun bathed these islands and the sea in its rays, rejoicing in its beautiful children. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
898:Libido, in Freud’s account, begins as inwardly (narcissistically) directed, and is only secondarily directed toward objects. Freud used this pattern as a template for understanding the aggressive drive as well. Thus he suggested that aggression also begins as inwardly directed, derived from a death instinct. The baby begins life with both self-directed love and self-directed destructiveness. This revised Freudian infant, now infused with both sexual and aggressive energies, is often in a state of heightened tension, within which she may be indiscriminately aroused, stimulated by both libidinal and aggressive feelings, pleasure and pain. From ~ Stephen A Mitchell, #NFDB
899:There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 61, [T0],#NFDB
900:But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective - not only our proclaimed - values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning of life. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
901:Climate Change. When we talk about our responsibilities as human beings and as parents, there is nothing more important than leaving this country and the entire planet in a way that is habitable for our kids and grandchildren. The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity and it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and around the world. The scientists are telling us that if we do not boldly transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energies, this planet could be five to ten degrees ~ Bernie Sanders, #NFDB
902:By being with yourself…by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence. NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ, I Am That Stopping People think of meditation as some kind of special activity, but this is not exactly correct. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
903:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell,#NFDB
904:For the Jedi, Mastery was conferred when one attained a true understanding of the ways of the Force; for the Sith, that level of understanding was merely the beginning. The Jedi Order’s homespun cloaks announced: I want for nothing, because I am clothed in the Force; the cloaks of the Sith: I am the light in the dark, the convergence of opposing energies. And yet, while all Sith Lords were powerful, not all were brilliant or in complete possession of the powers the dark side granted them. Darth Millennial had rebelled against the teachings of his Master, Darth Cognus, and even Plagueis spoke of having reached a philosophical impasse with his Master, Tenebrous. ~ James Luceno, #NFDB
905:The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. ~ J rgen Moltmann,#NFDB
906:The finish line at the end of a career is no different from the finish line at the end of a match. The objective is to get within reach of that finish line, because then it gives off a magnetic force. When you’re close, you can feel that force pulling you, and you can use that force to get across. But just before you come within range, or just after, you feel another force, equally strong, pushing you away. It’s inexplicable, mystical, these twin forces, these contradictory energies, but they both exist. I know, because I’ve spent much of my life seeking the one, fighting the other, and sometimes I’ve been stuck, suspended, bounced like a tennis ball between the two. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
907:We have to learn the art of stopping - stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation? How How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful smiling, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
908:The Perfect Person's Rule of Life:
The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward.
The perfect person does good through love.
His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does.
He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward.
The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God. ~ Clement of Alexandria,#NFDB
909:Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals that have carried their sinning to extremes should not despair or say, “I am too great a sinner to change,” or “God would not want me.” God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gesture, but with a “passionless passion,” a “wild tranquility.” A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, any more that a man on dry land can swim; but as soon as he takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done which keep one from God; it is the present persistence in that wrong. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
910:What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. The day will come when, after mastering the ether, the winds, the tides, gravity, we shall master the energies of love, for God. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have made fire his servant. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
911:Except in a very few matches, usually with world-class performers, there is a point in every match (and in some cases it's right at the beginning) when the loser decides he's going to lose. And after that, everything he does will be aimed at providing an explanation of why he will have lost. He may throw himself at the ball (so he will be able to say he's done his best against a superior opponent). He may dispute calls (so he will be able to say he's been robbed). He may swear at himself and throw his racket (so he can say it was apparent all along he wasn't in top form). His energies go not into winning but into producing an explanation, an excuse, a justification for losing. ~ C Terry Warner, #NFDB
912:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,#NFDB
913:In moving through apprehensive chills to mounting excitement and waves of moist tingling warmth, the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become creative wellspring when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensations, such as trembling, that stem from traumatic symptoms. Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potentials, and resources necessary for their constructive transformation. The creative healing process can be blocked in a number of ways—by using drugs to suppress symptoms, by overemphasizing adjustment or control, or by denial or invalidation of feelings and sensations. ~ Peter A Levine, #NFDB
914:Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy, chiefly those that assign personal worth based on rank. By not thinking about how and why we value people, we can fall into this trap almost by default. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
915:For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends. ~ Rona Jaffe, #NFDB
916:Bob is talking about alternative people. Alternative beliefs and outlooks, alternative business and politics, alternative lifestyles and healthcare. alternative foods and fabrics, alternative child-rearing and schooling, alternative fuels and energies—alternative everything, basically, but not very alternative. These are alternatives within the established paradigm. not alternatives to it: a subherd running in parallel to the main body. Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multivarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via the removal, avoidance and denial of unhappiness. ~ Jed McKenna, #NFDB
917:The Holy Father is doing the wisest thing possible, considering the circumstances. He has gently but firmly deflected Vettore’s attention elsewhere. He has given him a noble project that will consume his energies, yet demand of him a proof of orthodoxy It is a test the cardinal cannot escape without abandoning his public image. He is to begin a series of fact-finding journeys to the Far East, assessing the condition of the Church in mainland China and Vietnam. He is to put all of his effort into this research for the coming two years. And the Pope has generously excused him from the ordinary duties of his office, replacing him, temporarily of course, with a man we know to be loyal. ~ Michael D O Brien, #NFDB
918:Clare folded her hands together and pressed them to her lips. "I believe that prayer focuses our human thoughts and energies, sends them to the people we're praying for. I believe that helps, in ways we can't yet understand. I believe that God hears our prayers, and cherishes them. I believe He answers by sending us His spirit, giving us strength, and peace, and insight. I don't think he responds by turning away bullets and curing cancer. Though sometimes that happens."
Harlene frowned, "In other words, sometimes, the answer is no?"
"No. Sometimes the answer is 'This is life, in all its variety. Make your way through it with grace, and never forget that I love you. ~ Julia Spencer Fleming,#NFDB
919:In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio? ~ Andy Crouch, #NFDB
920:Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies ~ Alejandra Pizarnik, #NFDB
921:No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers.
Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. This is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource. Conversely, any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
922:True believers must realize that the state of our society is the result of the righteous judgment of God. God has not commissioned His people to reconstruct society. We are not called to expend our energies for moral reform. We are salt—a preservative for a decaying generation (Matt. 5:13). And we are lights designed to shine in a way that enables people who see our good works to glorify our heavenly Father (vv. 14–16). In other words, our primary task is to preach the truth of God’s Word, live in obedience to that truth, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world (Jas. 1:27). Our influence on society must be the fruit of that kind of living, not the product of fleshly energy or political clout. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
923:We have learned up a good many glib phrases about the wickedness of war, and we thank God that we live in these peaceful, trading times, wherein we can — and do — devote the whole of our thoughts and energies to robbing and cheating and swindling one another — to “doing” our friends, and overcoming our enemies by trickery and lies — wherein, undisturbed by the wicked ways of fighting-men, we can cultivate to better perfection the “smartness,” the craft, and the cunning, and all the other “business-like” virtues on which we so pride ourselves, and which were so neglected and treated with so little respect in the bad old age of violence, when men chose lions and eagles for their symbols rather than foxes. ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
924:Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like a giant universal computer, He knows exactly what combination of energies, in exactly what context, would do the most to further God’s plan for salvation. No meetings are accidental. “Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
925:Let us remember that all that we love of life can be accessed only now. All we seek is here, with us and available to us in this moment. All the real riches—love, passion, joy, satisfaction, harmony—are available now on the menu of the mind, available for us to savor should we awake and order them. All that we seek to become is also here; we can choose what role we want to play and how we will direct life’s energies in each moment. Should we learn to direct our awareness and power in all we do, then discontent shall disappear and a vital energy will return. We will sense a vibrancy unfathomable to most men and women of this Earth. For this, let us declare: We Shall Meet Life with Full Presence and Power. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
926:I do not view your astrology chart as an accident. The moment of your birth, which is what your chart is based on, is perfect and very carefully chosen on the spiritual level of your own soul. Our soul chose its moment for manifestation, how it wanted things to be, only we forgot and lost the authority of our own energies. The curtain dropped, and we forgot that we chose it all. In this way the birthchart is a means of getting back in touch with the way we wanted it to be, our life or soul’s direction. The astrology chart defines precisely the path we need to follow in order to fulfill personal potential and gain the satisfaction of self-completion. It is, in terms of individual completeness, the map back home. ~ Jan Spiller, #NFDB
927:By living in a spirit of forgiveness we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom, it comes from sacrifice. That is the message of the christian religion and it is the message that is conveyed by all the memorable works of our culture. It is the message that has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but which it seems to me can be heard once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the christian tradition the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices vengeance and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
928:In the ninth century, Ethiopian shepherds noticed their flocks acting unusually frisky after eating wild red berries in the highlands. Those plants were domesticated and coffee is now cultivated in 80 countries. Today, it is said to be the most traded commodity after crude oil. Every year, 400 billion cups of the beverage are drunk by people seeking a caffeine fix. Others prefer caffeinated tea or soft drinks for the same reason – to attain a heightened state of alertness. Ironically, the cup we drink to refresh ourselves when our energies flag is an alkaloid produced by plants to put to sleep insects that have designs on their seeds. In other words, we are addicted to an insecticide that evolved to paralyze and kill. ~ Janaki Lenin, #NFDB
929:To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will fin that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
930:If you hurt any of your fingers, your whole body will feel its effect. Everything is connected. Infect one part of something, and a reaction will spread and affect the rest. We sit sometimes not knowing why we feel restless or sad, but in truth we are feeling transferred emotions moving through our atmosphere. We pick up on frequencies that come from near and far that affect us unconsciously. Humans are like moving antennas. We are magnetic entities living in an electromagnetic world. The core of the earth is a gigantic crystal that captures and amplifies strong energies in all directions. We all act and react as its transmitters and receivers. Every cause has effect and every effect has cause. All words and actions do matter. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
931:Those who must control everything fear being vulnerable. Why? Because to be vulnerable opens one up to being shamed. All my life I used up my energies by always having to be guarded. This was a mighty waste of time and energy. The fear was that I would be exposed. And when exposed, all would see that I was flawed and defective as a person—an imposter. Control is a way to ensure that no one can ever shame us again. It involves controlling our own thoughts, expressions, feelings and actions. And it involves attempting to control other people’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Control is the ultimate villain in destroying intimacy. We cannot share freely unless we are equal. When one person controls another, equality is ruptured. ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
932:The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! ~ Louis Ferdinand C line,#NFDB
933:The power of science is seen in the cumulative and coordinated nature of scientific work; each generation in science builds on the work of workers who came before, and each generation organizes its energies via collaboration and public discussion. This social organization permits the scientific strategy to function at the level of social groups; the dialogue between the speculative voice and the critical voice can literally be a dialogue, rather than something internalized in the mind-set of the individual scientist. These social groups can include some individuals who are not especially open-minded-who are very wedded to their own ideas-provided that the group as a whole retains flexibility and responsiveness to evidence. ~ Peter Godfrey Smith, #NFDB
934:THE PREDESTINED In 1856, William Walker proclaims himself president of Nicaragua. The ceremony includes speeches, a military parade, a mass, and a banquet featuring fifty-three toasts of European wines. A week later, United States Ambassador John H. Wheeler officially recognizes the new president, and his speech compares him to Christopher Columbus. Walker imposes Louisiana’s constitution on Nicaragua, reestablishing slavery, abolished in all Central America thirty years previous. He does so for the good of the blacks, because “inferior races cannot compete with the white race, unless they are given a white master to channel their energies.” This Tennessee gentleman known as “the Predestined” receives orders directly from God. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
935:(from chapter 20, "Bezalel")
"Worship is an art, using the sensory to bring us into an awareness of and attentiveness to the mystery of God. Worship has to do with practicing a way of life that is immersed in the salvation and revelation of Yahweh. Bezalel led the people whom Moses had led out of Egypt into making and worshipping in a sanctuary, a place designed to keep them aware and responsive to a way of life in which all their senses were brought into lively participation in the stuff of creation and the energies of salvation. he designed a worship center, the ark of the covenant, in which all visibilities converged into an Invisibility: Yahweh - a presence, a relationship - who can only be worshipped and never used. ~ Eugene H Peterson,#NFDB
936:Creativity is, by its nature, fitful and inconstant, easily upset by constraint, foreboding, insecurity, external pressure. Any great preoccupation with the problems of ensuring animal survival exhausts the energies and disturbs the receptivity of the sensitive mind. Such creativity as was first achieved in the city came about largely through an arrogation of the economic means of production and distribution by a small minority, attached to the temple and the palace. In the epic of creation Marduk remarks of man: "Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe." Shall we err greatly if we translate this as: "Let our subjects be burdened with daily toil that the king and the priesthood may freely breathe"? ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
937:O my Charlotte, the sacred, tender remembrance! Gracious Heaven! restore to me the happy moment of our first acquaintance.
I smile at the suggestions of my heart, and obey its dictates.
their hearts do not beat in unison
I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers, in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! And why not? Because she knows how much I love her.
I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.
My dear friend, my energies are all prostrated: she can do with me what she pleases. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#NFDB
938:It’s actually ironic that you should be afraid of feeling your feelings; as an overeater, what you have created for yourself and have had to endure are some of the most painful emotions there are. The horrible feelings of failure that are endemic to the chronic overeater make your tolerance for pain already higher than you think. The pain you’re trying to avoid is nothing compared to the pain you’ve already lived through. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said: “All neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Any pathological tendency—overeating included—represents the twisted energies of unprocessed pain. The pathology is not ended by suppressing your pain, but by feeling the legitimate suffering it is seeking to express. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
939:And those they love have forgotten them because all their energies are devoted to making schemes and taking steps to get them out of the camp. And by dint of always thinking about these schemes and steps they have ceased thinking about those whose release they’re trying to secure. And that, too, is natural enough. In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything - by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
940:your energies are dominant in muladhara, then food and sleep will be the most dominant factors in your life. If your energies are dominant in swadhishthana, pleasure will be most dominant in your life; this means you enjoy your physical reality in many ways. If your energies are dominant in manipuraka, you are a doer; you can accomplish many things in the world. If your energies are dominant in anahata, you are a very creative person. If your energies are dominant in vishuddhi, you will develop a powerful presence. If your energies are dominant in agna, then you are intellectually realized. Intellectual realization can bring you to a certain state of peace and stability within yourself, irrespective of what is happening outside of you. These ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
941:There are certain constant factors to be found in true success whether it be the success of an Andrew Carnegie or of a Mahatma Gandhi. These are the essential factors, independent of wealth or achievement, poverty or asceticism. These are the dynamic factors in success, the very bone and sinew of it. The first constant factor is purpose. One must know that in whatever he does he is moving forward toward a goal. Aimlessness is the worst enemy of success. One can hardly feel successful in a bog. But as long as one has purpose he feels that his energies and creative thought are taking him somewhere, and there is satisfaction in the journey just as there is despair whenever we feel, as we often insightfully put it, that we are “getting nowhere. ~ Og Mandino, #NFDB
942:Yet the need for justifying the wealth and power of great corporations in the eyes of the people has never been greater. Why not hark back to Florence, Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam? The great corporations could devote wealth and energies to cleaning up, improving and adorning our cities. Each large corporation might adopt a city and vie with other corporations to see whose city shines brightest. In the center of each financial district there should be a large plaza in which periodically poets, singers, storytellers and artists of every sort would compete for rich prizes. The corporations should see it as their duty to spot and encourage talent, and celebrate greatness. There should be social intimacy between the powerful and the creative. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
943:On the way back to the office- I get a cab, on expenses, naturally- I decide that I could quite like Ed. Maybe I could even fancy him, and maybe the fact that I'm not thinking about him that much when I'm not with him is a good thing, maybe it means this is a proper relationship, not just lust, or the equivalent to a teenage crush. Because quite frankly I'm sick of falling madly in love and spending twenty-four hours a day thinking about them and crying with misery when they don't phone. I'm sick of being the kind of girl who, when they say jump, says how high. I'm sick of always, always being the one to fall in love and get hurt. And maybe this is how it should be, getting on with my life and not putting all my energies into a relationship. ~ Jane Green, #NFDB
944:The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. Hitler made full use of “the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a ‘kick’ out of love affairs.”1 He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before their husbands had heard of him.2 Miriam Beard tells of a similar role played by bored wives of businessmen before the French Revolution: “they were devastated with boredom and given to fits of the vapors. Restlessly, they applauded innovators. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
945:[The] period of Indian history since 1947’, writes the political theorist Sunil Khilnani, ‘might be seen as the adventure of apolitical idea: democracy.’ Viewed thus, independent India appears as the ‘third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions’. Each of these experiments ‘released immense energies; each raised towering expectations; and each has suffered tragic disappointments’. While the Indian experiment is the youngest, says Khilnani, ‘its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
946:The individual shrinks to an imperceptible centre; we might say that he is no more than an observation post, a sentient focus-point of repulsions and attractions; he makes his choice from among the countless energies that radiate through him; he seeks, casting to and fro; he turns back upon himself and directs himself so that he may breathe in more or less fully according to the direction he takes, the energizing atmosphere that surrounds him, in which he is one single, conscious point. This is the external condition imposed on us: we are, we may say, more outside ourselves in time and space than we are inside ourselves, every second of our lives. The person, the human monad, is, like every monad, essentially cosmic. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
947:From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence,
I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed
to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and
soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover
myself when she withdrew her arms.
In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange
tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with
a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her
while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into
adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can
make no other attempt to explain the feeling. ~ J Sheridan Le Fanu,#NFDB
948:Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home. The warmth of dark energies that drew me to The Mecca, that drew out Prince Jones, the warmth of our particular world, is beautiful, no matter how brief and breakable. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
949:mean, for inftance, that the natural habits of bodies, viz. beauty, ftrength, health, and alfo fucii things as, independent of the corporeal conftitution, pertain to fouls, viz. power, and honour, and riches, belong to allotments of a better condition; but thofe habits and circumftances which are oppofite to thefe, belong to thofe of an inferior condition. Thefe things then being neceflarily divided after the above-mentioned manner, thofe which belong to the better portion it^was ufual with the antient-s immediately to denominate good, but thofe of the contrary portion they denominated evil ; yet not in the fame fignification as when we call an unjuft and intemperate habit of the foul evil ; but as impediments of energies, as darkening our natural difpofi-tions, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
950:There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
951:I believe in energies. Good energy has served me well. Being fair with others, compassionate towards them, remaining humble, and making a difference to someone are just a few of the things that I have seen create good energy. Beautiful things. Human things. I do my best to surround myself with these types of things, to generate an atmosphere thick with such energy. It has kept me safe in many situations. I have taken risks in the past, and managed to avoid harm by the protection of the good energy I have created around me. I believe that ugliness creates more ugliness. And no matter how touched by ugliness you are, you do not have to give in to it and start spreading it beyond yourself. I have seen this sickness and what it does to a person, and those around them. ~ Ashly Lorenzana, #NFDB
952:There are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
953:Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. ~ William James, #NFDB
954:...it would be a contradiction in terms to think of formulating techniques for making fundamental new discoveries in science or original and creative works of art, for the very essence of such action is a certain freedom from dependence on others, who would be needed as guides. How can this freedom be transmitted in an activity in which conforming to someone else's knowledge is the main source of energy?
....Actually, there are no direct and positive things that man can do to get in touch with the immeasurable, for this must be immensely beyond anything that man can grasp with his mind or accomplish with his hands or his instruments. What man can do is give his full attention and creative energies to bring clarity and order into the totality of the field of measure. ~ David Bohm,#NFDB
955:Love-All
The decorously informative church
Guide to Sex suggested that any urge
could well be controlled by playing tennis:
and the game provided also 'many
harmless opportunities for healthy
social intercourse between the sexes.'
For weeks the drawings in the Guide misled
me as to what went where, but nonetheless
I booked the public courts and learnt the game
with other curious youths of my age:
and later joined a club, to lose six one,
six love, in the first round of the Open.
But the only girl I ever met had
her 'energies channelled' far too bloody
'healthily', and very quickly let me
know that love was merely another means
of saying nil. It was not as though I
became any good at tennis; either.
~ Ben Jonson,#NFDB
956:Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. ~ Gustave Flaubert,#NFDB
957:As a black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
958:A talisman is a storehouse of some particular kind of energy, the kind that is needed to accomplish the task for which you have constructed it...The decisive advantage of this system is not that its variety makes it so adaptable to our needs, but that we already posses the Invocations necessary to call forth the Energies required...You must lay most closely to your heart the theory of the Magical Link and see well to it that it rings true; for without this your talisman is worse than useless. It is dangerous; for all that Energy is bound to expend itself somehow; it will make its own links with anything handy that takes its fancy; and you can get into any sort of the most serious kind of trouble...Most of my Talismans, like my Invocations, have been poems. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #NFDB
959:But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions Of The Synthesis, The Threefold Life, 29,#NFDB
960:There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texa...s? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
961:Children feel hounded by symbols they don't understand the need of, verbal demands that seem picayune, and rules and codes that call them away from their pleasure in the straightforward expression of their natural energies. And when they try to master the body, pretend it isn't there, act "like a little man," the body suddenly overwhelms them, submerges them in vomit or excrement-and the child breaks down in desperate tears over his melted pretense at being a purely symbolic animal. Often the child deliberately soils himself or continues to wet the bed, to protest against the imposition of artificial symbolic rules: he seems to be saying that the body is his primary reality and that he wants to remain in the simpler physical Eden and not be thrown out into the world of "right and wrong. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
962:All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors: 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outer circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. [1982.jpg] -- from The Complete Illuminated Books, by William Blake
~ William Blake, The Errors of Sacred Codes (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
,#NFDB
963:Where does it come from, this sickliness? For man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminate than any other animal, there is no doubt of that — he is the sick animal: how has that come about? Certainly he has also dared more, done more new things, braved more and challenged fate more than all the other animals put together: he, the great experimenter with himself, discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals, nature, and gods for ultimate domination — he, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace, so that his future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present — how should such a courageous and richly endowed animal not also be the most imperiled, the most chronically and profoundly sick of all sick animals? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
964:What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures. ~ Sven Birkerts, #NFDB
965:And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me - against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born - I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for awhile; and shall later on be my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
966:Familiarity with Nature has bred contempt for her ultimate secrets; our relation with her is one of practical business. We tease her, so to speak, to discover the ways in which she may be forced to serve our purposes; we make use of her energies, whose Source yet remains unknown. In science our relation with Nature is like that between an arrogant man and his servant; or, in a philosophical sense, Nature is like a captive in the witness box. We cross-examine her, challenge her, and minutely weigh her evidence in human scales that cannot measure her hidden values. “On the other hand, when the self is in communion with a higher power, Nature automatically obeys, without stress or strain, the will of man. This effortless command over Nature is called ‘miraculous’ by the uncomprehending materialist. “The ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
967:To build a church when a school house is needed is to perpetrate a theft upon education.
To build a church when a hospital is needed is to take from the parched lips of the sick the cup of relief and from the suffering the merciful hand of help.
When the object of man's conduct will be to improve the conditions of his fellow man and not the appeasement of a mythical God, he will become more understanding and more indulgent of the frailties, mistakes, and action of others, and by the same token he will become more appreciative of their efforts.
He will develop a greater consciousness to avoid mistakes and to prevent injury. Life and its living will take on a greater significance, and our efforts and energies will be devoted to creating as much joy and happiness as possible for all living creatures. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
968:I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object-subject reversal in the form of a private illumination - in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself - it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means 'believing' in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radiance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
969:If you hurt any of your fingers, your whole body will feel its effect. Everything is connected. Infect one part of something, and a reaction will spread and affect the rest. We sit sometimes not knowing why we feel restless or sad, but in truth we are feeling transferred emotions moving through our atmosphere. We pick up on frequencies that come from near and far that affect us unconsciously. Humans are like moving antennas. We are magnetic entities living in an electromagnetic world. The core of the earth is a gigantic crystal that captures and amplifies strong energies in all directions. We all act and react as its transmitters and receivers. Every cause has effect and every effect has cause. All words and actions do matter.
We are all connected. When one arm or foot is poisoned, the whole body becomes infected. ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
970:As a being of Power, Intelligence, and Love, and the Lord of his own thoughts, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself that transforming and regenerative agency by which he may make himself what he wills.
Man is always the master, even in his weakest and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his household. When he begins to reflect upon his condition, and to search diligently for the Law upon which his being is established, he then becomes the wise master, directing his energies with intelligence, and fashioning his thoughts to fruitful issues. Such is the conscious master, and man can only thus become by discovering within himself the laws of thought; which discovery is totally a matter of application, self-analysis, and experience. ~ James Allen,#NFDB
971:Artificially induced positive feelings are not only short-lived, they also leave us in the state of a child hoping against hope that our parents will one day show their good sides, thus relieving us of the necessity to feel anger or fear in connection with them. But if we want to attain true adulthood and live in our present reality, we must (and can) free ourselves of these illusory expectations. To do so, we need to admit the so-called negative emotions and change them into meaningful feelings, instead of trying to banish them as quickly and effectively as possible. Once they are admitted into our awareness, these emotions do not last forever, though in the relatively short time they persist they can liberate pent-up energies. Only when we attempt to ignore or banish them altogether do they ensconce themselves in the body. ~ Alice Miller, #NFDB
972:To her father who had taught her what she knew of botany, the love of Nature had been a kind of religion, a form of spiritual striving: he had believed that in trying to comprehend the inner vitality of each species, human beings could transcend the mundane world and its artificial divisions. If botany was the Scripture of this religion, then horticulture was its form of worship: tending a garden was, for Pierre Lambert, no mere matter of planting seeds and pruning branches--it was a spiritual discipline, a means of communicating with forms of life that were necessarily mute and could be understood only through a careful study of their own modes of expression--the languages of efflorescence, growth and decay: only thus, he taught Paulette, could human beings apprehend the vital energies that constitute the Spirit of the Earth. ~ Amitav Ghosh, #NFDB
973:The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
974:THE PROCESS OF LIFE The Greek conception of the kosmos was not simply that of a world of atoms, metaphysical ideas and numbers, and random energies. It also consisted of plants and animals, the life-forms of the biological world, including the human species, considered as observable phenomena. We would be remiss if we based any critique of culture and civilization on the discoveries and theories of modern physics alone. Of more importance to the layman are the principles that seem to describe and govern activities in the world of which they are a part. Therefore we must investigate other fields of knowledge to see if some of contemporary interpretations of the world can be made compatible with the discoveries in the field of physics, thereby extending the possibility of our metaphysical search into a broader perspective. The ~ Vine Deloria Jr, #NFDB
975:Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
976:It is sheer fantasy to think that you can ever transform your grandiose energies so they will never seduce you again, that you can ever prevent your grandiosity from being seductive. Sometimes people think if they just prayed enough, or went to enough masses, then their grandiosity would stop being seductive. Or if they became a cardinal, or a bishop, or a mother superior, it would not be seductive anymore. The truth, of course, is just the opposite, because the more successful you get, the more seductive grandiosity gets. The more traumas and tragedies you have in your life, the more grandiosity will attack you. It can tell you how impressive it is that you are still alive, or it can chide you into depression by suggesting you might as well go ahead and commit suicide. Many suicidal thoughts come from a grandiose perfectionism. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
977:The two poles of civilization, then, are mechanically organized work and mechanically organized destruction and extermination. Roughly the same forces and the same methods of operation were applicable to both areas. To some extent systematic daily work served to keep in check the licentious energies that were now available for turning mere dreams and wanton fantasies into actualities: but among the governing classes no such salutary check operated. Sated with leisure, war gave them 'something to do' and by its incidental hardships, responsibilities, and mortal risks, provided the equivalent of honorable labor. War became not merely the 'health of the state,' as Nietzsche called it: in addition, it was the cheapest form of mock-creativity, for in a few days it could produce visible results that undid the efforts of many lifetimes. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
978:Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a living. Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation. Wanted, a man of courage who is not a coward in any part of his nature. Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development, who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow specialty and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and die. Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of things; a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who does not let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day life; a man who prefers substance to show, and one who regards his good name as a priceless treasure. ~ Brett McKay, #NFDB
979:We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn,#NFDB
980:He looked past Chin toward streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets.
"In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole. ~ Don DeLillo,#NFDB
981:What is it that a young man wants? Where is the central source of that wild fury that boils up in him, that goads and drives and lashes him, that explodes his energies and strews his purpose to the wind of a thousand instant and chaotic impulses? The older and assured people of the world, who have learned to work without waste and error, think they know the reason for the chaos and confusion of a young man’s life. They have learned the thing at hand, and learned to follow their single way through all the million shifting hues and tones and cadences of living, to thread neatly with unperturbed heart their single thread through that huge labyrinth of shifting forms and intersecting energies that make up life—and they say, therefore, that the reason for a young man’s confusion, lack of purpose, and erratic living is because he has not “found himself. ~ Thomas Wolfe, #NFDB
982:I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W’s soul, which is with him as he is making his passage. ..there’s a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn’t just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There’s enough love around him to carry him now… ~ Mark Doty, #NFDB
983:The transmission of excitation energies between molecules through electromagnetic coupling is not a mere matter of speculation.”2 These energies flow through water channels inside the body since over 99 percent of the molecules inside the body are water molecules and the body is two-thirds water by volume. Every protein, whether constituting bone, sinews, or any other tissue, exists in a hydrated form. When the water content of the body decreases to less than 50 percent, we die. Protons and electrons separate along membranes to create charged layers analogous to a tiny battery as the revolutionary work of Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington has recently shown.3 In this inner electrical environment of our bodies, the magic of life unfolds and this environment is also able to be influenced in a powerful manner through sound vibrations. ~ Eileen Day McKusick, #NFDB
984:We have no school for the turning-out of stanch men in this nineteenth century. In the old, earnest times, war made men stanch and true to each other. We have learned up a good many glib phrases about the wickedness of war, and we thank God that we live in these peaceful, trading times, wherein we can — and do — devote the whole of our thoughts and energies to robbing and cheating and swindling one another — to “doing” our friends, and overcoming our enemies by trickery and lies — wherein, undisturbed by the wicked ways of fighting-men, we can cultivate to better perfection the “smartness,” the craft, and the cunning, and all the other “business-like” virtues on which we so pride ourselves, and which were so neglected and treated with so little respect in the bad old age of violence, when men chose lions and eagles for their symbols rather than foxes. ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
985:The condition of today's world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex.
Nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.
We have only one option: in examining the manifestations of our age, we must penetrate them with sufficient breadth and depth that we do not come under the demonic and destructive spell.
We must not focus our view merely on these phenomena, but rather on the humus of the decaying world beneath, where the seedlings of the future are growing, immeasurable in their potential and vigor.
Since our insight into the energies pressing toward development aids their unfolding, the seedlings and inceptive beginnings must be made visible and comprehensible." ~ Jean Gebser,#NFDB
986:It is generally agreed by modern cosmologist that we have established the general framework of how the universe behaved from when it was just one second old until the present, some fifteen billion years later. This is not to claim that we understand everything that occurred. We do not understand the detailed process by which galaxies formed, but such processes actually exert a negligible influence upon the course of the overall expansion. Prior to one second after the apparent beginning, we are on all together shakier ground. We no longer have direct fossil remnants from the early Universe against which to check the accuracy of our reconstruction of its history. In order to reconstruct the history of the universe in these first instants we require knowledge of the behavior of matter at far higher energies than are accessible to us by terrestrial experiments. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
987:You should leave your wife more time.” “She has all day available.” “I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.” “What’s the crime?” “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm. “Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me.” “If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?” Pietro frowned. “When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there’s nothing that can keep us from completing it.” I felt wounded, I whispered with a false smile: “My husband is saying that I have no true interest. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
988:If the technology platforms of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions aided in the severing and enclosing of the Earth’s myriad ecological interdependencies for market exchange and personal gain, the IoT platform of the Third Industrial Revolution reverses the process. What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
989:scientific knowledge has taught [humans] much since the days of the Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: 'We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
990:Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape—and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind. If you use words that you’re too familiar with, words that are so close to your thoughts that you have trouble separating thought from word, that insulation is very thin. So most wizards use words from ancient languages they don’t know very well, or else they make up nonsense words and mentally attach their meanings to a particular effect. That way, a wizard’s mind has an extra layer of protection against magical energies coursing through it. But you can work magic without words, without insulation for your mind. If you’re not afraid of it hurting a little. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
991:What is poetry’s role when the world is burning? Encroaching environmental disaster and the relentless wars around the world have had, it seems, a paralyzing, sterilizing effect on much American poetry. It is less the magnitude of the crises than our apparent immunity to them, this death on which we all thrive, that is spinning our best energies into esoteric language games, or complacent retreats into nostalgias of form or subject matter, or shrill denunciations of a culture whose privileges we are not ready to renounce—or, more accurately, do not even know how to renounce. There is some fury of clarity, some galvanizing combination of hope and lament, that is much needed now, but it sometimes seems that we—and I use the plural seriously, I don’t exempt myself—are anxiously waiting for the devastation to reach our very streets, as it one day will, it most certainly will. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
992:The history of man proves that religion perverts man's concept of life and the universe, and has made him a cringing coward before the blind forces of nature.
If you believe that there is a God; that man was 'created'; that he was forbidden to eat of the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge'; that he disobeyed; that he is a 'fallen angel'; that he is paying the penalty for his 'sins,' then you devote your time praying to appease an angry and jealous God.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the universe is a great mystery; that man is the product of evolution; that he is born without knowledge; that intelligence comes from experience, then you devote your time and energies to improving his condition with the hope of securing a little happiness here for yourself and your fellow man.
That is the difference.
If man was 'created,' then someone made a grievous mistake. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
993:The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball! ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
994:That the life of man is but a dream, many a man has surmised heretofore; and I, too, am everywhere pursued by this feeling. When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes, — when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
995:why any entity, human or otherwise, would want to separate away from its Cosmic Self-cycle of Life and confine its existence into a lesser state of limitation culminating in a calculated extinction. Why accept so much less than its ultimate entitlements? Inevitably the answer is for the sake of short-term profits and pressurised powers which produce illusions of self-importance, grandeur, and other gratificatory experiences on low Life-levels. We human entities have freewill within our Self-circles how we distribute our energies around them. We instinctively know our Life-purpose to be the attainment of Identity as an Individual. The whole point is whether we are prepared to accept the long, difficult and demanding " Cosmic climb " leading steadily up the Ladder of Life toward our Ultimate Truth, or " fall for " an inferior imitation of such an achievement limited to life on this lower level. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
996:If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
997:Let’s begin with a quotation from mindfulness expert and teacher Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. It beautifully encapsulates what deceptive brain messages are, what they do to you, and how they keep you from following the path of your true self: We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those [thoughts] for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears, endlessly seeking security.16 To phrase it another way: We spend a considerable amount of our time engrossed in following deceptive brain messages until we begin to see them for what they are and value our true emotions and needs. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
998:you can get by doing it physically, you can get by doing it mentally. Mentally, you can exercise the body. If you really apply yourself, after some time you will see, you can improve your muscle tone just by doing it mentally, because once your imagination can be coupled with your life energies, it becomes a living reality, it is no more just imagination. This fundamentally involves two basic steps. One is to have the ability to vividly create every detail of what you want in your mind, and of truly being able to create as the Creator did. The most fundamental thing is to be able to keep your personality out of your imagination, which takes a certain amount of training and dispassion about yourself. That is, you do not think much of yourself. It takes a certain amount of sadhana and preparation for a person to be like this, that he can extensively use his mind without imposing his personality upon it. ~ Sadguru, #NFDB
999:hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
1000:Once Reagan was elected, the Republican strategy had two components. The first was to build from the bottom up, getting the party rooted so it could win state and local elections, then congressional elections, then the presidency. When it comes to the presidency, liberal Democrats have daddy issues, even when their candidate is a woman. Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country's problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little. And so they are perpetually dissatisfied with their presidents and snipe at them from the left, which is the last thing a Democratic president in the current environment needs. ~ Mark Lilla, #NFDB
1001:There are, however, but few mature minds in the world; and thus it was that the philosophic-religious doctrines of the pagans were divided to meet the needs of these two fundamental groups of human intellect--one philosophic, the other incapable of appreciating the deeper mysteries of life. To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations. In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. While the ignorant multitudes brought their offerings to the altars of Priapus and Pan (deities representing the procreative energies), the wise recognized in these marble statues only symbolic concretions of great abstract truths. ~ Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, #NFDB
1002:Plato sees the rot setting in and cries out like a prophet to his people to repent while there is yet time. He sees that the theater audience is in fact looking to the theater for nothing but amusement and entertainment, that their energies are, in fact, frittering themselves away in spurious emotion— sob stuff and sensation, and senseless laughter, phantasy and daydreaming, and admiration for the merely smart and slick and clever and amusing. And there is an ominous likeness between his age and ours. We too have audiences and critics and newspapers assessing every play and book and novel in terms of its entertainment value, and a whole generation of young men and women who dream over novels and wallow in daydreaming at the cinema, and who seemed to be in a fair way of doping themselves into complete irresponsibility over the conduct of life until war came, as it did to Greece, to jerk them back to reality. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1003:Thinks about the three-mild, slow, and wild-as if the realm of chance were a world in its own right, with its own peculiar laws of physics. Mild randomness, then, is like the solid phase of matter: low energies, stable structures, well-defined volume. It stays where you put it. Wild randomness is like the gaseous phase of matter: high energies, no structure, no volume. No telling what it can do, where it will go. Slow randomness is intermediate between the others, the liquid state. I first proposed some of my views of chance in 1964 in Jerusalem, at an International Congress of Logic and Philosophy of Science. Since then, I have much expanded the theory and shown it to be critical to understanding financial markets in their proper light. As will be seen, the standard theories of finance assume the easier, mild form of randomness. Overwhelming evidence shows markets are far wilder, and scarier, than that. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot, #NFDB
1004:You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. 48 “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” THE WORLD IS NOT A STAGE ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
1005:There is a pretty Indian fable to the effect that if it rains when the star Svati is in the ascendant, and a drop of rain falls into an oyster, that drop will become a pearl. The oysters know this, so they come to the surface when that star shines, and wait to catch the precious rain-drop. When one falls into the shell, quickly the oyster closes it and dives down to the bottom of the sea, there to patiently develop the drop into the pearl. We should be like that. First hear, then understand, and then, leaving all distractions, shut our minds to outside influences, and devote ourselves to developing the truth within us. There is the danger of frittering away our energies by taking up an idea only for its novelty, and then giving it up for another that is newer. Take one thing up and do it, and see the end of it, and before ou have seen the end, do not give it up. He who can become mad upon an idea, he alone will see light. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1006:Sometimes the woodpecker will show up just to stimulate new rhythms. Rhythm is a powerful means of affecting the physical energies. Sometimes it is easy to get so wrapped up in our daily mental and spiritual activities that we neglect the physical. This can be when the woodpecker shows up. It may also reflect a need to drum some new changes and rhythms into your life. The woodpecker has strong hooked claws for firm holds upon a tree. Its tail feathers help to prop it upright. It also has a peculiar up and down flight. It will fly, coast down, fly and then coast down. It flies in a manner and rhythm unique to itself. All of this serves to emphasize the fact that it will become increasingly important for you to follow your own unique rhythms and flight. Do what works for you in the manner best for you. When woodpecker comes into your life, it indicates that the foundation is there. It is now safe to follow your own rhythms. ~ Ted Andrews, #NFDB
1007:What are the minimum requirements to be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open? There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be assured the space and the chances to fulfil ourselves, that is to say, to progress till we arrive (directly or indirectly, individually or collectively) at the utmost limits of ourselves. This is an elementary request, a basic wage, so to speak, veiling nevertheless a stupendous demand. But is not the end and aim of thought that still unimaginable farthest limit of a convergent sequence, propagating itself without end and ever higher? Does not the end or confine of thought consist precisely in not having a confine? Unique in this respect among all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceivable and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling or to suppose that it can double back upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1008:We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1009:the artist who gives his all to life, to living within some sort of perfected ideal. Sometime in his past, he has discovered he is…let us say, a poet: that certain situations, certain convergences of situations—usually too complicated for him to understand wholly, as they propitiously juxtapose conscious will with unconscious passion—they something-between-cause-and-allow a poem. He dedicates himself to living, according to his concepts, the civilized life in which poetry exists because it is part of civilization. He risks as much as his cousin. He generally produces fewer works, with greater intervals between them, and constantly must contend with the possibility that he will never write again if his life should so dictate—a good deal of his civilized energies must go toward resigning himself to the insignificance of his art, into the suppression of that theatrical side of his personality of which ambition is only a small part. He ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
1010:But Pandarus, incited by an immoderate defire of riches and power,* leaps to unjufl: energies, the poet all but exclaiming in the very words of Socrates in the Republic', " that many things are extended to fouls from the univerfe, which aftonifh the flupid, and caufe them to err refpe6iing the eledions of lives/' As therefore the prophet extends a tyrannic life, and he who firft choofes this is faid to be flupid, although he by whom it was extended was entirely a divine nature; fo here, when Minerva offers to the choice of Pandarus a more powerful and rich condition with impiety, or one entirely contrary to this, he makes choice of the worfe. And in this cafe Minerva is not the caufe of the elecflion, but the improbity of him by whom the ele61ion is made. For neither is the prophet in Plato the caufe of a tyrannic life, but the intemperance of him that chofc it. Hence Pandarus, in obeying Minerva, is faid to fuffer this through his ftupidity. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1011:When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution— We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.
On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry—the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth—from the worm to the dinosaur. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1012:That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know. While we all have the potential to be creative, some people hang back, while others forge ahead. What are the tools they use that lead them toward the new? Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And that, according to the people who make films at Pixar and Disney Animation, means developing a mental model that sustains you. It might sound silly or woo-woo, this kind of visualization, but I believe it’s crucial. Sometimes—especially at the beginning of a daunting project—our mental models are all we’ve got. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
1013:was a little embarrassed after I dressed and sat down to review my schoolwork. She had a large tumbler of imported sherry and poured me a small glass. The Jerez sherry was an indulgence she had learned during the two years she had lived in Barcelona and Ibiza. She pushed the schoolwork aside and started to talk, more a slangish monologue than a lecture: “I certainly don’t believe that story about you screwing a pheasant-hunter but that’s your business, and right now it should matter to no one except you. You’re going to have a hard time, because you are lovely and your body is as fine as I’ve seen.” I objected to this as ugly and irrelevant but she went on: “You have to study extremely hard and find some subject or profession you’re obsessed with because in our culture it has been very hard on the attractive women I know. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
1014:But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified. Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. (THE MESSAGE) ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
1015:No one can say what the inner life is, but poetry tries to, and no one can say what poetry is, but let's be bold and claim that there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi's poetry: call them fana and baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine.
Rumi's poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction. A movement out, a movement in. Fana is the streaming that moves from the human out into mystery-the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon into the all. The gnat becomes buttermilk; a chickpea disappears into the flavor of the soup; a dead mule decays into salt flat; the infant turns to the breast. These wild and boundaryless absorptions are the images and the kind of poem Rumi is most well known for, a drunken clairvoyant tavern voice that announces, "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home. ~ Coleman Barks,#NFDB
1016:It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure. When you have deep friendships with good people, you copy and then absorb some of their best traits. When you love a person deeply, you want to serve them and earn their regard. When you experience great art, you widen your repertoire of emotions. Through devotion to some cause, you elevate your desires and organize your energies. Moreover, the struggle against the weaknesses in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason, compassion, and character are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride, greed, and self-deception. Everybody needs redemptive assistance from outside—from family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, exemplars, and, for believers, God. We all need people to tell us when we are wrong, to advise us on how to do right, and to encourage, support, arouse, cooperate, and inspire us along the way. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
1017:Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
1018:The analysis of the last age, the 'dark age' or Kali Yuga, brings to light two essential features. The first is that mankind living in this age is strictly connected to the body and cannot prescind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body. The second characteristic is that of the dissolution typical of this age. During the Kali Yuga, the bull of dharma stands on only one foot (it lost the other three during the previous three ages). This means that the traditional law (dharma) is wavering, is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and seems to be almost succumbing. During Kali Yuga, however, the goddess Kali, who was asleep in the previous ages, is now fully awake. . . . let us say that this symbolism implies that during the last age elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
1019:All our puzzles about whether or not lambda exists and, if so, what is responsible for giving it such a strange value, are like questions about the inflationary scalar field's potential landscape. Why is its final vacuum state so fantastically close to the zero line? How does it 'know' where to end up when the scalar field starts rolling downhill in its landscape? Nobody knows the answer to these questions. They are the greatest unsolved problems in gravitation physics and astronomy. The nature of their answers could take many forms. There could exist some deep new principle that links together all the different forces of Nature in a way that dictates the vacuum levels of all the fields of energy that feel their effects. This principle would be unlike any that we know because it would need to control all the possible contributions to lambda that arise at symmetry breakings during the expansion of the Universe. It would need to control physics over a vast range of energies. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
1020:Of course, people who have been severed from their true feelings since early childhood will be dependent on institutions like the church and will let themselves be told what they are allowed to feel. In most cases it is very little indeed. But I cannot imagine that it will always be like this. Somewhere, sometime, there will be a rebellion, and the process of mutual stultification will be halted. It will be halted with individuals summon up the courage to overcome their understandable fears, to tell, feel, and publish the truth and communicate with others on this basis. Once we realize the immense amount of energy children can summon up in order to survive cruelty and extreme sadism, things suddenly start looking more optimistic. Then it is easy to imagine our world could be a much better one if those children (like Rimbaud, Schiller, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) could expend their almost limitless energies on other, more productive ends than merely fighting for their own survival. ~ Alice Miller, #NFDB
1021:Balance comes not only from the principal ability to discover equilibrium amid all the opposing forces of the universe, but also from the ability to recognize and harness them. The cosmos itself is a collection of all the forces that have ever existed throughout space and time. Light and dark, good and evil, the divine and the diabolical, sinner and saint, and every other set of conflicting energies that saturates the universe - these are the lifeblood that courses through us and animates our actions. It's the flow and even collision of these forces and energies that generates life itself. The history of human civilization is just another testament to this, depicting contrasts within humanity itself. For every Gandhi, there's a Hitler. For every movement bred in hate that grows and has an impact over time, there's a righteous one that counteracts and contrasts with it. It's his friction and subsequent balance between opposing forces that lays the foundation of our ongoing existence. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1022:Our eagerness for worldly activity kills in us the sense of spiritual awe. We cannot comprehend the Great Life behind all names and forms, just because science brings home to us how we can use the powers of nature; this familiarity has bred a contempt for her ultimate secrets. Our relation with nature is one of practical business. We tease her, so to speak, to know how she can be used to serve our purposes; we make use of her energies, whose Source yet remains unknown. In science our relation with nature is one that exists between a man and his servant, or in a philosophical sense she is like a captive in the witness box. We cross-examine her, challenge her, and minutely weigh her evidence in human scales which cannot measure her hidden values. On the other hand, when the self is in communion with a higher power, nature automatically obeys, without stress or strain, the will of man. This effortless command over nature is called ‘miraculous’ by the uncomprehending materialist. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1023:If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you honestly that without a spiritual practice it will be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to deal effectively with your archetypal Self, its grandiose energies, and its unconscious projections. If you come into analysis with me without a spiritual life, you might project your god-complex onto me if you like me and idealize me. I will probably try to carry it, and we will be tempted to have one of those Woody Allen, twenty-year analyses. This is what happens with Freudians and other therapists who do not understand that an idealizing transference of the god-complex onto the therapist is a mythic and spiritual phenomenon. If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion. The therapist has become a little Holy Father with his own little pseudo-religion. ~ Robert L Moore, #NFDB
1024:Responsibility to yourself… means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be 'different'; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
1025:The most effective people concentrate on their “areas of excellence,” that is, on the things they do best and on those high-impact activities that will advance their life-work. In being so consumed by the important things, they find it easy to say no to the less-than-worthy distractions that clamor for their attention. Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the game’s history, did not negotiate his contracts, design his uniforms and prepare his travel schedules. He focused his time and energies on what he did best: playing basketball, and delegated everything else to his handlers. Jazz great Louis Armstrong did not spend his time selling tickets to his shows and setting up chairs for the audience. He concentrated on his point of brilliance: playing the trumpet. Learning to say no to the non-essentials will give you more time to devote to the things that have the power to truly improve the way you live and help you leave the legacy you know in your heart you are destined to leave. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1026:You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1027:Focus on yourself instead. Go see a therapist and dig into your earliest memories, what makes you tick, what you want from your life, and what you expect from love. Dig in and figure out who you are. Keep a journal and write down your thoughts every morning and every night. Listen to music if that helps you to access your emotions more easily.
While you’re doing this, train your social energies on enriching your friendships. Think about what it would take to have closer friendships with people. Would you have to see each other more often for camaraderie and familiarity to build? Would you need to have lunch or dinner so you could sit across from each other and talk? What if you hosted a weekly poker game with the same people every week, women and men? What if you tried to go out to a movie with a friend once a month? Casual friendships grow into close friendships with repeated experience, so allow it to happen. Accumulate experience together. As you each open up, trust will build. ~ Heather Havrilesky,#NFDB
1028:The personal will of the sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf or distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the process, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #NFDB
1029:Everybody wants friends. Everybody needs friends. No one wishes to be without them. But never lose sight of the fact that it is your friends who will lead you along the paths that you will follow. While you should be friendly with all people, select with great care those whom you wish to have close to you. They will be your safeguards in situations where you may vacillate between choices, and you in turn may save them. . . .
Be Grateful.
Be Smart.
Be Involved.
Be Clean.
Be True.
Be Positive.
Be Humble.
Be Still.
Be Prayerful.
There they are, nine Be's which, if observed, will bring handsome dividends to any young man or woman. They will add sparkle to your days and peace to your nights. They will save you from heartache and pain. They will bring purpose into your life and give direction to your energies.
They will bring you friends of your own kind. They will protect you from associations that would pull you down and deflect you from your course. ~ Gordon B Hinckley,#NFDB
1030:In the 18th century, a revolution in thought, known as the Enlightenment, dragged us away from the superstition and brutality of the Middle Ages toward a modern age of science, reason and democracy. It changed everything. If it wasn't for the Enlightenment, you wouldn't be reading this right now. You'd be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch. Yes, the Enlightenment was one of the most significant developments since the wheel. Which is why we're trying to bollocks it all up.
Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently. ~ Charlie Brooker,#NFDB
1031:Let us discuss these problems in some detail. One problem is to amass enough energy to rip the fabric of space and time. The simplest way to do this is to compress an object until it becomes smaller than its "event horizon." For the sun, this means compressing it down to about 2 miles in diameter, whereupon it will collapse into a black hole. (The Sun's gravity is too weak to compress it naturally down to 2 miles, so our sun will never become a black hole, In principle, this means that anything, even you, can become a black hole if you were sufficiently compressed. This would mean compressing all the atoms of your body to smaller than subatomic distances-a feat that is beyond the capabilities of modern science.)
A more practical approach would be to assemble a batter of laser beams to fire an intense beam at a specific spot. Or to build a huge atom smasher to create two beams, which would then collide with each other at fantastic energies, sufficient to create a small tear in the fabric of space-time. ~ Michio Kaku,#NFDB
1032:The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
1033:We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his "courage to be" from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1034:But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
1035:The lively thought-image of foam serves to recover the premetaphysical pluralism of world-inventions postmetaphysically. It helps us to enter the element of a manifold thought undeterred by the nihilistic pathos that involuntarily accompanied a reflection disappointed by the monological metaphysics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explains once again what this liveliness is about: “God is dead” is affirmed as the good news of the present day. One could reformulate it thus: “So the One Orb has imploded – now the foams are alive” When the mechanisms of cooption through simplifying globes and imperial totalizations have been seen through, this is precisely not a reason to abandon everything that was considered great, inspiring and valuable. Claiming that he harmful god of consensus has died means declaring which energies are required to resume work: it can only be those that were bound by metaphysical hyperbole. Once a great exaggeration becomes obsolete, swarms of more discrete upsurges arise. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1036:Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but—to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call—the honor roll—of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win—he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1037:The lively thought-image of foam serves to recover the premetaphysical pluralism of world-inventions postmetaphysically. It helps us to enter the element of a manifold thought undeterred by the nihilistic pathos that involuntarily accompanied a reflection disappointed by the monological metaphysics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explains once again what this liveliness is about: “God is dead” is affirmed as the good news of the present day. One could reformulate it thus: “So the One Orb has imploded – now the foams are alive” When the mechanisms of cooption through simplifying globes and imperial totalizations have been seen through, this is precisely not a reason to abandon everything that was considered great, inspiring and valuable. Claiming that the harmful god of consensus has died means declaring which energies are required to resume work: it can only be those that were bound by metaphysical hyperbole. Once a great exaggeration becomes obsolete, swarms of more discrete upsurges arise. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1038:THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEITY MEDITATION On a personal, psychological level, deity meditation gives us access to a power that works on a deeper level than is available through conventional psychology. The transformative power of the goddess energies can untangle psychic knots, calling forth specific transformative forces within the mind and heart. It can cleanse our mental and emotional bodies, put us in touch with the protective powers within us, and deeply change the way we see the world. More than that, it can shift the way we see ourselves, giving us the power to see the divine qualities we already hold. For women especially, tuning in to the goddesses is a way of homing in on aspects of our own life-energy that we may never have understood or owned. Celebrating the goddesses has the potential not only to tune us to our own sacred capacities, but also to help us work with the hidden and secret forces at play in our lives. When we can do that, we can literally harness these forces for our own transformation. GODDESS ~ Sally Kempton, #NFDB
1039:One comfort is to be found in a God whose power is in His magnanimity as well as His wisdom. These two traits mean that His divine energies are spent not in precluding chaos but in reordering it, not in preventing suffering but in alchemizing it, not in disallowing error but in transmuting it into goodness. Satan’s unhindered efforts in the garden were simply assimilated into God’s greater purpose. The malice of the biblical Joseph’s brothers became instrumental in their entire household’s salvation. (“The brothers of Joseph could have never done him so much good with their love and favor as they did him with their malice and hatred,” Thomas More noted.17) In the supernal instance of this principle, according to the felix culpa of Christian tradition, the expulsion from the garden was a happy catastrophe, since it brought forth a remedy that more than compensated for the loss of Eden. Christ’s sacrifice, so dazzling in its overflowing grace and mercy, made it possible for us, in leaving Eden, to return Home. p78-9 ~ Terryl L Givens, #NFDB
1040:These fields, which govern the interaction of all subatomic particles, are now called Yang-Mills fields. However, the puzzle that has stumped physicists within this century is why the subatomic field equations look so vastly different from the field equations of Einstein-that is, why the nuclear force seems so different from gravity. Some of the greatest minds in physics have tackled this problem, only to fail. Perhaps the reason for their failure is that they were trapped by common sense. Confined to three or four dimensions, the field equations of the subatomic world and gravitation are difficult to unify. The advantage of the hyperspace theory is that the Yang-Mills field, Maxwell's field, and Einstein's field can all be placed comfortably within the hyperspace field. We see that these fields fit together precisely within the hyperspace field like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. The other advantage of field theory is that it allows us to calculate the precise energies at which we can expect space and time to foem wormholes. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
1041:It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. After the goal has been absolutely reached, and the honour and the titles and the wealth actually won, a man may talk with some humour, even with some affection, of the maternal tub; ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
1042:But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the ascetic? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnipotence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becomings of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the immutable Being, its consent to this infinite fecundity of its own dynamic Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality Omnipresent, #NFDB
1043:Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the air's harsh damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
1044:Exuberance draws people together and primes them to act boldly; it warrants that the immediate world is safe for exploration and enjoyment and creates a vivifying climate in which a group can rekindle its collective mental and physical energies if depleted by setback, stress, or aggression. It answers despair with hope: "How I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm," wrote John Osborne in Look Back in Anger. "Just enthusiasm-that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive." By capturing many in its far-flung web, exuberance overrides the inhibition that blocks action or innovation; like other positive emotions, it also enhances learning and fosters communal generosity. Infectious joy pumps life into social bonds and creates new ones through collective celebration and lively exchange. Shared joys rather than shared sufferings make a friend, Nietzsche believed, and there is much truth in this. High spirits beget high spirits; the memory of delight is laid down, the expectation of joy seeded. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
1045:I had tried years earlier to kill myself, and nearly died in the attempt, but did not consider it either a selfish or a not-selfish thing to have done. It was simply the end of what I could bear, the last afternoon of having to imagine waking up the next morning only to start all over again with a thick mind and black imaginings. It was the final outcome of a bad disease, a disease it seemed to me I would never get the better of. No amount of love from or for other people0and there was a lot-could help. No advantage of a caring family and fabulous job was enough to overcome the pain and hopelessness I felt; no passionate or romantic love, however strong, could make a difference. Nothing alive and warm could make its way in through my carapace. I knew my life to be a shambles, and I believed-incontestably-that my family, friends, and patients would be better off without me. There wasn't much of me left anymore, anyway, and I thought my death would free up the wasted energies and well-meant efforts that were being wasted on my behalf. (290) ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
1046:As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.
Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men,
I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church? ~ Mark Twain,#NFDB
1047:As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), #NFDB
1048:So far as he could prevent it, Dickens never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary. There was always some prank, some impetuous proposal, some practical joke, some sudden hospitality, some sudden disappearance. It is related of him (I give one anecdote out of a hundred) that in his last visit to America, when he was already reeling as it were under the blow that was to be mortal, he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted cottages looked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime. No sooner had the suggestion passed his lips than he leapt at the nearest doorway and in exact imitation of the clown in the harlequinade, beat conscientiously with his fist, not on the door (for that would have burst the canvas scenery of course), but on the side of the doorpost. Having done this he lay down ceremoniously across the doorstep for the owner to fall over him if he should come rushing out. He then got up gravely and went on his way. His whole life was full of such unexpected energies, precisely like those of the pantomime clown. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1049:Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding. Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. Empowerment is the acceptance of personal authority. It derives from the capacity to choose the direction and execution of one’s own energies. Mastery is the possession of skillful techniques in dealing successfully with threat. Orientation is the process of ascertaining one’s position relative to both circumstance and environment. In these ways the residue of trauma is renegotiated. ~ Peter A Levine, #NFDB
1050:While the Eternal Feminine in Faust II still appears in personalized form as the Madonna, she works her effects in The Magic Flute as an invisible spiritual power, as music. But this music is the expression of divine love itself, which unites law and freedom, above and below, in the wisdom of the heart and of love. As harmony, it grants humankind divine peace and rules the world as the highest divinity.
From the earliest times, magic and music have stood under the rule of the Archetypal Feminine, which in myth and fairy tale is also the mistress of transformation, intoxication, and enchanting sound. Thus it is quite understandable that it is precisely this feminine principle that bestows the magical instruments. The Orpheus motif of the magical taming of the animal energies through music belongs to her, for as mistress of the animals the Great Goddess rules the world of wild as well as tame creatures. She can transform things and people into animal form, tame the animal, and enchant it because, like music, she is able to make the tame wild and the wild tame with the power of her magic. ~ Erich Neumann,#NFDB
1051:If the gods have made decisions about me and the things that happen to me, then they were good decisions. (It’s hard to picture a god who makes bad ones.) And why would they expend their energies on causing me harm? What good would it do them—or the world, which is their primary concern? And if they haven’t made decisions about me as an individual, they certainly have about the general welfare. And anything that follows from that is something I have to welcome and embrace. And if they make no decisions, about anything—and it’s blasphemous even to think so (because if so, then let’s stop sacrificing, praying, swearing oaths, and doing all the other things we do, believing the whole time that the gods are right here with us)—if they decide nothing about our lives . . . well, I can still make decisions. Can still consider what it’s to my benefit to do. And what benefits anyone is to do what his own nature requires. And mine is rational. Rational and civic. My city and state are Rome—as Antoninus. But as a human being? The world. So for me, “good” can only mean what’s good for both communities. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1052:from Wilhelm Reich, the esoteric teachings of Secret Orders and Tantric practices. We believed that this "mixture" of ancient and modern wisdom would lead to the creation of the Magickal Child and Enlightenment. The idea of creating a homunculus or a Magickal Child is ancient. The alchemists experimented with the homunculus idea for centuries. Even as late as the 1970's reports were circulated that some students of the late Frater Albertus had created life using alchemical means. I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy or validity of these reports; however, the idea of using Sexual practices for the purpose of Enlightenment and incarnating "souls" or psychic energies has been a goal of most magical orders. The idea of creating or generating a race to heal the planet and help man to evolve is a desire as old as history itself. In fact, influencing the characteristics of the foetus by incantations, prayer and other means is common. Some parents today for example use various means from ~ Christopher S Hyatt, #NFDB
1053:Men have a built-in drive to succeed. The waffle boxes in which a man is most likely to succeed are the boxes he will spend the most time in. When a man knows he can do something well—that’s where he’ll expend his energies. Other boxes—the ones in which he’s less successful—are the ones where he’ll spend the least time and energy. A man who is highly productive at work will enjoy going to work and may even spend too much time there. A man who is adept at athletic competition wants all of it he can fit into his schedule. A man who reads well and thinks clearly is naturally motivated to extend his education. A man who is skilled at making things with his hands will always have a project going. Unfortunately, this drive to succeed has a dark side. If a man figures out he’s very good at unproductive things, he will be just as attracted to them as he is to his positive pursuits. A man who realizes he’s good at being lazy will fill his schedule with idleness. A man who constantly hears from others that he’s an underachiever will commit himself to underachieve for the rest of his life. If crudeness comes easily and ~ Bill Farrel, #NFDB
1054:It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 23,#NFDB
1055:Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!—fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thraldom!—fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty!—fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless!—fortunate for a large circle of friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits of character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as being bound with them!—fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men!—fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of public usefulness, "gave the world assurance of a MAN," quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free! ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
1056:This is a formula for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but—to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call—the honor roll—of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win—he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1057:the city, while an accumulator of the energies of culture, is also an accumulator of potencies of evil (Amos 3:9; Micah 1:5).”15 Sometimes these seats of culture making can be established to bring glory to God’s name (1 Cor 10:31) and therefore be a means of serving God and neighbor (e.g., Bezalel in Exod 31:3 – 5), or they can be erected to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4), resulting in a culture of human pride, self-salvation, violence, and oppression (Gen 4:17 – 24). Vos adds that what makes the human city fallen is not its density of population (indeed, this is what makes it an “accumulator of the energies of culture”), but its “spirit of rebellious self-dependence over against God.”16 A horse is a more valuable animal than a mouse, yet a crazed horse is capable of far more damage than a crazed mouse; so too a city’s strengths under sin can unleash more destructive evil. As the Genesis narrative unfolds, we see that warring with the city’s great potential is a profound bent toward corruption and idolatry. For most of the rest of Genesis, the city is seen in a negative light. The city is mentioned in connection ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
1058:In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1059:This (the tendency to revive the old, and just stay with the old) is true not just of Habad but of Hassidim in generally, whether they are in Williamsburg or Mea She’arim. They are pouring all their energies into reliving an anachronism, so much so that there is no energy left over to live in the present. This attempt at living out an anachronism prevents them, not only from interchanging with the world around them, but even from praying properly, or studying, let alone from perceiving the presence of their children or their wives.” (SS: understanding what they need in the presence time and generation).
“I’m not anti-tradition. On the contrary, I’ll use anything that will help me get off. I’ve got a great deal invested in the materials of civilization, like language and vocabulary - booba, zeida, cholent, tallis - they’re deeply embedded in the core of my brain, attached to my thalamus, not to the cortex. It would be foolish to deny that they’re not part of my make-up. But, if someone says that I must believe in the God who was active at the time of Moses, or Yohannan ben Zakai, or the Baal Shem Tov, my answer is no. ~ Zalman Schachter Shalomi,#NFDB
1060:Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost superhuman degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. This is a basic principle of the Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West.25 It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1061:A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1062:You don't need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say; we are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand... There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places but a means of preserving and protecting those relations. For many people, true, poetry will remain remote, inaccessible... But who knows by what unconscious routes poetry is reaching into lives that seem to have nothing to do with it? Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being—shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what—back to them? ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1063:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensation s and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs.
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,#NFDB
1064:Back when wizards were just crazy men with no powers and a mystical belief system that they couldn’t really prove, the clergy was their sworn enemy. Kind of like two used car dealerships set up on the same street. Both sides claimed to have all the answers, but couldn’t demonstrate that they were right without resorting to a lot of arm waving and suggesting that people look around them and think about it. They couldn’t prove themselves right, so they channeled their energies into proving the other side wrong. Then we came along, with our irritating ability to prove that we had powers. We put the fake wizards right out of business, and the more practical-minded members of the church, Bishop Galbraith among them, decided that they had to find a way to explain our existence that was consistent with their belief system.” “How do they explain us?” “They just say we were created by God.” “Fair enough. Why do they say God created wizards?” “For a reason.” “Okay, I’m still with you. What is that reason?” “The reason is . . . beyond man’s understanding.” Martin thought about this. “That’s not much of an explanation.” “No, but it is consistent with their beliefs. ~ Scott Meyer, #NFDB
1065:And around this hub, its center enclosed by the rounded rectangle of the elevated Loop tracks, clustered the dozens of individual neighborhoods that together formed this huge and diverse metropolis. Here was Little Poland, Little Italy, the Black Belt, and Greektown, the silk-stocking districts and the New World shtetls, each one of which—whether made up of crumbling tenements, luxurious mansions, or neat little worker cottages—stood in many ways apart from the others, a self-contained enclave with its own ethos and mores. From this height, one could also see the engines that kept this collection of urban villages in operation—the interlocking feedlots and slaughterhouses of the stockyards district to the southwest, the enormous steel mills to the far south, the reaper works, the railcar factories, the gasworks, the warehouses and merchandise marts of the retailing trade, and the endless railyards full of trains that connected the city to the rest of the world. To call this conglomeration by a single name—Chicago—seemed wildly inappropriate. It was less like a city than a world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude. ~ Gary Krist, #NFDB
1066:Strings possess one defining property which is their tension. This quantity plays a crucial role in the overall picture of how strings can be reconciled with the miraculous experimental success of the point-like Quantum field theories in explaining the observed features of the world at lower Energies. For the strings possess a tension that varies with the energy of the environment, so that at low energies, the tension is high and pulls the strings taut into points and we recover the favorable features of a world of Point like Elementary particles. At high energies where the string tension is low, their essential stringiness becomes evident and creates Behavior that is qualitatively different from that of the point particle theories.
Unfortunately at present the mathematical expertise required to reveal these properties is somewhat Beyond us. For the first time modern physicists have found that off-the-shelf mathematics is insufficient to extract the physical content of their theories. But, in time, suitable techniques will no doubt emerge, or perhaps a better way to look at the theory will be found: one that is conceptually and technically simpler. ~ John D Barrow,#NFDB
1067:…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…
…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt,#NFDB
1068:Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day. ~ Henry Beston, #NFDB
1069:There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1070:The Māyāvādī philosophers think that if Kṛṣṇa is everything, then Kṛṣṇa’s separate identity is lost. That is material thinking. For example, by my drinking this milk, little by little, when I finish there is no more milk; it has gone to my belly. Kṛṣṇa is not like that. He is omnipotent. We are utilizing His energy continually; still He is there, present. A crude example: a man begets many children, but the man is still there. It’s not that because he has produced many children he is finished. Similarly, God, or Kṛṣṇa, in spite of His unlimited number of children, is still there. Pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyate: “Because He is the Complete Whole, even though so many complete units emanate from Him, He remains the complete balance.” This is Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Kṛṣṇa is never finished. Kṛṣṇa is so powerful. Therefore He is all-attractive. This is one side of the display of Kṛṣṇa’s energy. Similarly, He has unlimited energies. This study of Kṛṣṇa’s energy is only one side, or a portion only. So in this way, if you go on studying Kṛṣṇa, that is Kṛṣṇa consciousness. It is not a bogus thing – “maybe,” “perhaps not.” Absolutely! It is! ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhup da, #NFDB
1071:The energies that make us act out of anger,fear,insecurity and doubt are extremely familiar. They are like an old,dark house we return to whenever things get too hard to handle.It feels risky to leave this house and see what's outside,yet we have to leave if we expect to be loved.
So we take the risk.We walk out into the light and offer ourselves to the beloved.This feels wonderful;it's like nothing we have imagined in our old,dark house.But when things get tough,we run back inside,we choose familiarity to fear and lovelessness over the vulnerability of love, until finally we feel safe enough to go back and try love again.
This is essentially the rhythm of every intimate relationship-risk and retreat. Over and over we repeat this rhythm,accepting love and pushing it away until finally something miraculous happiness. The old,dark house isn't necessary anymore.We look around, and we have a new house, a house of light. Where did it come from?How did we build it? It was built from the love of the heart.It has silently been weaving our higher and lower natures,blending fear,anger,survival and protection into the energies of devotion,trust,compassion and acceptance. ~ Deepak Chopra,#NFDB
1072:There's a limit to the power of a spring, no matte
r how tightly one winds it.'
'Oh, yes. Yes. And you hope that if you wind a spri
ng one way, all its energies will
unwind the other way. And sometimes you have to win
d the spring as tight as it
will go,' said Vetinari, 'and pray it doesn't break.
'Oh, yes. Then men would be truly free. From the ai
r, there are no boundaries.
There could be no more war, because the sky is endl
ess. How happy we would be,
if we could but fly.'
Vetinari turned the machine over and over in his ha
nds.
'Yes,' he said, 'I daresay we would.'
'I had tried clockwork, you know.'
'I'm sorry? I was thinking about something else.'
'I meant clockwork to power my flying machine. But
it won't work.'
'Oh.'
'There's a limit to the power of a spring, no matte
r how tightly one winds it.'
'Oh, yes. Yes. And you hope that if you wind a spri
ng one way, all its energies will
unwind the other way. And sometimes you have to win
d the spring as tight as it
will go,' said Vetinari, 'and pray it doesn't break.'
His expression changed.
'He didn't thump the wall. I may have gone too far. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1073:Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls "the knight of faith." This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; not task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant's parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others' lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1074:It is always better to try to concentrate in a centre, the centre of aspiration, one might say, the place where the flame of aspiration burns, to gather in all the energies there, at the solar plexus centre and, if possible, to obtain an attentive silence as though one wanted to listen to something extremely subtle, something that demands a complete attention, a complete concentration and a total silence. And then not to move at all. Not to think, not to stir, and make that movement of opening so as to receive all that can be received, but taking good care not to try to know what is happening while it is happening, for it one wants to understand or even to observe actively, it keeps up a sort of cerebral activity which is unfavourable to the fullness of the receptivity - to be silent, as totally silent as possible, in an attentive concentration, and then be still. If one succeeds in this, then, when everything is over, when one comes out of meditation, some time later - usually not immediately - from within the being something new emerges in the consciousness: a new understanding, a new appreciation of things, a new attitude in life - in short, a new way of being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, [where to concentrate?],#NFDB
1075:It could be that it’s not the stone itself, but the water molecules inside the stone that record and store the energies of the living. Some research has shown that ordinary water molecules may be able to store memories and may even be able to pass on those memories to other water molecules. Water is a building block of life that has been shown to store the properties of other materials imprinted on it. Some homeopathic medicines under extreme agitation have been shown to “remember” the properties of other chemicals even after those chemicals have been removed from the water (look up the work of immunologist Professor Jacques Benveniste). The theory here is that extreme emotional events can imprint themselves on nearby water molecules and then be released as the water evaporates. But if that were true then why would the memory stay for decades and even centuries after the event? The answer (theoretically) is that the original molecules continually pass their imprinted memories to neighboring molecules. With each copy the memory becomes less clear and distinct the same way copying a videotape makes each copy fade. The water may also evaporate completely, which would cause the imprinted memories to disappear as well. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
1076:Niccolo Machiavelli folded his arms across his chest and looked at the alchemyst. “I always knew we would meet again,” he said in French. “Though I never imagined it would be in these circumstances,” he added with a smile. “I was certain I’d get you in Paris last Saturday.” He bowed, an old-fashioned courtly gesture as Perenelle joined her husband. “Mistress Perenelle, it seems we are forever destined to meet on islands.”
“The last time we met you had poisoned my husband and attempted to kill me,” Perenelle reminded him, speaking in Italian.
Over three thousand years previously, the Sorceress and the Italian had fought at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily. Although Perenelle had defeated Machiavelli, the energies they unleashed caused the ancient volcano to erupt. Lava flowed for five weeks after the battle and destroyed ten villages.
“Forgive me. I was younger then, and foolish. And you emerged the victor of the encounter. I carry the scars to this day.”
“Let us try and not blow up this island,” she said with a smile. Then she stretched out her hand. “I saw you try to save me earlier. There is no longer any enmity between us.”
Machiavelli took her fingers in his and bent over them. “Thank you. That pleases me. ~ Michael Scott,#NFDB
1077:Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered something credible. The result is ONE.
There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The gods must be called.
The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not the law; he despises rules. Whenever ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like.
One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord. ~ Ernst J nger,#NFDB
1078:I've just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please," Dr. Tuttle said. "You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?" I leaned carefully against the bookshelf.
"What do you use the massage table for?" I heard myself ask.
"Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It's an ancient form of healing—locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies."
"I see."
"And by surgery I mean metaphysical. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you're interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it's very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms—adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don't worry. I'm not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it," she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid's at the doctor's. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh,#NFDB
1079:Exercise #2: Writing as a Trigger Another useful trigger for getting at shadow energies is automatic writing: Take a piece of paper, and start writing the sentence “I am really feeling right now.” Fill in the blank with any feeling that comes up—preferably a negative feeling that you had to keep to yourself that day—and keep writing. Don’t stop—write as fast as you can, putting down any words that want to stream out of you. Other sentences that you can use to begin this exercise might be: “What I should have said was .” “I can’t wait to tell someone that I .” “Nobody can stop me from saying the truth about .” “Nobody wants to hear me say this, but .” Through these triggers, you are giving yourself permission to express yourself, but the more important aim is to get at a forbidden feeling. That’s why the words don’t matter. Once you access the feeling, the real work of release can begin. You need to go on and feel it completely, ask for release, and keep going until you get a new bit of self-understanding. It may take practice before any real deep release comes to you, but step by step the walls of resistance will come down. The shadow is subtly involved in everyday life. It is never so hidden that you cannot bring it to light. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1080:Anesthesia was discovered. Do you know what it means to relieve man of his pain and suffering? Anesthesia is the most humane of all of man's accomplishments, and what a merciful accomplishment it was. For this great discovery we are indebted to Dr. W. T. G. Morton.
Do you know that the religionists opposed the use of anesthesia on the ground that God sent pain as a punishment for sin, and it was considered the greatest of sacrileges to use it—just think of it, a sin to relieve man of his misery! What a monstrous perversion! This one instance alone should convince you of the difference in believing in God or not.
No believer in God would have spent his energies to discover anesthesia. He would have been in mortal fear of the wrath of his God for interfering with his 'divine plan,' of making man suffer for having eaten of the fruit of the 'Tree of Knowledge.'
The very crux of the matter is in this one instance. Man seeks to relieve his fellow man from the suffering of disease and the pangs of mental agony. The believers in God are content that man's suffering is ordained, and therefore he accepts life and its trials and tribulations as a penance for living.
The fear of the wrath of God has been a stumbling block to progress. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1081:For the first step, we need much more efficient Grid supercurrents. They must mightily suppress the unwanted strong<>weak color charge transformations. Of course, this means that the supercurrents themselves would be flows involving both strong and weak color charges.
No known form of matter can supply such supercurrents. On the other hand, it's easy to invent new Higgs-like fields that do the job. People have played with other ideas, too. Maybe these currents arise from particles racing around in additional, tiny cureled-up spatial dimensions. Maybe they're vibrations of strings that wrap around additional tiny curled-up spatial dimensions. Because the concentrated energies required to probe distances this small lie far, far beyond what we can achieve in practice, these speculations are not easy to check.
Fortunately, just as in the Core electroweak theory, we can make good progress by taking the supercurrents as given, without fingo-ing hypotheses about what they're made of. That's the philosophy I adopted in Part III of this book. It led us to some encouraging successes, and to some specific predictions. If it survives further scrutiny, we'll be able to assert with confidence that we live within a multilayered, multicolored cosmic superconductor. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1082:From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century we have merely been expending the incalculable treasures discovered then and using up the great supply of energies gathered up to that time. Hence, modern history is the antithesis of the Middle Ages; man no longer wants to keep silent about himself: he hastens to express to others every slightest feeling and every new thought he may have through the medium of colors or sounds and, without fail, by means of the printing press. One might say that just as man studiously effaced himself up to the fourteenth century, so he becomes garrulous once he crosses into that century and all the succeeding ones. Not only what is wise, not only what is noble, but also what is ridiculous, stupid, and hideous in himself he couches in poetry and prose, sets to music, and would very much like, but he is unable, to express in marble and to fix within architectural lines. It is remarkable that architecture - that kind of impersonal art, that form of creation in which the creator is merged with his epoch and people, in which he does not rise above them, nor set apart his own I on their background - declines, as soon as we enter modern history, and not once during this period does it rise to the sublime or the beautiful.
("On Symbolists And Decadents") ~ Vasily Rozanov,#NFDB
1083:Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it, hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1084:Sorrow (A Song)
To me this world's a dreary blank,
All hopes in life are gone and fled,
My high strung energies are sank,
And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--
The world once smiling to my view,
Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;
The world I then but little knew,
Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;
All then was jocund, all was gay,
No thought beyond the present hour,
I danced in pleasure’s fading ray,
Fading alas! as drooping flower.
Nor do the heedless in the throng,
One thought beyond the morrow give,
They court the feast, the dance, the song,
Nor think how short their time to live.
The heart that bears deep sorrow’s trace,
What earthly comfort can console,
It drags a dull and lengthened pace,
'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--
The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,
E’en better than the tongue can tell;
In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,
Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--
The rising tear, the stifled sigh,
A mind but ill at ease display,
Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,
Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.
Thus when souls' energy is dead,
When sorrow dims each earthly view,
When every fairy hope is fled,
We bid ungrateful world adieu. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,#NFDB
1085:The art department proper I thought much inferior to that of the Tokyo Exhibition of 1890. Fine things there were, but few. Evidence, perhaps, of the eagerness with which the nation is turning all its energies and talents in directions where money is to be made; for in those larger departments where art is combined with industry,—such as ceramics, enamels, inlaid work, embroideries,—no finer and costlier work could ever have been shown. Indeed, the high value of certain articles on display suggested a reply to a Japanese friend who observed, thoughtfully, "If China adopts Western industrial methods, she will be able to underbid us in all the markets of the world." "Perhaps in cheap production," I made answer. "But there is no reason why Japan should depend wholly upon cheapness of production. I think she may rely more securely upon her superiority in art and good taste. The art-genius of a people may have a special value against which all competition by cheap labor is vain. Among Western nations, France offers an example. Her wealth is not due to her ability to underbid her neighbors. Her goods are the dearest in the world: she deals in things of luxury and beauty. But they sell in all civilized countries because they are the best of their kind. Why should not Japan become the France of the Further East? ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
1086:To me this world's a dreary blank,
All hopes in life are gone and fled,
My high strung energies are sank,
And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--
The world once smiling to my view,
Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;
The world I then but little knew,
Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;
All then was jocund, all was gay,
No thought beyond the present hour,
I danced in pleasures fading ray,
Fading alas! as drooping flower.
Nor do the heedless in the throng,
One thought beyond the morrow give,
They court the feast, the dance, the song,
Nor think how short their time to live.
The heart that bears deep sorrows trace,
What earthly comfort can console,
It drags a dull and lengthened pace,
'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--
The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,
Een better than the tongue can tell;
In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,
Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--
The rising tear, the stifled sigh,
A mind but ill at ease display,
Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,
Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.
Thus when souls' energy is dead,
When sorrow dims each earthly view,
When every fairy hope is fled,
We bid ungrateful world adieu.
AUGUST, 1810.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Song. Sorrow
,#NFDB
1087:We not only do not believe that man is punished for his 'sins,' but emphatically state that there is no such thing as sin. There are wrongs and injustices, but no sin. Sin, like purgatory and hell, was invented by priests, first to frighten, and then to rob the living.
We do not fear these myths and curses, and that is why we devote our time and energies to help our fellow man. That is why we build educational institutions and seek, by a slow and painful process, to teach man the true nature of the universe and a proper understanding of his place as a member in society. At the same time we try to fortify his mind with courage to withstand the rebuffs, the trials and tribulations of life. That it is a difficult and arduous task no one can deny because we cannot correct all of 'God's mistakes' in one life time.
As Ingersoll so succinctly states: 'Nature cannot pardon.'
Remember this: You are not a depraved human being.
You have no sins to atone for.
There is no need for fear.
There are no ghosts—holy or otherwise.
Stop making yourself miserable for 'the love of God.'
Drive this monster of tyrannic fear from your mind, and enjoy the inestimable freedom of an emancipated human being. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1088:Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.” 13 A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted. 14 He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; 15 “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.” 16 He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1089:Only non-involvement and the ability to remain extraneous, to refuse any identification with one’s job and with one’s working condition, only a radical rejection of the ethics of responsibility, might offer workers the possibility of navigating a way out from this productivity blackmail. Unfortunately, the ethics of responsibility, the phoney discourse on participation and collaboration, are prevailing in today’s political and cultural life. We invest our psychic energies and our expectations into work because our intellectual and affective life is poor, because we are depressed, anxious and insecure. So we are trapped. The industrial worker who was obliged to repeat the same gesture a thousand times every day had no reason to identify with her work – so she invested her psychological energies into solidarity with colleagues, and her mind was free to hate the assembly line, and to entertain thoughts that had nothing to do with her daily slavery. Conversely, cognitive workers have been lured into the trap of creativity: their expectations are submitted to the productivity blackmail because they are obliged to identify their soul (the linguistic and emotional core of their activity) with their work. Social conflicts and dissatisfaction are perceived as psychological failures whose effect is the destruction of self-esteem. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1090:We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have always known, they have known for ten thousand years, that to lock a human being into solitary confinement can make a madman of him or an animal. They have always known that a poor man frightened of the police and his landlord is a slave. They have always known that frightened people are cruel. They have always known that violence breeds violence. And we know it. But do the great masses of the world know it? No. It is our job to tell them. Because the great men can't be bothered. Their imaginations are already occupied with how to colonise Venus; they are already creating in their minds visions of a society full of free and noble human beings. Meanwhile, human beings are ten thousand years behind them, imprisoned in fear. The great men can't be bothered. And they are right. Because they know we are here, the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the lower slopes of an immensely high mountain, while they stand on the top of the mountain, already free. All our lives, you and I, we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushng that boulder another inch up the mountain. And they rely on us and they are right; and that is why we are not useless after all. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1091:You might have thought that, faced with a novel anti-political picture of the nation, liberals would have countered with an imaginative, hopeful vision of what we share as Americans and what we might accomplish together. Instead, they lost themselves in the thickets of identity politics and developed a resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference to match it. You might have thought that, faced with Republican's steady acquisition of institutional power, they would have poured their energies into helping the Democratic Party win elections at every level of government and in every region of the country, reaching out especially to working-class Americans who used to vote for it. Instead, they became enthralled with social movements operating outside those institutions and developed disdain for the demos living between the coasts. You might have thought that, faced with the dogma of radical economic individualism that Reaganism normalized, liberals would have used their positions in our educational institutions to teach young people that they share a destiny with all their fellow citizens and have duties toward them. Instead, they trained students to be spelunkers of their personal identities and left them incurious about the world outside of their heads. You might have thought a lot of reasonable things. And you would have been wrong. ~ Mark Lilla, #NFDB
1092:1. Love is the creative force of all life. Love is God in manifestation and exists everywhere and in all things. 2. We have free will and power of choice. We are responsible for every aspect of our being. We shape our own future. 3. The power of our words, thoughts, and feelings will come back to us like a boomerang. If we send out thoughts that are unkind, destructive, or negative, we will reap the results. They will come back to us. 4. For every action, there is a reaction on the material plane, not just on the spiritual plane. 5. There is always an energy that seeks to bring balance and harmony at the physical, mental and spiritual levels. When we lose something through no fault of our own, this energy will bestow something new to compensate for it; perhaps something not directly related to our loss, but it will help balance the loss. 6. Like attracts like. If we tend to be positive and kind, we will attract people and opportunities that are helpful and positive. If we constantly send out negative vibes, the vibration within us and in our auras will reflect this and act like a magnet to bring more of the same into our lives. 7. When we unselfishly give to others in terms of service, kindness, prayers, healing energies, positive thoughts or material resources, it will be returned to us, magnified and timely, in a form that we need. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1093:It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist — surely any serious Marxist — should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.
As for the world’s second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the ‘socialist’ dungeon. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
1094:A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for—rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires. What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. In a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictory goals. On the one hand, official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turn us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. On the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is dialectically linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy dissipation—provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1095:You perform at your highest potential only when you are focusing on the most valuable use of your time. This is the key to personal and business success. It is the central issue in personal efficiency and time management. You must always be asking yourself, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? Discipline yourself to work exclusively on the one task that, at any given time, is the answer to this question. Keep yourself on track and focused on your most important responsibilities by asking yourself, over and over, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? How you can apply this law immediately: 1. Remember that you can do only one thing at a time. Stop and think before you begin. Be sure that the task you do is the highest-value use of your time. Remind yourself that anything else you do while your most important task remains undone is a relative waste of time. 2. Be clear about the most valuable work that you do for your organization. Whatever it is, resolve to concentrate on doing that specific task before anything else. Why are you on the payroll? What specific, tangible, measurable results are expected of you? And of all the different results you are capable of achieving, which are the most important to your career at this moment? Whatever the answer, this is where you must focus your energies, and nowhere else. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
1096:It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that war began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organisation of mankind into great States and Empires, and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness, enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined. All the noblest virtues of individuals were gathered to strengthen the destructive capacity of the mass. Good finances, the resources of world-wide credit and trade, the accumulation of large capital reserves, made it possible to divert for considerable periods the energies of whole peoples to the task of devastation. Democratic institutions gave expression to the will-power of millions. Education not only brought the course of the conflict within the comprehension of everyone, but rendered each person serviceable in a high degree for the purpose in hand. The Press afforded a means of unification and of mutual stimulation. Religion, having discreetly avoided conflict on the fundamental issues, offered its encouragements and consolations, through all its forms, impartially to all the combatants. Lastly, Science unfolded her treasures and her secrets to the desperate demands of men, and placed in their hands agencies and apparatus almost decisive in their character. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1097:SECTION SUMMARY TO BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER … Recognize that you have limited strengths. Do whatever it takes to discover what they are. Once you know, find a work environment that allows you to focus your energies on the few things you were created to do well. Don’t allow your time to get eaten up with responsibilities and projects that call for skills that fall outside your core competencies. That is a recipe for mediocrity. Embrace this truth: The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Narrow your focus to increase your productivity and expand your influence within your organization. Empower the leaders around you by delegating those responsibilities that fall outside your zone. Somebody is dying to pick up the ball you drop. Your weakness is his opportunity. Remember: Great leaders know when to follow. THE NEXT GENERATION CHALLENGE What defines success for you in your current employment situation? Is there alignment between your core competencies and those competencies necessary to succeed in your job? What would change about your current job description if you were given the freedom to focus on the two or three things you do best? What would need to change in your current employment situation in order for you to focus on the things that add the most value to your organization? Take some time to complete the exercises described on this page through this page. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
1098:Communities need tensions if they are to grow and deepen. Tensions come from conflicts within each person - conflicts born out of a refusal of personal and community growth, conflicts between individual egoisms, conflicts arising from a diminishing gratuite, from a class of temperaments and from individual psychological difficulties. These are natural tensions. Anguish is the normal reaction to being brought up against our own limitations and darkness, to the discovery of our deep wound. Tension is the normal reaction to responsibilities we find hard because they make us feel insecure. We all weep and grieve inwardly at the successive deaths of our own interests.
. . . When everything is going well, when the community feels it is living successfully, its members tend to let their energies dissipate, and to listen less carefully to each other. Tensions bring people back to the reality of their helplessness; obliging them to spend more time in prayer and dialogue, to work patiently to overcome the crisis and refind lost unity; making them understand that the community is more than just a human reality, that it also needs the spirit of God if it is to live and deepen.
I am told that there is a Chinese word for 'crisis' which means 'opportunity and danger'. Every tension, every crisis can become a source of new life if we approach it wisely, or it can bring death and division. ~ Jean Vanier,#NFDB
1099:How many troops do we embark?' inquired Philip.
'Two hundred and forty-five rank and file, and six officers. Poor fellows! There are but few of them will ever return; nay, more than one-half will not see another birthday. It is a dreadful climate. I have landed three hundred men at that horrid hole, and in six months, even before I had sailed, there were not one hundred left alive.'
'It is almost murder to send them there,' observed Philip.
'Pshaw! They must die somewhere, and if they die a little sooner, what matter? Life is a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. We send out so much manufactured goods and so much money to barter for Indian commodities. We also send out so much life, and it gives a good return to the Company.'
'But not to the poor soldiers, I am afraid.'
'No; the Company buy it cheap and sell it dear,' replied the captain, who walked forward.
True, thought Philip, they do purchase human life cheap, and make a rare profit of it, for without these poor fellows how could they hold their possessions in spite of native and foreign enemies? For what a paltry and cheap annuity do these men sell their lives? For what a miserable pittance do they dare all the horrors of a most deadly climate, without a chance, a hope of return to their native land, where they might happily repair their exhausted energies, and take a new lease of life! ~ Frederick Marryat,#NFDB
1100:The complexity and freedom that have been thrust upon us, and that our ancestors had fought so hard to achieve, are a challenge we must find ways to master. If we do, the lives of our descendants will be infinitely more enriched than anything previously experienced on this planet. If we do not, we run the risk of frittering away our energies on contradictory, meaningless goals. But in the meantime how do we know where to invest psychic energy? There is no one out there to tell us, “Here is a goal worth spending your life on.” Because there is no absolute certainty to which to turn, each person must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own. Through trial and error, through intense cultivation, we can straighten out the tangled skein of conflicting goals, and choose the one that will give purpose to action. Self-knowledge—an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten—is the process through which one may organize conflicting options. “Know thyself” was carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle, and ever since untold pious epigrams have extolled its virtue. The reason the advice is so often repeated is that it works. We need, however, to rediscover afresh every generation what these words mean, what the advice actually implies for each individual. And to do that it is useful to express it in terms of current knowledge, and envision a contemporary method for its application. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1101:...If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.
“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? ~ Mark Twain,#NFDB
1102:Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad. ~ Colin Wilson,#NFDB
1103:Clearance Sale
For what the Jews have not sold,
what neither nobility nor crime have tasted,
what is unknown to monstrous love
and to the infernal probity of the masses!
what neither time nor science need recognize: The Voices restored;
fraternal awakening of all choral and orchestral energies
and their instantaneous application; the opportunity, the only one,
for the release of our senses! For sale Bodies without price,
outside any race, any world, any sex, any lineage! Riches gushing at every step!
Uncontrolled sale of diamonds!
For sale anarchy for the masses;
irrepressible satisfaction for rare connoisseurs;
agonizing death for the faithful and for lovers!
For sale colonization and migrations, sports,
fairylands and incomparable comforts,
and the noise and the movement
and the future they make!
For sale the application of calculations
and the incredible leaps of harmony.
Discoveries and terms never dreamed of,
-- immediate possession.
Wild and infinite flight toward invisible splendors,
toward intangible delights-and its maddening secrets for every vice
-- and its terrifying gaiety for the mob.
For sale, the bodies, the voices,
the enormous and unquestionable wealth,
that which will never be sold.
Salesmen are not at the end of their stock!
It will be some time before travelers have to turn in their accounts.
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1104:He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have? This terror ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1105:It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1106:the first necessity; :::
The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part and every movement to that which seems to the unregenerated sensemind so much less real than the material world and its objects. Our whole being - soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life, body - must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore. Every vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 72,#NFDB
1107:If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.
Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace.
Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering.
The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man.
He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear! ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1108:In Milwaukee and across the nation, most renters were responsible for keeping the lights and heat on, but that had become increasingly difficult to do. Since 2000, the cost of fuels and utilities had risen by more than 50 percent, thanks to increasing global demand and the expiration of price caps. In a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.4 Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter. As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.5 Stealing gas was much more difficult and rare. It was also unnecessary in the wintertime, when the city put a moratorium on disconnections. On that April day when the moratorium lifted, gas operators returned to poor neighborhoods with their stacks of disconnection notices and toolboxes. We Energies disconnected roughly 50,000 households each year for nonpayment. Many tenants who in the winter stayed current on their rent at the expense of their heating bill tried in the summer to climb back in the black with the utility company by shorting their landlord. Come the following winter, they had to be connected to benefit from the moratorium on disconnection. So every year in Milwaukee evictions spiked in the summer and early fall and dipped again in November, when the moratorium began. ~ Matthew Desmond, #NFDB
1109:Man is always the master, even in his weaker and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his "household." When he begins to reflect upon his condition, and to search diligently for the Law upon which his being is established, he then becomes the wise master, directing his energies with intelligence, and fashioning his thoughts to fruitful issues. Such is the conscious master, and man can only thus become by discovering within himself the laws of thought; which discovery is totally a matter of application, self analysis, and experience. Only by much searching and mining, are gold and diamonds obtained, and man can find every truth connected with his being, if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul; and that he is the maker of his character, the moulder of his life, and the builder of his destiny, he may unerringly prove, if he will watch, control, and alter his thoughts, tracing their effects upon himself, upon others, and upon his life and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation, and utilizing his every experience, even to the most trivial, everyday occurrence, as a means of obtaining that knowledge of himself which is Understanding, Wisdom, Power. In this direction, as in no other, is the law absolute that "He that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened;" for only by patience, practice, and ceaseless importunity can a man enter the Door of the Temple of Knowledge. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1110:true evils to fouls, but the depraved habits of thefe are the fources to them of their depraved energies. But every energy, though it proceeds with depravity into the univerfe, is under the direftion of prefiding Gods, and of a more total or partial providence. For it becomes, fays PJotinu^, an unjufh adion to him who does it, fo far as pertains to the doing it, but jufl: to him who fuffers for it, fo far as he fuffers. And fo far as an adion of this kind is atheiftical, it originates from a partial caufe, which gives perfedion to an atlion full of paflion; but fo far as it is good, it obtains from prefiding powers its proper end. For it is neceffary that the authors of the greatell: crimes fhould fume time or other be called to punifliment; but this would never take place, unlefs their depravity received its completion. Many habits therefore, remaining unenergetic, render thofe by whom they are pofTefled incapable of obtaining their proper cure. Hence, on the Gods coiifulting concerning bringing the war to an end, and faving the Trojans, the Goddefs who prefides over juftice prevents any energy of this kind, that the Trojans may more fwiftly fuffer the punifhment of their crimes; and Minerva, who cooperates with this divinity, excites to the violation of the oath, that, energizing according to the whole of their depravity, they may receive the punifliment of the whole of it. For neither was it good for them to remain without a cure, nor that their latent depravity fhould be healed prior to their fecond offences. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1111:Obviously, the leveling process applies to the sexes as well. The Soviet emancipation of the woman parallels the emancipation that in America the feminist idiocy, deriving from 'democracy' all its logical conclusions, had achieved a long time ago in conjunction with the materialistic and practical degradation of man. Through countless and repeated divorces the disintegration of the family in America is characterized by the same pace that we could expect in a society that knows only 'comrades.' The women, having given up their true nature, believe they can elevate themselves by taking on and practicing all kinds of traditionally masculine activities. These women are chaste in their immorality and banal even in their lowest perversions; quite often they find in alcohol the way to rid themselves of the repressed or deviated energies of their nature. Moreover, young women seem to know very little of the polarity and the elemental magnetism of sex as they indulge in a comradely and sportive promiscuity. These phenomena are typically American, even though their contagious diffusion all over the world makes it difficult for people to trace their origin to America. Actually, if there is a difference between this promiscuity and that envisioned by communism, it is resolved in a pejorative sense by a gynaecocratic factor, since every woman and young girl in America and other Anglo-Saxon countries considers it only natural that some kind of pre-eminence and existential respectability be bestowed upon her as if it were her inalienable right. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
1112:THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO
There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.
It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.
You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.
Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1113:They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
1114:What is this mysterious masculine force which spurs you onwards, whence comes this will, this heroic initiative which seems to precede the start of the great journey? This is what prevents you turning back on the path. If you were to do so, if you failed to travel the path to its end, you would be guilty, because the practices of your initiation have mobilised enormous forces which destroy men and drive them insane if they are not aimed in the right direction. The signs will help you open a way for yourself in the virgin forest where no roads exist.
'Even the Gods are your enemies; because their impersonal lives are at risk in this war. You will have to overcome the Archetypes, dethrone them, reincorporating their tremendous numinous energies within yourself. Do you remember the Greek legend? Man was a circular androgynous. He began to roll up Mount Olympus. The Gods were frightened, fearing defeat, and so they resorted to artifice: they divided the man-sphere in half. The result was that he was so busy trying to find his other half that he had no time to make war with them. But, luckily, the Gods made a mistake. Because one day we will bring them back to life as well, giving them a face.
'When the water runs downhill, it gives rise to Samsara and human generations, to the circular movement of the involuted earth; when it runs uphill, the opposite direction, it provokes the mutation of the Gods themselves, the divinisation of the hero; it creates a free, eternal race, without Gods, without a king. This is the Road of the Warrior. ~ Miguel Serrano,#NFDB
1115:THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO
There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.
It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.
You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.
Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,#NFDB
1116:[the value of sublimation:]
And since Yoga is in its essence a turning away from the ordinary material and animal life led by most men or from the more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication. On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from the powers that oppose our progress. It is the difficulty of this wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in the path of Yoga. For our entire nature and its environment, all our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth and work against the whole-heartedness of our endeavour.
In a certain sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations, - an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations. What we propose in our Yoga is nothing less than to break up the whole formation of our past and present which makes up the ordinary material and mental man and to create a new centre of vision and a new universe of activities in ourselves which shall constitute a divine humanity or a superhuman nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, [71] [T1],#NFDB
1117:Of course, he was in favor of Armageddon in general terms. If anyone had asked him why he'd been spending centuries tinkering in the affairs of mankind he'd have said, "Oh, in order to bring about Armageddon and the triumph of Hell." But it was one thing to work to bring it about, and quite another for it to actually happen.
Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn't have any alternative. But he'd hoped it would be a long way off.
Because he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millenium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do to themselves and they do things we've never even though of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got imagination. And electricity, of course. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1118:Karma Yoga, the Path of Works; :::
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga, 39, #index,#NFDB
1119:This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. All that we externally and superficiallyare and do is not ego but Nature. An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed. The Sadhaka in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical, "I" that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only worker in him and in all things and creatures.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 214,#NFDB
1120:Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way. ~ Adrienne Rich,#NFDB
1121:[R]esitance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize -- or even recognize -- the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.
The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic drama over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self. The frustrating truth is that we have no political vision to offer the nation, and we are thinking and speaking and acting in ways guaranteed to prevent one from emerging. ~ Mark Lilla,#NFDB
1122:Please, Holy Mother God,” I whispered in prayer, “help me cut the invisible cords that bind me, and set me free. Give me the inner strength to let go of all that I have created up until now, on every level, and which no longer reflects the highest path for me, and for those I love and serve. Help calm my more masculine energies so I can settle into my own divine feminine nature and cool the angry fires of hurt and fear that have burned in my heart for so long.” After making my prayerful request, I got up and lit a candle to the Divine Mother, to say “thank you” for hearing me. I was ready to surrender. I knew it was time to release control over my life and let God take over. I spoke my intention aloud: “This life of mine is now finished. My present way is no longer serving me or allowing my greater Spirit to express through me. I ask for the cocoon to break open and free my true divine light. I surrender all attachments on all levels to the past and am now ready for what the Universe has in store for me. And so it is.” At that moment time stood still. I knew my intention was heard and registered by the heavens, and that my request would be honored and met with divine support. I sensed an inner shift take place in me. I didn’t feel euphoric. I didn’t even feel happy. Rather, I felt somber and quiet in spite of the thousand sounds swirling around me, the Universe saying, Okay, get ready. The next morning, I suddenly had a powerful intuitive hit from my Higher Self that said, “Sonia, it is time to heal your life, and the only way to do that is to walk the Camino de Santiago. And go alone. ~ Sonia Choquette, #NFDB
1123:the vital
the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul of man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of nature. The vital part of man is a true instrument only when its feelings and tendencies have been purified by the psychic touch and governed by the spiritual light and power. The vital has three main parts:
higher vital
the mental vital and emotional vital taken together. The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest.
central vital or vital proper
dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, such as ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passion of various kinds and the field of many vital energies.
lower vital
made up of the smaller movements of human life-desire and life-reactions, it is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds, etc. The material vital is that part of the lower vital turned entirely upon physical things, full of desires and greeds and seekings for pleasure on the physical plane. ~ Integral Yoga; Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice,#NFDB
1124:EVERY workman knows the necessity of keeping his tools in a good state of repair, for “if the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength.” If the workman lose the edge from his adze, he knows that there will be a greater draught upon his energies, or his work will be badly done. Michael Angelo, the elect of the fine arts, understood so well the importance of his tools, that he always made his own brushes with his own hands, and in this he gives us an illustration of the God of grace, who with special care fashions for himself all true ministers. It is true that the Lord, like Quintin Matsys in the story of the Antwerp well-cover, can work with the faultiest kind of instrumentality, as he does when he occasionally makes very foolish preaching to be useful in conversion; and he can even work without agents, as he does when he saves men without a preacher at all, applying the word directly by his Holy Spirit; but we cannot regard God’s absolutely sovereign acts as a rule for our action. He may, in His own absoluteness, do as pleases Him best, but we must act as His plainer dispensations instruct us; and one of the facts which is clear enough is this, that the Lord usually adapts means to ends, from which the plain lesson is, that we shall be likely to accomplish most when we are in the best spiritual condition; or in other words, we shall usually do our Lord’s work best when our gifts and graces are in good order, and we shall do worst when they are most out of trim. This is a practical truth for our guidance. When the Lord makes exceptions, they do but prove the rule. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1125:These diseases are not really there, are they? A: They can be if people choose to allow those energies to enter into their body. But for the most part, they are only in the energetic fields. And like anything else that is talked about, or thought about, it can become reality in the physical. D: Yes, if enough people accept it as their reality. A: But the diseases are extremely blown out of proportion, and they are not epidemics as they are portrayed to be. The media and the movies are showing you their desperation as they insist in presenting to the masses information that is completely negative and fear-based. Subject matter such as murder, death and betrayal, attacks and such that keep the consciousness focused on these matters, as opposed to portraying in the media images of hope and inspiration. But nevertheless, there are enough of those positive messages being broadcast at this time, that like a domino effect, they are no longer stoppable. D: Another fear the government is trying to promote is terrorism. A: Yes. It is just another tool, like the diseases, to find excuses to give people a reason to be afraid and not unify, but to trust that the government will solve their problems. They are imaginary problems, and in the subconscious, many people are becoming aware of this. They are no longer believing, although many are in the masses. But on their subconscious level, they are beginning to awaken, and the power knows this. That is the reason they are resorting to ridiculous stories that only those who wish to believe, believe in them because anybody with a logical and reasonable mind could not believe them. ~ Dolores Cannon, #NFDB
1126:When confronted with a problem involving the use of the reasoning faculties, individuals of strong intellect keep their poise, and seek to reach a solution by obtaining facts bearing upon the question. Those of immature mentality, on the other hand, when similarly confronted, are overwhelmed. While the former may be qualified to solve the riddle of their own destiny, the latter must be led like a flock of sheep and taught in simple language. They depend almost entirely upon the ministrations of the shepherd. The Apostle Paul said that these little ones must be fed with milk, but that meat is the food of strong men. Thoughtlessness is almost synonymous with childishness, while thoughtfulness is symbolic of maturity. There are, however, but few mature minds in the world; and thus it was that the philosophic-religious doctrines of the pagans were divided to meet the needs of these two fundamental groups of human intellect--one philosophic, the other incapable of appreciating the deeper mysteries of life. To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations. In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. While the ignorant multitudes brought their offerings to the altars of Priapus and Pan (deities representing the procreative energies), the wise recognized in these marble statues only symbolic concretions of great abstract truths. In all cities of the ancient ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
1127:Then there is the life-force, the Prana, that works in our vital being and nervous system. The Upanishad speaks of it as the first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya, asanya; it is that which carries in it the Word, the creative expression. In the body of man there are said to be five workings of the life-force called the five Pranas. One specially termed Prana moves in the upper part of the body and is pre-eminently the breath of life, because it brings the universal life-force into the physical system and gives it there to be distributed. A second in the lower part of the trunk, termed Apana, is the breath of death; for it gives away the vital force out of the body. A third, the Samana, regulates the interchange of these two forces at their meeting-place, equalises them and is the most important agent in maintaining the equilibrium of the vital forces and their functions. A fourth, the Vyana, pervasive, distributes the vital energies throughout the body. A fifth, the Udana, moves upward from the body to the crown of the head and is a regular channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the spirit. None of these are the first or supreme Breath, although the Prana most nearly represents it; the Breath to which so much importance is given in the Upanishads, is the pure life-force itself, - first, because all the others are secondary to it, born from it and only exist as its special functions. It is imaged in the Veda as the Horse; its various energies are the forces that draw the chariots of the Gods. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
1128:The same effort to conserve force was also evident in war, at the tactical level. The ideal Roman general was not a figure in the heroic style, leading his troops in a reckless charge to victory or death. He would rather advance in a slow and carefully prepared march, building supply roads behind him and fortified camps each night in order to avoid the unpredictable risks of rapid maneuver. He preferred to let the enemy retreat into fortified positions rather than accept the inevitable losses of open warfare, and he would wait to starve out the enemy in a prolonged siege rather than suffer great casualties in taking the fortifications by storm. Overcoming the spirit of a culture still infused with Greek martial ideals (that most reckless of men, Alexander the Great, was actually an object of worship in many Roman households), the great generals of Rome were noted for their extreme caution. It is precisely this aspect of Roman tactics (in addition to the heavy reliance on combat engineering) that explains the relentless quality of Roman armies on the move, as well as their peculiar resilience in adversity: the Romans won their victories slowly, but they were very hard to defeat. Just as the Romans had apparently no need of a Clausewitz to subject their military energies to the discipline of political goals, it seems that they had no need of modern analytical techniques either. Innocent of the science of systems analysis, the Romans nevertheless designed and built large and complex security systems that successfully integrated troop deployments, fixed defenses, road networks, and signaling links in a coherent whole. ~ Edward N Luttwak, #NFDB
1129:Then he spoke to me mockingly, 'And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my design! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me, against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born, I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn, for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me. Now you shall come to my call. When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding. And to that end this!' "With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the… Oh, my God! My God! What have I done? What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days. God pity me! Look down on a poor soul in worse than mortal peril. And in mercy pity those to whom she is dear!" Then she began to rub her lips as though to cleanse them from pollution. ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
1130:We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
Another silence ensued.
"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. ~ Don DeLillo,#NFDB
1131:an attractive middle-aged school teacher who was taking time out after a few hours gardening and who, even in these relaxed, unguarded moments was never far from that school-marmish neatness which she carried from her classroom and which, in the early years of our marriage, we made good use of when she would play the role of the prim schoolteacher taking it from the rough-hewn but sensitive laggard at the back of the class, bent over the table, in the hallway, wherever – neither of us claiming there was anything original about the fantasy but both of us stepping into our roles with such gusto that our energies carried us into a place where we found ourselves overtaken with a greedy appetite for each other, sometimes so intense that Mairead said she thought there was something cosmic about it and that she felt capable of fucking the world into redemption
her own words
fucking our way past the pettiness and desperation which sometimes overcame us in our day-to-day lives, so that twisted together in the act of love we found our way towards that one molten moment in which only that which was true and unsullied in us would survive, everything else burned away, leaving us truly naked with all our senses open to giving the best of ourselves to each other and to the world we had created around us, something which thankfully, happened often enough back then to allow us now, in middle age
to sit across the table from each other and reflect that we’d had our proper share of such passion, we had not short-changed that part of ourselves while
all this comes to me now in such an unbroken torrent
sitting here at this table ~ Mike McCormack,#NFDB
1132:Received him in their deathless harmonies.
All things were perfect there that flower in Time;
Beauty was there creation's native mould,
Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.
There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams
And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;
Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,
And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;
Dream walked along the highways of the stars;
Sweet common things turned into miracles:
Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,
Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,
Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy
Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.
All life's high visions are embodied there,
Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs
Caught by the honey-eater's darting tongue,
Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,
Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm
And liberated her immense desires.
In that paradise of perfect heart and sense
No lower note could break the endless charm
Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;
Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.
After the anguish of the soul's long strife
At length were found calm and celestial rest
And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,
Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs
In the encircling arms of Energies
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense
Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues
He met the forms that divinise the sight,
To music that can immortalise the mind
And make the heart wide as infinity
Listened, and captured the inaudible
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,#NFDB
1133:The doctors found one electrode contact that greatly relieved the woman's symptoms. But the unexpected happened when the electric current passed through one of the four contact sites on the patient's left side, precisely two millimeters below the contact that improved her condition. The patient stopped her ongoing conversation quite abruptly, cast her eyes down and to her right side, then leaned slightly to the right and her emotional expression became one of sadness. After a few seconds she suddenly began to cry. Tears flowed and her entire demeanor was one of profound misery. Soon she was sobbing. As this display continued she began talking about how deeply sad she felt, how she had no energies left to go on living in this manner, how hopeless and exhausted she was. [ . . . ]
The physician in charge of the treatment realized that this unusual event was due to the current and aborted the procedure. About ninety seconds after the current was interrupted the patient's behavior returned to normal. [ . . . ]
Why would this patient's brain evoke the kind of thoughts that normally cause sadness considering that the emotion and feeling were unmotivated by the appropriate stimuli? The answer has to do with the dependence of feeling on emotion and the intriguing ways of one's memory. When the emotion sadness is deployed, feelings of sadness instantly follow. In short order, the brain also brings forth the kind of thoughts that normally cause the emotion sadness and feelings of sadness. This is because associative learning has linked emotions with thoughts in a rich two-way network. Certain thoughts evoke certain emotions and vice-versa. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,#NFDB
1134:scope and aim of the works of sacrifice :::
Into the third and last category of the works of sacrifice can be gathered all that is directly proper to the Yoga of works; for here is its field of effectuation and major province. It covers the entire range of lifes more visible activities; under it fall the multiform energies of the Will-to-Life throwing itself outward to make the most of material existence. It is here that an ascetic or other-worldly spirituality feels an insurmountable denial of the Truth which it seeks after and is compelled to turn away from terrestrial existence, rejecting it as for ever the dark playground of an incurable Ignorance. Yet it is precisely these activities that are claimed for a spiritual conquest and divine transformation by the integral Yoga. Abandoned altogether by the more ascetic disciplines, accepted by others only as a field of temporary ordeal or a momentary, superficial and ambiguous play of the concealed spirit, this existence is fully embraced and welcomed by the integral seeker as a field of fulfilment, a field for divine works, a field of the total self-discovery of the concealed and indwelling Spirit. A discovery of the Divinity in oneself is his first object, but a total discovery too of the Divinity in the world behind the apparent denial offered by its scheme and figures and, last, a total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal; for by its descent this world and self-will be empowered to break their disguising envelopes and become divine in revealing form and manifesting process as they now are secretly in their hidden essence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 169,#NFDB
1135: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, #NFDB
1136:Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier. He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence. At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1137:Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.'
He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd...
'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?'
'No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward. ~ Lauren Groff,#NFDB
1138:Jefferson did try. “Nothing shall be spared on my part to obliterate the traces of party and consolidate the nation, if it can be done without abandonment of principle,” he said in March 1801.8 Thirty-four months later, after the partisan wars of his first term, he struck more practical notes, accepting the world as it was. “The attempt at reconciliation was honorably pursued by us for a year or two and spurned by them,” he said.9 As Jefferson well knew, in practice the best he could hope for was a truce between himself and his opponents, not a permanent peace. Political divisions were intrinsic; what mattered most was how a president managed those divisions. Jefferson’s strategy was sound. Believing in the promise of democratic republicanism and in his own capacity for transformative leadership, he took a broad view: “There is nothing to which a nation is not equal where it pours all its energies and zeal into the hands of those to whom they confide the direction of their force.”10 He proposed a covenant: Let us meet the political challenges of the country together and try to restrain the passions that led to the extremist, apocalyptic rhetoric of what Jefferson called the “gloomy days of terrorism” of the 1790s, and perhaps politics could become a means of progress, not simply a source of conflict.11 The prevailing Federalist view was that such a covenant was lovely to talk about but impossible to bring into being. John Quincy Adams was right when he told his diary that political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. “The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.12 ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
1139:In a dark night, With anxious love inflamed, O, happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest. TAKING these words, then, with reference to purgation, contemplation, or detachment, or poverty of spirit—these are, as it were, one and the same thing—they may be thus explained in this way, as if the soul were saying: In poverty, without protection and help1 in all my powers, the understanding in darkness, the will under constraint, the memory in trouble and distress, in the dark, in pure faith, which is the dark night of the natural faculties, the will alone touched by grief and affliction, and the anxieties of the love of God, I went forth out of myself, out of my low conceptions and lukewarm love, out of my scanty and poor sense of God, without being hindered by the flesh or the devil. 2. This was to me a great blessing, a happy lot, for by annihilating and subduing my faculties, passions, appetites,2 and affections—the instruments of my low conceptions of God—I went forth out of the scanty works and ways of my own to those of God; that is, my understanding went forth out of itself, and from human and natural3 became divine; for united to God in that purgation, it understands no more by its natural powers,4 but in the divine wisdom to which it is united. 3. My will went forth out of itself becoming divine, for now, united with the divine love, it loves no more meanly with the powers of its nature,5 but with the energy and pureness of the divine spirit. Thus the will acts now in the things of God, not in a human way, and the memory also is transformed in eternal apprehensions of glory. Finally, all the energies and affections of the soul are, in this night and purgation of the old man, renewed into a divine temper and delight. ~ Juan de la Cruz, #NFDB
1140:The effects can already be felt: with each passing day our public life is getting uglier. So it is encouraging to see how quickly liberals have organized to resist Trump. But resistance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump. The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic dramas over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self. The frustrating truth is that we have no political vision to offer the nation, and we are thinking and speaking and acting in ways guaranteed to prevent one from emerging. ~ Mark Lilla, #NFDB
1141:A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most nineteenth-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do, whose value is particularly emphasized by the plight of Mexico. Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. There is no more agreeable position than that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people's creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies. There are times when dissidents are not only enviable but valuable. The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB
1142:We've seen that the theories of the Core forces, each deeply based on symmetry, can be combined. The three separate Core symmetries can be realized as parts of a single, all-encompassing symmetry. Moreover, that encompassing symmetry brings unity and coherence to the clusters of the Core. From a motley six, we assemble the faultless Charge Account. We also discover that once we correct for the distorting effect of Grid fluctuations-and after upping the ante to include SUSY-the different powers of the Core forces derive from a common value at short distances. Even gravity, that hopelessly feeble misfit, comes into the field.
To reach this clear and lofty perspective, we made some hopeful leaps of imagination. We assumed that the Grid-the entity that in everyday life we consider empty space-is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. We assumed that the world contains the extra quantum dimensions required to support super-symmetry. And we boldly took the laws of physics, supplemented with these two "super" assumptions, up to energies and down to distances far beyond where we've tested them directly.
From the intellectual success so far achieved-from the clarity and coherence of this vision of unification-we are tempted to believe that our assumptions correspond to reality. But in science, Mother Nature is the ultimate judge.
After the solar expedition of 1919 confirmed his prediction for the bending of light by the Sun, a reporter asked Albert Einstein what it would have meant if the result had been otherwise. He replied, "Then God would have missed a great opportunity." Nature doesn't miss such opportunities. I anticipated that Nature's verdicts in favor of our "super" ideas will inaugurate a new golden age in fundamental physics. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1143:The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
1144:THERE is a view of the Christian life that regards it as a sort of partnership, in which God and man have each to do their part. It admits that it is but little that man can do, and that little defiled with sin; still he must do his utmost--then only can he expect God to do His part. To those who think thus,it is extremely difficult to understand what Scripture means when it speaks of our being still and doing nothing, of our resting and waiting to see the salvation of God. It appears to them a perfect contradiction, when we speak of this quietness and ceasing from all effort as the secret of the highest activity of man and all his powers. And yet this is just what Scripture does teach. The explanation of the apparent mystery is to be found in this, that when God and man are spoken of as working together, there is nothing of the idea of a partnership between two partners who each contribute their share to a work. The relation is a very different one. The true idea is that of cooperation founded on subordination. As Jesus was entirely dependent on the Father for all His words and all His works, so the believer can do nothing of himself. What he can do of himself is altogether sinful. He must therefore cease entirely from his own doing, and wait for the working of God in him. As he ceases from self-effort, faith assures him that God does what He has undertaken, and works in him. And what God does is to renew, to sanctify, and waken all his energies to their highest power. So that just in proportion as he yields himself a truly passive instrument in the hand of God, will he be wielded of God as the active instrument of His almighty power. The soul in which the wondrous combination of perfect passivity with the highest activity is most completely realized, has the deepest experience of what the Christian life is. ~ Andrew Murray, #NFDB
1145:If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya, 293, #NFDB
1146:Historically speaking, a mathematical technique known as renormalization was developed to grapple with the quantitative implications of severe, small-scale (high-energy) quantum field jitters. When applied to the quantum field theories of the three nongravitational forces, renormalization cured the infinite quantities that had emerged in various calculations, allowing physicists to generate fantastically accurate predictions. However, when renormalization was brought to bear on the quantum jitters of the gravitational field, it proved ineffective: the method failed to cure infinities that arose in performing quantum calculations involving gravity.
From a more modern vantage point, these infinities are now viewed rather differently. Physicists have come to realize that en route to an ever-deeper understanding of nature's laws, a sensible attitude to take is that any given proposal is provisional, and-if relevant at all-is likely capable of describing physics only down to some particular length scale (or only up to some particular energy scale). Beyond that are phenomena that lie outside the reach of the given proposal. Adopting this perspective, it would be foolhardy to extend the theory to distances smaller than those within its arena of applicability (or to energies above its arena of applicability). And with such inbuilt cutoffs (much as described in the main text), no infinities ever arise. Instead, calculations are undertaken within a theory whose range of applicability is circumscribed from the outset. This means that the ability to make predictions is limited to phenomena that lie within the theory's limits-at very short distances (or at very high energies) the theory offers no insight. The ultimate goal of a complete theory of quantum gravity would be to lift the inbuilt limits, unleashing quantitative, predictive capacities on arbitrary scales. ~ Brian Greene,#NFDB
1147:I thank you, Wilhelm, for your heartfelt sympathy, for your well-intentioned advice, but beg you to be quiet. Let me stick it out. Blessedly exhausted as I am, I have strength enough to carry through. I honor religion, you know that, I feel it is a staff for many weary souls, refreshment for many a one who is pining away. But--can it be, must it be, the same thing for everyone? If you look at the great world, you see thousands for whom it wasn't, thousands for whom it will not be the same, preached or unpreached, and must it then be the same for me? Does not the son of God Himself say that those would be around Him whom the Father had given Him? But if I am not given? If the Father wants to keep me for Himself, as my heart tells me?--I beg you, do not misinterpret this, do not see mockery in these innocent words. What I am laying before you is my whole soul; otherwise I would rather have kept silent, as I do not like to lose words over things that everyone knows as little about as I do. What else is it but human destiny to suffer out one's measure, drink up one's cup?--And if the chalice was too bitter for the God from heaven on His human lips, why should I boast and pretend that it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed in the terrible moment when my entire being trembles between being and nothingness, since the past flashes like lightning above the dark abyss of the future and everything around me is swallowed up, and the world perishes with me?--Is that not the voice of the creature thrown back on itself, failing, trapped, lost, and inexorably tumbling downward, the voice groaning in the inner depths of its vainly upwards-struggling energies: My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? And if I should be ashamed of the expression, should I be afraid when facing that moment, since it did not escape Him who rolls up heaven like a carpet? ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1148:To analyse the classes of life we have to consider two very different kinds of phenomena: the one embraced under the collective name-Inorganic chemistry-the other under the collective nameOrganic chemistry, or the chemistry of hydro-carbons. These divisions are made because of the peculiar properties of the elements chiefly involved in the second class. The properties of matter are so distributed among the elements that three of them- Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon-possess an ensemble of unique characteristics. The number of reactions in inorganic chemistry are relatively few, but in organic chemistry-in the chemistry of these three elements the number of different compounds is practically unlimited. Up to 1910, we knew of more than 79 elements of which the whole number of reactions amounted to only a few hundreds, but among the remaining three elements-Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen-the reactions were known to be practically unlimited in number and possibilities; this fact must have very far reaching consequences. As far as energies are concerned, we have to take them as nature reveals them to us. Here more than ever, mathematical thinking is essential and will help enormously. The reactions in inorganic chemistry always involve the phenomenon of heat, sometimes light, and in some instances an unusual energy is produced called electricity. Until now, the radioactive elements represent a group too insufficiently known for an enlargement here upon this subject.
The organic compounds being unlimited in number and possibilities and with their unique characteristics, represent of course, a different class of phenomena, but being, at the same time, chemical they include the basic chemical phenomena involved in all chemical reactions, but being unique in many other respects, they also have an infinitely vast field of unique characteristics. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 53,#NFDB
1149:It is the sheer weight of the robot that makes us feel we are living in a ‘wooden world’. We can see for example that the moment Ouspensky or Ward returned from the mystical realm of perfect freedom and found themselves ‘back in the body’ they once again found themselves saddled with all their boring old habits and worries and neuroses, all their old sense of identity built up from the reactions of other people, and above all the dreary old heaviness, as if consciousness has turned into a leaden weight. This is the sensation that made the romantics feel that life is a kind of hell — or at the very least, purgatory. Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover. The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight. He takes over only when our energies are low. So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight. This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing. ‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling. Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced. Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glass wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator. This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp the place of objective rational judgements. Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times. This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
1150:Carbon originates in the Universe via a two-step process from nuclei of helium, or alpha particles as we usually call them. Two alpha particles combine under stellar conditions to make a nucleus of the element beryllium. The addition of a further alpha particle is necessary to transform this into a carbon nucleus. One would have expected this two-step process to be extremely improbable, but remarkably the last step happens to possess a rare property called 'resonance' which enables it to proceed at a rate far in excess of our naive expectation. In effect, the energies of the participating particles plus the ambient heat energy in the star add to a value that lies just above a natural energy level of the carbon nucleus and so the product of the nuclear reaction finds a natural state to drop into. It amounts to something akin to the astronomical equivalent of a hole-in-one. But this is not all. While it is doubly striking enough for there to exist not only a carbon resonance level but one positioned just above the incoming energy total within the interior of the star, it is well-nigh miraculous to discover that there exists a further resonance level in the oxygen nucleus that would be made in the next step of the nuclear reaction chain when a carbon nucleus interacts with a further alpha particle. But this resonance level lies just above the total energy of the alpha particle, the carbon nucleus, and the ambient environment of the star. Hence, the precious carbon fails to be totally destroyed by a further resonant nuclear reaction. This multiple coincidence of the resonance levels is a necessary condition for our existence. The carbon atoms in our bodies which are responsible for the marvellous flexibility of the DNA molecules at the heart of our complexity have all originated in the stars as a result of these coincidences. The positioning of the resonance levels are determined in a complicated way by the precise numerical values of the constants of physics. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
1151:From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Its mirages of reality all break down under analysis. As one by one the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his past transgression of the divine command: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” In his famous equation outlining the equivalence of mass and energy, Einstein proved that the energy in any particle of matter is equal to its mass or weight multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The release of the atomic energies is brought about through the annihilation of the material particles. The ‘death’ of matter has been the ‘birth’ of an Atomic Age. Light-velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite could equal the velocity of light. This conception brings us to the law of miracles. The masters who are able to materialise and dematerialise their bodies or any other object and to move with the velocity of light, and to utilise the creative light-rays in bringing into instant visibility any physical manifestation, have fulfilled the necessary Einsteinian condition: their mass is infinite. The consciousness of a perfected yogi is effortlessly identified, not with a narrow body, but with the universal structure. Gravitation, whether the ‘force’ of Newton or the Einsteinian ‘manifestation of inertia’, is powerless to compel a master to exhibit the property of ‘weight’ which is the distinguishing gravitational condition of all material objects. He who knows himself as the omnipresent Spirit is subject no longer to the rigidities of a body in time and space. Their imprisoning ‘rings-pass-not’ have yielded to the solvent: “I am He. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1152:A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance. Sooner or later this “capitalist” approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other “communist” resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of “mid-life crisis.” The women’s liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth. As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: “If ever two were one, then we.”20 As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1153:How can we heal and transform the world without the living presence of its Creator? Monotheism pointed us away from the many gods and goddesses of the ancient world towards a single transcendent God. If the living presence of God is to return to our consciousness it will be not as a step back to the old ways, but as a divine Oneness that embraces all of creation. Mystics have always experienced the oneness of being, the many facets of creation reflecting the single Essence. We are beginning to be aware of the ecological unity of life and its interconnectedness; economically and technologically we are being drawn into an era of global oneness. We now need to understand divine oneness: how the different qualities of the divine form a living presence in the inner and outer worlds, and how these qualities work together as one.
On a very simple level we do not have the power or technology to “fix” our ecological crisis on our own. The problems we have created are too severe. And yet here is the very root of our misunderstanding. We cannot do this on our own. We need to embrace the divine not as some transcendent being, but as a living presence that contains the visible and invisible worlds, all of the spirit and angelic beings that our ancestors understood. The oneness of God includes many different levels of existence.
We know for our individual self that real healing only takes place when our inner and outer selves are aligned, when we are nourished by our own soul and the archetypal forces within us. What is true for the individual is true for the whole. It is from the energies within and behind creation that the healing of creation will take place, because these are the beings that support, nourish and help creation to develop and evolve. How can we heal creation without the help of the devas and other spiritual forces that are within creation? They are waiting to be asked to participate, for their wisdom and power to be used. We need to once again work together with the divine oneness that is within and around us. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee,#NFDB
1154:
Sweet Mother, here it is written: "There is a Yoga-Shakti lying coiled or asleep..." How can it be awakened?
I think it awakens quite naturally the moment one takes the resolution to do the yoga. If the resolution is sincere and one has an aspiration, it wakes up by itself.
In fact, it is perhaps its awakening which gives the aspiration to do yoga.
It is possible that it is a result of the Grace... or after some conversation or reading, something that has suddenly given you the idea and aspiration to know what yoga is and to practise it. Sometimes just a simple conversation with someone is enough or a passage one reads from a book; well, it awakens this Yoga-Shakti and it is this which makes you do your yoga.
One is not aware of it at first - except that something has changed in our life, a new decision is taken, a turning.
What is it, this Yoga-Shakti, Sweet Mother?
It is the energy of progress. It is the energy which makes you do the yoga, precisely, makes you progress - consciously. It is a conscious energy.
In fact, the Yoga-Shakti is the power to do yoga.
Sweet Mother, isn't it more difficult to draw the divine forces from below?
I think it is absolutely useless.
Some people think that there are more reserves of energy - I have heard this very often: a great reserve of energy - in the earth, and that if they draw this energy into themselves they will be able to do things; but it is always mixed.
The divine Presence is everywhere, that's well understood. And in fact, there is neither above nor below. What is called above and below, I think that is rather the expression of a degree of consciousness or a degree of materiality; there is the more unconscious and the less unconscious, there is what is subconscious and what is superconscious, and so we say above and below for the facility of speech.
But in fact, the idea is to draw from the energies of the earth which, when you are standing up, are under your feet, that is, below in relation to you. But these energies are always mixed, and mostly they are terribly dark.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955,#NFDB
1155:Many labor leaders are aware that the global economy is robbing communities of control over our own destiny (former AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland said as much during the anti-NAFTA struggle), but they do not link up with local communities to struggle against NAFTA and other legislation, because they do not understand or accept that the struggle to rebuild and control our communities is the wave of the future.9 That is why they are on the defensive and behind the eight ball in so many struggles, for example, the recent Detroit newspaper strike. On the other hand, as so often happens, it is right-wing reactionaries like the Militiamen and Pat Buchanan who have their fingers on the pulse of the people. Attacking these groups for their reactionary politics will only increase their defenders and supporters. As we wrote back in the early 1970s, “we must not allow our thought to be paralyzed by fear of repression and fascism. One must always think realistically about the dangers, but in thinking about the counter-revolution a revolutionist must be convinced that it is a ‘paper tiger.’”10 What we need to do instead is encourage groups of all kinds and all ages to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge the humanity of all of us and then, in devising concrete programs on which they can work together, if only in a small way, to move toward their vision. In this unique interim time between historical epochs, this is how we can elicit the hope that is essential to the building of a movement and unleash the energies that in the absence of hope are turned against other people or even against oneself. That is why more and more I have been conducting and urging others to conduct visioning workshops using this basic format. When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present. The spirit and the way to make the spirit live coalesce. Instead of seeing ourselves only as victims, we begin to see ourselves as part of the continuing struggle of human beings, not only to survive but to evolve into more human human beings. ~ Grace Lee Boggs, #NFDB
1156:The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us -- intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body-has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order. Moreover, we find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude. Our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use offer the manifestation of their forms and forces. The difficulty of our separate salvation is immensely increased by this complexity and manifold openness and subjection to tile in-streaming energies of the universe. Of all this we have to take account, to deal with it, to know what is the secret stuff of our nature and its constituent and resultant motions and to create in it all a divine centre and a true harmony and luminous order. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 1.02, #NFDB
1157:The Swagman's Rest
We buried old Bob where the bloodwoods wave
At the foot of the Eaglehawk;
We fashioned a cross on the old man's grave
For fear that his ghost might walk;
We carved his name on a bloodwood tree
With the date of his sad decease
And in place of "Died from effects of spree"
We wrote "May he rest in peace".
For Bob was known on the Overland,
A regular old bush wag,
Tramping along in the dust and sand,
Humping his well-worn swag.
He would camp for days in the river-bed,
And loiter and "fish for whales".
"I'm into the swagman's yard," he said.
"And I never shall find the rails."
But he found the rails on that summer night
For a better place -- or worse,
As we watched by turns in the flickering light
With an old black gin for nurse.
The breeze came in with the scent of pine,
The river sounded clear,
When a change came on, and we saw the sign
That told us the end was near.
He spoke in a cultured voice and low -"I fancy they've 'sent the route';
I once was an army man, you know,
Though now I'm a drunken brute;
But bury me out where the bloodwoods wave,
And, if ever you're fairly stuck,
Just take and shovel me out of the grave
And, maybe, I'll bring you luck.
"For I've always heard --" here his voice grew weak,
His strength was wellnigh sped,
He gasped and struggled and tried to speak,
Then fell in a moment -- dead.
Thus ended a wasted life and hard,
487
Of energies misapplied -Old Bob was out of the "swagman's yard"
And over the Great Divide.
The drought came down on the field and flock,
And never a raindrop fell,
Though the tortured moans of the starving stock
Might soften a fiend from hell.
And we thought of the hint that the swagman gave
When he went to the Great Unseen -We shovelled the skeleton out of the grave
To see what his hint might mean.
We dug where the cross and the grave posts were,
We shovelled away the mould,
When sudden a vein of quartz lay bare
All gleaming with yellow gold.
'Twas a reef with never a fault nor baulk
That ran from the range's crest,
And the richest mine on the Eaglehawk
Is known as "The Swagman's Rest".
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
1158:Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed
barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows
and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE
MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There
were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated
spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto
lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides--pictures of the barn taken from the elevated
spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged
silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the
aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who
were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective
perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
Another silence ensued.
"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
13
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the
rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it
different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because
we've read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of
the aura. We're here, we're now."
He seemed immensely pleased by this. ~ Don DeLillo,#NFDB
1159:Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ~ William James, #NFDB
1160:Living Without God In The World
Mystery of God! thou brave & beauteous world!
Made fair with light, & shade, & stars, & flowers;
Made fearful and august with woods & rocks,
Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms;
Sun, over all-that no co-rival owns,
But thro' heaven's pavement rides in despite
Or mockery of the Littleness of Man!
I see a mighty Arm, by Man unseen,
Resistless-not to be controuled; that guides,
In solitude of unshared energies,
All these thy ceaseless miracles, O World!
Arm of the world, I view thee, & I muse
On Man; who, trusting in his mortal strength,
Leans on a shadowy staff-a staff of dreams.
We consecrate our total hopes and fears
To idols, flesh & blood, our love (heaven's due),
Our praise & admiration; praise bestowed
By man on man, and acts of worship done
To a kindred nature, certes do reflect
Some portion of the glory, & rays oblique,
Upon the politic worshipper-so man
Extracts a pride from his humility.
Some braver spirits, of the modern stamp,
Affect a Godhead nearer: these talk loud
Of mind, & independent intellect;
Of energies omnipotent in man;
And man of his own fate artificerYea, of his own life lord, & of the days
Of his abode on earth, when time shall be
That life immortal shall become an Art;
Or Death, by chemic practices deceived,
Forego the scent which for six thousand years,
Like a good hound, he has followed, or at length,
More manners learning, & a decent sense,
And rev'rence of a philosophic world,
Relent, & leave to prey on carcasses.
73
But these are fancies of a few: the rest,
Atheists, or Deists only in the name,
By word or deed deny a God. They eat
Their daily bread, & draw the breath of heaven,
Without a thought or thanks; heav'n's roof to them
Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps,
No more, that light them to their purposes.
They 'wander loose about.' They nothing see,
Themselves except, and creatures like themselves,
That liv'd short-sighted, impotent to save.
So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late,
Destruction cometh 'like an armed man,'
Or like a dream of murder in the night,
Withering their mortal faculties, & breaking
The bones of all their pride.~ Charles Lamb,#NFDB
1161:And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1162:The idea of an anthropic principle began with the remark that the laws of nature seem surprisingly well suited to the existence of life. A famous example is provided by the synthesis of the elements. According to modern ideas, this synthesis began when the universe was about three minutes old (before then it was too hot for protons and neutrons to stick together in atomic nuclei) and was later continued in stars. It had originally been though that the elements were formed by adding one nuclear particle at a time to atomic nuclei, starting with the simplest element, hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of just one particle (a proton). But, although there was no trouble in building up helium nuclei, which contain four nuclear particles (two protons and two neutrons), there is no stable nucleus with five nuclear particles and hence no way to take the next step. The solution found eventually by Edwin Salpeter in 1952 is that two helium nuclei can come together in stars to form the unstable nucleus of the isotope beryllium 8, which occasionally before it has a chance to fission into two helium nuclei absorbs yet another helium nucleus and forms a nucleus of carbon. However, as emphasized in 1954 by Fred Hoyke, in order for this process to account for the observed cosmic abundance of carbon, there must be a state of the carbon nucleus that has an energy that gives it an anomalously large probability of being formed in the collison of a helium nucleus and a nucleus of beryllium 8. (Precisely such a state was subsequently found by experimenters working with Hoyle.) Once carbon is formed in stars, there is no obstacle to building up all the heavier elements, including those like oxygen and nitrogen that are necessary for known forms of life. But in order for this to work, the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus must be very close to the energy of a nucleus of beryllium 8 plus the energy of a helium nucleus. If the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus were too large or too small, then little carbon or heavier elements would be formed in stars, and with only hydrogen and helium there would be no way that life could arise. The energies of nuclear states depend in a complicated way on all the constants of physics, such as the masses and electric charges of the different types of elementary particles. It seems at first sight remarkable that these constants should take just the values that are needed to make it possible for carbon to be formed in this way. ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB
1163:O OUR most holy FATHER, Our Creator, Redeemer, Consoler, and Savior WHO ARE IN HEAVEN: In the angels and in the saints, Enlightening them to love, because You, Lord, are light Inflaming them to love, because You, Lord, are love Dwelling in them and filling them with happiness, because You, Lord, are the Supreme Good, the Eternal Good from Whom comes all good without Whom there is no good. HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME: May our knowledge of You become ever clearer That we may know the breadth of Your blessings the length of Your promises the height of Your majesty the depths of Your judgments YOUR KINGDOM COME: So that You may rule in us through Your grace and enable us to come to Your kingdom where there is an unclouded vision of You a perfect love of You a blessed companionship with You an eternal enjoyment of You YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN: That we may love you with our whole heart by always thinking of You with our whole soul by always desiring You with our whole mind by directing all our intentions to You and by seeking Your glory in everything and with our whole strength by spending all our energies and affections of soul and body in the service of Your love and of nothing else and may we love our neighbors as ourselves by drawing them all with our whole strength to Your love by rejoicing in the good fortunes of others as well as our own and by sympathizing with the misfortunes of others and by giving offense to no one GIVE US THIS DAY: in memory and understanding and reverence of the love which our Lord Jesus Christ had for us and of those things which He said and did and suffered for us OUR DAILY BREAD Your own Beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES: Through Your ineffable mercy through the power of the Passion of Your Beloved Son together with the merits and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all Your chosen ones AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US: And whatever we do not forgive perfectly, do you, Lord, enable us to forgive to the full so that we may truly love our enemies and fervently intercede for them before You returning no one evil for evil and striving to help everyone in You AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION Hidden or obvious Sudden or persistent BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL Past, present and to come. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. [1495.jpg] -- from Francis and Clare: The Complete Works: The Classics of Western Spirituality, Translated by Regis J. Armstrong, OFM CAP / Translated by Ignatius C. Brady, OFM
~ Saint Francis of Assisi, Prayer Inspired by the Our Father
,#NFDB
1164:Red: Maintaining health, bodily strength, physical energy, sex, passion, courage, protection, and defensive magic. This is the color of the element of fire. Throughout the world, red is associated with life and death, for this is the color of blood spilled in both childbirth and injury. Pink: Love, friendship, compassion, relaxation. Pink candles can be burned during rituals designed to improve self-love. They’re ideal for weddings and for all forms of emotional union. Orange: Attraction, energy. Burn to attract specific influences or objects. Yellow: Intellect, confidence, divination, communication, eloquence, travel, movement. Yellow is the color of the element of air. Burn yellow candles during rituals designed to heighten your visualization abilities. Before studying for any purpose, program a yellow candle to stimulate your conscious mind. Light the candle and let it burn while you study. Green: Money, prosperity, employment, fertility, healing, growth. Green is the color of the element of earth. It’s also the color of the fertility of the earth, for it echoes the tint of chlorophyll. Burn when looking for a job or seeking a needed raise. Blue: Healing, peace, psychism, patience, happiness. Blue is the color of the element of water. This is also the realm of the ocean and of all water, of sleep, and of twilight. If you have trouble sleeping, charge a small blue candle with a visualization of yourself sleeping through the night. Burn for a few moments before you get into bed, then extinguish its flame. Blue candles can also be charged and burned to awaken the psychic mind. Purple: Power, healing severe diseases, spirituality, meditation, religion. Purple candles can be burned to enhance all spiritual activities, to increase your magical power, and as a part of intense healing rituals in combination with blue candles. White: Protection, purification, all purposes. White contains all colors. It’s linked with the moon. White candles are specifically burned during purification and protection rituals. If you’re to keep but one candle on hand for magical purposes, choose a white one. Before use, charge it with personal power and it’ll work for all positive purposes. Black: Banishing negativity, absorbing negativity. Black is the absence of color. In magic, it’s also representative of outer space. Despite what you may have heard, black candles are burned for positive purposes, such as casting out baneful energies or to absorb illnesses and nasty habits. Brown: Burned for spells involving animals, usually in combination with other colors. A brown candle and a red candle for animal protection, brown and blue for healing, and so on. ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
1165:I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society."
"That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me." (...)
We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects.
"The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die."
"Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us.
"Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art.
"If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives? ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB
1166:IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. “Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored,” he writes, “but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults.” He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don’t speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. “They seem to live the excessively wishful lives,” he notes, “of those who assume that they are the only person in the world.” The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. “The modern child,” he observes. “Too much desire; too little organization.” Children are pashas of excess. If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults—especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm—it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. (When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”) Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. “Children would be very surprised,” Phillips writes, “to discover just how mad we think they are.” The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive their parents crazy. The extravagance of children’s wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents’ well-ordered lives. “All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature,” he concludes, “is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad and how not to be driven mad (by the child).” This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they’re putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics—whether it’s bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor—feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak’s wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. “All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide,” writes Phillips in another essay. “One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
1167:Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes (7). “Quite apart from the charm of the new, and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience, and thus satisfies the scientific need of ‘facts,’ and besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga (8) also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos. “When the thing which the individual is doing is also a cosmic event, the effect experienced in the body (the innervation), unites with the emotion of the spirit (the universal idea), and out of this there develops a lively unity which no technique, however scientific, can produce. Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual with each other in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.” The Western day is indeed nearing when the inner science of self- control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of nature. This new Atomic Age will see men’s minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. Finer forces of the human mind can and must liberate energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction (9). ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1168:Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ‘Don’t you see yourself where the fault lies?’ But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, and to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners’ exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation.” With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. “That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependant we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1169:Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do. The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find “the right way to solve it.” To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be “cured.” The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the CHEMCAL metaphor. We see this as a clear case of the power of metaphor to create a reality rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality. ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
1170:root of the falsification and withdrawl of divine love :::
At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,#NFDB
1171:What do we understand by the term "chance"? Chance can only be the opposite of order and harmony. There is only one true harmony and that is the supramental - the reign of Truth, the expression of the Divine Law. In the Supermind, therefore, chance has no place. But in the lower Nature the supreme Truth is obscured: hence there is an absence of that divine unity of purpose and action which alone can constitute order. Lacking this unity, the domain of lower Nature is governed by what we may call chance - that is to say, it is a field in which various conflicting forces intermix, having no single definite aim. Whatever arises out of such a rushing together of forces is a result of confusion, dissonance and falsehood - a product of chance. Chance is not merely a conception to cover our ignorance of the causes at work; it is a description of the uncertain mele ́e of the lower Nature which lacks the calm one-pointedness of the divine Truth. The world has forgotten its divine origin and become an arena of egoistic energies; but it is still possible for it to open to the Truth, call it down by its aspiration and bring about a change in the whirl of chance. What men regard as a mechanical sequence of events, owing to their own mental associations, experiences and generalisations, is really manipulated by subtle agencies each of which tries to get its own will done. The world has got so subjected to these undivine agencies that the victory of the Truth cannot be won except by fighting for it. It has no right to it: it has to gain it by disowning the falsehood and the perversion, an important part of which is the facile notion that, since all things owe their final origin to the Divine, all their immediate activities also proceed directly from it. The fact is that here in the lower Nature the Divine is veiled by a cosmic Ignorance and what takes place does not proceed directly from the divine knowledge. That everything is equally the will of God is a very convenient suggestion of the hostile influences which would have the creation stick as tightly as possible to the disorder and ugliness to which it has been reduced. So what is to be done, you ask? Well, call down the Light, open yourselves to the power of Transformation. Innumerable times the divine peace has been given to you and as often you have lost it - because something in you refuses to surrender its petty egoistic routine. If you are not always vigilant, your nature will return to its old unregenerate habits even after it has been filled with the descending Truth. It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #NFDB
1172:To A Victor In A Game Of Pallone
The face of glory and her pleasant voice,
O fortunate youth, now recognize,
And how much nobler than effeminate sloth
Are manhood's tested energies.
Take heed, O generous champion, take heed,
If thou thy name by worthy thought or deed,
From Time's all-sweeping current couldst redeem;
Take heed, and lift thy heart to high desires!
The amphitheatre's applause, the public voice,
Now summon thee to deeds illustrious;
Exulting in thy lusty youth.
In thee, to-day, thy country dear
Beholds her heroes old again appear.
_His_ hand was ne'er with blood barbaric stained,
At Marathon,
Who on the plain of Elis could behold
The naked athletes, and the wrestlers bold,
And feel no glow of emulous zeal within,
The laurel wreath of victory to win.
And he, who in Alphëus stream did wash
The dusty manes and foaming flanks
Of his victorious mares, _he_ best could lead
The Grecian banners and the Grecian swords
Against the flying, panic-stricken ranks
Of Medes, who, dying, Asia's shore
And great Euphrates will behold no more.
And will you call that vain, which seeks
The latent sparks of virtue to evolve,
Or animate anew to high resolve,
The drooping fervor of our weary souls?
What but a game have mortal works e'er been,
Since Phoebus first his weary wheels did urge?
And is not truth, no less than falsehood, vain?
And yet, with pleasing phantoms, fleeting shows,
Nature herself to our relief has come;
And custom, aiding nature, still must strive
These strong illusions to revive;
116
Or else all thirst for noble deeds is gone,
Is lost in sloth, and blind oblivion.
The time may come, perchance, when midst
The ruins of Italian palaces,
Will herds of cattle graze,
And all the seven hills the plough will feel;
Not many years will have elapsed, perchance,
E'er all the towns of Italy
Will the abode of foxes be,
And dark groves murmur 'mid the lofty walls;
Unless the Fates from our perverted minds
Remove this sad oblivion of the Past;
And heaven by grateful memories appeased,
Relenting, in the hour of our despair,
The abject nations, ripe for slaughter, spare.
But thou, O worthy youth, wouldst grieve,
Thy wretched country to survive.
Thou once through her mightst have acquired renown,
When on her brow she wore the glittering crown,
Now lost! Our fault, and Fate's! That time is o'er;
Ah, such a mother who could honor, more?
But for thyself, O lift thy thoughts on high!
What is our life? A thing to be despised:
Least wretched, when with perils so beset,
It must, perforce, its wretched self forget,
Nor heed the flight of slow-paced, worthless hours;
Or, when, to Lethe's dismal shore impelled,
It hath once more the light of day beheld.
~ Count Giacomo Leopardi,#NFDB
1173:Our joy, our peace, our happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming our habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, there are negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace, and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness. Mindfulness helps us be aware of what is going on. Then, when the habit energy shows itself, we know right away. "Hello, my little habit energy, I know you are there. I will take good care of you." By recognizing this energy as it is, you are in control of the situation. You don't have to fight your habit energy. In fact the Buddha does not recommend that you fight it, because that habit energy is you and you should not fight against yourself. You have to generate the energy of mindfulness, which is also you, and that positive energy will do the work of recognizing and embracing. Every time you embrace your habit energy, you can help it transform a little bit. The habit energy is a kind of seed within your consciousness, and when it becomes a source of energy, you have to recognize it. You have to bring your mindfulness into the present moment, and you just embrace that negative energy: "Hello, my negative habit energy. I know you are there. I am here for you." After maybe one or two or three minutes, that energy will go back into the form of a seed. But it may re-manifest later on. You have to be very alert.
Every time a negative energy is embraced by the energy of mindfulness, it will no longer push you to do or to say things you do not want to do or say, and it loses a little bit of its strength as it returns as a seed to the lower level of consciousness. The same thing is true for all mental formations: your fear, your anguish, your anxiety, and your despair. They exist in us in the form of seeds, and every time one of the seeds is watered, it becomes a zone of energy on the upper level of our consciousness. If you don't know how to take care of it, it will cause damage, and push us to do or to say things that will damage us and damage the people we love. Therefore, generating the energy of mindfulness to recognize, embrace, and take care of negative energy is the practice. And the practice should be done in a very tender, nonviolent way. There should be no fighting, because when you fight, you create damage within yourself.
The Buddhist practice is based on the insight of non-duality: you are love, you are mindfulness, but you are also that habit energy within you. To meditate does not mean to transform yourself into a battlefield with right fighting wrong, positive fighting negative. That's not Buddhist. Based on the insight of nonduality, the practice should be nonviolent. Mindfulness embracing anger is like a mother embracing her child, big sister embracing younger sister. The embrace always brings a positive effect. You can bring relief, and you can cause the negative energy to lose some of its strength, just by embracing it. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,#NFDB
1174:EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective. ~ Alberto Villoldo, #NFDB
1175:It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large.
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.
I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.
I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.
I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary.
[Part 2]
I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.
Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state.
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is. ~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
1176:An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But mans present nature is limited, divided, unequal, -- it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the minds one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Supermind and the Yoga of Works [279-280],#NFDB
1177:If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle.
…
Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself;
(p. 6)
In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin.
...
…; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
(p. 8)
At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10)
It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12)
Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17)
That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism.
(p. 31)
Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32)
The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism.
(p. 38)
The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42)
Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42)
According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43)
It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49)
Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49) ~ Erich Fromm,#NFDB
1178:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#NFDB
1179:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],#NFDB
1180:One of the positive side-effects of maintaining a very high degree of awareness of death is that it will prepare the individual to such an extent that, when the individual actually faces death, he or she will be in a better position to maintain his or her presence of mind. Especially in Tantric Buddhism, it is considered that the state of mind which one experiences at the point of death is extremely subtle and, because of the subtlety of the level of that consciousness, it also has a great power and impact upon one’s mental continuum. In Tantric practices we find a lot of emphasis placed on reflections upon the process of death, so that the individual at the time of death not only retains his or her presence of mind, but also is in a position to utilize that subtle state of consciousness effectively towards the realization of the path. From the Tantric perspective, the entire process of existence is explained in terms of the three stages known as ‘death’, the ‘intermediate state’ and ‘rebirth’. All of these three stages of existence are seen as states or manifestations of the consciousness and the energies that accompany or propel the consciousness, so that the intermediate state and rebirth are nothing other than various levels of the subtle consciousness and energy. An example of such fluctuating states can be found in our daily existence, when during the 24-hour day we go through a cycle of deep sleep, the waking period and the dream state. Our daily existence is in fact characterized by these three stages. As death becomes something familiar to you, as you have some knowledge of its processes and can recognize its external and internal indications, you are prepared for it. According to my own experience, I still have no confidence that at the moment of death I will really implement all these practices for which I have prepared. I have no guarantee! Sometimes when I think about death I get some kind of excitement. Instead of fear, I have a feeling of curiosity and this makes it much easier for me to accept death. Of course, my only burden if I die today is, ‘Oh, what will happen to Tibet? What about Tibetan culture? What about the six million Tibetan people’s rights?’ This is my main concern. Otherwise, I feel almost no fear of death. In my daily practice of prayer I visualize eight different deity yogas and eight different deaths. Perhaps when death comes all my preparation may fail. I hope not! I think these practices are mentally very helpful in dealing with death. Even if there is no next life, there is some benefit if they relieve fear. And because there is less fear, one can be more fully prepared. If you are fully prepared then, at the moment of death, you can retain your peace of mind. I think at the time of death a peaceful mind is essential no matter what you believe in, whether it is Buddhism or some other religion. At the moment of death, the individual should not seek to develop anger, hatred and so on. I think even non-believers see that it is better to pass away in a peaceful manner, it is much happier. Also, for those who believe in heaven or some other concept, it is also best to pass away peacefully with the thought of one’s own God or belief in higher forces. For Buddhists and also other ancient Indian traditions, which accept the rebirth or karma theory, naturally at the time of death a virtuous state of mind is beneficial. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1181:The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate.
("On Symbolists And Decadents") ~ Vasily Rozanov,#NFDB
1182:There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'.
Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world.
The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just.
The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age. ~ Richard Overy,#NFDB
1183:The Doors music has been included in movies and their career has inspired feature films. Chapter 8 - The Doors at The Movies Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison were film students at UCLA when they met. They both had an abiding interest in film and the past masters as well as creating a new cinema. Through The Doors they did create cinema. At first, one strictly of The Doors, but as their influence and legend spread through culture they, in turn, inspired those that were creating movies. The Doors Film Feast of Friends Late in March 1968 (the exact date is unknown) The Doors decided to film a documentary of their forthcoming tour. The idea may have come about because Bobby Neuwirth, who was hired to hang out with Jim and try to direct his energies to more productive pursuits than drinking, produced a film Not to Touch the Earth that utilized behind the scenes film of The Doors. The band set up an initial budget of $20,000 for the project. Former UCLA film students Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek hired film school friends Paul Ferrara as director of photography, Frank Lisciandro as editor, and Morrison friend Babe Hill as the sound recorder. The first show shot, for what would be later named Feast of Friends, was the April 13th performance at the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds. Overall shooting of the film lasted for five months between March and September, and captured the riots in Cleveland and the Singer Bowl. Filming culminated in Saratoga Springs, New York, where backstage Morrison goofed around on a warm up piano and improvised a hilarious ode to Frederick Nietzsche. After filming started, the concept grew and Feast of Friends was to incorporate fictional scenes (some version of HWY?). But problems started to arise. The live sound, in parts, was unusable so the decision was made to use the album cuts of Doors songs. The budget grew by another $10,000 and the film still wasn’t finished. A decision was made by Ray, Robby and John to pull the plug on the film, but Paul Ferrara appealed to Jim and a compromise was worked out. The fictional scenes would be dropped and another $4,000 was added to the budget to complete the editing. The completed film runs to about thirty-eight minutes and is mostly images taken from different shows, or the band prior to a show. It has some footage of the Singer Bowl riot, which shows the riot in full flower, the stage crowded with policemen and fans. Occasionally, Morrison comes out of nowhere to encourage it all. The centerpiece of the film is The End from the Hollywood Bowl show. The film suffers a bit from not using live sound, the superimposition of album cuts of songs (except the Hollywood Bowl footage) removes the viewer from the immediacy and impact of The Doors. Feast of Friends was later accepted at five major film festivals, including the Atlanta International Film Festival that Frank Lisciandro describes in An Hour For Magic. In later years Feast of Friends was shelved, missing the late 70’s midnight movie circuit showing rock films. In the 80’s with the advent of MTV, Ray Manzarek started producing videos of Doors songs for showing on MTV and they relied heavily on the Feast of Friends footage. Chances are that even if you haven’t seen Feast of Friends you’ve seen a lot of the footage. Jim Morrison Films HWY The Doors had laid low for just over a month. On March 1, 1969, the ‘Miami Incident’ had occurred, at first with no reaction more than any other Doors show, and the band went off on a prearranged Jamaican vacation in anticipation ~ Jim Cherry, #NFDB
1184:Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making.
At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work.
Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense.
It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement. ~ Edward N Luttwak,#NFDB
1185:Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger.
In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic.
At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves.
From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness. ~ Julius Evola,#NFDB
1186:There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world.
Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these songs.
It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone.
It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been.
Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen?
We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth.
It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold. ~ Tom Robbins,#NFDB
1187:The charge that Anarchism is destructive, rather than constructive, and that, therefore, Anarchism is opposed to organization, is one of the many falsehoods spread by our opponents. They confound our present social institutions with organization; hence they fail to understand how we can oppose the former, and yet favor the latter. The fact, however, is that the two are not identical. “The State is commonly regarded as the highest form of organization. But is it in reality a true organization? Is it not rather an arbitrary institution, cunningly imposed upon the masses? “Industry, too, is called an organization; yet nothing is farther from the truth. Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor. “We are asked to believe that the Army is an organization, but a close investigation will show that it is nothing else than a cruel instrument of blind force. “The Public School! The colleges and other institutions of learning, are they not models of organization, offering the people fine opportunities for instruction? Far from it. The school, more than any other institution, is a veritable barrack, where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. “Organization, as WE understand it, however, is a different thing. It is based, primarily, on freedom. It is a natural and voluntary grouping of energies to secure results beneficial to humanity. “It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form, the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, result in the perfection of social harmony, which we call Anarchism. In fact, Anarchism alone makes non-authoritarian organization of common interests possible, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes. “Under present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a co-operative commonwealth. “There is a mistaken notion that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and growth of personality. “Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in formation of the complete organism, so does the individual, by co-operative effort with other individuals, attain his highest form of development. “An organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented in the expression of individual energies. “It therefore logically follows that the greater the number of strong, self-conscious personalities in an organization, the less danger of stagnation, and the more intense its life element. “Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all. “The germ of such an organization can be found in that form of trades unionism which has done away with centralization, bureaucracy, and discipline, and which favors independent and direct action on the part of its members. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1188:Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated. ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
1189:Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other:
"A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy.
Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in.
A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory.
If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception.
Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field.
The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?
Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God. ~ Lynne McTaggart,#NFDB
1190:The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. "I see" he cries "all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and the Siddhas crying "May there be peace and weal" praise it with many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, "Declare to me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of thy workings." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita, 2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer,#NFDB
1191:In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?"
I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance.
Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads?
To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations.
But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular.
So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow.
Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power.
Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city.
When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant ~ R A Salvatore,#NFDB
1192:At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. ~ Abraham Lincoln,#NFDB
1193::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#NFDB
1194:To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword and the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and trees.
"In As You Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes to live in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood, and in A Midsummer Night's Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood 'outside Athens' that is quite obviously an English wood, full of the faeries and Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.
"Pinned on my study wall is a still from Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage. It shows Victor, the feral boy, clambering through the tangle of branches of the dense deciduous woods of the Aveyron. The film remains one of my touchstones for thinking about our relations with the natural world: a reminder that we are not so far away as we would like to think from our cousins the gibbons, who swing like angels through the forest canopy, at such headlong speed that they almost fly like the tropical birds they envy and emulate in the music of their marriage-songs at dawn in the tree-tops....
"The Chinese count wood as the fifth element, and Jung considers trees an archetype. Nothing can compete with these larger-than-life organisms for signalling the changes in the natural world. They are our barometers of the weather and of the changing seasons. We tell the time of year by them. Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through the winter. I know of nothing quite as elemental as the log fire glowing in my hearth, nothing that excites the imagination and the passions quite as much as its flames. To Keats, the gentle cracklings of the fire were whisperings of the household gods 'that keep / A gentle reminder o'er fraternal souls.'
"Most of the world still cooks on wood fires, and the vast majority of the world's wood is used as firewood. In so far as 'Western' people have forgotten how to lay a wood fire, or its fossil equivalent in coal, they have lost touch with nature. Aldous Huxley wrote of D.H. Lawrence that 'He could cook, he could sew, he could darn a stocking and milk a cow, he was an efficient woodcutter and a good hand at embroidery, fires always burned when he had laid them and a floor after he had scrubbed it was thoroughly clean.' As it burns, wood releases the energies of the earth, water and sunshine that grew it. Each species expresses its character in its distinctive habits of combustion. Willow burns as it grows, very fast, spitting like a firecracker. Oak glows reliably, hard and long. A wood fire in the hearth is a little household sun.
"When Auden wrote, 'A culture is no better than its woods,' he knew that, having carelessly lost more of their woods than any other country in Europe, the British take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left. Woods, like water, have been suppressed by motorways and the modern world, and have come to look like the subconscious of the landscape. They have become the guardians of our dreams of greenwood liberty, of our wildwood, feral, childhood selves, of Richmal Crompton's Just William and his outlaws. They hold the merriness of Merry England, of yew longbows, of Robin Hood and his outlaw band. But they are also repositories of the ancient stories, of Icelandic myths of Ygdrasil the Tree of Life, Robert Graves's 'The Battle of the Trees' and the myths of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. The enemies of the woods are always enemies of culture and humanity. ~ Roger Deakin,#NFDB
1195:My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.
For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’.
Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme. ~ Muhammad Asad,#NFDB
1196:Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
1197:Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.”
Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.”
Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.”
(...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?”
Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.”
Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.”
“This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus.
“Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.”
Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.”
Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.”
“Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.”
Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited. ~ John C Wright,#NFDB
1198:Mates
It boots not to retrace the path
To ages dim and hoar,
When Man, at the domestic hearth,
First learned the art of war,
And - since in battle one must fall Held his defeated spouse in thrall,
That she should fight no more;
And thereby doomed to sleep and sloth
Strength that in action strengthened both.
It boots not when the better day
First showed a glint of morn,
Nor whose the eye that, in its ray,
Saw Woman's chains outworn;
Nor which was first and which was last
When savage rivalry was past
And chivalry was born;
Enough for us that, free or pent,
Her primal treasure was misspent.
The waxing noontide sees them now
Joint sovereigns of the land,
No trace upon the gentler brow
Of the old helot brand.
Consenting that the right is right,
They walk as comrades - or they might For ever hand in hand.
Yet still a stronger leads and drags,
And still a weaker leans and lags.
Because we reap what we have sown,
And are as we were bred;
Because one passion, overgrown,
Since so long overfed,
Still works confusion to the scheme
Whereof both man and woman dream.
'T'is the unnumbered dead
That laid it on him for a curse,
And her, its immemorial nurse.
134
But, with these tyrants in the dust,
Why should their ghosts hold sway?
Cut the long entail of their lust,
Heirs of a cleaner day!
Lift the dead hand from living mind,
Break the old spells that bind and blind,
O Woman, far astray!
And march with Man the open road
Without a fetter or a load.
Our pioneer brothers can discern
The sunlit heights around;
We, that should likewise look and learn,
Keep eyes upon the ground;
And drug our feebleness with sweets
When needing tonic of strong meats;
And all our ways surround
With tangling trifles, gaud and toy,
That mock us with the name of joy.
What brains these fragile webs enmesh!
What soaring thought they tie!
What energies of soul and flesh
They still or stultify!
What wasted riches of the mind,
What wealth of genius, dumb and blind,
In shop and workroom lie,
While the great realms of life are stored
With such vast mystery unexplored!
Where were the sciences and arts
When men went plumed and curled?
Where were the brains, the hands, the hearts,
That now subdue the world The March of Progress, straight and true When men wore coats of every hue?
In childish swaddlings furled,
Their strength lay latent and unknown,
As ineffectual as our own.
Freed from this complicated coil
By mere vainglory spun,
135
Uprooted from this fruitless soil,
Unfed by rain or sun,
Where sleep the germs of noble deeds
In still unfructifying seeds,
Or leafage scarce begun This ash-heap of the poor and small
That chokes the greatness in us all Uplifted to the light - the place
Where Man his manhood found
When tyranny of silk and lace
No longer held him bound;
With eyes, from Fashion's witchcraft clear,
For Beauty, simple and sincere,
And, unbeguiled by sound
Of siren wooings, quiet ears
For the high message that he hears:
The swelling call to loftier life
That, like a distant bell,
Chimes through the traffic and the strife
Of those who buy and sell;
Through camp and temple, field and street,
The market where we game and cheat,
The home wherein we dwell: Here should we stand, as strong, as free,
For splendid enterprise as he.
To him no flowering parasite
That only sucks and clings
To drain and enervate and blight,
But impulse to his wings;
His mate in passion, mate in power,
His soul's wife, that for marriage dower
Exhaustless treasure brings The daily bread, the daily spur,
The day's reward for him - and her.
Like woodland creatures, that have willed
To pair by Nature's plan,
A woman finished and fulfilled
And a completed man;
136
To run together and abreast,
And side by side to fight or rest,
As when the world began;
Each bound to other, yet both free . . . .
It is not, but it ought to be.
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
1199:By A Norfolk Broad
One hour ago the crimson sun, that seemed so long a-drowning, sank.
The summer day is all but done. Our boat is moored beneath the bank.
I bask in peace, content, replete — my faithful comrade at my feet.
The water-violet shuts its eye; the water-lily petals close;
So in the evening light we lie and dream in undisturbed repose.
How far all petty cares have flown! How calm the fretful world has grown!
We only hear the gentle breeze, in tender sighs and whispers, pass
Through osier beds and alder trees, and rustling flags and bending grass;
The song of blackbird in the hedge, the quack of wild-duck in the sedge.
The distant bark of farmhouse dogs, the piping of a clear-voiced thrush,
The murmurous babble of the frogs, of rippling stream in reed and rush;
The splash of pike and bream that rise to flitting moths and dragon-files.
Far from the haunts of striving men, the toil and moil, the dust and din,
At home, at peace, in this lone fen, with these our dumb and gentler kin;
In Mother Nature's arms at rest, we drink the nectar of her breast.
The fragrance of these dewy hours, the perfume that the rich earth yields,
Sweetbriar and bean and clover-flowers, the incense of the quiet fields;
The new-cut hay, so sweet and fresh . . . . what balm to spirit and to flesh!
And those white gulls, inland for food; and that still heron, carved in jet;
That paddling water-hen and brood, those swifts and swallows, hunting yet;
All these soft creatures, wild and free, how lovely and how kind they be!
Kind to that monster of the gun, that ravager of earth and sky,
From whom the fledgelings hide and run — the immemorial enemy!
Ah, but this hand of their dread lord hath sheathed the devastating sword.
Tell them, my comrade, in thy tongue, that I come not to rob and strike.
Tell these shy hearts, so wronged and wrung, that all men's hearts are not alike.
In the Dark Ages of thy race, thou hast foretaste of light and grace.
Thou, love-enfranchised, that canst sleep unharmed, unharried, at my door,
Wolf-brother, taught to guard the sheep, teach them that man is something
more
77
Than instrument of woe and death to half the creatures that have breath.
The western glories fade and pass. The twilight deepens more and more.
A thin mist, like a breath on glass, veils shining mere and distant shore.
The moor-hen's family is fed. The heron hies him home to bed.
No hum of gnat or bee is heard; no pipe of thrush on hawthorn bough;
No cry of any beast or bird to stir the solemn stillness now,
Though earth and air and stream are rife with latent energies of life.
Silent the otter where he prowls, the gliding polecat and her prey;
Silent the soft-winged mousing owls, the flickering bats, like imps at play.
War, death, the fighters and the fight — all ghostly shadows of the night.
What means that questioning paw of thine? those wistful eyes upon my face?
Ah, hunter! Dost thou sniff and whine? Art still a-quiver for the chase?
Peace — peace! Lie down again, old hound. This place to-night is holy ground.
The clocks strike ten. The last, last gleam of lingering day has disappeared.
On field and marsh and quiet stream a few stars shine. The mist has cleared.
The willows of the further shore stand outlined on the sky once more.
How clear the blackness, leaf and bark, the plumes upon those bulbous stumps!
A pallid fragment of the dark shows fine-etched flag and osier clumps.
Sharper and sharper in the glow the iris and the bulrush grow.
A faint dawn glimmers on the sedge, the grassy banks, the flowery meads;
A bright disc shows its radiant edge, the round moon rises from the reeds;
The sleeping lilies take the light; their steel-dark bed turns silver-white.
That path of glory, widening, streams across the mere to where we sit.
My sight swims in its dazzling beams; spirit and brain are steeped in it . . . .
Dost thou not answer to the touch? Listen, my dog, that knows so much: —
There may be lovelier worlds than this, a heavenly country, vast and fair,
Where saints and seraphs dwell in bliss — I do not know — I do not care.
While in my human flesh I live I ask no more than earth can give.
Ethereal essences may roam Elysian Fields beyond the grave,
But we, my dog, will saunter home, to all we love and all we crave.
God sees us thankful for our lot. The Unborn Day concerns us not.
78
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
1200:Nightfall In The Fens
1.
One hour ago the red- hot sun below the bright horizon sank.
The long midsummer day is done. Our boat is moored beneath the bank.
The glory of the crimson west dies slowly on the river's breast.
2.
The water- violet shuts its eye; the water- lily petals close;
So in the evening light we lie and dream in undisturbed repose.
How far all petty cares have flown! How calm the fretful world has grown!
3.
We only hear the gentle breeze, in soft, delicious whispers, pass
Through osier beds and alder trees, and rustling flags and bending grass;
The song of blackbird in the hedge, the quack of wild duck in the sedge.
4.
The distant bark of farmhouse dogs, the piping of a clear- voiced thrush;
The murmurous babble of the frogs, of rippling stream in reed and rush;
The splash of hungry trout that rise to passing gnats and dragon- flies.
5.
Sounds that make silence eloquent, but cannot break it, nor dispel
The tranquil sense of still content that holds us like enchanter's spell —
At rest and free, in this lone fen, from noise of streets and striving men.
145
6.
What perfume in these dewy hours the rich earth to the soft air yields!
Sweetbriar and bean and clover flowers breathe incense from the quiet fields;
And every whiff that comes this way brings fragrant scent of new- mown hay.
7.
A long- legged heron stalks about that marshy meadow, seeking food;
A little water- hen creeps out close by us, with her paddling brood;
A water- rat, in blank surprise, stares at us with his beady eyes.
8.
The swallow lingers, and the swift, like arrow from a bow, darts by;
Light clouds of little midges drift between us and the tender sky;
Cockchafers hum as they whir past. But the hushed twilight gathers fast.
9.
All Nature takes her happy ease, and we no more can fume and fret.
No inward questions taunt and tease. All life's disasters we forget —
All life's injustice we forgive. To- night it is enough to live.
10.
No time is this to talk of books — no time vexed problems to discuss
Through all the upward spirit looks, and sees that Good is meant for us —
Sees more in these transparent skies than in all wise philosophies.
146
11.
The western glories fade and pass. The twilight deepens more and more.
A thin mist, like a breath on glass, veils shining stream and distant shore;
And night is falling, still and cool, on each broad marsh and silent pool.
12.
The moor- hen paddles in the weeds no longer, for her chicks are fed;
The heron, rising from the reeds, goes slowly sailing home to bed;
Just now, from off that mossy bank, the little brown rat slipped and sank.
13.
Night comes at length. The last pale gleam of lingering day has disappeared.
On silent fields and quiet stream a few stars shine; the mist has cleared;
The willows of the further shore stand outlined on the sky once more.
14.
No hum of gnat or bee is heard; no pipe of thrush on hawthorn bough;
No cry of any beast or bird to stir the solemn stillness now,
Though all the soundless air is rife with latent energies of life
15.
Only a vagrant bat we see on silken pinion flitting by;
Only a white owl, roaming free, with downy wings and steadfast eye;
Two ghostly visions in their flight — two noiseless shadows of the night.
16.
147
How clear the darkness, and how fine the plumes upon those bulbous stumps!
A luminous greyness seems to shine behind those serried osier clumps;
And sharper in the pallid glow the stems of flag and bulrush grow.
17.
A faint dawn breaks on yonder sedge, and broadens in that bed of weeds;
A bright disc shows its radiant edge, the round moon rises from the reeds;
Its level rays of silver glide across the steel- dark river tide.
18.
They burnish steel to silver bright — a mirror for an angel meet;
They bridge it with a bridge of light — fit pathway for an angel's feet;
If angel feet and angel face haunt mortal creatures' dwelling place.
19.
The widening track of glory streams to this low margin where we sit;
My sight swims in its dazzling beams, and heart and brain are steeped in it —
Are washed from all the dust and grime, the smears and tears, of working time.
20.
Like waves when stormy winds are past, my toils and turmoils sink and cease;
Like long- bound captive free at last, I bask in ecstasies of peace;
Like tired child I lie at rest upon my unknown parent's breast.
21.
There may be happier worlds than this — a heavenly country, vast and fair,
Where saints and seraphs dwell in bliss — but I pray not for entrance there.
While in my human flesh I live I ask no more than earth can give.
148
22.
Ethereal essences may roam Elysian fields beyond the grave,
But I, a man, am in my home, with all I love and all I crave.
How is it, faithful friend, with thee? This sweet world is enough for me.
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
1201:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#NFDB
1202:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.
Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.
Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.
Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,#NFDB
1203:In his own footprints, I do follow through
His reasonings, and with pronouncements teach
The covenant whereby all things are framed,
How under that covenant they must abide
Nor ever prevail to abrogate the aeons'
Inexorable decrees- how (as we've found),
In class of mortal objects, o'er all else,
The mind exists of earth-born frame create
And impotent unscathed to abide
Across the mighty aeons, and how come
In sleep those idol-apparitions
That so befool intelligence when we
Do seem to view a man whom life has left.
Thus far we've gone; the order of my plan
Hath brought me now unto the point where I
Must make report how, too, the universe
Consists of mortal body, born in time,
And in what modes that congregated stuff
Established itself as earth and sky,
Ocean, and stars, and sun, and ball of moon;
And then what living creatures rose from out
The old telluric places, and what ones
Were never born at all; and in what mode
The human race began to name its things
And use the varied speech from man to man;
And in what modes hath bosomed in their breasts
That awe of gods, which halloweth in all lands
Fanes, altars, groves, lakes, idols of the gods.
Also I shall untangle by what power
The steersman Nature guides the sun's courses,
And the meanderings of the moon, lest we,
Percase, should fancy that of own free will
They circle their perennial courses round,
Timing their motions for increase of crops
And living creatures, or lest we should think
They roll along by any plan of gods.
For even those men who have learned full well
That godheads lead a long life free of care,
If yet meanwhile they wonder by what plan
Things can go on (and chiefly yon high things
Observed o'erhead on the ethereal coasts),
Again are hurried back unto the fears
Of old religion and adopt again
Harsh masters, deemed almighty- wretched men,
Unwitting what can be and what cannot,
And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
But for the rest, lest we delay thee here
Longer by empty promises- behold,
Before all else, the seas, the lands, the sky:
O Memmius, their threefold nature, lo,
Their bodies three, three aspects so unlike,
Three frames so vast, a single day shall give
Unto annihilation! Then shall crash
That massive form and fabric of the world
Sustained so many aeons! Nor do I
Fail to perceive how strange and marvellous
This fact must strike the intellect of man,-
Annihilation of the sky and earth
That is to be,- and with what toil of words
'Tis mine to prove the same; as happens oft
When once ye offer to man's listening ears
Something before unheard of, but may not
Subject it to the view of eyes for him
Nor put it into hand- the sight and touch,
Whereby the opened highways of belief
Lead most directly into human breast
And regions of intelligence. But yet
I will speak out. The fact itself, perchance,
Will force belief in these my words, and thou
Mayst see, in little time, tremendously
With risen commotions of the lands all things
Quaking to pieces- which afar from us
May she, the steersman Nature, guide: and may
Reason, O rather than the fact itself,
Persuade us that all things can be o'erthrown
And sink with awful-sounding breakage down!
But ere on this I take a step to utter
Oracles holier and soundlier based
Than ever the Pythian pronounced for men
From out the tripod and the Delphian laurel,
I will unfold for thee with learned words
Many a consolation, lest perchance,
Still bridled by religion, thou suppose
Lands, sun, and sky, sea, constellations, moon,
Must dure forever, as of frame divine-
And so conclude that it is just that those,
(After the manner of the Giants), should all
Pay the huge penalties for monstrous crime,
Who by their reasonings do overshake
The ramparts of the universe and wish
There to put out the splendid sun of heaven,
Branding with mortal talk immortal things-
Though these same things are even so far removed
From any touch of deity and seem
So far unworthy of numbering with the gods,
That well they may be thought to furnish rather
A goodly instance of the sort of things
That lack the living motion, living sense.
For sure 'tis quite beside the mark to think
That judgment and the nature of the mind
In any kind of body can exist-
Just as in ether can't exist a tree,
Nor clouds in the salt sea, nor in the fields
Can fishes live, nor blood in timber be,
Nor sap in boulders: fixed and arranged
Where everything may grow and have its place.
Thus nature of mind cannot arise alone
Without the body, nor have its being far
From thews and blood. Yet if 'twere possible?-
Much rather might this very power of mind
Be in the head, the shoulders, or the heels,
And, born in any part soever, yet
In the same man, in the same vessel abide
But since within this body even of ours
Stands fixed and appears arranged sure
Where soul and mind can each exist and grow,
Deny we must the more that they can dure
Outside the body and the breathing form
In rotting clods of earth, in the sun's fire,
In water, or in ether's skiey coasts.
Therefore these things no whit are furnished
With sense divine, since never can they be
With life-force quickened.
Likewise, thou canst ne'er
Believe the sacred seats of gods are here
In any regions of this mundane world;
Indeed, the nature of the gods, so subtle,
So far removed from these our senses, scarce
Is seen even by intelligence of mind.
And since they've ever eluded touch and thrust
Of human hands, they cannot reach to grasp
Aught tangible to us. For what may not
Itself be touched in turn can never touch.
Wherefore, besides, also their seats must be
Unlike these seats of ours,- even subtle too,
As meet for subtle essence- as I'll prove
Hereafter unto thee with large discourse.
Further, to say that for the sake of men
They willed to prepare this world's magnificence,
And that 'tis therefore duty and behoof
To praise the work of gods as worthy praise,
And that 'tis sacrilege for men to shake
Ever by any force from out their seats
What hath been stablished by the Forethought old
To everlasting for races of mankind,
And that 'tis sacrilege to assault by words
And overtopple all from base to beam,-
Memmius, such notions to concoct and pile,
Is verily- to dote. Our gratefulness,
O what emoluments could it confer
Upon Immortals and upon the Blessed
That they should take a step to manage aught
For sake of us? Or what new factor could,
After so long a time, inveigle them-
The hitherto reposeful- to desire
To change their former life? For rather he
Whom old things chafe seems likely to rejoice
At new; but one that in fore-passed time
Hath chanced upon no ill, through goodly years.
O what could ever enkindle in such an one
Passion for strange experiment? Or what
The evil for us, if we had ne'er been born?-
As though, forsooth, in darkling realms and woe
Our life were lying till should dawn at last
The day-spring of creation! Whosoever
Hath been begotten wills perforce to stay
In life, so long as fond delight detains;
But whoso ne'er hath tasted love of life,
And ne'er was in the count of living things,
What hurts it him that he was never born?
Whence, further, first was planted in the gods
The archetype for gendering the world
And the fore-notion of what man is like,
So that they knew and pre-conceived with mind
Just what they wished to make? Or how were known
Ever the energies of primal germs,
And what those germs, by interchange of place,
Could thus produce, if nature's self had not
Given example for creating all?
For in such wise primordials of things,
Many in many modes, astir by blows
From immemorial aeons, in motion too
By their own weights, have evermore been wont
To be so borne along and in all modes
To meet together and to try all sorts
Which, by combining one with other, they
Are powerful to create, that thus it is
No marvel now, if they have also fallen
Into arrangements such, and if they've passed
Into vibrations such, as those whereby
This sum of things is carried on to-day
By fixed renewal. But knew I never what
The seeds primordial were, yet would I dare
This to affirm, even from deep judgments based
Upon the ways and conduct of the skies-
This to maintain by many a fact besides-
That in no wise the nature of all things
For us was fashioned by a power divine-
So great the faults it stands encumbered with.
First, mark all regions which are overarched
By the prodigious reaches of the sky:
One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains
And forests of the beasts do have and hold;
And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea
(Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands)
Possess it merely; and, again, thereof
Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat
And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob
From mortal kind. And what is left to till,
Even that the force of Nature would o'errun
With brambles, did not human force oppose,-
Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat
Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave
The soil in twain by pressing on the plough.
Unless, by the ploughshare turning the fruitful clods
And kneading the mould, we quicken into birth,
The crops spontaneously could not come up
Into the free bright air. Even then sometimes,
When things acquired by the sternest toil
Are now in leaf, are now in blossom all,
Either the skiey sun with baneful heats
Parches, or sudden rains or chilling rime
Destroys, or flaws of winds with furious whirl
Torment and twist. Beside these matters, why
Doth Nature feed and foster on land and sea
The dreadful breed of savage beasts, the foes
Of the human clan? Why do the seasons bring
Distempers with them? Wherefore stalks at large
Death, so untimely? Then, again, the babe,
Like to the castaway of the raging surf,
Lies naked on the ground, speechless, in want
Of every help for life, when Nature first
Hath poured him forth upon the shores of light
With birth-pangs from within the mother's womb,
And with a plaintive wail he fills the place,-
As well befitting one for whom remains
In life a journey through so many ills.
But all the flocks and herds and all wild beasts
Come forth and grow, nor need the little rattles,
Nor must be treated to the humouring nurse's
Dear, broken chatter; nor seek they divers clothes
To suit the changing skies; nor need, in fine,
Nor arms, nor lofty ramparts, wherewithal
Their own to guard- because the earth herself
And Nature, artificer of the world, bring forth
Aboundingly all things for all.
author class:Lucretius
~ now, Against Teleological Concept
,#NFDB
1204:THE FAIRY
'The present and the past thou hast beheld.
It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn,
The secrets of the future--Time!
Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud--Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny!'
Joy to the Spirit came.
Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,
Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear;
Earth was no longer hell;
Love, freedom, health had given
Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,
And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres;
Then dulcet music swelled
Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;
It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,
Catching new life from transitory death;
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, falls and swells by fits,
Was the pure stream of feeling
That sprung from these sweet notes,
And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies
With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.
Joy to the Spirit came--
Such joy as when a lover sees
The chosen of his soul in happiness
And witnesses her peace
Whose woe to him were bitterer than death;
Sees her unfaded cheek
Glow mantling in first luxury of health,
Thrills with her lovely eyes,
Which like two stars amid the heaving main
Sparkle through liquid bliss.
Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:
'I will not call the ghost of ages gone
To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;
The present now is past,
And those events that desolate the earth
Have faded from the memory of Time,
Who dares not give reality to that
Whose being I annul. To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep,
Space, matter, time and mind. Futurity
Exposes now its treasure; let the sight
Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal
Where virtue fixes universal peace,
And, 'midst the ebb and flow of human things,
Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,
A light-house o'er the wild of dreary waves.
'The habitable earth is full of bliss;
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate or live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves
And melodize with man's blest nature there.
'Those deserts of immeasurable sand,
Whose age-collected fervors scarce allowed
A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,
Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love
Broke on the sultry silentness alone,
Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,
Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;
And where the startled wilderness beheld
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs
The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,
Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang--
Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door,
Sharing his morning's meal
With the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet.
'Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail
Has seen above the illimitable plain
Morning on night and night on morning rise,
Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread
Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gusty wind
In melancholy loneliness, and swept
The desert of those ocean solitudes
But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm;
Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds
Of kindliest human impulses respond.
Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,
With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,
Which like a toil-worn laborer leaps to shore
To meet the kisses of the flowrets there.
'All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life.
The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,
Rewarding her with their pure perfectness;
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues and diffuse them all abroad;
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,
Glows in the fruits and mantles on the stream;
No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,
Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride
The foliage of the ever-verdant trees;
But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,
And autumn proudly bears her matron grace,
Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring,
Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit
Reflects its tint and blushes into love.
'The lion now forgets to thirst for blood;
There might you see him sporting in the sun
Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,
His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made
His nature as the nature of a lamb.
Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting bane
Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows;
All bitterness is past; the cup of joy
Unmingled mantles to the goblet's brim
And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.
But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know
More misery, and dream more joy than all;
Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast
To mingle with a loftier instinct there,
Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,
Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;
Who stands amid the ever-varying world,
The burden or the glory of the earth;
He chief perceives the change; his being notes
The gradual renovation and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind.
'Man, where the gloom of the long polar night
Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,
Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,
Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;
His chilled and narrow energies, his heart
Insensible to courage, truth or love,
His stunted stature and imbecile frame,
Marked him for some abortion of the earth,
Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,
Whose habits and enjoyments were his own;
His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,
Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,
Apprised him ever of the joyless length
Which his short being's wretchedness had reached;
His death a pang which famine, cold and toil
Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark
Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:
All was inflicted here that earth's revenge
Could wreak on the infringers of her law;
One curse alone was sparedthe name of God.
'Nor, where the tropics bound the realms of day
With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,
Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere
Scattered the seeds of pestilence and fed
Unnatural vegetation, where the land
Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,
Was man a nobler being; slavery
Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust;
Or he was bartered for the fame of power,
Which, all internal impulses destroying,
Makes human will an article of trade;
Or he was changed with Christians for their gold
And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound
Of the flesh-mangling scourge he does the work
Of all-polluting luxury and wealth,
Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads
The long-protracted fulness of their woe;
Or he was led to legal butchery,
To turn to worms beneath that burning sun
Where kings first leagued against the rights of men
And priests first traded with the name of God.
'Even where the milder zone afforded man
A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,
Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,
Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late
Availed to arrest its progress or create
That peace which first in bloodless victory waved
Her snowy standard o'er this favored clime;
There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,
The mimic of surrounding misery,
The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,
The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.
'Here now the human being stands adorning
This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;
Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,
Which gently in his noble bosom wake
All kindly passions and all pure desires.
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing
Which from the exhaustless store of human weal
Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age;
And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth; no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,
Kindled all putrid humors in his frame,
All evil passions and all vain belief,
Hatred, despair and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease and crime.
No longer now the winged habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
Which little children stretch in friendly sport
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
All things are void of terror; man has lost
His terrible prerogative, and stands
An equal amidst equals; happiness
And science dawn, though late, upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend
Their all-subduing energies, and wield
The sceptre of a vast dominion there;
Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends
Its force to the omnipotence of mind,
Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth
To decorate its paradise of peace.'
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab - Part VIII.
,#NFDB
1205:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education, #self-knowledge,#NFDB
1206:'Thus do the generations of the earth
Go to the grave and issue from the womb,
Surviving still the imperishable change
That renovates the world; even as the leaves
Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year
Has scattered on the forest-soil and heaped
For many seasons therethough long they choke,
Loading with loathsome rottenness the land,
All germs of promise, yet when the tall trees
From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes,
Lie level with the earth to moulder there,
They fertilize the land they long deformed;
Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs
Of youth, integrity and loveliness,
Like that which gave it life, to spring and die.
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.
Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.
'Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange
Of all that human art or Nature yield;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,
And natural kindness hasten to supply
From the full fountain of its boundless love,
Forever stifled, drained and tainted now.
Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade
No solitary virtue dares to spring,
But poverty and wealth with equal hand
Scatter their withering curses, and unfold
The doors of premature and violent death
To pining famine and full-fed disease,
To all that shares the lot of human life,
Which, poisoned body and soul, scarce drags the chain
That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind.
'Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue.
'Since tyrants by the sale of human life
Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame
To their wide-wasting and insatiate pride,
Success has sanctioned to a credulous world
The ruin, the disgrace, the woe of war.
His hosts of blind and unresisting dupes
The despot numbers; from his cabinet
These puppets of his schemes he moves at will,
Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,
Beneath a vulgar master, to perform
A task of cold and brutal drudgery;
Hardened to hope, insensible to fear,
Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine,
Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,
That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth!
'The harmony and happiness of man
Yields to the wealth of nations; that which lifts
His nature to the heaven of its pride,
Is bartered for the poison of his soul;
The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes,
Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain,
Withering all passion but of slavish fear,
Extinguishing all free and generous love
Of enterprise and daring, even the pulse
That fancy kindles in the beating heart
To mingle with sensation, it destroys,
Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self,
The grovelling hope of interest and gold,
Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed
Even by hypocrisy.
And statesmen boast
Of wealth! The wordy eloquence that lives
After the ruin of their hearts, can gild
The bitter poison of a nation's woe;
Can turn the worship of the servile mob
To their corrupt and glaring idol, fame,
From virtue, trampled by its iron tread,
Although its dazzling pedestal be raised
Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field,
With desolated dwellings smoking round.
The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
And bare fulfilment of the common laws
Of decency and prejudice confines
The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds
A passing tear perchance upon the wreck
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door
The frightful waves are driven,when his son
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil;
Who ever hears his famished offspring's scream;
Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gaze
Forever meets, and the proud rich man's eye
Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene
Of thousands like himself;he little heeds
The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,
That knows and dreads his enmity.
'The iron rod of penury still compels
Her wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth,
And poison, with unprofitable toil,
A life too void of solace to confirm
The very chains that bind him to his doom.
Nature, impartial in munificence,
Has gifted man with all-subduing will.
Matter, with all its transitory shapes,
Lies subjected and plastic at his feet,
That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread.
How many a rustic Milton has passed by,
Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,
In unremitting drudgery and care!
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!
How many a Newton, to whose passive ken
Those mighty spheres that gem infinity
Were only specks of tinsel fixed in heaven
To light the midnights of his native town!
'Yet every heart contains perfection's germ.
The wisest of the sages of the earth,
That ever from the stores of reason drew
Science and truth, and virtue's dreadless tone,
Were but a weak and inexperienced boy,
Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued
With pure desire and universal love,
Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain,
Untainted passion, elevated will,
Which death (who even would linger long in awe
Within his noble presence and beneath
His changeless eye-beam) might alone subdue.
Him, every slave now dragging through the filth
Of some corrupted city his sad life,
Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,
Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense
With narrow schemings and unworthy cares,
Or madly rushing through all violent crime
To move the deep stagnation of his soul,
Might imitate and equal.
But mean lust
Has bound its chains so tight about the earth
That all within it but the virtuous man
Is venal; gold or fame will surely reach
The price prefixed by Selfishness to all
But him of resolute and unchanging will;
Whom nor the plaudits of a servile crowd,
Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury,
Can bribe to yield his elevated soul
To Tyranny or Falsehood, though they wield
With blood-red hand the sceptre of the world.
'All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the laws allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart
Of undisguising Selfishness, that sets
On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign.
Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,
And youth's corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism, has filled
All human life with hydra-headed woes.
'Falsehood demands but gold to pay the pangs
Of outraged conscience; for the slavish priest
Sets no great value on his hireling faith;
A little passing pomp, some servile souls,
Whom cowardice itself might safely chain
Or the spare mite of avarice could bribe
To deck the triumph of their languid zeal,
Can make him minister to tyranny.
More daring crime requires a loftier meed.
Without a shudder the slave-soldier lends
His arm to murderous deeds, and steels his heart,
When the dread eloquence of dying men,
Low mingling on the lonely field of fame,
Assails that nature whose applause he sells
For the gross blessings of the patriot mob,
For the vile gratitude of heartless kings,
And for a cold world's good word,viler still!
'There is a nobler glory which survives
Until our being fades, and, solacing
All human care, accompanies its change;
Deserts not virtue in the dungeon's gloom,
And in the precincts of the palace guides
Its footsteps through that labyrinth of crime;
Imbues his lineaments with dauntlessness,
Even when from power's avenging hand he takes
Its sweetest, last and noblest titledeath;
The consciousness of good, which neither gold,
Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss,
Can purchase; but a life of resolute good,
Unalterable will, quenchless desire
Of universal happiness, the heart
That beats with it in unison, the brain
Whose ever-wakeful wisdom toils to change
Reason's rich stores for its eternal weal.
'This commerce of sincerest virtue needs
No meditative signs of selfishness,
No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,
No balancings of prudence, cold and long;
In just and equal measure all is weighed,
One scale contains the sum of human weal,
And one, the good man's heart.
How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives.
'But hoary-headed selfishness has felt
Its death-blow and is tottering to the grave;
A brighter morn awaits the human day,
When every transfer of earth's natural gifts
Shall be a commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease and woe,
War with its million horrors, and fierce hell,
Shall live but in the memory of time,
Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,
Look back, and shudder at his younger years.'
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab - Part V.
,#NFDB
1207:Saint Romualdo
I give God thanks that I, a lean old man,
Wrinkled, infirm, and crippled with keen pains
By austere penance and continuous toil,
Now rest in spirit, and possess 'the peace
Which passeth understanding.' Th' end draws nigh,
Though the beginning is yesterday,
And a broad lifetime spreads 'twixt this and thatA favored life, though outwardly the butt
Of ignominy, malice, and affront,
Yet lighted from within by the clear star
Of a high aim, and graciously prolonged
To see at last its utmost goal attained.
I speak not of mine Order and my House,
Here founded by my hands and filled with saintsA white society of snowy souls,
Swayed by my voice, by mine example led;
For this is but the natural harvest reaped
From labors such as mine when blessed by God.
Though I rejoice to think my spirit still
Will work my purposes, through worthy hands,
After my bones are shriveled into dust,
Yet have I gleaned a finer, sweeter fruit
Of holy satisfaction, sure and real,
Though subtler than the tissue of the airThe power completely to detach the soul
From her companion through this life, the flesh;
So that in blessed privacy of peace,
Communing with high angels, she can hold,
Serenely rapt, her solitary course.
Ye know, O saints of heaven, what I have borne
Of discipline and scourge; the twisted lash
Of knotted rope that striped my shrinking limbs;
Vigils and fasts protracted, till my flesh
Wasted and crumbled from mine aching bones,
And the last skin, one woof of pain and sores,
Thereto like yellow parchment loosely clung;
Exposure to the fever and the frost,
When 'mongst the hollows of the hills I lurked
178
From persecution of misguided folk,
Accustoming my spirit to ignore
The burden of the cross, while picturing
The bliss of disembodied souls, the grace
Of holiness, the lives of sainted men,
And entertaining all exalted thoughts,
That nowise touched the trouble of the hour,
Until the grief and pain seemed far less real
Than the creations of my brain inspired.
The vision, the beatitude, were true:
The agony was but an evil dream.
I speak not now as one who hath not learned
The purport of those lightly-bandied words,
Evil and Fate, but rather one who knows
The thunders of the terrors of the world.
No mortal chance or change, no earthly shock,
Can move or reach my soul, securely throned
On heights of contemplation and calm prayer,
Happy, serene, no less actual joy
Of present peace than faith in joys to come.
This soft, sweet, yellow evening, how the trees
Stand crisp against the clear, bright-colored sky!
How the white mountain-tops distinctly shine,
Taking and giving radiance, and the slopes
Are purpled with rich floods of peach-hued light!
Thank God, my filmy, old dislustred eyes
Find the same sense of exquisite delight,
My heart vibrates to the same touch of joy
In scenes like this, as when my pulse danced high,
And youth coursed through my veins! This the one link
That binds the wan old man that now I am
To the wild lad who followed up the hounds
Among Ravenna's pine-woods by the sea.
For there how oft would I lose all delight
In the pursuit, the triumph, or the game,
To stray alone among the shadowy glades,
And gaze, as one who is not satisfied
With gazing, at the large, bright, breathing sea,
The forest glooms, and shifting gleams between
The fine dark fringes of the fadeless trees,
On gold-green turf, sweet-brier, and wild pink rose!
179
How rich that buoyant air with changing scent
Of pungent pine, fresh flowers, and salt cool seas!
And when all echoes of the chase had died,
Of horn and halloo, bells and baying hounds,
How mine ears drank the ripple of the tide
On the fair shore, the chirp of unseen birds,
The rustling of the tangled undergrowth,
And the deep lyric murmur of the pines,
When through their high tops swept the sudden breeze!
There was my world, there would my heart dilate,
And my aspiring soul dissolve in prayer
Unto that Spirit of Love whose energies
Were active round me, yet whose presence, sphered
In the unsearchable, unbodied air,
Made itself felt, but reigned invisible.
This ere the day that made me what I am.
Still can I see the hot, bright sky, the sea
Illimitably sparkling, as they showed
That morning. Though I deemed I took no note
Of heaven or earth or waters, yet my mind
Retains to-day the vivid portraiture
Of every line and feature of the scene.
Light-hearted 'midst the dewy lanes I fared
Unto the sea, whose jocund gleam I caught
Between the slim boles, when I heard the clink
Of naked weapons, then a sudden thrust
Sickening to hear, and then a stifled groan;
And pressing forward I beheld the sight
That seared itself for ever on my brainMy kinsman, Ser Ranieri, on the turf,
Fallen upon his side, his bright young head
Among the pine-spurs, and his cheek pressed close
Unto the moist, chill sod: his fingers clutched
A handful of loose weeds and grass and earth,
Uprooted in his anguish as he fell,
And slowly from his heart the thick stream flowed,
Fouling the green, leaving the fair, sweet face
Ghastly, transparent, with blue, stony eyes
Staring in blankness on that other one
Who triumphed over him. With hot desire
Of instant vengeance I unsheathed my sword
To rush upon the slayer, when he turned
180
In his first terror of blood-guiltiness.
.......
Within my heart a something snapped and brake.
What was it but the chord of rapturous joy
For ever stilled? I tottered and would fall,
Had I not leaned against the friendly pine;
For all realities of life, unmoored
From their firm anchorage, appeared to float
Like hollow phantoms past my dizzy brain.
The strange delusion wrought upon my soul
That this had been enacted ages since.
This very horror curdled at my heart,
This net of trees spread round, these iron heavens,
Were closing over me when I had stood,
Unnumbered cycles back, and fronted HIM,
My father; and he felt mine eyes as now,
Yet saw me not; and then, as now, that form,
The one thing real, lay stretched between us both.
The fancy passed, and I stood sane and strong
To grasp the truth. Then I remembered allA few fierce words between them yester eve
Concerning some poor plot of pasturage,
Soon silenced into courteous, frigid calm:
This was the end. I could not meet him now,
To curse him, to accuse him, or to save,
And draw him from the red entanglement
Coiled by his own hands round his ruined life.
God pardon me! My heart that moment held
No drop of pity toward this wretched soul;
And cowering down, as though his guilt were mine,
I fled amidst the savage silences
Of that grim wood, resolved to nurse alone
My boundless desolation, shame, and grief.
There, in that thick-leaved twilight of high noon,
The quiet of the still, suspended air,
Once more my wandering thoughts were calmly ranged,
Shepherded by my will. I wept, I prayed
A solemn prayer, conceived in agony,
Blessed with response instant, miraculous;
For in that hour my spirit was at one
181
With Him who knows and satisfies her needs.
The supplication and the blessing sprang
From the same source, inspired divinely both.
I prayed for light, self-knowledge, guidance, truth,
And these like heavenly manna were rained down
To feed my hungered soul. His guilt was mine.
What angel had been sent to stay mine arm
Until the fateful moment passed away
That would have ushered an eternity
Of withering remorse? I found the germs
In mine own heart of every human sin,
That waited but occasion's tempting breath
To overgrow with poisoned bloom my life.
What God thus far had saved me from myself?
Here was the lofty truth revealed, that each
Must feel himself in all, must know where'er
The great soul acts or suffers or enjoys,
His proper soul in kinship there is bound.
Then my life-purpose dawned upon my mind,
Encouraging as morning. As I lay,
Crushed by the weight of universal love,
Which mine own thoughts had heaped upon myself,
I heard the clear chime of a slow, sweet bell.
I knew it-whence it came and what it sang.
From the gray convent nigh the wood it pealed,
And called the monks to prayer. Vigil and prayer,
Clean lives, white days of strict austerity:
Such were the offerings of these holy saints.
How far might such not tend to expiate
A riotous world's indulgence? Here my life,
Doubly austere and doubly sanctified,
Might even for that other one atone,
So bound to mine, till both should be forgiven.
They sheltered me, not questioning the need
That led me to their cloistered solitude.
How rich, how freighted with pure influence,
With dear security of perfect peace,
Was the first day I passed within those walls!
The holy habit of perpetual prayer,
The gentle greetings, the rare temperate speech,
The chastening discipline, the atmosphere
182
Of settled and profound tranquillity,
Were even as living waters unto one
Who perisheth of thirst. Was this the world
That yesterday seemed one huge battlefield
For brutish passions? Could the soul of man
Withdraw so easily, and erect apart
Her own fair temple for her own high ends?
But this serene contentment slowly waned
As I discerned the broad disparity
Betwixt the form and spirit of the laws
That bound the order in strait brotherhood.
Yet when I sought to gain a larger love,
More rigid discipline, severer truth,
And more complete surrender of the soul
Unto her God, this was to my reproach,
And scoffs and gibes beset me on all sides.
In mine own cell I mortified my flesh,
I held aloof from all my brethren's feasts
To wrestle with my viewless enemies,
Till they should leave their blessing on my head;
For nightly was I haunted by that face,
White, bloodless, as I saw it 'midst the ferns,
Now staring out of darkness, and it held
Mine eyes from slumber and my brain from rest
And drove me from my straw to weep and pray.
Rebellious thoughts such subtle torture wrought
Upon my spirit that I lay day-long
In dumb despair, until the blessed hope
Of mercy dawned again upon my soul,
As gradual as the slow gold moon that mounts
The airy steps of heaven. My faith arose
With sure perception that disaster, wrong,
And every shadow of man's destiny
Are merely circumstance, and cannot touch
The soul's fine essence: they exist or die
Only as she affirms them or denies.
This faith sustain me even to the end:
It floods my heart with peace as surely now
As on that day the friars drove me forth,
Urging that my asceticism, too harsh,
Endured through pride, would bring into reproach
183
Their customs and their order. Then began
My exile in the mountains, where I bode
A hunted man. The elements conspired
Against me, and I was the seasons' sport,
Drenched, parched, and scorched and frozen alternately,
Burned with shrewd frosts, prostrated by fierce heats,
Shivering 'neath chilling dews and gusty rains,
And buffeted by all the winds of heaven.
Yet was this period my time of joy:
My daily thoughts perpetual converse held
With angels ministrant; mine ears were charmed
With sweet accordance of celestial sounds,
Song, harp and choir, clear ringing through the air.
And visions were revealed unto mine eyes
By night and day of Heaven's very courts,
In shadowless, undimmed magnificence.
I gave God thanks, not that He sheltered me,
And fed me as He feeds the fowls of airFor had I perished, this too had been wellBut for the revelation of His truth,
The glory, the beatitude vouchsafed
To exalt, to heal, to quicken, to inspire;
So that the pinched, lean excommunicate
Was crowned with joy more solid, more secure,
Than all the comfort of the vales could bring.
Then the good Lord touched certain fervid hearts,
Aspiring toward His love, to come to me,
Timid and few at first; but as they heard
From mine own lips the precious oracles,
That soothed the trouble of their souls, appeased
Their spiritual hunger, and disclosed
All of the God within them to themselves,
They flocked about me, and they hailed me saint,
And sware to follow and to serve the good
Which my word published and my life declared.
Thus the lone hermit of the mountain-top
Descended leader of a band of saints,
And midway 'twixt the summit and the vale
I perched my convent. Yet I bated not
One whit of strict restraint and abstinence.
And they who love me and who serve the truth
Have learned to suffer with me, and have won
184
The supreme joy that is not of the flesh,
Foretasting the delights of Paradise.
This faith, to them imparted, will endure
After my tongue hath ceased to utter it,
And the great peace hath settled on my soul.
~ Emma Lazarus,#NFDB
1208:SCENE I. A part of the Forest.
Enter CONRAD and AURANTHE.
Auranthe. Go no further; not a step more; thou art
A master-plague in the midst of miseries.
Go I fear thee. I tremble every limb,
Who never shook before. There's moody death
In thy resolved looks Yes, I could kneel
To pray thee far away. Conrad, go, go
There! yonder underneath the boughs I see
Our horses!
Conrad. Aye, and the man.
Auranthe. Yes, he is there.
Go, go, no blood, no blood; go, gentle Conrad!
Conrad. Farewell!
Auranthe. Farewell, for this Heaven pardon you.
[Exit AURANTHE,
Conrad. If he survive one hour, then may I die
In unimagined tortures or breathe through
A long life in the foulest sink of the world!
He dies 'tis well she do not advertise
The caitiff of the cold steel at his back.
[Exit CONRAD.
Enter LUDOLPH and PAGE.
Ludolph. Miss'd the way, boy, say not that on your peril!
Page. Indeed, indeed I cannot trace them further.
Ludolph. Must I stop here? Here solitary die?
Stifled beneath the thick oppressive shade
Of these dull boughs, this oven of dark thickets,
Silent, without revenge? pshaw! bitter end,
A bitter death, a suffocating death,
A gnawing silent deadly, quiet death!
Escaped? fled? vanish'd? melted into air?
She's gone! I cannot clutch her! no revenge!
A muffled death, ensnar'd in horrid silence!
Suck'd to my grave amid a dreamy calm!
O, where is that illustrious noise of war,
To smother up this sound of labouring breath,
This rustle of the trees!
[AURANTHE shrieks at a distance.
Page. My Lord, a noise!
This way hark!
Ludolph. Yes, yes! A hope! A music!
A glorious clamour! How I live again! [Exeunt.
SCENE II. Another part of the Forest,
Enter ALBERT (wounded).
Albert. O for enough life to support me on
To Otho's feet
Enter LUDOLPH.
Ludolph. Thrice villainous, stay there
Tell me where that detested woman is
Or this is through thee!
Albert. My good Prince, with me
The sword has done its worst; not without worst
Done to another Conrad has it home
I see you know it all
Ludolph. Where is his sister?
AURANTHE rushes in.
Auranthe. Albert!
Ludolph. Ha! There! there! He is the paramour I
There hug him dying! O, thou innocence,
Shrine him and comfort him at his last gasp,
Kiss down his eyelids! Was he not thy love?
Wilt thou forsake him at his latest hour?
Keep fearful and aloof from his last gaze,
His most uneasy moments, when cold death
Stands with the door ajar to let him in?
Albert. O that that door with hollow slam would close
Upon me sudden, for I cannot meet,
In all the unknown chambers of the dead,
Such horrors
Ludolph. Auranthe! what can he mean?
What horrors? Is it not a joyous time?
Am I not married to a paragon
"Of personal beauty and untainted soul"?
A blushing fair-eyed Purity! A Sylph,
Whose snowy timid hand has never sin'd
Beyond a flower pluck'd, white as itself?
Albert, you do insult my Bride your Mistress
To talk of horrors on our wedding night.
Albert. Alas! poor Prince, I would you knew my heart.
'Tis not so guilty
Ludolph. Hear you he pleads not guilty
You are not? or if so what matters it?
You have escap'd me, free as the dusk air
Hid in the forest safe from my revenge;
I cannot catch you--You should laugh at me,
Poor cheated Ludolph, make the forest hiss
With jeers at me You tremble; faint at once,
You will come to again. O Cockatrice,
I have you. Whither wander those fair eyes
To entice the Devil to your help, that he
May change you to a Spider, so to crawl
Into some cranny to escape my wrath?
Albert. Sometimes the counsel of a dying man
Doth operate quietly when his breath is gone
Disjoin those hands part--part, do not destroy
Each other forget her our miseries
Are equal shar'd, and mercy is
Ludolph. A boon
When one can compass it. Auranthe, try
Your oratory your breath is not so hitch'd
Aye, stare for help
[ALBERT groans and dies.
There goes a spotted soul
Howling in vain along the hollow night
Hear him he calls you Sweet Auranthe, come!
Auranthe. Kill me.
Ludolph. No! What? upon our Marriage-night!
The earth would shudder at so foul a deed
A fair Bride, a sweet Bride, an innocent Bride!
No, we must revel it, as 'tis in use
In times of delicate brilliant ceremony:
Come, let me lead you to our halls again
Nay, linger not make no resistance sweet
Will you Ah wretch, thou canst not, for I have
The strength of twenty lions 'gainst a lamb
Now one adieu for Albert come away.
[Exeunt.
SCENE III. An inner Court of the Castle.
Enter SIGIFRED, GONFRED, and THEODORE meeting.
Theodore. Was ever such a night?
Sigifred. What horrors more?
Things unbeliev'd one hour, so strange they are,
The next hour stamps with credit.
Theodore. Your last news ?
Gonfred. After the Page's story of the death
Of Albert and Duke Conrad?
Sigifred. And the return
Of Ludolph with the Princess.
Gonfred. No more save
Prince Gersa's freeing Abbot Ethelbert,
And the sweet lady, fair Erminia,
From prison.
Theodore. Where are they now? hast yet heard?
Gonfred. With the sad Emperor they are closeted ;
I saw the three pass slowly up the stairs,
The lady weeping, the old Abbot cowl'd.
Sigifred. What next?
Thedore. I ache to think on't.
Gonfred. Tis with fate.
Theodore. One while these proud towers are hush'd as death.
Gonfred. The next our poor Prince fills the arched rooms
With ghastly ravings.
Sigifred. I do fear his brain.
Gonfred. I will see more. Bear you so stout a heart?
[Exeunt into the Castle.
SCENE IV. A Cabinet, opening towards a Terrace.
OTHO, ERMINIA, ETHELBERT, and a Physician, discovered.
Otho. O, my poor Boy! my Son! my Son! My Ludolph!
Have ye no comfort for me, ye Physicians
Of the weak Body and Soul?
Ethelbert. Tis not the Medicine
Either of heaven or earth can cure unless
Fit time be chosen to administer
Otho. A kind forbearance, holy Abbot come
Erminia, here sit by me, gentle Girl;
Give me thy hand hast thou forgiven me?
Erminia. Would I were with the saints to pray for you!
Otho. Why will ye keep me from my darling child?
Physician. Forgive me, but he must not see thy face
Otho. Is then a father's countenance a Gorgon?
Hath it not comfort in it? Would it not
Console my poor Boy, cheer him, heal his spirits?
Let me embrace him, let me speak to him
I will who hinders me? Who's Emperor?
Physician. You may not, Sire 'twould overwhelm him quite,
He is so full of grief and passionate wrath,
Too heavy a sigh would kill him or do worse.
He must be sav'd by fine contrivances
And most especially we must keep clear
Out of his sight a Father whom he loves
His heart is full, it can contain no more,
And do its ruddy office.
Ethelbert. Sage advice;
We must endeavour how to ease and slacken
The tight-wound energies of his despair,
Not make them tenser
Otho. Enough! I hear, I hear.
Yet you were about to advise more I listen.
Ethelbert. This learned doctor will agree with me,
That not in the smallest point should he be thwarted
Or gainsaid by one word his very motions,
Nods, becks and hints, should be obey'd with care,
Even on the moment: so his troubled mind
May cure itself
Physician. There is no other means.
Otho. Open the door: let's hear if all is quiet
Physician. Beseech you, Sire, forbear.
Erminia. Do, do.
Otho. I command!
Open it straight hush! quiet my lost Boy!
My miserable Child!
Ludolph (indistinctly without). Fill, fill my goblet,
Here's a health!
Erminia. O, close the door!
Otho. Let, let me hear his voice; this cannot last
And fain would I catch up his dying words
Though my own knell they be this cannot last
O let me catch his voice for lo! I hear
This silence whisper me that he is dead!
It is so. Gersa?
Enter GERSA.
Physician. Say, how fares the prince?
Gersa. More calm his features are less wild and flushed
Once he complain'd of weariness
Physician. Indeed!
'Tis good 'tis good let him but fall asleep,
That saves him.
Otho. Gersa, watch him like a child
Ward him from harm and bring me better news
Physician. Humour him to the height. I fear to go;
For should he catch a glimpse of my dull garb,
It might affright him fill him with suspicion
That we believe him sick, which must not be
Gersa. I will invent what soothing means I can.
[Exit GERSA.
Physician. This should cheer up your Highness weariness
Is a good symptom, and most favourable
It gives me pleasant hopes. Please you walk forth
Onto the Terrace; the refreshing air
Will blow one half of your sad doubts away.
[Exeunt.
SCENE V. A Banqueting Hall, brilliantly illuminated, and set forth
with all costly magnificence, with Supper-tables, laden with services
of Gold and Silver. A door in the back scene, guarded by two Soldiers.
Lords, Ladies, Knights, Gentlemen, &c., whispering sadly,
and ranging themselves; part entering and part discovered.
First Knight. Grievously are we tantaliz'd, one and all
Sway'd here and there, commanded to and fro
As though we were the shadows of a dream
And link'd to a sleeping fancy. What do we here?
Gonfred. I am no Seer you know we must obey
The prince from A to Z though it should be
To set the place in flames. I pray hast heard
Where the most wicked Princess is?
First Knight. There, Sir,
In the next room have you remark'd those two
Stout soldiers posted at the door?
Gonfred. For what?
[They whisper.
First Lady. How ghast a train!
Second Lady. Sure this should be some splendid burial.
First Lady. What fearful whispering! See, see, Gersa there.
Enter GERSA.
Gersa. Put on your brightest looks; smile if you can;
Behave as all were happy; keep your eyes
From the least watch upon him ;
if he speaks
To any one, answer collectedly,
Without surprise, his questions, howe'er strange.
Do this to the utmost, though, alas! with me
The remedy grows hopeless! Here he comes,
Observe what I have said, show no surprise.
Enter LUDOLPH, followed by SIGIFRED and Page.
Ludolph. A splendid company! rare beauties here!
I should have Orphean lips, and Plato's fancy,
Amphion's utterance, toned with his lyre,
Or the deep key of Jove's sonorous mouth,
To give fit salutation. Methought I heard,
As I came in, some whispers, what of that?
'Tis natural men should whisper; at the kiss
Of Psyche given by Love, there was a buzz
Among the gods! and silence is as natural.
These draperies are fine, and, being a mortal,
I should desire no better; yet, in truth,
There must be some superiour costliness,
Some wider-domed high magnificence!
I would have, as a mortal I may not,
Hanging of heaven's clouds, purple and gold,
Slung from the spheres; gauzes of silver mist,
Loop'd up with cords of twisted wreathed light,
And tassell'd round with weeping meteors!
These pendent lamps and chandeliers are bright
As earthly fires from dull dross can be cleansed;
Yet could my eyes drink up intenser beams
Undazzled, this is darkness, when I close
These lids, I see far fiercer brilliances,
Skies full of splendid moons, and shooting stars,
And spouting exhalations, diamond fires,
And panting fountains quivering with deep glows!
Yes this is dark is it not dark?
Sigifred. My Lord,
'Tis late; the lights of festival are ever
Quench'd in the morn.
Ludolph. 'Tis not to-morrow then?
Sigifred. Tis early dawn.
Gersa. Indeed full time we slept;
Say you so, Prince?
Ludolph. I say I quarreled with you ; We did not tilt each other, that's a blessing,
Good gods! no innocent blood upon my head!
Sigifred. Retire, Gersa!
Ludolph. There should be three more here:
For two of them, they stay away perhaps,
Being gloomy-minded, haters of fair revels,
They know their own thoughts best.
As for the third,
Deep blue eyes semi-shaded in white lids,
Finished with lashes fine for more soft shade,
Completed by her twin-arch'd ebon brows
White temples of exactest elegance,
Of even mould felicitous and smooth
Cheeks fashioned tenderly on either side,
So perfect, so divine that our poor eyes
Are dazzled with the sweet proportioning,
And wonder that 'tis so, the magic chance!
Her nostrils, small, fragrant, faery-delicate;
Her lips -I swear no human bones e'er wore
So taking a disguise you shall behold her!
We'll have her presently; aye, you shall see her,
And wonder at her, friends, she is so fair
She is the world's chief Jewel, and by heaven
She's mine by right of marriage she is mine!
Patience, good people, in fit time I send
A Summoner she will obey my call,
Being a wife most mild and dutiful.
First I would hear what music is prepared
To herald and receive her let me hear!
Sigifred. Bid the musicians soothe him tenderly.
[A soft strain of Music.
Ludolph. Ye have none better no I am content;
'Tis a rich sobbing melody, with reliefs
Full and majestic; it is well enough,
And will be sweeter, when ye see her pace
Sweeping into this presence, glisten'd o'er
With emptied caskets, and her train upheld
By ladies, habited in robes of lawn,
Sprinkled with golden crescents; (others bright
In silks, with spangles shower'd,) and bow'd to
By Duchesses and pearled Margravines
Sad, that the fairest creature of the earth
I pray you mind me not 'tis sad, I say,
That the extremest beauty of the world
Should so entrench herself away from me,
Behind a barrier of engender 'd guilt!
Second Lady. Ah! what a moan!
First Knight. Most piteous indeed!
Ludolph. She shall be brought before this company,
And then then
First Lady. He muses.
Gersa. O, Fortune, where will this end?
Sigifred. I guess his purpose! Indeed he must not have
That pestilence brought in, that cannot be,
There we must stop him.
Gersa. I am lost! Hush, hushl
He is about to rave again.
Ludolph. A barrier of guilt! I was the fool.
She was the cheater! Who's the cheater now,
And who the fool? The entrapp'd, the caged fool,
The bird-limy raven? She shall croak to death
Secure! Methinks I have her in my fist,
To crush her with my heel! Wait, wait! I marvel
My father keeps away: good friend, ah! Sigifred!
Do bring him to me and Erminia
I fain would see before I sleep and Ethelbert,
That he may bless me, as I know he will
Though I have curs'd him.
Sigifred. Rather suffer me
To lead you to them
Ludolph. No, excuse me, no
The day is not quite done go bring them hither.
[Exit SIGIFRED.
Certes, a father's smile should, like sunlight,,
Slant on my sheafed harvest of ripe bliss
Besides, I thirst to pledge my lovely Bride
In a deep goblet: let me see what wine?
The strong Iberian juice, or mellow Greek?
Or pale Calabrian? Or the Tuscan grape?
Or of old tna's pulpy wine presses,
Black stain'd with the fat vintage, as it were
The purple slaughter-house, where Bacchus' self
Prick'd his own swollen veins? Where is my Page?
Page. Here, here!
Ludolph. Be ready to obey me; anon thou shalt
Bear a soft message for me for the hour
Draws near when I must make a winding up
Of bridal Mysteries a fine-spun vengeance!
Carve it on my Tomb, that when I rest beneath
Men shall confess This Prince was gulled and cheated,
But from the ashes of disgrace he rose
More than a fiery Phoenix and did burn
His ignominy up in purging fires
Did I not send, Sir, but a moment past,
For my Father?
Gersa. You did.
Ludolph. Perhaps 'twould be
Much better he came not.
Gersa. He enters now!
Enter OTHO, ERMINIA, ETHELBERT, SIGIFRED, and Physician.
Ludolph. O thou good Man, against whose sacred head
I was a mad conspirator, chiefly too
For the sake of my fair newly wedded wife,
Now to be punish'd, do not look so sad!
Those charitable eyes will thaw my heart,
Those tears will wash away a just resolve,
A verdict ten times sworn! Awake awake
Put on a judge's brow, and use a tongue
Made iron-stern by habit! Thou shalt see
A deed to be applauded, 'scribed in gold!
Join a loud voice to mine, and so denounce
What I alone will execute!
Otho. Dear son,
What is it? By your father's love, I sue
That it be nothing merciless!
Ludolph. To that demon?
Not so! No! She is in temple-stall
Being garnish'd for the sacrifice, and I,
The Priest of Justice, will immolate her
Upon the altar of wrath! She stings me through!-
Even as the worm doth feed upon the nut,
So she, a scorpion, preys upon my brain!
I feel her gnawing here! Let her but vanish,
Then, father, I will lead your legions forth,
Compact in steeled squares, and speared files,
And bid our trumpets speak a fell rebuke
To nations drows'd in peace!
Otho. To-morrow, Son,
Be your word law forget to-day
Ludolph. I will
When I have finish 'd it now! now! I'm pight,
Tight-footed for the deed!
Erminia. Alas! Alas!
Ludolph. What Angels voice is that? Erminia!
Ah! gentlest creature, whose sweet innocence
Was almost murder'd; I am penitent,
Wilt thou forgive me? And thou, holy Man,
Good Ethelbert, shall I die in peace with you?
Erminia. Die, my lord!
Ludolph. I feel it possible.
Otho. Physician?
Physician. I fear me he is past my skill.
Otho. Not so!
Ludolph. I see it, I see it I have been wandering
Half-mad not right here I forget my purpose.
Bestir, bestir, Auranthe! ha! ha! ha!
Youngster! Page! go bid them drag her to me!
Obey! This shall finish it! [Draws a dagger.
Otho. O my Son! my Son!
Sigifred. This must not be stop there!
Ludolph. Am I obey'd?
A little talk with her no harm haste ! haste !
[Exit Page.
Set her before me never fear I can strike.
Several Voices. My Lord! My Lord!
Gersa. Good Prince!
Ludolph. Why do ye trouble me? out-out-out away!
There she is! take that! and that! no, no-
That's not well done Where is she?
The doors open. Enter Page. Several women are seen grouped
about AURANTHE in the inner room.
Page. Alas! My Lord, my Lord! they cannot move her!
Her arms are stiff, her fingers clench'd and cold
Ludolph. She's dead!
[Staggers and jails into their arms.
Ethelbert. Take away the dagger.
Gersa. Softly; so!
Otho. Thank God for that!
Sigifred. I fear it could not harm him.
Gersa. No! brief be his anguish!
Ludolph. She's gone I am content Nobles, good night!
We are all weary faint set ope the doors
I will to bed! To-morrow [Dies.
THE CURTAIN FALLS.
by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ John Keats, Otho The Great - Act V
,#NFDB
1209:A FRAGMENT
PART I
Nec tantum prodere vati,
Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam
Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus.
Lucan, Phars. v. 176.
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
One pale as yonder wan and hornd moon,
With lips of lurid blue,
The other glowing like the vital morn,
When throned on ocean's wave
It breathes over the world:
Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!
Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton,
Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres,
To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne
Cast that fair prey? Must that divinest form,
Which love and admiration cannot view
Without a beating heart, whose azure veins
Steal like dark streams along a field of snow,
Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed
In light of some sublimest mind, decay?
Nor putrefaction's breath
Leave aught of this pure spectacle
But loathsomeness and ruin?
Spare aught but a dark theme,
On which the lightest heart might moralize?
Or is it but that downy-wingd slumbers
Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids
To watch their own repose?
Will they, when morning's beam
Flows through those wells of light,
Seek far from noise and day some western cave,
Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds
A lulling murmur weave?
Ianthe doth not sleep
The dreamless sleep of death:
Nor in her moonlight chamber silently
Doth Henry hear her regular pulses throb,
Or mark her delicate cheek
With interchange of hues mock the broad moon.
Outwatching weary night,
Without assured reward.
Her dewy eyes are closed;
On their translucent lids, whose texture fine
Scarce hides the dark blue orbs that burn below
With unapparent fire,
The baby Sleep is pillowed:
Her golden tresses shade
The bosom's stainless pride,
Twining like tendrils of the parasite
Around a marble column.
Hark! whence that rushing sound?
'Tis like a wondrous strain that sweeps
Around a lonely ruin
When west winds sigh and evening waves respond
In whispers from the shore:
'Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes
Which from the unseen lyres of dells and groves
The genii of the breezes sweep.
Floating on waves of music and of light,
The chariot of the Daemon of the World
Descends in silent power:
Its shape reposed within: slight as some cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of day
When evening yields to night,
Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue
Its transitory robe.
Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful
Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light
Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold
Their wings of braided air:
The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car
Gazed on the slumbering maid.
Human eye hath ne'er beheld
A shape so wild, so bright, so beautiful,
As that which o'er the maiden's charmd sleep
Waving a starry wand,
Hung like a mist of light.
Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds
Of wakening spring arose,
Filling the chamber and the moonlight sky.
Maiden, the world's supremest spirit
Beneath the shadow of her wings
Folds all thy memory doth inherit
From ruin of divinest things,
Feelings that lure thee to betray,
And light of thoughts that pass away.
For thou hast earned a mighty boon,
The truths which wisest poets see
Dimly, thy mind may make its own,
Rewarding its own majesty,
Entranced in some diviner mood
Of self-oblivious solitude.
Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest;
From hate and awe thy heart is free;
Ardent and pure as day thou burnest,
For dark and cold mortality
A living light, to cheer it long,
The watch-fires of the world among.
Therefore from nature's inner shrine,
Where gods and fiends in worship bend,
Majestic spirit, be it thine
The flame to seize, the veil to rend,
Where the vast snake Eternity
In charmd sleep doth ever lie.
All that inspires thy voice of love,
Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes,
Or through thy frame doth burn or move,
Or think or feel, awake, arise!
Spirit, leave for mine and me
Earth's unsubstantial mimicry!
It ceased, and from the mute and moveless frame
A radiant spirit arose,
All beautiful in naked purity.
Robed in its human hues it did ascend,
Disparting as it went the silver clouds,
It moved towards the car, and took its seat
Beside the Daemon shape.
Obedient to the sweep of ary song,
The mighty ministers
Unfurled their prismy wings.
The magic car moved on;
The night was fair, innumerable stars
Studded heaven's dark blue vault;
The eastern wave grew pale
With the first smile of morn.
The magic car moved on.
From the swift sweep of wings
The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew;
And where the burning wheels
Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak
Was traced a line of lightning.
Now far above a rock the utmost verge
Of the wide earth it flew,
The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow
Frowned o'er the silver sea.
Far, far below the chariot's stormy path,
Calm as a slumbering babe,
Tremendous ocean lay.
Its broad and silent mirror gave to view
The pale and waning stars,
The chariot's fiery track,
And the grey light of morn
Tingeing those fleecy clouds
That cradled in their folds the infant dawn.
The chariot seemed to fly
Through the abyss of an immense concave,
Radiant with million constellations, tinged
With shades of infinite colour,
And semicircled with a belt
Flashing incessant meteors.
As they approached their goal,
The wingd shadows seemed to gather speed.
The sea no longer was distinguished; earth
Appeared a vast and shadowy sphere, suspended
In the black concave of heaven
With the sun's cloudless orb,
Whose rays of rapid light
Parted around the chariot's swifter course,
And fell like ocean's feathery spray
Dashed from the boiling surge
Before a vessel's prow.
The magic car moved on.
Earth's distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens,
Whilst round the chariot's way
Innumerable systems widely rolled,
And countless spheres diffused
An ever varying glory.
It was a sight of wonder! Some were horned.
And like the moon's argentine crescent hung
In the dark dome of heaven; some did shed
A clear mild beam like Hesperus, while the sea
Yet glows with fading sunlight; others dashed
Athwart the night with trains of bickering fire,
Like spherd worlds to death and ruin driven;
Some shone like stars, and as the chariot passed
Bedimmed all other light.
Spirit of Nature! here
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose involved immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee,
Yet not the meanest worm,
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead,
Less shares thy eternal breath.
Spirit of Nature! thou
Imperishable as this glorious scene,
Here is thy fitting temple.
If solitude hath ever led thy steps
To the shore of the immeasurable sea,
And thou hast lingered there
Until the sun's broad orb
Seemed resting on the fiery line of ocean,
Thou must have marked the braided webs of gold
That without motion hang
Over the sinking sphere:
Thou must have marked the billowy mountain clouds,
Edged with intolerable radiancy,
Towering like rocks of jet
Above the burning deep:
And yet there is a moment
When the sun's highest point
Peers like a star o'er ocean's western edge,
When those far clouds of feathery purple gleam
Like fairy lands girt by some heavenly sea:
Then has thy rapt imagination soared
Where in the midst of all existing things
The temple of the mightiest Daemon stands.
Yet not the golden islands
That gleam amid yon flood of purple light,
Nor the feathery curtains
That canopy the sun's resplendent couch,
Nor the burnished ocean waves
Paving that gorgeous dome,
So fair, so wonderful a sight
As the eternal temple could afford.
The elements of all that human thought
Can frame of lovely or sublime, did join
To rear the fabric of the fane, nor aught
Of earth may image forth its majesty.
Yet likest evening's vault that fary hall,
As heaven low resting on the wave it spread
Its floors of flashing light,
Its vast and azure dome;
And on the verge of that obscure abyss
Where crystal battlements o'erhang the gulf
Of the dark world, ten thousand spheres diffuse
Their lustre through its adamantine gates.
The magic car no longer moved;
The Daemon and the Spirit
Entered the eternal gates.
Those clouds of ary gold
That slept in glittering billows
Beneath the azure canopy,
With the ethereal footsteps trembled not;
While slight and odorous mists
Floated to strains of thrilling melody
Through the vast columns and the pearly shrines.
The Daemon and the Spirit
Approached the overhanging battlement,
Below lay stretched the boundless universe!
There, far as the remotest line
That limits swift imagination's flight,
Unending orbs mingled in mazy motion,
Immutably fulfilling
Eternal Nature's law.
Above, below, around,
The circling systems formed
A wilderness of harmony,
Each with undeviating aim
In eloquent silence through the depths of space
Pursued its wondrous way.
Awhile the Spirit paused in ecstasy.
Yet soon she saw, as the vast spheres swept by,
Strange things within their belted orbs appear.
Like animated frenzies, dimly moved
Shadows, and skeletons, and fiendly shapes,
Thronging round human graves, and o'er the dead
Sculpturing records for each memory
In verse, such as malignant gods pronounce,
Blasting the hopes of men, when heaven and hell
Confounded burst in ruin o'er the world:
And they did build vast trophies, instruments
Of murder, human bones, barbaric gold,
Skins torn from living men, and towers of skulls
With sightless holes gazing on blinder heaven,
Mitres, and crowns, and brazen chariots stained
With blood, and scrolls of mystic wickedness,
The sanguine codes of venerable crime.
The likeness of a thrond king came by,
When these had passed, bearing upon his brow
A threefold crown; his countenance was calm,
His eye severe and cold; but his right hand
Was charged with bloody coin, and he did gnaw
By fits, with secret smiles, a human heart
Concealed beneath his robe; and motley shapes,
A multitudinous throng, around him knelt,
With bosoms bare, and bowed heads, and false looks
Of true submission, as the sphere rolled by.
Brooking no eye to witness their foul shame,
Which human hearts must feel, while human tongues
Tremble to speak, they did rage horribly,
Breathing in self-contempt fierce blasphemies
Against the Daemon of the World, and high
Hurling their armd hands where the pure Spirit,
Serene and inaccessibly secure,
Stood on an isolated pinnacle,
The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around
Necessity's unchanging harmony.
PART II
O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!
To which those restless powers that ceaselessly
Throng through the human universe aspire;
Thou consummation of all mortal hope!
Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!
Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,
Verge to one point and blend for ever there:
Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!
Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,
Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:
O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!
Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,
And dim forebodings of thy loveliness,
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes, that the proud Power of Evil
Shall not for ever on this fairest world
Shake pestilence and war, or that his slaves
With blasphemy for prayer, and human blood
For sacrifice, before his shrine for ever
In adoration bend, or Erebus
With all its banded fiends shall not uprise
To overwhelm in envy and revenge
The dauntless and the good, who dare to hurl
Defiance at his throne, girt tho' it be
With Death's omnipotence. Thou hast beheld
His empire, o'er the present and the past;
It was a desolate sightnow gaze on mine,
Futurity. Thou hoary giant Time,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud.Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny!
The Spirit saw
The vast frame of the renovated world
Smile in the lap of Chaos, and the sense
Of hope thro' her fine texture did suffuse
Such varying glow, as summer evening casts
On undulating clouds and deepening lakes.
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits,
Was the sweet stream of thought that with wild motion
Flowed o'er the Spirit's human sympathies.
The mighty tide of thought had paused awhile,
Which from the Daemon now like Ocean's stream
Again began to pour.
To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep
Space, matter, time and mindlet the sight
Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life:
The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,
Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,
Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream;
No storms deform the beaming brow of heaven,
Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride
The foliage of the undecaying trees;
But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,
And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace,
Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring,
Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit
Reflects its tint and blushes into love.
The habitable earth is full of bliss;
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate nor live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves
And melodise with man's blest nature there.
The vast tract of the parched and sandy waste
Now teems with countless rills and shady woods,
Corn-fields and pastures and white cottages;
And where the startled wilderness did hear
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
Hymning his victory, or the milder snake
Crushing the bones of some frail antelope
Within his brazen foldsthe dewy lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door,
Share with the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet, his morning's meal.
Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail
Has seen, above the illimitable plain,
Morning on night and night on morning rise,
Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread
Its shadowy mountains on the sunbright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gusty wind
In melancholy loneliness, and swept
The desert of those ocean solitudes,
But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm.
Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds
Of kindliest human impulses respond:
Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,
With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,
Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,
To meet the kisses of the flowerets there.
Man chief perceives the change, his being notes
The gradual renovation, and defines
Each movement of its progress on his mind.
Man, where the gloom of the long polar night
Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,
Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost
Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,
Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night:
Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day
With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,
Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere
Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed
Unnatural vegetation, where the land
Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,
Was man a nobler being; slavery
Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust.
Even where the milder zone afforded man
A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,
Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,
Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth availed
Till late to arrest its progress, or create
That peace which first in bloodless victory waved
Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime:
There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,
The mimic of surrounding misery,
The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,
The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.
Here now the human being stands adorning
This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind:
Blest from his birth with all bland impulses,
Which gently in his noble bosom wake
All kindly passions and all pure desires.
Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing,
Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise
In time-destroying infiniteness gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks
The unprevailing hoariness of age,
And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth: no longer now
He slays the beast that sports around his dwelling
And horribly devours its mangled flesh,
Or drinks its vital blood, which like a stream
Of poison thro' his fevered veins did flow
Feeding a plague that secretly consumed
His feeble frame, and kindling in his mind
Hatred, despair, and fear and vain belief,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
No longer now the wingd habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
Which little children stretch in friendly sport
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
All things are void of terror: man has lost
His desolating privilege, and stands
An equal amidst equals: happiness
And science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reason and passion cease to combat there;
Whilst mind unfettered o'er the earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.
Mild is the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts
With choicest boons her human worshippers.
How vigorous now the athletic form of age!
How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!
Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformity
On all the mingling lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth!
How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy.
Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,
Fearless and free the ruddy children play,
Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows
With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
There rust amid the accumulated ruins
Now mingling slowly with their native earth:
There the broad beam of day, which feebly once
Lighted the cheek of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, now freely shines
On the pure smiles of infant playfulness:
No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair
Peals through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes
Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment are resonant around.
The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more
The voice that once waked multitudes to war
Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond
To the death dirge of the melancholy wind:
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast,
So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing!
Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To-day, the breathing marble glows above
To decorate its memory, and tongues
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.
These ruins soon leave not a wreck behind:
Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe,
To happier shapes are moulded, and become
Ministrant to all blissful impulses:
Thus human things are perfected, and earth,
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Is strengthened in all excellence, and grows
Fairer and nobler with each passing year.
Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene
Closes in steadfast darkness, and the past
Fades from our charmd sight. My task is done:
Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own.
With all the fear and all the hope they bring.
My spells are past: the present now recurs.
Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains
Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand.
Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,
Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue
The gradual paths of an aspiring change:
For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked powers that thro' the world
Wander like winds have found a human home,
All tend to perfect happiness, and urge
The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:
For birth but wakes the universal mind
Whose mighty streams might else in silence flow
Thro' the vast world, to individual sense
Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape
New modes of passion to its frame may lend;
Life is its state of action, and the store
Of all events is aggregated there
That variegate the eternal universe;
Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,
That leads to azure isles and beaming skies
And happy regions of eternal hope.
Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on:
Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,
Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,
Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth,
To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,
That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,
Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile.
Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand,
So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch flares;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,
The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.
For what thou art shall perish utterly,
But what is thine may never cease to be;
Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen
Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,
Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there,
And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.
Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene
Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?
Hopes that not vainly thou, and living fires
Of mind as radiant and as pure as thou,
Have shone upon the paths of menreturn,
Surpassing Spirit, to that world, where thou
Art destined an eternal war to wage
With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot
The germs of misery from the human heart.
Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe
The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,
Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,
Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease:
Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy
Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,
When fenced by power and master of the world.
Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,
Free from heart-withering custom's cold control,
Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.
Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee.
And therefore art thou worthy of the boon
Which thou hast now received: virtue shall keep
Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,
And many days of beaming hope shall bless
Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.
Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life and rapture from thy smile.
The Daemon called its wingd ministers.
Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,
That rolled beside the crystal battlement,
Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.
The burning wheels inflame
The steep descent of Heaven's untrodden way.
Fast and far the chariot flew:
The mighty globes that rolled
Around the gate of the Eternal Fane
Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared
Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs
That ministering on the solar power
With borrowed light pursued their narrower way.
Earth floated then below:
The chariot paused a moment;
The Spirit then descended:
And from the earth departing
The shadows with swift wings
Speeded like thought upon the light of Heaven.
The Body and the Soul united then,
A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame:
Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;
Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:
She looked around in wonder and beheld
Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Daemon Of The World
,#NFDB
1210:Scene. Colmar in Alsatia: an Inn. 1528.
Paracelsus, Festus.
Paracelsus
[to Johannes Oporinus, his Secretary].
Sic itur ad astra! Dear Von Visenburg
Is scandalized, and poor Torinus paralysed,
And every honest soul that Basil holds
Aghast; and yet we live, as one may say,
Just as though Liechtenfels had never set
So true a value on his sorry carcass,
And learned Ptter had not frowned us dumb.
We live; and shall as surely start to morrow
For Nuremberg, as we drink speedy scathe
To Basil in this mantling wine, suffused
A delicate blush, no fainter tinge is born
I' the shut heart of a bud. Pledge me, good John
"Basil; a hot plague ravage it, and Ptter
"Oppose the plague!" Even so? Do you too share
Their panic, the reptiles? Ha, ha; faint through these,
Desist for these! They manage matters so
At Basil, 't is like: but others may find means
To bring the stoutest braggart of the tribe
Once more to crouch in silencemeans to breed
A stupid wonder in each fool again,
Now big with admiration at the skill
Which stript a vain pretender of his plumes:
And, that done,means to brand each slavish brow
So deeply, surely, ineffaceably,
That henceforth flattery shall not pucker it
Out of the furrow; there that stamp shall stay
To show the next they fawn on, what they are,
This Basil with its magnates,fill my cup,
Whom I curse soul and limb. And now despatch,
Despatch, my trusty John; and what remains
To do, whate'er arrangements for our trip
Are yet to be completed, see you hasten
This night; we'll weather the storm at least: to-morrow
For Nuremberg! Now leave us; this grave clerk
Has divers weighty matters for my ear:
[Oporinus goes out.
And spare my lungs. At last, my gallant Festus,
I am rid of this arch-knave that dogs my heels
As a gaunt crow a gasping sheep; at last
May give a loose to my delight. How kind,
How very kind, my first best only friend!
Why, this looks like fidelity. Embrace me!
Not a hair silvered yet? Right! you shall live
Till I am worth your love; you shall be pround,
And Ibut let time show! Did you not wonder?
I sent to you because our compact weighed
Upon my conscience(you recall the night
At Basil, which the gods confound!)because
Once more I aspire. I call you to my side:
You come. You thought my message strange?
Festus.
So strange
That I must hope, indeed, your messenger
Has mingled his own fancies with the words
Purporting to be yours.
Paracelsus.
He said no more,
'T is probable, than the precious folk I leave
Said fiftyfold more roughly. Well-a-day,
'T is true! poor Paracelsus is exposed
At last; a most egregious quack he proves:
And those he overreached must spit their hate
On one who, utterly beneath contempt,
Could yet deceive their topping wits. You heard
Bare truth; and at my bidding you come here
To speed me on my enterprise, as once
Your lavish wishes sped me, my own friend!
Festus.
What is your purpose, Aureole?
Paracelsus.
Oh, for purpose,
There is no lack of precedents in a case
Like mine; at least, if not precisely mine,
The case of men cast off by those they sought
To benefit.
Festus.
They really cast you off?
I only heard a vague tale of some priest,
Cured by your skill, who wrangled at your claim,
Knowing his life's worth best; and how the judge
The matter was referred to, saw no cause
To interfere, nor you to hide your full
Contempt of him; nor he, again, to smother
His wrath thereat, which raised so fierce a flame
That Basil soon was made no place for you.
Paracelsus.
The affair of Liechtenfels? the shallowest fable,
The last and silliest outragemere pretence!
I knew it, I foretold it from the first,
How soon the stupid wonder you mistook
For genuine loyaltya cheering promise
Of better things to comewould pall and pass;
And every word comes true. Saul is among
The prophets! Just so long as I was pleased
To play off the mere antics of my art,
Fantastic gambols leading to no end,
I got huge praise: but one can ne'er keep down
Our foolish nature's weakness. There they flocked,
Poor devils, jostling, swearing and perspiring,
Till the walls rang again; and all for me!
I had a kindness for them, which was right;
But then I stopped not till I tacked to that
A trust in them and a respecta sort
Of sympathy for them; I must needs begin
To teach them, not amaze them, "to impart
"The spirit which should instigate the search
"Of truth," just what you bade me! I spoke out.
Forthwith a mighty squadron, in disgust,
Filed off"the sifted chaff of the sack," I said,
Redoubling my endeavours to secure
The rest. When lo! one man had tarried so long
Only to ascertain if I supported
This tenet of his, or that; another loved
To hear impartially before he judged,
And having heard, now judged; this bland disciple
Passed for my dupe, but all along, it seems,
Spied error where his neighbours marvelled most;
That fiery doctor who had hailed me friend,
Did it because my by-paths, once proved wrong
And beaconed properly, would commend again
The good old ways our sires jogged safely o'er,
Though not their squeamish sons; the other worthy
Discovered divers verses of St. John,
Which, read successively, refreshed the soul,
But, muttered backwards, cured the gout, the stone,
The colic and what not. Quid multa? The end
Was a clear class-room, and a quiet leer
From grave folk, and a sour reproachful glance
From those in chief who, cap in hand, installed
The new professor scarce a year before;
And a vast flourish about patient merit
Obscured awhile by flashy tricks, but sure
Sooner or later to emerge in splendour
Of which the example was some luckless wight
Whom my arrival had discomfited,
But now, it seems, the general voice recalled
To fill my chair and so efface the stain
Basil had long incurred. I sought no better,
Only a quiet dismissal from my post,
And from my heart I wished them better suited
And better served. Good night to Basil, then!
But fast as I proposed to rid the tribe
Of my obnoxious back, I could not spare them
The pleasure of a parting kick.
Festus.
You smile:
Despise them as they merit!
Paracelsus.
If I smile,
'T is with as very contempt as ever turned
Flesh into stone. This courteous recompense,
This grateful . . . Festus, were your nature fit
To be defiled, your eyes the eyes to ache
At gangrene-blotches, eating poison-blains,
The ulcerous barky scurf of leprosy
Which findsa man, and leavesa hideous thing
That cannot but be mended by hell fire,
I would lay bare to you the human heart
Which God cursed long ago, and devils make since
Their pet nest and their never-tiring home.
Oh, sages have discovered we are born
For various endsto love, to know: has ever
One stumbled, in his search, on any signs
Of a nature in us formed to hate? To hate?
If that be our true object which evokes
Our powers in fullest strength, be sure 't is hate!
Yet men have doubted if the best and bravest
Of spirits can nourish him with hate alone.
I had not the monopoly of fools,
It seems, at Basil.
Festus.
But your plans, your plans!
I have yet to learn your purpose, Aureole!
Paracelsus.
Whether to sink beneath such ponderous shame,
To shrink up like a crushed snail, undergo
In silence and desist from further toil,
and so subside into a monument
Of one their censure blasted? or to bow
Cheerfully as submissively, to lower
My old pretensions even as Basil dictates,
To drop into the rank her wits assign me
And live as they prescribe, and make that use
Of my poor knowledge which their rules allow,
Proud to be patted now and then, and careful
To practise the true posture for receiving
The amplest benefit from their hoofs' appliance
When they shall condescend to tutor me?
Then, one may feel resentment like a flame
Within, and deck false systems in truth's garb,
And tangle and entwine mankind with error,
And give them darkness for a dower and falsehood
For a possession, ages: or one may mope
Into a shade through thinking, or else drowse
Into a dreamless sleep and so die off.
But I,now Festus shall divine!but I
Am merely setting out once more, embracing
My earliest aims again! What thinks he now?
Festus.
Your aims? the aims?to Know? and where is found
The early trust . . .
Paracelsus.
Nay, not so fast; I say,
The aimsnot the old means. You know they made me
A laughing-stock; I was a fool; you know
The when and the how: hardly those means again!
Not but they had their beauty; who should know
Their passing beauty, if not I? Still, dreams
They were, so let them vanish, yet in beauty
If that may be. Stay: thus they pass in song!
[He sings.
Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island-gain.
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young.
Mine, every word! And on such pile shall die
My lovely fancies, with fair perished things,
Themselves fair and forgotten; yes, forgotten,
Or why abjure them? So, I made this rhyme
That fitting dignity might be preserved;
No little proud was I; though the list of drugs
Smacks of my old vocation, and the verse
Halts like the best of Luther's psalms.
Festus.
But, Aureole,
Talk not thus wildly and madly. I am here
Did you know all! I have travelled far, indeed,
To learn your wishes. Be yourself again!
For in this mood I recognize you less
Than in the horrible despondency
I witnessed last. You may account this, joy;
But rather let me gaze on that despair
Than hear these incoherent words and see
This flushed cheek and intensely-sparkling eye.
Paracelsus.
Why, man, I was light-hearted in my prime
I am light-hearted now; what would you have?
Aprile was a poet, I make songs
'T is the very augury of success I want!
Why should I not be joyous now as then?
Festus.
Joyous! and how? and what remains for joy?
You have declared the ends (which I am sick
Of naming) are impracticable.
Paracelsus.
Ay,
Pursued as I pursued themthe arch-fool!
Listen: my plan will please you not, 't is like,
But you are little versed in the world's ways.
This is my plan(first drinking its good luck)
I will accept all helps; all I despised
So rashly at the outset, equally
With early impulses, late years have quenched:
I have tried each way singly: now for both!
All helps! no one sort shall exclude the rest.
I seek to know and to enjoy at once,
Not one without the other as before.
Suppose my labour should seem God's own cause
Once more, as first I dreamed,it shall not baulk me
Of the meanest earthliest sensualest delight
That may be snatched; for every joy is gain,
And gain is gain, however small. My soul
Can die then, nor be taunted"what was gained?"
Nor, on the other hand, should pleasure follow
As though I had not spurned her hitherto,
Shall she o'ercloud my spirit's rapt communion
With the tumultuous past, the teeming future,
Glorious with visions of a full success.
Festus.
Success!
Paracelsus.
And wherefore not? Why not prefer
Results obtained in my best state of being,
To those derived alone from seasons dark
As the thoughts they bred? When I was best, my youth
Unwasted, seemed success not surest too?
It is the nature of darkness to obscure.
I am a wanderer: I remember well
One journey, how I feared the track was missed,
So long the city I desired to reach
Lay hid; when suddenly its spires afar
Flashed through the circling clouds; you may conceive
My transport. Soon the vapours closed again,
But I had seen the city, and one such glance
No darkness could obscure: nor shall the present
A few dull hours, a passing shame or two,
Destroy the vivid memories of the past.
I will fight the battle out; a little spent
Perhaps, but still an able combatant.
You look at my grey hair and furrowed brow?
But I can turn even weakness to account:
Of many tricks I know, 't is not the least
To push the ruins of my frame, whereon
The fire of vigour trembles scarce alive,
Into a heap, and send the flame aloft.
What should I do with age? So, sickness lends
An aid; it being, I fear, the source of all
We boast of: mind is nothing but disease,
And natural health is ignorance.
Festus.
I see
But one good symptom in this notable scheme.
I feared your sudden journey had in view
To wreak immediate vengeance on your foes
'T is not so: I am glad.
Paracelsus.
And if I please
To spit on them, to trample them, what then?
'T is sorry warfare truly, but the fools
Provoke it. I would spare their self-conceit
But if they must provoke me, cannot suffer
Forbearance on my part, if I may keep
No quality in the shade, must needs put forth
Power to match power, my strength against their strength,
And teach them their own game with their own arms
Why, be it so and let them take their chance!
I am above them like a god, there's no
Hiding the fact: what idle scruples, then,
Were those that ever bade me soften it,
Communicate it gently to the world,
Instead of proving my supremacy,
Taking my natural station o'er their head,
Then owning all the glory was a man's!
And in my elevation man's would be.
But live and learn, though life's short, learning, hard!
And therefore, though the wreck of my past self,
I fear, dear Ptter, that your lecture-room
Must wait awhile for its best ornament,
The penitent empiric, who set up
For somebody, but soon was taught his place;
Now, but too happy to be let confess
His error, snuff the candles, and illustrate
(Fiat experientia corpore vili)
Your medicine's soundness in his person. Wait,
Good Ptter!
Festus.
He who sneers thus, is a god!
Paracelsus.
Ay, ay, laugh at me! I am very glad
You are not gulled by all this swaggering; you
Can see the root of the matter!how I strive
To put a good face on the overthrow
I have experienced, and to bury and hide
My degradation in its length and breadth;
How the mean motives I would make you think
Just mingle as is due with nobler aims,
The appetites I modestly allow
May influence me as being mortal still
Do goad me, drive me on, and fast supplant
My youth's desires. You are no stupid dupe:
You find me out! Yes, I had sent for you
To palm these childish lies upon you, Festus!
Laughyou shall laugh at me!
Festus.
The past, then, Aureole,
Proves nothing? Is our interchange of love
Yet to begin? Have I to swear I mean
No flattery in this speech or that? For you,
Whate'er you say, there is no degradation;
These low thoughts are no inmates of your mind,
Or wherefore this disorder? You are vexed
As much by the intrusion of base views,
Familiar to your adversaries, as they
Were troubled should your qualities alight
Amid their murky souls; not otherwise,
A stray wolf which the winter forces down
From our bleak hills, suffices to affright
A village in the valeswhile foresters
Sleep calm, though all night long the famished troop
Snuff round and scratch against their crazy huts.
These evil thoughts are monsters, and will flee.
Paracelsus.
May you be happy, Festus, my own friend!
Festus.
Nay, further; the delights you fain would think
The superseders of your nobler aims,
Though ordinary and harmless stimulants,
Will ne'er content you. . . .
Paracelsus.
Hush! I once despised them,
But that soon passes. We are high at first
In our demand, nor will abate a jot
Of toil's strict value; but time passes o'er,
And humbler spirits accept what we refuse:
In short, when some such comfort is doled out
As these delights, we cannot long retain
Bitter contempt which urges us at first
To hurl it back, but hug it to our breast
And thankfully retire. This life of mine
Must be lived out and a grave thoroughly earned:
I am just fit for that and nought beside.
I told you once, I cannot now enjoy,
Unless I deem my knowledge gains through joy;
Nor can I know, but straight warm tears reveal
My need of linking also joy to knowledge:
So, on I drive, enjoying all I can,
And knowing all I can. I speak, of course,
Confusedly; this will better explainfeel here!
Quick beating, is it not?a fire of the heart
To work off some way, this as well as any.
So, Festus sees me fairly launched; his calm
Compassionate look might have disturbed me once,
But now, far from rejecting, I invite
What bids me press the closer, lay myself
Open before him, and be soothed with pity;
I hope, if he command hope, and believe
As he directs mesatiating myself
With his enduring love. And Festus quits me
To give place to some credulous disciple
Who holds that God is wise, but Paracelsus
Has his peculiar merits: I suck in
That homage, chuckle o'er that admiration,
And then dismiss the fool; for night is come.
And I betake myself to study again,
Till patient searchings after hidden lore
Half wring some bright truth from its prison; my frame
Trembles, my forehead's veins swell out, my hair
Tingles for triumph. Slow and sure the morn
Shall break on my pent room and dwindling lamp
And furnace dead, and scattered earths and ores;
When, with a failing heart and throbbing brow,
I must review my captured truth, sum up
Its value, trace what ends to what begins,
Its present power with its eventual bearings,
Latent affinities, the views it opens,
And its full length in perfecting my scheme.
I view it sternly circumscribed, cast down
From the high place my fond hopes yielded it,
Proved worthlesswhich, in getting, yet had cost
Another wrench to this fast-falling frame.
Then, quick, the cup to quaff, that chases sorrow!
I lapse back into youth, and take again
My fluttering pulse for evidence that God
Means good to me, will make my cause his own.
See! I have cast off this remorseless care
Which clogged a spirit born to soar so free,
And my dim chamber has become a tent,
Festus is sitting by me, and his Michal . . .
Why do you start? I say, she listening here,
(For yonderWrzburg through the orchard-bough!)
Motions as though such ardent words should find
No echo in a maiden's quiet soul,
But her pure bosom heaves, her eyes fill fast
With tears, her sweet lips tremble all the while!
Ha, ha!
Festus.
It seems, then, you expect to reap
No unreal joy from this your present course,
But rather . . .
Paracelsus.
Death! To die! I owe that much
To what, at least, I was. I should be sad
To live contented after such a fall,
To thrive and fatten after such reverse!
The whole plan is a makeshift, but will last
My time.
Festus.
And you have never mused and said,
"I had a noble purpose, and the strength
"To compass it; but I have stopped half-way,
"And wrongly given the first-fruits of my toil
"To objects little worthy of the gift.
"Why linger round them still? why clench my fault?
"Why seek for consolation in defeat,
"In vain endeavours to derive a beauty
"From ugliness? why seek to make the most
"Of what no power can change, nor strive instead
"With mighty effort to redeem the past
"And, gathering up the treasures thus cast down,
"To hold a steadfast course till I arrive
"At their fit destination and my own?"
You have never pondered thus?
Paracelsus.
Have I, you ask?
Often at midnight, when most fancies come,
Would some such airy project visit me:
But ever at the end . . . or will you hear
The same thing in a tale, a parable?
You and I, wandering over the world wide,
Chance to set foot upon a desert coast.
Just as we cry, "No human voice before
"Broke the inveterate silence of these rocks!"
Their querulous echo startles us; we turn:
What ravaged structure still looks o'er the sea?
Some characters remain, too! While we read,
The sharp salt wind, impatient for the last
Of even this record, wistfully comes and goes,
Or sings what we recover, mocking it.
This is the record; and my voice, the wind's.
[He sings.
Over the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest-tree
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nailed all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black bull-hides,
Seethed in fat and suppled in flame,
To bear the playful billows' game:
So, each good ship was rude to see,
Rude and bare to the outward view,
But each upbore a stately tent
Where cedar pales in scented row
Kept out the flakes of the dancing brine,
And an awning drooped the mast below,
In fold on fold of the purple fine,
That neither noontide nor starshine
Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,
Might pierce the regal tenement.
When the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad
We set the sail and plied the oar;
But when the night-wind blew like breath,
For joy of one day's voyage more,
We sang together on the wide sea,
Like men at peace on a peaceful shore;
Each sail was loosed to the wind so free,
Each helm made sure by the twilight star,
And in a sleep as calm as death,
We, the voyagers from afar,
Lay stretched along, each weary crew
In a circle round its wondrous tent
Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent,
And with light and perfume, music too:
So the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past,
And at morn we started beside the mast,
And still each ship was sailing fast.
Now, one morn, land appeareda speck
Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky:
"Avoid it," cried our pilot, "check
"The shout, restrain the eager eye!"
But the heaving sea was black behind
For many a night and many a day,
And land, though but a rock, drew nigh;
So, we broke the cedar pales away,
Let the purple awning flap in the wind,
And a statute bright was on every deck!
We shouted, every man of us,
And steered right into the harbour thus,
With pomp and pan glorious.
A hundred shapes of lucid stone!
All day we built its shrine for each,
A shrine of rock for every one,
Nor paused till in the westering sun
We sat together on the beach
To sing because our task was done.
When lo! what shouts and merry songs!
What laughter all the distance stirs!
A loaded raft with happy throngs
Of gentle islanders!
"Our isles are just at hand," they cried,
"Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping
"Our temple-gates are opened wide,
"Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping
"For these majestic forms"they cried.
Oh, then we awoke with sudden start
From our deep dream, and knew, too late,
How bare the rock, how desolate,
Which had received our precious freight:
Yet we called out"Depart!
"Our gifts, once given, must here abide.
"Our work is done; we have no heart
"To mar our work,"we cried.
Festus.
In truth?
Paracelsus.
Nay, wait: all this in tracings faint
On rugged stones strewn here and there, but piled
In order once: then followsmark what follows!
"The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
"To their first fault, and withered in their pride."
Festus.
Come back then, Aureole; as you fear God, come!
This is foul sin; come back! Renounce the past,
Forswear the future; look for joy no more,
But wait death's summons amid holy sights,
And trust me for the eventpeace, if not joy.
Return with me to Einsiedeln, dear Aureole!
Paracelsus.
No way, no way! it would not turn to good.
A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss
'T is well for him; but when a sinful man,
Envying such slumber, may desire to put
His guilt away, shall he return at once
To rest by lying there? Our sires knew well
(Spite of the grave discoveries of their sons)
The fitting course for such: dark cells, dim lamps,
A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm:
No mossy pillow blue with violets!
Festus.
I see no symptom of these absolute
And tyrannous passions. You are calmer now.
This verse-making can purge you well enough
Without the terrible penance you describe.
You love me still: the lusts you fear will never
Outrage your friend. To Einsiedeln, once more!
Say but the word!
Paracelsus.
No, no; those lusts forbid:
They crouch, I know, cowering with half-shut eye
Beside you; 't is their nature. Thrust yourself
Between them and their prey; let some fool style me
Or king or quack, it matters notthen try
Your wisdom, urge them to forego their treat!
No, no; learn better and look deeper, Festus!
If you knew how a devil sneers within me
While you are talking now of this, now that,
As though we differed scarcely save in trifles!
Festus.
Do we so differ? True, change must proceed,
Whether for good or ill; keep from me, which!
Do not confide all secrets: I was born
To hope, and you . . .
Paracelsus.
To trust: you know the fruits!
Festus.
Listen: I do believe, what you call trust
Was self-delusion at the best: for, see!
So long as God would kindly pioneer
A path for you, and screen you from the world,
Procure you full exemption from man's lot,
Man's common hopes and fears, on the mere pretext
Of your engagement in his serviceyield you
A limitless licence, make you God, in fact,
And turn your slaveyou were content to say
Most courtly praises! What is it, at last,
But selfishness without example? None
Could trace God's will so plain as you, while yours
Remained implied in it; but now you fail,
And we, who prate about that will, are fools!
In short, God's service is established here
As he determines fit, and not your way,
And this you cannot brook. Such discontent
Is weak. Renounce all creatureship at once!
Affirm an absolute right to have and use
Your energies; as though the rivers should say
"We rush to the ocean; what have we to do
"With feeding streamlets, lingering in the vales,
"Sleeping in lazy pools?" Set up that plea,
That will be bold at least!
Paracelsus.
'T is like enough.
The serviceable spirits are those, no doubt,
The East produces: lo, the master bids,
They wake, raise terraces and garden-grounds
In one night's space; and, this done, straight begin
Another century's sleep, to the great praise
Of him that framed them wise and beautiful,
Till a lamp's rubbing, or some chance akin,
Wake them again. I am of different mould.
I would have soothed my lord, and slaved for him
And done him service past my narrow bond,
And thus I get rewarded for my pains!
Beside, 't is vain to talk of forwarding
God's glory otherwise; this is alone
The sphere of its increase, as far as men
Increase it; why, then, look beyond this sphere?
We are his glory; and if we be glorious,
Is not the thing achieved?
Festus.
Shall one like me
Judge hearts like yours? Though years have changed you much,
And you have left your first love, and retain
Its empty shade to veil your crooked ways,
Yet I still hold that you have honoured God.
And who shall call your course without reward?
For, wherefore this repining at defeat
Had triumph ne'er inured you to high hopes?
I urge you to forsake the life you curse,
And what success attends me?simply talk
Of passion, weakness and remorse; in short,
Anything but the naked truthyou choose
This so-despised career, and cheaply hold
My happiness, or rather other men's.
Once more, return!
Paracelsus.
And quickly. John the thief
Has pilfered half my secrets by this time:
And we depart by daybreak. I am weary,
I know not how; not even the wine-cup soothes
My brain to-night . . .
Do you not thoroughly despise me, Festus?
No flattery! One like you needs not be told
We live and breathe deceiving and deceived.
Do you not scorn me from your heart of hearts,
Me and my cant, each petty subterfuge,
My rhymes and all this frothy shower of words,
My glozing self-deceit, my outward crust
Of lies which wrap, as tetter, morphew, furfair
Wrapt the sound flesh?so, see you flatter not!
Even God flatters: but my friend, at least,
Is true. I would depart, secure henceforth
Against all further insult, hate and wrong
From puny foes; my one friend's scorn shall brand me:
No fear of sinking deeper!
Festus.
No, dear Aureole!
No, no; I came to counsel faithfully.
There are old rules, made long ere we were born,
By which I judge you. I, so fallible,
So infinitely low beside your mighty
Majestic spirit!even I can see
You own some higher law than ours which call
Sin, what is no sinweakness, what is strength.
But I have only these, such as they are,
To guide me; and I blame you where they bid,
Only so long as blaming promises
To win peace for your soul: the more, that sorrow
Has fallen on me of late, and they have helped me
So that I faint not under my distress.
But wherefore should I scruple to avow
In spite of all, as brother judging brother,
Your fate is most inexplicable to me?
And should you perish without recompense
And satisfaction yettoo hastily
I have relied on love: you may have sinned,
But you have loved. As a mere human matter
As I would have God deal with fragile men
In the endI say that you will triumph yet!
Paracelsus.
Have you felt sorrow, Festus?'t is because
You love me. Sorrow, and sweet Michal yours!
Well thought on: never let her know this last
Dull winding-up of all: these miscreants dared
Insult meme she loved:so, grieve her not!
Festus.
Your ill success can little grieve her now.
Paracelsus.
Michal is dead! pray Christ we do not craze!
Festus.
Aureole, dear Aureole, look not on me thus!
Fool, fool! this is the heart grown sorrow-proof
I cannot bear those eyes.
Paracelsus.
Nay, really dead?
Festus.
'T is scarce a month.
Paracelsus.
Stone dead!then you have laid her
Among the flowers ere this. Now, do you know,
I can reveal a secret which shall comfort
Even you. I have no julep, as men think,
To cheat the grave; but a far better secret.
Know, then, you did not ill to trust your love
To the cold earth: I have thought much of it:
For I believe we do not wholly die.
Festus.
Aureole!
Paracelsus.
Nay, do not laugh; there is a reason
For what I say: I think the soul can never
Taste death. I am, just now, as you may see,
Very unfit to put so strange a thought
In an intelligible dress of words;
But take it as my trust, she is not dead.
Festus.
But not on this account alone? you surely,
Aureole, you have believed this all along?
Paracelsus.
And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews,
While I am moved at Basil, and full of schemes
For Nuremberg, and hoping and despairing,
As though it mattered how the farce plays out,
So it be quickly played. Away, away!
Have your will, rabble! while we fight the prize,
Troop you in safety to the snug back-seats
And leave a clear arena for the brave
About to perish for your sport!Behold!
~ Robert Browning, Paracelsus - Part IV - Paracelsus Aspires
,#NFDB
1211:Leszko The Bastard
``Why do I bid the rising gale
To waft me from your shore?
Why hail I, as the vultures hail,
The scent of far-off gore?
Why wear I with defiant pride
The Paynim's badge and gear,
Though I am vowed to Christ that died,
And fain would staunch the gaping side
That felt the sceptic spear?
And why doth one in whom there runs
The blood of Sclavic sires and sons,
In those but find a foe,
That onward march with sword and flame,
To vindicate the Sclavic name,
From the fringe of Arctic snows,
To the cradle of the rose,
Where the Sweet Waters flow?
Strange! But 'twere stranger yet if I,
When Turk and Tartar splinters fly,
Lagged far behind the van.
While the wind dallies with my sail,
Listen! and you shall hear my tale;
Then marvel, if you can!
``Nothing but snow! A white waste world,
Far as eye reached, or voice could call!
Motion within itself slept furled;
The earth was dead, and Heaven its pall!
Now nothing lived except the wind,
That, moaning round with restless mind,
Seemed like uncoffined ghost to flit
O'er vacant tracts, that it might find
Some kindred thing to speak with it.
Nothing to break the white expanse!
No far, no near, no high, no low!
Nothing to stop the wandering glance!
One smooth monotony of snow!
I lifted the latch, and I shivered in;
My mother stood by the larch-log blaze,
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My mother, stately, and tall, and thin,
With the shapely head and the soft white skin,
And the sweetly-sorrowing gaze.
She was younger than you, aye, you who stand
In matron prime by your household fire,
A happy wife in a happy land,
And with all your heart's desire.
But though bred, like you, from the proud and brave,
Her hair was blanched and her voice was grave.
If you knew what it is to be born a slave,
And to feel a despot's ire!
``She turned her round from the hearth like one
That hath waited long, and said,
`Come hither, and sit by me, my son!
For somehow to-night doth remembrance run
Back to the days that are dead.
And you are tall and stalwart now,
And coming manhood o'er your brow
Its shadow 'gins to shed.
Sit by me close!' and as I sate
Close, close as I could sit,
She took my hand and placed it flat
On hers, and fondled it.
Then with the same soft palm she brushed
My wind-tossed locks apart,
And, kissing my bared temples, hushed
The flow of love that else had gushed,
Love-loosened, from my heart.
```Listen! you often have questioned why
Here 'neath this pale Siberian sky,
You scarcely live, I slowly die.
That we dwell on, but exiles here,
In regions barren, sunless, drear,
And have no more the power to fly
To brighter lands and bluer sky,
Than some poor bird whom man's caprice
Hath tethered by a clanking chain,
And leaves upon its perch in pain
To pine for, ne'er to find release,This do you know, and still have known
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Since first I taught your mouth to frame
The syllables of Poland's name,
Even before my own.
But how could I to childhood's ears,
Or boyhood's, tell the tale of tears
That links me with the bygone years?Tale steeped in rapture, drenched with woe,
A tale of wrong, and loss, and love,
That opens in the heavens above,
And ends in worse than hell below?A tale I only could impart
To mind mature and full-grown heart;
A tale to fill your larger life
With hissing waters of distress
And overflowing bitterness,
And set you with yourself at strife?
But you must hear it now. The down
Of manhood fringes lip and cheek;
Your temples take a richer brown,
And on your forehead buds the crown
Of kingly thought that yet will speak.
Listen! and let no faintest word
Of all I utter fall unheard
Upon your ear or heart!
'Twill wring your youth, but nerve it too:And what have I now left to do,
But unveil tyranny to view,
And wing the avenging dart?
```So like to you! The same blue eye,
Same lavish locks, same forehead high,
But of a manlier majesty!
His limbs, like yours, were straight and strong,
Yet supple as the bough in bud;
For tyrants cannot tame the blood,
Or noble lineage lose, through wrong
Its heritage of hardihood.
And maybe since his years were more,
And partly that you needs must bear
In every filial vein and pore
With his pure strain the base alloy
Of that in you which is my share,
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Though you are tall and comely, boy!
Yet he was taller, comelier.
In days that now but live in song,
When Rurik's hinds felt Poland's heel,
And Poland's horsemen, cased in steel,
To Volo's plain were wont to throng,
A hundred thousand manes in strength,
And vowed, if Heaven let fall the sky,
To uphold it on their lance's length
As 'twere a silken canopy;
His sires were there in gallant trim,
Haught of mien and hard of limbVisors up and foreheads gashed,
Swords that poised, and swooped, and flashed,
Like the wings of the flaming Cherubim!
And when Imperial vultures tore
With banded beaks Sarmatia's breast,
And wallowed in Sarmatia's gore,
His fathers by their fathers swore
Ne'er to recede nor rest,
Till they had pushed the watchful points
Of vengeance in between the joints
Of armour dear to tyrants pricked
Of conscience never hushed nor tricked,
And made them feel what they inflict.
Vow sternly kept, but kept in vain!
For ninety hoping, hopeless years,
Poland hath known no couch save pain,
No mate except the dull cold chain,
Hath felt the lash, and fed on jeers,
While Heaven, it seems, no longer hears
The wail of prayers, the drip of tears,
Or the voices of the slain.
Thrice have her sons, despite their gyves,
Essayed to sell their worthless lives
At least against the price
Of ruin on their gaolers brought;
But each brave stroke hath come to nought,
And blood, and wounds, and death, have brought,
Only fresh bootless sacrifice.
No blow was struck they did not share,
No banner raised, but straight they flew
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For one more tussle with despair;
And ever as they fought, they fell,
Waxing still fewer and more few,
Till only one remained to tell
How they had passed away, and dare
With front erect and unquelled stare
Those earthly ministers of hell.
One only of that kindred bandLike some last column gazing lone
Across the bare and brackish sand,
In a depopulated land,
Telling of times and temples flown!
```He loved me. Love in every clime,
Through all vicissitudes of time,
Is life's climacteric and prime.
Matched against it, all boons that bless,
All joys we chase, all good we prize,
All that of tender and sublime
Expands the heart and fills the eyes,
Tastes pitiful and savourless.
It glorifies the common air,
It clothes with light the mountains bare,
And shows the heavens all shining there.
It lifts our feet from off the ground,
It lets us walk along the skies;
It makes the daily silence sound
With transcendental harmonies.
It rules the seasons. Linnets sing
As loud in winter as in spring,
When hearts are leal, and love is king.
Bathed in its light, the distance glows
With all the colours of the rose.
Its vivid gaze blends far and near
In one delicious atmosphere,
Projects the future from the past,
And hugs the faith, without a fear,
Since love is all, that all will last.
The peevish voice of doubt grows dumb;
The demons of dejection flee;
And even sordid cares become
But a divine anxiety.
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Hope sails no more in far-off skies,
But makes its nest upon the ground;
And happiness, coy wing that flies
Too oft when mortal yearning woos,
At love's sweet summons circling round,
Sits on the nearest bough, and coos.
```Yes! such is love in every land,
If blest or curst, enslaved or free.
But how can they whose chainless hand
May stretch towards all they dream or see,
Whose lungs exult, whose lives expand,
In air of bracing liberty,
Feel love's delirium like to those
Who, of all other bliss bereft,
And cooped from each hale wind that blows,
Fondle, amid a world of foes,
The solitary friend that's left?
Through whatso regions freemen roam,
They find a hearth, they make a home.
Their unfenced energies embrace
All realms of thought, all fields of space,
At each fresh step fresh prospects find,
Larger than any left behind,
And mount with still rewarded stress
From happiness to happiness.
E'en love itself for such can bring
To life's tuned lyre but one more string,
Or but with fingers subtly straying
Among the chords, and softly playing,
Make more harmonious everything.
But when to him whose hopes are bound
Within a dismal prison round,
Whose thoughts, suspected, must not soar
Beyond his straitened dungeon floor,
Who may not speak, nor groan, nor sigh,
Nor lend sharp agony a vent,
Lest those should hear him who are nigh,
And catch, perchance, in passing by,
Contagion from his discontent;
Who dwells an exile in his home,
And cannot rest and may not roam;
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Whom even hope doth not delude;
Who vainly lives, in vain would die,
And, hemmed in close, alike would fly,
Society and solitude;Oh! when to such as he love brings
Message of heaven upon its wings,
It fills his heart, it floods his brain,
Riots in every pulse and vein,
And turns to paradise his pain.
Body, and soul, and sense conspire
To feed the rising, rushing fire.
The passions which are wont to share
Love's empire o'er distracted man,
Denied their outlet, in him fan
The exclusive fury of desire.
As one who faints of thirst, he takes
Swiftly what should be slowly quaffed,
With ravenous lips his fever slakes,
Then dies, delirious, of the draught!
```He loved me. Do you ask if I
His love returned? Go, ask the sky
If it in vain pours sun and shower
On herb and leaf, on tree and flower.
Go, ask of echo if it wakes
When voice in lonely places calls;
Ask of the silence if it takes
The sound of plashing waterfalls:
Ask the parched plains if they refuse
The solace of descending dews;
Ask the unrippled lake that lies
Under faint fleecy clouds that flit,
If it reflects with tender eyes
The heavenly forms that gaze on it;
But ask not me if I returned
The love with which his being burned.
His passion such, in any heart
It straight had worked its counterpart,
Woke its own echo, roused a tone
In perfect concert with its own,
And made, the instant that it shone,
Mirror of what it gazed upon.
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```We loved, as few have loved before,
'Chance none; and lo! the hour drew nigh
To ratify the vows we swore
One night beneath the sky,
Before the solemn altar-rails
O'er which He hangs, pierced through with nails,
Who for our sins did die.
Oh! why is woman doomed to bear
The love, or lust, she cannot share;
And hear from alien lips the sighs
She fain herself would waken ne'er,
Save within kindred hearts and eyes?
Never by word, nor glance, nor e'en
That barren courtesy we give
Unto well nigh all things that live,
Did his detested rival glean
That I another's homage should
Not greet, as evil is by good.
But, had my heart been free as air,
Fickle as wind, as quick to take
Impression as some limpid lake
That every wanton breath can stir,
How had it ruffled been by one
Who wore the livery of the brood
By whom, with hands in blood imbrued,
Thrice had my country been undone?
But I, nor free, nor false, nor light,
Bound both to Poland, and to him
Who yearned for Poland's wrongs to fight,
Had rather torn been limb from limb,
Than share with such love's last delight!
I answered softly, not in scorn;
For in what guise soe'er it come,
Because of gentle longings born,
Love should leave indignation dumb.
But he was, like his shifty race,
Disloyal, cunning, vengeful, base,
And when he heard the lips of fate,
Love in him straightway turned to hate,
Even before my face!
He menaced me with vengeance dire.
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He knew my lover, brother, sire,
All rebels to the core.
And in the rush of lustful ire,
By his schismatic saints he swore,
That ruin, exile, death, should fall
With speedy stroke upon them all,
Unless I fed his foul desire.
I knew it was no idle boast;
He had the power to fetter, slay,
Abetted by a servile host,
Perjured, suborned by bribes to say
Whatever falsehood pleased him most.
Yet then I bridled not my scorn,
But poured upon his dastard head
All that by woman can be said,
When she confronts, before her eyes,
Creature created to despise,
And, since of manlier weapons shorn,
Can only wish him dead.
``Beware!'' he croaked, with passion hoarse,
``Within your patriot arms shall lie,
Repelled or welcomed, none but I;
And what you now to love deny,
You yet shall yield to fear or force.''
With scorn yet fiercer than at first
I flashed, and bade him work his worst.
``Before to-morrow's sun hath set,''
He answered, ``I shall pay the debt
Of vengeance, never baffled yet.
Think not to foil me or to fly!
I ever do the thing I would.''
Then laughing loud, he went; and I
Hated the ground where late he stood.
```The Night lay encamped in the summer sky,
And the burning stars kept watch;
All were asleep upon earth save I,
Who had waited the hour and lifted the latch,
And crept out noiselessly.
The air was as silent as love or death,
Except for the beat of my quickened breath,
And once the lonely belated wail
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Of an answered nightingale.
I dared not quicken my steps, for fear
The silence should listening be, and hear.
Slowly, stealthily, foot by foot.
Girding my garments tightly round,
Lest they should touch and tell the ground,
I threaded the laurel-walk and passed
On to the latchet-gate, and put
My hand on the creaking key, aghast
Lest the first stage of flight should prove the last.
Through! and out in the meadows beyond,
With the cooling grass-dews round my feet,
Which would tell the tale of my journey fond,
But too late to hinder its purpose sweet;
Over the narrow and swaying planks
That span the neck of the marish pool
Where the tall spear-lilies close their ranks,
And the water-hens nestle safe and cool.
Then into the gloomy, darksome wood
Where the trunks seemed ghosts, and the big boughs stood
As though they would block my way.
Woman's love is stronger than woman's fright,
And though dogged by dread, yet I faced that night
What I ne'er had faced by day.
O the blessëd break, and the blank without,
From each grinning bole and each staring leaf!
I clutched my temples, and gave a shout;
It was mad, but it brought relief.
And then with a saner fear I stopped
To know if my foolish cry was heard.
But, like to a stream where a stone is dropped,
The silence was only a moment stirred,
And stillness closed over the hazard word.
```I was there! in the garden where first I lent
My ear to the trembling music of love,
And my soul succumbed to its blandishment.
I was there! I could smell the syringa's scent
And the lilac plumes that loomed dark above,
But, like to the heart that keeps alway
True to its friends, when friends betray,
Was lending the night that hid from view
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Its delicate tufts and tender hue,
Odours sweeter than e'en by day.
The laburnum tassels brushed my cheek,
And the tangled clematis clutched my hair;
But I hurried along; though my limbs were weak,
I was strengthened by despair.
A moment more, and I should be
Hard by the window where he slept.
How should I wake him? how should flee,
If another o'erheard my voice? I crept
Softly, silently, over the sward.
The walls were dark, and the windows barred,
All saving-Yes, 'twas he! 'twas he!
Leaning out of his casement, lowly
Singing a love-song, sweetly, slowly,
That he first had sung to me.
He saw me not. He was gazing free
Across the dark, mysterious air,
At the shining stars, at the solemn sky,
At the unattainable far and fair,
The infinite something around, above,
With which, when alone, we identify
The finite thing we love.
I stood, and listened, and drank each note
Of love that came from the yearning throat,
As it rose, as it fell, as it floated and died;
And then with that courage that oft will spring,
When we have not time to think,
And impulse whispers the blessëd thing
From which resolve would shrink,
I with the song replied.
```One instant, and the echoed song,
The night, the dark, the heavens bare,
And all that was of far and fair,
And all that was of sweet and strong,
Seemed gathered into one embrace,
And showered their magic on my face.
His arms were round me, and his breath
As close to mine as life to death.
He murmured things I could not hear,
For I was deaf with bliss and fear.
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Dumb, too; in vain I strove to speak;
I could but lean on breast and cheek,
And prove my passion wildly weak.
He drew me in. I still was dumb,
Panting for words that would not come,
But only tears instead, and sobs,
And broken syllables, and throbs,
With which hearts beat, whom rapture robs
Of all save love's delirium.
``Why hast thou come?'' I heard him say.
``There is no hour of night or day,
The coming of thy worshipped feet
Would not make richer or more sweet.
O come! come! come! Yes, come alway!
Nay, never come, love! rather, stay!
I must or miss you, or not meet;
Absence is long, and presence fleet.
And I am dead, when thou away!
But why to-night, and here?'' I saw
Love's brightness overcast by awe;
And terror in his face o'ercame
The terror in my weakened frame;
Till listening to his voice, I caught
Contagion from his steadier thought,
And found at length the words I sought.
With rapid lips I told him all,
What had befallen-might befallThe hateful lust, the lustful hate,
The threats of one who, well he knew,
If false in love, in wrath was true,
And our impending fate.
``'Twas this alone I came to tell,
And, Leszko! now 'tis told, farewell!''
I murmured with a faltering tongue.
Round me his arms he tightly flung,
And ``Never!'' cried. ``Thy faith shall foil
The base assassins of our soil.
By the harmonious orbs that shine,
To-night, within that dome divine,
What thou hast promised me, must be mine!
Before to-morrow's sun can sink,
May deeds be done I would not name,
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And vengeance wreaked I dare not think.
If thus you went, 'twere vain you came!
To-night is ours, and, seized, will be
Ours, ours, through all eternity.
The dawn shall find us kneeling where
Passion is purified by prayer;
And hands of patriot priest shall bless
And bind our premature caress.
If we are parted then, we part,
One, one in body, breast, and heart.
Hate, lust, and tyranny, in vain
Will strive to snap the cherished chain
That we around ourselves have bound.
Vanda! my love! my wife! my more!
If more be in love's language found,
Let them not baulk the troth we swore!
Wed me with bonds not fiends can sever,
And be thou mine-if once-for ever!''
The winds of the morn began to stir,
And the stars began to pale;
We could feel the chill of the moving air,
And the lifting of the veil
That covers the face of the shrinking night,
Its dreams, its dangers, its delight.
We started up. We listened, heard
The pipe of an awaking bird;
Another-then another stillLouder and longer, and more shrill,
Till every copse began to fill
With music piercing bitter, fell,
The discord of our forced farewell.
We clung one moment, panted, kissed,
Then bravely rending us, he cried``Back through the curling morning mist,
Vanda! my love! my life! my bride!
A few brief hours, and side by side
Before Heaven's altar we shall stand,
As now in heart, then one in hand,
Then-be the future blest or curstLet Poland's tyrants wreak their worst!
One-one more kiss!''
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```We leaned, to give
The richest of all boons that live,
But paused, half given!. . .We each had heard
A sound that was no waking bird,
Nor stealthy footfall of the night,
Scudding the unseen tracks of flight.
The noise of human voices broke
Upon our ears; the words they spoke
Came nearer and more near.
We clung in silence; 'twas too late
To more than bide the feet of fate,
And face them without fear.
Loudest among them I could trace
The voice I hated most on earth;
Another moment, and his face,
Lit with vindictiveness and mirth,
Was gazing on our checked embrace.
His myrmidons were at his heel:
I did not shrink, I did not reel,
But closer clung, to make him feel
I loathed him and his alien race.
I know no more. Unarmed we stood.
I heard the clank of ordered steel,
Then suddenly a blinding hood
Over my head was flung, and I,
Powerless to struggle, see, or cry,
Felt myself wrenched from arms that fain
Had fenced my freedom, but in vain,
And, doubtful did he live or die,
Borne through the chilly morning air,
Bound, stifled, cooped with dumb despair!'
``She paused, and strove for breath, as though
The mere remembrance of that hour,
Though fled and faded long ago,
Retained the never-dying power
To choke and stifle her again,
And leave her dumb and dark, as then.
But mute no less I sate; and she
The horror in my stare could see,
The speechless, open-mouthed suspense,
That kept me gazing there, to know
311
If I had heard the worst from woe,
Or if I must prepare my sense
For outrage deeper, more intense,
And from extremity of wrong
Become invulnerably strong.
`O no!' she cried, for swift she guessed
The hell of anguish in my breast;
`O no! not that! My boy! thou art
The child of love and not of hate,
Memento of my only mate!
The birth of heart convulsed on heart
With rapture pure and passionate!
Though never more upon my breast
His breast did beat, his head did rest;
Though I no more beheld his eye
Beaming above me like the sky
When all is bright and all is high,
And by which gazed on, one is blest;
Though ne'er again his touch, his breath,
Was blent with mine, to make me feel
That something betwixt life and death,
When the converging senses reel,
And, through devotedness divine,
Joy knows not what it suffereth;No other hand has soiled the shrine;
And, Leszko lost! though lost, yet mine,
My senses, as my soul, kept thine!'
``She saw the shadow quit my brow;
But, as it crept away, the light
Seemed to desert her temples now.
The hand she had imprisoned tight
In hers, while travelling wildly back
To passion's bourne o'er sorrow's track,
She loosed, and half let go. `Hast heard,
Hast drunk, hast understood, each word,'
Slowly she asked, `my lips have said?
Ours was no sanctioned marriage-bed.
No priestly blessing, altar's rite,
Confirmed the nuptials of that night.
Leszko! thou art-'
312
``'Twas not her tongue
That paused upon the bitter word,
But that before the name I heard
I shrink not from, my arms I flung
Around her sainted neck and showered
The love with which my soul was stirred.
I kissed her knees, her hands devoured,
I hushed her mouth, I sealed her eyes,
With kisses blent with broken cries,
Such as from baffled lips arise
When bursting hearts are overpowered
With sense of sublime sacrifice.
`Mother!' I cried, `I'd sooner be
The child of love, and him, and thee,
Than bear or boast the tightest ties
Altars can knit or priests devise!
If love, faith, country cannot bind
Two souls through love already blent,
Where among mortals shall we find
Solemnity or Sacrament?
And were aught wanting to complete
In face of God's just judgment-seat,
Thy snapped-off love and life,
The tyrant's outrage, years of wrong,
Have weaved thee wedlock doubly strong,
And made thee more than wife!'
``She smoothed my hair, caressed my brow;
Consoling tears coursed down her cheek,
Furrowed by sorrow's barren plough:
She stroked my hand, she strove to speak:
`Yes, Leszko! Holier bond was ne'er
Sanctioned by heaven or sealed by prayer.
Let others deem that formal vows
Breathed between kneeling spouse and spouse,
Can sanctify a link where each
Is but the slave of ordered speech;
Where vanity, ambition, greed,
Are the base instincts that precede
The purest of the passions, sent
Life's desolate low steps to lead
Up to the star-thronged firmament;
313
Let others fancy, if they will,
That pomp, and compliment, and smile,
Are sacramental bonds, though guile
And calculating coldness fill
The hollows of the heart the while;
Let those, too, scorn me who have knelt
In fancied faithfulness, and sworn
The eternal troth they thought they felt,
But, soon as they were left to mourn
One to whose flesh their flesh they vowed
Not more in marriage-sheet than shroud,
After a few short trappings worn
To silence the censorious crowd,
Have let their facile feelings melt
Unto some second fancy, nursed
In the same lap where burned the first!
Let them!-Nor pomp nor pandars gave
Me unto him! 'Twas love alone
Anointed us; and not the grave,
Not life, not death, shall e'er deprave
The body that remains his own.
Not mine a fault for which to crave
By Heaven or mortal to be shriven.
If I a suppliant need to be
To any, 'tis, my boy, to thee!
And I by thee am all forgiven!
```Yet-yet-that night of shining joy
Its shadow flings athwart thy life;
I am not, I can ne'er be wife,
And thou art no one's son, our boy!
His name I gave thee, and despite
Their jugglery of wrong and right,
It shall thou bear, whate'er betide.
But who can give thee aught beside?
Bastard thou art! and thou canst claim,
It boots not what thy blood, thy fame,
Thy father's features, manly age,
Only a bastard's heritage.
But, Leszko! who would care to boast
All that the rightful covet most;
Who, who would wish to clutch and hold
Honour, or rank, or lands, or gold,
314
When lands, and gold, and rank, but be
A brighter badge of slavery?
They who have nothing may excuse
Submission to the tyrant's beck;
Too bare and beggared to refuse
Unsavoury morsel from the hand
That plants the heel upon the neck
Of their assassinated land.
But they who yet have aught to lose,
Base must they be if they can use
What still is left to them, to deck
The mourning of their country's wreck.
Be sure thy sire doth not retain
What would but aggravate his pain.
Of me, of love, when dispossessed,
How would he care to keep the rest?
Robbed of my arms, his arms would find
But emptiness in all behind,
Vacuous air and moaning wind.
Who tore me from him, must have torn
With it long since the worldly dregs
Easy resigned by him who begs
That death at least to him be kind,
And bans the day that he was born!
```Nay, ask not if he lives. I know
Nothing, since that cold dawn of woe.
Once more I had to hear, and bear,
The vengeful menace, lustful prayer,
Of one who sued, but would not spare.
He threatened he would blazen wide
That which he dared to call my shame.
Guess how I answered! I defied,
Exulted, and with patriot pride
Told him that I myself to fame
Would trumpet forth the deed that I
Had done to foil the treachery
Already hatching, and by whom!
He cursed me. That was his reply.
But mine, alas! had sealed my doom.
```'Twas over, quick. I saw no more
315
Familiar face, or roof, or floor,
Or anything I knew before.
My eyes were bandaged, limbs were bound,
As through rough distance on we wound,
Aware but of the unseen ground
We traversed ever, day and night.
At length they gave me back my sight;
And lo! there stretched before, around,
The desert steppe, inhuman, bare,
That answered me with stare for stare.
I gazed around me for some face,
Some answering look, some kindred guise,
Some woe that I might recognize
Even in this desert place.
But none of all I saw, I knew;
And never one among them threw
A pitying glance on me.
So desolate it seemed, I should
Have thankful been if there had stood
Before me even he
Who thuswise had my ruin wrought.
I vow to you, his face I sought,
Among the convoy, early, late.
No face, no fiend, my exiled fate
Could now or better make or worse:
And it to me relief had brought
Could I have seen him, but to hate,
And greeted, but to curse!
```A mute and melancholy band,
For days and weeks we journeyed on,
Across a bare and level land,
On which the fierce sun ever shone,
But whence all life and growth were gone,
Utterly, as from salt-steeped strand.
Dawn after dawn, the steppe stretched round:
It seemed to have no halt, no end,
Centre, circumference, nor bound,
No sight, no shade, no scent, no sound;
But ever we appeared to wend
Into eternal exile, doomed
To make the endless track we trod,
316
Now over sand, now scanty sod,
Where nought save blight and canker bloomed.
Though on we gasped, no goal was gained;
Further we went, further remained,
As when thought struggles after God:
Save that, instead, we seemed to go
Towards infinity of woe.
Many we were, but each alone.
We durst not with each other speak,
And but exchanged a tear or groan.
The strong might not assist the weak,
And to be child or woman gave
No privilege or power, save
To suffer more and be more brave.
So wretched were we, we could bless
A lighter load of wretchedness;
And when at last the cruel sun
Began to pity us, and leave
In sleep our pain a short reprieve,
We almost felt our griefs were done.
We knew not they had scarce begun.
Into another land we passed,
Drearier and deader than the last,
That knows no future and no past,
But only one fixed present!-land
Where nothing waxeth more or less,
Nothing is born and nothing dies,
And where, 'neath never-changing skies,
E'en frozen time itself doth stand
Immutable and motionless!
A land of snow and snow-fed wind,
Which freeze the blood, congeal the mind,
And harden man against mankind:
Region of death that is not dead,
But ever on its icy bed
Lies dying, and must ever lie,
Forbid to live, forbid to die!
```And, as its doom, such too seemed mine,
The doom of deathlessness in death.
In vain I used to pray and pine
The greedy cold would suck my breath,
317
And leave my empty husk to bleach
On the untrodden waste of white,
And draw the prowling jackal's screech,
Or give the wolf one foul delight.
```One night, as, prostrate in despair
At each unanswered tear and prayer,
I blasphemed God, and wildly sware
That if at least He would not give
Me death, I would no longer live,
But would myself the torture end,
That had nor change, nor hope, nor friend,
Sudden I started, gave a cry;
I seemed as changed to flesh from stone:
Oh! joy! I was no more alone.
And then for worlds I would not die!
'Twas thou! 'twas thou! my babe! my boy!
In joylessness my more than joy!
My more than heaven 'mid more than hell!
Weeping, upon my knees I fell,
And prayed forgiveness for my sin.
What now to me or cold or heat,
My shivering head, my burning feet,
Hunger or ache? I held within
The memory of that midnight sweet.
I had no thought for things without:
Sensation, suffering, struggle, doubt,
Each sense wherewith we feel, hear, see,
Was concentrated inwardly.
My aim was how to feed the root
That in the silence 'gan to shoot,
And pulsed with promise of the fruit.
Sometimes, in fresh access of woe,
Hope veered, and longed that thou and I
Lay underneath the snug, warm snow,
Together, and with none to know;
But swung back ever, true and high,
From desperation's gusty strife,Pointing from love and set towards life!
```You lived!'. . .`O mother!' here I cried,
`Tell me no more! I cannot bear
318
The tale of love, and grief, and pride.
Is't not enough that now we share
Pride, love, and exile, side by side?
And, let what will of wrong betide,
No wrong my youth, at least, shall tear,
From your soft hand and silvery hair!'
```What, Leszko! Leszko's son!' she said,
Her voice was grave, her tears were fled:
`Think you I told this tale of woe,
To stir your love for me, I know,
Will hold you living, haunt you dead?
Not quit my side, luxurious boy!
Share anguish that is almost joy,
To shrink from pain without alloy!
By all my hopes of husband fled,
My interrupted marriage-bed,
I charge you, bid you, not to cling,
To me, to love, to anything!
Not leave me! What is this I hear?
The mawkish kiss, the vapid tear,
Not flashing eye and springing spear!'
She pushed me off. `It cannot be
His patriot seed and mine I see.
Thou art some changeling! Go, then, go!
And hunt the lynx across the snow,
And when the blue-eyed scyllas blow,
Gather thereof a dainty bunch,
To woo some daughter of the foe,
While jackals and hyenas crunch
Thy country's flesh and bones, and bloom
No flowers, of all Spring used to know,
Save such as mourn o'er Poland's tomb!
For Poland, I from him was torn,
For Poland, he from me! But thouThou, thou forsooth, must cling on now,
Like infant that, from threatened hurt
Flies whimpering, to thy mother's skirt,
Dead unto duty as to scorn!
Bastard, indeed, thou doubly wert,
And both are shamed that thou wast born!'
``I knelt me down; towards the ground
319
I bowed my head in lowly guise.
I did not dare to raise my eyes,
But when at last my voice I found,
`Mother!' I cried, `I am not base,
Nor bastard, and his blood is mine;
But gazing on thy holy face,
I all forgot a woe, a wrong,
Sadder, more sacred, e'en than thine.
But now thy strength hath made me strong,
And in my features thou shalt trace,
And in my soul, that I belong
Unto a noble name and race.'
I stood up straight. There was no sign
Of melting in my voice or gaze.
`When shall I go?' I said, `The ways
Are not more ready stretched than I
To start at once, to run, to fly,
Whither thy sharp reproaches point.
Mother, farewell! In every joint
I feel the blood of Poland stir.
She is my mother! I for her
Can lonely live, will lonely die.'
```Kneel then once more!' she said. I knelt,
But this time with unbending brow.
Her face fawned towards me, and I felt
Her lips upon me, tender now.
She took the cross from off her breast,
Passed its cord softly o'er my head:
`I have no sword to give,' she said,
`But you will find one 'mong the dead
That now lie thick-though baffled, blestAmong the forests where, once more,
Poland renews the hopeless strife,
And liberates with lavish gore,
Awhile, the fever of its life.
Listen! There shortly start from hence
Two fresh battalions of the foe,
For Poland bound. They doubtless go
To aid their kindred's violence.
You must march with them o'er the snow.
Nay, start not! must their colours wear,
320
Aye, boy! must false allegiance swear
To their detested Pontiff-Czar!
Such perjuries, I tell thee, are
Not heard at Heaven's just judgment-bar.
And if thy lips abhor the lie,
Poland absolves thee-so do I!'
``The hour had come, and face to face
We stood, my mother, there, and I.
We did not fondle nor embrace;
She did not weep, I did not sigh.
I wore the trappings of the race
That battens upon Poland's heart;
So, well I knew that uncaressed,
Unfolded to her craving breast,
I from her must depart.
`Have you the cross?' she asked. I laid
My hand where 'gainst my heart it lay,
But did not speak. `Both night and day,
Brood on it, as a constant maid
Broods on the face that cannot fade,
When he who loves her is away!
It was the one dumb thing on earth
That spoke to me; the only one,
Dead, that was eloquent of birth;
So have I given it thee, my son!
I have no gift of his, no toy,
No trinket, trifle, leaf, nor flower,
Naught to remind me of my joy.
But it was on my breast that hour,
That night, when it, and it alone,
Was 'twixt his bosom and my own.
Go, now! And I will nightly pray
The Queen of Poland, we may meet,
When bitter has been turned to sweet,
And earthly dark to heavenly day!'
I bent. She raised her hands to bless;
And then I went without caress,
And left her to her loneliness.
``Why tell the rest? Too well you know,
Ah! you, free child of Freedom's shore,
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That spurred our hopes, but lent no blow
In aid of all our wasted gore,
How Poland, maddened, rose once more,
And blindly struck at friend and foe.
Why should I tell-the tale, too long!Of the weak writhing 'gainst the strong,
Pricked by reiterated wrong?
The orphaned pillows, rifled roofs,
The sudden rush of trampling hoofs,
The reeking village, blazing town;
The perjured charge, the traitor's mesh,
The virgin's lacerated flesh;
The wail of childhood, helpless fair,
Frenzy itself had stopped to spare;
Priests at the altar stricken down,
Mingling their blood with that of Christ,
While sacrificing, sacrificed;
Chaste spouses of the cloister, weaned
From earth, and from Earth's passions screened,
Shrieking beneath the clutch of fiend,
And outraged, less from lust than hate,
In refuges inviolate.Enough! Had Hell broke loose, and sent
Its demons forth, on man to vent
The tortures God's maligners feign
Heaven vents on them, they would in vain
Have striven to paragon the pain
Poland's oppressors knew to wreak
Upon the sensitive and weak,
When we, the strong, their strength defied,
And Freedom, foiling despots, died.
``I was too late. 'Twas nearly o'er;
But straight I sloughed the garb I wore,
And joined one last determined band,
Who to the border forests clung
That sever from the Tartar's hand
That share of our partitioned land
Which owns a rule more just and bland,
Keeping at least its creed and tongue.
We did not think with fate to cope;
No! vengeance was our only hope,
322
And vengeance to me came.
We were pursued by one who gave
No mercy or to faint or brave:
I heard, and knew his name.
'Twas he, whose lust had torn apart
For ever loving heart from heart,
As far as hatred can.
We lay in ambush; they were caught,
And could not fly, so mercy sought.
We slew them, to a man!
He fell to me! One thrust I made,
And at my feet I saw him laid:
I sucked the blood from off my blade:
Christ! it was sweet! aye, sweeter far
Than the smile of home, than the kiss of maid,
Or the glow of the evening star!
``It was the last blow struck. We fled
Across the frontier, each as best
A gap could gain, and left the dead
To stock the unclean raven's nest.
Exile once more, though all the earth
Henceforth lay open to my tread,
All save the one that gave me birth,
I saw no goal except the one
Where, sitting mute in deepest dearth,
The mother waited for the son.
But how? I donned the pedlar's pack,
And started on the trackless track,
Day after day, league after league,
Fatigue slow-linked with slow fatigue,
But ever getting nearer back
Unto the larch-log fire where she
Sat patiently, awaiting me.
And there was yet another sight
Behind, to spur my flagging tread:
The foe, the fiend, I felled in fight,
And gloated over, dead!
Could I have borne his hated head,
And laid it at my mother's feet!
The very thought fresh vigour gave,
And made my final footsteps fleet.
323
I raved. You deem that still I rave.
What think you that they found? Her grave.
``Back, back across the cruel waste,
Her tomb behind, my life before;An ebbing wave that raced and raced,
But ne'er could hope to find a shore,
Not e'en a rock 'gainst which to break:
A vista of unending ache,
Trod and endured for no one's sake!
Rather than live without some end,
Such misery fresh woe will make,
And woo misfortune for a friend.
And I, since it was vain to hope
That I could find, where'er I ran,
Solace or happiness, began
For further wretchedness to grope.
Now other object had I none,
From rise of day to set of sun,
Except to seek my sire;
Though well I knew I should not find,
Or finding, curse the fate unkind
That baulked not my desire.
And fate was ruthless to the last.
Five years of bootless search had passed,
And still I sought. But when on fire,
Her roofs delirious Paris saw,
I found him stretched on sordid straw.
He had not fought for crowd or law:
Sooth, had he wished, he could not draw
A sword from scabbard now, nor lift
His body from its borrowed bed.
His brackish life was ebbing swift.
He who had eaten beggar's bread,
And known each sad and sordid shift
That just sustains the exile's tread,
Needed no more the stranger's gift.
I knelt me down beside his head,
And breathed her name into his ear.
There came no start, no word, no tear:
His brain was deaf; he did not know
The difference now 'twixt joy and woe,
324
'Twixt love and hate, 'twixt friend and foe,
'Twixt me and any other! Vain
My years of search and sought-for pain.
Yet not quite vain. Upon his breast
A silver locket hung; and when
I stretched my hand to it, he pressed
'Gainst it his own, nor loosed again,
Until he passed away to rest.
I took it when his grasp grew cold,
And lo! it was my mother's face!
Not as I knew her, blanched and old,
But in the glow of youth and grace,
With eyes of heaven and hair of gold,
And all the passion of her race.
I wear it and its rusted chain.
I put her cross there in its place:
The iron cross; yes, cross indeed!
And iron, too! the fitting meed
Of those who for wronged Poland bleed,
And ever bleed in vain!
``Rise quick, ye winds! Race swift, ye waves!
And bear me where blue Danube rolls,
Past Orsova's loud-foaming caves,
On 'twixt armed hosts of rival slaves,
To scatter among Euxine shoals.
Now, do you ask why hence I fly
To join the Moslem camp, and hurl
My poor weak life, foredoomed to die,
On those who Freedom's flag unfurl
For Christian boor and Sclavic churl?Out on the sacrilegious lie!
Robbers, assassins, liars, slaves!
Whose feet are fresh from outraged graves!
Let those among you, dupes, or worse,
Sucklings of falsehood, or its nurse,
Believe that Russian arms can bear
To others aught except a share
In chains themselves consent to wear!
Let them! But I! Did Tartar swords
Storm hell, and Turkish steel defend,
I would the infernal Cause befriend
325
Against the worse than demon hordes
Who to the damned would bring fresh curse,
And enter Hell, to make it worse!''
~ Alfred Austin,#NFDB
1212:The woods were long austere with snow: at last
Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast
Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes,
Brightened, "as in the slumbrous heart o' the woods
"Our buried year, a witch, grew young again
"To placid incantations, and that stain
"About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
"With those black pines"so Eglamor gave vent
To a chance fancy. Whence a just rebuke
From his companion; brother Naddo shook
The solemnest of brows: "Beware," he said,
"Of setting up conceits in nature's stead!"
Forth wandered our Sordello. Nought so sure
As that to-day's adventure will secure
Palma, the visioned ladyonly pass
O'er you damp mound and its exhausted grass,
Under that brake where sundawn feeds the stalks
Of withered fern with gold, into those walks
Of pine and take her! Buoyantly he went.
Again his stooping forehead was besprent
With dew-drops from the skirting ferns. Then wide
Opened the great morass, shot every side
With flashing water through and through; a-shine,
Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine,
Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
Athwart the flying herons? He advanced,
But warily; though Mincio leaped no more,
Each foot-fall burst up in the marish-floor
A diamond jet: and if he stopped to pick
Rose-lichen, or molest the leeches quick,
And circling blood-worms, minnow, newt or loach,
A sudden pond would silently encroach
This way and that. On Palma passed. The verge
Of a new wood was gained. She will emerge
Flushed, now, and panting,crowds to see,will own
She loves himBoniface to hear, to groan,
To leave his suit! One screen of pine-trees still
Opposes: butthe startling spectacle
Mantua, this time! Under the wallsa crowd
Indeed, real men and women, gay and loud
Round a pavilion. How he stood!
In truth
No prophecy had come to pass: his youth
In its prime nowand where was homage poured
Upon Sordello?born to be adored,
And suddenly discovered weak, scarce made
To cope with any, cast into the shade
By this and this. Yet something seemed to prick
And tingle in his blood; a sleighta trick
And much would be explained. It went for nought
The best of their endowments were ill bought
With his identity: nay, the conceit,
That this day's roving led to Palma's feet
Was not so vainlist! The word, "Palma!" Steal
Aside, and die, Sordello; this is real,
And thisabjure!
What next? The curtains see
Dividing! She is there; and presently
He will be therethe proper You, at length
In your own cherished dress of grace and strength:
Most like, the very Boniface!
Not so.
It was a showy man advanced; but though
A glad cry welcomed him, then every sound
Sank and the crowd disposed themselves around,
"This is not he," Sordello felt; while, "Place
"For the best Troubadour of Boniface!"
Hollaed the Jongleurs,"Eglamor, whose lay
"Concludes his patron's Court of Love to-day!"
Obsequious Naddo strung the master's lute
With the new lute-string, "Elys," named to suit
The song: he stealthily at watch, the while,
Biting his lip to keep down a great smile
Of pride: then up he struck. Sordello's brain
Swam; for he knew a sometime deed again;
So, could supply each foolish gap and chasm
The minstrel left in his enthusiasm,
Mistaking its true versionwas the tale
Not of Apollo? Only, what avail
Luring her down, that Elys an he pleased,
If the man dared no further? Has he ceased
And, lo, the people's frank applause half done,
Sordello was beside him, had begun
(Spite of indignant twitchings from his friend
The Trouvere) the true lay with the true end,
Taking the other's names and time and place
For his. On flew the song, a giddy race,
After the flying story; word made leap
Out word, rhymerhyme; the lay could barely keep
Pace with the action visibly rushing past:
Both ended. Back fell Naddo more aghast
Than some Egyptian from the harassed bull
That wheeled abrupt and, bellowing, fronted full
His plague, who spied a scarab 'neath the tongue,
And found 't was Apis' flank his hasty prong
Insulted. But the peoplebut the cries,
The crowding round, and proffering the prize!
For he had gained some prize. He seemed to shrink
Into a sleepy cloud, just at whose brink
One sight withheld him. There sat Adelaide,
Silent; but at her knees the very maid
Of the North Chamber, her red lips as rich,
The same pure fleecy hair; one weft of which,
Golden and great, quite touched his cheek as o'er
She leant, speaking some six words and no more.
He answered something, anything; and she
Unbound a scarf and laid it heavily
Upon him, her neck's warmth and all. Again
Moved the arrested magic; in his brain
Noises grew, and a light that turned to glare,
And greater glare, until the intense flare
Engulfed him, shut the whole scene from his sense.
And when he woke 't was many a furlong thence,
At home; the sun shining his ruddy wont;
The customary birds'-chirp; but his front
Was crownedwas crowned! Her scented scarf around
His neck! Whose gorgeous vesture heaps the ground?
A prize? He turned, and peeringly on him
Brooded the women-faces, kind and dim,
Ready to talk"The Jongleurs in a troop
"Had brought him back, Naddo and Squarcialupe
"And Tagliafer; how strange! a childhood spent
"In taking, well for him, so brave a bent!
"Since Eglamor," they heard, "was dead with spite,
"And Palma chose him for her minstrel."
Light
Sordello roseto think, now; hitherto
He had perceived. Sure, a discovery grew
Out of it all! Best live from first to last
The transport o'er again. A week he passed,
Sucking the sweet out of each circumstance,
From the bard's outbreak to the luscious trance
Bounding his own achievement. Strange! A man
Recounted an adventure, but began
Imperfectly; his own task was to fill
The frame-work up, sing well what he sung ill,
Supply the necessary points, set loose
As many incidents of little use
More imbecile the other, not to see
Their relative importance clear as he!
But, for a special pleasure in the act
Of singinghad he ever turned, in fact,
From Elys, to sing Elys?from each fit
Of rapture to contrive a song of it?
True, this snatch or the other seemed to wind
Into a treasure, helped himself to find
A beauty in himself; for, see, he soared
By means of that mere snatch, to many a hoard
Of fancies; as some falling cone bears soft
The eye along the fir-tree-spire, aloft
To a dove's nest. Then, how divine the cause
Why such performance should exact applause
From men, if they had fancies too? Did fate
Decree they found a beauty separate
In the poor snatch itself?"Take Elys, there,
"'Her head that 's sharp and perfect like a pear,
"'So close and smooth are laid the few fine locks
"'Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks
"'Sun-blanched the livelong summer'if they heard
"Just those two rhymes, assented at my word,
"And loved them as I love them who have run
"These fingers through those pale locks, let the sun
"Into the white cool skinwho first could clutch,
"Then praiseI needs must be a god to such.
"Or what if some, above themselves, and yet
"Beneath me, like their Eglamor, have set
"An impress on our gift? So, men believe
"And worship what they know not, nor receive
"Delight from. Have they fanciesslow, perchance,
"Not at their beck, which indistinctly glance
"Until, by song, each floating part be linked
"To each, and all grow palpable, distinct?"
He pondered this.
Meanwhile, sounds low and drear
Stole on him, and a noise of footsteps, near
And nearer, while the underwood was pushed
Aside, the larches grazed, the dead leaves crushed
At the approach of men. The wind seemed laid;
Only, the trees shrunk slightly and a shade
Came o'er the sky although 't was midday yet:
You saw each half-shut downcast floweret
Flutter"a Roman bride, when they 'd dispart
"Her unbound tresses with the Sabine dart,
"Holding that famous rape in memory still,
"Felt creep into her curls the iron chill,
"And looked thus," Eglamor would sayindeed
'T is Eglamor, no other, these precede
Home hither in the woods. "'T were surely sweet
"Far from the scene of one's forlorn defeat
"To sleep!" judged Naddo, who in person led
Jongleurs and Trouveres, chanting at their head,
A scanty company; for, sooth to say,
Our beaten Troubadour had seen his day.
Old worshippers were something shamed, old friends
Nigh weary; still the death proposed amends.
"Let us but get them safely through my song
"And home again!" quoth Naddo.
All along,
This man (they rest the bier upon the sand)
This calm corpse with the loose flowers in his hand,
Eglamor, lived Sordello's opposite.
For him indeed was Naddo's notion right,
And verse a temple-worship vague and vast,
A ceremony that withdrew the last
Opposing bolt, looped back the lingering veil
Which hid the holy place: should one so frail
Stand there without such effort? or repine
If much was blank, uncertain at the shrine
He knelt before, till, soothed by many a rite,
The power responded, and some sound or sight
Grew up, his own forever, to be fixed,
In rhyme, the beautiful, forever!mixed
With his own life, unloosed when he should please,
Having it safe at hand, ready to ease
All pain, remove all trouble; every time
He loosed that fancy from its bonds of rhyme,
(Like Perseus when he loosed his naked love)
Faltering; so distinct and far above
Himself, these fancies! He, no genius rare,
Transfiguring in fire or wave or air
At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up
In some rock-chamber with his agate cup,
His topaz rod, his seed-pearl, in these few
And their arrangement finds enough to do
For his best art. Then, how he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From menone not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces(Eglamor
Was neediest of his tribe)since verse, the gift,
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift
Without it, e'en content themselves with wealth
And pomp and power, snatching a life by stealth.
So, Eglamor was not without his pride!
The sorriest bat which cowers throughout noontide
While other birds are jocund, has one time
When moon and stars are blinded, and the prime
Of earth is his to claim, nor find a peer;
And Eglamor was noblest poet here
He well knew, 'mid those April woods he cast
Conceits upon in plenty as he passed,
That Naddo might suppose him not to think
Entirely on the coming triumph: wink
At the one weakness! 'T was a fervid child,
That song of his; no brother of the guild
Had e'er conceived its like. The rest you know,
The exaltation and the overthrow:
Our poet lost his purpose, lost his rank,
His lifeto that it came. Yet envy sank
Within him, as he heard Sordello out,
And, for the first time, shoutedtried to shout
Like others, not from any zeal to show
Pleasure that way: the common sort did so,
What else was Eglamor? who, bending down
As they, placed his beneath Sordello's crown,
Printed a kiss on his successor's hand,
Left one great tear on it, then joined his band
In time; for some were watching at the door:
Who knows what envy may effect? "Give o'er,
"Nor charm his lips, nor craze him!" (here one spied
And disengaged the withered crown)"Beside
"His crown? How prompt and clear those verses rang
"To answer yours! nay, sing them!" And he sang
Them calmly. Home he went; friends used to wait
His coming, zealous to congratulate;
But, to a manso quickly runs report
Could do no less than leave him, and escort
His rival. That eve, then, bred many a thought:
What must his future life be? was he brought
So low, who stood so lofty this Spring morn?
At length he said, "Best sleep now with my scorn,
"And by to-morrow I devise some plain
"Expedient!" So, he slept, nor woke again.
They found as much, those friends, when they returned
O'erflowing with the marvels they had learned
About Sordello's paradise, his roves
Among the hills and vales and plains and groves,
Wherein, no doubt, this lay was roughly cast,
Polished by slow degrees, completed last
To Eglamor's discomfiture and death.
Such form the chanters now, and, out of breath,
They lay the beaten man in his abode,
Naddo reciting that same luckless ode,
Doleful to hear. Sordello could explore
By means of it, however, one step more
In joy; and, mastering the round at length,
Learnt how to live in weakness as in strength,
When from his covert forth he stood, addressed
Eglamor, bade the tender ferns invest,
Primval pines o'ercanopy his couch,
And, most of all, his fame(shall I avouch
Eglamor heard it, dead though he might look,
And laughed as from his brow Sordello took
The crown, and laid on the bard's breast, and said
It was a crown, now, fit for poet's head?)
Continue. Nor the prayer quite fruitless fell.
A plant they have, yielding a three-leaved bell
Which whitens at the heart ere noon, and ails
Till evening; evening gives it to her gales
To clear away with such forgotten things
As are an eyesore to the morn: this brings
Him to their mind, and bears his very name.
So much for Eglamor. My own month came;
'T was a sunrise of blossoming and May.
Beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay
Sordello; each new sprinkle of white stars
That smell fainter of wine than Massic jars
Dug up at Bai, when the south wind shed
The ripest, made him happier; filleted
And robed the same, only a lute beside
Lay on the turf. Before him far and wide
The country stretched: Goito slept behind
The castle and its covert, which confined
Him with his hopes and fears; so fain of old
To leave the story of his birth untold.
At intervals, 'spite the fantastic glow
Of his Apollo-life, a certain low
And wretched whisper, winding through the bliss,
Admonished, no such fortune could be his,
All was quite false and sure to fade one day:
The closelier drew he round him his array
Of brilliance to expel the truth. But when
A reason for his difference from men
Surprised him at the grave, he took no rest
While aught of that old life, superbly dressed
Down to its meanest incident, remained
A mystery: alas, they soon explained
Away Apollo! and the tale amounts
To this: when at Vicenza both her counts
Banished the Vivaresi kith and kin,
Those Maltraversi hung on Ecelin,
Reviled him as he followed; he for spite
Must fire their quarter, though that self-same night
Among the flames young Ecelin was born
Of Adelaide, there too, and barely torn
From the roused populace hard on the rear,
By a poor archer when his chieftain's fear
Grew high; into the thick Elcorte leapt,
Saved her, and died; no creature left except
His child to thank. And when the full escape
Was knownhow men impaled from chine to nape
Unlucky Prata, all to pieces spurned
Bishop Pistore's concubines, and burned
Taurello's entire household, flesh and fell,
Missing the sweeter preysuch courage well
Might claim reward. The orphan, ever since,
Sordello, had been nurtured by his prince
Within a blind retreat where Adelaide
(For, once this notable discovery made,
The past at every point was understood)
Might harbour easily when times were rude,
When Azzo schemed for Palma, to retrieve
That pledge of Agnes Esteloth to leave
Mantua unguarded with a vigilant eye,
While there Taurello bode ambiguously
He who could have no motive now to moil
For his own fortunes since their utter spoil
As it were worth while yet (went the report)
To disengage himself from her. In short,
Apollo vanished; a mean youth, just named
His lady's minstrel, was to be proclaimed
How shall I phrase it?Monarch of the World!
For, on the day when that array was furled
Forever, and in place of one a slave
To longings, wild indeed, but longings save
In dreams as wild, suppressedone daring not
Assume the mastery such dreams allot,
Until a magical equipment, strength,
Grace, wisdom, decked him too,he chose at length,
Content with unproved wits and failing frame,
In virtue of his simple will, to claim
That mastery, no lessto do his best
With means so limited, and let the rest
Go by,the seal was set: never again
Sordello could in his own sight remain
One of the many, one with hopes and cares
And interests nowise distinct from theirs,
Only peculiar in a thriveless store
Of fancies, which were fancies and no more;
Never again for him and for the crowd
A common law was challenged and allowed
If calmly reasoned of, howe'er denied
By a mad impulse nothing justified
Short of Apollo's presence. The divorce
Is clear: why needs Sordello square his course
By any known example? Men no more
Compete with him than tree and flower before.
Himself, inactive, yet is greater far
Than such as act, each stooping to his star,
Acquiring thence his function; he has gained
The same result with meaner mortals trained
To strength or beauty, moulded to express
Each the idea that rules him; since no less
He comprehends that function, but can still
Embrace the others, take of might his fill
With Richard as of grace with Palma, mix
Their qualities, or for a moment fix
On one; abiding free meantime, uncramped
By any partial organ, never stamped
Strong, and to strength turning all energies
Wise, and restricted to becoming wise
That is, he loves not, nor possesses One
Idea that, star-like over, lures him on
To its exclusive purpose. "Fortunate!
"This flesh of mine ne'er strove to emulate
"A soul so varioustook no casual mould
"Of the first fancy and, contracted, cold,
"Clogged her foreversoul averse to change
"As flesh: whereas flesh leaves soul free to range,
"Remains itself a blank, cast into shade,
"Encumbers little, if it cannot aid.
"So, range, free soul!who, by self-consciousness,
"The last drop of all beauty dost express
"The grace of seeing grace, a quintessence
"For thee: while for the world, that can dispense
"Wonder on men who, themselves, wondermake
"A shift to love at second-hand, and take
"For idols those who do but idolize,
"Themselves,the world that counts men strong or wise,
"Who, themselves, court strength, wisdom,it shall bow
"Surely in unexampled worship now,
"Discerning me!"
(Dear monarch, I beseech,
Notice how lamentably wide a breach
Is here: discovering this, discover too
What our poor world has possibly to do
With it! As pigmy natures as you please
So much the better for you; take your ease,
Look on, and laugh; style yourself God alone;
Strangle some day with a cross olive-stone!
All that is right enough: but why want us
To know that you yourself know thus and thus?)
"The world shall bow to me conceiving all
"Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small,
"Afarnot tasting any; no machine
"To exercise my utmost will is mine:
"Be mine mere consciousness! Let men perceive
"What I could do, a mastery believe,
"Asserted and established to the throng
"By their selected evidence of song
"Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek
"To be, I amwhose words, not actions speak,
"Who change no standards of perfection, vex
"With no strange forms created to perplex,
"But just perform their bidding and no more,
"At their own satiating-point give o'er,
"While each shall love in me the love that leads
"His soul to power's perfection." Song, not deeds,
(For we get tired) was chosen. Fate would brook
Mankind no other organ; he would look
For not another channel to dispense
His own volition by, receive men's sense
Of its supremacywould live content,
Obstructed else, with merely verse for vent.
Nor should, for instance, strength an outlet seek
And, striving, be admired: nor grace bespeak
Wonder, displayed in gracious attitudes:
Nor wisdom, poured forth, change unseemly moods;
But he would give and take on song's one point.
Like some huge throbbing stone that, poised a-joint,
Sounds, to affect on its basaltic bed,
Must sue in just one accent; tempests shed
Thunder, and raves the windstorm: only let
That key by any little noise be set
The far benighted hunter's halloo pitch
On that, the hungry curlew chance to scritch
Or serpent hiss it, rustling through the rift,
However loud, however lowall lift
The groaning monster, stricken to the heart.
Lo ye, the world's concernment, for its part,
And this, for his, will hardly interfere!
Its businesses in blood and blaze this year
But wile the hour awaya pastime slight
Till he shall step upon the platform: right!
And, now thus much is settled, cast in rough,
Proved feasible, be counselled! thought enough,
Slumber, Sordello! any day will serve:
Were it a less digested plan! how swerve
To-morrow? Meanwhile eat these sun-dried grapes,
And watch the soaring hawk there! Life escapes
Merrily thus.
He thoroughly read o'er
His truchman Naddo's missive six times more,
Praying him visit Mantua and supply
A famished world.
The evening star was high
When he reached Mantua, but his fame arrived
Before him: friends applauded, foes connived,
And Naddo looked an angel, and the rest
Angels, and all these angels would be blest
Supremely by a songthe thrice-renowned
Goito-manufacture. Then he found
(Casting about to satisfy the crowd)
That happy vehicle, so late allowed,
A sore annoyance; 't was the song's effect
He cared for, scarce the song itself: reflect!
In the past life, what might be singing's use?
Just to delight his Delians, whose profuse
Praise, not the toilsome process which procured
That praise, enticed Apollo: dreams abjured,
No overleaping means for endstake both
For granted or take neither! I am loth
To say the rhymes at last were Eglamor's;
But Naddo, chuckling, bade competitors
Go pine; "the master certes meant to waste
"No effort, cautiously had probed the taste
"He 'd please anon: true bard, in short,disturb
"His title if they could; nor spur nor curb,
"Fancy nor reason, wanting in him; whence
"The staple of his verses, common sense:
"He built on man's broad naturegift of gifts,
"That power to build! The world contented shifts
"With counterfeits enough, a dreary sort
"Of warriors, statesmen, ere it can extort
"Its poet-soulthat 's, after all, a freak
"(The having eyes to see and tongue to speak)
"With our herd's stupid sterling happiness
"So plainly incompatible thatyes
"Yesshould a son of his improve the breed
"And turn out poet, he were cursed indeed!"
"Well, there 's Goito and its woods anon,
"If the worst happen; best go stoutly on
"Now!" thought Sordello.
Ay, and goes on yet!
You pother with your glossaries to get
A notion of the Troubadour's intent
In rondel, tenzon, virlai or sirvent
Much as you study arras how to twirl
His angelot, plaything of page and girl
Once; but you surely reach, at last,or, no!
Never quite reach what struck the people so,
As from the welter of their time he drew
Its elements successively to view,
Followed all actions backward on their course,
And catching up, unmingled at the source,
Such a strength, such a weakness, added then
A touch or two, and turned them into men.
Virtue took form, nor vice refused a shape;
Here heaven opened, there was hell agape,
As Saint this simpered past in sanctity,
Sinner the other flared portentous by
A greedy people. Then why stop, surprised
At his success? The scheme was realized
Too suddenly in one respect: a crowd
Praising, eyes quick to see, and lips as loud
To speak, delicious homage to receive,
The woman's breath to feel upon his sleeve,
Who said, "But Anafestwhy asks he less
"Than Lucio, in your verses? how confess,
"It seemed too much but yestereve!"the youth,
Who bade him earnestly, "Avow the truth!
"You love Bianca, surely, from your song;
"I knew I was unworthy!"soft or strong,
In poured such tributes ere he had arranged
Ethereal ways to take them, sorted, changed,
Digested. Courted thus at unawares,
In spite of his pretensions and his cares,
He caught himself shamefully hankering
After the obvious petty joys that spring
From true life, fain relinquish pedestal
And condescend with pleasuresone and all
To be renounced, no doubt; for, thus to chain
Himself to single joys and so refrain
From tasting their quintessence, frustrates, sure,
His prime design; each joy must he abjure
Even for love of it.
He laughed: what sage
But perishes if from his magic page
He look because, at the first line, a proof
'T was heard salutes him from the cavern roof?
"On! Give yourself, excluding aught beside,
"To the day's task; compel your slave provide
"Its utmost at the soonest; turn the leaf
"Thoroughly conned. These lays of yours, in brief
"Cannot men bear, now, something better?fly
"A pitch beyond this unreal pageantry
"Of essences? the period sure has ceased
"For such: present us with ourselves, at least,
"Not portions of ourselves, mere loves and hates
"Made flesh: wait not!"
Awhile the poet waits
However. The first trial was enough:
He left imagining, to try the stuff
That held the imaged thing, and, let it writhe
Never so fiercely, scarce allowed a tithe
To reach the lighthis Language. How he sought
The cause, conceived a cure, and slow re-wrought
That Language,welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it,boots not. This obtained
With some ado, no obstacle remained
To using it; accordingly he took
An action with its actors, quite forsook
Himself to live in each, returned anon
With the resulta creature, and, by one
And one, proceeded leisurely to equip
Its limbs in harness of his workmanship.
"Accomplished! Listen, Mantuans!" Fond essay!
Piece after piece that armour broke away,
Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language: thought may take perception's place
But hardly co-exist in any case,
Being its mere presentmentof the whole
By parts, the simultaneous and the sole
By the successive and the many. Lacks
The crowd perception? painfully it tacks
Thought to thought, which Sordello, needing such,
Has rent perception into: it's to clutch
And reconstructhis office to diffuse,
Destroy: as hard, then, to obtain a Muse
As to become Apollo. "For the rest,
"E'en if some wondrous vehicle expressed
"The whole dream, what impertinence in me
"So to express it, who myself can be
"The dream! nor, on the other hand, are those
"I sing to, over-likely to suppose
"A higher than the highest I present
"Now, which they praise already: be content
"Both parties, ratherthey with the old verse,
"And I with the old praisefar go, fare worse!"
A few adhering rivets loosed, upsprings
The angel, sparkles off his mail, which rings
Whirled from each delicatest limb it warps;
So might Apollo from the sudden corpse
Of Hyacinth have cast his luckless quoits.
He set to celebrating the exploits
Of Montfort o'er the Mountaineers.
Then came
The world's revenge: their pleasure, now his aim
Merely,what was it? "Not to play the fool
"So much as learn our lesson in your school!"
Replied the world. He found that, every time
He gained applause by any ballad-rhyme,
His auditory recognized no jot
As he intended, and, mistaking not
Him for his meanest hero, ne'er was dunce
Sufficient to believe himall, at once.
His will . . . conceive it caring for his will!
Mantuans, the main of them, admiring still
How a mere singer, ugly, stunted, weak,
Had Montfort at completely (so to speak)
His fingers' ends; while past the praise-tide swept
To Montfort, either's share distinctly kept:
The true meed for true merit!his abates
Into a sort he most repudiates,
And on them angrily he turns. Who were
The Mantuans, after all, that he should care
About their recognition, ay or no?
In spite of the convention months ago,
(Why blink the truth?) was not he forced to help
This same ungrateful audience, every whelp
Of Naddo's litter, make them pass for peers
With the bright band of old Goito years,
As erst he toiled for flower or tree? Why, there
Sat Palma! Adelaide's funereal hair
Ennobled the next corner. Ay, he strewed
A fairy dust upon that multitude,
Although he feigned to take them by themselves;
His giants dignified those puny elves,
Sublimed their faint applause. In short, he found
Himself still footing a delusive round,
Remote as ever from the self-display
He meant to compass, hampered every way
By what he hoped assistance. Wherefore then
Continue, make believe to find in men
A use he found not?
Weeks, months, years went by
And lo, Sordello vanished utterly,
Sundered in twain; each spectral part at strife
With each; one jarred against another life;
The Poet thwarting hopelessly the Man
Who, fooled no longer, free in fancy ran
Here, there: let slip no opportunities
As pitiful, forsooth, beside the prize
To drop on him some no-time and acquit
His constant faith (the Poet-half's to wit
That waiving any compromise between
No joy and all joy kept the hunger keen
Beyond most methods)of incurring scoff
From the Man-portionnot to be put off
With self-reflectings by the Poet's scheme,
Though ne'er so bright. Who sauntered forth in dream,
Dressed any how, nor waited mystic frames,
Immeasurable gifts, astounding claims,
But just his sorry self?who yet might be
Sorrier for aught he in reality
Achieved, so pinioned Man's the Poet-part,
Fondling, in turn of fancy, verse; the Art
Developing his soul a thousand ways
Potent, by its assistance, to amaze
The multitude with majesties, convince
Each sort of nature that the nature's prince
Accosted it. Language, the makeshift, grew
Into a bravest of expedients, too;
Apollo, seemed it now, perverse had thrown
Quiver and bow away, the lyre alone
Sufficed. While, out of dream, his day's work went
To tune a crazy tenzon or sirvent
So hampered him the Man-part, thrust to judge
Between the bard and the bard's audience, grudge
A minute's toil that missed its due reward!
But the complete Sordello, Man and Bard,
John's cloud-girt angel, this foot on the land,
That on the sea, with, open in his hand,
A bitter-sweetling of a bookwas gone.
Then, if internal struggles to be one,
Which frittered him incessantly piecemeal,
Referred, ne'er so obliquely, to the real
Intruding Mantuans! ever with some call
To action while he pondered, once for all,
Which looked the easier effortto pursue
This course, still leap o'er paltry joys, yearn through
The present ill-appreciated stage
Of self-revealment, and compel the age
Know himor else, forswearing bard-craft, wake
From out his lethargy and nobly shake
Off timid habits of denial, mix
With men, enjoy like men. Ere he could fix
On aught, in rushed the Mantuans; much they cared
For his perplexity! Thus unprepared,
The obvious if not only shelter lay
In deeds, the dull conventions of his day
Prescribed the like of him: why not be glad
'T is settled Palma's minstrel, good or bad,
Submits to this and that established rule?
Let Vidal change, or any other fool,
His murrey-coloured robe for filamot,
And crop his hair; too skin-deep, is it not,
Such vigour? Then, a sorrow to the heart,
His talk! Whatever topics they might start
Had to be groped for in his consciousness
Straight, and as straight delivered them by guess.
Only obliged to ask himself, "What was,"
A speedy answer followed; but, alas,
One of God's large ones, tardy to condense
Itself into a period; answers whence
A tangle of conclusions must be stripped
At any risk ere, trim to pattern clipped,
They matched rare specimens the Mantuan flock
Regaled him with, each talker from his stock
Of sorted-o'er opinions, every stage,
Juicy in youth or desiccate with age,
Fruits like the fig-tree's, rathe-ripe, rotten-rich,
Sweet-sour, all tastes to take: a practice which
He too had not impossibly attained,
Once either of those fancy-flights restrained;
(For, at conjecture how might words appear
To others, playing there what happened here,
And occupied abroad by what he spurned
At home, 't was slipped, the occasion he returned
To seize he 'd strike that lyre adroitlyspeech,
Would but a twenty-cubit plectre reach;
A clever hand, consummate instrument,
Were both brought close; each excellency went
For nothing, else. The question Naddo asked,
Had just a lifetime moderately tasked
To answer, Naddo's fashion. More disgust
And more: why move his soul, since move it must
At minute's notice or as good it failed
To move at all? The end was, he retailed
Some ready-made opinion, put to use
This quip, that maxim, ventured reproduce
Gestures and tonesat any folly caught
Serving to finish with, nor too much sought
If false or true 't was spoken; praise and blame
Of what he said grew pretty nigh the same
Meantime awards to meantime acts: his soul,
Unequal to the compassing a whole,
Saw, in a tenth part, less and less to strive
About. And as for men in turn . . . contrive
Who could to take eternal interest
In them, so hate the worst, so love the best,
Though, in pursuance of his passive plan,
He hailed, decried, the proper way.
As Man
So figured he; and how as Poet? Verse
Came only not to a stand-still. The worse,
That his poor piece of daily work to do
Wasnot sink under any rivals; who
Loudly and long enough, without these qualms,
Turned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psalms,
To Plara's sonnets spoilt by toying with,
"As knops that stud some almug to the pith
"Prickd for gum, wry thence, and crinkld worse
"Than pursd eyelids of a river-horse
"Sunning himself o' the slime when whirrs the breese"
Gad-fly, that is. He might compete with these!
Butbut
"Observe a pompion-twine afloat;
"Pluck me one cup from off the castle-moat!
"Along with cup you raise leaf, stalk and root,
"The entire surface of the pool to boot.
"So could I pluck a cup, put in one song
"A single sight, did not my hand, too strong,
"Twitch in the least the root-strings of the whole.
"How should externals satisfy my soul?"
"Why that's precise the error Squarcialupe"
(Hazarded Naddo) "finds; 'the man can't stoop
"'To sing us out,' quoth he, 'a mere romance;
"'He'd fain do better than the best, enhance
"'The subjects' rarity, work problems out
"'Therewith.' Now, you 're a bard, a bard past doubt,
"And no philosopher; why introduce
"Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use
"In poetrywhich still must be, to strike,
"Based upon common sense; there's nothing like
"Appealing to our nature! what beside
"Was your first poetry? No tricks were tried
"In that, no hollow thrills, affected throes!
"'The man,' said we, 'tells his own joys and woes:
"'We'll trust him.' Would you have your songs endure?
"Build on the human heart!why, to be sure
"Yours is one sort of heartbut I mean theirs,
"Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares
"To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,
"That's father of . . . nay, go yourself that length,
"Ask those calm-hearted doers what they do
"When they have got their calm! And is it true,
"Fire rankles at the heart of every globe?
"Perhaps. But these are matters one may probe
"Too deeply for poetic purposes:
"Rather select a theory that . . . yes,
"Laugh! what does that prove?stations you midway
"And saves some little o'er-refining. Nay,
"That's rank injustice done me! I restrict
"The poet? Don't I hold the poet picked
"Out of a host of warriors, statesmen . . . did
"I tell you? Very like! As well you hid
"That sense of power, you have! True bards believe
"All able to achieve what they achieve
"That is, just nothingin one point abide
"Profounder simpletons than all beside.
"Oh, ay! The knowledge that you are a bard
"Must constitute your prime, nay sole, reward!"
So prattled Naddo, busiest of the tribe
Of genius-hauntershow shall I describe
What grubs or nips or rubs or ripsyour louse
For love, your flea for hate, magnanimous,
Malignant, Pappacoda, Tagliafer,
Picking a sustenance from wear and tear
By implements it sedulous employs
To undertake, lay down, mete out, o'er-toise
Sordello? Fifty creepers to elude
At once! They settled staunchly; shame ensued:
Behold the monarch of mankind succumb
To the last fool who turned him round his thumb,
As Naddo styled it! 'T was not worth oppose
The matter of a moment, gainsay those
He aimed at getting rid of; better think
Their thoughts and speak their speech, secure to slink
Back expeditiously to his safe place,
And chew the cudwhat he and what his race
Were really, each of them. Yet even this
Conformity was partial. He would miss
Some point, brought into contact with them ere
Assured in what small segment of the sphere
Of his existence they attended him;
Whence blunders, falsehoods rectifieda grim
Listslur it over! How? If dreams were tried,
His will swayed sicklily from side to side,
Nor merely neutralized his waking act
But tended e'en in fancy to distract
The intermediate will, the choice of means.
He lost the art of dreaming: Mantuan scenes
Supplied a baron, say, he sang before,
Handsomely reckless, full to running-o'er
Of gallantries; "abjure the soul, content
"With body, therefore!" Scarcely had he bent
Himself in dream thus low, when matter fast
Cried out, he found, for spirit to contrast
And task it duly; by advances slight,
The simple stuff becoming composite,
Count Lori grew Apollo: best recall
His fancy! Then would some rough peasant-Paul,
Like those old Ecelin confers with, glance
His gay apparel o'er; that countenance
Gathered his shattered fancies into one,
And, body clean abolished, soul alone
Sufficed the grey Paulician: by and by,
To balance the ethereality,
Passions were needed; foiled he sank again.
Meanwhile the world rejoiced ('t is time explain)
Because a sudden sickness set it free
From Adelaide. Missing the mother-bee,
Her mountain-hive Romano swarmed; at once
A rustle-forth of daughters and of sons
Blackened the valley. "I am sick too, old,
"Half-crazed I think; what good's the Kaiser's gold
"To such an one? God help me! for I catch
"My children's greedy sparkling eyes at watch
"'He bears that double breastplate on,' they say,
"'So many minutes less than yesterday!'
"Beside, Monk Hilary is on his knees
"Now, sworn to kneel and pray till God shall please
"Exact a punishment for many things
"You know, and some you never knew; which brings
"To memory, Azzo's sister Beatrix
"And Richard's Giglia are my Alberic's
"And Ecelin's betrothed; the Count himself
"Must get my Palma: Ghibellin and Guelf
"Mean to embrace each other." So began
Romano's missive to his fighting man
Taurelloon the Tuscan's death, away
With Friedrich sworn to sail from Naples' bay
Next month for Syria. Never thunder-clap
Out of Vesuvius' throat, like this mishap
Startled him. "That accursed Vicenza! I
"Absent, and she selects this time to die!
"Ho, fellows, for Vicenza!" Half a score
Of horses ridden dead, he stood before
Romano in his reeking spurs: too late
"Boniface urged me, Este could not wait,"
The chieftain stammered; "let me die in peace
"Forget me! Was it I who craved increase
"Of rule? Do you and Friedrich plot your worst
"Against the Father: as you found me first
"So leave me now. Forgive me! Palma, sure,
"Is at Goito still. Retain that lure
"Only be pacified!"
The country rung
With such a piece of news: on every tongue,
How Ecelin's great servant, congeed off,
Had done a long day's service, so, might doff
The green and yellow, and recover breath
At Mantua, whither,since Retrude's death,
(The girlish slip of a Sicilian bride
From Otho's house, he carried to reside
At Mantua till the Ferrarese should pile
A structure worthy her imperial style,
The gardens raise, the statues there enshrine,
She never lived to see)although his line
Was ancient in her archives and she took
A pride in him, that city, nor forsook
Her child when he forsook himself and spent
A prowess on Romano surely meant
For his own growthwhither he ne'er resorts
If wholly satisfied (to trust reports)
With Ecelin. So, forward in a trice
Were shows to greet him. "Take a friend's advice,"
Quoth Naddo to Sordello, "nor be rash
"Because your rivals (nothing can abash
"Some folks) demur that we pronounced you best
"To sound the great man's welcome; 't is a test,
"Remember! Strojavacca looks asquint,
"The rough fat sloven; and there 's plenty hint
"Your pinions have received of late a shock
"Outsoar them, cobswan of the silver flock!
"Sing well!" A signal wonder, song 's no whit
Facilitated.
Fast the minutes flit;
Another day, Sordello finds, will bring
The soldier, and he cannot choose but sing;
So, a last shift, quits Mantuaslow, alone:
Out of that aching brain, a very stone,
Song must be struck. What occupies that front?
Just how he was more awkward than his wont
The night before, when Naddo, who had seen
Taurello on his progress, praised the mien
For dignity no crosses could affect
Such was a joy, and might not he detect
A satisfaction if established joys
Were proved imposture? Poetry annoys
Its utmost: wherefore fret? Verses may come
Or keep away! And thus he wandered, dumb
Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent,
On a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went,
Yielding himself up as to an embrace.
The moon came out; like features of a face,
A querulous fraternity of pines,
Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
Also came out, made gradually up
The picture; 't was Goito's mountain-cup
And castle. He had dropped through one defile
He never dared explore, the Chief erewhile
Had vanished by. Back rushed the dream, enwrapped
Him wholly. 'T was Apollo now they lapped,
Those mountains, not a pettish minstrel meant
To wear his soul away in discontent,
Brooding on fortune's malice. Heart and brain
Swelled; he expanded to himself again,
As some thin seedling spice-tree starved and frail,
Pushing between cat's head and ibis' tail
Crusted into the porphyry pavement smooth,
Suffered remain just as it sprung, to soothe
The Soldan's pining daughter, never yet
Well in her chilly green-glazed minaret,
When rooted up, the sunny day she died,
And flung into the common court beside
Its parent tree. Come home, Sordello! Soon
Was he low muttering, beneath the moon,
Of sorrow saved, of quiet evermore,
Since from the purpose, he maintained before,
Only resulted wailing and hot tears.
Ah, the slim castle! dwindled of late years,
But more mysterious; gone to ruintrails
Of vine through every loop-hole. Nought avails
The night as, torch in hand, he must explore
The maple chamber: did I say, its floor
Was made of intersecting cedar beams?
Worn now with gaps so large, there blew cold streams
Of air quite from the dungeon; lay your ear
Close and 't is like, one after one, you hear
In the blind darkness water drop. The nests
And nooks retain their long ranged vesture-chests
Empty and smelling of the iris root
The Tuscan grated o'er them to recruit
Her wasted wits. Palma was gone that day,
Said the remaining women. Last, he lay
Beside the Carian group reserved and still.
The Body, the Machine for Acting Will,
Had been at the commencement proved unfit;
That for Demonstrating, Reflecting it,
Mankindno fitter: was the Will Itself
In fault?
His forehead pressed the moonlit shelf
Beside the youngest marble maid awhile;
Then, raising it, he thought, with a long smile,
"I shall be king again!" as he withdrew
The envied scarf; into the font he threw
His crown
Next day, no poet! "Wherefore?" asked
Taurello, when the dance of Jongleurs, masked
As devils, ended; "don't a song come next?"
The master of the pageant looked perplexed
Till Naddo's whisper came to his relief.
"His Highness knew what poets were: in brief,
"Had not the tetchy race prescriptive right
"To peevishness, caprice? or, call it spite,
"One must receive their nature in its length
"And breadth, expect the weakness with the strength!"
So phrasing, till, his stock of phrases spent,
The easy-natured soldier smiled assent,
Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin,
And nodded that the bull-bait might begin.
~ Robert Browning, Sordello - Book the Second
,#NFDB
1213:Pauline, A Fragment of a Question
Plus ne suis ce que j'ai t,
Et ne le saurois jamais tre.
Marot.
Non dubito, quin titulus libri nostri raritate sua quamplurimos alliciat ad legendum: inter quos nonnulli obliqu opinionis, mente languidi, multi etiam maligni, et in ingenium nostrum ingrati accedent, qui temeraria sua ignorantia, vix conspecto titulo clamabunt Nos vetita docere, hresium semina jacere: piis auribus offendiculo, prclaris ingeniis scandalo esse: . . . . adeo conscienti su consulentes, ut nec Apollo, nec Mus omnes, neque Angelus de coelo me ab illorum execratione vindicare queant: quibus et ego nunc consulo, ne scripta nostra legant, nec intelligant, nec meminerint: nam noxia sunt, venenosa sunt: Acherontis ostium est in hoc libro, lapides loquitur, caveant, ne cerebrum illis excutiat. Vos autem, qui qua mente ad legendum venitis, si tantam prudenti discretionem adhibueritis, quantam in melle legendo apes, jam securi legite. Puto namque vos et utilitatis haud parum et voluptatis plurimum accepturos. Quod si qua repereritis, qu vobis non placeant, mittite illa, nec utimini. Nam et ego vobis illa non Probo, sed Narro. Ctera tamen propterea non respuite . . . . . Ideo, si quid liberius dictum sit, ignoscite adolescenti nostr, qui minor quam adolescens hoc opus composui.
Hen. Corn. Agrippa, De Occult. Philosoph. in Prfat.
London: January 1833.V. A. XX .
1833.
Pauline, mine own, bend o'er methy soft breast
Shall pant to minebend o'er methy sweet eyes,
And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms
Drawing me to theethese build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear;
So that I might unlock the sleepless brood
Of fancies from my soul, their lurking-place,
Nor doubt that each would pass, ne'er to return
To one so watched, so loved and so secured.
But what can guard thee but thy naked love?
Ah dearest, whoso sucks a poisoned wound
Envenoms his own veins! Thou art so good,
So calmif thou shouldst wear a brow less light
For some wild thought which, but for me, were kept
From out thy soul as from a sacred star!
Yet till I have unlocked them it were vain
To hope to sing; some woe would light on me;
Nature would point at one whose quivering lip
Was bathed in her enchantments, whose brow burned
Beneath the crown to which her secrets knelt,
Who learned the spell which can call up the dead,
And then departed smiling like a fiend
Who has deceived God,if such one should seek
Again her altars and stand robed and crowned
Amid the faithful! Sad confession first,
Remorse and pardon and old claims renewed,
Ere I can beas I shall be no more.
I had been spared this shame if I had sat
By thee for ever from the first, in place
Of my wild dreams of beauty and of good,
Or with them, as an earnest of their truth:
No thought nor hope having been shut from thee,
No vague wish unexplained, no wandering aim
Sent back to bind on fancy's wings and seek
Some strange fair world where it might be a law;
But, doubting nothing, had been led by thee,
Thro' youth, and saved, as one at length awaked
Who has slept through a peril. Ah vain, vain!
Thou lovest me; the past is in its grave
Tho' its ghost haunts us; still this much is ours,
To cast away restraint, lest a worse thing
Wait for us in the dark. Thou lovest me;
And thou art to receive not love but faith,
For which thou wilt be mine, and smile and take
All shapes and shames, and veil without a fear
That form which music follows like a slave:
And I look to thee and I trust in thee,
As in a Northern night one looks alway
Unto the East for morn and spring and joy.
Thou seest then my aimless, hopeless state,
And, resting on some few old feelings won
Back by thy beauty, wouldst that I essay
The task which was to me what now thou art:
And why should I conceal one weakness more?
Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills; the black-thorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.
I walked with thee who knew'st not a deep shame
Lurked beneath smiles and careless words which sought
To hide it till they wandered and were mute,
As we stood listening on a sunny mound
To the wind murmuring in the damp copse,
Like heavy breathings of some hidden thing
Betrayed by sleep; until the feeling rushed
That I was low indeed, yet not so low
As to endure the calmness of thine eyes.
And so I told thee all, while the cool breast
I leaned on altered not its quiet beating:
And long ere words like a hurt bird's complaint
Bade me look up and be what I had been,
I felt despair could never live by thee:
Thou wilt remember. Thou art not more dear
Than song was once to me; and I ne'er sung
But as one entering bright halls where all
Will rise and shout for him: sure I must own
That I am fallen, having chosen gifts
Distinct from theirsthat I am sad and fain
Would give up all to be but where I was,
Not high as I had been if faithful found,
But low and weak yet full of hope, and sure
Of goodness as of lifethat I would lose
All this gay mastery of mind, to sit
Once more with them, trusting in truth and love
And with an aimnot being what I am.
Oh Pauline, I am ruined who believed
That though my soul had floated from its sphere
Of wild dominion into the dim orb
Of selfthat it was strong and free as ever!
It has conformed itself to that dim orb,
Reflecting all its shades and shapes, and now
Must stay where it alone can be adored.
I have felt this in dreamsin dreams in which
I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt
A strange delight in causing my decay.
I was a fiend in darkness chained for ever
Within some ocean-cave; and ages rolled,
Till through the cleft rock, like a moonbeam, came
A white swan to remain with me; and ages
Rolled, yet I tired not of my first free joy
In gazing on the peace of its pure wings:
And then I said "It is most fair to me,
"Yet its soft wings must sure have suffered change
"From the thick darkness, sure its eyes are dim,
"Its silver pinions must be cramped and numbed
"With sleeping ages here; it cannot leave me,
"For it would seem, in light beside its kind,
"Withered, tho' here to me most beautiful."
And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form
Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me;
Till one morn, as he sat in the sunshine
Upon my knees, singing to me of heaven,
He turned to look at me, ere I could lose
The grin with which I viewed his perishing:
And he shrieked and departed and sat long
By his deserted throne, but sunk at last
Murmuring, as I kissed his lips and curled
Around him, "I am still a godto thee."
Still I can lay my soul bare in its fall,
Since all the wandering and all the weakness
Will be a saddest comment on the song:
And if, that done, I can be young again,
I will give up all gained, as willingly
As one gives up a charm which shuts him out
From hope or part or care in human kind.
As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words,
All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts:
So, aught connected with my early life,
My rude songs or my wild imaginings,
How I look on themmost distinct amid
The fever and the stir of after years!
I ne'er had ventured e'en to hope for this,
Had not the glow I felt at His award,
Assured me all was not extinct within:
His whom all honour, whose renown springs up
Like sunlight which will visit all the world,
So that e'en they who sneered at him at first,
Come out to it, as some dark spider crawls
From his foul nets which some lit torch invades,
Yet spinning still new films for his retreat.
Thou didst smile, poet, but can we forgive?
Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!
Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring
Gladdens and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not, other bards arise,
But none like thee: they stand, thy majesties,
Like mighty works which tell some spirit there
Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn,
Till, its long task completed, it hath risen
And left us, never to return, and all
Rush in to peer and praise when all in vain.
The air seems bright with thy past presence yet,
But thou art still for me as thou hast been
When I have stood with thee as on a throne
With all thy dim creations gathered round
Like mountains, and I felt of mould like them,
And with them creatures of my own were mixed,
Like things half-lived, catching and giving life.
But thou art still for me who have adored
Tho' single, panting but to hear thy name
Which I believed a spell to me alone,
Scarce deeming thou wast as a star to men!
As one should worship long a sacred spring
Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross,
And one small tree embowers droopingly
Joying to see some wandering insect won
To live in its few rushes, or some locust
To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird
Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air:
And then should find it but the fountain-head,
Long lost, of some great river washing towns
And towers, and seeing old woods which will live
But by its banks untrod of human foot,
Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering
In light as some thing lieth half of life
Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change;
Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay
Its course in vain, for it does ever spread
Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,
Being the pulse of some great countryso
Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!
And I, perchance, half feel a strange regret
That I am not what I have been to thee:
Like a girl one has silently loved long
In her first loneliness in some retreat,
When, late emerged, all gaze and glow to view
Her fresh eyes and soft hair and lips which bloom
Like a mountain berry: doubtless it is sweet
To see her thus adored, but there have been
Moments when all the world was in our praise,
Sweeter than any pride of after hours.
Yet, sun-treader, all hail! From my heart's heart
I bid thee hail! E'en in my wildest dreams,
I proudly feel I would have thrown to dust
The wreaths of fame which seemed o'erhanging me,
To see thee for a moment as thou art.
And if thou livest, if thou lovest, spirit!
Remember me who set this final seal
To wandering thoughtthat one so pure as thou
Could never die. Remember me who flung
All honour from my soul, yet paused and said
"There is one spark of love remaining yet,
"For I have nought in common with him, shapes
"Which followed him avoid me, and foul forms
"Seek me, which ne'er could fasten on his mind;
"And though I feel how low I am to him,
"Yet I aim not even to catch a tone
"Of harmonies he called profusely up;
"So, one gleam still remains, although the last."
Remember me who praise thee e'en with tears,
For never more shall I walk calm with thee;
Thy sweet imaginings are as an air,
A melody some wondrous singer sings,
Which, though it haunt men oft in the still eve,
They dream not to essay; yet it no less
But more is honoured. I was thine in shame,
And now when all thy proud renown is out,
I am a watcher whose eyes have grown dim
With looking for some star which breaks on him
Altered and worn and weak and full of tears.
Autumn has come like spring returned to us,
Won from her girlishness; like one returned
A friend that was a lover, nor forgets
The first warm love, but full of sober thoughts
Of fading years; whose soft mouth quivers yet
With the old smile, but yet so changed and still!
And here am I the scoffer, who have probed
Life's vanity, won by a word again
Into my own lifeby one little word
Of this sweet friend who lives in loving me,
Lives strangely on my thoughts and looks and words,
As fathoms down some nameless ocean thing
Its silent course of quietness and joy.
O dearest, if indeed I tell the past,
May'st thou forget it as a sad sick dream!
Or if it lingermy lost soul too soon
Sinks to itself and whispers we shall be
But closer linked, two creatures whom the earth
Bears singly, with strange feelings unrevealed
Save to each other; or two lonely things
Created by some power whose reign is done,
Having no part in God or his bright world.
I am to sing whilst ebbing day dies soft,
As a lean scholar dies worn o'er his book,
And in the heaven stars steal out one by one
As hunted men steal to their mountain watch.
I must not think, lest this new impulse die
In which I trust; I have no confidence:
So, I will sing on fast as fancies come;
Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints
I strip my mind bare, whose first elements
I shall unveilnot as they struggled forth
In infancy, nor as they now exist,
When I am grown above them and can rule
But in that middle stage when they were full
Yet ere I had disposed them to my will;
And then I shall show how these elements
Produced my present state, and what it is.
I am made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;
And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:
But linked, in me, to self-supremacy,
Existing as a centre to all things,
Most potent to create and rule and call
Upon all things to minister to it;
And to a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all
This is myself; and I should thus have been
Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.
And of my powers, one springs up to save
From utter death a soul with such desire
Confined to clayof powers the only one
Which marks mean imagination which
Has been a very angel, coming not
In fitful visions but beside me ever
And never failing me; so, though my mind
Forgets not, not a shred of life forgets,
Yet I can take a secret pride in calling
The dark past up to quell it regally.
A mind like this must dissipate itself,
But I have always had one lode-star; now,
As I look back, I see that I have halted
Or hastened as I looked towards that star
A need, a trust, a yearning after God:
A feeling I have analysed but late,
But it existed, and was reconciled
With a neglect of all I deemed his laws,
Which yet, when seen in others, I abhorred.
I felt as one beloved, and so shut in
From fear: and thence I date my trust in signs
And omens, for I saw God everywhere;
And I can only lay it to the fruit
Of a sad after-time that I could doubt
Even his beinge'en the while I felt
His presence, never acted from myself,
Still trusted in a hand to lead me through
All danger; and this feeling ever fought
Against my weakest reason and resolve.
And I can love nothingand this dull truth
Has come the last: but sense supplies a love
Encircling me and mingling with my life.
These make myself: I have long sought in vain
To trace how they were formed by circumstance,
Yet ever found them mould my wildest youth
Where they alone displayed themselves, converted
All objects to their use: now see their course!
They came to me in my first dawn of life
Which passed alone with wisest ancient books
All halo-girt with fancies of my own;
And I myself went with the talea god
Wandering after beauty, or a giant
Standing vast in the sunsetan old hunter
Talking with gods, or a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
I tell you, nought has ever been so clear
As the place, the time, the fashion of those lives:
I had not seen a work of lofty art,
Nor woman's beauty nor sweet nature's face,
Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves
And nothing ever will surprise me now
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.
And strange it is that I who could so dream
Should e'er have stooped to aim at aught beneath
Aught low or painful; but I never doubted:
So, as I grew. I rudely shaped my life
To my immediate wants; yet strong beneath
Was a vague sense of power though folded up
A sense that, though those shades and times were past,
Their spirit dwelt in me, with them should rule.
Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down
My soul till it was changed. I lost myself,
And were it not that I so loathe that loss,
I could recall how first I learned to turn
My mind against itself; and the effects
In deeds for which remorse were vain as for
The wanderings of delirious dream; yet thence
Came cunning, envy, falsehood, all world's wrong
That spotted me: at length I cleansed my soul.
Yet long world's influence remained; and nought
But the still life I led, apart once more,
Which left me free to seek soul's old delights,
Could e'er have brought me thus far back to peace.
As peace returned, I sought out some pursuit;
And song rose, no new impulse but the one
With which all others best could be combined.
My life has not been that of those whose heaven
Was lampless save where poesy shone out;
But as a clime where glittering mountain-tops
And glancing sea and forests steeped in light
Give back reflected the far-flashing sun;
For music (which is earnest of a heaven,
Seeing we know emotions strange by it,
Not else to be revealed,) is like a voice,
A low voice calling fancy, as a friend,
To the green woods in the gay summer time:
And she fills all the way with dancing shapes
Which have made painters pale, and they go on
Till stars look at them and winds call to them
As they leave life's path for the twilight world
Where the dead gather. This was not at first,
For I scarce knew what I would do. I had
An impulse but no yearningonly sang.
And first I sang as I in dream have seen
Music wait on a lyrist for some thought,
Yet singing to herself until it came.
I turned to those old times and scenes where all
That's beautiful had birth for me, and made
Rude verses on them all; and then I paused
I had done nothing, so I sought to know
What other minds achieved. No fear outbroke
As on the works of mighty bards I gazed,
In the first joy at finding my own thoughts
Recorded, my own fancies justified,
And their aspirings but my very own.
With them I first explored passion and mind,
All to begin afresh! I rather sought
To rival what I wondered at than form
Creations of my own; if much was light
Lent by the others, much was yet my own.
I paused again: a change was comingcame:
I was no more a boy, the past was breaking
Before the future and like fever worked.
I thought on my new self, and all my powers
Burst out. I dreamed not of restraint, but gazed
On all things: schemes and systems went and came,
And I was proud (being vainest of the weak)
In wandering o'er thought's world to seek some one
To be my prize, as if you wandered o'er
The White Way for a star.
And my choice fell
Not so much on a system as a man
On one, whom praise of mine shall not offend,
Who was as calm as beauty, being such
Unto mankind as thou to me, Pauline,
Believing in them and devoting all
His soul's strength to their winning back to peace;
Who sent forth hopes and longings for their sake,
Clothed in all passion's melodies: such first
Caught me and set me, slave of a sweet task,
To disentangle, gather sense from song:
Since, song-inwoven, lurked there words which seemed
A key to a new world, the muttering
Of angels, something yet unguessed by man.
How my heart leapt as still I sought and found
Much there, I felt my own soul had conceived,
But there living and burning! Soon the orb
Of his conceptions dawned on me; its praise
Lives in the tongues of men, men's brows are high
When his name means a triumph and a pride,
So, my weak voice may well forbear to shame
What seemed decreed my fate: I threw myself
To meet it, I was vowed to liberty,
Men were to be as gods and earth as heaven,
And Iah, what a life was mine to prove!
My whole soul rose to meet it. Now, Pauline,
I shall go mad, if I recall that time!
Oh let me look back ere I leave for ever
The time which was an hour one fondly waits
For a fair girl that comes a withered hag!
And I was lonely, far from woods and fields,
And amid dullest sights, who should be loose
As a stag; yet I was full of bliss, who lived
With Plato and who had the key to life;
And I had dimly shaped my first attempt,
And many a thought did I build up on thought,
As the wild bee hangs cell to cell; in vain,
For I must still advance, no rest for mind.
'Twas in my plan to look on real life,
The life all new to me; my theories
Were firm, so them I left, to look and learn
Mankind, its cares, hopes, fears, its woes and joys;
And, as I pondered on their ways, I sought
How best life's end might be attainedan end
Comprising every joy. I deeply mused.
And suddenly without heart-wreck I awoke
As from a dream: I said "'Twas beautiful,
"Yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!"
As some world-wanderer sees in a far meadow
Strange towers and high-walled gardens thick with trees,
Where song takes shelter and delicious mirth
From laughing fairy creatures peeping over,
And on the morrow when he comes to lie
For ever 'neath those garden-trees fruit-flushed
Sung round by fairies, all his search is vain.
First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Nextfaith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends
And aims and loves, and human love went last.
I felt this no decay, because new powers
Rose as old feelings leftwit, mockery,
Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad,
Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast
Hope joyously away: I laughed and said
"No more of this!" I must not think: at length
I looked again to see if all went well.
My powers were greater: as some temple seemed
My soul, where nought is changed and incense rolls
Around the altar, only God is gone
And some dark spirit sitteth in his seat.
So, I passed through the temple and to me
Knelt troops of shadows, and they cried "Hail, king!
"We serve thee now and thou shalt serve no more!
"Call on us, prove us, let us worship thee!"
And I said "Are ye strong? Let fancy bear me
"Far from the past!" And I was borne away,
As Arab birds float sleeping in the wind,
O'er deserts, towers and forests, I being calm.
And I said "I have nursed up energies,
"They will prey on me." And a band knelt low
And cried "Lord, we are here and we will make
"Safe way for thee in thine appointed life!
"But look on us!" And I said "Ye will worship
"Me; should my heart not worship too?" They shouted
"Thyself, thou art our king!" So, I stood there
Smilingoh, vanity of vanities!
For buoyant and rejoicing was the spirit
With which I looked out how to end my course;
I felt once more myself, my powersall mine;
I knew while youth and health so lifted me
That, spite of all life's nothingness, no grief
Came nigh me, I must ever be light-hearted;
And that this knowledge was the only veil
Betwixt joy and despair: so, if age came,
I should be lefta wreck linked to a soul
Yet fluttering, or mind-broken and aware
Of my decay. So a long summer morn
Found me; and ere noon came, I had resolved
No age should come on me ere youth was spent,
For I would wear myself out, like that morn
Which wasted not a sunbeam; every hour
I would make mine, and die.
And thus I sought
To chain my spirit down which erst I freed
For flights to fame: I said "The troubled life
"Of genius, seen so gay when working forth
"Some trusted end, grows sad when all proves vain
"How sad when men have parted with truth's peace
"For falsest fancy's sake, which waited first
"As an obedient spirit when delight
"Came without fancy's call: but alters soon,
"Comes darkened, seldom, hastens to depart,
"Leaving a heavy darkness and warm tears.
"But I shall never lose her; she will live
"Dearer for such seclusion. I but catch
"A hue, a glance of what I sing: so, pain
"Is linked with pleasure, for I ne'er may tell
"Half the bright sights which dazzle me; but now
"Mine shall be all the radiance: let them fade
"Untoldothers shall rise as fair, as fast!
"And when all's done, the few dim gleams transferred,"
(For a new thought sprang up how well it were,
Discarding shadowy hope, to weave such lays
As straight encircle men with praise and love,
So, I should not die utterly,should bring
One branch from the gold forest, like the knight
Of old tales, witnessing I had been there)
"And when all's done, how vain seems e'en success
"The vaunted influence poets have o'er men!
"'T is a fine thing that one weak as myself
"Should sit in his lone room, knowing the words
"He utters in his solitude shall move
"Men like a swift windthat tho' dead and gone,
"New eyes shall glisten when his beauteous dreams
"Of love come true in happier frames than his.
"Ay, the still night brings thoughts like these, but morn
"Comes and the mockery again laughs out
"At hollow praises, smiles allied to sneers;
"And my soul's idol ever whispers me
"To dwell with him and his unhonoured song:
"And I foreknow my spirit, that would press
"First in the struggle, fail again to make
"All bow enslaved, and I again should sink.
"And then know that this curse will come on us,
"To see our idols perish; we may wither,
"No marvel, we are clay, but our low fate
"Should not extend to those whom trustingly
"We sent before into time's yawning gulf
"To face what dread may lurk in darkness there.
"To find the painter's glory pass, and feel
"Music can move us not as once, or, worst,
"To weep decaying wits ere the frail body
"Decays! Nought makes me trust some love is true,
"But the delight of the contented lowness
"With which I gaze on him I keep for ever
"Above me; I to rise and rival him?
"Feed his fame rather from my heart's best blood,
"Wither unseen that he may flourish still."
Pauline, my soul's friend, thou dost pity yet
How this mood swayed me when that soul found thine,
When I had set myself to live this life,
Defying all past glory. Ere thou camest
I seemed defiant, sweet, for old delights
Had flocked like birds again; music, my life,
Nourished me more than ever; then the lore
Loved for itself and all it showsthat king
Treading the purple calmly to his death,
While round him, like the clouds of eve, all dusk,
The giant shades of fate, silently flitting,
Pile the dim outline of the coming doom;
And him sitting alone in blood while friends
Are hunting far in the sunshine; and the boy
With his white breast and brow and clustering curls
Streaked with his mother's blood, but striving hard
To tell his story ere his reason goes.
And when I loved thee as love seemed so oft,
Thou lovedst me indeed: I wondering searched
My heart to find some feeling like such love,
Believing I was still much I had been.
Too soon I found all faith had gone from me,
And the late glow of life, like change on clouds,
Proved not the morn-blush widening into day,
But eve faint-coloured by the dying sun
While darkness hastens quickly. I will tell
My state as though 'twere none of minedespair
Cannot come near usthis it is, my state.
Souls alter not, and mine must still advance;
Strange that I knew not, when I flung away
My youth's chief aims, their loss might lead to loss
Of what few I retained, and no resource
Be left me: for behold how changed is all!
I cannot chain my soul: it will not rest
In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere:
It has strange impulse, tendency, desire,
Which nowise I account for nor explain,
But cannot stifle, being bound to trust
All feelings equally, to hear all sides:
How can my life indulge them? yet they live,
Referring to some state of life unknown.
My selfishness is satiated not,
It wears me like a flame; my hunger for
All pleasure, howsoe'er minute, grows pain;
I envyhow I envy him whose soul
Turns its whole energies to some one end,
To elevate an aim, pursue success
However mean! So, my still baffled hope
Seeks out abstractions; I would have one joy,
But one in life, so it were wholly mine,
One rapture all my soul could fill: and this
Wild feeling places me in dream afar
In some vast country where the eye can see
No end to the far hills and dales bestrewn
With shining towers and towns, till I grow mad
Well-nigh, to know not one abode but holds
Some pleasure, while my soul could grasp the world,
But must remain this vile form's slave. I look
With hope to age at last, which quenching much,
May let me concentrate what sparks it spares.
This restlessness of passion meets in me
A craving after knowledge: the sole proof
Of yet commanding will is in that power
Repressed; for I beheld it in its dawn,
The sleepless harpy with just-budding wings,
And I considered whether to forego
All happy ignorant hopes and fears, to live,
Finding a recompense in its wild eyes.
And when I found that I should perish so,
I bade its wild eyes close from me for ever,
And I am left alone with old delights;
See! it lies in me a chained thing, still prompt
To serve me if I loose its slightest bond:
I cannot but be proud of my bright slave.
How should this earth's life prove my only sphere?
Can I so narrow sense but that in life
Soul still exceeds it? In their elements
My love outsoars my reason; but since love
Perforce receives its object from this earth
While reason wanders chainless, the few truths.
Caught from its wanderings have sufficed to quell
Love chained below; then what were love, set free,
Which, with the object it demands, would pass
Reason companioning the seraphim?
No, what I feel may pass all human love
Yet fall far short of what my love should be.
And yet I seem more warped in this than aught,
Myself stands out more hideously: of old
I could forget myself in friendship, fame,
Liberty, nay, in love of mightier souls;
But I begin to know what thing hate is
To sicken and to quiver and grow white
And I myself have furnished its first prey.
Hate of the weak and ever-wavering will,
The selfishness, the still-decaying frame . . .
But I must never grieve whom wing can waft
Far from such thoughtsas now. Andromeda!
And she is with me: years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her notso beautiful
With her fixed eyes, earnest and still, and hair
Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze,
And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,
Resting upon her eyes and hair, such hair,
As she awaits the snake on the wet beach
By the dark rock and the white wave just breaking
At her feet; quite naked and alone; a thing
I doubt not, nor fear for, secure some god
To save will come in thunder from the stars.
Let it pass! Soul requires another change.
I will be gifted with a wondrous mind,
Yet sunk by error to men's sympathy,
And in the wane of life, yet only so
As to call up their fears; and there shall come
A time requiring youth's best energies;
And lo, I fling age, sorrow, sickness off,
And rise triumphant, triumph through decay.
And thus it is that I supply the chasm
'Twixt what I am and all I fain would be:
But then to know nothing, to hope for nothing,
To seize on life's dull joys from a strange fear
Lest, losing them, all 's lost and nought remains!
There 's some vile juggle with my reason here;
I feel I but explain to my own loss
These impulses: they live no less the same.
Liberty! what though I despair? my blood
Rose never at a slave's name proud as now.
Oh sympathies, obscured by sophistries!
Why else have I sought refuge in myself,
But from the woes I saw and could not stay?
Love! is not this to love thee, my Pauline?
I cherish prejudice, lest I be left
Utterly loveless? witness my belief
In poets, though sad change has come there too;
No more I leave myself to follow them
Unconsciously I measure me by them
Let me forget it: and I cherish most
My love of Englandhow her name, a word
Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!
Pauline, could I but break the spell! Not now
All's feverbut when calm shall come again,
I am prepared: I have made life my own.
I would not be content with all the change
One frame should feel, but I have gone in thought
Thro' all conjuncture, I have lived all life
When it is most alive, where strangest fate
New-shapes it past surmisethe throes of men
Bit by some curse or in the grasps of doom
Half-visible and still-increasing round,
Or crowning their wide being's general aim.
These are wild fancies, but I feel, sweet friend,
As one breathing his weakness to the ear
Of pitying angeldear as a winter flower,
A slight flower growing alone, and offering
Its frail cup of three leaves to the cold sun,
Yet joyous and confiding like the triumph
Of a child: and why am I not worthy thee?
I can live all the life of plants, and gaze
Drowsily on the bees that flit and play,
Or bare my breast for sunbeams which will kill,
Or open in the night of sounds, to look
For the dim stars; I can mount with the bird
Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or rise cheerfully springing to the heavens;
Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air
In the misty sun-warm water; or with flower
And tree can smile in light at the sinking sun
Just as the storm comes, as a girl would look
On a departing lovermost serene.
Pauline, come with me, see how I could build
A home for us, out of the world, in thought!
I am uplifted: fly with me, Pauline!
Night, and one single ridge of narrow path
Between the sullen river and the woods
Waving and muttering, for the moonless night
Has shaped them into images of life,
Like the uprising of the giant-ghosts,
Looking on earth to know how their sons fare:
Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell
Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting
Of thy soft breasts. No, we will pass to morning
Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,
Half in the air, like creatures of the place,
Trusting the element, living on high boughs
That swing in the windlook at the silver spray
Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here
With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come,
Dive we downsafe! See this our new retreat
Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,
Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down
To a small pool whose waters lie asleep
Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants:
And tall trees overarch to keep us in,
Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
And in the dreamy water one small group
Of two or three strange trees are got together
Wondering at all around, as strange beasts herd
Together far from their own land: all wildness,
No turf nor moss, for boughs and plants pave all,
And tongues of bank go shelving in the lymph,
Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head,
And old grey stones lie making eddies there,
The wild-mice cross them dry-shod. Deeper in!
Shut thy soft eyesnow lookstill deeper in!
This is the very heart of the woods all round
Mountain-like heaped above us; yet even here
One pond of water gleams; far off the river
Sweeps like a sea, barred out from land; but one
One thin clear sheet has overleaped and wound
Into this silent depth, which gained, it lies
Still, as but let by sufferance; the trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl,
And through their roots long creeping plants out-stretch
Their twined hair, steeped and sparkling; farther on,
Tall rushes and thick flag-knots have combined
To narrow it; so, at length, a silver thread,
It winds, all noiselessly through the deep wood
Till thro' a cleft-way, thro' the moss and stone,
It joins its parent-river with a shout.
Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods!
See, they part, like a ruined arch: the sky!
Nothing but sky appears, so close the roots
And grass of the hill-top level with the air
Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!
Water is beautiful, but not like air:
See, where the solid azure waters lie
Made as of thickened air, and down below,
The fern-ranks like a forest spread themselves
As though each pore could feel the element;
Where the quick glancing serpent winds his way,
Float with me there, Pauline!but not like air.
Down the hill! Stopa clump of trees, see, set
On a heap of rock, which look o'er the far plain:
So, envious climbing shrubs would mount to rest
And peer from their spread boughs; wide they wave, looking
At the muleteers who whistle on their way,
To the merry chime of morning bells, past all
The little smoking cots, mid fields and banks
And copses bright in the sun. My spirit wanders:
Hedgerows for methose living hedgerows where
The bushes close and clasp above and keep
Thought inI am concentratedI feel;
But my soul saddens when it looks beyond:
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.
O God, where do they tendthese struggling aims?
What would I have? What is this "sleep" which seems
To bound all? can there be a "waking" point
Of crowning life? The soul would never rule;
It would be first in all things, it would have
Its utmost pleasure filled, but, that complete,
Commanding, for commanding, sickens it.
The last point I can trace isrest beneath
Some better essence than itself, in weakness;
This is "myself," not what I think should be:
And what is that I hunger for but God?
My God, my God, let me for once look on thee
As though nought else existed, we alone!
And as creation crumbles, my soul's spark
Expands till I can say,Even from myself
I need thee and I feel thee and I love thee.
I do not plead my rapture in thy works
For love of thee, nor that I feel as one
Who cannot die: but there is that in me
Which turns to thee, which loves or which should love.
Why have I girt myself with this hell-dress?
Why have I laboured to put out my life?
Is it not in my nature to adore,
And e'en for all my reason do I not
Feel him, and thank him, and pray to himnow?
Can I forego the trust that he loves me?
Do I not feel a love which only one . . .
O thou pale form, so dimly seen, deep-eyed!
I have denied thee calmlydo I not
Pant when I read of thy consummate power,
And burn to see thy calm pure truths out-flash
The brightest gleams of earth's philosophy?
Do I not shake to hear aught question thee?
If I am erring save me, madden me,
Take from me powers and pleasures, let me die
Ages, so I see thee! I am knit round
As with a charm by sin and lust and pride,
Yet though my wandering dreams have seen all shapes
Of strange delight, oft have I stood by thee
Have I been keeping lonely watch with thee
In the damp night by weeping Olivet,
Or leaning on thy bosom, proudly less,
Or dying with thee on the lonely cross,
Or witnessing thine outburst from the tomb.
A mortal, sin's familiar friend, doth here
Avow that he will give all earth's reward,
But to believe and humbly teach the faith,
In suffering and poverty and shame,
Only believing he is not unloved.
And now, my Pauline, I am thine for ever!
I feel the spirit which has buoyed me up
Desert me, and old shades are gathering fast;
Yet while the last light waits, I would say much,
This chiefly, it is gain that I have said
Somewhat of love I ever felt for thee
But seldom told; our hearts so beat together
That speech seemed mockery; but when dark hours come,
And joy departs, and thou, sweet, deem'st it strange
A sorrow moves me, thou canst not remove,
Look on this lay I dedicate to thee,
Which through thee I began, which thus I end,
Collecting the last gleams to strive to tell
How I am thine, and more than ever now
That I sink fast: yet though I deeplier sink,
No less song proves one word has brought me bliss,
Another still may win bliss surely back.
Thou knowest, dear, I could not think all calm,
For fancies followed thought and bore me off,
And left all indistinct; ere one was caught
Another glanced; so, dazzled by my wealth,
I knew not which to leave nor which to choose,
For all so floated, nought was fixed and firm.
And then thou said'st a perfect bard was one
Who chronicled the stages of all life,
And so thou bad'st me shadow this first stage.
'T is done, and even now I recognize
The shift, the change from last to pastdiscern
Faintly how life is truth and truth is good.
And why thou must be mine is, that e'en now
In the dim hush of night, that I have done,
Despite the sad forebodings, love looks through
Whispers,E'en at the last I have her still,
With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist,
And clouds float white above like broods of swans.
How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread
As thinned by kisses! only in her lips
It wells and pulses like a living thing,
And her neck looks like marble misted o'er
With love-breath,a Pauline from heights above,
Stooping beneath me, looking upone look
As I might kill her and be loved the more.
So, love meme, Pauline, and nought but me,
Never leave loving! Words are wild and weak,
Believe them not, Pauline! I stained myself
But to behold thee purer by my side,
To show thou art my breath, my life, a last
Resource, an extreme want: never believe
Aught better could so look on thee; nor seek
Again the world of good thoughts left for mine!
There were bright troops of undiscovered suns,
Each equal in their radiant course; there were
Clusters of far fair isles which ocean kept
For his own joy, and his waves broke on them
Without a choice; and there was a dim crowd
Of visions, each a part of some grand whole:
And one star left his peers and came with peace
Upon a storm, and all eyes pined for him;
And one isle harboured a sea-beaten ship,
And the crew wandered in its bowers and plucked
Its fruits and gave up all their hopes of home;
And one dream came to a pale poet's sleep,
And he said, "I am singled out by God,
"No sin must touch me." Words are wild and weak,
But what they would express is,Leave me not,
Still sit by me with beating breast and hair
Loosened, be watching earnest by my side,
Turning my books or kissing me when I
Look uplike summer wind! Be still to me
A help to music's mystery which mind fails
To fathom, its solution, no mere clue!
O reason's pedantry, life's rule prescribed!
I hopeless, I the loveless, hope and love.
Wiser and better, know me now, not when
You loved me as I was. Smile not! I have
Much yet to dawn on you, to gladden you.
No more of the past! I'll look within no more.
I have too trusted my own lawless wants,
Too trusted my vain self, vague intuition
Draining soul's wine alone in the still night,
And seeing how, as gathering films arose,
As by an inspiration life seemed bare
And grinning in its vanity, while ends
Foul to be dreamed of, smiled at me as fixed
And fair, while others changed from fair to foul
As a young witch turns an old hag at night.
No more of this! We will go hand in hand,
I with thee, even as a childlove's slave,
Looking no farther than his liege commands.
And thou hast chosen where this life shall be:
The land which gave me thee shall be our home,
Where nature lies all wild amid her lakes
And snow-swathed mountains and vast pines begirt
With ropes of snowwhere nature lies all bare,
Suffering none to view her but a race
Or stinted or deformed, like the mute dwarfs
Which wait upon a naked Indian queen.
And there (the time being when the heavens are thick
With storm) I'll sit with thee while thou dost sing
Thy native songs, gay as a desert bird
Which crieth as it flies for perfect joy,
Or telling me old stories of dead knights;
Or I will read great lays to theehow she,
The fair pale sister, went to her chill grave
With power to love and to be loved and live:
Or we will go together, like twin gods
Of the infernal world, with scented lamp
Over the dead, to call and to awake,
Over the unshaped images which lie
Within my mind's cave: only leaving all,
That tells of the past doubt. So, when spring comes
With sunshine back again like an old smile,
And the fresh waters and awakened birds
And budding woods await us, I shall be
Prepared, and we will question life once more,
Till its old sense shall come renewed by change,
Like some clear thought which harsh words veiled before;
Feeling God loves us, and that all which errs
Is but a dream which death will dissipate.
And then what need of longer exile? Seek
My England, and, again there, calm approach
All I once fled from, calmly look on those
The works of my past weakness, as one views
Some scene where danger met him long before.
Ah that such pleasant life should be but dreamed!
But whate'er come of it, and though it fade,
And though ere the cold morning all be gone,
As it may be;tho' music wait to wile,
And strange eyes and bright wine lure, laugh like sin
Which steals back softly on a soul half saved,
And I the first deny, decry, despise,
With this avowal, these intents so fair,
Still be it all my own, this moment's pride!
No less I make an end in perfect joy.
E'en in my brightest time, a lurking fear
Possessed me: I well knew my weak resolves,
I felt the witchery that makes mind sleep
Over its treasure, as one half afraid
To make his riches definite: but now
These feelings shall not utterly be lost,
I shall not know again that nameless care
Lest, leaving all undone in youth, some new
And undreamed end reveal itself too late:
For this song shall remain to tell for ever
That when I lost all hope of such a change,
Suddenly beauty rose on me again.
No less I make an end in perfect joy,
For I, who thus again was visited,
Shall doubt not many another bliss awaits,
And, though this weak soul sink and darkness whelm,
Some little word shall light it, raise aloft,
To where I clearlier see and better love,
As I again go o'er the tracts of thought
Like one who has a right, and I shall live
With poets, calmer, purer still each time,
And beauteous shapes will come for me to seize,
And unknown secrets will be trusted me
Which were denied the waverer once; but now
I shall be priest and prophet as of old.
Sun-treader, I believe in God and truth
And love; and as one just escaped from death
Would bind himself in bands of friends to feel
He lives indeed, so, I would lean on thee!
Thou must be ever with me, most in gloom
If such must come, but chiefly when I die,
For I seem, dying, as one going in the dark
To fight a giant: but live thou for ever,
And be to all what thou hast been to me!
All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me
Know my last state is happy, free from doubt
Or touch of fear. Love me and wish me well.
Richmond: October 22, 1832.
~ Robert Browning, Pauline, A Fragment of a Question
,#NFDB
1214:The Golden Age
Long ere the Muse the strenuous chords had swept,
And the first lay as yet in silence slept,
A Time there was which since has stirred the lyre
To notes of wail and accents warm with fire;
Moved the soft Mantuan to his silvery strain,
And him who sobbed in pentametric pain;
To which the World, waxed desolate and old,
Fondly reverts, and calls the Age of Gold.
Then, without toil, by vale and mountain side,
Men found their few and simple wants supplied;
Plenty, like dew, dropped subtle from the air,
And Earth's fair gifts rose prodigal as prayer.
Love, with no charms except its own to lure,
Was swiftly answered by a love as pure.
No need for wealth; each glittering fruit and flower,
Each star, each streamlet, made the maiden's dower.
Far in the future lurked maternal throes,
And children blossomed painless as the rose.
No harrowing question `why,' no torturing `how,'
Bent the lithe frame or knit the youthful brow.
The growing mind had naught to seek or shun;
Like the plump fig it ripened in the sun.
From dawn to dark Man's life was steeped in joy,
And the gray sire was happy as the boy.
Nature with Man yet waged no troublous strife,
And Death was almost easier than Life.
Safe on its native mountains throve the oak,
Nor ever groaned 'neath greed's relentless stroke.
No fear of loss, no restlessness for more,
Drove the poor mariner from shore to shore.
No distant mines, by penury divined,
Made him the sport of fickle wave or wind.
Rich for secure, he checked each wish to roam,
And hugged the safe felicity of home.
Those days are long gone by; but who shall say
Why, like a dream, passed Saturn's Reign away?
Over its rise, its ruin, hangs a veil,
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And naught remains except a Golden Tale.
Whether 'twas sin or hazard that dissolved
That happy scheme by kindly Gods evolved;
Whether Man fell by lucklessness or pride,Let jarring sects, and not the Muse, decide.
But when that cruel Fiat smote the earth,
Primeval Joy was poisoned at its birth.
In sorrow stole the infant from the womb,
The agëd crept in sorrow to the tomb.
The ground, so bounteous once, refused to bear
More than was wrung by sower, seed, and share.
Ofttimes would ruthless winds or torrents raze
The ripening fruit of toilsome nights and days.
Each one in turn grew jealous of his own,
And fenced his patch with ditch and churlish stone.
As greed uprose, and greed engendered strife,
Contention raged coincident with life.
Man against man, maid against maiden turned,
And the soft breast with envious passions burned.
The loss of one was hailed as others' gain,
And pleasure took unnatural birth from pain.
Goaded by woe, and through tradition's lore
Mindful of all the blissfulness of yore,
The Human Race, its sorrows to assuage,
Dreamed afar off a second Golden Age;
Not in the dim irrevocable Past,
But in a Future just as vague and vast.
The prophet's lips, the poet's flattering pen,
Revelled in forecasts of that golden Then.
The days should come when grief would be no more,
And Peace and Plenty rule from shore to shore;
All men alike enjoy what none did earn,
And even more than Saturn's Reign return.
As years rolled on, as centuries went by,
And still that Promised Time seemed no more nigh,
Mankind at length, outwearied with delays,
Gave up all hope of those seductive days.
Then other prophets, other scribes arose,
A nearer, surer Eden to disclose.
`O, long-befooled!' they said, `awake, and deem
The Past a tale, the Future but a dream.
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Here, in the living Present, act your part,
Straining its vulgar blessings to your heart.
Let hand with hand and brain with brain contend,
And each one labour to some selfish end.
In wealth and riot, luxury and power,
Baffle the mockery of the transient hour.
If thousands fall, if tens of thousands bleed,
Will not a hundred, or a score, succeed?
Let those who cannot yield to those who canFate has its piles of victims; why not Man?
Better a furious fight where some one wins,
Than sluggish life which ends as it begins.
Vain was the bard who, whilst the World was new,
'Twixt men and beasts the fond distinction drew,
That these confine their downward gaze to earth,
Whilst man looks up, enamoured of his birth.
Not in the skies, but deep beneath the soil,
There will you find your happiness and spoil.
Enough for brutes its simple face to know,
But godlike man must pierce and delve below.
Deep in its bowels seek the shining ore,
And at its touch shall Saturn reign once more.
For him whose thews are sound, whose vision clear,
Whose purpose firm, the Golden Age is here.'
Never from cave or tripod, mount or glade,
Issued a voice so welcomed, so obeyed.
From zone to zone the Golden Gospel flew,
And in its train mankind obedient drew.
See from their seats the ancient Gods dethroned,
Altars upset, and oracles disown'd.
The Muses, scared, conceal the smothered lyre;
No longer prized, the Graces swift retire;
Virtue, a butt for ribalds, seeks her shroud,
And even Venus veils herself in cloud.
Religion, Ethics, all men erst adored,
Hymned on the harp, or fought for with the sword,
All lofty scopes, all ends esteemed of old,
Dissolve like mist before the rage for gold.
The priest for gold makes traffic of his robe;
For gold the soldier desolates the globe;
The poet shapes for gold his venal lays;
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Through gold Vice stalks caparisoned with praise.
Tempted by gold, the virgin sells her charms,
Though no Immortal slips into her arms.
Saddled with gold, the adventurer can buy
Titles, precedence, place, and dignity.
High, middle, low, the young, the ripe, the old,
Man, woman, child, live, die, are damned for Gold.
Soon as the youthful mind begins to ope,
It searches Life's significance and scope;
And, fed by generous impulse year by year,
Dreams for itself some glorious career.
Its shall it be, instructed by the Muse,
Truth to abet, and beauty to diffuse;
With full-blown sail, and genius at the helm,
To steer men's thoughts to a serener realm.
Perhaps the ingenuous boy would fain recall
Tintoret's canvas, Memmi's fresco'd wall;
With godlike pencil purify the mart,
And life ennoble with the breath of Art.
Maybe he burns, by Plato's failure fired,
To scale the heights which every wing have tired,
Seize first each part, then comprehend the whole,
And solve the eternal problem of the Soul.
Be these his aims, or, nobler still, to train
His kind to mutiny till Virtue reign,
Soon doth he learn to count his lovely schemes
A host of bubbles in a world of dreams.
Experience whispers early, Have a care!
Who with the Muse would live must live on air.
The tempting maid is but a poet's lie,
`Who gave to song what gold could never buy.'
Confront the world, take counsel with the throng;
Their verdict what? `The thing's not worth a song.'
Are you content you now have learnt your price?
Come, sink the Muse, and don't be quite so nice.
Start a new Company, and float the shares,
Then lunch with Ministers and dine with Mayors.
Pimp for a Party, praise a Premier's heart,
Head a subscription, and then shine-a Bart.
Return your income fifty thousand clearThe devil's in it, or you'll die a peer.
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Success so great is never done by halves'Tis only virtue, when 'tis greatest, starves.
Perhaps his breast, untutored yet to serve,
Spurns the base counsel with a proud reserve;
For Youth is stubborn, and when Nature draws,
In vain a parent's warning, wisdom's saws.
Let cravens straight their impotence confess,
And sell their birthright for a filthy mess;
In flowers see, bee-like, nought but stuff for hives,
And for foul lucre prostitute their lives;
They have not failed who never once have tried,
Or, if they failed, they failed for want of pride.
He, he at least his soul will ne'er demean,
But 'mong the foul will keep his honour clean.
O touching sight, to witness day by day
His splendid generous day-dreams fade away!
His sire reproaches, and his brothers scoff,
His mother doubts, his sisters e'en fall off.
The neighbours pity, strangers deem him mad;
Girls, smiling, whisper, What a foolish lad!
Meanwhile his compeers, started in the race,
Are swiftly marching on to power and place.
One makes a coup, and weds a wife of rank;
Another's junior partner in a bank.
A third in sugar with unscriptural hand,
Traffics, and builds a lasting house on sand.
A fourth, for beer and piety renowned,
Owns all the publics in the country round;
Its drink adulterates with face demure,
But burns with zeal to keep opinion pure;
Cares not one jot for bodies drunk or sick,
But scans your soul like a new Dominick.
The fifth, the patron of a new balloon,
Projects a Company to reach the moon;
Baits his prospectus with a batch of peers,
And vows nought pays like money in the Spheres.
Shares in the moon advanced-advancing still.
Then comes a crash-stock guaranteed at nil.
But sure, the man is ruined? Not at all;
He scarce can tumble who has sense to crawl.
490
Your modern Icarus is much too wise
On his own pinions to attempt the skiesOn others' soaring follies doth he rise.
Long ere the bubble burst his shares were sold;
Just at that moment he had need of gold.
Singed wings, you know, are but for simple folk;
He, with his peers, 'scapes safe from flame and smoke,
And buys a borough with the happy stroke.
Few are the souls who die for Cato's creed:
To fail seems base, when all around succeed.
Foiled in his purpose, both by foe and friend,
Through noble means to reach a noble end,
The baffled boy forswears his cherished dream,
And learns to swim, like others, with the stream.
Keen to recover precious moments lost,
And taught by bitter tasks what Virtue cost,
He midst the rush, whilst others rise and fall,
Swims on, the most unscrupulous of all.
Let others chouse with care, he cheats with pluck,
And millions stake their all upon his luck.
His daring overawes the small, the great,
And whilst he plunders they but peculate.
He lures the easy, makes the fat his spoil,
Pares the lean wage of proletarian toil;
Swindles the widow of her hoarded mite,
Drags the poor pensioner once more to fight;
Robs age of rest, and youth of prospects fair,
Plunges the sanguine bridegroom in despair;
Severs the ties made sacred long by home,
And sends the son from sire across the foam;
Dashes the faith of plighted swain and maid,
And helps alone the cynic sexton's spade:
Does all that well beseems a Fallen StarIt needs a Lucifer to fall so far!
Sometimes will Fortune on the traitor scowl,
And e'en with gold not pay a deed so foul.
He who was born a glittering child of light,
Trenchant as Raphael, as Ithuriel bright,
Yet sells his soul a vulgar prize to reap,
And for brute guerdons holds his honour cheap,
491
Too often finds that he who, grovelling, flies
From unrewarded reverie in the skies,
And seeks in venal efforts to employ
The gifts God formed for beauty and for joy,
Makes but a barren barter of his birth,
And Heaven foregoes, without securing earth.
See how he sinks! The more he strains to clutch
Terrestrial spoil, unworthy of his touch,
It seems, for him, to take elusive shapes,
And like a shadow from his grasp escapes.
As baser wax his aims, more mean his scope,
More and still more he sprawls-the sport of Hope.
Still as he tries to suffocate his soul,
Farther beyond him seems the carnal goal.
In vain he turns to catch the favouring gale;
Becalmed he lies-he labours but to fail.
Poor and despised, he now would fain retrace
His erring steps to his first dwelling-place,
But finds, alas! baseness hath borne its fruit;
Wings long unused have withered at the root.
He who in vain has crawled in vain would fly,
And rots abandoned both by earth and sky.
Meaner his end than that poor tradesman's doom,
Who, asked what words of honour on his tomb
His friends should place, with cynic touch replied,
`Here lies who, born a man, a grocer died!'
Whom doth this foe of human virtue spare?
Look round! More sweet its victims, the more fair.
Its natural slaves, who, spawned from wealth, are born
To Traffic's tricks they lack the soul to scorn,
Whose lust for lucre is their proper lot,
It just as oft impoverishes as not.
'Tis those in whom the Unseen God inspires
The restless leaven of divine desires;
Who, from the moment that they lisp, betray
An alien spirit housed within their clay;
Whose fretful youth life's narrow limits chafe,
And yearns for worlds more spacious, if less safe;
Striving to reach, despite its fleshly thrall,
That larger Something which surrounds us all;These, these the souls-and not that baser band-
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To whom Gold loves to stretch a helping hand;
With early smiles their generous aims to bless,
And lead them, blind, to ruinous success.
When Lelius chanted first his fragrant lays,
Men praised, and he was amply paid with praise.
Not salons' sycophant, nor Fashion's bard,
No glittering heaps did his sweet notes reward.
He was content with audience fit, though few,
When to his side the cunning demon drew.
`Your pen's worth gold; you need but blunt its point;
Come, cut the Muse; the times are out of joint.
Fame's well enough, but comfort has its laws;
You'll make a damned poor supper off applause.
Sing, be select, and starve. Prose is the thingThe thing that pays. The Million now is King.
Write gossip, scandal, slander-what you will;
A well-filled purse awaits a ready quill.'
The curst insidious demon has his way,
And Grub-street swallows Lelius for aye.
Turn from the pen, and for a while survey
The wide domains which brush and canvas sway.
Enter those realms, and what do we behold?
Art, heavenly Art, the slave and pimp of gold!
Time was when its poor votaries were too proud
To sate the itch of a vain-glorious crowd,
Serve the mean aims of narrow personal pelf,
And swell the ignoble retinue of Self.
Only the State, which merges private ends,
Or sacred Church, which lifts them and extends,
Might then presume the artist's craft to claim,
And paid him, happy, with immortal Fame.
Here, Friendship's guest, where fairest Florence lies,
A dream in stone, stretched out before mine eyes,
I think of all the treasures there enshrined,
And what small dole nurtured each master mind;
Or led by memory o'er the classic chain
Which Umbrian slope divides from Tuscan plain,
I all the priceless unbought gems recall
That link with heaven Assisi's frescoed wall;
Then, borne on wings of weakness, I repair
To mine own land, and groan to think that there,
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Debased by Fashion to a venal trade,
Art counts its triumphs by its fortunes made;
Spurned by the State, and by the Church unsought,
Works but for wealth, and by the base is bought;
Stranger to altars, palaces, or domes,
Pampers the pomp of ostentatious homes.
How changed the days since Duccio's hand of old
On Saints and Virgins lavished costly gold;
But for himself asked but a few poor crowns,
Less than we give to harlequins and clowns.
Now do our mercenary tricksters grudge
Almost the very canvas that they smudge;
Yet scan with greedy eyes the glittering heap
That opulent folly holds, for once, so cheap.
See, too, how Genius, when its touch was true,
On humble walls its lasting fancies drew;
Whose modern apes, ridiculously bold,
Hang their ephemeral daubs in frames of gold.
In vain doth Heaven, while Gold thus rules the earth,
With generous instincts sow the soul at birth.
Swift in the genial soil the seed takes root,
Then seeks the sun with many a venturous shoot.
But, ah, how soon the cruel outer air
Checks the brave growth and nips its promise fair!
Warmed by the glow of Tasso's splendid lay,
Or borne by Dante to the gates of Day;
Softly seduced by Scott's romantic strain
To deem all ends, excepting honour, vain;
Or nobly trained by Shelley's burning song
To cherish an eternal feud with wrong,The simple girl constructs a future fair,
Rears a whole world of castles in the air,
And nowhere warned, or deaf to warning, deems
That life will clothe and justify her dreams.
As year by year the maiden grows apace,
And half the woman mantles in her face,
With sickening sense, sad eye, and sinking heart,
She sees her forecasts one by one depart.
Slowly, but, ah, too surely doth she find
That poets' tales no longer rule mankind;
That Peace is homeless as the hunted hare,
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And Love far less a shelter than a snare;
That godlike Valour meets a demon's doom,
Whilst Prudence prospers even from the tomb;
That Youth, save schooled in Mammon's miry ways,
Groans o'er the lapse of unrequited days;
That Beauty, Genius, all are vain and cold,
Till foully touched and fertilised by Gold.
Soon as the time so dear to mother's vows
Draws nigh, to find the maid some fitting spouse,
Then most of all she learns what leading part
Is played by Gold in dramas of the heart.
Chance to young Hylas, beautiful as Dawn,
And sweet as fair, she feels her fancy drawn.
Are you a nymph? one whispers. Let him pass.
He doth but gather daisies in the grass.
Where your cool wave, hidden from human eyes,
In which to lure and love him till he dies?
Bid him rejoin his Hercules, and seize
The golden apples of the Hesperides;
And then perchance, should none more rich than he
Engage your love, you may his Hera be.
Alas, poor Hylas! worse than Mysian fate
Doth his meandering flowery feet await.
If that a Solon, versed in every art
Of song and science, touch the maiden's heart,
The neighbours softly whisper, Have a care;
Can Erudition keep a chaise and pair?
Pundits, alas, like fools, must pay their bills,
And Knowledge figures sorrily in wills.
For single life learning is well enough,
But marriage should be made of sterner stuff.
Should Cato's fame her pious soul attract,
The whole world cries, The woman must be cracked.
What! wed with Virtue! Is the girl awake?
Sure, she confounds the altar with the stake.
Send for the doctor. Try a change of air.
Swear Cato drinks. In war and love all's fair.
Bring Croesus to the front. At four he's freeThere's no one left to swindle after three.
In one brief hour behold him curled and drest,
And borne on wings of fashion to the West!
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What though to regions fondly deemed refined,
He brings his City manners, City mind,
And cynics titter?-he laughs best who wins,A Greenwhich dinner covers many sins.
What! dine with Croesus? Surely. Is a feast
One jot the worse because the host's a beast?
He's worse than that-a snob-a cad. Agreed;
But then his goblets smack of Ganymede?
Do some strange freaks his conversation mar?
He stops your censure with a prime cigar.
A Norway stream, a shooting-lodge in Perth,
In practice look uncommonly like worth.
The Town to hear some new soprano flocks.
You long to go? Well, Croesus has a box.
How at this hour are tickets to be got
For the Regatta? Croesus has a yacht.
Goodwood is here. Your hopes begin to flag.
One chance awaits you: Croesus has a drag.
You doat on Flower-shows: Croesus has a bone.
Be friends with Croesus, and the World's your own.
Who could resist seductions such as these?
Or what could charm, if Croesus failed to please?
Blinded and bribed, the critical are cured,
And loud extol whom late they scarce endured.
Caressed and courted, Croesus grows the rage,
The type and glory of our Golden Age;
And Cato, Hylas, Solon, shoved aside,
Our heavenly maid is hailed as Croesus' bride.
Shade of Lucretius! if thy lyre waxed wild
With sacred rage for Clytemnestra's child,
And nought could hold thee as thy soul surveyed
The cursëd ills Religion can persuade,
How would thy verse impetuously shower
Sonorous scorn on Gold's atrocious power;
Embalm its victims with a touch divine,
And damn the monster in one sounding line!
Can honeyed forms or stereotyped applause
Alter the scope of Heaven's eternal laws?
What though with gifts should massive sideboards groan,
And every heart be glad except her own,
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And troops of blooming girls behold with pride,
Perchance with envy, this resplendent bride;
Though vieing voices hail her Fashion's queen,
And even a Bishop's blessing crown the scene,
No rites, no rings, no altars, can avail
To make a sacred contract of a sale,
Stir the far depths of the reluctant mind,
Or join the hearts which love hath failed to bind.
If soul stands passive whilst the flesh is sold,
Is there no foul aroma in the gold?
Is the base barter covered by the price,
And do huge figures make the nasty nice?
The nameless outcast, prowling for her prey,
Renews her filthy bargain day by day;
Let Croesus give her what he gave his wife,
She's virtuous too-at least, she's his for life.
Croesus-but hold! Let Charity presume
That Croesus' wife but dimly knew her doom.
The luckless maid, since knowledge comes too late,
In splendour seeks oblivion of her fate;
Of every tender pious aim bereft,
Hugs in despair the only idol left;
In alien worship seeks to be consoled,
And builds her hopes of happiness on Gold.
Gold rules her steps, determines her desiresMere puppet she, whilst Mammon jerks the wires.
Futile to ask if London suits her healthWould you consult her doctor, not her wealth?
You soon are answered: Whether ill or well,
A house in Town is indispensable.
Where shall it be? On gravel or on clay?
Wherever tenants have the most to pay.
Price is the thing, not soil. If Fashion's camp
Be pitched just here, what matter dry or damp?
But, health apart, 'tis known that Croesus' wife,
If left to choose, prefers a country life.
Well, she shall have it when the Parks are brown,
And Fashion, wearied, hath dispersed the Town.
But whilst the woods are leafy, and the lanes
With lush wild-flowers rob life of half its pains;
While sweetest scents and softest sounds combine
497
To make existence, did they last, divine;
Not for the world must Croesus' wife be missed
From fetid streets, foul rooms, and Fashion's list;
And only thence to rural refuge flies
As, self-exhausted, pleasant Summer dies.
Say, shall we marvel, amid scenes like these,
With all to dazzle, but with nought to please,
If links of simple gold should fail to cleave,
And tempters prompt their webs not vainly weave?
See, Plutus, first in each ignoble strife,
Battered and bored, bethinks him of a wife.
The happy tidings, spreading through the West,
Fires each maternal mercenary breast.
The soaring dames parade their daughters' charms,
To lure the hug of Plutus' palsied arms;
And as brave Eld for one fair woman fought,
For one foul man our world to rage is wrought.
At last, opining he might chance do worse,
Plutus to proud Olympia flings his purse.
Olympia lifts it with triumphant smile,
Whilst round her crowds congratulating guile,
Escorts her to the altar, decks her brows
With orange-buds, then leaves her with her spouse,
Who, though his suit by golden showers throve,
Can grasp his Danaë with no thews of Jove.
O, who shall tell Olympia's tale aright,
Each splendid day, each miserable night;
Her thirst divine by human draughts but slaked,
Her smiling face whilst the heart sorely ached,
Or note the edge whence one we loved so well
To sweet, seductive, base perdition fell?
I cast no stone, but half by rage consoled,
I snatch the lyre and curse this fiendish Gold.
Though Beauty's fame oft spreads through all the land,
Splendour is far more curiously scanned;
And they who once upon Olympia threw
A passing glance, since she was fair to view,
Now gilded pomp and Ostentation's choir
Attend her path, of gazing never tire;
Suck up her speech, translate her silent eyes,
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Each movement, look, and posture scrutinise,
Stalk all her steps, as matron, friend, and wife,
And feed in greedy gossip on her life.
Not mine to follow to the noisome den
Where woman's frailty stands the gaze of men,
And well-coached menials, limed with gold, detail
The piteous scenes that pass behind the veil.
Enough to know that, thanks to wealth, once more
Plutus can woo, e'en richer than before.
The tottering cuckold leaves the court consoled;
Considerate juries tip his horns with Gold!
Sure some malicious demon in the brain
It needs must be, drives men reputed sane
To spurn the joys adjacent to their feet,
In the fond chase of this receding cheat?
Say, when the Stoic on his tranquil height,
And swinish crowd, sweating in miry fight,
In every age a like conclusion reach,
And sage and simple one same sermon preachThat whether Heaven hath made one serf or king,
Reason alone true happiness can bringCan we but stand astounded as we scan
This race untaught, unteachable, called Man?
Would you be truly rich, how small the heap
Your aims require, the price how passing cheap!
A modest house, from urban jars removed,
By thrist selected, yet by taste approved;
Whose walls are gay with every sweet that blows,
Whose windows scented by the blushing rose;
Whose chambers few to no fine airs pretend,
Yet never are too full to greet a friend;
A garden plot, whither unbidden come
Bird's idle pipe and bee's laborious hum;
Smooth-shaven lawn, whereon in pastime's hours
The mallet rings within a belt of flowers;
A leafy nook where to enjoy at will
Gibbon's rich prose or Shakespeare's wizard quill;
A neighbouring copse wherein the stock-doves coo,
And a wild stream unchecked sings all day through;
Two clean bright stalls, where midday, night, and morn,
Two good stout roadsters champ their well-earned corn;
499
A few learned shelves from modern rubbish free,
Yet always, Mill, with just a place for Thee;
Head ne'er at dawn by clownish bouts obscured,
And limbs by temperate exercise inured;
A few firm friendships made in early life,
Yet doubly fastened by a pleasant wife;
A wholesome board, a draught of honest wine;This is true wealth; and this, thank Heaven, is mine!
And though you ransacked worlds from shore to shore,
From sea to sky, you could not give me more.
And if, all these beyond, I still should crave
Something impossible this side the grave,
Let humbler souls my soaring hopes forgiveAfter my life still in my verse to live.
Well would it be if Mammon's feverish rage
Did but the vulgar and the base engage;
If those alone whose undistinguished name,
Haply if fouled, would shed no slur on Fame,
Sought in this sordid, despicable strife,
To find the good and snatch the crown of life.
But in the mire of venal fight embroiled,
Have we not seen the noblest scutcheons soiled?
Not the proud thought that many a splendid fray,
When crowns obeyed the fortunes of the day,
To stalwart arms its pregnant issue owed,
Whose glorious blood in their own body flowed;
Not the remembrance that their sires did share
The toils that made this England great and fair;
Not their resplendent pedigree, nor all
The line of haught fierce faces on the wall,
That tells the tale of their ancestral hall,
Have yet availed, in days like these, to hold
Men, thus seduced, from the coarse race for Gold.
Have we not seen the generous beast, whose sires
Once bore their fathers into battle's fires,
By titled gamblers' mercenary taste
His once stout loins to nimble flanks debased,
Made for curst gold to sweat through all his pores,
The panting pet of blacklegs, lords, and whores?
On such a course what dismal woes await,
500
Let the world learn by young Lucullus' fate.
Whilst yet the bloom of boyhood matched his cheek,
And all his duty was to master Greek.
Make a long score, bound o'er the running brook,
Cleave the clear wave, Lucullus had a book.
No glorious volume was't, whose subtle page
The wisdom breathed of many a studious age.
No wealth of wit, no Learning's garnered sheaves
Lay, like a treasure, lurking in its leaves.
But, in their place, crabbed Calculation scrawled
Symbols which shocked and figures that appalled.
Not for sweet Fancy, nor the simple stake
Of generous sports, did he his tasks forsake.
Ere sentiment could move, or sense control,
Adventurous Greed had swallowed up his soul.
If Gold Acrisius' Tower of Brass could flout,
How will the playground shut the monster out?
Thus by his own base instincts first betrayed,
The race of harpies lend their shameful aid,
With evil eye his smiling lands behold,
And smooth his path to infamy with gold.
At length behold him grown to man's estate,
Rich, noble, noted, lord of his own fate.
Here Duty beckons, Honour there incites,
And Love entices to its saving rites.
He heeds them not; he joins the madding crowd,
King of the base, the vulgar, and the loud;
Builds his most precious friendships on a bet,
And through the gutter trails his coronet.
Vain fool! inflamed by flattery and conceit,
He marks no pitfalls yawning at his feet;
But, winning, deems the cunning snare his luck,
And losing, pays, to plume him on his pluck;
Accepts each challenge, doubles every stake,
While tipsy plaudits follow in his wake.
But what avails, if Fortune quits his side?
Curse on the jade, he cries, she always lied!
Well, now's an end! . . . A comrade plucks his gown:
An end as yet, man! cut the timber down.
The luck will turn; you lost for want of skill;
Come, play again-you'll win. . . . By G-, I will!
501
Done soon as said. The swift sure axe resounds
Through the green stretch of his ancestral grounds.
The soaring elm, whose topmost boughs defied
The scaling valour of his boyish pride;
The umbrageous beech, beneath whose courtly shade
The loves that issued in his life were made;
The lordly oak, young when his line was young,
To which with pride inherited had clung
His sires and they from whom his sires were sprung;
Behold them now, around the naked hall,
One after one in fell succession fall.
Lo, the wide woods which centuries had seen
By frosts unmoved, mid thunder-fugues serene,
By thousand suns, by tens of thousand showers,
Fostered and fed, one greedy day devours.
And all in vain! Lured by the severed spoil,
The foul fierce harpies fasten on the soil.
`My lands on luck.' We take you. Clear the course;
Twenty to one upon Lucullus' horse!
One minute more, and poor Lucullus flies,
The beggared heir of all the centuries.
Then scoffed, and scourged, and stripped of all his wealth,
His last friends leave him-energy and health.
Anxiety and fierce Excitement's flame
Have scorched his blood and shrivelled up his frame.
`Plum to a pony!' hear the cripple call;
`Ere six months pass, the grave will end it all.'
Lucky at last, he wins his bootless bet,
And dies of drink, debauchery, and debt.
Gone are the times indeed when savage Might
Usurped the throne and claimed the wage of Right.
No longer now the tiller of the soil
Sees his fair fields the lusty robber's spoil;
No timid burgher now grows rich by stealth,
Lest some rude noble swoop upon his wealth;
The quiet citizen no longer fears
A raid upon his money or his ears,
That local turmoil or imperial strife
Will wreck his home or leave him bare for life.
But say, is Force the only fearful foe,
502
Or the keen Sword worst source of human woe?
Wielding base weapons Violence disdained,
Cunning prevails where once Compulsion reigned.
The tyrant's lance, Oppression's piercing shaft,
Torment no more, but abdicate to Craft.
Could feudal despot swooping on his prey,
Could bandit burning for the unequal fray,
Could fire, sword, famine, spread more wreck abroad,
Than marks the path of Greed allied with Fraud;
Or waits on life, where no rude signs portend
When the dread bolt of Ruin will descend?
See the poor father, who for years has toiled,
At one fell stroke of all his store despoiled.
His was the pious wish, by daily care
And safe degrees to make his hearth more fair;
His the ambition-far too meek to roamTo swell the simple luxuries of home;
By loving thrift to deck his comely spouse
With some poor gem, the summit of her vows;
To instruct his boys in every generous art
Which trains the man to act a shining part;
By culture's aid to see his daughters armed
With each fair grace that in their mother charmed;
Year after year, as strength and vigour waned,
To find his fondest forecasts all attained;
And then, since faithful to the final stage,
Doff the hard harness from the back of age.
But watchful Greed with jealous eye beheld
Day after day his little earnings swelled;
Studied the tender workings of his mind,
Marked the fond aims to which his heart inclined;
With specious lips his trusting senses stole,
And with false visions fired his prudent soul.
Poor wretch! but yesterday in modest state
He lived, secure from every bolt of Fate.
To-day, he wanders feverish and depressed,
As though whole Andes weighed upon his breast.
To-morrow, back unto his home he crawls,
A beggared man, and at the threshold falls.
Now will no more his trustful wife behold
The gladsome face returning as of old,
503
And read in sparkling eye and smiling cheek
The day's good tidings e'en before he speak;
Never again in hastening footsteps guess
Some pretty love-gift, token of success.
Their blooming boys, for whom parental hope
So oft had cast the fairest horoscope,
And seen with fond anticipating eyes
Each proud successive civic honour rise,
Torn from their noble studies, have to crave
From base pursuits the pittance of a slave,
Pour the soul's wine into the body's sieve,
And grand life lose in mean attempts to live.
Perchance, at home their humble wants denied,
Gaunt Hunger drives them from their mother's side;
Leaves her to weep alone o'er what hath been,
And places ocean, pitiless, between.
The tender girls, their father's pride and joy,
Whose dreams a fiend had scrupled to destroy;
From childhood's earliest days whose only care
Was to be gracious, virtuous, and fair,
And who from Heaven could nothing else implore
Save to be all their mother was before;
Who pictured as their perfect scheme of life
A clinging daughter and a helpful wife,At one rude flash behold the world enlarge,
And stand, pale victims, trembling on the marge.
Little, alas, now boots it where they roam,
Since they must leave the tranquil shores of home.
Whether, poor slaves, they crawl with aching feet
Hour after hour from dreary street to street,
Or, as in mockery of home, alas!
Beneath the stranger's icy portal pass,
And thankless task and miserable wage
Their exiled cheerless energies engage,
Their youth, their life, is blasted at the core,
And Hope's sweet sap will mount their veins no more.
Should every door their humble prayers repel,
Scorning to buy what Hunger kneels to sell,
And they, half thankful that the strangers spurn,
To their own roof be driven to return,
How strange the scene that meets their wearied gaze!
How changed the hearth, the home, of other days!
504
Contracting Care usurps the mother's face,
Whose smiles of old spread sunshine through the place.
Alone she weeps; but should she chance to hear
Her husband's steps, she hides the furtive tear;
Follows his movements with an anxious dread,
Studies his brow, and scans his restless tread;
Assails his woe with every female wile,
Prattles of hope, and simulates a smile.
He, broken man, wrapt in perpetual gloom,
Wanders anon from vacant room to room;
Then, creeping back, the image of despair,
With a deep sigh he sinks into his chair.
He seldom speaks; and when his voice is heard,
Peevish its tone, and querulous his word;
And vain laments and childish tears attest
The lamp of life is dying in his breast.
Perhaps his death some timely pittance frees,
Secured by prudence in their days of ease;
And, O the pity! posthumous relief
Stanches love's wounds, and blunts the edge of grief.
Unless, indeed-for this too hath been knownAll-grasping Greed hath made that mite its own,
Filched from the widow her last hopes of bread,
And whom it ruined living, plunders dead!
These are thy triumphs, Gold! thy trophies these,
To nurture fraud, and rob the world of ease,
Faith to befool, young genius to seduce,
And blight at once its beauty and its use.
Thine is the bait, as loveless hearths avouch,
Which drags fresh victims to the venal couch;
Thine the foul traps wherewith our ways are rife,
That lure them first, then close upon their life;
Thine, thine the springes, set in regions fair,
Whose unseen nooses strangle whom they snare;
The cynic glory thine to lie in wait
To make men little who had else been great,
Frustrate our plenty, aggravate our dearth,
And keep eternal feud 'twixt Heaven and Earth!
Lo, where huge London, huger day by day,
505
O'er six fair counties spreads its hideous sway,
A tract there lies by Fortune's favours blest,
And at Fame's font yclept the happy West.
There, as by wizard touch, for miles on miles,
Rise squares, streets, crescents of palatial piles.
In the brave days when England's trusty voice
Made grappling rivals tremble or rejoice;
When, foremost shield of Weakness or of Right,
She scorned to warn unless resolved to smite;
When, few but firm, her stalwart children bore
The terror of her Flag from shore to shore,
Purged Christ's dear tomb from sacrilege and shame,
And made the Moslem quake at Richard's name;
Taught the vain Gaul, though gallant, still to kneel,
And Spain's proud sons the weight of northern steel;Then were her best in no such splendour nursed
As now awaits her basest and her worst.
No kingly Harry glittering with renown,
No Edward radiant in a peaceful crown,
Was housed as now, at turn of Fortune's wrist,
Some lucky navvy turned capitalist,
Some convict's bastard who a-sudden shines
In the bright splendour of Australian mines,
Or subtle Greek, who, skilled in Eastern ways,
Exposes all Golconda to our gaze.
These, as to Pomp's pretentious peaks they rush,
Heed not the crowds their sordid conquests crush:
Secure in glaring opulence, they scan
With placid eyes the miseries of man;
Fat units, watch the leanness of the whole,
And gag remonstrance with a paltry dole:
Mid harrowing want, with conscience unafraid,
Die on the golden dirt-heaps they have made.
Here Plenty gorges gifts from every zone,
There thankful Hunger gnaws its meagre bone;
Profusion here melts more than pearls in wine,
There craves gaunt Penury some shucks from swine;
And whilst rich rogues quaff deep round roaring fires,
At Dives' portal Lazarus expires!
Betwixt these fierce extremes of wealth and woe,
A crowd of strugglers hustles to and fro,
506
Whose one sole aim and only hope in life
Are just to wrench subsistence from the strife.
To what base shifts these hideous straits compel
The straining wretches, let our records tell.
Victims of greedy Competition's craft,
We drain cheap poison in each sparkling draught,
Purchase a lie in every vaunted ware,
And swallow filth in the most frugal fare.
Building a refuge for our age, we find
The crumbling mortar lets in wet and wind;
Face the rude waves, by science freed from awe,
To sink, poor dupes, on life-belts made of straw!
Nor this the worst! When ripened Shame would hide
Fruits of that hour when Passion conquered Pride,
There are not wanting in this Christian land
The breast remorseless and the Thuggish hand,
To advertise the dens where Death is sold,
And quench the breath of baby-life for gold!
Nor man alone, case-hardened man, surveys
These shocking contrasts with a careless gaze.
Fair melting woman of the tender breast
Here finds no room for pity as her guest.
Unsexed, she strains to Ostentation's goal,
While Splendour's dreams demoralise her soul;
Drains, like a goddess, hecatombs of lives,
Nor heeds who lags, provided she arrives.
See Claribel, by every gift designed
Mid anguish keen to be an angel kind,
Once plunged in rival factions' golden fight,
Turned to a demon in her own despite.
Behold, to-morrow in the Royal smile
Will bask the birth and wealth of all the Isle.
She, long abroad, received the summons late.
What's to be done? Nor time nor tide will wait.
She turns her wardrobe over, racks her brain;
Nothing will do. She wants a dress and train.
Drive to the modiste's. Not a finger free.
There's only Clara. Clara let it be.
But Clara's sick and sorry. Give her gold;
Her aches will cease, her sorrows be consoled.
507
It must be done. Sure Lilian there will glow
In gorgeous newness decked from top to toe;
Shall it be said that Claribel did less?
To-morrow, then, in time the train and dress.
So Clara drags her weary limbs from bed,
O'er the brave finery hangs her throbbing head;
Still as her senses swim sews on and on,
Till day dies out and twilight pale is gone.
Then, by the taper's soft and silent light,
Like a pale flower that opens most by night,
Her pace she quickens, and the needle moves
Subtler and swifter through the gauzy grooves;
But as the dawn on guttering sockets gains,
Her tired lids drop, and sleep arrests her pains.
But sleep how short! She feels her shoulder clutched:
`Clara, awake! the train's not even touched!
Day strides apace. See, there's the morning sun,
And ere again he sinks, 't must all be done.'
Again, again, the shooting thread she plies,
In silent agony of smothered sighs.
She seems to breathe her breath into the gown,
To give it life the while she lays hers down.
Fast as the task advances set by pride,
So fast within her ebbs the vital tide.
The daylight goes, and softly comes the moon's,
And then poor Clara over the last stitch swoons.
Meanwhile, the panting Claribel awaits
The precious gown within her golden gates.
It comes-it comes. Now who shall shine her down?
Not Lilian, surely? No, not the entire Town.
She not for worlds had lost this courtly chance;
And Clara dies that Claribel may dance!
If private worth, thus languishing, expires,
Will public Virtue keep alive her fires?
The slaves of wealth, in Britain as in Rome,
Bring to the Forum vices formed at home.
First the community, and then the State,
Falls to their fangs, which naught can satiate.
Not born nor bred to rule, of culture void,
508
And by no wave of young ambition buoyed,
Anxious on heights conspicuous to flaunt
Nought but the tawdry trophies they can vaunt,
They woo the grasping crowd with golden guile,
And spread Corruption's canker through the Isle.
You want a seat? Then boldly sate your itch.
Be very radical, and very rich.
Sell your opinions first to please the pure,
Then buy the sordid, and your triumph's sure.
Do all, in brief, that honest men abhor,
And England hails another Senator.
See the vain Tribune who, in lust of power,
Bows to the base exactions of the hour,
And, fooled by sycophants, stands forth at last
A devotee turned sworn iconoclast!
Behind him sit dense rows of golden mutes,
Deaf to whate'er demonstrates or refutes,
Ready to vote, rescind, obey in all
The whip demands, as hounds the huntsman's call.
They neither know nor reck what helpful deeds
In this grave hour their perilled Country needs.
They want to see their daughters nobly wed,
Their wives at Court, their own names trumpeted,
Their private Bills advanced another stage,
Their schemes of plunder foisted on the age.
Leave them but these, the gamblers come to call,
Nor heed an Empire nodding to its fall!
When Power is built on props like these, how vain
The hope that Law the giddy will restrain!
Spoilt by twin sops, servility and gold,
The headstrong crowd is then but ill controlled.
In vain they now would sway who lately served,
And Riot cows Authority unnerved.
Better that such base compromise should end,
And the dread bolt of Anarchy descend!
Goths of the gutter, Vandals of the slum,
Thieves and Reformers, come! Barbarians, come!
Before your might let rails and rules be hurled,
And sweep Civilisation from the world!
509
Nor now, alas, do Commoners alone
To private ends the public weal postpone.
Those too, whom worth ancestral plants on seats
High above where all vulgar Clamour beats,
With paltry fear to their clipped ermine cling,
And shrink from right, lest right should ruin bring.
The Peers stand firm; the Commons disagree.
The Peers be-well, it now is close on three.
By five, a world of reasons will be found.
Throw Jonas over, or the ship's aground.
You know the fury of the hand that steers;
And what were Britain with no House of Peers?
Would Primogeniture its fall survive,
Or even Property be kept alive?
Let Herbert fume, or frantic Cecil chafe,
Better a deal to choose the side that's safe;
Bow to the will of Finlen and his hordes,
And still thank Heavën for a House of Lords!
Thus may the British breast exult to think.
That noble names can sell ignoble ink;
That ill-got gains, if deftly spent, unlock
Birth's choicest circles to the ambitious smock;
That Dives foul mounts fine Aristo's stairs,
If but Aristo Dives' plunder shares;
And half Debrett urbanely flocks to White's,
To back the boor who saves them from the kites.
His son succeeds him. `Make the son a Peer.
Why not? His income's eighty thousand clear.
New blood is wanted. Here's the very stuff.
Besides, he wields the county vote.' Enough.
But hold! there's Cato. `Cato! are you sane?
Why, Cato's means but one small hearth sustain.
Ennoble Cato, you'll have Peers for life,
Or else forbid the man to take a wife.
He can't maintain the necessary state,
And would you have a poor name legislate?
No, Dives' son's the very man we need.
What says the Crown?' The Crown! Of course, Agreed.
And the young fool, enriched by parent knaves,
From Ruin's jaws our Constitution saves!
Is there no path of honour for the great,
510
No sound and clean salvation for the State?
Must we for ever fly to shifts like this,
And trust to Gold to save us from the abyss?
Must honours old by new-got wealth be vamped,
And Valour's stock by plutocrats be swamped?
Back to your lands, base sons of splendid sires!
From spendthrift squares back to your native shires!
Back, back from Baden, and leave Homburg's shades
To dazzling Jews and mercenary jades.
Leave London's round of vulgar joys to those
Who seek in such from base pursuits repose.
Cease to contend with upstart Wealth's parade,
To wring your lands to vie with tricks of trade;
And, proudly spurning Glitter's transient lies,
At least be honest, if you can't be wise!
Worship your household gods, and spend at home
The solid earnings of the generous loam.
Delve, fence, and drain; the dripping waste reclaim;
With spreading woodlands multiply your fame.
Yours let it be to screen the reverent hind,
Who loves your presence, 'gainst the frost and wind;
Scorning to count the profit, raise his lot;
Lure the shy Graces to his lowly cot;
Be, one and all, acknowledged, far and wide,
Patriarchs and patterns of the country side.
And whether demagogues shall rise or fall,
A Cleon mount, or Boänerges bawl,
True to yourselves and native duty, thus
Save this poor England by being virtuous!
And you, Sir, hope of this once famous isle,
Round whom its halo plays, its favours smile,
Hark to the Muse, which, poised on Candour's wings,
Flouts the base crowd, but scorns to flatter kings.
Hark, while she tells you, nor her counsel spurn,
From giddy Pleasure's gilded toys to turn;
That not from minions opulent or coarse
Do Princes gain their lustre and their force;
That Reverence anchors not in deep carouse,
And that a Crown fits only kingly brows!
Fired by each bright example, shun the shade,
Where Scandal best can ply her noxious trade.
511
Learn from your pious Father how to share
With hands, too lonely now, a Kingdom's care.
Be by your fair loved Consort's pattern moved,
And like your virtuous Mother, stand approved;
Do for this England all the Sceptre can,
And be at least a stainless gentleman.
Be this too much, you well may live to find
That firmest Thrones can fail the weak and blind,
And, though no Samson, sharing half his fate,
Pull down the pillars of a mighty State!
Whilst our domestic fortunes thus obey
All-searching Gold's demoralising sway,
We hug the limits of our puny shore,
And Glory knows our once great name no more.
First are we still in every bloodless fray,
Where piles of gold adventurous prows repay;
But when flushed Honour sets the world on fire,
We furl our sails and to our coasts retire;
And, basely calm whilst outraged nations bleed,
Invent new doctrines to excuse our greed.
When gallant Denmark, now the spoiler's prey,
Flashed her bright blade, and faced the unequal fray,
And, all abandoned both by men and gods,
Fell, faint with wounds, before accursèd odds,Where, where was England's vindicating sword,
Her promised arm, to stay the invading horde;
Bid the rude German drop his half-clutched spoil,
And scare the robber from ancestral soil?
The fair young Dane, beloved by every Grace,
And all the Virtues shining in her face,
Who, more an angel than a princess deemed,
Withal was even sweeter than she seemed,
With noisy throats we summoned o'er the foam,
And with cheap cheers escorted to her home.
But when with streaming eye and throbbing breast
She, pious child, her loving fears confessed,
And, leagued with Honour's voice and Valour's ire,
Prayed us to save her country and her sire,
We turned away, and opulently cold,
Put back our swords of steel in sheaths of gold!
512
And yet what sandy base doth Gold afford,
Though crowned by Law, and fenced round by the Sword,
Learn from that Empire which, a scorn for aye,
Grew in a night and perished in a day!
Helped by a magic name and doubtful hour,
See the Adventurer scale the steeps of Power.
Upon him groups of desperate gamesters wait,
To snatch their profit from a sinking State.
Folly, and Fate which Folly still attends,
Conspire to shape and expedite their ends.
The Hour, the Man are here! No pulse? No breath?
Wake, Freedom, wake! In vain! She sleeps like Death.
The impious hands, emboldened by her swoon,
Choke in the night, and slay her in the noon!
Then, when vain crowds with dilatory glaive
Rush to avenge the life they would not save,
The prompt conspirators with lavish hand
Fling their last pieces to a pampered band,
Bribe cut-throat blades Vengeance' choked ways to hold,
And bar the avenues of rage with gold!
Then mark how soon, amid triumphant hymns,
The Imperial purple girds the blood-stained limbs.
The perjured hands a golden sceptre gain,
A crown of gold screens the seared brow of Cain,
And golden eagles, erst of simpler ore,
Assert the Caesar, and his rod restore.
See round his throne Pomp's servile tributes swell,
Not Nero knew, e'er Rome to ruin fell,
Far from his feet the lust of glitter spread,
And the vain herd on Splendour's follies fed!
Nor they alone, the shallow, base, and gay,
Bend to this Idol with the feet of clay:
Statesmen and soldiers kneel with flattering suit,
Kings are his guests, e'en queens his cheeks salute;
Senates extol him, supple priests caress,
And even thou, O Pius, stoop'st to bless!
And the World's verdict, ever blind as base,
Welcomes the `Second Saviour' of the race!
And yet how weak this Empire girt with gold
Did prove to save when Battle's torrents rolled,
513
Have we not seen in ruin, rout, and shame,
Burnt deep in Gaul's for ever broken fame?
What then availed her courts of pomp and pride,
What her bright camps with glittering shows allied?
What, in that hour, the luxury which passed
To soldiers' lips the sybarite repast?
Did all her gold suffice, when steel withstood
Her stride, to make her rash, vain challenge good?
Behold her Chief, in comfort longwhile slung,
By War's rough couch and random fare unstrung
His vaunted Leaders, who to Power had mown
Their path with swords that propped a venal Throne,
Brandishing rival blades, his brain confound,
While still, but sure, the solid foe press round.
See her soft sons, whom arms enervate lead,
Spurn the long marches which to victory speed,
And, fondly deeming Science served by Wealth
Will snatch the fight at distance and by stealth,
Smitten with fear at Valour's downright face,
And taught swift limbs in Flight's ignoble chase!
See one, see all, before the Victor fleet,
Then lay their swords, submissive, at his feet!
O hapless France! e'en then insurgent ire
Had your soiled scutcheon lifted from the mire,
Placed the bright helm on Honour's front once more,
And laurels reaped more lasting than of yore,
Had not rich ease your manhood's marrow stole,
And gold emollient softened all your soul.
O, what a sight-a sight these eyes beheldHer fair green woods by the invader felled;
Her fields and vineyards by the Teuton trod,
Those she once smote encamped upon her sod;
Her homes, in dread, abandoned to the foe,
Or saved from rapine by obsequience low;
Her cities ransomed, provinces o'erawed,
Her iron strongholds wrenched by force or fraud;
Her once proud Paris grovelling in the dust,
And-crowning irony, if lesson justThe grasping victor, loth to quit his hold,
Coaxed slowly homewards o'er a bridge of gold!
514
Is there no warning, England, here, for thee?
Or are Heaven's laws balked by a strip of sea?
Are thy foundations, Albion, so approved,
Thou canst behold such downfall all unmoved?
Have we not marked how this Briarean Gold
Doth all our life and energies enfold?
And as our practice, so our doctrines tooWe shape new ethics for our vices new;
Our sires forswear, our splendid Past defame,
And in high places glory in our shame!
Hear our loud-tinkling Tribunes all declare
Once lavish England hath no blood to spare,
No gold to spend; within her watery wall
She needs to roll and wallow in it all.
Doth towering Might some poor faint Cause oppress,
They bid her turn, impartial, from distress;
Indulge her tears, but hide her ire from sight,
Lest a like doom her angry front invite.
And when this craven caution fails to save
Her peaceful fortunes from the braggart glaive,
They bid her still be moral and be meek,
Hug tight her gold, and turn the other cheek.
Her very sons, sprung from her mighty loins,
We aliens make, to save some paltry coins;
With our own hands destroy our Empire old,
And stutter, `All is lost, except our gold!'
With languid limbs, by comfortable fire,
We see our glories, one by one, expire;
A Nelson's flag, a Churchill's flashing blade,
Debased to menials of rapacious Trade;
Lost by a Cardwell what a Wellesley won,
And by a Gladstone Chatham's world undone!
Pale, gibbering spectres fumbling at the helm,
Whilst dark winds howl, and billowy seas o'erwhelm.
Yet deem you, England, that you thus will save,
Even your wealth from rapine or the grave?
Will your one chain of safety always hold,
Or `silver streak' for ever guard your gold?
If through long slumbrous years the ignoble rust
Of selfish ease your erst bright steel encrust,
When Storm impends, you vainly will implore
The Gods of Ocean to protect your shore.
515
Bribed by the foe, behold Britannia stand
At Freedom's portals with a traitress hand,
Help the Barbarian to its sacred hold,
Then, like Tarpeia, sink oppressed with Gold!
Perish the thought! O, rather let me see
Conspiring myriads bristling on the sea,
Our tranquil coasts bewildered by alarms,
And Britain, singly, face a World in arms!
What if a treacherous Heaven befriend our foes?
Let us go down in glory, as we rose!
And if that doom-the best that could betideBe to our Fame by envious Fate denied,
Then come, primeval clouds and seasons frore,
And wrap in gloom our luckless land once more!
Come, every wind of Heaven that rudely blows,
Plunge back our Isle in never-ending snows!
Rage, Eurus, rage! fierce Boreas, descend!
With glacial mists lost Albion befriend!
E'en of its name be every trace destroyed,
And Dark sit brooding o'er the formless Void!
~ Alfred Austin,#NFDB
1215:Obiit Mdcccxxxiii (Entire)
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou:
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
414
Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;
What seem’d my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
I.
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,
Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.’
II.
415
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
O not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.
III.
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;
A web is wov’n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands–
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,–
A hollow form with empty hands.’
And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
416
IV.
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
‘What is it makes me beat so low?’
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!
Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken’d eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’
V.
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
417
VI.
One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’
That ‘Loss is common to the race’–
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
O father, wheresoe’er thou be,
Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still’d the life that beat from thee.
O mother, praying God will save
Thy sailor,–while thy head is bow’d,
His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.
Ye know no more than I who wrought
At that last hour to please him well;
Who mused on all I had to tell,
And something written, something thought;
Expecting still his advent home;
And ever met him on his way
With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’
Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’
O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,
That sittest ranging golden hair;
And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!
For now her father’s chimney glows
In expectation of a guest;
And thinking ‘this will please him best,’
She takes a riband or a rose;
418
For he will see them on to-night;
And with the thought her colour burns;
And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;
And, even when she turn’d, the curse
Had fallen, and her future Lord
Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,
Or kill’d in falling from his horse.
O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.
VII.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more–
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
VIII.
A happy lover who has come
To look on her that loves him well,
Who ’lights and rings the gateway bell,
And learns her gone and far from home;
419
He saddens, all the magic light
Dies off at once from bower and hall,
And all the place is dark, and all
The chambers emptied of delight:
So find I every pleasant spot
In which we two were wont to meet,
The field, the chamber and the street,
For all is dark where thou art not.
Yet as that other, wandering there
In those deserted walks, may find
A flower beat with rain and wind,
Which once she foster'd up with care;
So seems it in my deep regret,
O my forsaken heart, with thee
And this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.
But since it pleased a vanish’d eye,
I go to plant it on his tomb,
That if it can it there may bloom,
Or dying, there at least may die.
IX.
Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.
So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.
All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro’ early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.
420
Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
X.
I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night:
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
Thou bring’st the sailor to his wife,
And travell’d men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish’d life.
So bring him: we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies: O to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems
To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God;
Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
And hands so often clasp’d in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.
XI.
421
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro’ the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
XII.
Lo, as a dove when up she springs
To bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,
Some dolorous message knit below
The wild pulsation of her wings;
Like her I go; I cannot stay;
I leave this mortal ark behind,
A weight of nerves without a mind,
And leave the cliffs, and haste away
O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,
And reach the glow of southern skies,
And see the sails at distance rise,
And linger weeping on the marge,
422
And saying; ‘Comes he thus, my friend?
Is this the end of all my care?’
And circle moaning in the air:
‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’
And forward dart again, and play
About the prow, and back return
To where the body sits, and learn
That I have been an hour away.
XIII.
Tears of the widower, when he sees
A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these;
Which weep a loss for ever new,
A void where heart on heart reposed;
And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
Silence, till I be silent too.
Which weeps the comrade of my choice,
An awful thought, a life removed,
The human-hearted man I loved,
A Spirit, not a breathing voice.
Come Time, and teach me, many years,
I do not suffer in a dream;
For now so strange do these things seem,
Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;
My fancies time to rise on wing,
And glance about the approaching sails,
As tho’ they brought but merchants’ bales,
And not the burthen that they bring.
XIV.
423
If one should bring me this report,
That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,
And I went down unto the quay,
And found thee lying in the port;
And standing, muffled round with woe,
Should see thy passengers in rank
Come stepping lightly down the plank,
And beckoning unto those they know;
And if along with these should come
The man I held as half-divine;
Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;
And
And
And
And
I should tell him all my pain,
how my life had droop’d of late,
he should sorrow o’er my state
marvel what possess’d my brain;
And I perceived no touch of change,
No hint of death in all his frame,
But found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange.
XV.
To-night the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl’d away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;
The forest crack’d, the waters curl’d,
The cattle huddled on the lea;
And wildly dash’d on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world:
And but for fancies, which aver
That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
424
That makes the barren branches loud;
And but for fear it is not so,
The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.
XVI.
What words are these have fall’n from me?
Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be?
Or doth she only seem to take
The touch of change in calm or storm;
But knows no more of transient form
In her deep self, than some dead lake
That holds the shadow of a lark
Hung in the shadow of a heaven?
Or has the shock, so harshly given,
Confused me like the unhappy bark
That strikes by night a craggy shelf,
And staggers blindly ere she sink?
And stunn’d me from my power to think
And all my knowledge of myself;
And made me that delirious man
Whose fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan?
XVII.
425
Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze
Compell’d thy canvas, and my prayer
Was as the whisper of an air
To breathe thee over lonely seas.
For I in spirit saw thee move
Thro’ circles of the bounding sky,
Week after week: the days go by:
Come quick, thou bringest all I love.
Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.
So may whatever tempest mars
Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;
And balmy drops in summer dark
Slide from the bosom of the stars.
So kind an office hath been done,
Such precious relics brought by thee;
The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run.
XVIII.
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
’Tis little; but it looks in truth
As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest
And in the places of his youth.
Come then, pure hands, and bear the head
That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,
And come, whatever loves to weep,
And hear the ritual of the dead.
426
Ah yet, ev’n yet, if this might be,
I, falling on his faithful heart,
Would breathing thro’ his lips impart
The life that almost dies in me;
That dies not, but endures with pain,
And slowly forms the the firmer mind,
Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.
XIX.
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
That salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,
And hush’d my deepest grief of all,
When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
XX.
The lesser griefs that may be said,
That breathe a thousand tender vows,
Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;
427
Who speak their feeling as it is,
And weep the fulness from the mind:
‘It will be hard,’ they say, ‘to find
Another service such as this.’
My lighter moods are like to these,
That out of words a comfort win;
But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;
For by the hearth the children sit
Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
And scarce endure to draw the breath,
Or like to noiseless phantoms flit:
But open converse is there none,
So much the vital spirits sink
To see the vacant chair, and think,
‘How good! how kind! and he is gone.’
XXI.
I sing to him that rests below,
And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.
The traveller hears me now and then,
And sometimes harshly will he speak:
‘This fellow would make weakness weak,
And melt the waxen hearts of men.’
Another answers, ‘Let him be,
He loves to make parade of pain,
That with his piping he may gain
The praise that comes to constancy.’
A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour
For private sorrow’s barren song,
When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power?
428
‘A time to sicken and to swoon,
When Science reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon?’
Behold, ye speak an idle thing:
Ye never knew the sacred dust:
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing:
And one is glad; her note is gay,
For now her little ones have ranged;
And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stol’n away.
XXII.
The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro’ four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
And we with singing cheer’d the way,
And, crown’d with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:
But where the path we walk’d began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow fear’d of man;
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And dull’d the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, tho’ I walk in haste,
And think, that somewhere in the waste
429
The Shadow sits and waits for me.
XXIII.
Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut,
Or breaking into song by fits,
Alone, alone, to where he sits,
The Shadow cloak’d from head to foot,
Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,
I wander, often falling lame,
And looking back to whence I came,
Or on to where the pathway leads;
And crying, How changed from where it ran
Thro’ lands where not a leaf was dumb;
But all the lavish hills would hum
The murmur of a happy Pan:
When each by turns was guide to each,
And Fancy light from Fancy caught,
And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;
And all we met was fair and good,
And all was good that Time could bring,
And all the secret of the Spring
Moved in the chambers of the blood;
And many an old philosophy
On Argive heights divinely sang,
And round us all the thicket rang
To many a flute of Arcady.
XXIV.
And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?
The very source and fount of Day
430
Is dash’d with wandering isles of night.
If all was good and fair we met,
This earth had been the Paradise
It never look’d to human eyes
Since our first Sun arose and set.
And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?
Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein?
XXV.
I know that this was Life,–the track
Whereon with equal feet we fared;
And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.
But this it was that made me move
As light as carrier-birds in air;
I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love:
Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
When mighty Love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.
XXVI.
Still onward winds the dreary way;
I with it; for I long to prove
No lapse of moons can canker Love,
Whatever fickle tongues may say.
431
And if that eye which watches guilt
And goodness, and hath power to see
Within the green the moulder’d tree,
And towers fall’n as soon as built–
Oh, if indeed that eye foresee
Or see (in Him is no before)
In more of life true life no more
And Love the indifference to be,
Then might I find, ere yet the morn
Breaks hither over Indian seas,
That Shadow waiting with the keys,
To shroud me from my proper scorn.
XXVII.
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
XXVIII.
432
The time draws near the birth of Christ:
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
Four voices of four hamlets round,
From far and near, on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound:
Each voice four changes on the wind,
That now dilate, and now decrease,
Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.
This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish’d no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:
But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll’d me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.
XXIX.
With such compelling cause to grieve
As daily vexes household peace,
And chains regret to his decease,
How dare we keep our Christmas-eve;
Which brings no more a welcome guest
To enrich the threshold of the night
With shower’d largess of delight
In dance and song and game and jest?
Yet go, and while the holly boughs
Entwine the cold baptismal font,
Make one wreath more for Use and Wont,
That guard the portals of the house;
433
Old sisters of a day gone by,
Gray nurses, loving nothing new;
Why should they miss their yearly due
Before their time? They too will die.
XXX.
With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
A rainy cloud possess’d the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.
At our old pastimes in the hall
We gambol’d, making vain pretence
Of gladness, with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.
We paused: the winds were in the beech:
We heard them sweep the winter land;
And in a circle hand-in-hand
Sat silent, looking each at each.
Then echo-like our voices rang;
We sung, tho’ every eye was dim,
A merry song we sang with him
Last year: impetuously we sang:
We ceased: a gentler feeling crept
Upon us: surely rest is meet:
‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’
And silence follow’d, and we wept.
Our voices took a higher range;
Once more we sang: ‘They do not die
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change;
‘Rapt from the fickle and the frail
With gather’d power, yet the same,
Pierces the keen seraphic flame
From orb to orb, from veil to veil.’
434
Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,
Draw forth the cheerful day from night:
O Father, touch the east, and light
The light that shone when Hope was born.
XXXI.
When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,
And home to Mary’s house return’d,
Was this demanded–if he yearn’d
To hear her weeping by his grave?
‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’
There lives no record of reply,
Which telling what it is to die
Had surely added praise to praise.
From every house the neighbours met,
The streets were fill’d with joyful sound,
A solemn gladness even crown’d
The purple brows of Olivet.
Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unreveal’d;
He told it not; or something seal’d
The lips of that Evangelist.
XXXII.
Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,
Nor other thought her mind admits
But, he was dead, and there he sits,
And he that brought him back is there.
Then one deep love doth supersede
All other, when her ardent gaze
Roves from the living brother’s face,
And rests upon the Life indeed.
435
All subtle thought, all curious fears,
Borne down by gladness so complete,
She bows, she bathes the Saviour’s feet
With costly spikenard and with tears.
Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure;
What souls possess themselves so pure,
Or is there blessedness like theirs?
XXXIII.
O thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reach’d a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form,
Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith thro’ form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good:
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!
See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev’n for want of such a type.
XXXIV.
My own dim life should teach me this,
That life shall live for evermore,
Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is;
This round of green, this orb of flame,
436
Fantastic beauty; such as lurks
In some wild Poet, when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.
What then were God to such as I?
’Twere hardly worth my while to choose
Of things all mortal, or to use
A little patience ere I die;
’Twere best at once to sink to peace,
Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness and to cease.
XXXV.
Yet if some voice that man could trust
Should murmur from the narrow house,
‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;
Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’
Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,
But for one hour, O Love, I strive
To keep so sweet a thing alive:’
But I should turn mine ears and hear
The moanings of the homeless sea,
The sound of streams that swift or slow
Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be;
And Love would answer with a sigh,
‘The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead to know that I shall die.’
O me, what profits it to put
And idle case? If Death were seen
At first as Death, Love had not been,
Or been in narrowest working shut,
437
Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,
Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape
Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,
And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.
XXXVI.
Tho’ truths in manhood darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame,
We yield all blessing to the name
Of Him that made them current coin;
For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,
Where truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors.
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought;
Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.
XXXVII.
Urania speaks with darken’d brow:
‘Thou pratest here where thou art least;
This faith has many a purer priest,
And many an abler voice than thou.
‘Go down beside thy native rill,
On thy Parnassus set thy feet,
And hear thy laurel whisper sweet
About the ledges of the hill.’
And my Melpomene replies,
438
A touch of shame upon her cheek:
‘I am not worthy ev’n to speak
Of thy prevailing mysteries;
‘For I am but an earthly Muse,
And owning but a little art
To lull with song an aching heart,
And render human love his dues;
‘But brooding on the dear one dead,
And all he said of things divine,
(And dear to me as sacred wine
To dying lips is all he said),
‘I murmur’d, as I came along,
Of comfort clasp’d in truth reveal’d;
And loiter’d in the master’s field,
And darken’d sanctities with song.’
XXXVIII.
With weary steps I loiter on,
Tho’ always under alter’d skies
The purple from the distance dies,
My prospect and horizon gone.
No joy the blowing season gives,
The herald melodies of spring,
But in the songs I love to sing
A doubtful gleam of solace lives.
If any care for what is here
Survive in spirits render’d free,
Then are these songs I sing of thee
Not all ungrateful to thine ear.
XXXIX.
Old warder of these buried bones,
439
And answering now my random stroke
With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
Dark yew, that graspest at the stones
And dippest toward the dreamless head,
To thee too comes the golden hour
When flower is feeling after flower;
But Sorrow–fixt upon the dead,
And darkening the dark graves of men,–
What whisper’d from her lying lips?
Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,
And passes into gloom again.
XL.
Could we forget the widow’d hour
And look on Spirits breathed away,
As on a maiden in the day
When first she wears her orange-flower!
When crown’d with blessing she doth rise
To take her latest leave of home,
And hopes and light regrets that come
Make April of her tender eyes;
And doubtful joys the father move,
And tears are on the mother’s face,
As parting with a long embrace
She enters other realms of love;
Her office there to rear, to teach,
Becoming as is meet and fit
A link among the days, to knit
The generations each with each;
And, doubtless, unto thee is given
A life that bears immortal fruit
In those great offices that suit
The full-grown energies of heaven.
Ay me, the difference I discern!
440
How often shall her old fireside
Be cheer’d with tidings of the bride,
How often she herself return,
And tell them all they would have told,
And bring her babe, and make her boast,
Till even those that miss’d her most
Shall count new things as dear as old:
But thou and I have shaken hands,
Till growing winters lay me low;
My paths are in the fields I know,
And thine in undiscover’d lands.
XLI.
The spirit ere our fatal loss
Did ever rise from high to higher;
As mounts the heavenward altar-fire,
As flies the lighter thro’ the gross.
But thou art turn’d to something strange,
And I have lost the links that bound
Thy changes; here upon the ground,
No more partaker of thy change.
Deep folly! yet that this could be–
That I could wing my will with might
To leap the grades of life and light,
And flash at once, my friend, to thee.
For tho’ my nature rarely yields
To that vague fear implied in death;
Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,
The howlings from forgotten fields;
Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor
An inner trouble I behold,
A spectral doubt which makes me cold,
That I shall be thy mate no more,
441
Tho’ following with an upward mind
The wonders that have come to thee,
Thro’ all the secular to-be,
But evermore a life behind.
XLII.
I vex my heart with fancies dim:
He still outstript me in the race;
It was but unity of place
That made me dream I rank’d with him.
And so may Place retain us still,
And he the much-beloved again,
A lord of large experience, train
To riper growth the mind and will:
And what delights can equal those
That stir the spirit’s inner deeps,
When one that loves but knows not, reaps
A truth from one that loves and knows?
XLIII.
If Sleep and Death be truly one,
And every spirit’s folded bloom
Thro’ all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;
Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the colour of the flower:
So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;
And love will last as pure and whole
442
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul.
XLIV.
How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
The days have vanish’d, tone and tint,
And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
A little flash, a mystic hint;
And in the long harmonious years
(If Death so taste Lethean springs),
May some dim touch of earthly things
Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.
If such a dreamy touch should fall,
O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
My guardian angel will speak out
In that high place, and tell thee all.
XLV.
The baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I:’
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of ‘I,’ and ‘me,’
And finds ‘I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.’
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
443
As thro’ the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
XLVI.
We ranging down this lower track,
The path we came by, thorn and flower,
Is shadow’d by the growing hour,
Lest life should fail in looking back.
So be it: there no shade can last
In that deep dawn behind the tomb,
But clear from marge to marge shall bloom
The eternal landscape of the past;
A lifelong tract of time reveal’d;
The fruitful hours of still increase;
Days order’d in a wealthy peace,
And those five years its richest field.
O Love, thy province were not large,
A bounded field, nor stretching far;
Look also, Love, a brooding star,
A rosy warmth from marge to marge.
XLVII.
That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,
Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
444
And I shall know him when we meet:
And we shall sit at endless feast,
Enjoying each the other’s good:
What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
Upon the last and sharpest height,
Before the spirits fade away,
Some landing-place, to clasp and say,
‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.’
XLVIII.
If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,
Were taken to be such as closed
Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn:
Her care is not to part and prove;
She takes, when harsher moods remit,
What slender shade of doubt may flit,
And makes it vassal unto love:
And hence, indeed, she sports with words,
But better serves a wholesome law,
And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords:
Nor dare she trust a larger lay,
But rather loosens from the lip
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
XLIX.
From art, from nature, from the schools,
Let random influences glance,
Like light in many a shiver’d lance
445
That breaks about the dappled pools:
The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,
The fancy’s tenderest eddy wreathe,
The slightest air of song shall breathe
To make the sullen surface crisp.
And look thy look, and go thy way,
But blame not thou the winds that make
The seeming-wanton ripple break,
The tender-pencil’d shadow play.
Beneath all fancied hopes and fears
Ay me, the sorrow deepens down,
Whose muffled motions blindly drown
The bases of my life in tears.
L.
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
LI.
446
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be near us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide?
No inner vileness that we dread?
Shall he for whose applause I strove,
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame
And I be lessen’d in his love?
I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.
Be near us when we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.
LII.
I cannot love thee as I ought,
For love reflects the thing beloved;
My words are only words, and moved
Upon the topmost froth of thought.
‘Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,’
The Spirit of true love replied;
‘Thou canst not move me from thy side,
Nor human frailty do me wrong.
‘What keeps a spirit wholly true
To that ideal which he bears?
What record? not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:
‘So fret not, like an idle girl,
That life is dash’d with flecks of sin.
Abide: thy wealth is gather’d in,
When Time hath sunder’d shell from pearl.’
447
LIII.
How many a father have I seen,
A sober man, among his boys,
Whose youth was full of foolish noise,
Who wears his manhood hale and green:
And dare we to this fancy give,
That had the wild oat not been sown,
The soil, left barren, scarce had grown
The grain by which a man may live?
Or, if we held the doctrine sound
For life outliving heats of youth,
Yet who would preach it as a truth
To those that eddy round and round?
Hold thou the good: define it well:
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell.
LIV.
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
448
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last–far off–at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
LV.
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
LVI.
449
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
LVII.
Peace; come away: the song of woe
Is after all an earthly song:
Peace; come away: we do him wrong
To sing so wildly: let us go.
450
Come; let us go: your cheeks are pale;
But half my life I leave behind:
Methinks my friend is richly shrined;
But I shall pass; my work will fail.
Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever look’d with human eyes.
I hear it now, and o’er and o’er,
Eternal greetings to the dead;
And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said,
‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore.
LVIII.
In those sad words I took farewell:
Like echoes in sepulchral halls,
As drop by drop the water falls
In vaults and catacombs, they fell;
And, falling, idly broke the peace
Of hearts that beat from day to day,
Half-conscious of their dying clay,
And those cold crypts where they shall cease.
The high Muse answer’d: ‘Wherefore grieve
Thy brethren with a fruitless tear?
Abide a little longer here,
And thou shalt take a nobler leave.’
LIX.
O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be;
O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,
451
Be sometimes lovely like a bride,
And put thy harsher moods aside,
If thou wilt have me wise and good.
My centred passion cannot move,
Nor will it lessen from to-day;
But I’ll have leave at times to play
As with the creature of my love;
And set thee forth, for thou art mine,
With so much hope for years to come,
That, howsoe’er I know thee, some
Could hardly tell what name were thine.
LX.
He past; a soul of nobler tone:
My spirit loved and loves him yet,
Like some poor girl whose heart is set
On one whose rank exceeds her own.
He mixing with his proper sphere,
She finds the baseness of her lot,
Half jealous of she knows not what,
And envying all that meet him there.
The little village looks forlorn;
She sighs amid her narrow days,
Moving about the household ways,
In that dark house where she was born.
The foolish neighbours come and go,
And tease her till the day draws by:
At night she weeps, ‘How vain am I!
How should he love a thing so low?’
LXI.
If, in thy second state sublime,
452
Thy ransom’d reason change replies
With all the circle of the wise,
The perfect flower of human time;
And if thou cast thine eyes below,
How dimly character’d and slight,
How dwarf’d a growth of cold and night,
How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!
Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man:
I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakespeare love thee more.
LXII.
Tho’ if an eye that’s downward cast
Could make thee somewhat blench or fail,
Then be my love an idle tale,
And fading legend of the past;
And thou, as one that once declined,
When he was little more than boy,
On some unworthy heart with joy,
But lives to wed an equal mind;
And breathes a novel world, the while
His other passion wholly dies,
Or in the light of deeper eyes
Is matter for a flying smile.
LXIII.
Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven,
And love in which my hound has part,
Can hang no weight upon my heart
In its assumptions up to heaven;
And I am so much more than these,
As thou, perchance, art more than I,
And yet I spare them sympathy,
453
And I would set their pains at ease.
So mayst thou watch me where I weep,
As, unto vaster motions bound,
The circuits of thine orbit round
A higher height, a deeper deep.
LXIV.
Dost thou look back on what hath been,
As some divinely gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star;
Who makes by force his merit known
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mould a mighty state’s decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;
And moving up from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope
The pillar of a people’s hope,
The centre of a world’s desire;
Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
When all his active powers are still,
A distant dearness in the hill,
A secret sweetness in the stream,
The limit of his narrower fate,
While yet beside its vocal springs
He play’d at counsellors and kings,
With one that was his earliest mate;
Who ploughs with pain his native lea
And reaps the labour of his hands,
454
Or in the furrow musing stands;
‘Does my old friend remember me?’
LXV.
Sweet soul, do with me as thou wilt;
I lull a fancy trouble-tost
With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost,
A little grain shall not be spilt.’
And in that solace can I sing,
Till out of painful phases wrought
There flutters up a happy thought,
Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:
Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee
And move thee on to noble ends.
LXVI.
You thought my heart too far diseased;
You wonder when my fancies play
To find me gay among the gay,
Like one with any trifle pleased.
The shade by which my life was crost,
Which makes a desert in the mind,
Has made me kindly with my kind,
And like to him whose sight is lost;
Whose feet are guided thro’ the land,
Whose jest among his friends is free,
Who takes the children on his knee,
And winds their curls about his hand:
He plays with threads, he beats his chair
For pastime, dreaming of the sky;
His inner day can never die,
455
His night of loss is always there.
LXVII.
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o’er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.
LXVIII.
When in the down I sink my head,
Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead:
I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn,
When all our path was fresh with dew,
And all the bugle breezes blew
Reveillée to the breaking morn.
But what is this? I turn about,
I find a trouble in thine eye,
Which makes me sad I know not why,
Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:
456
But ere the lark hath left the lea
I wake, and I discern the truth;
It is the trouble of my youth
That foolish sleep transfers to thee.
LXIX.
I dream’d there would be Spring no more,
That Nature’s ancient power was lost:
The streets were black with smoke and frost,
They chatter’d trifles at the door:
I wander’d from the noisy town,
I found a wood with thorny boughs:
I took the thorns to bind my brows,
I wore them like a civic crown:
I met with scoffs, I met with scorns
From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
They call’d me in the public squares
The fool that wears a crown of thorns:
They call’d me fool, they call’d me child:
I found an angel of the night;
The voice was low, the look was bright;
He look’d upon my crown and smiled:
He reach’d the glory of a hand,
That seem’d to touch it into leaf:
The voice was not the voice of grief,
The words were hard to understand.
LXX.
I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night;
457
Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;
And crowds that stream from yawning doors,
And shoals of pucker’d faces drive;
Dark bulks that tumble half alive,
And lazy lengths on boundless shores;
Till all at once beyond the will
I hear a wizard music roll,
And thro’ a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.
LXXI.
Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance
And madness, thou hast forged at last
A night-long Present of the Past
In which we went thro’ summer France.
Hadst thou such credit with the soul?
Then bring an opiate trebly strong,
Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong
That so my pleasure may be whole;
While now we talk as once we talk’d
Of men and minds, the dust of change,
The days that grow to something strange,
In walking as of old we walk’d
Beside the river’s wooded reach,
The fortress, and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge,
The breaker breaking on the beach.
LXXII.
458
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,
And howlest, issuing out of night,
With blasts that blow the poplar white,
And lash with storm the streaming pane?
Day, when my crown’d estate begun
To pine in that reverse of doom,
Which sicken’d every living bloom,
And blurr’d the splendour of the sun;
Who usherest in the dolorous hour
With thy quick tears that make the rose
Pull sideways, and the daisy close
Her crimson fringes to the shower;
Who might’st have heaved a windless flame
Up the deep East, or, whispering, play’d
A chequer-work of beam and shade
Along the hills, yet look’d the same.
As wan, as chill, as wild as now;
Day, mark’d as with some hideous crime,
When the dark hand struck down thro’ time,
And cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,
Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows
Thro’ clouds that drench the morning star,
And whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar,
And sow the sky with flying boughs,
And up thy vault with roaring sound
Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
And hide thy shame beneath the ground.
LXXIII.
So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be,
How know I what had need of thee,
For thou wert strong as thou wert true?
459
The fame is quench’d that I foresaw,
The head hath miss’d an earthly wreath:
I curse not nature, no, nor death;
For nothing is that errs from law.
We pass; the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age? It rests with God.
O hollow wraith of dying fame,
Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-infolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name.
LXXIV.
As sometimes in a dead man’s face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out–to some one of his race:
So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,
I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old.
But there is more than I can see,
And what I see I leave unsaid,
Nor speak it, knowing Death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee.
LXXV.
I leave thy praises unexpress’d
In verse that brings myself relief,
And by the measure of my grief
I leave thy greatness to be guess’d;
What practice howsoe’er expert
460
In fitting aptest words to things,
Or voice the richest-toned that sings,
Hath power to give thee as thou wert?
I care not in these fading days
To raise a cry that lasts not long,
And round thee with the breeze of song
To stir a little dust of praise.
Thy leaf has perish’d in the green,
And, while we breathe beneath the sun,
The world which credits what is done
Is cold to all that might have been.
So here shall silence guard thy fame;
But somewhere, out of human view,
Whate’er thy hands are set to do
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.
LXXVI.
Take wings of fancy, and ascend,
And in a moment set thy face
Where all the starry heavens of space
Are sharpen’d to a needle’s end;
Take wings of foresight; lighten thro’
The secular abyss to come,
And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb
Before the mouldering of a yew;
And if the matin songs, that woke
The darkness of our planet, last,
Thine own shall wither in the vast,
Ere half the lifetime of an oak.
Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers
With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain;
And what are they when these remain
The ruin’d shells of hollow towers?
461
LXXVII.
What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?
These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane
A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.
But what of that? My darken’d ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.
LXXVIII.
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess’d the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:
The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.
Who show’d a token of distress?
462
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?
O last regret, regret can die!
No–mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.
LXXIX.
‘More than my brothers are to me,’–
Let this not vex thee, noble heart!
I know thee of what force thou art
To hold the costliest love in fee.
But thou and I are one in kind,
As moulded like in Nature’s mint;
And hill and wood and field did print
The same sweet forms in either mind.
For us the same cold streamlet curl’d
Thro’ all his eddying coves; the same
All winds that roam the twilight came
In whispers of the beauteous world.
At one dear knee we proffer’d vows,
One lesson from one book we learn’d,
Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turn’d
To black and brown on kindred brows.
And so my wealth resembles thine,
But he was rich where I was poor,
And he supplied my want the more
As his unlikeness fitted mine.
LXXX.
If any vague desire should rise,
463
That holy Death ere Arthur died
Had moved me kindly from his side,
And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;
Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,
The grief my loss in him had wrought,
A grief as deep as life or thought,
But stay’d in peace with God and man.
I make a picture in the brain;
I hear the sentence that he speaks;
He bears the burthen of the weeks
But turns his burthen into gain.
His credit thus shall set me free;
And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
Unused example from the grave
Reach out dead hands to comfort me.
LXXXI.
Could I have said while he was here,
‘My love shall now no further range;
There cannot come a mellower change,
For now is love mature in ear.’
Love, then, had hope of richer store:
What end is here to my complaint?
This haunting whisper makes me faint,
‘More years had made me love thee more.’
But Death returns an answer sweet:
‘My sudden frost was sudden gain,
And gave all ripeness to the grain,
It might have drawn from after-heat.’
LXXXII.
I wage not any feud with Death
For changes wrought on form and face;
464
No lower life that earth’s embrace
May breed with him, can fright my faith.
Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks;
And these are but the shatter’d stalks,
Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.
Nor blame I Death, because he bare
The use of virtue out of earth:
I know transplanted human worth
Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.
For this alone on Death I wreak
The wrath that garners in my heart;
He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.
LXXXIII.
Dip down upon the northern shore,
O sweet new-year delaying long;
Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
Delaying long, delay no more.
What stays thee from the clouded noons,
Thy sweetness from its proper place?
Can trouble live with April days,
Or sadness in the summer moons?
Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,
The little speedwell’s darling blue,
Deep tulips dash’d with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.
O thou, new-year, delaying long,
Delayest the sorrow in my blood,
That longs to burst a frozen bud
And flood a fresher throat with song.
465
LXXXIV.
When I contemplate all alone
The life that had been thine below,
And fix my thoughts on all the glow
To which thy crescent would have grown;
I see thee sitting crown’d with good,
A central warmth diffusing bliss
In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,
On all the branches of thy blood;
Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;
For now the day was drawing on,
When thou should’st link thy life with one
Of mine own house, and boys of thine
Had babbled ‘Uncle’ on my knee;
But that remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.
I seem to meet their least desire,
To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.
I see their unborn faces shine
Beside the never-lighted fire.
I see myself an honour’d guest,
Thy partner in the flowery walk
Of letters, genial table-talk,
Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;
While now thy prosperous labour fills
The lips of men with honest praise,
And sun by sun the happy days
Descend below the golden hills
With promise of a morn as fair;
And all the train of bounteous hours
Conduct by paths of growing powers,
To reverence and the silver hair;
Till slowly worn her earthly robe,
466
Her lavish mission richly wrought,
Leaving great legacies of thought,
Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;
What time mine own might also flee,
As link’d with thine in love and fate,
And, hovering o’er the dolorous strait
To the other shore, involved in thee,
Arrive at last the blessed goal,
And He that died in Holy Land
Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul.
What reed was that on which I leant?
Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake
The old bitterness again, and break
The low beginnings of content.
LXXXV.
This truth came borne with bier and pall,
I felt it, when I sorrow’d most,
’Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all–
O true in word, and tried in deed,
Demanding, so to bring relief
To this which is our common grief,
What kind of life is that I lead;
And whether trust in things above
Be dimm’d of sorrow, or sustain’d;
And whether love for him have drain’d
My capabilities of love;
Your words have virtue such as draws
A faithful answer from the breast,
Thro’ light reproaches, half exprest,
And loyal unto kindly laws.
467
My blood an even tenor kept,
Till on mine ear this message falls,
That in Vienna’s fatal walls
God’s finger touch’d him, and he slept.
The great Intelligences fair
That range above our mortal state,
In circle round the blessed gate,
Received and gave him welcome there;
And led him thro’ the blissful climes,
And show'd him in the fountain fresh
All knowledge that the sons of flesh
Shall gather in the cycled times.
But I remained, whose hopes were dim,
Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,
To wander on a darkened earth,
Where all things round me breathed of him.
friendship, equal poised control,
heart, with kindliest motion warm,
sacred essence, other form,
solemn ghost, O crowned soul!
Yet none could better know than I,
How much of act at human hands
The sense of human will demands
By which we dare to live or die.
Whatever way my days decline,
I felt and feel, tho’ left alone,
His being working in mine own,
The footsteps of his life in mine;
A life that all the Muses decked
With gifts of grace, that might express
All comprehensive tenderness,
All-subtilising intellect:
And so my passion hath not swerved
To works of weakness, but I find
468
An image comforting the mind,
And in my grief a strength reserved.
Likewise the imaginative woe,
That loved to handle spiritual strife,
Diffused the shock thro’ all my life,
But in the present broke the blow.
My pulses therefore beat again
For other friends that once I met;
Nor can it suit me to forget
The mighty hopes that make us men.
I woo your love: I count it crime
To mourn for any overmuch;
I, the divided half of such
A friendship as had master’d Time;
Which masters Time indeed, and is
Eternal, separate from fears:
The all-assuming months and years
Can take no part away from this:
But Summer on the steaming floods,
And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,
And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,
That gather in the waning woods,
And every pulse of wind and wave
Recalls, in change of light or gloom,
My old affection of the tomb,
And my prime passion in the grave:
My old affection of the tomb,
A part of stillness, yearns to speak:
‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek
A friendship for the years to come.
‘I watch thee from the quiet shore;
Thy spirit up to mine can reach;
But in dear words of human speech
We two communicate no more.’
469
And I, ‘Can clouds of nature stain
The starry clearness of the free?
How is it? Canst thou feel for me
Some painless sympathy with pain?’
And lightly does the whisper fall;
‘’Tis hard for thee to fathom this;
I triumph in conclusive bliss,
And that serene result of all.’
So hold I commerce with the dead;
Or so methinks the dead would say;
Or so shall grief with symbols play
And pining life be fancy-fed.
Now looking to some settled end,
That these things pass, and I shall prove
A meeting somewhere, love with love,
I crave your pardon, O my friend;
If not so fresh, with love as true,
I, clasping brother-hands aver
I could not, if I would, transfer
The whole I felt for him to you.
For which be they that hold apart
The promise of the golden hours?
First love, first friendship, equal powers,
That marry with the virgin heart.
Still mine, that cannot but deplore,
That beats within a lonely place,
That yet remembers his embrace,
But at his footstep leaps no more,
My heart, tho’ widow’d, may not rest
Quite in the love of what is gone,
But seeks to beat in time with one
That warms another living breast.
Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,
470
Knowing the primrose yet is dear,
The primrose of the later year,
As not unlike to that of Spring.
LXXXVI.
Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
The round of space, and rapt below
Thro’ all the dewy-tassell’d wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odour streaming far,
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace.’
LXXXVII.
I past beside the reverend walls
In which of old I wore the gown;
I roved at random thro’ the town,
And saw the tumult of the halls;
And heard one more in college fanes
The storm their high-built organs make,
And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophet blazon’d on the panes;
And caught one more the distant shout,
The measured pulse of racing oars
471
Among the willows; paced the shores
And many a bridge, and all about
The same gray flats again, and felt
The same, but not the same; and last
Up that long walk of limes I past
To see the rooms in which he dwelt.
Another name was on the door:
I linger’d; all within was noise
Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
That crash’d the glass and beat the floor;
Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land;
When one would aim an arrow fair,
But send it slackly from the string;
And one would pierce an outer ring,
And one an inner, here and there;
And last the master-bowman, he,
Would cleave the mark. A willing ear
We lent him. Who, but hung to hear
The rapt oration flowing free
From point to point, with power and grace
And music in the bounds of law,
To those conclusions when we saw
The God within him light his face,
And seem to lift the form, and glow
In azure orbits heavenly wise;
And over those ethereal eyes
The bar of Michael Angelo.
LXXXVIII.
472
Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden thro’ the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy:
And I–my harp would prelude woe–
I cannot all command the strings;
The glory of the sum of things
Will flash along the chords and go.
LXXXIX.
Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
And thou, with all thy breadth and height
Of foliage, towering sycamore;
How often, hither wandering down,
My Arthur found your shadows fair,
And shook to all the liberal air
The dust and din and steam of town:
He brought an eye for all he saw;
He mixt in all our simple sports;
They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
And dusty purlieus of the law.
O joy to him in this retreat,
Immantled in ambrosial dark,
To drink the cooler air, and mark
The landscape winking thro’ the heat:
O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
473
O bliss, when all in circle drawn
About him, heart and ear were fed
To hear him, as he lay and read
The Tuscan poets on the lawn:
Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon:
Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
And break the livelong summer day
With banquet in the distant woods;
Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
Discuss’d the books to love or hate,
Or touch’d the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream;
But if I praised the busy town,
He loved to rail against it still,
For ‘ground in yonder social mill
We rub each other’s angles down,
‘And merge’ he said ‘in form and gloss
The picturesque of man and man.’
We talk’d: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,
Or cool’d within the glooming wave;
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fall’n into her father’s grave,
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honied hours.
474
XC.
He tasted love with half his mind,
Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
Where nighest heaven, who first could fling
This bitter seed among mankind;
That could the dead, whose dying eyes
Were closed with wail, resume their life,
They would but find in child and wife
An iron welcome when they rise:
’Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,
To pledge them with a kindly tear,
To talk them o’er, to wish them here,
To count their memories half divine;
But if they came who past away,
Behold their brides in other hands;
The hard heir strides about their lands,
And will not yield them for a day.
Yea, tho’ their sons were none of these,
Not less the yet-loved sire would make
Confusion worse than death, and shake
The pillars of domestic peace.
Ah dear, but come thou back to me:
Whatever change the years have wrought,
I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee.
XCI.
When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;
Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish’d years
475
Be large and lucid round thy brow.
When summer’s hourly-mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;
Come: not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after form,
And like a finer light in light.
XCII.
If any vision should reveal
Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal
To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.
Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And tho’ the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning true,
They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,
And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.
XCIII.
I shall not see thee. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land
476
Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay?
No visual shade of some one lost,
But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.
O, therefore from thy sightless range
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,
Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My Ghost may feel that thine is near.
XCIV.
How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.
In vain shalt thou, or any, call
The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all.
They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:
But when the heart is full of din,
And doubt beside the portal waits,
They can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within.
XCV.
477
By night we linger’d on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o’er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;
And calm that let the tapers burn
Unwavering: not a cricket chirr’d:
The brook alone far-off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn:
And bats went round in fragrant skies,
And wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;
While now we sang old songs that peal’d
From knoll to knoll, where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field.
But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fall’n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love’s dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro’ wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
478
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
Æonian music measuring out
The steps of Time–the shocks of Chance–
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or ev’n for intellect to reach
Thro’ memory that which I became:
Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
And suck’d from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o’er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said
‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.
XCVI.
479
You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinaï’s peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.
XCVII.
My love has talk’d with rocks and trees;
He finds on misty mountain-ground
His own vast shadow glory-crown’d;
He sees himself in all he sees.
Two partners of a married life–
I look’d on these and thought of thee
In vastness and in mystery,
And of my spirit as of a wife.
480
These two–they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die.
Their love has never past away;
The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate’er the faithless people say.
Her life is lone, he sits apart,
He loves her yet, she will not weep,
Tho’ rapt in matters dark and deep
He seems to slight her simple heart.
He
He
He
He
thrids the labyrinth of the mind,
reads the secret of the star,
seems so near and yet so far,
looks so cold: she thinks him kind.
She keeps the gift of years before,
A wither’d violet is her bliss:
She knows not what his greatness is,
For that, for all, she loves him more.
For him she plays, to him she sings
Of early faith and plighted vows;
She knows but matters of the house,
And he, he knows a thousand things.
Her faith is fixt and cannot move,
She darkly feels him great and wise,
She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
‘I cannot understand: I love.’
XCVIII.
You leave us: you will see the Rhine,
And those fair hills I sail’d below,
When I was there with him; and go
481
By summer belts of wheat and vine
To where he breathed his latest breath,
That City. All her splendour seems
No livelier than the wisp that gleams
On Lethe in the eyes of Death.
Let her great Danube rolling fair
Enwind her isles, unmark’d of me:
I have not seen, I will not see
Vienna; rather dream that there,
A treble darkness, Evil haunts
The birth, the bridal; friend from friend
Is oftener parted, fathers bend
Above more graves, a thousand wants
Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey
By each cold hearth, and sadness flings
Her shadow on the blaze of kings:
And yet myself have heard him say,
That not in any mother town
With statelier progress to and fro
The double tides of chariots flow
By park and suburb under brown
Of lustier leaves; nor more content,
He told me, lives in any crowd,
When all is gay with lamps, and loud
With sport and song, in booth and tent,
Imperial halls, or open plain;
And wheels the circled dance, and breaks
The rocket molten into flakes
Of crimson or in emerald rain.
XCIX.
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,
So loud with voices of the birds,
482
So thick with lowings of the herds,
Day, when I lost the flower of men;
Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red
On yon swoll’n brook that bubbles fast
By meadows breathing of the past,
And woodlands holy to the dead;
Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves
A song that slights the coming care,
And Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves;
Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
To myriads on the genial earth,
Memories of bridal, or of birth,
And unto myriads more, of death.
O wheresoever those may be,
Betwixt the slumber of the poles,
To-day they count as kindred souls;
They know me not, but mourn with me.
C.
I climb the hill: from end to end
Of all the landscape underneath,
I find no place that does not breathe
Some gracious memory of my friend;
No gray old grange, or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;
Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw
That hears the latest linnet trill,
Nor quarry trench’d along the hill
And haunted by the wrangling daw;
Nor runlet tinkling from the rock;
Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves
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To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock;
But each has pleased a kindred eye,
And each reflects a kindlier day;
And, leaving these, to pass away,
I think once more he seems to die.
CI.
Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away;
Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove;
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child;
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.
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CII.
We leave the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky;
The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,
Will shelter one of stranger race.
We go, but ere we go from home,
As down the garden-walks I move,
Two spirits of a diverse love
Contend for loving masterdom.
One whispers, ‘Here thy boyhood sung
Long since its matin song, and heard
The low love-language of the bird
In native hazels tassel-hung.’
The other answers, ‘Yea, but here
Thy feet have stray’d in after hours
With thy lost friend among the bowers,
And this hath made them trebly dear.’
These two have striven half the day,
And each prefers his separate claim,
Poor rivals in a losing game,
That will not yield each other way.
I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another’s arms
To one pure image of regret.
CIII.
On that last night before we went
From out the doors where I was bred,
I dream’d a vision of the dead,
Which left my after-morn content.
Methought I dwelt within a hall,
And maidens with me: distant hills
485
From hidden summits fed with rills
A river sliding by the wall.
The hall with harp and carol rang.
They sang of what is wise and good
And graceful. In the centre stood
A statue veil’d, to which they sang;
And which, tho’ veil’d, was known to me,
The shape of him I loved, and love
For ever: then flew in a dove
And brought a summons from the sea:
And when they learnt that I must go
They wept and wail’d, but led the way
To where a little shallop lay
At anchor in the flood below;
And on by many a level mead,
And shadowing bluff that made the banks,
We glided winding under ranks
Of iris, and the golden reed;
And still as vaster grew the shore
And roll’d the floods in grander space,
The maidens gather’d strength and grace
And presence, lordlier than before;
And I myself, who sat apart
And watch’d them, wax’d in every limb;
I felt the thews of Anakim,
The pulses of a Titan’s heart;
As one would sing the death of war,
And one would chant the history
Of that great race, which is to be,
And one the shaping of a star;
Until the forward-creeping tides
Began to foam, and we to draw
From deep to deep, to where we saw
A great ship lift her shining sides.
486
The man we loved was there on deck,
But thrice as large as man he bent
To greet us. Up the side I went,
And fell in silence on his neck:
Whereat those maidens with one mind
Bewail’d their lot; I did them wrong:
‘We served thee here’ they said, ‘so long,
And wilt thou leave us now behind?’
So rapt I was, they could not win
An answer from my lips, but he
Replying, ‘Enter likewise ye
And go with us:’ they enter’d in.
And while the wind began to sweep
A music out of sheet and shroud,
We steer’d her toward a crimson cloud
That landlike slept along the deep.
CIV.
The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid, the night is still;
A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist.
A single peal of bells below,
That wakens at this hour of rest
A single murmur in the breast,
That these are not the bells I know.
Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
In lands where not a memory strays,
Nor landmark breathes of other days,
But all is new unhallow’d ground.
CV.
487
To-night ungather’d let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand:
We live within the stranger’s land,
And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.
Our father’s dust is left alone
And silent under other snows:
There in due time the woodbine blows,
The violet comes, but we are gone.
No more shall wayward grief abuse
The genial hour with mask and mime;
For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use.
Let cares that petty shadows cast,
By which our lives are chiefly proved,
A little spare the night I loved,
And hold it solemn to the past.
But let no footstep beat the floor,
Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
For who would keep an ancient form
Thro’ which the spirit breathes no more?
Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown;
No dance, no motion, save alone
What lightens in the lucid east
Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
Run out your measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good.
CVI.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
488
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring
Ring
Ring
Ring
out old shapes of foul disease;
out the narrowing lust of gold;
out the thousand wars of old,
in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
CVII.
It is the day when he was born,
A bitter day that early sank
489
Behind a purple-frosty bank
Of vapour, leaving night forlorn.
The time admits not flowers or leaves
To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies
The blast of North and East, and ice
Makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves,
And bristles all the brakes and thorns
To yon hard crescent, as she hangs
Above the wood which grides and clangs
Its leafless ribs and iron horns
Together, in the drifts that pass
To darken on the rolling brine
That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,
Arrange the board and brim the glass;
Bring in great logs and let them lie,
To make a solid core of heat;
Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat
Of all things ev’n as he were by;
We keep the day. With festal cheer,
With books and music, surely we
Will drink to him, whate’er he be,
And sing the songs he loved to hear.
CVIII.
I will not shut me from my kind,
And, lest I stiffen into stone,
I will not eat my heart alone,
Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:
What profit lies in barren faith,
And vacant yearning, tho’ with might
To scale the heaven’s highest height,
Or dive below the wells of Death?
What find I in the highest place,
But mine own phantom chanting hymns?
490
And on the depths of death there swims
The reflex of a human face.
I'll rather take what fruit may be
Of sorrow under human skies:
’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.
CIX.
Heart-affluence in discursive talk
From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye,
That saw thro’ all the Muses’ walk;
Seraphic intellect and force
To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassion’d logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course;
High nature amorous of the good,
But touch’d with no ascetic gloom;
And passion pure in snowy bloom
Thro’ all the years of April blood;
A love of freedom rarely felt,
Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;
And manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;
All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look’d on: if they look’d in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.
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CX.
Thy converse drew us with delight,
The men of rathe and riper years:
The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,
Forgot his weakness in thy sight.
On thee the loyal-hearted hung,
The proud was half disarm’d of pride,
Nor cared the serpent at thy side
To flicker with his double tongue.
The stern were mild when thou wert by,
The flippant put himself to school
And heard thee, and the brazen fool
Was soften’d, and he knew not why;
While I, thy nearest, sat apart,
And felt thy triumph was as mine;
And loved them more, that they were thine,
The graceful tact, the Christian art;
Nor mine the sweetness or the skill,
But mine the love that will not tire,
And, born of love, the vague desire
That spurs an imitative will.
CXI.
The churl in spirit, up or down
Along the scale of ranks, thro’ all,
To him who grasps a golden ball,
By blood a king, at heart a clown;
The churl in spirit, howe’er he veil
His want in forms for fashion’s sake,
Will let his coltish nature break
At seasons thro’ the gilded pale:
For who can always act? but he,
To whom a thousand memories call,
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Not being less but more than all
The gentleness he seem’d to be,
Best seem’d the thing he was, and join’d
Each office of the social hour
To noble manners, as the flower
And native growth of noble mind;
Nor ever narrowness or spite,
Or villain fancy fleeting by,
Drew in the expression of an eye,
Where God and Nature met in light;
And thus he bore without abuse
The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soil’d with all ignoble use.
CXII.
High wisdom holds my wisdom less,
That I, who gaze with temperate eyes
On glorious insufficiencies,
Set light by narrower perfectness.
But thou, that fillest all the room
Of all my love, art reason why
I seem to cast a careless eye
On souls, the lesser lords of doom.
For what wert thou? some novel power
Sprang up for ever at a touch,
And hope could never hope too much,
In watching thee from hour to hour,
Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world-wide fluctuation sway’d
In vassal tides that follow’d thought.
493
CXIII.
’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise;
Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee
Which not alone had guided me,
But served the seasons that may rise;
For can I doubt, who knew thee keen
In intellect, with force and skill
To strive, to fashion, to fulfil–
I doubt not what thou wouldst have been:
life in civic action warm,
soul on highest mission sent,
potent voice of Parliament,
pillar steadfast in the storm,
Should licensed boldness gather force,
Becoming, when the time has birth,
A lever to uplift the earth
And roll it in another course,
With thousand shocks that come and go,
With agonies, with energies,
With overthrowings, and with cries,
And undulations to and fro.
CXIV.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
But on her forehead sits a fire:
She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain–
She cannot fight the fear of death.
494
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst
All barriers in her onward race
For power. Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.
A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:
For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.
O, friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,
I would the great world grew like thee,
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.
CXV.
Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.
Now rings the woodland loud and long,
The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And drown’d in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song.
Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
The flocks are whiter down the vale,
And milkier every milky sail
On winding stream or distant sea;
Where now the seamew pipes, or dives
495
In yonder greening gleam, and fly
The happy birds, that change their sky
To build and brood; that live their lives
From land to land; and in my breast
Spring wakens too; and my regret
Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest.
CXVI.
Is it, then, regret for buried time
That keenlier in sweet April wakes,
And meets the year, and gives and takes
The colours of the crescent prime?
Not all: the songs, the stirring air,
The life re-orient out of dust,
Cry thro’ the sense to hearten trust
In that which made the world so fair.
Not all regret: the face will shine
Upon me, while I muse alone;
And that dear voice, I once have known,
Still speak to me of me and mine:
Yet less of sorrow lives in me
For days of happy commune dead;
Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be.
CXVII.
O days and hours, your work is this
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace
For fuller gain of after bliss:
That out of distance might ensue
Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
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And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,
For every grain of sand that runs,
And every span of shade that steals,
And every kiss of toothed wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.
CXVIII.
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature’s earth and lime;
But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place,
If so he type this work of time
Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown’d with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter’d with the shocks of doom
To shape and use. Arise and fly
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The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
CXIX.
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, not as one that weeps
I come once more; the city sleeps;
I smell the meadow in the street;
I hear a chirp of birds; I see
Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early dawn,
And think of early days and thee,
And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
And bright the friendship of thine eye;
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thine hand.
CXX.
I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;
Not only cunning casts in clay:
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.
Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was born to other things.
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CXXI.
Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
The team is loosen’d from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken’d in the brain.
Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,
By thee the world’s great work is heard
Beginning, and the wakeful bird;
Behind thee comes the greater light:
The market boat is on the stream,
And voices hail it from the brink;
Thou hear’st the village hammer clink,
And see’st the moving of the team.
Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name
For what is one, the first, the last,
Thou, like my present and my past,
Thy place is changed; thou art the same.
CXXII.
Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,
While I rose up against my doom,
And yearn’d to burst the folded gloom,
To bare the eternal Heavens again,
To feel once more, in placid awe,
The strong imagination roll
A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;
If thou wert with me, and the grave
Divide us not, be with me now,
And enter in at breast and brow,
499
Till all my blood, a fuller wave,
Be quicken’d with a livelier breath,
And like an inconsiderate boy,
As in the former flash of joy,
I slip the thoughts of life and death;
And all the breeze of Fancy blows,
And every dew-drop paints a bow,
The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.
CXXIII.
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
But in my spirit will I dwell,
And dream my dream, and hold it true;
For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,
I cannot think the thing farewell.
CXXIV.
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess;
I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;
Nor thro’ the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun:
500
If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
I heard a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.
CXXV.
Whatever I have said or sung,
Some bitter notes my harp would give,
Yea, tho’ there often seem’d to live
A contradiction on the tongue,
Yet Hope had never lost her youth;
She did but look through dimmer eyes;
Or Love but play’d with gracious lies,
Because he felt so fix’d in truth:
And if the song were full of care,
He breathed the spirit of the song;
And if the words were sweet and strong
He set his royal signet there;
Abiding with me till I sail
To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
And this electric force, that keeps
501
A thousand pulses dancing, fail.
CXXVI.
Love is and was my Lord and King,
And in his presence I attend
To hear the tidings of my friend,
Which every hour his couriers bring.
Love is and was my King and Lord,
And will be, tho’ as yet I keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompass’d by his faithful guard,
And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well.
CXXVII.
And all is well, tho’ faith and form
Be sunder’d in the night of fear;
Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm,
Proclaiming social truth shall spread,
And justice, ev’n tho’ thrice again
The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead.
But ill for him that wears a crown,
And him, the lazar, in his rags:
They tremble, the sustaining crags;
The spires of ice are toppled down,
And molten up, and roar in flood;
The fortress crashes from on high,
The brute earth lightens to the sky,
And the great Æon sinks in blood,
502
And compass’d by the fires of Hell;
While thou, dear spirit, happy star,
O’erlook’st the tumult from afar,
And smilest, knowing all is well.
CXXVIII.
The love that rose on stronger wings,
Unpalsied when he met with Death,
Is comrade of the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things.
No doubt vast eddies in the flood
Of onward time shall yet be made,
And throned races may degrade;
Yet O ye mysteries of good,
Wild Hours that fly with Hope and Fear,
If all your office had to do
With old results that look like new;
If this were all your mission here,
To
To
To
To
draw, to sheathe a useless sword,
fool the crowd with glorious lies,
cleave a creed in sects and cries,
change the bearing of a word,
To shift an arbitrary power,
To cramp the student at his desk,
To make old bareness picturesque
And tuft with grass a feudal tower;
Why then my scorn might well descend
On you and yours. I see in part
That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil coöperant to an end.
CXXIX.
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Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O loved the most, when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher;
Known and unknown; human, divine;
Sweet human hand and lips and eye;
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;
Strange friend, past, present, and to be;
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold, I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee.
CXXX.
Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.
What art thou then? I cannot guess;
But tho’ I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less:
My love involves the love before;
My love is vaster passion now;
Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.
Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.
CXXXI.
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O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer’d years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.
_________
O true and tried, so well and long,
Demand not thou a marriage lay;
In that it is thy marriage day
Is music more than any song.
Nor have I felt so much of bliss
Since first he told me that he loved
A daughter of our house; nor proved
Since that dark day a day like this;
Tho’ I since then have number’d o’er
Some thrice three years: they went and came,
Remade the blood and changed the frame,
And yet is love not less, but more;
No longer caring to embalm
In dying songs a dead regret,
But like a statue solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm.
Regret is dead, but love is more
Than in the summers that are flown,
For I myself with these have grown
To something greater than before;
Which makes appear the songs I made
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As echoes out of weaker times,
As half but idle brawling rhymes,
The sport of random sun and shade.
But where is she, the bridal flower,
That must he made a wife ere noon?
She enters, glowing like the moon
Of Eden on its bridal bower:
On me she bends her blissful eyes
And then on thee; they meet thy look
And brighten like the star that shook
Betwixt the palms of paradise.
O when her life was yet in bud,
He too foretold the perfect rose.
For thee she grew, for thee she grows
For ever, and as fair as good.
And thou art worthy; full of power;
As gentle; liberal-minded, great,
Consistent; wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.
But now set out: the noon is near,
And I must give away the bride;
She fears not, or with thee beside
And me behind her, will not fear.
For I that danced her on my knee,
That watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,
That shielded all her life from harm
At last must part with her to thee;
Now waiting to be made a wife,
Her feet, my darling, on the dead;
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life
Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,
The ‘wilt thou’ answer’d, and again
The ‘wilt thou’ ask’d, till out of twain
506
Her sweet ‘I will’ has made you one.
Now sign your names, which shall be read,
Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are sign’d, and overhead
Begins the clash and clang that tells
The joy to every wandering breeze;
The blind wall rocks, and on the trees
The dead leaf trembles to the bells.
O happy hour, and happier hours
Await them. Many a merry face
Salutes them–maidens of the place,
That pelt us in the porch with flowers.
O happy hour, behold the bride
With him to whom her hand I gave.
They leave the porch, they pass the grave
That has to-day its sunny side.
To-day the grave is bright for me,
For them the light of life increased,
Who stay to share the morning feast,
Who rest to-night beside the sea.
Let all my genial spirits advance
To meet and greet a whiter sun;
My drooping memory will not shun
The foaming grape of eastern France.
It circles round, and fancy plays,
And hearts are warm’d and faces bloom,
As drinking health to bride and groom
We wish them store of happy days.
Nor count me all to blame if I
Conjecture of a stiller guest,
Perchance, perchance, among the rest,
And, tho’ in silence, wishing joy.
507
But they must go, the time draws on,
And those white-favour’d horses wait;
They rise, but linger; it is late;
Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.
A shade falls on us like the dark
From little cloudlets on the grass,
But sweeps away as out we pass
To range the woods, to roam the park,
Discussing how their courtship grew,
And talk of others that are wed,
And how she look’d, and what he said,
And back we come at fall of dew.
Again the feast, the speech, the glee,
The shade of passing thought, the wealth
Of words and wit, the double health,
The crowning cup, the three-times-three,
And last the dance;–till I retire:
Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,
And high in heaven the streaming cloud,
And on the downs a rising fire:
And rise, O moon, from yonder down,
Till over down and over dale
All night the shining vapour sail
And pass the silent-lighted town,
The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,
And catch at every mountain head,
And o’er the friths that branch and spread
Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;
And touch with shade the bridal doors,
With tender gloom the roof, the wall;
And breaking let the splendour fall
To spangle all the happy shores
By which they rest, and ocean sounds,
And, star and system rolling past,
508
A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,
And, moved thro’ life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race
Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;
No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;
Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
184 Integral Yoga
33 Christianity
28 Occultism
18 Poetry
15 Science
12 Philosophy
10 Yoga
9 Hinduism
7 Integral Theory
7 Fiction
4 Psychology
3 Education
2 Mythology
2 Baha i Faith
1 Theosophy
1 Thelema
1 Sufism
1 Buddhism
1 Alchemy
266 Sri Aurobindo
82 The Mother
34 Nolini Kanta Gupta
32 Satprem
28 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
17 Aleister Crowley
9 James George Frazer
7 Swami Vivekananda
5 Vyasa
4 Plotinus
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley
4 Paul Richard
4 A B Purani
3 Swami Krishnananda
3 Robert Browning
3 H P Lovecraft
3 Carl Jung
2 William Wordsworth
2 Thubten Chodron
2 Plato
2 Lucretius
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Baha u llah
2 Aldous Huxley
81 The Synthesis Of Yoga
33 The Life Divine
21 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
16 Record of Yoga
14 Savitri
13 Prayers And Meditations
12 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
10 The Future of Man
10 Magick Without Tears
10 Letters On Yoga IV
9 The Golden Bough
9 Essays On The Gita
9 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Letters On Yoga I
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
7 The Secret Of The Veda
7 The Phenomenon of Man
7 Letters On Yoga II
6 Questions And Answers 1956
6 Questions And Answers 1953
6 Liber ABA
6 Isha Upanishad
6 Hymn of the Universe
5 Vishnu Purana
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 Some Answers From The Mother
5 Let Me Explain
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
4 Words Of Long Ago
4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4 Shelley - Poems
4 Raja-Yoga
4 Questions And Answers 1955
4 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
4 Letters On Yoga III
4 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
4 Essays Divine And Human
4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
4 Agenda Vol 11
3 The Study and Practice of Yoga
3 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
3 The Human Cycle
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
3 On Education
3 Lovecraft - Poems
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 Browning - Poems
3 Agenda Vol 10
3 Agenda Vol 08
3 Agenda Vol 03
2 Wordsworth - Poems
2 Words Of The Mother III
2 Vedic and Philological Studies
2 The Perennial Philosophy
2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 Questions And Answers 1954
2 On the Way to Supermanhood
2 Of The Nature Of Things
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Aion
2 Agenda Vol 04
2 Agenda Vol 02
2 Agenda Vol 01
2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
your whole energies to progress on the Path.
[175]
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Which activity will most fully utilise all the energies?
The one that is done in the most perfect spirit of consecration.
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
--
Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment. The great part assigned to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. "As the spokes of a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-Energy is all established, the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the LifeEnergy is all this that is established in the triple heaven."2 It is therefore no integral Yoga that kills these vital energies, forces them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source
annakos.a and pran.akos.a.
--
Moreover the whole trend of modern thought and modern endeavour reveals itself to the observant eye as a large conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in man's physical being and vital energies and in his material environment for his full mental possibilities. By the spread of education, by the advance of the backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement
The Three Steps of Nature
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The long period of the Second World War with all its vicissitudes passed through these years. It was a priceless experience to see how he devoted his energies to the task of saving humanity from the threatened reign of Nazism. It was a practical lesson of solid work done for humanity without any thought of return or reward, without even letting humanity know what he was doing for it! Thus he lived the Divine and showed us how the Divine cares for the world, how He comes down and works for man. I shall never forget how he who was at one time in his own words "not merely a non-co-operator but an enemy of British Imperialism" bestowed such anxious care on the health of Churchill, listening carefully to the health-bulletins! It was the work of the Divine, it was the Divine's work for the world.
There were no formal evening sittings during these years, but what appeared to me important in our informal talks was recorded and has been incorporated in this book.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.
But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An undiscriminating combination in block would not be a synthesis, but a confusion. Nor would a successive practice of each of them in turn be easy in the short span of our human life and with our limited energies, to say nothing of the waste of labour implied in so cumbrous a process. Sometimes, indeed,
Hathayoga and Rajayoga are thus successively practised. And in a recent unique example, in the life of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, we see a colossal spiritual capacity first driving straight to the divine realisation, taking, as it were, the kingdom of heaven by violence, and then seizing upon one Yogic method after another and extracting the substance out of it with an incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge. Such an example cannot be generalised. Its object also was special and temporal, to exemplify in the great and decisive experience of a master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity, towards which a world long divided into jarring sects and schools is with difficulty labouring, that all sects are forms and fragments of a single integral truth and all disciplines labour in their different ways towards one supreme experience. To know, be and possess
--
Yogic disciplines and seizing rather on some central principle common to all which will include and utilise in the right place and proportion their particular principles, and on some central dynamic force which is the common secret of their divergent methods and capable therefore of organising a natural selection and combination of their varied energies and different utilities.
This was the aim which we set before ourselves at first when we entered upon our comparative examination of the methods of
--
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga, which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Vama Marga, started from a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, - Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities. But in both paths there was in the end an obscuration of principles, a deformation of symbols and a fall.
If, however, we leave aside, here also, the actual methods and practices and seek for the central principle, we find, first, that Tantra expressly differentiates itself from the Vedic methods of Yoga. In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their method is knowledge, though it is not always discernment by the intellect, but may be, instead, the knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out through action. In all of them the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The vital is at once the place of desires and energies, impulses
and passions, of cowardice, but also of heroism - to bridle it is
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there are many other kinds of energies, or rather many
other forms of Energy, which is one and universal.
--
Each region of the being and each activity has its energies. We
Series Eight - To a Young Captain
may classify them generally into vital energies, mental energies, spiritual energies. Modern science tells us that Matter is
ultimately nothing but energy condensed.
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our present fate, child of past energies.
3.11
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
His grasp surprised her mightiest energies' springs;
He spoke with the unknown Guardians of the worlds,
--
He drew the energies that transmute an age.
Immeasurable by the common look,
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ifso long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon earth something of her charm and wizardry. The fullness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould.
"The Last Voyage" by Charles Williams-A Little Book of Modern Verse, (Faber and Faber).
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands
Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One must learn to concentrate one's energies in the heart
- then, when one succeeds in that, silence comes automatically.
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The energies that human beings use for reproduction and that
occupy such a predominant place in their lives, should on the
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Money is not meant to generate money; money should generate an increase in production, an improvement in the conditions of life and a progress in human consciousness. This is its true use. What I call an improvement in consciousness, a progress in consciousness, is everything that education in all its forms can providenot as its generally understood, but as we understand it here: education in art, education in from the education of the body, from the most material progress, to the spiritual education and progress through yoga; the whole spectrum, everything that leads humanity towards its future realization. Money should serve to augment that and to augment the material base for the earths progress, the best use of what the earth can giveits intelligent utilization, not the utilization that wastes and loses energies. The use that allows energies to be replenished.
In the universe there is an inexhaustible source of energy that asks only to be replenished; if you know how to go about it, it is replenished. Instead of draining life and the energies of our earth and making of it something parched and inert, we must know the practical exercise for replenishing the energy constantly. And these are not just words; I know how its to be done, and science is in the process of thoroughly finding outit has found out most admirably. But instead of using it to satisfy human passions, instead of using what science has found so that men may destroy each other more effectively than they are presently doing, it must be used to enrich the earth: to enrich the earth, to make the earth richer and richer, more active, generous, productive and to make all life grow towards its maximum efficiency. This is the true use of money. And if its not used like that, its a vicea short circuit and a vice.
But how many people know how to use it in this way? Very few, which is why they have to be taught. What I call teach is to show, to give the example. We want to be the example of true living in the world. Its a challenge I am placing before the whole financial world: I am telling them that they are in the process of withering and ruining the earth with their idiotic system; and with even less than they are now spending for useless thingsmerely for inflating something that has no inherent life, that should be only an instrument at the service of life, that has no reality in itself, that is only a means and not an end (they make an end of something that is only a means)well then, instead of making of it an end, they should make it the means. With what they have at their disposal they could oh, transform the earth so quickly! Transform it, put it into contact, truly into contact, with the supramental forces that would make life bountiful and, indeed, constantly renewedinstead of becoming withered, stagnant, shrivelled up: a future moon. A dead moon.
0 1960-07-12 - Mothers Vision - the Voice, the ashram a tiny part of myself, the Mothers Force, sparkling white light compressed - enormous formation of negative vibrations - light in evil, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its form was elongated, slanting downwards (it always has this form). At the top it looked like a head, then the lines disappeared down below. It had no openings. And then, it was surrounded by various dark sheaths, a very dark purple which is the color of protection. A sparkling light was entering into itit kept entering, but without making any holes. It passed right through everything, through the purplethrough everything. It passed through and entered inside, where there were sparklings of every color, like a cascade. There are always these cascades of forcesimilar to a cascading stream whose waters neither flow on nor disappear, but accumulate: an accumulation of energies, a condensation. And they accumulate without taking up any more space through a kind of compression. And inside, its moving, vibrating, vibrating, vibrating, it keeps coming and comingyou dont know where it comes from, but it keeps coming and accumulating.
It was a force with a sparkling white light at its center, the light which is the force of the Divine Mother, and as soon as it was well packed and concentrated inside, or condensed, it took on all the colorsvibrations of every color Like a materialization these colors were like a materialization of the Divine Force when it enters matter. (Just as matter is a condensation of energy, well, this seemed to be a condensation of Divine Force. Thats really the impression it gave.)
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know if its because I have been so violently attackedbludgeonedby all these malevolent energies, but in any case, I sensed acutely the FORMIDABLE immensity of what has to be done in order for THAT to be realized.
(silence)
0 1961-12-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Dear Sir I must begin by telling you that although this text is an excellent essay, it is not, in its present form, a book for the Spiritual Masters series. Let us enumerate the reasons for this. First of all, the general impression is of an ABSTRACT text. I can straight-away imagine your reaction to this and I dread misunderstandings! But putting myself in the readers place, since, once again, it does involve a collection intended for a wide public that we are beginning to know well, I can assure you that this public will not be able to follow page after page of reflections upon what one is bound to call a philosophical and spiritual system. Obviously this impression is caused primarily by the fact that you have begun with twenty-one pages where the reader is assumed to already know of Sri Aurobindos historical existence and the content of the Vedas and the Upanishads, plus I dont know how many other notions of rite, truth, divinity, wisdom, etc., etc. In my view, and the solution is going to appear cruel to you, for you certainly value these twenty-one pages [on the Secret of the Veda], they should purely and simply be deleted, for everything you say there, which is very rich in meaning, can only become clear when one has read what follows. There are many books in which readers can be asked to make the effort entailed in not understanding the beginning until they have read the end: but not books of popular culture. One could envisage an introduction of three or four pages to situate the spiritual climate and cultural world in which Sri Aurobindos thought has taken place, provided, however, that it is sufficiently descriptive, and not a pre-synthesis of everything to be expounded upon in what follows. In a general way you are going to smile, finding me quite Cartesian! But the readership we address is more or less permeated by a widespread Cartesianism, and you can help them, if you like, to reverse their methodology, but on the condition that you make yourself understood right from the start. Generally, you dont make enough use of analysis and, even before analysis, of a description of the realities being analyzed. That is why the sections of pure philosophical analysis seem much too long to us, and, even apart from the abstract character of the chapter on evolution (which should certainly be shorter), one feels at a positive standstill! After having waited patiently, and sometimes impatiently, for some light to be thrown on Sri Aurobindos own experience, one reads with genuine amazement that one can draw on energies from above instead of drawing on them from the material nature around oneself, or from an animal sleep, or that one can modify his sleep and render it conscious master illnesses before they enter the body. All of that in less than a page; and you conclude that the spirit that was the slave of matter becomes again the master of evolution. But how Sri Aurobindo was led to think this, the experiences that permitted him to verify it, those that permit other men to consider the method transmittable, the difficulties, the obstacles, the realizationsdoesnt this constitute the essence of what must be said to make the reader understand? Once again, it is the question of a pedagogy intimately tied in with the spirit of the collection. Let me add as well that I always find it deplorable when a thought is not expressed purely for its own sake, but is accompanied by an aggressive irony towards concepts which the author does not share. This is pointless and harms the ideas being presented, all the more so because they are expressed in contrast with caricatured notions: the allusions you make to such concepts as you think yourself capable of evoking the soul, creation, virtue, sin, salvationwould only hold some interest if the reader could find those very concepts within himself. But, as they are caricatured by your pen, the reader is given the impression of an all too easily obtained contrast between certain ideas admired and others despised. Whereas it would be far more to the point if they corresponded to something real in the religious consciousness of the West. I have too much esteem for you and the spiritual world in which you live to avoid saying this through fear of upsetting you.
Amen.
0 1962-03-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You can lie down on a mat, look at a flower or a patch of sky if theres any to see; if need be (teasingly), smoke a cigarette to keep yourself busy, and just stay like that, relaxed. And if you do your pranayama along with this relaxation you will notice yourself growing extremely strongstoring, storing, storing up energies. And then if you have to make an effort, theres nothing to itits as easy as pie.
Its that old habit, the old fear of being lazy. It took me. But Sri Aurobindo cured me of that rather quickly. Thats how it was before I met him. And thats the first thing he did: he gave me a tap on the head, and all activity ceasedtotal silence, all mental constructions and habits swept away in the blink of an eye.
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have already told you the reason (there are many reasons): one tiny undeveloped level in the being is enough. It obviously has to do with atavism, with the way the body was built, the milieu one was born in, ones education, the life one has led. But its mainly how much one has been drawn to higher things. It is clear that your energies have been far more concentrated on breaking through that lid and touching the Source of Truth than on having mediumistic experiencesfar more. And for what you have come to do, that was INFINITELY more important. Minor experiences such as exteriorizing and the like are just diversions along the way thats how I have always seen them.
Yes, Mother, thats all right. But theres no outer encouragement. I have the feeling that nothing is happening I wake up each morning and theres nothing. I meditate, theres nothing theres never anything! Just the certainty that its the only thing worth doing.
0 1962-10-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I tell you, it also has an EXTRAORDINARY utility: it automatically renews all the energies. Actually, thats the true reason for sleep: to be able to enter that state. And thats why those who can enter it consciously in meditation need much less sleep. Much less. Its what enables the body to last: Sat. And whenever I have meditated with you, Ive always had a feeling of entering that state.
Pure existence, outside of the Manifestation. It is wonderfully luminous, immobile, tranquil, and a sort of bliss devoid of any vibration, beyond vibration.
0 1963-08-13a, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Regarding an old "Playground Talk" of 1950 and noted from memory by a disciple, which Mother asks Satprem to scrap. The subject was Nirvana, which one was to reachor so the notation saidby withdrawing all one's energies into the psychic being or soul.)
None of that is true!
In the first place, we should say that each realm has an energy of its own. But what people generally feel as energy is vital energy; and vital energy (hem!) is vital! Therefore to say that those who withdraw withdraw all their energies and consciousness into the psychic to attain Nirvana is nonsense!
There is a nirvana behind the vital, a nirvana behind the psychic, a nirvana behind the mind; there is a nirvana on every level, even behind the physicalits death. And those who withdraw, who try to attain Nirvana, NEVER go into the psychic the psychic is something essentially linked to divine manifestation, not to divine nonintervention, not to Nirvana.
0 1963-12-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The world grew full of menacing energies,
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
0 1964-08-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Silence, silence. This is a time for gathering energies and not for wasting them away in useless and meaningless words. Anyone who proclaims loudly his opinions on the present situation of the country, must understand that opinions are of no value and cannot in the least help Mother India to come out of her difficulties. If you want to be useful, first control yourself and keep silentsilence, silence, silence. It is only in silence that anything great can be done.
That was just when the war began; people were criticizing the government as if To one of them I wrote personally: If you were up there, would you know what has to be done? No. So if you dont know, you have no right to say anythingkeep silent.
0 1965-08-04, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It comes like this (Mother bangs her fist down as if into Matter). But its rather interesting because it comes straight from above and when it reaches the earth atmosphere, it gathers there all the energies of the earth, and then it enters (same gesture). Now it has become like that. A rather strong golden light, which comes massively, then touches the earth atmosphere and ATTRACTS and gathers the vital energies of the earth, and then it goes like this (same gesture banging down). I see it I see the thing and it goes through my arms, my hands. (With an ironic smile:) Do you feel something or not?
Oh, yes, I feel the Force!
0 1967-01-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It seems to me to be the legacy of primordial habits the habits of Matter. This Matter, of course, comes from total unconsciousness, and throughout the ages and all the ways of being, it returns to total consciousness it goes from one extreme to the other; well, its these habits of static immobility that give this need for trance. It shouldnt be necessary. Only (how can I explain?), logically, as things are, it depends on the balance between the bodys capacity of receptivity and its external activity: its obviously far more receptive when it is immobile, because its energies are occupied with the transformation.
There is also another thing which could change the course of events: its that the vital is becoming more and more receptive and collaborative. This whole vital zone, which was the zone of revolt and deliberate opposition to the divine transformation, is becoming more and more collaborative, and with its collaboration (because this vital zone is the zone of movement, action, energy put to use), with its conscious collaboration, the methods of transformation may become different (its something I have been studying these last few days). It may change the methods. But thats a whole world to be learned.
0 1967-04-12, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There has been for some time a deliberate will not to leave the body. In the mornings, when I emerged from my nocturnal activities, I would often notice that there was a whole work of readjustment to be done in the body, as though the concentration of forces had been disturbed and even undone in the night and everything had to be started up again. It was a sheer waste of time, a waste. Previously, in the evening when I would lay down on my bed, I would go limp, a complete relaxation (one should always do that), that is, surrender, and the consciousness would rise above. There was a concentration of forces, but it wouldnt last: after two or three hours, everything was taken up by the nights activities. But now, instead of that, there is a will to keep the whole consciousness in the body, to concentrate and to keep all the energies so that the work in the cells may go on undisturbed. And I see the effect lasts much longer; even when I wake up (or rather when I get into external activity), I can see it goes on, it doesnt cease, and it resumes as soon as I am outwardly awake. A sort of concentration of energy, of consciousness, force, light, which starts working in the cells at night. And then theres nothing, no activity, theres a contemplative silence.
I had only one instance of activity these last four days, one morning between two and four, that I spent absolutely conscious and active with Sri Aurobindo, who had made changes in his activities and his organization of the subtle physical; he had made changes and wanted to show them to me, to let me know about them. And he showed it all to me for two hours. But that was the only thing, and as for the resteverything, going to see people, going here or there, doing this or that I have stopped it all. And things are better.
0 1967-11-08, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not the number of years you have lived that makes you old. You become old when you stop progressing. As soon as you feel you have done what you had to do, as soon as you think you know what you ought to know, as soon as you want to sit and enjoy the results of your effort, with the feeling you have worked enough in life, then at once you become old and begin to decline. When, on the contrary, you are convinced that what you know is nothing compared to all that remains to be known, when you feel that what you have done is just the starting point of what remains to be done, when you see the future like an attractive sun shining with innumerable possibilities yet to be achieved, then you are young, howsoever many are the years you have passed upon earth, young and rich with all the realisations of tomorrow. And if you do not want your body to fail you, avoid wasting your energies in useless agitation. Whatever you do, do it in a quiet and composed poise. In peace and silence is the greatest strength.
There.
0 1969-07-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have become a little too public for my taste. Yesterday, the whole morning I saw people from the government here. The [Pondicherry] governor comes very often: he comes, sits down, removes his Gandhi cap, then settles there in front of me, and stays for at least five minutes like that [absorbing energies] like a sponge.
(silence)
--
My sleep is no longer sleep at all, I dont know, its a sort of (gesture as if Mother drew her energies within) withdrawal, that is, I go within, and then I am active. And those people are in that same state. Among them, some are with people who still have a body: its not just those who no longer have a body. So then, I am also there, and in the same kind of state. But the strange thing is that when I supposedly wake up and get up, I go on with something (laughing) thats not physical! You understand, the state of over there goes on, and its as real, as tangible as physical things; and after half an hour I realize that I have moved about here and done all kinds of things ENTIRELY in that consciousness!10 Whats that consciousness?
Its a very clear, very harmonious consciousness, in which there are no difficulties, and very creative. I dont know what it is.11 This morning it was peculiar: for a half-hour I was literally there [in that world], and I wasnt aware of it! Its afterwards that I wondered, But is it physically like this? There was someone, you understand, I was with someone [in that world], and I wondered, But is this person physically like this? Is it physical? And I was standing! So its as if the two worlds were (Mother slips the fingers of her right hand through those of her left hand). Strange.
0 1969-10-11, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, but the aim was to withdraw from Matter. The aim was to withdraw here (gesture of drawing all energies upward) and reject Matter, like all illusionists, you understand. Its the continuation of Buddhism, too.
(silence)
0 1969-12-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He says that for a few years, energies in Auroville have been scattered: they are egoistic, everyone wants to build his own little hut, his own little story, or, at best, hopes to build a supercity, which will only be an improvement on all the existing cities of the world. In this Auroville, an axis, a center is missing. Whats missing is a unification of the consciousnesses around a center, an axis. So he said that in the past, they built pyramids, they built cathedrals, and around those symbolic constructions, consciousnesses could unify
(Mother nods approvingly)
0 1970-01-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theyd be only too happy! For them it would be an extraordinary amusement! I have more difficulty preventing them from dissipating their energies than I would have trying to get them to do some work! For them it would be an amusement.
Because he says that if there isnt the inner force of the Ashram people mingling with the Aurovilians, the Aurovilians will remain what they are. There is a break between Auroville and the Ashram.
--
I am working and working (gesture of kneading) to gather the energies that can do the work. And there has to be some sifting there.
Yes.
--
You can tell them that In fact, R. spoke to me (it was the same thing with other words) and I didnt say either yes or no, I was waiting because I wanted to know how others saw the thing. So now I have seen, I see that they agree. If they can agree, the work will go faster! So there. Objections of detail dont matter because you start with one idea and end with anotheryou progress a lot in between. So it doesnt need discussion, its only Only, try to put your energies together so as to start sooner, thats all! (Mother laughs)
Whats the time?
0 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We would have to be able to absorb vital energies directly.
Yes, exactly.
Not material energies, vital ones.
But thats something theyre beginning to find, because you can feed on vitamins and things like that.
0 1970-07-11, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then, when I went back from here [to France, in 1915] I did something deliberately: all the energies of the last center [at the base of the spine] were drawn up here (gesture to the heart).
But I felt centers BELOW the feet.
I felt a center below the feet.5 There was one below the feet, one at the knees, one here (gesture at the base of the spine), and all of it (Mother gestures, drawing the energies upward), like this, drawn up, and it came here (gesture to the heart).
Does Sri Aurobindo speak of that transformation of the subconscient and its becoming conscious?
--
Thats what took place when the energies were drawn here: it was the result.
(long silence)
--
What I am conscious of is the Consciousness there (gesture above); thats something unchanging. This (gesture to the forehead): blank. If it starts stirring, its very uncomfortable, but generally it doesnt stir at allone day it stirred for a few minutes, and it was extremely unpleasant. Its like this (gesture like a motionless bar), blank: a blank feeling, like blank paper. This (gesture from the throat to the mouth) is the connection with people, and thats EXTREMELY unpleasant, really extremely unpleasant (I cant say), and materially it results in the deterioration of teeth and Very unpleasant. Here (gesture to the heart) I told you, all energies, from below the feet (Mother gestures as if pulling it all upward), all that was brought up to here. Here (gesture to the heart), its like a sun, always. Its like a radiant sun: thats where I work; thats where I work from. But with the centers there (gesture to the base of the spine), all the energies have been as if brought up to the heart.
And thats so natural. This and this (gesture to the heart and above the head), its so natural that I dont even observe it anymore: its my way of being.
0 1970-09-19, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Working on the physical is like digging the ground; the physical is absolutely inert, dead like stone. When the work began there, all former energies disappeared, experiences stopped; if they came they didnt last. The progress is exceedingly slow. One rises, falls; rises again and falls again, constantly meeting with the suggestions of the Vedic Asuras, You cant do anything, you are bound to fail.
You have to go on working and working year after year, point after point, till you come to a central point in the subconscient which has to be conquered and it is the crux of the whole problem, hence exceedingly difficult. This point in the subconscient is the seed and it goes on sprouting and sprouting till you have cut out the seed.
0 1972-03-25, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, he probably absorbs energies directly.
Yes. There will probably be intermediary beings who wont last, you see, just as there were intermediary beings between the chimpanzee and man.
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A million moods, a myriad energies,
The world-shapes that are fancies of its Truth
02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Out of the Void's unseeing energies
Inventing the scene of a concrete universe,
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And random shapeless energies drove towards form
And took each wisp-fire for a guiding sun.
02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The world grew full of menacing energies,
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
--
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
02.09 - The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the encircling arms of energies
That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the older order, however, a kindlier treatment was meted out to this class, this class of the creators of values. They had patrons who looked after their physical well-being. They had the necessary freedom and leisure to follow their own bent and urge of creativity. Kings and princes, the court and the nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and art or man's creative genius hardly ever rose to that height ever since. The downward curve started with the advent and growth of the bourgeoisie when the artist or the creative genius lost their supporters and had to earn their own living by the sweat of their brow. Indeed the greatest tragedies of frustration because of want and privation, occur, not as much among the "lowest" classes who are usually considered as the poorest and the most miserable in society, but in that section from where come the intellectuals, "men of light and leading," to use the epithet they are honoured with. For very few of this group are free to follow their inner trend and urge, but have either to coerce and suppress them or stultify them in the service of lesser alien duties, which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives in.
It is one of the great illusionsor perhaps a show plank for propagandato think or say that the so-called poorer classes are the poorest and the most miserable. It is not so in fact. Really poor are those who have a standard of life commensurate with their inner nature and consciousnessof beauty and orderliness and material sufficiency and yet their actual status and function in society do not provide them with the necessary where-withals and resources. No amount of philanthropic sentimentalising can suppress or wipe off the fact that the poor do not feel the pinch of poverty so much as do those who are poor and yet are to live and move as not poor. It all depends upon one's standard. One is truly rich or poor not in proportion- to one's income, but" in accordance with one's needs and the means to meet them. And all do not have the same needs and requirements. This does not mean that the needs of the princes, the aristocrats, the magnates are greater than those of the mere commoner. No, it means that there are people, there is a section of humanity found more or less in all these classes, but mostly in less fortunate classes, whose needs are intrinsically greater and they require preferential treatment. There should be none poor or miserable in society, well and good. But this should not mean that all the economic resources of the society must be requisitioned only to enrichto pamper the poor. For there is a pampering possible in this matter. We know the nouveaux riches, the parvenus and the kind of life they lead with their fair share boldly seized. A levelling, a formal equalisation of the economic status, although it may mean uplift in certain cases, may involve gross injustice to others. The ideal is not equal distribution but rational distribution of wealth, and that distribution should not depend upon any material function, but upon psychological demands. Is this bourgeois economics? Even if it is so, the truth has to be faced and recognised. You can call truth by the name bourgeois and hang it, but it will revive all the same, like the Phoenix out of the ashes.
02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A million energies joined and were the One.
All flowed immeasurably to one sea:
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Rapture of beatific energies
Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy;
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Inscrutable energies drive him and deceive,
Immense implacable deities oppose.
03.07 - Brahmacharya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It must be understood that this discipline is not merely for those who wish to follow a religious or spiritual life, but for all without exception. Brahmacharya is the first ashrama, order or stage of life with which one begins one's organisation of life; one has to pass through it to others leading to greater and higher degrees of fulfilment. It forms the foundation, prepares the necessary ground upon which the life structure can safely be raised and maintained. It is the secret fund of strength, the source of pure energies that vitalises life, enhances its values, makes it worth living.
The energy that one stores by continence, regular habits and self-discipline increases also in that way. Sometimes special methodskriyaare adopted to help the process, Asana or Pranayama, for example. But an inner and a more psychological procedure is needed, a concentration of will and consciousnessa kind of dhyana, in other wordsin order to be able to take the next step in discipline. For after the storage and increase of energy comes the sublimation of energy, that is to say, the physico-vital energy transmuted into the energy of mental substance, medh. Sublimation means also the increase of brain-power, an enhancement in the degree and quality of its capacity. This has nothing to do with the volume of knowledge enclosed (the mass of information to which we referred before) the growth is with regard to the very stuff of the mind from within, the natural strength of intelligence that can be applied to any field of knowledge with equal success and felicity.
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This movement of extension, looked at from the standpoint of intensiveness, is also a movement of devolution, of reclamation. The Brahminic stage represents culture that is knowledge; it touches the mind, it is the brain that is the recipient and instrument of the Light. The Kshatriya comes into the field when the light, the vibration of awakening, from the mind comes down into the vital energies, from the brain to the heart region. The Vaishya spirit has taken up man still at a lower region, the lower vital: the economic man that has his gaze fixed upon his stomach and entrails. Lastly, the final stage is reached when physical work, bodily labour, material service have attained supreme importance and are considered almost as the only values worth the name for a human being. To walk and work firmly upon Earth the Light needs a strong pair of feet. Therefore, the Veda says, Padbhym sudro ajyata, out of the feet of the Cosmic Godhead the Sudra was born.
That is how man has become and is becoming integrally consciousconscious in and of all parts of his being. He is awakening and opening to the light that descends from above: indeed the true light, the light of truth is something transcendent and it is that that comes down and slowly inhabits the world and possesses humanity. Its progress marks the steps of evolution. It means the gradual enlightening and illumining of the various layers of our being, the different strands of consciousness from the higher to the lower, from the less dense to the more dense, from mind to the body. It means also in the same process a canalisation, materialisation and fixing upon earth and in the physical being of the increasing powers of the Light.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Energy, however, is not merely either muscular (physical) or cerebral. There are energies subtler than thought and yet more dynamic than the muscle (or the electric pile). One such, for example, is vital energy, although orthodox bio-chemists do not believe in any kind of vitalism that is something more than mere physico-chemical reaction. Indeed, this is the energy that counts in life; for it is this that brings about what we call success in the world. A man with push and go, as it is termed, is nothing but a person with abundant vital energy. But even of this energy there are gradations. It can be deep, controlled, organised or it can be hectic, effusive, confused: the latter kind expresses and spends itself often in mere external, nervous and muscular movements. Those, however, who are known as great men of action are precisely they who are endowed with life energy of the first kind.
The Yogi the Hatha Yogi, the Raja Yogi, the Tantrikseeks consciously to master this life energy, to possess and use it as he wills. The Yogi, the true Yogi, aims at a higher quality, a deeper potentiality of the life energy: it may be called the Inner Life Energy. This inner life energy is in a line with, is one with the universal life energy; therefore it is said when one possesses and controls this power one has comm and over the universal power. All other energiesvisible, tangible, concretised and canalisedare particular formations and embodiments of till, mother energy. Even the most physical and material energiesmechanical, electrical, nervous, etc.are all derivatives and lesser potentials of this fount and origin. The mastery of the inner vital energy is the whole secret of what is known as occultism, even magic, black or white, spell and other allied powers or miracles. The eight siddhis well known to the Yogis are the natural results of this mastery. With such a mastery the Yogi controls and guides his own destiny; he can also in the same way control and guide the destiny of others, even of peoples and humanity at large. That is the deeper meaning the great phrase of the Gitalokasagrahacarries. Indeed, great souls are precisely they who move with the upward current of Nature, in and through whom Nature works out vast changes, prepares the steps of evolution in the world and humanity.
But what again is this universal vital energy? This also is an instrument, not the ultimate agent. After all, vital energy is blind by itself; it moves instinctively or intuitively, as Bergson would say; it does not know consciously beforeh and the next step it is going to take. Consciousness then is the secret. This is the power behind the throne, it is this to which the Upanishad refers in its analysis of the ultimate dynamics of things as the life of Life, prasva pr .
--
Consciousness has a fourfold potential. The first is the normal consciousness, which is predominantly mental; it is the sphere comprising movements of which man is usually and habitually aware. It is what the Upanishad names Jgrat or jgaritasthna and characterises as bahipraja: it is the waking state and has cognition only of external things. In other words, the consciousness here is wholly objectivised, externalisedextrovert: it is also a strongly individualised formation, the consciousness is hedged in, isolated and contoured by a protective ring, as it were, of a characteristically separative personality; it is a surface formation, a web made out of day-to-day sensations and thoughts, perceptions and memories, impressions and associations. It is a system of outward actions and reactions against or in the midst of one's actual environment. The second potential is that of the Inner Consciousness: its characteristic is that the consciousness here is no longer trenchantly separative and individual, narrowly and rigidly egoistic. It feels and sees itself as part of or one with the world consciousness. It looks upon its individuality as only a wave of the universal movement. It is also sometimes called the subliminal consciousness; for it plays below or behind the normal surface range of consciousness. It is made up of the residuary powers of the normal consciousness, the abiding vibrations and stresses that settle down and remain in the background and are not immediately required or utilised for life purposes: also it contacts directly energies and movements that well out of the universal life. The phenomena of clairvoyance and clairaudience, the knowledge of the past and the future and of other worlds and persons and beings, certain more dynamic movements such as distant influence and guidance and controlling without any external means, well known in all yogic disciplines, are various manifestations of the power of this Inner Consciousness. But there is not only an outward and an inner consciousness; there is also a deeper or nether consciousness. This is the great field that has been and is being explored by modern psychologists. It is called the subconscious, sometimes also the unconscious: but really it should be named the inconscient, for it is not altogether devoid of consciousness, but is conscious in its own way the consciousness is involved or lost within itself or lies buried. It comprises those movements and impulsions, inclinations and dispositions that have no rational basis, on the contrary, have an irrational basis; they are not acquired or developed by the individual in his normal course of life experience, they are ingrained, lie imbedded in man's nature and are native to his original biological and physical make-up. As the human embryo recapitulates in the womb the whole history of man's animal evolution, even so the normal man, even the most civilised and apparently the farthest from his ancient moorings and sources, enshrines in his cells, in a miraculously living manner, the memory of vast geological epochs, the great struggles and convulsions through which earth and its inhabitants have passed, the basic urges of the crude life force, its hopes, fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant worldeven perhaps to the mineral worldout of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the original consciousness. It was a collectivea racial and an aboriginal consciousness. The same lies chromosomic, one can almost say, in the constitution of the individual man of today. This region of the unconscious (or the inconscient) is a veritable field of force: it lies at the root of all surface dynamisms. The surface consciousness, jgrat, is a very small portion of the whole, it is only the tip of the pyramid or an iceberg, the major portion lies submerged beyond our normal view. In reflex movements, in sudden unthinking outbursts, in dreams and day-dreams, this undercurrent is silhouetted and made visible and recognisable. Even otherwise, they exercise a profound influence upon all our conscious movements. This underground consciousness is the repository of the most dark and unenlightened elements that grew and flourished in the slime of man's original habitat. They are small, ugly, violent, anti-social, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest applicationHunger that is Death.
But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he is also a child of the White Mother (ka and vet). Or again, if Earth is our mother, the Heaven is our fatherdyaur me pit mat pthiv iyam. In other words, consciousness extends not in depth alone, but in height alsoit is vertically extended, infinite both ways. As there is a sub-consciousness or unconsciousness, so also there is at the other end super-consciousness.
04.03 - The Eternal East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Spirit is not the static transcendent absolute entity only. It is dynamic Force, creative conscious Energy. The spiritual is not mere silence and status it is expression and movement also. Any silence and any status are not the silence and the status of the Spirit the silence and status of death, for example; so too any expression and movement are not of the Spirit either but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic beinga somewhat aggrandised human beingtreating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally. Again, at the other end, Matter is not mere dead mechanical matter. It is vibrant energy, but energy that conceals within it life and consciousness. Besides, the whirl and motion of energies is not all, something inherently static looms large behind: you call it ether, field, space or substratumit is being, one would like to say, infused with a secret consciousness and will.
We say then, symbolically at least, if not literally, that the West is looking to the East for this revelation towards which it is groping or moving in its own way: the secret spirit-consciousness that is alive in and through the material cosmos, that alone gives its total sense and significance. And the secret spirit must embody itself here below in material life, the status must be made supremely dynamic the transcendent consciousness, even while maintaining its transcendence, has to deploy its immanence in things of the earth and earthly existence. That is what the West brings to the East; that is what the Scientific and materialist look and labour offer to be integrated into the aspiration and realisation of the East.
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Humanity is evolving and developing the various groupings to manifest fundamental aspects of its cosmic person. Ancient Egypt, for example, brought us in contact with an occult world and a subliminal consciousness. We know also of the nature of the Hebraic genius, the moral fervour, the serious, almost grim spirit of Righteousness that formed and even now forms a major strain in the European or Christian culture and civilisation. The famous "sweetness and light" of the Hellenic mind supplied the other strain. The Roman genius for law and government is a well-known commonplace of history. Well-known also India's spirituality. All these modes of consciousness are elementsforces, energies and personalities that build up the godhead of humanity. Peoples and races in the past were the scattered limbs of the godhead-scattered and isolated from one another, because of the original unconsciousness and sharp egocentricity out of which Nature started its course of evolution. The disjecta membra are being collected together by a growing consciousness.
Such then is the destiny of man and mankindman to rise to higher heights of consciousness beyond mental reason that are not governed by the principle of division, separation, antithesis but by the principle of unity, identity, mutuality and totality. In other words, he will take his seat in the status of his soul, his inner and inmost being, his divine personality where he is one with all beings and with the world. This is a rare and difficult realisation for man as he is today, but tomorrow it will be his normal nature. The individual will live in his total being and therefore in and through other individuals; as a consequence the nature too in each will undergo a divine transmutation, a marvellous sea-change.
04.04 - To the Heights IV, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The secret energies of Nature work and create in the deeps of silence.
Out of the uttermost stillness the whirling universe was born
04.08 - An Evolutionary Problem, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If you have no eyes and want to see and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and don't want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will eventually get a long neck like the giraffe.
But the metaphysics here are surely false. If a species has no eyes, has never possessed eyes, is unconscious of sight, or of the fact that there are sights to be seen, is unaware of any necessity for sight, how can that species desire sight or will itself into the possession of eyes? We can only will what we need."
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is again a point of view to say that things are fundamentally values only, as "philosophers of value" seem to declare today. It would be equally true to say that masses are fundamentally energies or that particles are merely waves. The truth of the matter, here as elsewhere, is globalubhayameva, in the famous phrase of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. In other words, values and things are aspects, polarisations of one single reality. Things have values; things are values: things are also things. .
Value refers to the particular poise or status, the mode of being or function of a thing. In its ultimate formulation we can say it is the rhythm or force of consciousness that vibrates in an object, it is the becomingof the being:but becoming does not cancel being, it only activises, energises, formulates. The debate brings us back to the ancient quarrel between the Buddhists and the Vedantists, the latter posits sat, being or existence, while the former considers sat as only an assemblage of asat. The object and its function, the thing-in-itself and its attribute (the fire and its burning power, as the Indian logicians used to cite familiarly as an example) are not to be separated they are not separated in fact but given together as one unified entity; it is the logical mind that separates them artificially.
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The root of the Cosmic Evil is in Matter. From there it shoots up and overshadows the upper layers of our being and consciousness. Even if the mind is cleaned, the vital cleared, still if the physical consciousness is not sufficiently probed into, purified and reclaimed, then nothing permanent is done, one would build upon sand. All efforts, spiritual or other, at the regeneration and reformation of mankind and a good many individual endeavours too have come to a sorry end, because the foundation was not laid sufficiently deep and secure. One must dig into Matter as far down as possiblelike Rishi Agastya in the Vedaeven to the other end. For there is another mystery there, perhaps the Mystery of mysteries. The deeper you go down into Matter, as you clear up the jungle and bring in the higher light, you discover and unlock strange and mighty energies of consciousness secreted there, even like the uranium pile in the atomic world. It is revealed to you that Inconscience is not total absence of consciousness, it is simply consciousness asleep, in-gathered, entranced. And this nether consciousness is, after all, one with the supreme Consciousness. It is itself the best weapon to bring about its own transformation. Not only the higher self, but the lower self too must be salvaged and saved by its own selftman tmnam uddharet.
II
05.02 - Of the Divine and its Help, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the same way, all repose must be filled with intense activity-tranquil and immobile, yet a dynamo of the swiftest and surest energies.
One must know how to wait-calm, patient, unshakable-wait indefinitely, as long as that is demanded, accepting even what looks like defeat.
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An ordinary man is a most disorganised entity and possesses no individual character. His mind is a conglomeration of thoughts and ideas which do not particularly belong to him, but to everybody, being elements of the world-mind in general. His vital being too is a medley of desires, impulses, energies that are not personal in any sense, but pass through him or take a long or short-term asylum in him from the universal vital force. The body, being a definitely delimited object, is perhaps the only thing that appears to be personal the chief, if not the only source and sign of personal identity; and with the loss of the body, the whole personality seems to crumble down and disappear in the world-existence the body particles get mixed into the world of matter, the life elements disperse in the vital world, the mental components disintegrate into the world of mind. In fact, this is what happens to the human person after death or would happen normally.
Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no personality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every momentas the poet says:
05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that it is consciousness-energy. And it is this consciousness-energy that is at the source of all cosmic activities. Man's action too springs from this original source, although apparently it seems to be caused by other secondary and derivative energies. As a matter of fact what these energies that seem to be actually in play do is not the origination but rather the deviation and diversion, a diminution and adulteration of the supreme energy, a lowering of the quality, the tone and temper of the dynamism. In other words, as we have already said, a thought force, a vital force, a nervous or physical force, all these are only lower, even minima values, more or less distant and deformed echoes of a true and absolute Power behind and above them all. These forces become powerful in proportion as they are instruments and functions of that one mother energy. The truth is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Brahma a and the gods in the Kena Upanishad. The gods conquered and were proud of their conquest; each thought that it was due to his own personal prowess that he conquered. But they were utterly discomfited and shamed when the Divine Power appeared and proved to them that but for this Power they would not be able even to tackle a blade of grassFire would not burn it, Water would not drench it, Wind would not move it.
The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo
06.12 - The Expanding Body-Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The field of our physical activity is very limited. If you look at it closely you will find it indeed extremely narrow and our capacities confined within a small circle. We are bound by the outline of our material body. I cannot, for instance, be sitting in my room and at the same time doing gymnastics in the playground. If you wish to do one thing you cannot do another; if you are at one place you cannot be at another simultaneously. How convenient it would be if while I was writing at the table, I could get there immediately a book from a far-off shelf for consultation without moving or taking anybody's help! And yet is the thing so very impossible? We know, for example, of extraordinaryat least, queerthings happening at what are called spirit sances, things that cannot be explained by the normal functioning of the physical senses; they are explained as interventions from the spirit world. In reality, however, spirits or ghosts have, in general, very little to do in this matter. It is action not of disembodied beings but of the normal human energiesespecially the vital or life energyfreed from the body's control and exerting itself independently. An example, a true fact that happened, will best illustrate what I mean to say.
A young man, in Paris, a clerk at a railway station, used to receive there his fiance and her mother from time to time. One day he was expecting them and waiting for the train time; they had to come by train. As he was busy with his work at the table, at about the appointed hour, people around saw him all on a sudden bending down his head with a loud scream and then resting it on the table; he lay unconscious. In the meantime, what happened on the other side was a terrible railway disaster: the two women were involved in it.
07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the bare elemental energies
Make of the sense a glory of boundless joy,
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.
I have pored on her infinitesimal elements
07.22 - Mysticism and Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Occultism is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science, altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry or physics; for occult knowledge is very much like scientific knowledge, only science deals with material objects and forces, while occultism deals with invisible entities and energies, their potentials of combination and association. And as by your chemical or physical knowledge you control material phenomena, in the same way by the occult knowledge you control subtle phenomena, make them active and effective. The procedure also is quite scientific. It is to be learnt exactly as you do a science. It is not a matter of feeling or emotion: it is nothing vague or uncertain. You must work as in a laboratory. You have to learn the laws of action and reaction and apply them. Only there are not many people to teach you. Also it is not without danger. There are in this field combinations as explosive as any chemical combination.
It is a thing, however, that can be learnt. But one must have the aptitude. If you have the power latent in you, you can develop it by practice; but if you have not, you can try for 50 years, it will come to nothing. Everybody cannot have the occult power; it is as if you said that everybody in the world could be a musician or a painter or a poet. There are people who can and there are those who cannot. Usually, if you are interested in the subject, unless it is a mere idle curiosity, it is a sign that you have the gift. You then try. But, as I say, it is to be done with great precaution.
07.29 - How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Three hundred years is the minimum, I should say. You must realise what it means to transform the body. The body with all its organs and functionings works automatically without the intervention of your consciousness, and is built upon an animal plan. If your heart stops for the hundredth part of a second, your body goes off. You cannot do without a single one of your organs and you must keep watch over their proper functioning. Transformation means the replacement of this purely material arrangement by a systematic concentration of forces. You must bring about an arrangement of forces, according to a certain kind of vibration, replacing each organ by a centre of self-conscious energy which governs through the concentration of a higher force. There will no longer be a stomach, no more a heart even. These things will give place to a system of vibrations which represent what they really are. The material organs are symbols of energy centres; they are not the essential reality, they only give a form or figure to it under certain circumstances. The transformed body will function through its real energy centres, not through their representatives as developed in an animal body. For that you must first of all be conscious of these centres and their functionings; instead of an unconscious automatic movement there has to be a movement of conscious control. Thus one will have at his disposal not physical animal organs but the symbolic vibrations, the symbolic energies. This does not mean that there will not be any definite recognizable form. The form will be built up with qualities rather than with solid (dust) particles. It will be, so to say, a practical or pragmatic form: it will be supple and mobile, unlike the fixed grossly material shape. As the expression of your face changes with your feeling, impulsion, even so the body will change according to the need of the inner movement: have you never had this kind of experience in your dream? You rise up in the air and you give as it were a push with your elbow in one direction and your body extends that way; you give a kick with your foot and you land somewhere else: you can be transparent at will and go easily through a solid wall! The transformed body will behave somewhat in the same way, it will be light, luminous, elastic. Lightness, luminosity, elasticity will be the very fundamental qualities of the body.
To prepare such a body 300 years is nothing; even a thousand years will not be too much. Naturally, I am speaking of the same body. If you change your body in between, it will no longer be the same body. At 50 the body already begins to wear out. But, on the contrary, if you have a body that goes on perfecting itself; if each passing year represents a step in progress, then you can continue indefinitely: for after all, you are immortal.
07.43 - Music Its Origin and Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Something similar to that experience may happen to you when your consciousness is all attentive and concentrated; you feel suddenly that you are being carried aloft, that all your energies are gathered and lifted up, as if your head has opened out and you are thrown into the free air, into the far spaces of extraordinary heights and magnificent lights. The experience gives you in a few seconds what one may in the normal course of things achieve after many years of difficult yoga. Only immediately after the experience you drop down below upon the earth, because the basis has not been built; even you may begin to doubt whether you really had the experience. Still the consciousness has been prepared, something definitive has been done and remains.
***
08.24 - On Food, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not like your stomach which can digest only a limited quantity of food and this food again can give out only a portiona very small portionof its energy. For after the energy spent in swallowing, masticating, digesting, etc. how much of it still remains available? If, on the other hand, you learnyou learn instinctively, it is a kind of instinctto draw from the universal energy which is freely available in the world and in any quantity, you can take it in and absorb as much as you are capable of doing. Thus, as I have said, when there is not the support from below coming from food, the body makes an automatic movement to get the needed energy from the environment. It gets at times, more than enough, even an overdose and that puts you in a state of tension or stimulation. And if your body is strong and can remain without food for some time, then you can maintain your poise and utilise the energies in all waysto make inner progress, for example, to become more conscious, to change your nature. But if your body does not have much reserve, it gets easily weakened by fast, then there occurs a disharmony between the intensity of the energies you absorb and the capacity of the body to hold them and that upsets you. You lose your poise, the equilibrium of the forces is broken and anything can happen. In any case, if such a thing happens, you lose a good deal of self-control, you get excited and this unnatural excitement you consider as a higher state of consciousness. But it is an inner unbalance, nothing more. Otherwise, in that state your senses get refined and receptive. Thus when you fast and do not draw energy from below, if you smell a flower, you feel nourished, the perfume you brea the in serves as food, it gives you energy and this you would not have known but for the fasting.
In this condition certain faculties become intensified and that is taken as a spiritual effect. But in reality it has very little to do with spirituality. However, instead of thinking all the while about food, how to get it and eat it, if one were to take to fasting for the sake of freeing oneself from the bondage of food preoccupation, rising a little in the scale of consciousness, it would be a good thing. If you have the faith it will do you good, it will purify you, make you progress a little. In that way it is all right: it will not do any harm to your body except making it a little slimmer. But if you fast and then continuously turn back to it and think of the food that you might have eaten or are likely to eat after the fasting, well, such fasting is worse than feasting.
08.27 - Value of Religious Exercises, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I have been to holy places. I have seen monuments considered as very highly religious, in France, in Japan and elsewhere; they were not always the same kind of temples or churches nor were they the same gods but the impression they left on me, my experiences of them were everywhere almost the same, with but slight differences. There is usually a force concentrated at the place, but its character depends entirely upon the faith of the faithful; also there is a difference between the force as it really exists and the form in which it appears to the faithful. For instance, in a most famous and most beautiful place of worship which was, from the standpoint of art, the most magnificent creation one could imagine, I saw within its holy of holies a huge black Spider that had spread its net all around, caught within it and absorbed all the energies emanating from the devotion of the people, their prayers and all that. It was not a very pleasant spectacle. But the people who were there and prayed felt the divine contact, they received all kinds of benefit from their prayers. And yet the truth of the matter was what I saw. The people had the faith and their faith changed what was bad into something that was good to them. Now if I had gone and told them: 'you think it is God you are praying to! it is only a formidable vital Spider that is sucking your force,' surely it would not have been very charitable on my part. But everywhere it is almost the same thing. There is a vital Force presiding. And vital beings feed upon the vibrations of human emotion. Very few are they, a microscopic number, who go to the temples and churches and holy places with the true religious feeling, that is to say, not to pray or beg something of God, but to offer themselves, to express gratitude, to aspire, to surrender. One in a million would be too many. These when they are there, get some touch of the Divine just for the moment. But all others go only out of superstition, egoism, self-interest and create the atmosphere as it is found and it is that that you usually brea the in when you go to a holy place; only as you go there with a good feeling, you say to yourself "what a peace-giving spot!"
I am sorry to say it. But it is like that. I tell you I have purposely made the experiment to some extent everywhere. Perhaps I came across at times in far-away small cornerslike a small village church, for exampleplaces where there was real peace and quiet and some true aspiration. Barring that, everywhere it is but a web of adverse vital forces that use everything for their food. The bigger the congregation, the more portentous the vital deity. Besides, in the invisible world it is only the vital beings that like to be worshipped. For, as I have said, that pleases them, gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and are happy; when they can have a troop of people adoring them, they reach the very height of satisfaction.
09.02 - Meditation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Collective meditation, of which the most external form is collective prayer, has been practised since ancient times for different reasons, in different ways, and with different purposes. Groups of persons, whether belonging to the same Church or not, come together to express a common feeling; in certain cases, it is to sing together in praise of God, to chant a hymn of gratitude, expressing love, adoration, thankfulness. In other cases,there are many historical examples of thispeople gather together for a common invocation, to ask something from the Divine in the hope that a prayer done collectively will have more effect than an individual prayer. Thus, in Europe prophets announced that in the year one thousand of grace there would be the end of the world; everywhere crowds assembled to implore the divine protection and to pray that the catastrophe might be averted. More recently in modern times, when the king of England, George VI, had an attack of pneumonia and was almost on the point of death, the British people gathered not only in churches but even in the streets in front of the royal palace, to pray in common and to ask God to save their king. This is of course a most external form, I could say, a most worldly meditation in community. Besides, in all groups of Initiation, in all spiritual schools of ancient times and naturally in modern times also, meditation in community has always been practised; here the purpose is evidently very different. People gather together to make a collective progress, to open themselves to a force, a light and an influence; it is somewhat like that which we all try to do here. There are two ways to proceed, and both are excellent. For individual meditation, first of all, one must prepare to meditate, that is to say, after sitting down in a posture, at the same time comfortable enough not to be too cramped, and not too comfortable either lest you should fall asleep, one establishes the calm and the silence, not only externally but internally and then one gathers as far as possible one's consciousness which is generally dispersed in all kinds of thoughts and preoccupations. One brings back the consciousness as completely as one can, and concentrates it in the region of the heart, towards the solar plexus, so that all the active energies which are in the head, all which make the brain active are turned and concentrated on this point. This may be done in a few seconds, or in a few minutes. It depends upon each one; when you have prepared yourself in this way, you have the choice between two attitudes: active and passive.
What I call an active attitude is to concentrate on the person who guides the meditation with the will to open yourself to receive what is being given to you or to the force with which you are put in contact. It is active, because here there is a will which acts and an active concentration to open yourself to someone or something.
100.00 - Synergy, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
behaviors; there seemed to be "lost" energies. The lost energies were the lost
synergetic interstabilizations.
--
accompany the amount of energies necessary for a jet to fly would have melted all
the engines of yesterday. Not until you had chrome-nickel-steel was it possible to
--
local machines always had friction, therefore energies were always going out of
the system. They call that entropy: local systems were always losing energy to the
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Of monstrous energies chained in a stark round
Soulless and stone-eyed with mechanic dreams?
10.17 - Miracles: Their True Significance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A miracle is nothing but the intervention of a force from another plane of consciousness. It must be recognised at the very outset that the physical plane of existence is not the only reality, there are many other planes superimposed' one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other levels like these. A miracle happens, that is to say, a material formation behaves in an abnormal way because a force has come down from the vital region and has influenced or taken control of the material object. So the material object instead of obeying the material law is obliged to obey a vital law which is of a much greater potency. Yogis who do miracles possess this vital power, they have acquired it through a regular discipline and training. Spirit-calling, table-turning, even curing diseases and ailments in a moment and many other activities of the kind are manifestations of very elementary energies of life. From the occult point of view these are very crude and rudimentary examples of what a different kind of force can achieve on a different plane. Even the vital plane possesses deeper and higher energies whose action on the material plane is of deeper and higher category. A deeper or higher vital power can change radically your character and long-standing habits, help to mould them into a different, nobler and more beautiful pattern. The mind too is capable of performing miracles, a strong mental energy can dictate its terms to life and even to the body. Only the miracles here are not of a dazzling kind that astound or confound you. They have a subtler composition, yet they belong to the same category. In the mind itself miracles happen also when a higher light, a superior consciousness intuition, inspiration, revelationdescends into the normal mental working and creates there a thing that is abnormal in beauty and truth and reality. Thus for example, a matter of fact mind is seen turned into a fine poet or a workaday hand is transmuted into a consummate artist.
A miracle can be said to be doubly a miracle; first of all, because it means an intervention from another plane, a superior level of being, and secondly because the process or the action of the intervention is not deployed or staged out but is occult and telescoped, the result being almost simultaneous with the pressure of the moving force. .
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
We have only one option: in examining the manifestations of our age, we must penetrate them with sufficient breadth and depth that we do not come under their demonic and destructive spell. We must not focus our view merely an these phenomena, but rather on the humus of the decaying world beneath, where the seedlings of the future are growing, immeasurable in their potential and vigor. Since our insight into the energies pressing toward development aids their unfolding, the seedlings and inceptive beginnings must be made visible and comprehensible.
It will be our task to demonstrate that the first stirrings of the new can be found in all areas of human expression, and that they inherently share a common character. This demonstration can succeed only if we have certain knowledge about the manifestations of both our past and our present. Consequently, the task of the present work will be to work out the foundations of the past and the present which are also the basis of the new consciousness and the new reality arising therefrom. It will be the task of the second part to define the new emergent consciousness structure to the extent that its inceptions are already visible.
1.01 - Meeting the Master - Authors first meeting, December 1918, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
All the energies of the leaders were taken up by the freedom movement. Only a few among them attempted to see beyond the horizon of political freedom some ideal of human perfection; for, after all, freedom is not the ultimate goal but a condition for the expression of the cultural Spirit of India. In Swami Shraddhananda, Pandit Madanmohan Malavia, Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi to name some leaders we see the double aspect of the inspiration. Among all the visions of perfection of the human spirit on earth, I found the synthetic and integral vision of Sri Aurobindo the most rational and the most satisfying. It meets the need of the individual and collective life of man today. It is the international form of the fundamental elements of Indian culture. It is, Dr. S. K. Maitra says, the message which holds out hope in a world of despair.
This aspect of Sri Aurobindo's vision attracted me as much as the natural affinity which I had felt on seeing him. I found on making a serious study of the Arya that it led me to very rational conclusions with regard to the solutions of the deepest problems of life. I opened correspondence with him and in 1916, with his permission, began to translate the Arya into Gujarati.
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:But still, in the practical development, each of the three stages has its necessity and utility and must be given its time or its place. It will not do, it cannot be safe or effective to begin with the last and highest alone. It would not be the right course, either, to leap prematurely from one to another. For even if from the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there are elements of the nature which long prevent the recognition from becoming realisation. But without realisation our mental belief cannot become a dynamic reality; it is still only a figure of knowledge, not a living truth, an idea, not yet a power. And even if realisation has begun, it may be dangerous to imagine or to assume too soon that we are altogether in the hands of the Supreme or are acting as his instrument. That assumption may introduce a calamitous falsity; it may produce a helpless inertia or, magnifying the movements of the ego with the Divine Name, it may disastrously distort and ruin the whole course of the Yoga. There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
17:The personal will of the Sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf of distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the progress, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working.
GURU
1.01 - The Mental Fortress, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
In fact, the illusion is being shattered despite ourselves. What we take to be a dreadful disarray is a great array of new energies coming to pump fresh air into our lungs of mentalized earthlings. New energies... there is a phrase with a mystical ring to it which would undoubtedly draw dark frowns from the materialist. But let us admit it (before circumstances force us to do so with our nose to the ground), today's materialists are as outdated as yesterday's religionists; they are in a closed, stifling, predictable and obsolete system. Both are products of the mental circle, the obverse and reverse of the same coin, which is proving counterfeit. The real point lies not in god versus no-god, but in something else: the point is to step out of the circle and see how one breathes on the other side one breathes very well on the other side, so well, in fact, that it is like breathing for the very first time ever.
Thus, we shall not effect the passage with our own strength; if such were the condition, no one could do it, except spiritual athletes. But those athletes, filled with meditations and concentrations and asceticism, do not get out either, although they may seem to. They inflate their own spiritual ego (a kind worse than the other one, far more deceptive, because it is garbed in a grain of truth) and their illuminations are simply the luminous discharges of their own accumulated cloud. The logic of it is simple: one does not get out of the circle by the power of the circle, any more than the lotus rises above the mud by the power of the mud. A little bit of sun is needed. And because the ascetics and saints and founders of religions throughout the ages only reached the rarefied realms of the mental bubble, they created one church or another that amazingly resembled the closed system from which they originated, namely, a dogma, a set of rules, the Tables of the Law, a one and only prophet born in the blessed year 000, around whom revolved the beautiful story, forever fixed in the year 000, like the electrons around the nucleus, the stars around the Great Bear, and man around his navel. Or, if they did get out, it was only in spirit, leaving the earth and bodies to their habitual decay. Granted, each new hub was wiser, more luminous, worthy and virtuous than the preceding one, and it did help men, but it changed nothing in the mental circle, as we have seen, for thousands of years because its light was only the other side of one and the same shadow, the white of the black, the good of evil, the virtue of a frightful misery that grips us all in the depths of our caves.
1.01 - The Science of Living, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will
manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
(Illustration: One does not confuse the pain of toothache with the decay which causes it. Inanimate objects are sensitive to certain physical forces, such as electrical and thermal conductivity; but neither in us nor in them so far as we know is there any direct conscious perception of these forces. Imperceptible influences are therefore associated with all material phenomena; and there is no reason why we should not work upon matter through those subtle energies as we do through their material bases. In fact, we use magnetic force to move iron, and solar radiation to reproduce images.)
14. Man is capable of being, and using, anything which he perceives; for everything that he perceives is in a certain sense a part of his being. He may thus subjugate the whole Universe of which he is conscious to his individual Will.
--
(Illustration: Heat may be transformed into light and power by using it to drive dynamos. The vibrations of the air may be used to kill men by so ordering them in speech as to inflame war-like passions. The hallucinations connected with the mysterious energies of sex result in the perpetuation of the species.)
16. The application of any given force affects all the orders of being which exist in the object to which it is applied, whichever of those orders is directly affected.
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(Illustration: A man may use a razor to make himself vigilant over his speech, by using it to cut himself whenever he unguardedly utters a chosen word. He may serve the same purpose by resolving that every incident of his life shall remind him of a particular thing, Making every impression the starting point of a connected series of thoughts ending in that thing. He might also devote his whole energies to some particular object, by resolving to do nothing at variance therewith, and to make every act turn to the advantage of that object.)
18. He may attract to himself any force of the Universe by making himself a fit receptacle for it, establishing a connection with it, and arranging conditions so that its nature compels it to flow toward him.
1.01 - Who is Tara, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
subtle inner energies. No matter whether others praise or blame her, harm or
help her, her energy does not become unbalanced and she does not lose her
1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
dynamic energies of Prana which, feeding upon physical substances, are dependent on and limited by their sustenance.5 Tapas
is the divine counterpart of this lower nervous or vital energy.
1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
aims and energies in the world as part of its own being.
THE ACTIVE BEATITUDE
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
the energies of the Pranic dynamism, of Life, of Matarishwan.
It is pure, unpierced by evil. What we call sin or evil, is
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Such is the mode of human aspiration. And Ashwapati in his quest begins to explore the world and see what it is, the way it is built up. He observes it rising tier upon tier, level upon level of consciousness. He mounts these stairs, takes cognisance of the modes and functions of each and passes on enriched by the experiences that each contri butes to his developing consciousness. The ascent he finds is from ignorance to knowledge. The human being starts from the darkest bed of ignorance, the solid basis of rock as it were, the body, the material existence. Ignorance here is absolute inconscience. Out of the total absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developingwidening, deepening and heighteningconsciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward, there is a growing light in And mixed with the obscurity; ignorance begins to shed its hard and dark coatings one and gives place to directed and motivated energies. He meets beings and creatures appropriate to those levels crawling and stirring and climbing, moved by the laws governing the respective regions. In this way Ashwapati passes on into the higher vital, into the border of the mental.
Ashwapati now observes with a clear vividness that all these worlds and the beings and forces that inhabit them are stricken as it were with a bar sinister branded upon their bodies. In spite of an inherent urge of ascension the way is not a straight road but devious and crooked breaking into by-lanes and blind alleys. There is a great corruption and perversion of natural movements towards Truth: falsehoods and pretensions, arrogance of blindness reign here in various degrees. Ashwapati sought to know the wherefore of it all. So he goes behind, dives down and comes into a region that seems to be the source and basis of all ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. He comes into the very heart of the Night, the abyss of consciousness. He meets there the Mother of Evil and the sons of darkness. He stands before
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I have seized the cosmic energies for my use.||124.48||
I have pored on her infinitesimal elements
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
everything that we observe. All the movement, all energies, all
forms, all happenings we must see as those of our one and real
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
to the computer. Psychologists in the west have concentrated their energies on determining how the brain
determines what is out there, so to speak out there, from the objective viewpoint. The Russians, by
1.02 - Meditating on Tara, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
the nature of reality. We recite a mantra in order to calm our energies, concentrate our mind, and approach a state of meditative equipoise. In Green
Taras mantra, om represents Taras body, speech, and mind, the faculties that
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
At the end of a cycle the energies now displayed in the universe quiet down and become potential. At the beginning of the next cycle they start up, strike upon the Akasha, and out of the Akasha evolve these various forms, and as the Akasha changes, this Prana changes also into all these manifestations of energy. The knowledge and control of this Prana is really what is meant by Pranayama.
This opens to us the door to almost unlimited power. Suppose, for instance, a man understood the Prana perfectly, and could control it, what power on earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and stars out of their places, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the biggest suns, because he would control the Prana. This is the end and aim of Pranayama. When the Yogi becomes perfect, there will be nothing in nature not under his control. If he orders the gods or the souls of the departed to come, they will come at his bidding. All the forces of nature will obey him as slaves. When the ignorant see these powers of the Yogi, they call them the miracles. One peculiarity of the Hindu mind is that it always inquires for the last possible generalisation, leaving the details to be worked out afterwards. The question is raised in the Vedas, "What is that, knowing which, we shall know everything?" Thus, all books, and all philosophies that have been written, have been only to prove that by knowing which everything is known. If a man wants to know this universe bit by bit he must know every individual grain of sand, which means infinite time; he cannot know all of them. Then how can knowledge be? How is it possible for a man to be all-knowing through particulars? The Yogis say that behind this particular manifestation there is a generalisation. Behind all particular ideas stands a generalised, an abstract principle; grasp it, and you have grasped everything. Just as this whole universe has been generalised in the Vedas into that One Absolute Existence, and he who has grasped that Existence has grasped the whole universe, so all forces have been generalised into this Prana, and he who has grasped the Prana has grasped all the forces of the universe, mental or physical. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his own mind, and all the minds that exist. He who has controlled the Prana has controlled his body, and all the bodies that exist, because the Prana is the generalised manifestation of force.
How to control the Prana is the one idea of Pranayama. All the trainings and exercises in this regard are for that one end. Each man must begin where he stands, must learn how to control the things that are nearest to him. This body is very near to us, nearer than anything in the external universe, and this mind is the nearest of all. The Prana which is working this mind and body is the nearest to us of all the Prana in this universe. This little wave of the Prana which represents our own energies, mental and physical, is the nearest to us of all the waves of the infinite ocean of Prana. If we can succeed in controlling that little wave, then alone we can hope to control the whole of Prana. The Yogi who has done this gains perfection; no longer is he under any power. He becomes almost almighty, almost all-knowing. We see sects in every country who have attempted this control of Prana. In this country there are Mind-healers, Faith-healers, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, etc., and if we examine these different bodies, we shall find at the back of each this control of the Prana, whether they know it or not. If you boil all their theories down, the residuum will be that. It is the one and the same force they are manipulating, only unknowingly. They have stumbled on the discovery of a force and are using it unconsciously without knowing its nature, but it is the same as the Yogi uses, and which comes from Prana.
The Prana is the vital force in every being. Thought is the finest and highest action of Prana. Thought, again, as we see, is not all. There is also what we call instinct or unconscious thought, the lowest plane of action. If a mosquito stings us, our hand will strike it automatically, instinctively. This is one expression of thought. All reflex actions of the body belong to this plane of thought. There is again the other plane of thought, the conscious. I reason, I judge, I think, I see the pros and cons of certain things, yet that is not all. We know that reason is limited. Reason can go only to a certain extent, beyond that it cannot reach. The circle within which it runs is very very limited indeed. Yet at the same time, we find facts rush into this circle. Like the coming of comets certain things come into this circle; it is certain they come from outside the limit, although our reason cannot go beyond. The causes of the phenomena intruding themselves in this small limit are outside of this limit. The mind can exist on a still higher plane, the superconscious. When the mind has attained to that state, which is called Samdhi perfect concentration, superconsciousness it goes beyond the limits of reason, and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. All manipulations of the subtle forces of the body, the different manifestations of Prana, if trained, give a push to the mind, help it to go up higher, and become superconscious, from where it acts.
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Thus, even in the universe of thought we find unity, and at last, when we get to the Self, we know that that Self can only be One. Beyond the vibrations of matter in its gross and subtle aspects, beyond motion there is but One. Even in manifested motion there is only unity. These facts can no more be denied. Modern physics also has demonstrated that the sum total of the energies in the universe is the same throughout. It has also been proved that this sum total of energy exists in two forms. It becomes potential, toned down, and calmed, and next it comes out manifested as all these various forces; again it goes back to the quiet state, and again it manifests. Thus it goes on evolving and involving through eternity. The control of this Prana, as before stated, is what is called Pranayama.
The most obvious manifestation of this Prana in the human body is the motion of the lungs. If that stops, as a rule all the other manifestations of force in the body will immediately stop. But there are persons who can train themselves in such a manner that the body will live on, even when this motion has stopped. There are some persons who can bury themselves for days, and yet live without breathing. To reach the subtle we must take the help of the grosser, and so, slowly travel towards the most subtle until we gain our point. Pranayama really means controlling this motion of the lungs and this motion is associated with the breath. Not that breath is producing it; on the contrary it is producing breath. This motion draws in the air by pump action. The Prana is moving the lungs, the movement of the lungs draws in the air. So Pranayama is not breathing, but controlling that muscular power which moves the lungs. That muscular power which goes out through the nerves to the muscles and from them to the lungs, making them move in a certain manner, is the Prana, which we have to control in the practice of Pranayama. When the Prana has become controlled, then we shall immediately find that all the other actions of the Prana in the body will slowly come under control. I myself have seen men who have controlled almost every muscle of the body; and why not? If I have control over certain muscles, why not over every muscle and nerve of the body? What impossibility is there? At present the control is lost, and the motion has become automatic. We cannot move our ears at will, but we know that animals can. We have not that power because we do not exercise it. This is what is called atavism.
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The gigantic will-powers of the world, the world-movers, can bring their Prana into a high state of vibration, and it is so great and powerful that it catches others in a moment, and thousands are drawn towards them, and half the world think as they do. Great prophets of the world had the most wonderful control of the Prana, which gave them tremendous will-power; they had brought their Prana to the highest state of motion, and this is what gave them power to sway the world. All manifestations of power arise from this control. Men may not know the secret, but this is the one explanation. Sometimes in your own body the supply of Prana gravitates more or less to one part; the balance is disturbed, and when the balance of Prana is disturbed, what we call disease is produced. To take away the superfluous Prana, or to supply the Prana that is wanting, will be curing the disease. That again is Pranayama to learn when there is more or less Prana in one part of the body than there should be. The feelings will become so subtle that the mind will feel that there is less Prana in the toe or the finger than there should be, and will possess the power to supply it. These are among the various functions of Pranayama. They have to be learned slowly and gradually, and as you see, the whole scope of Raja-Yoga is really to teach the control and direction in different planes of the Prana. When a man has concentrated his energies, he masters the Prana that is in his body. When a man is meditating, he is also concentrating the Prana.
In an ocean there are huge waves, like mountains, then smaller waves, and still smaller, down to little bubbles, but back of all these is the infinite ocean. The bubble is connected with the infinite ocean at one end, and the huge wave at the other end. So, one may be a gigantic man, and another a little bubble, but each is connected with that infinite ocean of energy, which is the common birthright of every animal that exists. Wherever there is life, the storehouse of infinite energy is behind it. Starting as some fungus, some very minute, microscopic bubble, and all the time drawing from that infinite store-house of energy, a form is changed slowly and steadily until in course of time it becomes a plant, then an animal, then man, ultimately God. This is attained through millions of aeons, but what is time? An increase of speed, an increase of struggle, is able to bridge the gulf of time. That which naturally takes a long time to accomplish can be shortened by the intensity of the action, says the Yogi. A man may go on slowly drawing in this energy from the infinite mass that exists in the universe, and, perhaps, he will require a hundred thousand years to become a Deva, and then, perhaps, five hundred thousand years to become still higher, and, perhaps, five millions of years to become perfect. Given rapid growth, the time will be lessened. Why is it not possible, with sufficient effort, to reach this very perfection in six months or six years? There is no limit. Reason shows that. If an engine, with a certain amount of coal, runs two miles an hour, it will run the distance in less time with a greater supply of coal. Similarly, why shall not the soul, by intensifying its action, attain perfection in this very life? All beings will at last attain to that goal, we know. But who cares to wait all these millions of aeons? Why not reach it immediately, in this body even, in this human form? Why shall I not get that infinite knowledge, infinite power, now?
1.02 - Prayer of Parashara to Vishnu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Then, ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable according to their qualities, as soothing, terrific, or stupifying; but possessing various energies, and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. Having combined, therefore, with one another, they assumed, through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and from the direction of spirit, with the acquiescence of the indiscrete Principle[29], Intellect and the rest, to the gross elements inclusive, formed an egg[30], which gradually expanded like a bubble of water. This vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements, and resting on the waters, was the excellent natural abode of Viṣṇu in the form of Brahmā; and there Viṣṇu, the lord of the universe, whose essence is inscrutable, assumed a perceptible form, and even he himself abided in it in the character of Brahmā[31]. Its womb, vast as the mountain Meru, was composed of the mountains; and the mighty oceans were the waters that filled its cavity. In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons, and mankind. And this egg was externally invested by seven natural envelopes, or by water, air, fire, ether, and Aha
kāra the origin of the elements, each tenfold the extent of that which it invested; next came the principle of Intelligence; and, finally, the whole was surrounded by the indiscrete Principle: resembling thus the cocoa-nut, filled interiorly with pulp, and exteriorly covered by husk and rind.
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:And since Yoga is in its essence a turning away from the ordinary material and animal life led by most men or from the more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication. On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from the powers that oppose our progress. It is the difficulty of this wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in the path of Yoga. For our entire nature and its environment, all our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth and work against the whole-heartedness of our endeavour. In a certain sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations, -- all amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations. What we propose in our Yoga is nothing less than to break up the whole formation of our past and present which makes up the ordinary material and mental man and to create a new centre of vision and a new universe of activities in ourselves which shall constitute a divine humanity or a superhuman nature.
7:The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part and every movement to that which seems to the unregenerated sensemind so much less real than the material world and its objects. Our whole being-soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life, body must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that "That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore." Every vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence. Mind has to cease to be mind and become brilliant with something beyond it. Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and powerful that can no longer recognise its old blind eager narrow self or petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the impeding clod it now is, but become instead a conscious servant and radiant instrument and living form of the spirit.
8:The difficulty of the task has led naturally to the pursuit of easy and trenchant solutions; it has generated and fixed deeply' the tendency of religions and of schools of Yoga to separate the life of the world from the inner life. The powers of this world and their actual activities, it is felt, either do not belong to God at all or are for some obscure and puzzling cause, Maya or another, a dark contradiction of the divine Truth. And on their own opposite side the powers of the Truth and their ideal activities are seen to belong to quite another plane of consciousness than that, obscure, ignorant and perverse in its impulses and forces, on which the life of the earth is founded. There appears at once the antinomy of a bright and pure kingdom of God and a dark and impure kingdom of the devil; we feel the opposition of our crawling earthly birth and life to an exalted spiritual God-consciousness; we become readily convinced of the incompatibility of life's subjection to Maya with the soul's concentration in pure Brahman existence. The easiest way is to turn away from all that belongs to the one and to retreat by a naked and precipitous ascent into the other. Thus arises the attraction and, it would seem, the necessity of the principle of exclusive concentration which plays so prominent a part in the specialised schools of Yoga; for by that concentration we can arrive through an uncompromising renunciation of the world at an entire self-consecration to the One on whom we concentrate. It is no longer incumbent on us to compel all the lower activities to the difficult recognition of a new and higher spiritualised life and train them to be its agents or executive powers. It is enough to kill or quiet them and keep at most the few energies necessary, on one side, for the maintenance of the body and, on the other, for communion with the Divine.
9:The very aim and conception of an integral Yoga debars us from adopting this simple and strenuous high-pitched process. The hope of an integral transformation forbids us to take a short cut or to make ourselves light for the race by throwing away our impediments. For we have set out to conquer all ourselves and the world for God; we are determined to give him our becoming as well as our being and not merely to bring the pure and naked spirit as a bare offering to a remote and secret Divinity in a distant heaven or abolish all we are in a holocaust to an immobile Absolute. The Divine that we adore is not only a remote extracosmic Reality, but a half-veiled Manifestation present and near to us here in the universe. Life is the field of a divine manifestation not yet complete: here, in life, on earth, in the body, -- ihaiva, as the Upanishads insist, -- we have to unveil the Godhead; here we must make its transcendent greatness, light and sweetness real to our consciousness, here possess and, as far as may be, express it. Life then we must accept in our Yoga in order utterly to transmute it; we are forbidden to shrink from the difficulties that this acceptance may add to our struggle. Our compensation is that even if the path is more rugged, the effort more complex and bafflingly arduous, yet after a point we gain an immense advantage. For once our minds are reasonably fixed in the central vision and our wills are on the whole converted to the single pursuit. Life becomes our helper. Intent, vigilant, integrally conscious, we can take every detail of its forms and every incident of its movements as food for the sacrificial Fire within us. Victorious in the struggle, we can compel Earth herself to be an aid towards our perfection and can enrich our realisation with the booty torn from the powers that oppose us.
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11:The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us -- intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body-has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order. Moreover, we find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude. Our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use offer the manifestation of their forms and forces. The difficulty of our separate salvation is immensely increased by this complexity and manifold openness and subjection to tile in-streaming energies of the universe. Of all this we have to take account, to deal with it, to know what is the secret stuff of our nature and its constituent and resultant motions and to create in it all a divine centre and a true harmony and luminous order.
12:In the ordinary paths of Yoga the method used for dealing with these conflicting materials is direct and simple. One or another of the principal psychological forces in us is selected as our single means for attaining to the Divine; the rest is quieted into inertia or left to starve in its smallness. The Bhakta, seizing on the emotional forces of the being, the intense activities of the heart, abides concentrated in the love of God, gathered up as into a single one-pointed tongue of fire; he is indifferent to the activities of thought, throws behind him the importunities of the reason, cares nothing for the mind's thirst for knowledge. All the knowledge he needs is his faith and the inspirations that well up from a heart in communion with the Divine. He has no use for any will to works that is not turned to the direct worship of the Beloved or the service of the temple. The man of Knowledge, self-confined by a deliberate choice to the force and activities of discriminative thought, finds release in the mind's inward-drawn endeavour. He concentrates on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions, deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life, -- the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and leave him free, still and mute, the eternal non-doer. The body is his stumbling-block, the vital functions are his enemies; if their demands can be reduced to a minimum, that is his great good fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine, to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in the single self-ward endeavour of the mind or Godward passion of the heart is the trend of these Yogas. The problem is solved by the excision of all but the one central difficulty which pursues the only chosen motive-force; into the midst of the dividing calls of our nature the principle of an exclusive concentration comes sovereignly to our rescue.
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20:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
21:Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
1.02 - The 7 Habits An Overview, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
That focus on golden eggs -- that attitude, that paradigm -- is totally inadequate to tap into the powerful energies of the mind and heart of another person. A short-term bottom line is important, but it isn't all-important.
Effectiveness lies in the balance. Excessive focus on P results in ruined health, worn-out machines, depleted bank accounts, and broken relationships. Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs for three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra 10 years of life it creates, unaware he's spending
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supreme being1 of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of the divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being,3 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine
Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.
1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
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Three great Gods, origin of the Puranic Trinity, largest puissances of the supreme Godhead, make possible this development and upward evolution; they support in its grand lines and fundamental energies all these complexities of the cosmos.
Brahmanaspati is the Creator; by the word, by his cry he creates - that is to say he expresses, he brings out all existence and conscious knowledge and movement of life and eventual forms from the darkness of the Inconscient. Rudra, the Violent and Merciful, the Mighty One, presides over the struggle of life to affirm itself; he is the armed, wrathful and beneficent Power of God who lifts forcibly the creation upward, smites all that opposes, scourges all that errs and resists, heals all that is wounded and suffers and complains and submits. Vishnu of the vast pervading motion holds in his triple stride all these worlds; it is he that makes a wide room for the action of Indra in our limited mortality; it is by him and with him that we rise into his highest seats where we find waiting for us the Friend, the Beloved, the Beatific Godhead.
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The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial session.
Such are some of the principal images of the Veda and a very brief and insufficient outline of the teaching of the Forefa thers. So understood the Rig Veda ceases to be an obscure, confused and barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.
1.02 - The Great Process, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The secrets are simple, as we have said. Unfortunately the mind has seized this one, as it seizes everything, and has pressed it into the service of its mental, vital or spiritual ego. It has discovered certain powers of meditation or concentration, more refined energies, higher mental planes that were like the divine source of our existence, lights that were not from the moon or stars, more direct and almost superhuman faculties it has climbed the ladder of consciousness but all that only served to sublimate and rarefy a rare human elite; sublimate it so much, in fact, that there did not seem to be any other issue to this climb than an ultimate leap out of the dualities and into the changeless peace of eternal truths. A few souls were saved, possibly, while the earth went on its dark course, increasingly dark. And what should have been the earth's secret became heaven's. The most frightful schism of all time was accomplished, the bleakest duality was imprinted on the heart of the earth. And the very ones who should have been humankind's supreme unifiers became its dividers, the Founding Fathers of atheism, materialism and all the other isms that struggle for our world. The earth, duped, had no other recourse but to believe exclusively in herself and her own strength.
But the damage does not stop there. Nothing is stickier than falsehood. It sticks to the soles of our shoes even though we have turned away from the wrong path. Others had indeed seen the earthly relevance of the Great Process the Zen Buddhists, the Tantric initiates, the Sufis and others and, more and more, disconcerted minds are turning to it and to themselves: never have so many more or less esoteric schools flourished. But the old error is holding fast (to tell the truth, we don't know whether error is ever an appropriate term, for the so-called error always turns out to be a roundabout route of the same Truth leading to a wider view of itself). It took so much effort out of the Sages of those days, and out of the lesser sages of these days, so many indispensable conditions of peace, austerity, silence and purity for them to achieve their more or less illumined goal, that our subconscious mind was as if branded by a red-hot iron with the idea that, without special conditions and special masters and somewhat special or mystical or innate gifts, it was not really possible to set out on that path, or at best the results would be meager and proportionate to the effort expended. And it was still, of course, an individual undertaking, a lofty extension of book learning. But this new dichotomy threatens to be more serious than the other one, more potentially harmful, between an unredeemed mass and an enlightened elite juggling lights about which anything can be said since there is no microscope to check it. Drugs, too, are a cheap ticket to dizzying glimpses of dazzling lights.
1.02 - The Refusal of the Call, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost con tinent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course; may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control.
This is a basic principle of the Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West. It can not be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of trans formation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved.
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul, in a
coherent manner: science has provisionally decided to ignore
--
A. The Problem of the Two energies
Since the inner face of the world is manifest deep within our
--
tion of one of these two energies into the other is no sooner
glimpsed than it has to be abandoned. As soon as we try to
--
The two energies of mind and matter spread respectively
through the two layers of the world (the within and the without)
--
tangential energies remains practically and statistically invariable
in the course of transformations. And this is all that science
--
to the sum total of the radial energies developed in the course of
transformation ?
c. Is this final and resultant form of radial energies, supposing it
exists, subject to reversal ? Is it destined one day to start disinte-
10.32 - The Mystery of the Five Elements, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, the five elements are not merely substances or states and qualities of substance, but they are also forces and energies, material forces and energiessince we have confined ourselves to matter and the material world. Science (we are always referring to Science, we have to do so since we are dealing with and speaking from the standpoint of matter and material existence), Science has familiarised us with the various forms and types of forces and energies. They are, starting from the most patent and gross, going up to more and more subtle energies, first of all mechanical energy, then (2) chemical energy, (3) electrical energy, (4) gravitational energy, and finally (5) the field energy; the last two are perhaps not very clearly differentiated and distinguished, but still one may make the distinction. And this mounting ladder of energy with its various steps, with its five steps corresponds exactly to the old Indian quintetearth, water, fire, air, space.
This is not to say that the ancients exactly knew the mysteries of modern scientific exploration. This only means that there is a parallelism between the ancient and the modern knowledge. The scale or hierarchy, from the most concrete substance through the subtler ones, to the subtlest, representing the constitution of the material world as conceived by the ancient seers finds a close and curious echo in the picture that modern science has drawn of material existence.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This creation as an expression of the Divine Truth may not be altogether a falsehood. It is an inadequate expression, as it stands at present, as it has been till now; but it is a growing, a progressive expression. In other words, the instruments of expression, to start with, are not fully developed, they have to be developed; they are being developed, through the evolutionary movement of Nature, in the course of advancing time. Indeed evolution in Nature means that and a great deal of that. Take for example, speech, which is a special organ of expression for man. Now, originally speech, that is to say, the vocabulary on man's tongue consisted of vocables related only to the familiar objects around him, in the ordinary day to day movement of life. The field was narrow and limited, level to the ground. Observe the language also, the written language. The original written language started with images, pictorial diagrams: there was no alphabet but things and movements were presented, that is represented, almost actually. Thus for man a figure of man was drawn, that is to say, straight lines sticking out representing hands and legs and a dot for the head; the sun was a circle and so on. As consciousness grew and as the mind developed and reason became active, the images, the figures and the symbols gradually changed into more and more abstract signs. At first there was the pictogram, then the ideogram, and then, at the end, came the alphabet. Evidently, it appears, language could not develop so quickly as the consciousness or the mind did, for we see even in the earlier epochs of human civilisation and culture, man could and did come in contact with the Truth and Realities beyond his normal sense-bound consciousness. And the experiences the seers had on those levels were of such a kind that whenever they sought to express them, communicate them to others in the outward mind and speech, they had to take refuge in symbolism: they had to use the words of everyday life as signs and symbols pointing to other realities, other-worldly and unfamiliar. Thus, horse was to them life-force, cow the radiance of truth, the wind thought energies, the sun consciousness or Truth, night as ignorance, light as knowledge, wine (soma means both wine and moon) as delight and ecstasy, the sky as infinity or transcendence. And so on.
Indeed, that is the hiatus, the inadequacy that still cripples and stultifies the mind, the physical mind in its attempt to seize other realities beyond. It is the mind which gives the formal structure, the pattern of expression in the material frame. The mind being bound to the life of the ignorant and outgoing senses is constitutionally incapable of receiving or holding or expressing facts of the higher life, the life beyondwhat we name as the spiritual or the divine. Not only so, the mind in trying to express the higher or supraterrestrial truths inevitably diminishes, dilutes, devalues, even negates and annuls them. The attempt through parables and allegories is the story of the difficulty the impossibility of expressing through the mind truths beyond the mind. We land into the weird and confused worlds of myths and mythologies,myths and mythologies for example about popular Radha and Krishna, and Kali or Shiva. We are compelled to reduce to our human measures, to accentuate our human failings in order to present graphically to us the inexpressible intensities or extensions of the high experiences above. The Vaishnava lyrics or the songs of Solomon become to us high spiritual documents.
1.03 - Fire in the Earth, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
even the very least of the energies which invade me
or brush past me, would I not die of cold?
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
subtle energies (channels, winds, and drops). Nine
deities are present:
1.03 - On Knowledge of the World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
After you have learned, O student of the divine mysteries, what this world in its meaning really is, it is important that you should look at the world in detail. Every thing in the world of matter which grows, has been included under three classes, animal, vegetable and mineral, which are called the three generations or kingdoms. Animals were created some for riding, some for food, and some for tilling. Vegetables were created to afford food and conveniences to man, and sustenance to various animals. Minerals, like gold, silver, copper and iron, were created to serve as instruments to provide means of sustaining life in man. It was designed that by means of these three kingdoms, the spirit of man, while dwelling for a few days in the body, should be employed in making preparation for the future world. Man, however, forgetful of the end for which he had come hither, heedless of the fact that he was soon to depart, and that he would then repent to find that he was going unprepared, became engaged in strife with his fellows about the things of the world, fell in love with its ways, and attempted to gain its wealth. In consequence various qualities began to appear in the heart, such as avarice, envy, ambition and hatred, which are sources of its ruin. Finally the heart, forgetful of the duties for the performance of which it had come in to the world, exhausted all its energies in building up the world.
As man's primary necessities in the world are three, viz : clothing, food and shelter, so the arts of the world are three, viz: weaving, planting and building. The rest of the arts serve either for the purpose of perfecting the others, or for repairing injuries. Thus the spinner aids the work [69] of weaving, the tailor carries out that work to perfection, while the cloth-dresser adds beauty to the work. In the arts, there is need of iron, skins and wood, and for these many instruments are necessary. No person is able to work at all kinds of trades, but by the will of God, upon one is devolved one art and upon another two, and the whole community is made dependent, one member upon the other. When avarice, ambition and covetousness hold sway in the hearts of men, because some are not pleased to see others obtain honors, and because they do not endeavor to quell their wants, envy and hatred arise among them. Each one, dissatisfied with his own rights, plots against the property and honor of his fellows. On this account there was a necessity for three farther distinctions, viz: sovereignty, judicial authority, and jurisprudence, which contains the digest of the law. But alas ! poor and wretched man coming under the influence of all these causes, motives and instruments, spends his life in collecting wealth and lays up for himself sources of regret. And just as the pilgrim, who on his way to the Kaaba of Mecca, was engaged day and night in taking care of his camel, got separated from the caravan, and perished in the desert, so those who know not the real nature of the world and its worthlessness, and do not understand that it is the place where seed is sown for eternity, but spend all their thoughts upon it, are certainly fascinated and deceived; as the apostle of God declares. "The world is more enchanting than Harout and Marout: let men beware of it."1
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies of Nature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its secret, - free expression out of a supreme inward silence.
All things here are the one and indivisible eternal transcendent and cosmic Brahman that is in its seeming divided in things and creatures; in seeming only, for in truth it is always one and equal in all things and creatures and the division is only a phenomenon of the surface. As long as we live in the ignorant seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature.
1.03 - The End of the Intellect, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
professor of French, then taught English at the state college, where he soon became vice-principal. He worked also as private secretary to the Prince. Between the court and the college he was busy enough, but in truth, it was the destiny of India that preoccupied him. He traveled many times to Calcutta, familiarizing himself with the political situation and writing several articles that created a scandal, for he didn't just refer to the Queen-Empress of India as an old lady so called by way of courtesy,21 but he urged his countrymen to shake off the British yoke, and attacked the mendicant policy in the Indian Congress party: no reforms, no collaboration. His aim was to gather and organize all the energies of the nation toward revolutionary action. This must have required some courage, considering the year was 1893, when the British ruled over three-fourths of the world. But Sri Aurobindo had a very special way of dealing with the problem; he did not lay any blame on the English, but on the Indians themselves:
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our purblind sentimentalism. 22
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
a functional and enforced mechanization of human energies (the
totalitarian principle), but of a "conspiration" informed with love.
1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self, can realise our whole being in this true Lord of our being, can give up our personality to and into this one real Person, merge our ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities into His plenary light, offer up our errant and struggling will and energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will, at once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving desires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss.
This is the world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all other highest teaching is but the various reflection and partial word, this the Voice to which the hearing of our soul has to awaken.
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
It has been suggested that these fourth and fifth Sephiros represent the expansive and contracting, centripetal, and centrifugal energies between the poles of the dimensions, acting under the will of the Logos, Chokmah.
Tobacco and the Nettle are correspondences, both because of their fiery and stinging nature. Its colour is red, obviously martial ; and hence the ruby, which is bright scarlet, is harmonious. Its sacred creature is the legendary
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Plane, which in one sense being passive and reflecting the energies from above, is lunar J>, even as the moon reflects the light from the sun. The Astral Light is an omnipresent and all-permeating fluid or medium of extremely subtile matter ; substance in a highly tenuous state, electric and magnetic in constitution, which is the model upon which the physical world is built. It is the endless, changeless, ebb and flow of the world's forces that, in the last resort, guarantee the stability of the world and provides its foundation. Yesod is this stable foundation, this change- less ebb and flow of astral forces, and the universal repro- ductive power in Nature. " Everything shall return to its foundation, from which it has proceeded. All marrow, seed, and energy are gathered in this place. Hence all the potentialities which exist go out through this " (Zohar),
Its Egyptian God is Shu, who was the God of Space, represented as lifting up Nuit, the Queen of Heaven, from off the body of Seb, the Earth. Its Hindu equivalent is
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:It is true that the glimpse of supraphysical realities acquired by methodical research has been imperfect and is yet ill-affirmed; for the methods used are still crude and defective. But these rediscovered subtle senses have at least been found to be true witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justification, then, for scouting them as false witnesses when they testify to supraphysical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of consciousness. Like all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and arranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of great ranges of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are perceived by more subtle instruments than those of gross physical Matter, claims in the end the same validity as the truth of the material universe. The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses.
8:But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. To that witness the worlds and their objects appeal for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical equally with the supraphysical we have no other evidence that they exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.
9:If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to "live his life", as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not, - is, for it is present and compelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works. At the other end, if we stress too much the unreality of the objective world, we arrive by a different road at similar but still more trenchant conclusions, - the fictitious character of the individual ego, the unreality and purposelessness of human existence, the return into the Non-Being or the relationless Absolute as the sole rational escape from the meaningless tangle of phenomenal life.
1.04 - A Leader, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
However, even in the heat of action, I was aware that there was something better to do, that our methods were not the best ones, that we were wasting our finest energies in vain, and that in spite of the almost fanatical enthusiasm which urged us on, we might well be defeated.
The collapse came, mowing us down like corn in a field; and misfortune compelled us to regain possession of ourselves, to think carefully. The best of us are lost. The most intelligent, those who were most able to guide and direct us paid for their courageous self-sacrifice with exile or death. Consternation reigned in our ranks; at last I was able to make the others listen to what I thought, to what I felt.
1.04 - Communion, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
part with all my energies in the consecration which
causes its flames to leap forth, is to consent to the
--
conflicts and energies out of which must develop
my power to apprehend and experience your holy
1.04 - KAI VALYA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
found the secret of these energies of nautre he can
manufacture any number of bodies, or minds, but they will all
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:We have found already in the cosmic consciousness a meeting-place where Matter becomes real to Spirit, Spirit becomes real to Matter. For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are intermediaries and no longer, as they seem in the ordinary egoistic mentality, agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel between the positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality. Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulae of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it consents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend. Matter reveals itself to the realising thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit, - Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments of the supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its multiple centres of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a pure mirror of the Truth of Being which expresses itself in the symbols of the universe; Life, when it consciously lends its energies to the perfect self-figuration of the Divine in ever-new forms and activities of the universal existence.
3:In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a divine life for man in the world which will at once justify Science by disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the terrestrial evolution and realise by the transfiguration of the human soul into the divine the great ideal dream of all high religions.
4:But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the ascetic? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnipotence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becomings of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the immutable Being, its consent to this infinite fecundity of its own dynamic Nature.
5:Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.
6:But, still, there is the absolute withdrawal, there is the NonBeing. Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient Scripture, Being appeared.2 Then into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of discrimination and multiple realisation, does not the NonBeing at least, as primal state and sole constant reality, negate and reject all possibility of a real universe? The Nihil of certain Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic solution; the Self, like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by an illusory phenomenal consciousness.
1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The snake is not the symbol of power but of energy, and just as there are obscure and perverted energies, so too the snake can be the symbol of unregenerate and anti-divine forces.
29 May 1934
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
earth's energies.
Intellectual concentration, manifest in the unification of our
1.04 - The Control of Psychic Prana, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The Yogi alone has the Sushumna open. When this Sushumna current opens, and begins to rise, we get beyond the sense, our minds become supersensuous, superconscious we get beyond even the intellect, where reasoning cannot reach. To open that Sushumna is the prime object of the Yogi. According to him, along this Sushumna are ranged these centres, or, in more figurative language, these lotuses, as they are called. The lowest one is at the lower end of the spinal cord, and is called Muldhra, the next higher is called Svdhishthna, the third Manipura, the fourth Anhata, the fifth Vishuddha, the sixth jn and the last, which is in the brain, is the Sahasrra, or "the thousand-petalled". Of these we have to take cognition just now of two centres only, the lowest, the Muladhara, and the highest, the Sahasrara. All energy has to be taken up from its seat in the Muladhara and brought to the Sahasrara. The Yogis claim that of all the energies that are in the human body the highest is what they call "Ojas". Now this Ojas is stored up in the brain, and the more Ojas is in a man's head, the more powerful he is, the more intellectual, the more spiritually strong. One man may speak beautiful language and beautiful thoughts, but they, do not impress people; another man speaks neither beautiful language nor beautiful thoughts, yet his words charm. Every movement of his is powerful. That is the power of Ojas.
Now in every man there is more or less of this Ojas stored up. All the forces that are working in the body in their highest become Ojas. You must remember that it is only a question of transformation. The same force which is working outside as electricity or magnetism will become changed into inner force; the same forces that are working as muscular energy will be changed into Ojas. The Yogis say that that part of the human energy which is expressed as sex energy, in sexual thought, when checked and controlled, easily becomes changed into Ojas, and as the Muladhara guides these, the Yogi pays particular attention to that centre. He tries to take up all his sexual energy and convert it into Ojas. It is only the chaste man or woman who can make the Ojas rise and store it in the brain; that is why chastity has always been considered the highest virtue. A man feels that if he is unchaste, spirituality goes away, he loses mental vigour and moral stamina. That is why in all the religious orders in the world which have produced spiritual giants you will always find absolute chastity insisted upon. That is why the monks came into existence, giving up marriage. There must be perfect chastity in thought, word, and deed; without it the practice of Raja-Yoga is dangerous, and may lead to insanity. If people practice Raja-Yoga and at the same time lead an impure life, how can they expect to become Yogis?
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Saraswati is known to us in the Purana,the Muse with her feet on the thousand leaved lotus of the mind, the goddess of thought, learning, poetry, of all that is high in mind and its knowledge. But, so far as we can understand from the Purana, she is the goddess of mind only, of intellect & imagination and their perceptions & inspirations. Things spiritual & the mightier supra-mental energies & illuminations belong not to her, but to other powers. Well, we meet Saraswati in the Vedas;and if she is the same goddess as our Puranic & modern protectress of learning & the arts, the Personality of the Intellect, then we have a starting pointwe know that the Vedic Rishis had other than naturalistic conceptions & could call to higher powers than the thunder-flash & the storm-wind. But there is a difficultySaraswati is the name of a river, of several rivers in India, for the very name means flowing, gliding or streaming, and the Europeans identify it with a river in the Punjab. We must be careful therefore, whenever we come across the name, to be sure which of these two is mentioned or invoked, the sweet-streaming Muse or the material river.
The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchchhanda Vaisvamitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invokedapparently in order to conduct an ordinary material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen,to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?
--
Indra and Varuna are called to give victory, because both of them are samrat. The words samrat & swarat have in Veda an ascertained philosophical sense.One is swarat when, having self-mastery & self-knowledge, & being king over his whole system, physical, vital, mental & spiritual, free in his being, [one] is able to guide entirely the harmonious action of that being. Swarajya is spiritual Freedom. One is Samrat when one is master of the laws of being, ritam, rituh, vratani, and can therefore control all forces & creatures. Samrajya is divine Rule resembling the power of God over his world. Varuna especially is Samrat, master of the Law which he follows, governor of the heavens & all they contain, Raja Varuna, Varuna the King as he is often styled by Sunahshepa and other Rishis. He too, like Indra & Agni & the Visvadevas, is an upholder & supporter of mens actions, dharta charshaninam. Finally in the fifth sloka a distinction is drawn between Indra and Varuna of great importance for our purpose. The Rishi wishes, by their protection, to rise to the height of the inner energies (yuvaku shachinam) and have the full vigour of right thoughts (yuvaku sumatinam) because they give then that fullness of inner plenty (vajadavnam) which is the first condition of enduring calm & perfection & then he says, Indrah sahasradavnam, Varunah shansyanam kratur bhavati ukthyah. Indra is the master-strength, desirable indeed, (ukthya, an object of prayer, of longing and aspiration) of one class of those boons (vara, varyani) for which the Rishis praise him, Varuna is the master-strength, equally desirable, of another class of these Vedic blessings. Those which Indra brings, give force, sahasram, the forceful being that is strong to endure & strong to overcome; those that attend the grace of Varuna are of a loftier & more ample description, they are shansya. The word shansa is frequently used; it is one of the fixed terms of Veda. Shall we translate it praise, the sense most suitable to the ritual explanation, the sense which the finally dominant ritualistic school gave to so many of the fixed terms of Veda? In that case Varuna must be urushansa, because he is widely praised, Agni narashansa because he is strongly praised or praised by men,ought not a wicked or cruel man to be nrishansa because he is praised by men?the Rishis call repeatedly on the gods to protect their praise, & Varuna here must be master of things that are praiseworthy. But these renderings can only be accepted, if we consent to the theory of the Rishis as semi-savage poets, feeble of brain, vague in speech, pointless in their style, using language for barbaric ornament rather than to express ideas. Here for instance there is a very powerful indicated contrast, indicated by the grammatical structure, the order & the rhythm, by the singular kratur bhavati, by the separation of Indra & Varuna who have hitherto been coupled, by the assignment of each governing nominative to its governed genitive and a careful balanced order of words, first giving the master Indra then his province sahasradavnam, exactly balancing them in the second half of the first line the master Varuna & then his province shansyanam, and the contrast thus pointed, in the closing pada of the Gayatri all the words that in their application are common at once to all these four separated & contrasted words in the first line. Here is no careless writer, but a style careful, full of economy, reserve, point, force, and the thought must surely correspond. But what is the contrast forced on us with such a marshalling of the stylists resources? That Indras boons are force-giving, Varunas praiseworthy, excellent, auspicious, what you will? There is not only a pointless contrast, but no contrast at all. No, shansa & shansya must be important, definite, pregnant Vedic terms expressing some prominent idea of the Vedic system. I shall show elsewhere that shansa is in its essential meaning self-expression, the bringing out of our sat or being that which is latent in it and manifesting it in our nature, in speech, in our general impulse & action. It has the connotation of self-expression, aspiration, temperament, expression of our ideas in speech; then divulgation, publication, praiseor in another direction, cursing. Varuna is urushansa because he is the master of wide self-expression, wide aspirations, a wide, calm & spacious temperament, Agni narashansa because he is master of strong self-expression, strong aspirations, a prevailing, forceful & masterful temperament;nrishansa had originally the same sense, but was afterwards diverted to express the fault to which such a temper is prone,tyranny, wrath & cruelty; the Rishis call to the gods to protect their shansa, that which by their yoga & yajna they have been able to bring out in themselves of being, faculty, power, joy,their self-expression. Similarly, shansya here means all that belongs to self-expression, all that is wide, noble, ample in the growth of a soul. It will follow from this rendering that Indra is a god of force, Varuna rather a god of being and as it appears from other epithets, of being when it is calm, noble, wide, self-knowing, self-mastering, moving freely in harmony with the Law of things because it is aware of that Law and accepts it. In that acceptance is his mighty strength; therefore is he even more than the gods of force the king, the giver of internal & external victory, rule, empire, samrajya to his votaries. This is Varuna.
We see the results & the conditions of the action ofVaruna in the four remaining verses. By their protection we have safety from attack, sanema, safety for our shansa, our rayah, our radhas, by the force of Indra, by the protecting greatness of Varuna against which passion & disturbance cast themselves in vain, only to be destroyed. This safety & this settled ananda or delight, we use for deep meditation, ni dhimahi, we go deep into ourselves and the object we have in view in our meditation is prarechanam, the Greek katharsis, the cleansing of the system mental, bodily, vital, of all that is impure, defective, disturbing, inharmonious. Syad uta prarechanam! In this work of purification we are sure to be obstructed by the powers that oppose all healthful change; but Indra & Varuna are to give us victory, jigyushas kritam. The final result of the successful purification is described in the eighth sloka. The powers of the understanding, its various faculties & movements, dhiyah, delivered from self-will & rebellion, become obedient to Indra & Varuna; obedient to Varuna, they move according to the truth & law, the ritam; obedient to Indra they fulfil with that passivity in activity, which we seek by Yoga, all the works to which mental force can apply itself when it is in harmony with Varuna & the ritam. The result is sharma, peace. Nothing is more remarkable in the Veda than the exactness with which hymn after hymn describes with a marvellous simplicity & lucidity the physical & psychological processes through which Indian Yoga proceeds. The process, the progression, the successive movements of the soul here described are exactly what the Yogin experiences today so many thousands of years after the Veda was revealed. No wonder, it is regarded as eternal truth, not the expression of any particular mind, not paurusheya but impersonal, divine & revealed.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Greeks. Apollo also is a correspondence, but only in that aspect of him as the Diviner, having the power to communi- cate the gift of prophecy to both gods and men. Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, says of Apollo that not only is he a god of all shaping energies, but also the soothsaying god.
" He who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For on one side he is aware of this Self everywhere, this everlasting Spirit-SubstanceBrahman, the Eternal the same self-existence here in time behind each appearance he sees or senses and timeless beyond the universe. He has this strong overpowering experience of a Self that is neither our limited ego nor our mind, life or body, world-wide but not outwardly phenomenal, yet to some spirit-sense in him more concrete than any form or phenomenon, universal yet not dependent for its being on anything in the universe or on the whole totality of the universe; if all this were to disappear, its extinction would make no difference to this Eternal of his constant intimate experience. He is sure of an inexpressible Self-Existence which is the essence of himself and all things; he is intimately aware of an essential Consciousness of which thinking mind and life-sense and body-sense are only partial and diminished figures, a Consciousness with an illimitable Force in it of which all energies are the outcome, but which is yet not explained or accounted for by the sum or power or nature of all these energies together; he feels, he lives in an inalienable self-existent Bliss which is not this lesser transient joy or happiness or pleasure. A changeless imperishable infinity, a timeless eternity, a self-awareness which is not this receptive and reactive or tentacular mental consciousness, but is behind and above it and present too below it, even in what we call Inconscience, a oneness in which there is no possibility of any other existence, are the fourfold character of this settled experience. Yet this eternal Self-Existence is seen by him also as a conscious Time-Spirit bearing the stream of happenings, a self-extended spiritual Space containing all things and beings, a Spirit-Substance which is the very form and material of all that seems non-spiritual, temporary and finite. For all that is transitory, temporal, spatial, bounded, is yet felt by him to be in its substance and energy and power no other than the One, the Eternal, the Infinite.
And yet there is not only in him or before him this eternal self-aware Existence, this spiritual Consciousness, this infinity of self-illumined Force, this timeless and endless Beatitude. There is too, constant also to his experience, this universe in measurable Space and Time, some kind perhaps of boundless finite, and in it all is transient, limited, fragmentary, plural, ignorant, exposed to disharmony and suffering, seeking vaguely for some unrealised yet inherent harmony of oneness, unconscious or half-conscious or, even when most conscious, still tied to the original Ignorance and Inconscience. He is not always in a trance of peace or bliss and, even if he were, it would be no solution, for he knows that this would still be going on outside him and yet within some larger self of him as if for ever. At times these two states of his spirit seem to exist for him alternately according to his state of consciousness; at others they are there as two parts of his being, disparate and to be reconciled, two halves, an upper and a lower or an inner and an outer half of his existence. He finds soon that this separation in his consciousness has an immense liberative power; for by it he is no longer bound to the Ignorance, the Inconscience; it no longer appears to him the very nature of himself and things but an illusion which can be overcome or at least a temporary wrong self-experience, Maya. It is tempting to regard it as only a contradiction of the Divine, an incomprehensible mystery-play, masque or travesty of the Infinite and so it irresistibly seems to his experience at times, on one side the luminous verity of Brahman, on the other a dark illusion of Maya. But something in him will not allow him to cut existence thus permanently in two and, looking more closely, he discovers that in this half-light or darkness too is the Eternalit is the Brahman who is here with this face of Maya.
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But as the consciousness deepens, he becomes aware that this is only a first frontal appearance. For he finds that it is by the silent support, permission or sanction of this witness soul in him that this executive nature can work intimately or persistently upon his being; if the soul withdraws its sanction, the movements of Nature in their action upon and within him become a wholly mechanical repetition, vehement at first as if seeking still to enforce their hold, but afterwards less and less dynamic and real. More actively using this power of sanction or refusal, he perceives that he can, slowly and uncertainly at first, more decisively afterwards, change the movements of Nature. Eventually in this witness soul or behind it is revealed to him the presence of a Knower and master Will in Nature, and all her activities more and more appear as an expression of what is known and either actively willed or passively permitted by this Lord of her existence. Prakriti herself now seems to be mechanical only in the carefully regulated appearance of her workings, but in fact a conscious Force with a soul within her, a self-aware significance in her turns, a revelation of a secret Will and Knowledge in her steps and figures. This Duality, in aspect separate, is inseparable. Wherever there is Prakriti, there is Purusha; wherever there is Purusha, there is Prakriti. Even in his inactivity he holds in himself all her force and energies ready for projection; even in the drive of her action she carries with her all his observing and mandatory consciousness as the whole support and sense of her creative purpose. Once more the seeker discovers in his experience the two poles of existence of One Being and the two lines or currents of their energy negative and positive in relation to each other which effect by their simultaneity the manifestation of all that is within it. Here too he finds that the separative aspect is liberative; for it releases him from the bondage of identification with the inadequate workings of Nature in the Ignorance. The unitive aspect is dynamic and effective; for it enables him to arrive at mastery and perfection; while rejecting what is less divine or seemingly undivine in her, he can rebuild her forms and movements in himself according to a nobler pattern and the law and rhythm of a greater existence. At a certain spiritual and supramental level the Duality becomes still more perfectly Two-in-one, the Master Soul with the Conscious Force within it, and its potentiality disowns all barriers and breaks through every limit. Thus this once separate, now biune Duality of Purusha-Prakriti is revealed to him in all its truth as the second great instrumental and effective aspect of the Soul of all souls, the Master of existence, the Lord of the Sacrifice.
On yet another line of approach the seeker meets another corresponding but in aspect distinct Duality in which the biune character is more immediately apparent,the dynamic Duality of Ishwara-Shakti. On one side he is aware of an infinite and self-existent Godhead in being who contains all things in an ineffable potentiality of existence, a Self of all selves, a Soul of all souls, a spiritual Substance of all substances, an impersonal inexpressible Existence, but at the same time an illimitable Person who is here self-represented in numberless personality, a Master of Knowledge, a Master of Forces, a Lord of love and bliss and beauty, a single Origin of the worlds, a self-manifester and self-creator, a Cosmic Spirit, a universal Mind, a universal Life, the conscious and living Reality supporting the appearance which we sense as unconscious inanimate Matter. On the other side he becomes aware of the same Godhead in effectuating consciousness and power put forth as a self-aware Force that contains and carries all within her and is charged to manifest it in universal Time and Space. It is evident to him that here there is one supreme and infinite Being represented to us in two different sides of itself, obverse and reverse in relation to each other. All is either prepared or pre-existent in the Godhead in Being and issues from it and is upheld by its Will and Presence; all is brought out, carried in movement by the Godhead in power; all becomes and acts and develops by her and in her its individual or its cosmic purpose. It is again a Duality necessary for the manifestation, creating and enabling that double current of energy which seems always necessary for the world-workings, two poles of the same Being, but here closer to each other and always very evidently carrying each the powers of the other in its essence and its dynamic nature. At the same time by the fact that the two great elements of the divine Mystery, the Personal and the Impersonal, are here fused together, the seeker of the integral Truth feels in the duality of Ishwara-Shakti his closeness to a more intimate and ultimate secret of the divine Transcendence and the Manifestation than that offered to him by any other experience.
For the Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of her revealing substance; on the other by the reascending current of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put on its divine character. There is not in her, although she devises a cosmic mechanism, the character of an inconscient mechanical Executrix which we find in the first physiognomy of Prakriti, the Nature-Force; neither is there that sense of an Unreality, creatrix of illusions or semi-illusions, which is attached to our first view of Maya. It is at once clear to the experiencing soul that here is a conscious Power of one substance and nature with the Supreme from whom she came. If she seems to have plunged us into the Ignorance and Inconscience in pursuance of a plan we cannot yet interpret, if her forces present themselves as all these ambiguous forces of the universe, yet it becomes visible before long that she is working for the development of the Divine Consciousness in us and that she stands above drawing us to her own higher entity, revealing to us more and more the very essence of the Divine Knowledge, Will and Ananda. Even in the movements of the Ignorance the soul of the seeker becomes aware of her conscious guidance supporting his steps and leading them slowly or swiftly, straight or by many detours out of the darkness into the light of a greater consciousness, out of mortality into immortality, out of evil and suffering towards a highest good and felicity of which as yet his human mind can form only a faint image. Thus her power is at once liberative and dynamic, creative, effective,creative not only of things as they are, but of things that are to be; for, eliminating the twisted and tangled movements of his lower consciousness made of the stuff of the Ignorance, it rebuilds and new-makes his soul and nature into the substance and forces of a higher divine Nature.
In this Duality too there is possible a separative experience. At one pole of it the seeker may be conscious only of the Master of Existence putting forth on him His energies of knowledge, power and bliss to liberate and divinise; the Shakti may appear to him only an impersonal Force expressive of these things or an attribute of the Ishwara. At the other pole he may encounter the World-Mother, creatrix of the universe, putting forth the Gods and the worlds and all things and existences out of her spirit-substance. Or even if he sees both aspects, it may be with an unequal separating vision, subordinating one to the other, regarding the Shakti only as a means for approaching the Ishwara. There results a one-sided tendency or a lack of balance, a power of effectuation not perfectly supported or a light of revelation not perfectly dynamic. It is when a complete union of the two sides of the Duality is effected and rules his consciousness that he begins to open to a fuller power that will draw him altogether out of the confused clash of Ideas and Forces here into a higher Truth and enable the descent of that Truth to illumine and deliver and act sovereignly upon this world of Ignorance. He has begun to lay his hand on the integral secret which in its fullness can be grasped only when he overpasses the double term that reigns here of Knowledge inextricably intertwined with an original Ignorance and crosses the border where spiritual mind disappears into supramental Gnosis. It is through this third and most dynamic dual aspect of the One that the seeker begins with the most integral completeness to enter into the deepest secret of the being of the Lord of the Sacrifice.
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.
1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
we really wonder how we were ever able to live without that current before. This is a first transmutation of our energies. Instead of drawing from the common source, below and around us, in universal life, we draw from above. And that energy is far clearer, far more sustained,
uninterrupted, and especially far more dynamic. In daily life, in the midst of our work and our myriad other occupations, the current of force is at first rather diluted, but the moment we stop and concentrate,
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and
baked in the fierceness of his lustres ...
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Pure thought, which Idealism regards as the first essence, may well constitute the abstract and conceptual foundation of being; it is not sufficient to explain the living and concrete reality. And Will itself cannot be presented as ultimate cause of the world. For Will is a power of action, realisation, emotion, productive of movement, only in the domain of the subjective energies. But the universe is not only an internal dynamism; it is a substantial activity.
It is, therefore, only an integral experience that can enable us to attain, beyond the multiple forms and successive depths of the reality, its ultimate sources. The discovery cannot be effected by the sole aid of the logical reason. The data of sensation must enter into it no less than those of the understanding, no less than those of the still more transcendent faculties of intuitive consciousness and of knowledge that is lived.
1.05 - Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
through concentration and exercises, we can eventually feel a Force awakening at the bottom of the spine and ascending from level to level up to the top of the head, with an undulating movement, just like a snake. At each level this Force pierces (rather violently) through the corresponding center, which opens up, thereby putting us in contact with all the universal vibrations or energies associated with the frequency of that particular center. With Sri Aurobindo's yoga, the descending Force opens the same centers, slowly and gently, from top to bottom. Often, the lower centers do not even fully open until much later. This process has a distinct advantage if we appreciate that each center corresponds to a universal mode of consciousness or energy.
To open the lower vital or subconscious centers at the beginning is to run the risk of being flooded not only by our own small personal problems, but by torrents of universal mud; we are automatically in contact with the confusion and mud of the world. This is why traditional yogas require the protective presence of a Master. With the descending Force this danger is avoided; we confront the lower centers only after our being is firmly established in the higher,
1.05 - Pratyahara and Dharana, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Now the control of the centres which is established in a hypnotic patient or the patient of faith-healing, by the operator, for a time, is reprehensible, because it leads to ultimate ruin. It is not really controlling the brain centres by the power of one's own will, but is, as it were, stunning the patient's mind for a time by sudden blows which another's will delivers to it. It is not checking by means of reins and muscular strength the mad career of a fiery team, but rather by asking another to deliver heavy blows on the heads of the horses, to stun them for a time into gentleness. At each one of these processes the man operated upon loses a part of his mental energies, till at last, the mind, instead of gaining the power of perfect control, becomes a shapeless, powerless mass, and the only goal of the patient is the lunatic asylum.
Every attempt at control which is not voluntary, not with the controller's own mind, is not only disastrous, but it defeats the end. The goal of each soul is freedom, mastery freedom from the slavery of matter and thought, mastery of external and internal nature. Instead of leading towards that, every will-current from another, in whatever form it comes, either as direct control of organs, or as forcing to control them while under a morbid condition, only rivets one link more to the already existing heavy chain of bondage of past thoughts, past superstitions. Therefore, beware how you allow yourselves to be acted upon by others. Beware how you unknowingly bring another to ruin. True, some succeed in doing good to many for a time, by giving a new trend to their propensities, but at the same time, they bring ruin to millions by the unconscious suggestions they throw around, rousing in men and women that morbid, passive, hypnotic condition which makes them almost soulless at last. Whosoever, therefore, asks any one to believe blindly, or drags people behind him by the controlling power of his superior will, does an injury to humanity, though he may not intend it.
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Be like the pearl oyster. There is a pretty Indian fable to the effect that if it rains when the star Svti is in the ascendant, and a drop of rain falls into an oyster, that drop becomes a pearl. The oysters know this, so they come to the surface when that star shines, and wait to catch the precious raindrop. When a drop falls into them, quickly the oysters close their shells and dive down to the bottom of the sea, there to patiently develop the drop into the pearl. We should be like that. First hear, then understand, and then, leaving all distractions, shut your minds to outside influences, and devote yourselves to developing the truth within you. There is the danger of frittering away your energies by taking up an idea only for its novelty, and then giving it up for another that is newer. Take one thing up and do it, and see the end of it, and before you have seen the end, do not give it up. He who can become mad with an idea, he alone sees light. Those that only take a nibble here and a nibble there will never attain anything. They may titillate their nerves for a moment, but there it will end. They will be slaves in the hands of nature, and will never get beyond the senses.
Those who really want to be Yogis must give up, once for all, this nibbling at things. Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, and this is the way great spiritual giants are produced. Others are mere talking machines. If we really want to be blessed, and make others blessed, we must go deeper. The first step is not to disturb the mind, not to associate with persons whose ideas are disturbing. All of you know that certain persons, certain places, certain foods, repel you. Avoid them; and those who want to go to the highest, must avoid all company, good or bad. Practise hard; whether you live or die does not matter. You have to plunge in and work, without thinking of the result. If you are brave enough, in six months you will be a perfect Yogi. But those who take up just a bit of it and a little of everything else make no progress. It is of no use simply to take a course of lessons. To those who are full of Tamas, ignorant and dull those whose minds never get fixed on any idea, who only crave for something to amuse them religion and philosophy are simply objects of entertainment. These are the unpersevering. They hear a talk, think it very nice, and then go home and forget all about it. To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will. "I will drink the ocean," says the persevering soul, "at my will mountains will crumble up." Have that sort of energy, that sort of will, work hard, and you will reach the goal.
1.05 - The Activation of Human Energy, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the elementary energies accumulated on the earth's surface. 1
(H.E., pp. 115-16.)
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence of the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make it necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and focus them only on that which will help the transition and to leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly turned towards the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to deal by the surface power of the mind still brings him, by reason of this tendency or habit, out of the depths to the surface or down from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing, to lower levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put aside until secure in a higher consciousness he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light or taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All that cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from any preconceived prejudgment of its emptiness or its incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed mental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind according to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all that is below and choose or reject their material out of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
How precisely or by what stages this progression and change will take place must depend on the form, need and powers of the individual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence is always one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the integral Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no two natures proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series of steps or with quite identical stages of their progress. It may yet be said that a logical succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which all the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being and a bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some new height of consciousness gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there may be a strong concentration on the inward central change of the consciousness and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental life or else its relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of it may be taken up again from time to time to see how far the new inner psychic and spiritual consciousness can be brought into its movements, but that compulsion of the temperament or the nature which, in human beings, necessitates one kind of activity or another and makes it seem almost an indispensable portion of the existence, will diminish and eventually no attachment will be left, no lower compulsion or driving force felt anywhere. Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole being; if there is any compulsion to activity it will be not that of implanted desire or of force of Nature, but the luminous driving of some greater Consciousness-Force which is becoming more and more the sole motive power of the whole existence. On the other hand, it is possible at any period of the inner spiritual progress that one may experience an extension rather than a restriction of the' activities; there may be an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new provinces of knowledge by the miraculous touch of the Yoga-shakti. Aesthetic feeling, the power of artistic creation in one field or many fields together, talent or genius of literary expression, a faculty of metaphysical thinking, any power of eye or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken where none was apparent before. The Divine within may throw these latent riches out from the depths in which they were hidden or a Force from above may pour down its energies to equip the instrumental nature for the activity or the creation of which it is meant to be a channel or a builder. But, whatever may be the method or the course of development chosen by the hidden Master of the Yoga, the common culmination of this stage is the growing consciousness of him above as the mover, decider, shaper of all the movements of the mind and all the activities of knowledge.
There are two signs of the transformation of the seeker's mind of knowledge and works of knowledge from the process of the Ignorance to the process of a liberated consciousness working partly, then wholly in the light of the Spirit. There is first a central change of the consciousness and a growing direct experience, vision, feeling of the Supreme and the cosmic existence, the Divine in itself and the Divine in all things; the mind will be taken up into a growing preoccupation with this first and foremost and will feel itself heightening, widening into a more and more illumined means of expression of the one fundamental knowledge. But also the central Consciousness in its turn will take up more and more the outer mental activities of knowledge and turn them into a parcel of itself or an annexed province; it will infuse into them its more au thentic movement and make a more and more spiritualised and illumined mind its instrument in these surface fields, its new conquests, as well as in its own deeper spiritual empire. And this will be the second sign, the sign of a certain completion and perfection, that the Divine himself has become the Knower and all the inner movements, including the activities of what was once a purely human mental action, have become his field of knowledge. There will be less and less individual choice, opinion, preference, less and less of intellectualisation, mental weaving, cerebral galley-slave labour; a Light within will see all that has to be seen, know all that has to be known, develop, create, organise. It will be the inner Knower who will do in the liberated and universalised mind of the individual the works of an all-comprehending knowledge.
1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
please and propitiate him, as physically to renew his energies of
heat, light, and motion. The constant demand for human victims to
1.05 - The True Doer of Works, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:The last stage of this perfection will come when you are completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself to be no longer another and separate being, instrument, servant or worker but truly a child and eternal portion of her consciousness and force. Always she will be in you and you in her; it will be your constant, simple and natural experience that all your thought and seeing and action, your very breathing and moving come from her and are hers. You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, ananda of her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect in divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine movement of the Eternal.
1.05 - The Universe The 0 = 2 Equation, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Note how admirably they have preserved the idea of balance. M.1. and F.1. are perfection. M.2. and F.2. still keep balance in their lines. The four "elements" show imperfection; yet they are all balanced as against each other. Note, too, how apt are the ideograms. M.3. shows the flames flickering on the hearth, F.3., the wave on the solid bottom of the sea; M.4., the mutable air, with impenetrable space above, and finally F.4., the thin crust of the earth masking the interior energies of the planet. They go in to double these Kw, thus reaching the sixty-four Hexagrams of the Y King, which is not only a Map, but a History of the Order of Nature.
It is pure enthusiastic delight in the Harmony and Beauty of the System that has led me thus far afield; my one essential purpose is to show how the Universe was derived by these Wise Men from Nothing.
1.05 - Vishnu as Brahma creates the world, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Next from Brahmā, in a form composed of the quality of foulness, was produced hunger, of whom anger was born: and the god put forth in darkness beings emaciate with hunger, of hideous aspects, and with long beards. Those beings hastened to the deity. Such of them as exclaimed, Oh preserve us! were thence called Rākṣasas[16]: others, who cried out, Let us eat, were denominated from that expression Yakṣas[17]. Beholding them so disgusting, the hairs of Brahmā were shrivelled up, and first falling from his head, were again renewed upon it: from their falling they became serpents, called Sarpa from their creeping, and Ahi because they had deserted the head[18]. The creator of the world, being incensed, then created fierce beings, who were denominated goblins, Bhūtas, malignant fiends and eaters of flesh. The Gandharvas were next born, imbibing melody: drinking of the goddess of speech, they were born, and thence their appellation[19]. The divine Brahmā, influenced by their material energies, having created these beings, made others of his own will. Birds he formed from his vital vigour; sheep from his breast; goats from his mouth; kine from his belly and sides; and horses, elephants, Sarabhas, Gayals, deer, camels, mules, antelopes, and other animals, from his feet: whilst from the hairs of his body sprang herbs, roots, and fruits.
Brahmā having created, in the commencement of the Kalpa, various plants, employed them in sacrifices, in the beginning of the Tretā age. Animals were distinguished into two classes, domestic (village) and wild (forest): the first class contained the cow, the goat, the hog, the sheep, the horse, the ass, the mule: the latter, all beasts of prey, and many animals with cloven hoofs, the elephant, and the monkey. The fifth order were the birds; the sixth, aquatic animals; and the seventh, reptiles and insects[20].
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
axis of Life now passes; it is upon them that the energies of an Evo-
lution principally concerned with the building of large molecules is
1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:The disorders of life and mind cease by discerning the secret of a more perfect order than the physical. Matter below life and mind contains in itself the balance between a perfect poise of tranquillity and the action of an immeasurable energy, but does not possess that which it contains. Its peace wears the dull mask of an obscure inertia, a sleep of unconsciousness or rather of a drugged and imprisoned consciousness. Driven by a force which is its real self but whose sense it cannot yet seize nor share, it has not the awakened joy of its own harmonious energies.
7:Life and mind awaken to the sense of this want in the form of a striving and seeking ignorance and a troubled and baffled desire which are the first steps towards self-knowledge and selffulfilment. But where then is the kingdom of their self-fulfilling? It comes to them by the exceeding of themselves. Beyond life and mind we recover consciously in its divine truth that which the balance of material Nature grossly represented, - a tranquillity which is neither inertia nor a sealed trance of consciousness but the concentration of an absolute force and an absolute selfawareness, and an action of immeasurable energy which is at the same time an out-thrilling of ineffable bliss because its every act is the expression, not of a want and an ignorant straining, but of an absolute peace and self-mastery. In that attainment our ignorance realises the light of which it was a darkened or a partial reflection; our desires cease in the plenitude and fulfilment towards which even in their most brute material forms they were an obscure and fallen aspiration.
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10:The universe comes to the individual as Life, - a dynamism the entire secret of which he has to master and a mass of colliding results, a whirl of potential energies out of which he has to disengage some supreme order and some yet unrealised harmony. This is after all the real sense of man's progress. It is not merely a restatement in slightly different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished. Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality. Otherwise, any system or order which assured a tolerable well-being and a moderate mental satisfaction would have stayed our advance. The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.
11:To the Life-Spirit, therefore, the individual in whom its potentialities centre is pre-eminently Man, the Purusha. It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God. This Man is the Manu, the thinker, the Manomaya Purusha, mental person or soul in mind of the ancient sages. No mere superior mammal is he, but a conceptive soul basing itself on the animal body in Matter. He is conscious Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through which Person can deal with substance. The animal life emerging out of Matter is only the inferior term of his existence. The life of thought, feeling, will, conscious impulsion, that which we name in its totality Mind, that which strives to seize upon Matter and its vital energies and subject them to the law of its own progressive transformation, is the middle term in which he takes his effectual station. But there is equally a supreme term which Mind in man searches after so that having found he may affirm it in his mental and bodily existence. This practical affirmation of something essentially superior to his present self is the basis of the divine life in the human being.
12:Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality, - Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God, - yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night, - a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality.
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16:For out of these false relations and by their aid the true have to be found. By the Ignorance we have to cross over death. So too the Veda speaks cryptically of energies that are like women evil in impulse, wandering from the path, doing hurt to their Lord, which yet, though themselves false and unhappy, build up in the end "this vast Truth", the Truth that is the Bliss. It would be, then, not when he has excised the evil in Nature out of himself by an act of moral surgery or parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned Death into a more perfect life, lifted the small things of the human limitation into the great things of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into their secret truth that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done and Heaven and Earth equalised join hands in the bliss of the Supreme.
17:Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all mortificationsto achieve a holy indifference to the temporal success or failure of the cause to which one has devoted ones best energies. If it triumphs, well and good; and if it meets defeat, that also is well and good, if only in ways that, to a limited and time-bound mind, are here and now entirely incomprehensible.
By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good or evil to disturb his inward economy, but rather falls in with what happens and does not add to the sum of his mortality.
1.06 - Quieting the Vital, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Having brought this mechanism to light, we will have found, at the same time, the true method toward vital mastery, which is not surgical but calming; the vital predicament is not overcome by struggling vitally against it, which can only exhaust our energies without exhausting its universal existence, but by taking another position and neutralizing it through silent peace: If you get peace, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple, then to clean the vital becomes easy. If you simply clean and clean and do nothing else, you go very slowly for the vital gets dirty again and has to be cleansed a hundred times. The peace is something that is clean in itself, so to get it is a positive way of securing your object. To look for dirt only and clean is the negative way.63
The Adverse Forces There is yet another difficulty. The vibrations coming from people or 60
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.
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It covers the entire range of life's more visible activities; under it fall the multiform energies of the Will-to-Life throwing itself outward to make the most of material existence. It is here that an ascetic or other-worldly spirituality feels an insurmountable denial of the Truth which it seeks after and is compelled to turn away from terrestrial existence, rejecting it as for ever the dark playground of an incurable Ignorance. Yet it is precisely these activities that are claimed for a spiritual conquest and divine transformation by the integral Yoga. Abandoned altogether by the more ascetic disciplines, accepted by others only as a field of temporary ordeal or a momentary, superficial and ambiguous play of the concealed spirit, this existence is fully embraced and welcomed by the integral seeker as a field of fulfilment, a field for divine works, a field of the total self-discovery of the concealed and indwelling spirit. A discovery of the Divinity in oneself is his first object, but a total discovery too of the Divinity in the world behind the apparent denial offered by its scheme and figures and, last, a total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal; for by its descent this world and self will be empowered to break their disguising envelopes and become divine in revealing form and manifesting process as they now are secretly in their hidden essence.
This object of the integral Yoga must be accepted wholly by those who follow it, but the acceptance must not be in ignorance of the immense stumbling-blocks that lie in the way of the achievement; on the contrary we must be fully aware of the compelling cause of the refusal of so many other disciplines to regard even its possibility, much less its imperative character, as the true meaning of terrestrial existence. For here in the works of life in the earth-nature is the very heart of the difficulty that has driven Philosophy to its heights of aloofness and turned away even the eager eye of Religion from the malady of birth in a mortal body to a distant Paradise or a silent peace of Nirvana.
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do only the works of Love and Knowledge and leave aside the works of will and power, possession and acquisition, production and fruitful expense of capacity, battle and victory and mastery, striking away from us the larger part of life because it seems to be made of the very stuff of desire and ego and therefore doomed to be a field of disharmony and mere conflict and disorder. For the division cannot really be made; or, if attempted, it must fail in its essential purpose, since it would isolate us from the total energies of the World-Power and sterilise an important part of integral Nature, just the one force in it that is a necessary instrument in any world-creative purpose. The Life-Force is an indispensable intermediary, the effectuating element in Nature here; mind needs its alliance if the works of mind are not to remain shining inner formations without a body; the spirit needs it to give an outer force and form to its manifested possibilities and arrive at a complete self-expression incarnated in Matter. If
Life refuses the aid of its intermediary energy to the spirit's other workings or is itself refused, they are likely to be reduced for all the effect they can have here to a static seclusion or a golden impotence; or if anything is done, it will be a partial irradiation of our action more subjective than objective, modifying existence perhaps, but without force to change it. Yet if Life brings its forces to the spirit but unregenerate, a worse result may follow since it is likely to reduce the spiritual action of Love or
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As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the
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1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
For desire represents in the being that first active form of Thought in which we must seek for the initial spring conscient or inconscient of its energies, the obscure genesis of its will and that first spontaneity of fundamental egoism by which the I of the relativity manifests.
Thought and Desire are for the inner universe what extension and movement are for the universe without. And if all the phenomena of the objective world can be reduced to the simple notion of movement, does not movement itself render sensible this first conceptual principle of the being,desire?
1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe. The Supreme is manifest in her for ever as the everlasting Sachchidananda, manifested through her in the worlds as the one and dual consciousness of Ishwara-Shakti and the dual principle of Purusha-Prakriti, embodied by her in the Worlds and the Planes and the Gods and their energies and figured because of her as all that is in the known worlds and in unknown others. All is her play with the Supreme; all is her manifestation of the mysteries of the Eternal, the miracles of the Infinite. All is she, for all are parcel and portion of the divine Conscious-Force. Nothing can be here or elsewhere but what she decides and the Supreme sanctions; nothing can take shape except what she moved by the Supreme perceives and forms after casting it into seed in her creating Ananda.
4:The Mahashakti, the universal Mother works out whatever is transmitted by her transcendent consciousness from the Supreme and enters into the worlds that she has made; her presence fills and supports them with the divine spirit and the divine all-sustaining force and delight without which they could not exist. That which we call Nature or Prakriti is only her most outward executive aspect; she marshals and arranges the harmony of her forces and processes, impels the operations of Nature and moves among them secret or manifest in all that can be seen or experienced or put into motion of life. Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother Each is something that she has seen in her vision, gathered into her heart of beauty and power and created in her Ananda. But there are many planes of her creation, many steps of the Divine Shakti. At the summit of this manifestation of which we are a part there are worlds of infinite existence, consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands as the unveiled eternal Power. All beings there live and move in an ineffable completeness and unalterable oneness, because she carries them safe in her arms for ever. Nearer to us are the worlds of a perfect supramental creation in which the Mother is the supramental Mahashakti, a Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its unfailing works and spontaneously perfect in every process. There all movements are the steps of the Truth; there all beings are souls and powers and bodies of the divine Light; there all experiences are seas and floods and waves of an intense and absolute Ananda. But here where we dwell are the worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in consciousness from their source, of which this earth is a significant centre and its evolution a crucial process. This too with all its obscurity and struggle and imperfection is upheld by the Universal Mother this too is impelled and guided to its secret aim by the Mahashakti.
1.075 - Self-Control, Study and Devotion to God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The body and the senses get adjusted between themselves. The body will not any more be a servant of the senses. There will be an agreement between them so that they become a compact whole. Then, there will be no dissipation of energy due to the impetuosity of the senses and the subjection of the body to the senses. Also, there will gradually come about a cessation of the cravings of the senses naturally, by gradual practice. Further, the satisfactions that follow from the restraint of the senses and the mind and the disciplines of the body will give a conviction and bring about a new type of joy in oneself, because they indicate that one is progressing correctly. The powers that we acquire and the energies that are generated within will indicate the righteousness of ones procedure. They will, in return, bring greater and greater joy because when joy is increased in quantity and quality, there is less inclination of the senses to go to objects.
It is dissatisfaction within that makes us run to things of the world a kind of vacuousness in our system and an emptiness in the senses and the mind. We feel a bankruptcy in every sense and, therefore, there is felt a necessity to go to objects outside. But, this vacuum will be filled up by the joy that arises within, and then the senses will feel less necessity to go out of their seats.
1.07 - Production of the mind-born sons of Brahma, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[4]: According to the Vāyu, the female became first twofold, or one half white, and the other black; and each of these, again, becomes manifold, being the various energies, or Śaktis, of Mahādeva, as stated by the Kūrma, after the words ### which are those of our text: ###. The Li
ga and Vāyu specify many of their names. Those of the white complexion, or mild nature, include Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī, Gaurī, Umā, &c. Those of the dark hue, and fierce disposition, Durgā, Kālī, Candī, Mahārātrī, and others.
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
14:But the play and movement embodies itself in a multiplicity of forms, a variation of tendencies, an interplay of energies. Multiplicity permits of the interference of a determinative and temporarily deformative factor, the individual ego; and the nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies. Ego is the factor which determines the reactions of error, sorrow, pain, evil, death; for it gives these values to movements which would otherwise be represented in their right relation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good. By recovering the right relation we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions, reducing them eventually to their true values; and this recovery can be effected by the right participation of the individual in the consciousness of the totality and in the consciousness of the transcendent which the totality represents.
15:Into later Vedanta there crept and arrived at fixity the idea that the limited ego is not only the cause of the dualities, but the essential condition for the existence of the universe. By getting rid of the ignorance of the ego and its resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities, but we eliminate along with them our existence in the cosmic movement. Thus we return to the essentially evil and illusory nature of human existence and the vanity of all effort after perfection in the life of the world. A relative good linked always to its opposite is all that here we can seek. But if we adhere to the larger and profounder idea that the ego is only an intermediate representation of something beyond itself, we escape from this consequence and are able to apply Vedanta to fulfilment of life and not only to the escape from life. The essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is beyond himself, that which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it, no longer as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of the universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into harmony with the Divine all individual determinations.
1.080 - Pratyahara - The Return of Energy, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
So is the case with pratyahara. It is the turning off of all the switches of action through the senses by which there has been expenditure of energy. The senses coming in contact with objects is like turning on the switch the fan is working, the light is working, the fridge is working everything is working, and so all the energy is spent. Sometimes it may be impossible for the power station to supply the requisite energy on account of the intense activity of the senses. When this happens, the connection is severed. What happens to that energy which was being spent through sense-activity, which was being utilised for perception, cognition of things, and enjoyment of objects? What happens to that energy? It goes back. It goes back to the source from where it was generated, from where it was conducted outward through the media of the senses. Then there is a rise or a swell of energy within suddenly coming up and overflowing, as it were. The mind will feel a new type of health within itself on account of the exuberance of energy that it has due to the reversion of the energies through the channels of the senses from the points of objects towards which they were previously moving. This is the meaning of the term cittasya svarupanukarah: the energy returning to the power station on account of the severance of contact with the points of expenditure. Then one becomes powerful, strong, indefatigable, energised charged with a new kind of buoyancy of spirit, and brilliant in ones expression, on account of the energy being stored within oneself rather than its being outwardly directed for expenditure through contact. So the senses are disconnected from contact with objects that is one thing that is expected here, and that is done. Secondly, the energy returns on account of this disconnection this is pratyahara. Svavishaya asamprayoge and cittasya svarupanukarah are the two essential points mentioned in respect of the practice of pratyahara.
Tata param vayat indriym (II.55). We then become supreme master of the senses and can direct them wherever we like. The senses no more compel us to act against our wish, and do not any more make us puppets in their hands, on account of the control gained over their activities. But this parama vashyata, the great mastery one gains over sense activities, is gained with great, hard effort. A very intensely strenuous effort is necessary for years, perhaps to gain this sort of mastery over the senses. We think that the senses will automatically come back from their objects; but, they will not listen to us. They are very powerful, and they will simply show their thumbs before us if we talk to them. It requires persistence, tenacity and untiring effort day in and day out doing the very same thing, even if we may fail in our attempt. It does not mean that every day we will succeed. One day they will listen, and for ten days they will not listen. Then it will look like our effort has been a failure. We will complain, What is the matter with me? For ten days I am struggling; nothing is happening. But, on the eleventh day they may listen. This is the peculiarity of these senses and the mind, so one should not be dejected.
1.08 - RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
So far as the achievement of mans final end is concerned, it is as much of a handicap to be an extreme cerebrotonic or an extreme viscerotonic as it is to be an extreme somatotonic. But whereas the cerebrotonic and the viscerotonic cannot do much harm except to themselves and those in immediate contact with them, the extreme somatotonic, with his native aggressiveness, plays havoc with whole societies. From one point of view civilization may be defined as a complex of religious, legal and educational devices for preventing extreme somatotonics from doing too much mischief, and for directing their irrepressible energies into socially desirable channels. Confucianism and Chinese culture have sought to achieve this end by inculcating filial piety, good manners and an amiably viscerotonic epicureanism the whole reinforced somewhat incongruously by the cerebrotonic spirituality and restraints of Buddhism and classical Taoism. In India the caste system represents an attempt to subordinate military, political and financial power to spiritual authority; and the education given to all classes still insists so strongly upon the fact that mans final end is unitive knowledge of God that even at the present time, even after nearly two hundred years of gradually accelerating Europeanization, successful somatotonics will, in middle life, give up wealth, position and power to end their days as humble seekers after enlightenment. In Catholic Europe, as in India, there was an effort to subordinate temporal power to spiritual authority; but since the Church itself exercised temporal power through the agency of political prelates and mitred business men, the effort was never more than partially successful. After the Reformation even the pious wish to limit temporal power by means of spiritual authority was completely abandoned. Henry VIII made himself, in Stubbss words, the Pope, the whole Pope, and something more than the Pope, and his example has been followed by most heads of states ever since. Power has been limited only by other powers, not by an appeal to first principles as interpreted by those who are morally and spiritually qualified to know what they are talking about. Meanwhile, the interest in religion has everywhere declined and even among believing Christians the Perennial Philosophy has been to a great extent replaced by a metaphysic of inevitable progress and an evolving God, by a passionate concern, not with eternity, but with future time. And almost suddenly, within the last quarter of a century, there has been consummated what Sheldon calls a somatotonic revolution, directed against all that is characteristically cerebrotonic in the theory and practice of traditional Christian culture. Here are a few symptoms of this somatotonic revolution.
In traditional Christianity, as in all the great religious formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action. Today the great majority even of professed Christians regard action (directed towards material and social progress) as the end, and analytic thought (there is no question any longer of integral thought, or contemplation) as the means to that end.
1.08 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS OF THE ATOM BOMB, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
but the tireless energies of steam and electricity. Each of these new
conquests signified extensively and intensively, for Man and for the
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converging energies of a sufficient number of minds sufficiendy
grouped and organized?
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or slumbering energies of matter and of thought. It is broadly in
these terms that we are obliged henceforth to envisage the grand
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This leads us quite naturally to liberation in action. For, in ones action, one must be free from all social conventions, all moral prejudices. However, this does not mean that one should lead a life of licence and dissoluteness. On the contrary, one imposes on oneself a rule that is far stricter than all social rules, for it tolerates no hypocrisy and demands a perfect sincerity. Ones entire physical activity should be organised to help the body to grow in balance and strength and beauty. For this purpose, one must abstain from all pleasure-seeking, including sexual pleasure. For every sexual act is a step towards death. That is why from the most ancient times, in the most sacred and secret schools, this act was prohibited to every aspirant towards immortality. The sexual act is always followed by a longer or shorter period of unconsciousness that opens the door to all kinds of influences and causes a fall in consciousness. But if one wants to prepare oneself for the supramental life, one must never allow ones consciousness to slip into laxity and inconscience under the pretext of pleasure or even of rest and relaxation. One should find relaxation in force and light, not in darkness and weakness. Continence is therefore the rule for all those who aspire for progress. But especially for those who want to prepare themselves for the supramental manifestation, this continence must be replaced by a total abstinence, achieved not by coercion and suppression but by a kind of inner alchemy, as a result of which the energies that are normally used in the act of procreation are transmuted into energies for progress and integral transformation. It is obvious that for the result to be total and truly beneficial, all sexual impulses and desires must be eliminated from the mental and vital consciousness as well as from the physical will. All radical and durable transformation proceeds from within outwards, so that the external transformation is the normal, almost inevitable result of this process.
A decisive choice has to be made between lending the body to Natures ends in obedience to her demand to perpetuate the race as it is, and preparing this same body to become a step towards the creation of the new race. For it is not possible to do both at the same time; at every moment one has to decide whether one wants to remain part of the humanity of yesterday or to belong to the superhumanity of tomorrow.
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In fact, the vital has three sources of subsistence. The one most easily accessible to it comes from below, from the physical energies through the sensations.
The second is on its own plane, when it is sufficiently vast and receptive, by contact with the universal vital forces.
1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
their energies in the mere preservation of what has come down
to them, with no thought of building on to their house and
1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11:This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought-centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. All that we externally and superficially are and do is not ego but Nature. An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed. The sadhaka in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical "I" that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only worker in him and in all things and creatures.
12:But what has fixed the modes of Nature? Or who has originated and governs the movements of Force? There is a Consciousness - or a Conscient - behind that is the lord, witness, knower, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for her works; this consciousness is Soul or Purusha. Prakriti shapes the action in us; Purusha in her or behind her witnesses, assents, bears and upholds it. Prakriti forms the thought in our minds; Purusha in her or behind her knows the thought and the truth in it. Prakriti determines the result of the action; Purusha in her or behind her enjoys or suffers the consequence. Prakriti forms mind and body, labours over them, develops them; Purusha upholds the formation and evolution and sanctions each step of her works. Prakriti applies the Will-force which works in things and men; Purusha sets that Will-force to work by his vision of that which should be done. This Purusha is not the surface ego, but a silent Self, a source of Power, an originator and receiver of Knowledge behind the ego. Our mental "I" is only a false reflection of this Self, this Power, this Knowledge. This Purusha or supporting Consciousness is therefore the cause, recipient and support of all Nature's works, but he is not himself the doer. Prakriti, NatureForce, in front and Shakti, Conscious-Force, Soul-Force behind her, - for these two are the inner and outer faces of the universal Mother - account for all that is done in the universe. The universal Mother Prakriti-Shakti, is the one and only worker.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This magic of Matter, this metamorphosis of physicochemical into psycho-mental energies and of movement into thought, remains for Science as for Philosophy the most perplexing of enigmas.
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After the creation by Desire, its transformation or new creation by Love; after the progressive formation of all energies in a state of disorder, the formation of spheres of harmony in which all these energies by organising themselves may give birth to conscient life.
And may it not be a core of love which in the atom as in the material worlds forms a centre for the condensation, the polarisation of the forces and movements of desire?
1.099 - The Entry of the Eternal into the Individual, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Even here, in this world, we find people of various calibres. Some children are born with special endowments, with precocious capacities genius seen at a very early age. It does not mean that all this happens by a fantastic freak of nature. They are the result of a very systematic development of causes and effects. The causes are unseen; only the effects are seen. But it does not follow thereby that the causes do not exist. In a similar manner, Patanjali tells us that in some cases it will appear as if the perfections manifest from the very time of birth itself. Also, there are cases where certain powers are acquired by the use of medicinal herbs which are spoken about in the yoga scriptures. We have, in India especially, some Himalayan herbs known as Sanjivini, etc., which are supposed to enliven even a corpse. Other herbs create certain vibrations in the system and stimulate the nerves, and allow the concentration of the mind. This is a very peculiar way of stimulating energy in ones system, and is the most artificial of all methods, because these vibrations are artificial results that follow from artificial causes. They are outside oneself and, therefore, they have a beginning and an end. Therefore, they are useless. Anyhow, Patanjali tells us that these herbs are also one of the ways of stirring up certain energies in the system. The effects will be there as long as the causes are there. When the causes subside, the effects also subside.
But, greater means than this is the power of mantras. The continuous recitation of certain mantras, or spiritual formulae, may create internal vibrations which enable a person to exercise supernormal powers. And the effects that follow from this practice are more lasting than the use of medicinal herbs. If a mantra is recited continuously, for a very long period, with deep concentration of mind, it sets up certain vibrations which release energy from the body and the entire system. Then, what works in ones system is the mantra itself. The deity of the mantra begins to operate. Thus, the aphorism tells us that this also is one of the ways of acquiring powers by yoga.
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The powers, or the siddhis, which the Vibhuti Pada speaks about are not creations, inventions, etc., but are only spontaneous actions of prakriti just as there is a spontaneous movement of water in the fields. What does yoga practice do? It does exactly what the farmer does in the fields. Instead of blocking the passage of water and not allowing it to flow into the field for the purpose of irrigation, the farmer opens up a stream, creates a channel, and allows the water to flow. This is what yoga does. At present the movement of energies, which flow of their own accord, are blocked. The movements are blocked due to there being no passage for the entry of the forces of nature. What is it that blocks the entry of these forces? There is only one thing which is the principal obstruction of the operation of natural forces in us. That is the I-principle, the ego, the asmita, which has various other accompaniments raga, dvesa, etc. Raga, dvesa, abhinivesa all these things mentioned earlier are accompanying features of the single impediment which is asmita. We are so powerful in our ego that nothing from outside can enter it. It is hard like flint, and it is, therefore, incapable of allowing the entry of any force into itself, just as any amount of water poured on hard rock will not enter the rock.
Thus, the aspect which is emphasised here in this sutra, in the context of yoga practice, is the function that the practicant performs in his discipline called yoga. There is spontaneity manifest everywhere. Nature is spontaneity, in other words. Everything happens of its own accord. On the other hand, we may say that the pains that we experience in our lives are not part of nature, because pain is not a part of natural action. It is a peculiar situation that is created by not allowing the forces of nature to enter into ones own system. Ultimately, it is neither pleasure nor pain that is a characteristic of nature. Pleasures and pains are the emotional reactions of the mind. These two reactions cease, and something new altogether arises and comes into play when we become as natural as prakriti itself. Yoga practice is a process of becoming more and more natural in ones being, and eliminating those causes which have made us unnatural. What is it that is natural, and what is unnatural? Anything that cannot harmonise with the laws of prakriti should be regarded as unnatural; and anything that is in harmony with the laws of prakriti is natural. What are these laws of prakriti?
1.09 - FAITH IN PEACE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
hesion pervaded and inspired with the same energies, now become
148 THE FUTURE OF MAN
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for James' statement1 it is of course true except in so far as the politician can indulge in other things as hobbies for his leisure hours, but if he wants to succeed as a politician he must give his best energies to politics. Conversely if Shakespeare or
Newton had spent part of their energies in politics they would not have been able to reach such heights in poetry and in science or even if they had they would have done much less. The main energies have to be concentrated on one thing; the others can only be minor pursuits at leisure or for distraction or interests rather than pursuits useful for keeping up a general culture.
All depends on the aim of the life. To one whose aim is to discover and possess the highest spiritual truth and the divine life, I do not think a University post can count for much, nor do
1.1.02 - Sachchidananda, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In each atom of the being there is an Energy, a Shakti - just as there is in every material atom a great material energy. When you see like that, you become aware of these energies. They are neither good nor bad - it depends on how they are used or how they act.
Power means strength and force, Shakti, which enables one to face all that can happen and to stand and overcome, also to carry out what the Divine Will proposes. It can include many things, power over men, events, circumstances, means etc. But all this not of the mental or vital kind, but by an action through unity of consciousness with the Divine and with all things and beings. It is not an individual strength depending on certain personal capacities, but the Divine Power using the individual as an instrument. It has no special relation to occult siddhis.
11.07 - The Labours of the Gods: The five Purifications, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This region of the Marut can be linked to that where the Vedic Maruts rule and govern. The Maruts are called thought godsthought-gods riding on the movements of life. They represent the aerial spirits or energies that lift, the human spirit from its purely vital and material coils into the rarer regions of pure thinking and light and consciousness, who spread and move further upward in the still farther and rarer regions of consciousness and energy.
Beyond is the fifth element, Vyom, the sphere overhead the Vast and the Infinite. That, of course, is the original source and status of the human being, where he gathers up all the elements in one indivisible perfect consciousness. That is the root of the Divine Tree of Existence which, as the Vedas say dwells up there, spreading downward all its branches, namely the other elements of the being.
1.10 - Conscious Force, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:Such is the explanation of things offered by the school of Indian philosophy which comes nearest to the modern materialistic ideas and which carried the idea of a mechanical or unconscious Force in Nature as far as was possible to a seriously reflective Indian mind. Whatever its defects, its main idea was so indisputable that it came to be generally accepted. However the phenomenon of consciousness may be explained, whether Nature be an inert impulse or a conscious principle, it is certainly Force; the principle of things is a formative movement of energies, all forms are born of meeting and mutual adaptation between unshaped forces, all sensation and action is a response of something in a form of Force to the contacts of other forms of Force. This is the world as we experience it and from this experience we must always start.
6:Physical analysis of Matter by modern Science has come to the same general conclusion, even if a few last doubts still linger. Intuition and experience confirm this concord of Science and Philosophy. Pure reason finds in it the satisfaction of its own essential conceptions. For even in the view of the world as essentially an act of consciousness, an act is implied and in the act movement of Force, play of Energy. This also, when we examine from within our own experience, proves to be the fundamental nature of the world. All our activities are the play of the triple force of the old philosophies, knowledge-force, desire-force, action-force, and all these prove to be really three streams of one original and identical Power, Adya Shakti. Even our states of rest are only equable state or equilibrium of the play of her movement.
1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
chic energies to impel it forward in yet another advance. . . .
And what can this mean except that, like those planetary orbits
1.10 - The Methods and the Means, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Yet at the same time excessive mirth should be avoided (Anuddharsha). Excessive mirth makes us unfit for serious thought. It also fritters away the energies of the mind in vain. The stronger the will, the less the yielding to the sway of the emotions. Excessive hilarity is quite as objectionable as too much of sad seriousness, and all religious realisation is possible only when the mind is in a steady, peaceful condition of harmonious equilibrium.
It is thus that one may begin to learn how to love the Lord.
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
these in turn were mere puppets in the clutch of these forces. When one is habituated to see the things behind, one is no longer prone to be touched by the outward aspects or to expect any remedy from political, institutional or social changes.110 Sri Aurobindo had become aware of these "enormous forces" behind, of the constant infiltration of the supraphysical into the physical. His energies were not focused on a moral problem violence versus nonviolence which after all would be rather superficial, but on a problem of effectiveness. He saw clearly, again through experience, that in order to cure the world's evil it is first necessary to cure "what is at its roots in man." Nothing can 109
At the risk of incurring the censure of his compatriots (it must be remembered that India had suffered enough under British rule not to be uninterested in the fate of Britain under German attack).
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For here in the world, though the gnosis is there secretly behind existence, what acts is not the gnosis but a magic of Knowledge-Ignorance, an incalculable yet apparently mechanical overmind Maya. The Divine appears to us here in one view as an equal, inactive and impersonal Witness Spirit, an immobile consenting Purusha not bound by quality or Space or Time, whose support or sanction is given impartially to the play of all action and energies which the transcendent Will has once permitted and authorised to fulfil themselves in the cosmos. This Witness Spirit, this immobile Self in things, seems to will nothing and determine nothing; yet we become aware that his very passivity, his silent presence compels all things to travel even in their ignorance towards a divine goal and attracts through division towards a yet unrealised oneness. Yet no supreme infallible Divine Will seems to be there, only a widely deployed Cosmic Energy of a mechanical executive Process, prakriti. This is one side of the cosmic Self; the other presents itself as a universal Divine, one in being, multiple in personality and power, who conveys to us, when we enter into the consciousness of his universal forces, a sense of infinite quality and will and act and a world-wide knowledge and a one yet innumerable delight; for through him we become one with all existences not only in their essence but in their play of action, see ourself in all and all in ourself, perceive all knowledge and thought and feeling as motions of the one Mind and Heart, all energy and action as kinetics of the one Will m power, all Matter and form as particles of the one Body, all personalities as projections of the one Person, all egos as deformations of the one and sole real "I" in existence. In him we no longer stand separate, but lose our active ego in the universal movement, even as by the Witness who is without qualities and for ever unattached and unentangled, we lose our static ego in the universal peace.
And yet there remains a contradiction between these two terms, the aloof divine Silence and the all-embracing divine Action, which we may heal in ourselves in a certain manner, in a certain high degree which seems to us complete, yet is not complete because it cannot altogether transform and conquer. A universal Peace, Light, Power, Bliss is ours, but its effective expression is not that of the Truth-Consciousness, the divine Gnosis, but still, though wonderfully freed, uplifted and illumined, supports only the present self-expression of the Cosmic Spirit and does not transform, as would a transcendental Descent, the ambiguous symbols and veiled mysteries of a world of Ignorance. Ourselves are free, but the earth-consciousness remains in bondage; only a further transcendental ascent and descent can entirely heal the contradiction and transform and deliver.
1.11 - The Seven Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The sevenfold waters thus rise upward and become the pure mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven. They there reveal themselves as the first eternal ever-young energies, separate streams but of one origin - for they have all flowed from the one womb of the super-conscient Truth - the seven Words or fundamental creative expressions of the divine Mind, sapta van.h.. This life of the pure mind is not like that of the nervous life which devours its objects in order to sustain its mortal existence; its waters devour not but they do not fail; they are the eternal truth robed in a transparent veil of mental forms; therefore, it is said, they are neither clothed nor naked (v. 6).
But this is not the last stage. The Force rises into the womb or birthplace of this mental clarity (ghr.tasya) where the waters flow as streams of the divine sweetness (srava the madhunam); there the forms it assumes are universal forms, masses of the vast and infinite consciousness. As a result, the fostering rivers in the lower world are nourished by this descending higher sweetness and the mental and physical consciousness, the two first mothers of the all-effecting Will, become in their entire largeness perfectly equal and harmonised by this light of the
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lord and lover; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifold movement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies (vs. 9-10).
Then we are told expressly that this infinite into which he has entered and in which he grows, in which the many Waters victoriously reaching their goal (yasasah.) increase him, is the unobstructed vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless infinite, his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. There the seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated though of one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but rather as indivisible companions (jamnam apasi svasr.n.am). In that entire meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things and upbears all things; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight, no longer affected by the lower crookedness; he from whom the radiances of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, now gives them this high and supreme birth; he turns them into the divine knowledge, the immortal consciousness (vs. 11-12).
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the world; the energies of the gods in the mortal consciousness
are its energies; when they conquer and grow great, it is because
Brahman has fought and won. This world therefore is an inferior action, a superficial representation of something infinitely
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in the Veda as the Horse; its various energies are the forces
that draw the chariots of the Gods. The Vedic image is recalled
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Time as a result of the mass of our past energies. For although
those energies seem to us to lie dead in the past because their
history is behind us, yet are they still existent in their mass and
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things in its energy of conscious power. These energies will be
the spontaneous inherent action of its conscious being creative
1.12 - Independence, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
These different minds, which act in these different bodies are called made-minds, and the bodies, made-bodies; that is, manufactured bodies and minds. Matter and mind are like two inexhaustible storehouses. When you become a Yogi, you learn the secret of their control. It was yours all the time, but you had forgotten it. When you become a Yogi, you recollect it. Then you can do anything with it, manipulate it in every way you like. The material out of which a manufactured mind is created is the very same material which is used for the macrocosm. It is not that mind is one thing and matter another, they are different aspects of the same thing. Asmit, egoism, is the material, the fine state of existence out of which these made-minds and made-bodies of the Yogi are manufactured. Therefore, when the Yogi has found the secret of these energies of nature, he can manufacture any number of bodies or minds out of the substance known as egoism.
6. Among the various Chittas, that which is attained by Samadhi is desireless.
1.1.2 - Intellect and the Intellectual, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Xs main grievance with respect to the intellectuals is that he is cut off from all discussion of mental things and mental stimulus and so his mental energies are becoming atrophied. But a man who has a mental life ought surely not to be dependent on others for it, since that life is found within there ought to be springs within that flow by their own force.
Perhaps the crows do in the "Crow Parliament" sometimes?
1.12 - Love The Creator, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
After having built up out of the cosmic dust the harmonious forms of the worlds and coordinated in the infinitesimal universe of the atoms, as in the infinite atom which is the universe, all conflicting forces and chaotic energies, after having perfected life and its forms, the forms by the progress of life, life by the progress of forms this Love is now at work in the human being. After having drawn him forth out of the divine possibilities of Nature it would now draw out of his nature the possibilities of the Divine.
This supreme aspiration of love explains and justifies the universal desire and transfigures it: therein the being discovers the secret of his goal shedding light on the mystery of his beginning.
1.12 - Sleep and Dreams, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are many ways of doing it. Here is one: first of all, put your body at ease, comfortably stretched out on a bed or in an easy-chair. Then try to relax your nerves, all together or one by one, till you have obtained complete relaxation. This done, and while your body lies limp like a rag on the bed, make your brain silent and immobile, till it is no longer conscious of itself. Then slowly, imperceptibly, pass from this state into sleep. When you wake up the next morning, you will be full of energy. On the contrary, if you go to bed completely tired and without relaxing yourself, you will fall into a heavy, dull and unconscious sleep in which the vital will lose all its energies.
It is possible that you may not obtain an immediate result, but persevere.
1.12 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE RIGHTS OF MAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
attain to the fullness of his personality, his energies, his power of action
and his consciousness, more especially since we do not become com-
1.12 - The Strength of Stillness, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To be capable of silence, stillness, illuminated passivity is to be fit for immortalityamtatvya kalpate. It is to be dhra, the ideal of our ancient civilisation, which does not mean to be tamasic, inert and a block. The inaction of the tamasic man is a stumbling-block to the energies around him, the inaction of the Yogin creates, preserves and destroys; his action is dynamic with the direct, stupendous driving-power of great natural forces. It is a stillness within often covered by a ripple of talk and activity without,the ocean with its lively surface of waves. But even as men do not see the reality of Gods workings from the superficial noise of the world and its passing events, for they are hidden beneath that cover, so also shall they fail to understand the action of the Yogin, for he is different within from what he is outside. The strength of noise and activity is, doubtless, great,did not the walls of Jericho fall by the force of noise? But infinite is the strength of the stillness and the silence, in which great forces prepare for action.
***
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
First, it is not enough to attain higher powers of consciousness; there must be someone to embody them, otherwise we are like a hunter discovering fabulous creatures through binoculars. Where is the "someone" in the cosmic consciousness? There is no one left. A present-day analogy may explain this better: we can send a rocket into the sun, thus reaching the apex of the world, but not the apex of man, who has not moved an inch in the process. The rocket has gone out of the earth's range. Similarly, the yogi concentrates on one point of his being, gathers all his energies like the cone of a rocket, breaks through his outer carapace, and emerges elsewhere, in another cosmic or nirvanic dimension.
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.168
--
This luminous flood will translate differently in different people (one is always too quick to give it a form instead of letting it quietly permeate the being and do its work of clarification). For some, there will be a sudden poetic blossoming, others will see new architectural forms, others will pursue new scientific discoveries, while still others will worship their God. Generally, the access to this new consciousness is accompanied by a spontaneous flowering of creative energies, particularly in the poetic field. It is interesting to note the number of poets of all languages Chinese, Indian, English, etc. among Sri Aurobindo's disciples, as if poetry and art were the first practical result of his yoga: I have seen both in myself and others a sudden flowering of capacities in every kind of activity come by the opening of consciousness, so that one who laboured long without the least success to express himself in rhythm becomes a master of poetic language and cadences in a day. It is a question of the right silence in the mind and the right openness to the Word that is trying to express itself for the Word is there ready formed in those inner planes where all artistic forms take birth, but it is the transmitting mind that must change and become a perfect channel and not an obstacle.192
Poetry is the most convenient means of conveying what these higher planes of consciousness are. In a poem's rhythm one can easily perceive vibrations. We will therefore use poetry to convey a sense of what these higher planes are, even though the Superconscient is not the sole privilege of poets. In his vast correspondence on poetry and in his Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo has given numerous instances of poetry issuing from the illumined mind. It is naturally Shakespeare who would give us the most abundant examples, provided we let go of the external meaning and listen to what vibrates behind the words; for poetry and all the arts are ultimately a means of capturing a tiny ineffable note, a mere nothing, a "nothing" that still constitutes life's very essence: . . . that his virtues
1.13 - Dawn and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Dawn is described as gomat asvavat vravat; and since the epithets gomat and asvavat applied to her are symbolical and mean not "cowful and horsed", but radiant with illuminations of knowledge and accompanied by the swiftnesses of force, so vravat cannot mean "man-accompanied" or accompanied by heroes or servants or sons, but rather signifies that she is attended by conquering energies or at any rate is used in some kindred and symbolic sense. This becomes quite evident in I.113.18, ya gomatr us.asah. sarvavrah. . . . ta asvada asnavat somasutva. It does not mean "the Dawns that have cows and all men or all servants, those a man, having offered the Soma, enjoys as horsegivers." The Dawn is the inner dawn which brings to man all the varied fullnesses of his widest being, force, consciousness, joy; it is radiant with its illuminations, it is accompanied by all possible powers and energies, it gives man the full force of vitality so that he can enjoy the infinite delight of that vaster existence.
We can no longer take gomad asvavad vravad radhah. in a physical sense; the very language of the Veda points us to quite another truth. Therefore the other circumstances of this god-given wealth must be taken equally in a spiritual significance; the offspring, gold, chariots are symbolical; sravas is not fame or food, but bears its psychological sense and means the higher knowledge which comes not to the senses or the intellect, but to the divine hearing and the divine vision of the Truth; radho drghasruttamam, rayim sravasyum is that rich state of being, that spiritually opulent felicity which turns towards the knowledge (sravasyu) and has a far-extended hearing for the vibrations of the Word that comes to us from the regions (disah.) of the Infinite. Thus the luminous figure of the Dawn liberates
1.1.3 - Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This [restless thinking] is what we call the activity of the mind, which always comes in the way of the concentration and tries to create doubt and dispersion of the energies. It can be got rid of in two ways, by rejecting it and pushing it out, till it remains as an outside force onlyby bringing down the higher peace and light into the physical mind.
***
1.13 - System of the O.T.O., #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I do beg you to mark well, dear sister, that a true Magical Operation is never "against Nature." It must go smoothly and serenely according to Her laws. One can bring in alien energies and compel an endothermic reaction; but "Pike's Peak or bust?" The answer will always be BUST!
To return for a moment to that question of Secrecy: there is no rule to prohibit you from quoting against me such of my brighter remarks as "Mystery is the enemy of Truth;" but, for one thing, I am, and always have been, the leader of the Extreme Left in the Council-Chamber of the City of the Pyramids, so that if I acquiesce at all in the system of the O.T.O. so far as the "secret of secrets" of the IX is concerned, it is really on a point of personal honour. My pledge given to the late Frater Superior and O.H.O., Dr. Theodor Reuss. For all that, in this particular instance it is beyond question a point of common prudence, both because the abuse of the Secret is, at least on the surface, so easy and so tempting, and because, if it became a matter of general knowledge the Order itself might be in danger of calumny and persecution; for the secret is even easier to misinterpret that to profane.
1.13 - The Divine Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:An infinite Mind of this character might possibly construct an accidental cosmos of conflicting possibilities and it might shape it into something shifting, something always transient, something ever uncertain in its drift, neither real nor unreal, possessed of no definite end or aim but only an endless succession of momentary aims leading - since there is no superior directing power of knowledge - eventually nowhither. Nihilism or Illusionism or some kindred philosophy is the only logical conclusion of such a pure noumenalism. The cosmos so constructed would be a presentation or reflection of something not itself, but always and to the end a false presentation, a distorted reflection; all cosmic existence would be a Mind struggling to work out fully its imaginations, but not succeeding, because they have no imperative basis of self-truth; overpowered and carried forward by the stream of its own past energies, it would be borne onward indeterminately for ever without issue unless or until it can either slay itself or fall into an eternal stillness. That traced to its roots is Nihilism and Illusionism and it is the only wisdom if we suppose that our human mentality or anything at all like it represents the highest cosmic force and the original conception at work in the universe.
17:But the moment we find in the original power of knowledge a higher force than that which is represented by our human mentality, this conception of the universe becomes insufficient and therefore invalid. It has its truth but it is not the whole truth. It is law of the immediate appearance of the universe, but not of its original truth and ultimate fact. For we perceive behind the action of Mind, Life and Body, something that is not embraced in the stream of Force but embraces and controls it; something that is not born into a world which it seeks to interpret, but has created in its being a world of which it has the omniscience; something that does not labour perpetually to form something else out of itself while it drifts in the overmastering surge of past energies it can no longer control, but has already in its consciousness a perfect Form of itself and is here gradually unfolding it. The world expresses a foreseen Truth, obeys a predetermining Will, realises an original formative self-vision, - it is the growing image of a divine creation.
18:So long as we work only through the mentality governed by appearances, this something beyond and behind and yet always immanent can be only an inference or a presence vaguely felt. We perceive a law of cyclic progress and infer an ever-increasing perfection of somewhat that is somewhere foreknown. For everywhere we see Law founded in self-being and, when we penetrate within into the rationale of its process, we find that Law is the expression of an innate knowledge, a knowledge inherent in the existence which is expressing itself and implied in the force that expresses it; and Law developed by Knowledge so as to allow of progression implies a divinely seen goal towards which the motion is directed. We see too that our reason seeks to emerge out of and dominate the helpless drift of our mentality and we arrive at the perception that Reason is only a messenger, a representative or a shadow of a greater consciousness beyond itself which does not need to reason because it is all and knows all that it is. And we can then pass to the inference that this source of Reason is identical with the Knowledge that acts as Law in the world. This Knowledge determines its own law sovereignly because it knows what has been, is and will be and it knows because it is eternally, and infinitely cognises itself. Being that is infinite consciousness, infinite consciousness that is omnipotent force, when it makes a world - that is to say, a harmony of itself - its object of consciousness, becomes seizable by our thought as a cosmic existence that knows its own truth and realises in forms that which it knows.
1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Two roads, as I shall seek to show, by which certain energies
and certain radiations, moral and mystical in their nature, in-
1.13 - The Supermind and the Yoga of Works, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate;
280
1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and
earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized," says the text
1.14 - The Supermind as Creator, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
18:But in the Supermind there is no such paralysing division, because knowledge is not self-divided, force is not self-divided, being is not self-divided as in the mind; they are neither broken in themselves, nor divorced from each other. For the Supermind is the Vast; it starts from unity, not division, it is primarily comprehensive, differentiation is only its secondary act. Therefore whatever be the truth of being expressed, the idea corresponds to it exactly, the will-force to the idea, - force being only power of the consciousness, - and the result to the will. Nor does the idea clash with other ideas, the will or force with other will or force as in man and his world; for there is one vast Consciousness which contains and relates all ideas in itself as its own ideas, one vast Will which contains and relates all energies in itself as its own energies. It holds back this, advances that other, but according to its own preconceiving Idea-Will.
19:This is the justification of the current religious notions of the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Divine Being. Far from being an irrational imagination they are perfectly rational and in no way contradict either the logic of a comprehensive philosophy or the indications of observation and experience. The error is to make an unbridgeable gulf between God and man, Brahman and the world. That error elevates an actual and practical differentiation in being, consciousness and force into an essential division. But this aspect of the question we shall touch upon afterwards. At present we have arrived at an affirmation and some conception of the divine and creative Supermind in which all is one in being, consciousness, will and delight, yet with an infinite capacity of differentiation that deploys but does not destroy the unity, - in which Truth is the substance and Truth rises in the Idea and Truth comes out in the form and there is one truth of knowledge and will, one truth of self-fulfilment and therefore of delight; for all self-fulfilment is satisfaction of being. Therefore, always, in all mutations and combinations a self-existent and inalienable harmony.
1.15 - Sex Morality, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Note also that the use of this supreme method involves the manipulation of energies ineffably secret and most delicately sensitive; it compares with the operations of ordinary Magick as the last word in artillery does with the blunderbuss!
I ought to have mentioned the sexual instinct or impulse in itself, careless of magical or any other considerations soever: the thing that picks you up by the scruff of the neck, slits your weasand with a cavalry sabre, and chucks the remains over the nearest precipice.
1.16 - Man, A Transitional Being, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite.317
This ceaseless movement from Being to Becoming is what Sri Aurobindo called devolution. The transition is gradual; the supreme Consciousness does not all at once become Matter. Matter is the final precipitate, the end product of an increasing fragmentation or "materialization" of consciousness, which is worked out slowly, one level at a time. At the "top" of this devolutive course though it is not a top but a supreme Point that is everywhere at once stands the supramental Consciousness-Force, which encompasses in a single Glance all the infinite possibilities of the Becoming, as the solar Fire contains all its rays within its center: "They unyoked the horses of the Sun," says the Rig Veda, "the ten thousand stood together, there was that One, tad ekam." (V.62.1) Then comes the Overmind: the "great clevage" of consciousness begins; the rays of the Sun branch off; the single Consciousness-Force is henceforth scattered into trillions of forces, each seeking its own absolute realization. Once begun, the Play will not stop until all the possibilities have been exhausted,
1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Up to a certain point this recoil has its uses and may easily even, by tapasy, by the law of energy increasing through compression, develop for a time a new vigour in the life of the society, as happened in India in the early Buddhist centuries. But beyond a certain point it tends, not really to kill, for that is impossible, but to discourage along with the vital instincts the indispensable life-energy of which they are the play and renders them in the end inert, feeble, narrow, unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was the final result in India of the agelong pressure of Buddhism and its supplanter and successor, Illusionism. No society wholly or too persistently and pervadingly dominated by this denial of the life dynamism can flourish and put forth its possibilities of growth and perfection. For from dynamic it becomes static and from the static position it proceeds to stagnation and degeneration. Even the higher being of man, which finds its account in a vigorous life dynamism, both as a fund of force to be transmuted into its own loftier energies and as a potent channel of connection with the outer life, suffers in the end by this failure and contraction. The ancient Indian ideal recognised this truth and divided life into four essential and indispensable divisions, artha, kma, dharma, moka, vital interests, satisfaction of desires of all kinds, ethics and religion, and liberation or spirituality, and it insisted on the practice and development of all. Still it tended not only to put the last forward as the goal of all the rest, which it is, but to put it at the end of life and its habitat in another world of our being, rather than here in life as a supreme status and formative power on the physical plane. But this rules out the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, the perfectibility of society and of man in society, the evolution of a new and diviner race, and without one or other of these no universal ideal can be complete. It provides a temporary and occasional, but not an inherent justification for life; it holds out no illumining fulfilment either for its individual or its collective impulse.
Let us then look at this vital instinct and life dynamism in its own being and not merely as an occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really rebellious in its very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and persists even when it is trained by the growing application to it of the enlightening reason. Evidently it is in this natural form a thing of the earth, gross, earthy, full even of hideous uglinesses and brute blunders and jarring discords; but so also is the infrarational stage in ethics, in aesthetics, in religion. It is true too that it presents a much more enormous difficulty than these others, more fundamentally and obstinately resists elevation, because it is the very province of the infrarational, a first formulation of consciousness out of the Inconscient, nearest to it in the scale of being. But still it has too, properly looked at, its rich elements of power, beauty, nobility, good, sacrifice, worship, divinity; here too are highreaching gods, masked but still resplendent. Until recently, and even now, reason, in the garb no longer of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up all this physical and vital life and perfect it by the sole power of rationalism, by a knowledge of the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology and biology and health, by collectivism, by State education, by a new psychological education and a number of other kindred means. All this is well in its own way and in its limits, but it is not enough and can never come to a truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high idealistic, rational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes only a polishing, a gloss, a clothing and mannerising of the original uncouth savage. The modern attempt of reason in the form of a broad and thorough rational, utilitarian and efficient instruction and organisation of man and his life is not succeeding any better for all its insistent but always illusory promise of more perfect results in the future. These endeavours cannot indeed be truly successful if our theory of life is right and if this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned suprarational, if it has, as it then must have, the instinctive reaching out for something divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its blind strivings. Here too reason must be overpassed or surpass itself and become a passage to the Divine.
1.16 - The Triple Status of Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:This, then, is the nature of the Divine Consciousness which creates in itself all things by a movement of its conscious-force and governs their development through a self-evolution by inherent knowledge-will of the truth of existence or real-idea which has formed them. The Being that is thus conscient is what we call God; and He must obviously be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. Omnipresent, for all forms are forms of His conscious being created by its force of movement in its own extension as Space and Time; omniscient, for all things exist in His consciousbeing, are formed by it and possessed by it; omnipotent, for this all-possessing consciousness is also an all-possessing Force and all-informing Will. And this Will and Knowledge are not at war with each other as our will and knowledge are capable of being at war with each other, because they are not different but are one movement of the same being. Nor can they be contradicted by any other will, force or consciousness from outside or within; for there is no consciousness or force external to the One, and all energies and formations of knowledge within are not other than it, but are merely play of the one all-determining Will and the one all-harmonising Knowledge. What we see as a clash of wills and forces, because we dwell in the particular and divided and cannot see the whole, the Supermind envisages as the conspiring elements of a predetermined harmony which is always present to it because the totality of things is eternally subject to its gaze.
7:Whatever be the poise or form its action takes, this will always be the nature of the divine Consciousness. But, its existence being absolute in itself, its power of existence is also absolute in its extension, and it is not therefore limited to one poise or one form of action. We, human beings, are phenomenally a particular form of consciousness, subject to Time and Space, and can only be, in our surface consciousness which is all we know of ourselves, one thing at a time, one formation, one poise of being, one aggregate of experience; and that one thing is for us the truth of ourselves which we acknowledge; all the rest is either not true or no longer true, because it has disappeared into the past out of our ken, or not yet true, because it is waiting in the future and not yet in our ken. But the Divine Consciousness is not so particularised, nor so limited; it can be many things at a time and take more than one enduring poise even for all time. We find that in the principle of Supermind itself it has three such general poises or sessions of its world-founding consciousness. The first founds the inalienable unity of things, the second modifies that unity so as to support the manifestation of the Many in One and One in Many; the third further modifies it so as to support the evolution of a diversified individuality which, by the action of Ignorance, becomes in us at a lower level the illusion of the separate ego.
1.17 - Astral Journey Example, How to do it, How to Verify your Experience, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Naturally one cannot realize this until one becomes a Master of the Temple; consequently one is perpetually plunged in sorrow and despair. There is, you see, a good deal more to it than merely learning one's mistakes. One can never be sure what is right and what is wrong, until one appreciates that "wrong" is equally "right." Now then one gets rid of the idea of "effort" which is associated with "lust of result." All that one does is to exercise pleasantly and healthfully one's energies.
It will not do to regard "man" as the "final cause" of manifestation. Please do not quote myself against me.
1.17 - Religion as the Law of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But here comes in an ambiguity which brings in a deeper source of divergence. For by spirituality religion seems often to mean something remote from earthly life, different from it, hostile to it. It seems to condemn the pursuit of earthly aims as a trend opposed to the turn to a spiritual life and the hopes of man on earth as an illusion or a vanity incompatible with the hope of man in heaven. The spirit then becomes something aloof which man can only reach by throwing away the life of his lower members. Either he must abandon this nether life after a certain point, when it has served its purpose, or must persistently discourage, mortify and kill it. If that be the true sense of religion, then obviously religion has no positive message for human society in the proper field of social effort, hope and aspiration or for the individual in any of the lower members of his being. For each principle of our nature seeks naturally for perfection in its own sphere and, if it is to obey a higher power, it must be because that power gives it a greater perfection and a fuller satisfaction even in its own field. But if perfectibility is denied to it and therefore the aspiration to perfection taken away by the spiritual urge, then it must either lose faith in itself and the power to pursue the natural expansion of its energies and activities or it must reject the call of the spirit in order to follow its own bend and law, dharma. This quarrel between earth and heaven, between the spirit and its members becomes still more sterilising if spirituality takes the form of a religion of sorrow and suffering and austere mortification and the gospel of the vanity of things; in its exaggeration it leads to such nightmares of the soul as that terrible gloom and hopelessness of the Middle Ages in their worst moment when the one hope of mankind seemed to be in the approaching and expected end of the world, an inevitable and desirable Pralaya. But even in less pronounced and intolerant forms of this pessimistic attitude with regard to the world, it becomes a force for the discouragement of life and cannot, therefore, be a true law and guide for life. All pessimism is to that extent a denial of the Spirit, of its fullness and power, an impatience with the ways of God in the world, an insufficient faith in the divine Wisdom and Will that created the world and for ever guide it. It admits a wrong notion about that supreme Wisdom and Power and therefore cannot itself be the supreme wisdom and power of the spirit to which the world can look for guidance and for the uplifting of its whole life towards the Divine.
The Western recoil from religion, that minimising of its claim and insistence by which Europe progressed from the mediaeval religious attitude through the Renascence and the Reformation to the modern rationalistic attitude, that making of the ordinary earthly life our one preoccupation, that labour to fulfil ourselves by the law of the lower members, divorced from all spiritual seeking, was an opposite error, the contrary ignorant extreme, the blind swing of the pendulum from a wrong affirmation to a wrong negation. It is an error because perfection cannot be found in such a limitation and restriction; for it denies the complete law of human existence, its deepest urge, its most secret impulse. Only by the light and power of the highest can the lower be perfectly guided, uplifted and accomplished. The lower life of man is in form undivine, though in it there is the secret of the divine, and it can only be divinised by finding the higher law and the spiritual illumination. On the other hand, the impatience which condemns or despairs of life or discourages its growth because it is at present undivine and is not in harmony with the spiritual life, is an equal ignorance, andha tama. The world-shunning monk, the mere ascetic may indeed well find by this turn his own individual and peculiar salvation, the spiritual recompense of his renunciation and Tapasya, as the materialist may find by his own exclusive method the appropriate rewards of his energy and concentrated seeking; but neither can be the true guide of mankind and its law-giver. The monastic attitude implies a fear, an aversion, a distrust of life and its aspirations, and one cannot wisely guide that with which one is entirely out of sympathy, that which one wishes to minimise and discourage. The sheer ascetic spirit, if it directed life and human society, could only prepare it to be a means for denying itself and getting away from its own motives. An ascetic guidance might tolerate the lower activities, but only with a view to persuade them in the end to minimise and finally cease from their own action. But a spirituality which draws back from life to envelop it without being dominated by it does not labour under this disability. The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it.
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
and progressively concentrate all those energies in your body and
change each organ into a center of conscious energy that will replace the symbolic functioning by the true one. For example, behind the symbolic movement of the lungs, there is a true movement that gives the capacity of lightness, and you escape the law of gravity. 346 And likewise for each organ. There is a true movement behind every symbolic one. This doesn't mean that there will no longer be any recognizable form; form will be made up of qualities rather than solid particles. It will be a practical or pragmatic form, so to speak
1.18 - Mind and Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:But this life mentality also, though it may get free from the error of body, does not make us free from the whole error of mind; it is still subject to the original act of ignorance by which the individualised soul regards everything from its own standpoint and can see the truth of things only as they present themselves to it from outside or else as they rise up to its view from its separate temporal and spatial consciousness, forms and results of past and present experience. It is not conscious of its other selves except by the outward indications they give of their existence, indications of communicated thought, speech, action, result of actions, or subtler indications - not felt directly by the physical being - of vital impact and relation. Equally is it ignorant of itself; for it knows of its self only through a movement in Time and a succession of lives in which it has used its variously embodied energies. As our physical instrumental mind has the illusion of the body, so this subconscious dynamic mind has the illusion of life. In that it is absorbed and concentrated, by that it is limited, with that it identifies its being. Here we do not yet get back to the meeting-place of mind and supermind and the point at which they originally separated.
16:But there is still another clearer reflective mentality behind the dynamic and vital which is capable of escaping from this absorption in life and views itself as assuming life and body in order to image out in active relations of energy that which it perceives in will and thought. It is the source of the pure thinker in us; it is that which knows mentality in itself and sees the world not in terms of life and body but of mind; it is that4 which, when we get back to it, we sometimes mistake for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul. This higher mind is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact and physical indication; it conceives too a mental figure of unity, and in its activity and its will it can create and possess more directly - not only indirectly as in the ordinary physical life - and in other minds and lives as well as its own. But still even this pure mentality does not escape from the original error of mind. For it is still its separate mental self which it makes the judge, witness and centre of the universe and through it alone strives to arrive at its own higher self and reality; all others are "others" grouped to it around itself: when it wills to be free, it has to draw back from life and mind in order to disappear into the real unity. For there is still the veil created by Avidya between the mental and supramental action; an image of the Truth gets through, not the Truth itself.
1.18 - The Divine Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga than to action done in the blindness of hopes and fears, lamed by the judgments of the stumbling reason, running about amidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will: Yoga, says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah. karmasu kausalam. But all this is done impersonally by the action of a great universal light and power operating through the individual nature. The Karmayogin knows that the power given to him will be adapted to the fruit decreed, the divine thought behind the work equated with the work he has to do, the will in him, - which will not be wish or desire, but an impersonal drive of conscious power directed towards an aim not his own, - subtly regulated in its energy and direction by the divine wisdom. The result may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, or it may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure; but to him it is always the success intended, not by him, but by the all-wise manipulator of action and result, because he does not seek for victory, but only for the fulfilment of the divine will and wisdom which works out its ends through apparent failure as well as and often with greater force than through apparent triumph. Arjuna, bidden to fight, is assured of victory; but even if certain defeat were before him, he must still fight because that is the present work assigned to him as his immediate share in the great sum of energies by which the divine will is surely accomplished.
The liberated man has no personal hopes; he does not seize on things as his personal possessions; he receives what the divine
1.18 - The Human Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(or, actively-moving) mares which bear the hero. Seated, I call the births divine" (verse 2). What path is this? It is the path between the home of the gods and our earthly mortality down which the gods descend through the antariks.a, the vital regions, to the earthly sacrifice and up which the sacrifice and man by the sacrifice ascends to the home of the gods. Agni yokes his mares, his variously-coloured energies or flames of the divine
Force he represents, which bear the Hero, the battling power within us that performs the journey. And the births divine are at once the gods themselves and those manifestations of the divine life in man which are the Vedic meaning of the godheads. That this is the sense becomes clear from the fourth Rik. "When the
1.19 - Dialogue between Prahlada and his father, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
"It is true that I have been instructed in all these matters by my venerable preceptor, and I have learnt them, but I cannot in all approve them. It is said that conciliation, gifts, punishment, and sowing dissension are the means of securing friends (or overcoming foes)[1]; but I, father-be not angry-know neither friends nor foes; and where no object is to be accomplished, the means of effecting it are superfluous. It were idle to talk of friend or foe in Govinda, who is the supreme soul, lord of the world, consisting of the world, and who is identical with all beings. The divine Viṣṇu is in thee, father, in me, and in all every where else; and hence how can I speak of friend or foe, as distinct from myself? It is therefore waste of time to cultivate such tedious and unprofitable sciences, which are but false knowledge, and all our energies should be dedicated to the acquirement of true wisdom. The notion that ignorance is knowledge arises, father, from ignorance. Does not the child, king of the Asuras, imagine the fire-fly to be a spark of fire. That is active duty, which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist. Knowing this, I look upon all such acquirement as profitless. That which is really profitable hear me, oh mighty monarch, thus prostrate before thee, proclaim. He who cares not for dominion, he who cares not for wealth, shall assuredly obtain both in a life to come. All men, illustrious prince, are toiling to be great; but the destinies of men, and not their own exertions, are the cause of greatness. Kingdoms are the gifts of fate, and are bestowed upon the stupid, the ignorant, the cowardly, and those to whom the science of government is unknown. Let him therefore who covets the goods of fortune be assiduous in the practice of virtue: let him who hopes for final liberation learn to look upon all things as equal and the same. Gods, men, animals, birds, reptiles, all are but forms of one eternal Viṣṇu, existing as it were detached from himself. By him who knows this, all the existing world, fixed or movable, is to be regarded as identical with himself, as proceeding alike from Viṣṇu, assuming a universal form. When this is known, the glorious god of all, who is without beginning or end, is pleased; and when he is pleased, there is an end of affliction."
On hearing this, Hiraṇyakaśipu started up from his throne in a fury, and spurned his son on the breast with his foot. Burning with rage, he wrung his hands, and exclaimed, "Ho Viprachitti! ho Rāhu! ho Bali[2]! bind him with strong bands[3], and cast him into the ocean, or all the regions, the Daityas and Dānavas, will become converts to the doctrines of this silly wretch. Repeatedly prohibited by us, he still persists in the praise of our enemies. Death is the just retribution of the disobedient." The Daityas accordingly bound the prince with strong bands, as their lord had commanded, and threw him into the sea. As he floated on the waters, the ocean was convulsed throughout its whole extent, and rose in mighty undulations, threatening to submerge the earth. This when Hiraṇyakaśipu observed, he commanded the Daityas to hurl rocks into the sea, and pile them closely on one another, burying beneath their iñcumbent mass him whom fire would not burn, nor weapons pierce, nor serpents bite; whom the pestilential gale could not blast, nor poison nor magic spirits nor incantations destroy; who fell from the loftiest heights unhurt; who foiled the elephants of the spheres: a son of depraved heart, whose life was a perpetual curse. "Here," he cried, "since he cannot die, here let him live for thousands of years at the bottom of the ocean, overwhelmed by mountains. Accordingly the Daityas and Dānavas hurled upon Prahlāda, whilst in the great ocean, ponderous rocks, and piled them over him for many thousand miles: but he, still with mind undisturbed, thus offered daily praise to Viṣṇu, lying at the bottom of the sea, under the mountain heap. "Glory to thee, god of the lotus eye: glory to thee, most excellent of spiritual things: glory to thee, soul of all worlds: glory to thee, wielder of the sharp discus: glory to the best of Brahmans; to the friend of Brahmans and of kine; to Kṛṣṇa, the preserver of the world: to Govinda be glory. To him who, as Brahmā, creates the universe; who in its existence is its preserver; be praise. To thee, who at the end of the Kalpa takest the form of Rudra; to thee, who art triform; be adoration. Thou, Achyuta, art the gods, Yakṣas, demons, saints, serpents, choristers and dancers of heaven, goblins, evil spirits, men, animals, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, and stones, earth, water, fire, sky, wind, sound, touch, taste, colour, flavour, mind, intellect, soul, time, and the qualities of nature: thou art all these, and the chief object of them all. Thou art knowledge and ignorance, truth and falsehood, poison and ambrosia. Thou art the performance and discontinuance of acts[4]: thou art the acts which the Vedas enjoin: thou art the enjoyer of the fruit of all acts, and the means by which they are accomplished. Thou, Viṣṇu, who art the soul of all, art the fruit of all acts of piety. Thy universal diffusion, indicating might and goodness, is in me, in others, in all creatures, in all worlds. Holy ascetics meditate on thee: pious priests sacrifice to thee. Thou alone, identical with the gods and the fathers of mankind, receivest burnt-offerings and oblations[5]. The universe is thy intellectual form[6]; whence proceeded thy subtile form, this world: thence art thou all subtile elements and elementary beings, and the subtile principle, that is called soul, within them. Hence the supreme soul of all objects, distinguished as subtile or gross, which is imperceptible, and which cannot be conceived, is even a form of thee. Glory be to thee, Puruṣottama; and glory to that imperishable form which, soul of all, is another manifestation[7] of thy might, the asylum of all qualities, existing in all creatures. I salute her, the supreme goddess, who is beyond the senses; whom the mind, the tongue, cannot define; who is to be distinguished alone by the wisdom of the truly wise. Om! salutation to Vāsudeva: to him who is the eternal lord; he from whom nothing is distinct; he who is distinct from all. Glory be to the great spirit again and again: to him who is without name or shape; who sole is to be known by adoration; whom, in the forms manifested in his descents upon earth, the dwellers in heaven adore; for they behold not his inscrutable nature. I glorify the supreme deity Viṣṇu, the universal witness, who seated internally, beholds the good and ill of all. Glory to that Viṣṇu from whom this world is not distinct. May he, ever to be meditated upon as the beginning of the universe, have compassion upon me: may he, the supporter of all, in whom every thing is warped and woven[8], undecaying, imperishable, have compassion upon me. Glory, again and again, to that being to whom all returns, from whom all proceeds; who is all, and in whom all things are: to him whom I also am; for he is every where; and through whom all things are from me. I am all things: all things are in me, who am everlasting. I am undecayable, ever enduring, the receptacle of the spirit of the supreme. Brahma is my name; the supreme soul, that is before all things, that is after the end of all. ootnotes and references:
1.2.02 - Qualities Needed for Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- these can only be temporary or local palliatives. The only true escape is a change of consciousness, a change into a greater, wider and purer way of being, and a life and action based upon that change. It is therefore to that that the energies must be turned, once the spiritual orientation is complete. This implies no contempt, but the preference of the only effective means over those which have been found ineffective.
Such qualities as faith, sincerity, aspiration, devotion etc. make up the perfection indicated in our language of the flowers.1 In ordinary language it would mean something else such as purity, love, benevolence, fidelity and a host of other virtues.
1.20 - Death, Desire and Incapacity, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:Death is imposed on the individual life both by the conditions of its own existence and by its relations to the All-Force which manifests itself in the universe. For the individual life is a particular play of energy specialised to constitute, maintain, energise and finally to dissolve, when its utility is over, one of myriad forms which all serve, each in its own place, time and scope, the whole play of the universe. The energy of life in the body has to support the attack of the energies external to it in the universe; it has to draw them in and feed upon them and is itself being constantly devoured by them. All Matter according to the Upanishad is food, and this is the formula of the material world that "the eater eating is himself eaten". The life organised in the body is constantly exposed to the possibility of being broken up by the attack of the life external to it or, its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devouring and the capacity or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away or broken; it has to go through the process of death for a new construction or renewal.
7:Not only so but, again in the language of the Upanishad, the life-force is the food of the body and the body the food of the life-force; in other words, the life-energy in us both supplies the material by which the form is built up and constantly maintained and renewed and is at the same time constantly using up the substantial form of itself which it thus creates and keeps in existence. If the balance between these two operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the different currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay intervene and commence the process of disintegration. And the very struggle for conscious mastery and even the growth of mind make the maintenance of the life more difficult. For there is an increasing demand of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand, and before a new balance can be established, many disorders are introduced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the life; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire fulfilment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed, a more intense struggle is generated; however strong the mastering life, unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new harmony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but must one day be overcome and disintegrated.
1.20 - HOW MAY WE CONCEIVE AND HOPE THAT HUMAN UNANIMIZATION WILL BE REALIZED ON EARTH?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
My object here is to show that such energies do exist.
They are of two kinds: forces of compression, which by exter-
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auto-unification emerging from the psychic energies released by
the technico-social concretion of the earth: this surely is a guaran-
1.20 - Talismans - The Lamen - The Pantacle, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The decisive advantage of this system is not that its variety makes it so adaptable to our needs, but that we already posses the Invocations necessary to call forth the energies required. What is perhaps still more to the point, they work without putting the Magician to such severe toil and exertion as is needed when he has to write them out from his own ingenium. Yes! This is weakness on my part, and I am very naughty to encourage you to shirk the hardest path.
I used often to make the background of my Talismans of four concentric circles, painting then, the first (inmost) in the King (or Knight) scale, the second in the Queen, the third in the Prince, and the outermost in the Princess scale, of the Sign, Planet, or Element to which I was devoting it. On this, preferably in the "flashing" colours, I would paint the appropriate Names and Figures.
1.20 - The Hound of Heaven, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(the cow Aditi, the vast and blissful higher consciousness) bringing for him the sweet food, the honey mixed with the ghr.ta, yielded it as her milk. For this Father also (for Heaven) they fashioned the vast and shining abode; doers of perfect works, they had the entire vision of it. Wide-upholding by their support the Parents (Heaven and Earth) they sat in that high world and embraced all its ecstasy. When for the cleaving away (of evil and falsehood) the vast Thought holds him immediately increasing in his pervasion of earth and heaven, - then for Indra in whom are the equal and faultless words, there are all irresistible energies.
He has found the great, manifold and blissful Field (the wide field of the cows, Swar); and he has sent forth together all the moving herd for his friends. Indra shining out by the human souls (the Angirases) has brought into being, together, the Sun, the Dawn, the Path and the Flame."
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pure, had served thee, the pure one, with the ghr.ta, they held the sacrificial names and set moving (to the supreme heaven) forms well born. They had knowledge of the vast heaven and earth and bore them forward, they the sons of Rudra, the lords of the sacrifice; the mortal awoke to vision and found Agni standing in the seat supreme. Knowing perfectly (or in harmony) they kneeled down to him; they with their wives (the female energies of the gods) bowed down to him who is worthy of obeisance; purifying themselves (or, perhaps, exceeding the limits of heaven and earth) they created their own (their proper or divine) forms, guarded in the gaze, each friend, of the Friend. In thee the gods of the sacrifice found the thrice seven secret seats hidden within; they, being of one heart, protect by them the immortality. Guard thou the herds that stand and that which moves. O Agni, having knowledge of all manifestations (or births) in the worlds (or, knowing all the knowledge of the peoples) establish thy forces, continuous, for life. Knowing, within, the paths of the journeying of the gods thou becamest their sleepless messenger and the bearer of the offerings. The seven mighty ones of heaven (the rivers) placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discerned the doors of the felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the cows whereby now the human creature enjoys (the supreme riches). They who entered upon all things that bear right issue, made the path to Immortality; by the great ones and by the greatness earth stood wide; the mother Aditi with her sons came for the upholding. The Immortals planted in him the shining glory, when they made the two eyes of heaven (identical probably with the two vision-powers of the Sun, the two horses of Indra); rivers, as it were, flow down released; the shining ones
(the cows) who were here below knew, O Agni."
1.21 - The Ascent of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:When Life reaches its second status, that which we recognise as vitality, the contrary phenomenon takes the lead and the physical basis of the vital ego is obliged to consent to dissolution. Its constituents are broken up so that the elements of one life can be used to enter into the elemental formation of other lives. The extent to which this law reigns in Nature has not yet been fully recognised and indeed cannot be until we have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter. Still we can see broadly that not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desireenergy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others. An ancient occult knowledge tells us that we have a vital frame as well as a physical and this too is after death dissolved and lends itself to the constitution of other vital bodies; our life energies while we live are continually mixing with the energies of other beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dissolution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of mind upon mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements. Interchange, intermixture and fusion of being with being, is the very process of life, a law of its existence.
5:We have then two principles in Life, the necessity or the will of the separate ego to survive in its distinctness and guard its identity and the compulsion imposed upon it by Nature to fuse itself with others. In the physical world she lays much stress on the former impulse; for she needs to create stable separate forms, since it is her first and really her most difficult problem to create and maintain any such thing as a separative survival of individuality and a stable form for it in the incessant flux and motion of Energy and in the unity of the infinite. In the atomic life therefore the individual form persists as the basis and secures by its aggregation with others the more or less prolonged existence of aggregate forms which shall be the basis of vital and mental individualisations. But as soon as Nature has secured a sufficient firmness in this respect for the safe conduct of her ulterior operations, she reverses the process; the individual form perishes and the aggregate life profits by the elements of the form that is thus dissolved. This, however, cannot be the last stage; that can only be reached when the two principles are harmonised, when the individual is able to persist in the consciousness of his individuality and yet fuse himself with others without disturbance of preservative equilibrium and interruption of survival.
1.22 - Dominion over different provinces of creation assigned to different beings, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Brahmā, Dakṣa, time, and all creatures are the four energies of Hari, which are the causes of creation. Viṣṇu, Manu and the rest, time, and all creatures are the four energies of Viṣṇu, which are the causes of duration. Rudra, the destroying fire, time, and all creatures are the four energies of Janārddana that are exerted for universal dissolution. In the beginning and the duration of the world, until the period of its end, creation is the work of Brahmā, the patriarchs, and living animals. Brahmā creates in the beginning; then the patriarchs beget progeny; and then animals incessantly multiply their kinds: but Brahmā is not the active agent in creation, independent of time; neither are the patriarchs, nor living animals. So, in the periods of creation and of dissolution, the four portions of the god of gods are equally essential. Whatever, oh Brahman, is engendered by any living being, the body of Hari is cooperative in the birth of that being; so whatever destroys any existing thing, movable or stationary, at any time, is the destroying form of Janārddana as Rudra. Thus Janārddana is the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer of the whole world-being threefold-in the several seasons of creation, preservation, and destruction, according to his assumption of the three qualities: but his highest glory[3] is detached from all qualities; for the fourfold essence of the supreme spirit is composed of true wisdom, pervades all things, is only to be appreciated by itself, and admits of no similitude.
Maitreya said:-
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There are two states of this Brahma; one with, and one without shape; one perishable, and one imperishable; which are inherent in all beings. The imperishable is the supreme being; the perishable is all the world. The blaze of fire burning on one spot diffuses light and heat around; so the world is nothing more than the manifested energy of the supreme Brahma: and inasmuch, Maitreya, as the light and heat are stronger or feebler as we are near to the fire, or far off from it, so the energy of the supreme is more or less intense in the beings that are less or more remote from him. Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva are the most powerful energies of god; next to them are the inferior deities, then the attendant spirits, then men, then animals, birds, insects, vegetables; each becoming more and more feeble as they are farther from their primitive source. In this way, illustrious Brahman, this whole world, although in essence imperishable and eternal, appears and disappears, as if it was subject to birth and death.
The supreme condition of Brahma, which is meditated by the Yogis in the commencement of their abstraction, as invested with form, is Viṣṇu, composed of all the divine energies, and the essence of Brahma, with whom the mystic union that is sought, and which is accompanied by suitable elements, is effected[7] by the devotee whose whole mind is addressed to that object. This Hari, who is the most immediate of all the energies of Brahma, is his embodied shape, composed entirely of his essence; and in him therefore is the whole world interwoven; and from him, and in him, is the universe; and he, the supreme lord of all, comprising all that is perishable and imperishable, bears upon him all material and spiritual existence, identified in nature with his ornaments and weapons.
Maitreya said:-
1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
awaited. The world's energies and substances so harmoniously
adapted and controlled that the supreme Transcendent would
1.22 - The Problem of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
10:The third difficulty is the division between force and consciousness in the evolutionary existence. There is, first, the division which has been created by the evolution itself in its three successive formations of Matter, Life and Mind, each with its own law of working. The Life is at war with the body; it attempts to force it to satisfy life's desires, impulses, satisfactions and demands from its limited capacity what could only be possible to an immortal and divine body; and the body, enslaved and tyrannised over, suffers and is in constant dumb revolt against the demands made upon it by the Life. The Mind is at war with both: sometimes it helps the Life against the Body, sometimes restrains the vital urge and seeks to protect the corporeal frame from life's desires, passions and over-driving energies; it also seeks to possess the Life and turn its energy to the mind's own ends, to the utmost joys of the mind's own activity, to the satisfaction of mental, aesthetic, emotional aims and their fulfilment in human existence; and the Life too finds itself enslaved and misused and is in frequent insurrection against the ignorant, half-wise tyrant seated above it. This is the war of our members which the mind cannot satisfactorily resolve because it has to deal with a problem insoluble to it, the aspiration of an immortal being in a mortal life and body. It can only arrive at a long succession of compromises or end in an abandonment of the problem either by submission with the materialist to the mortality of our apparent being or with the ascetic and the religionist by the rejection and condemnation of the earthly life and withdrawal to happier and easier fields of existence. But the true solution lies in finding the principle beyond Mind of which Immortality is the law and in conquering by it the mortality of our existence.
11:But there is also that fundamental division within between force of Nature and the conscious being which is the original cause of this incapacity. Not only is there a division between the mental, the vital and the physical being, but each of them is also divided against itself. The capacity of the body is less than the capacity of the instinctive soul or conscious being, the physical Purusha within it, the capacity of the vital force less than the capacity of the impulsive soul, the vital conscious being or Purusha within it, the capacity of the mental energy less than the capacity of the intellectual and emotional soul, the mental Purusha within it. For the soul is the inner consciousness which aspires to its own complete self-realisation and therefore always exceeds the individual formation of the moment, and the Force which has taken its poise in the formation is always pushed by its soul to that which is abnormal to the poise, transcendent of it; thus constantly pushed it has much trouble in answering, more in evolving from the present to a greater capacity. In trying to fulfil the demands of this triple soul it is distracted and driven to set instinct against instinct, impulse against impulse, emotion against emotion, idea against idea, satisfying this, denying that, then repenting and returning on what it has done, adjusting, compensating, readjusting ad infinitum, but not arriving at any principle of unity. And in the mind again the consciouspower that should harmonise and unite is not only limited in its knowledge and in its will, but the knowledge and the will are disparate and often at discord. The principle of unity is above in the supermind: for there alone is the conscious unity of all diversities; there alone will and knowledge are equal and in perfect harmony; there alone Consciousness and Force arrive at their divine equation.
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13:Equally, man, as he develops, becomes acutely aware of the discord and ignorance that governs his relations with the world, acutely intolerant of it, more and more set upon finding a principle of harmony, peace, joy and unity. This too can only come to him from above. For only by developing a mind which shall have knowledge of the mind of others as of itself, free from our mutual ignorance and misunderstanding, a will that feels and makes itself one with the will of others, an emotional heart that contains the emotions of others as its own, a life-force that senses the energies of others and accepts them for its own and seeks to fulfil them as its own, and a body that is not a wall of imprisonment and defence against the world, - but all this under the law of a Light and Truth that shall transcend the aberrations and errors, the much sin and falsehood of our and others' minds, wills, emotions, life- energies, - only so can the life of man spiritually and practically become one with that of his fellow-beings and the individual recover his own universal self. The subconscient has this life of the All and the superconscient has it, but under conditions which necessitate our motion upwards. For not towards the Godhead concealed in the "inconscient ocean where darkness is wrapped within darkness",4 but towards the Godhead seated in the sea of eternal light,5 in the highest ether of our being, is the original impetus which has carried upward the evolving soul to the type of our humanity.
14:Unless therefore the race is to fall by the wayside and leave the victory to other and new creations of the eager travailing Mother it must aspire to this ascent, conducted indeed through love, mental illumination and the vital urge to possession and self-giving, but leading beyond to the supramental unity which transcends and fulfils them; in the founding of human life upon the supramental realisation of conscious unity with the One and with all in our being and in all its members humanity must seek its final good and salvation. And this is what we have described as the fourth status of Life in its ascent towards the Godhead.
1.23 - Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But beyond the subjectivism of the vital self there is the possibility of a mental subjectivism which would at first perhaps, emerging out of the predominant vitalism and leaning upon the already realised idea of the soul as a soul of Life in action but correcting it, appear as a highly mentalised pragmatism. This first stage is foreshadowed in an increasing tendency to rationalise entirely man and his life, to govern individual and social existence by an ordered scientific plan based upon his discovery of his own and of lifes realities. This attempt is bound to fail because reason and rationality are not the whole of man or of life, because reason is only an intermediate interpreter, not the original knower, creator and master of our being or of cosmic existence. It can besides only mechanise life in a more intelligent way than in the past; to do that seems to be all that the modern intellectual leaders of the race can discover as the solution of the heavy problem with which we are impaled. But it is conceivable that this tendency may hereafter rise to the higher idea of man as a mental being, a soul in mind that must develop itself individually and collectively in the life and body through the play of an ever-expanding mental existence. This greater idea would realise that the elevation of the human existence will come not through material efficiency alone or the complex play of his vital and dynamic powers, not solely by mastering through the aid of the intellect the energies of physical Nature for the satisfaction of the life-instincts, which can only be an intensification of his present mode of existence, but through the greatening of his mental and psychic being and a discovery, bringing forward and organisation of his subliminal nature and its forces, the utilisation of a larger mind and a larger life waiting for discovery within us. It would see in life an opportunity for the joy and power of knowledge, for the joy and power of beauty, for the joy and power of the human will mastering not only physical Nature, but vital and mental Nature. It might discover her secret yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realise itself in the act, inner means of overcoming the obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous achievements of material Science. A development of this kind is far enough away from the dreams of the mass of men, but there are certain pale hints and presages of such a possibility and ideas which lead to it are already held by a great number who are perhaps in this respect the yet unrecognised vanguard of humanity. It is not impossible that behind the confused morning voices of the hour a light of this kind, still below the horizon, may be waiting to ascend with its splendours.
Such a turn of human thought, effort, ideas of life, if it took hold of the communal mind, would evidently lead to a profound revolution throughout the whole range of human existence. It would give it from the first a new tone and atmosphere, a loftier spirit, wider horizons, a greater aim. It might easily develop a science which would bring the powers of the physical world into a real and not only a contingent and mechanical subjection and open perhaps the doors of other worlds. It might develop an achievement of Art and Beauty which would make the greatness of the past a comparatively little thing and would save the world from the astonishingly callous reign of utilitarian ugliness that even now afflicts it. It would open up a closer and freer interchange between human minds and, it may well be hoped, a kindlier interchange between human hearts and lives. Nor need its achievements stop here, but might proceed to greater things of which these would be only the beginnings. This mental and psychic subjectivism would have its dangers, greater dangers even than those that attend a vitalistic subjectivism, because its powers of action also would be greater, but it would have what vitalistic subjectivism has not and cannot easily have, the chance of a detecting discernment, strong safeguards and a powerful liberating light.
1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
13:Even as between the other divided and opposed terms of manifested Being, so also a supramental consciousness-energy could alone establish a perfect harmony between these two terms - apparently opposite only because of the Ignorance - of spirit status and world dynamism in our embodied existence. In the Ignorance Nature centres the order of her psychological movements, not around the secret spiritual self, but around its substitute, the ego-principle: a certain ego-centrism is the basis on which we bind together our experiences and relations in the midst of the complex contacts, contradictions, dualities, incoherences of the world in which we live; this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defence. But in our spiritual change we have to forego this defence; ego has to vanish, the person finds itself dissolved into a vast impersonality, and in this impersonality there is at first no key to an ordered dynamism of action. A very usual result is that one is divided into two parts of being, the spiritual within, the natural without; in one there is the divine realisation seated in a perfect inner freedom, but the natural part goes on with the old action of Nature, continues by a mechanical movement of past energies her already transmitted impulse. Even, if there is an entire dissolution of the limited person and the old ego-centric order, the outer nature may become the field of an apparent incoherence, although all within is luminous with the Self. Thus we become outwardly inert and inactive, moved by circumstance or forces but not self-mobile,9 even though the consciousness is enlightened within, or as a child though within is a plenary self-knowledge,10 or as one inconsequent in thought and impulse though within is an utter calm and serenity,11 or as the wild and disordered soul though inwardly there is the purity and poise of the Spirit.12 Or if there is an ordered dynamism in the outward nature, it may be a continuation of superficial ego-action witnessed but not accepted by the inner being, or a mental dynamism that cannot be perfectly expressive of the inner spiritual realisation; for there is no equipollence between action of mind and status of spirit. Even at the best where there is an intuitive guidance of Light from within, the nature of its expression in dynamism of action must be marked with the imperfections of mind, life and body, a King with incapable ministers, a Knowledge expressed in the values of the Ignorance. Only the descent of the Supermind with its perfect unity of Truth-Knowledge and Truth-Will can establish in the outer as in the inner existence the harmony of the Spirit; for it alone can turn the values of the Ignorance entirely into the values of the Knowledge.
14:In the fulfilment of our psychic being as in the consummation of our parts of mind and life, it is the relating of it to its divine source, to its correspondent truth in the Supreme Reality, that is the indispensable movement; and, here too as there, it is by the power of the Supermind that it can be done with an integral completeness, an intimacy that becomes an au thentic identity; for it is the Supermind which links the higher and the lower hemispheres of the One Existence. In Supermind is the integrating Light, the consummating Force, the wide entry into the supreme Ananda: the psychic being uplifted by that Light and Force can unite itself with the original Delight of existence from which it came: overcoming the dualities of pain and pleasure, delivering from all fear and shrinking the mind, life and body, it can recast the contacts of existence in the world into terms of the Divine Ananda.
1.2.4 - Speech and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are some who have the flow of speech by nature and those who are very vital cannot do without it. But the latter case (not being able to do without it) is obviously a disability from the spiritual point of view. There are also certain stages in the sadhana when one has to go inward and silence is at that time very necessary while unnecessary speech becomes a dispersion of the energies or externalises the consciousness. It is especially this chat for chats sake tendency that has to be overcome.
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Talking has a very exhausting effect for the inner energiesunless the inner itself controls the talk.
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1.24 - The Killing of the Divine King, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them unabated,
under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor. In Southern
1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:But when we look more closely, we perceive that this normality is deceptive and that in fact there are several directions in which human mind reaches beyond itself, tends towards selfexceeding; these are precisely the necessary lines of contact or veiled or half-veiled passages which connect it with higher grades of consciousness of the self-manifesting Spirit. First, we have noted the place Intuition occupies in the human means of knowledge, and Intuition is in its very nature a projection of the characteristic action of these higher grades into the mind of Ignorance. It is true that in human mind its action is largely hidden by the interventions of our normal intelligence; a pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity: for what we call by the name is usually a point of direct knowledge which is immediately caught and coated over with mental stuff, so that it serves only as an invisible or a very tiny nucleus of a crystallisation which is in its mass intellectual or otherwise mental in character; or else the flash of intuition is quickly replaced or intercepted, before it has a chance of manifesting itself, by a rapid imitative mental movement, insight or quick perception or some swift-leaping process of thought which owes its appearance to the stimulus of the coming intuition but obstructs its entry or covers it with a substituted mental suggestion true or erroneous but in either case not the au thentic intuitive movement. Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or au thentic perception of things there is a veiled, a halfveiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spiritranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, - towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process. Again, there is not an entire absence of penetration from above into our mental limits. The phenomena of genius are really the result of such a penetration, - veiled no doubt, because the light of the superior consciousness not only acts within narrow limits, usually in a special field, without any regulated separate organisation of its characteristic energies, often indeed quite fitfully, erratically and with a supernormal or abnormal irresponsible governance, but also in entering the mind it subdues and adapts itself to mind substance so that it is only a modified or diminished dynamis that reaches us, not all the original divine luminosity of what might be called the overhead consciousness beyond us.
Still the phenomena of inspiration, of revelatory vision or of intuitive perception and intuitive discernment, surpassing our less illumined or less powerful normal mind-action, are there and their origin is unmistakable. Finally, there is the vast and multitudinous field of mystic and spiritual experience, and here the gates already lie wide open to the possibility of extending our consciousness beyond its present limits, - unless, indeed, by an obscurantism that refuses to inquire or an attachment to our boundaries of mental normality we shut them or turn away from the vistas they open before us. But in our present investigation we cannot afford to neglect the possibilities which these domains of mankind's endeavour bring near to us, or the added knowledge of oneself and of the veiled Reality which is their gift to human mind, the greater light which arms them with the right to act upon us and is the innate power of their existence.
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6:But once this entry into the inner being is accomplished, the inner Self is found to be capable of an opening, an ascent upwards into things beyond our present mental level; that is the second spiritual possibility in us. The first most ordinary result is a discovery of a vast static and silent Self which we feel to be our real or our basic existence, the foundation of all else that we are. There may be even an extinction, a Nirvana both of our active being and of the sense of self into a Reality that is indefinable and inexpressible. But also we can realise that this self is not only our own spiritual being but the true self of all others; it presents itself then as the underlying truth of cosmic existence. It is possible to remain in a Nirvana of all individuality, to stop at a static realisation or, regarding the cosmic movement as a superficial play or illusion imposed on the silent Self, to pass into some supreme immobile and immutable status beyond the universe. But another less negative line of supernormal experience also offers itself; for there takes place a large dynamic descent of light, knowledge, power, bliss or other supernormal energies into our self of silence, and we can ascend too into higher regions of the Spirit where its immobile status is the foundation of those great and luminous energies. It is evident in either case that we have risen beyond the mind of Ignorance into a spiritual state; but, in the dynamic movement, the resultant greater action of Consciousness-Force may present itself either simply as a pure spiritual dynamis not otherwise determinate in its character or it may reveal a spiritual mind-range where mind is no longer ignorant of the Reality, - not yet a supermind level, but deriving from the supramental Truth-Consciousness and still luminous with something of its knowledge.
7:It is in the latter alternative that we find the secret we are seeking, the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental transformation; for we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it. We are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge in a single view; it has a cosmic character, not the stamp of an individual thinking. Beyond this Truth-Thought we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truthaction, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.
8:In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
9:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and manysided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence.
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12:If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities, throws up a multiplicity of divergent view-points, divergent lines of action and lets them work themselves out side by side or in collision or in a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle.
13:And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena,5 into the material Inconscience, - the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, - and if the One is born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.
1.28 - The Killing of the Tree-Spirit, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
magical ceremonies for the purpose of awakening the dormant energies
of nature at the approach of what may be called the Australian
1.29 - The Myth of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the
dead. The ceremonies which they observed for this purpose were in
--
mother goddess, the embodiment of the reproductive energies of
nature. The references to their connexion with each other in myth
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
In the scheme and pattern of human existence in the hierarchy that is collective life, Sri Aurobindo sought to express the play of the supreme Truth, express materially that which works always in secret and behind the veil. The Supreme Reality is not merely the supreme awareness and consciousness, but it is a power and a force; and it holds still a secret source that has not yet been touched,touched consciously by the human consciousness and utilised for world existence. Man's genius has contacted today in the material world material forces which are almost immaterial the extra-galactic radiation, the laser beams and other energies of that category which are powerful in an unbelievable unheard of 'degree. Even so in the consciousness, there is a mode of force which is not only a force that knows but creates, not only creates but transforms. That force at its intrinsic optimum can enter into dull matter and transforming it, transform into radiant matter, radiant not only with the physical, the solar light but the light of the supreme Spirit.
This is the force which Sri Aurobindo has disclosed and put at the disposal of mankind. This is the force he has set free that is creating a new world,reorganising and remoulding, through a great travail indeed, our ancient sphere that will cradle the earth of the golden age.
1.32 - The Ritual of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
moment to them: more and more their thoughts and energies were
engrossed by the staple of their life, the corn; more and more
1.3.4.01 - The Beginning and the End, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The idea of eternal recurrence affects with a shudder of alarm the mind entrenched in the minute, the hour, the years, the centuries, all the finite's unreal defences. But the strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite.
God, Man, Nature, what are these three? Whence flow their divergences? To what ineffable union advances the everincreasing sum of their contacts? Let us look beyond the hours
1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the claim of those sadhaks who say that they feel the force of the Guru or the force of the Divine working in them and leading towards spiritual fulfilment and experience. Whether it is so or not in a particular case is a personal question, but the statement cannot be denounced as per se incredible and manifestly false because such things cannot be. Farther, if it be true that spiritual force is the original one and the others are derivative from it, then there is no irrationality in supposing that spiritual force can produce mental results, vital results, physical results. It may act through mental, vital or physical energies and through the means which these energies use, or it may act directly on mind, life or matter as the field of its own special and immediate action.
Either way is prima facie possible. In a case of cure of illness, someone is lying ill for two days, weak, suffering from pains and fever; he takes no medicine but finally asks for cure from his Guru; the next morning he rises well, strong and energetic.
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Always keep in touch with the Divine Force. The best thing for you is to do that simply and allow it to do its own work; wherever necessary, it will take hold of the inferior energies and purify them; at other times it will empty you of them and fill you with itself. But if you let your mind take the lead and discuss and decide what is to be done, you will lose touch with the Divine
Force and the lower energies will begin to act for themselves and all go into confusion and a wrong movement.
One feels the Force only when one is in conscious contact with it.
1.46 - The Corn-Mother in Many Lands, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
life into the languid or decaying energies of nature. Another
glimpse of the savage under the civilised Demeter will be afforded
1.48 - Morals of AL - Hard to Accept, and Why nevertheless we Must Concur, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Had Hitler been a less abnormal character, no great "Mischief," or at least a very different kind of "mischief," might have come of it. I think you have read Hitler speaks if not, do so his private conversation abounds in what sound almost like actual quotations from the Book of the Law. But he public man's private conversation can be repeated on the platform only at the risk of his political life; and he served up to the people only such concoctions as would tickle their gross palates. Worse still, he was the slave of his prophetic frenzy; he had not undertaken the balancing regimen of the Curriculum of AA; and, worst of all, he was very far indeed from being a full initiate, even in the loosest sense of the term. His Weltanschauung was accordingly a mass of personal and political prejudice; he had no true cosmic comprehension, no true appreciation of First Principles; and he was tossed about in every direction by the varied conflicting forces that naturally concentrated their energies ever more strenuously upon him as his personal position became more and more the dominating factor, first in domestic and then in European politics. I warned our S.H. Soror repeatedly that she ought to correct these tendencies; but she already saw the success of her plans within her grasp, and refused to believe that this success itself would alarm the world into combining to destroy him. "But we have the Book," she confidently retorted, failing to see that the other powers in extremity would be compelled to adopt those identical principles. Of course, as you know, it has happened as I foresaw; only a remnant of piety-purefied Prelates and sloppy sentimentalists still hold out against the Book of the Law, sabotage the victory, and will turn the Peace into a shambles of surrender if we are fools enough to give ear to their caterwauling as in the story of the highly-esteemed tomcat, when at last one of his fans obtained an interview; "all he could do was to talk about his operation."
Has this digression seemed too long? Ah, but it isn't a digression. Rightly considered, it strikes at the heart of your "difficulties."
1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the continuance or renewal of the corn-spirit's energies.
If persons of fastidious taste should object that the Greeks never
1.51 - Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
divine energies, the death of the corn-spirit may have been deemed
inevitable under the sickles or the knives of the reapers, and his
1.51 - How to Recognise Masters, Angels, etc., and how they Work, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Instantly my burden fell from my back. The long crucifixion of home life came to a crisis, immediately on my return to London. At the same time every other inhibition was automatically removed. For the first time since the spring of 1904 I felt myself free to do my Will. That, of course, was because I had at last understood what my Will was. My aspiration to be the means of emancipating humanity was perfectly fulfilled. I had merely to establish in the world the Law which had been given me to proclaim: "...thou hast no right but to do thy will." Had I bent my energies from the first to proclaiming the Law of Thelema I should doubtless have found no obstacle in my path. Those which naturally arise in the course of any work soever, would have been quietly removed by the Secret Chiefs. But I had chosen to fight against myself for five years, and "If Satan shall be divided against Satan, how shall his kingdom stand?" The more I strove, the more I encouraged an internal conflict, and stultified myself. I had been permitted to complete my initiation, for the reason that by doing so I was fitting myself for the fight; but all my other efforts had met with a derisory disaster. More, one does not wipe out a lustre of lunacy by a moment of sanity. I am suffering to this day from the effects of having wasted some of the best years of my life in the stupid and stubborn struggle to set up my conscious self against its silent sovereign, my true Soul. 'Had Zimri peace who slew his master?'
[The following is from Vol. 4 of The Confessions, pp. 590 - 598.[103]]
1.58 - Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
reproductive energies from any restraint or spell under which they
might be laid by demoniacal or other malignant agency; and as the
--
reproductive energies of the men or women either by communicating to
them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by ridding them
1.66 - Vampires, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
How? The traditional method is to get possession of some object or substance intimately connected with the victim. On this you work magically so as to absorb its virtue. It is best if it was as recently as possible part of his living tissue; for instance, a nail-paring, a hair plucked from his head. Something still alive or nearly so, and still part of the complex of energies that he included in his conception of his body.
Best of all are fluids and secretions, notably blood and one other of supreme importance to the continuity of life. When you can get these still alive to their function, it is best of all. That is why it is not so highly recommended to tear out and devour the heart and liver of your next-door neighbour; you have gone far to destroy just that which is of most importance to you to keep alive.
Doubtless you will reply with some apparent justice, indeed most plausible is such ratiocination, that by taking into your own body, and so preserving the life of, his heart and liver, the whole of his "vital energies" will desert the sinking ship of the physical tissue, and rush to the lifeboat provided by the vampire. Never forget that you confer an inestimable benefit upon the victim by absorbing his lower point of Energy into your higher. Read your Magick, Chapter XII![129]
You say this strongly, my dear Sister in the Lord; your thesis is impeccably stated, your arguments are cogent, plangent, not to be repeated. But this I pout to you most solemnly what experimental evidence do you adduce? How many hearts, how many livers, have been your spiritual sustenance? Have you excluded every source of error? Have you here, you know the routine; write it all down and send it along to be vetted!
17.01 - Hymn to Dawn, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Even like the God of Life, they bestow as the right impulsions break forth, life's energies;
and these he enjoys who has the immortal drink purified. [18]
1.76 - The Gods - How and Why they Overlap, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
But upon certain points the identity is bound to transpire; even when we read of his crushing and classic defeat at Waterloo by the Belgians, the man is detected. Transferring the analogy to the Gods, it is then open to us to suppose that Tahuti, Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Loki, Hanuman and the rest are identical, and that the diversity of the name and the series of exploits is due merely to the accidents of time and space. But it is at least equally plausible to suggest that these Gods are different individuals, although of the identical Order of Being, characteristics and function. Very much as if one took Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, Hood, Blake, Rodney and Nelson, as seen through the mists of history, tradition, legend and plain mythopoeia. Add a few names not English, and our position is closely parallel. Personally, I incline to the latter hypothesis; but it would be hard to say why, unless that it is because I feel that to identify them completely would be to reduce their stature to that of personifications of various cosmic energies.
History lends its weight to my view. When the philosophic schools, unable to refute the charge of absurdity leveled at the orthodox devotee who believed that Mars actually begot Romulus and Remus on a Vestal Virgin, explained that Mars was no more than the martial instinct, and the Virgin a type of Purity, their faith declined, and with it Roman Virtue. "Educate" Colonel Blimp's children and we have the "intelligentsia" of Bloomsbury. I am very sorry about all this; but life must always be brutal and stupid so long as it depends upon animals and vegetables for nourishment.
1914 01 02p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This marvellous silence manifests Thee despite the mad human agitation the immutable and constant silence so living in all things that one has but to listen to hear it, in contrast with all that is futile noise, vain agitation, useless dispersion of energies. Let it flower in our being as a source of light and peace; may its power radiate over all in beneficent streams.
Thou art the savour of all life and the reason for all activity, the goal of our thoughts.
1914 01 30p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O divine Master of love, eternal Teacher, Thou guidest our lives. It is in Thee alone and for Thee alone that we want to live; enlighten our consciousness, guide our steps, and grant that we may do the utmost we can, using all our energies solely to serve Thee.
***
1914 02 01p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I turn towards Thee who art everywhere and within all and outside all, intimate essence of all and remote from all, centre of condensation for all energies, creator of conscious individualities: I turn towards Thee and salute Thee, O liberator of the worlds, and, identified with Thy divine love, I contemplate the earth and its creatures, this mass of substance put into forms perpetually destroyed and renewed, this swarming mass of aggregates which are dissolved as soon as constituted, of beings who imagine that they are conscient and permanent individualities and who are as ephemeral as a breath, always alike or almost the same, in their diversity, repeating indefinitely the same desires, the same tendencies, the same appetites, the same ignorant errors.
But from time to time Thy sublime light shines in a being and radiates through him over the world, and then a little wisdom, a little knowledge, a little disinterested faith, heroism and compassion penetrates mens hearts, transforms their minds and sets free a few elements from that sorrowful and implacable wheel of existence to which their blind ignorance subjects them.
1914 02 11p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
From the standpoint of the eternal work, the one thing important is to become conscious of Thee, to identify oneself with Thee and to maintain that conscious identification constantly. But as to what best use can be made of our physical organism, Thy mode of manifestation upon earth, it is quite enough, when Thou alone art conscious within us, to turn the gaze to the body in order to know beyond all doubt what is the best thing it can do, what activity will most fully utilise all its energies.
And without attaching much importance to that activity, that altogether relative utilisation, one can take without any difficulty, any inner debate, decisions which, to the outer consciousness appear the boldest and most dangerous.
1914 03 28p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At no moment do I feel that I am living outside Thee and never have the horizons appeared vaster to me and the depths at once more luminous and unfathomable. Grant, O Divine Teacher, that we may know and accomplish our mission upon earth better and better, more and more, that we may make full use of all the energies that are in us, and Thy sovereign Presence become manifest ever more perfectly in the silent depths of our soul, in all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our actions.
I find it almost strange to speak to Thee, so much is it Thou who livest in me, thinkest and lovest.
1914 06 12p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O my sweet Master, eternal splendour, I can only unite with Thee in silence and peace, saying that Thy Will may be done in every detail as in the whole. Take possession of Thy kingdom, master all that revolts against Thee, heal the souls who do not know Thee and the intellects that do not want to submit and be consecrated to Thee. Awaken our slumbering energies, stimulate our courage, enlighten us, O Lord, show us the Way.
My heart is overflowing with a sovereign peace, my thought is calm and silent.
1914 07 12p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O sweet Master, sovereign Transfigurator, put an end to all negligence, all lazy indolence, gather together all our energies, make them into an indomitable, irresistible will.
O Light, Love, ineffable Force, all the atoms cry to Thee so that Thou mayst penetrate and transfigure them.
1914 08 02p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And all these mental powers, all these vital energies, and all these material elements, what are they if not Thyself in Thy outermost form, Thy ultimate modes of expression, of realisation, O Thou whom we adore devotedly and who escapest us on every side even while penetrating, animating and guiding us, Thou whom we cannot understand or define or name, Thou whom we cannot seize or embrace or conceive, and who art yet realised in our smallest acts.
And all this enormous universe is only an atom of Thy eternal Will.
1914 08 04p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Lord, O eternal Master, grant that all this may not be in vain, grant that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine Force may spread over the earth and penetrate its troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, the violent chaos of battling elements; grant that the pure light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy Benediction may fill mens hearts, penetrate their souls, illumine their consciousness and, out of this obscurity, out of this sombre, terrible and potent darkness, bring forth the splendour of Thy majestic Presence!
My being is laid before Thee in a holocaust conscious and complete, that their unconscious holocaust may by it be made effective.
1914 09 01p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Mother Divine, with what fervour, what ardent love I came to Thee in Thy deepest consciousness, in Thy high status of sublime love and perfect felicity, and I nestled so close into Thy arms and loved Thee with so intense a love that I became altogether Thyself. Then in the silence of our mute ecstasy a voice from yet profounder depths arose and the voice said, Turn towards those who have need of thy love. All the grades of consciousness appeared, all the successive worlds. Some were splendid and luminous, well ordered and clear; there knowledge was resplendent, expression was harmonious and vast, will was potent and invincible. Then the worlds darkened in a multiplicity more and more chaotic, the Energy became violent and the material world obscure and sorrowful. And when in our infinite love we perceived in its entirety the hideous suffering of the world of misery and ignorance, when we saw our children locked in a sombre struggle, flung upon each other by energies that had deviated from their true aim, we willed ardently that the light of Divine Love should be made manifest, a transfiguring force at the centre of these distracted elements. Then, that the will might be yet more powerful and effective, we turned towards Thee, O unthinkable Supreme, and we implored Thy aid. And from the unsounded depths of the Unknown a reply came sublime and formidable and we knew that the earth was saved.
***
1914 09 30p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Our Divine Mother is with us and has promised us identification with the supreme and total consciousness from the unfathomable depths to the most external world of the senses. And in all these domains Agni assures us of the help of his purifying flame, destroying all obstacles, kindling the energies, stimulating the will, so that the realisation may be hastened. Indra is with us for the perfection of the illumination in our knowledge; and the divine Soma has transformed us in his infinite, sovereign, marvellous love, bringer of the supreme beatitudes
O divine and sweet Mother, I bow to Thee with a rapt, ineffable tenderness, and with infinite trust.
1915 05 24p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One day, O Lord, Thou didst teach my mind that it could act fully as an instrument of manifestation of Thy divine truth, as an intermediary of Thy eternal will, without being limited in its realising constructions by the narrow field of possibilities of the external being. Till then this mind, except very rarely, was in the habit of coming out of its mute ecstasy, its silent contemplation before Thy ineffable infinity, only to concentrate its effort on the centre of action represented by the external being; and this was a sort of bondage within too narrow a frame; there was a contradiction between the powers of mental realisation and the instrument through which they were striving to make their way out; the most immediate result was the wastage and limitation of mental energies, which not finding any satisfaction in activity, quite naturally returned to merge into Thy eternity.
Suddenly Thou didst put an end to this disorder; Thou didst liberate the mind from its last fetters; Thou didst teach it to be freely active through all forms and no longer exclusively through those it considered till then as its own, that is, as its natural means of expression.
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.
1950-12-23 - Concentration and energy, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To solve a problem, to learn a lesson, a lot of concentration and attention is needed, everyone knows thatan intellectual attention and concentration. But concentration is not only an intellectual thing, it may be found in all the activities of the being, including bodily activities. The control over the nerves should be such as would allow you a complete concentration on what you are doing and, through the very intensity of your concentration, you acquire an immediate response to external touches. To attain this concentration you need a conscious control of the energies.
Are you conscious of the energies you receive and those you spend?
One is more or less conscious of the energy one spends, especially when one wastes it too much! It is a question here of the constant exchange between receiving and spending! Before the age of reason, little children receive a lot of energy and they spend it lavishly, without thinking, and this allows them to play for hours together without getting tired. But gradually, as thought develops, one begins to measure and calculate the energy spentusually this is futile, for unless you have the knowledge of the process of receiving energy, it is better to spend freely what you get than let it stagnate within you.
First, you must become conscious of the receiving of energies, their passing into your being and their expenditure. Next, you must have a sort of higher instinct which tells you whence the most favourable energies come; then you put yourself in contact with them through thought, through stillness or any other process there are many. You must know what energy you want, whence it comes, of what it is composed. Later comes the control of the energy received. Ninety per cent of men do not absorb enough energy or they take in too much and do not assimilate what they takeas soon as they have had a sufficient dose they immediately throw it out by becoming restless, talking, shouting, You must know how to keep within you the received energy and concentrate it fully on the desired activity and not on anything else. If you can do this, you wont need to use your will. You need only gather together all the energies received and use them consciously, concentrate with the maximum attention in order to do everything you want.
And you must know how to give a real value to what you want to dowhat the higher part of your being wants to do for to do what one likes to do is not difficult.
1950-12-25 - Christmas - festival of Light - Energy and mental growth - Meditation and concentration - The Mother of Dreams - Playing a game well, and energy, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How is it that as mental activities increase, the capacity to renew ones energies diminishes?
In adults mental activity tends to paralyse the spontaneous movement of exchange of energies. Till he is fourteen, every child, apart from a few rare exceptions, is a little animal; he renews his energies spontaneously like an animal by means of the same activities and exchanges. But the mind introduces a disequilibrium in the being; spontaneous action is replaced by something that wants to know, to regulate, to decide, etc., and to get back this capacity to renew spontaneously ones energies, one must rise to a higher rung above the instincts, that is, from ordinary mental activity one must pass directly into intuition.
Yet there is a source of energy which, once discovered, never dries up, whatever the circumstances and the physical conditions in life. It is the energy that can be described as spiritual, that which is received not from below, from the depths of inconscience, but from above, from the supreme origin of men and the universe, from the all-powerful and eternal splendours of the superconscious. It is there, everywhere around us, penetrating everything and to enter into contact with it and receive it, it is sufficient to sincerely aspire for it, to open oneself to it in faith and confidence so as to enlarge ones consciousness for identifying it with the universal Consciousness.
1951-01-13 - Aim of life - effort and joy. Science of living, becoming conscious. Forces and influences., #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are people who are just like beautiful animalsall their movements are harmonious, their energies are spent harmoniously, their uncalculating efforts call in energies all the time and they are always happy; but sometimes they have no thoughts in their head, sometimes they have no feelings in their heart, they live an altogether animalish life. I have known people like that: beautiful animals. They were handsome, their gestures were harmonious, their forces quite balanced and they spent without reckoning and received without measure. They were in harmony with the material universal forces and they lived in joy. They could not perhaps have told you that they were happyjoy with them was so spontaneous that it was natural and they would have been still less able to tell you why, for their intelligence was not very developed. I have known such people, who were capable of making the necessary effort (not a prudent and calculated effort but a spontaneous one) in no matter what field: material, vital, intellectual, etc., and in this effort there was always joy. For example, a man sits down to write a book, he makes an effort which sets vibrating something in his brain to attract ideas; well, suddenly, this man experiences joy. It is quite certain that, whatever you do, even the most material work, like sweeping a room or cooking, if you make the necessary effort to do this work to the maximum of your ability, you will feel joy, even if what you do is against your nature. When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. This compels you to a sort of organisation of yourself, a sort of concentration of your energies, because it is this that you wish to do and not fifty other things which contradict it. And it is in this concentration, this intensity of the will, that lies the origin of joy. This gives you the power to receive energies in exchange for those you spend.
***
1951-04-21 - Sri Aurobindos letter on conditions for doing yoga - Aspiration, tapasya, surrender - The lower vital - old habits - obsession - Sri Aurobindo on choice and the double life - The old fiasco - inner realisation and outer change, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not necessarily. They help only if one wants it; otherwise, on the contrary, one detaches oneself more and more from the outer nature. This is what happens to all those who seek mukti, liberation; they reject their outer nature with its character and habits as something altogether contemptible with which one should not busy oneself; they withdraw all their energies, all forces of consciousness towards the heights, and if they do it with sufficient perfection, generally they leave their body once for all. But in the immense majority of instances, they do it only partially and, when they come out of their meditation, their contemplation, their trance or their samadhi, they are generally worse than others because they have left their outer nature aside without working on it at all. Even ordinary people, when their defects are a little too glaring, try to correct them or control them a little so as not to have too much trouble in life, while these people who think that the right attitude is to leave ones body and ones outer consciousness completely and withdraw entirely to the spiritual heights, treat that like an old coat one throws aside and does not mend and when one takes it back it is full of holes and stains.
That does not help. It helps only if one has the sincere will to change; if one sincerely has the will to change, it is a powerful help because it gives you the force to make the change, the fulcrum to make the change. But one must sincerely want to change.
1953-05-20, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Transformation implies that all this purely material arrangement is replaced by an arrangement of concentrations of force having certain types of different vibrations substituting each organ by a centre of conscious energy moved by a conscious will and directed by a movement coming from above, from higher regions. No stomach, no heart any longer, no circulation, no lungs, no All this disappears. But it is replaced by a whole set of vibrations representing what those organs are symbolically. For the organs are only the material symbols of centres of energy; they are not the essential reality; they simply give it a form or a support in certain given circumstances. The transformed body will then function through its real centres of energy and not any longer through their symbolic representatives such as were developed in the animal body. Therefore, first of all you must know what your heart represents in the cosmic energy and what the circulation represents and what the stomach and the brain represent. To begin with, you must first be conscious of all that. And then, you must have at your disposal the original vibrations of that which is symbolised by these organs. And you must slowly gather together all these energies in your body and change each organ into a centre of conscious energy which will replace the symbolic movement by the real one. You believe it will take only three hundred years to do that? I believe it will take much more time to have a form with qualities which will not be exactly those we know, but will be much superior; a form that one naturally dreams to see plastic: as the expression of your face changes with your feelings, so the body will change (not the form but within the same form) in accordance with what you want to express with your body. It can become very concentrated, very developed, very luminous, very quiet, with a perfect plasticity, with a perfect elasticity and then a lightness at wills Have you never dreamt of giving a kick to the ground and then soaring into the air, flying away? You move about. You push a little with your shoulder, you go this way; you push again, you go that way; and you go wherever you like, quite easily; and finally when you have finished you come back, enter your body. Well, you must be able to do that with your body, and also certain things related to respiration but there will no longer be lungs; theres a true movement behind a symbolic movement which gives you this capacity of lightness; you do not belong any longer to the system of gravitation, you escape it.1 And so for each organ.
There is no end to imagination: to be luminous whenever one wants it, to be transparent whenever one wants it. Naturally there is no longer any need of any bones also in the system; it is not a skeleton with skin and viscera, it is another thing. It is concentrated energy obeying the will. This does not mean that there will no longer be any definite and recognisable forms; the form will be built by qualities rather than by solid particles. It will be, if one may say so, a practical or pragmatic form; it will be supple, mobile, light at will, in contrast to the fixity of the gross material form.
1953-05-27, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But imagine this same vital power of expression, with the inspiration coming from far above the highest inspiration possible, when all the heavens open before us then that becomes wonderful. There are certain passages of Csar Franck, certain passages of Beethoven, certain passages of Bach, there are pieces by others also which have this inspiration and power. But it is only a moment, it comes as a moment, it does not last. You cannot take the entire work of an artist as being on that level. Inspiration comes like a flash; sometimes it lasts sufficiently long, when the work is sustained; and when that is there, the same effect is produced, that is, if you are attentive and concentrated, suddenly that lifts you up, lifts up all your energies, it is as though someone opened out your head and you were flung into the air to tremendous heights and magnificent lights. It produces in a few seconds results that are obtained with so much difficulty through so many years of yoga. Only, in general, one may fall down afterwards, because the consciousness is not there as the basis; one has the experience and afterwards does not even know what has happened. But if you are prepared, if you have indeed prepared your consciousness by yoga and then the thing happens, it is almost definitive.
What is the cause of the great difference between European and Indian music? Is it the origin or the expression?
1953-06-10, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That happens to you in the class? It means you do not listen to your teacher, otherwise it would not happen. If you were very attentive in your class and paid attention to your lesson, that could not happen to you. When you came out of it, then you would feel that, but not in the class. This means that you were dreaming or living within you or following your imagination, but you were not listening to your lessons. But it is this thats wonderful, my children: when you are learning something, when you are studying, when you are concentrated on your lesson, these things never happen to you. They may happen before, they may happen afterwards; but they wont happen at that time. For if you are quite concentrated, all your energies are concentrated on your study and there is nothing unpleasant there. You understand what you learn and you are interested in what you learn.
Sometimes, one tries to concentrate but one cant.
1953-06-24, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Concentration consists precisely in removing the cloud. You gather together all the elements of your intelligence and fix them on one point, and then you do not even try actively to find the thing. All that you do is to concentrate in such a way as to see only the problem but seeing not only its surface, seeing it in its depth, what it conceals. If you are able to gather together all your mental energies, bringing them to a point which is fixed on the enunciation of the problem, and you stay there, fixed, as though you were about to drill a hole in the wall, all of a sudden it will come. And this is the only way. If you try: Is it this, is it that, is it this, is it that? You will never find anything or else you will need hours. You must get your mental forces to a point with strength enough to pierce through the words and strike upon the thing that is behind. There is a thing to be found find it.
And it is always the days you are a little hazy that it becomes difficult. You are hazy: as though there is something you seem to catch and which escapes you.
1953-08-05, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But all the while you externalise yourself and all the while you bring back something from this externalisation; it is like something porous: a force goes out and then a force comes in. There are pulsations like that. And this is why it is so important to choose the environment in which one lives, because there is constantly a kind of interchange between what you give and what you receive. People who throw themselves out a great deal in activity, receive more. But they receive on the same level, the level of their activity. Children, for example, who are younger, who always move about, always shout and romp and jump (very rarely do they keep quiet, except while asleep, and perhaps not even so), well, they spend much and they receive much, and generally it is the physical and vital energy that is spent and it is physical and vital energies that are received. They recuperate a good part of what they spend. So there, it is very important for them to be in surroundings where they can, after they have spent or while they are spending, recover something that is at least equal in quality to theirs, that is not of an inferior quality.
When you no longer have this generosity in your movements, you receive much less and this is one of the reasonsone of the chief reasonswhy physical progress stops. It is because you become thrifty, you try not to waste; the mind intervenes: Take care, dont tire yourself, dont do too much, etc. The mind intervenes and physical receptivity diminishes a great deal. Finally, you do not grow any moreby growing reasonable, you stop growing altogether!
1953-12-16, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is fit to do so many more things than one can usually imagine. If instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, one will be surprised at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, it will at every minute put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action, to recuperate through contact with the universal forces the energies it spends consciously and use-fully.
On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 7
1954-03-24 - Dreams and the condition of the stomach - Tobacco and alcohol - Nervousness - The centres and the Kundalini - Control of the senses, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I did not understand this passage from the text: Continence is therefore the rule for all those who aspire for progress. But especially for those who want to prepare themselves for the supramental manifestation, this continence must be replaced by a total abstinence, achieved not by coercion and suppression but by a kind of inner alchemy, as a result of which the energies that are normally used in the act of procreation are transmuted into energies for progress and integral transformations.
This is quite well known in yogic disciplines in India, when one begins to become conscious of ones energies and have control over them. You know, dont you, the theory of the different centres where the energies are concentrated? Generally, it is said that there are five. But the true number is seven or even twelve. Anyway, these centres are centres of accumulation of energy, energies which control certain activities. Thus, there is an accumulation of energy at the sex-centre, a great accumulation of energy, and those who have control over these energies succeed in mastering them and raising them up, and they place them here (Mother points to the centre of the chest). And here is the centre of the energies of progress. This is what is called the seat of Agni, but it is the energies of progress, the will to progress, that are here. So the energies concentrated in the sex-centre are pulled upwards and placed here. And they increase considerably, so that the sex-centre becomes absolutely calm, peaceful, immobile.
The ordinary practice for controlling these energies is to manage to uncoil the Kundalini which is coiled up at the base of the spine and raise the energies through the spinal column to the different centres, and awaken the centres, open them, wake them up and set them in motion one after another right up to the top of the head, and then, go out from up there. And when one has succeeded in doing this (this is the first practice), when one has uncoiled the Kundalini, next to master it, guide and develop it, to guide it to all the centres, awaken all these centres. Once that has been done, one is master of the functioning. Once one is master of the functioning, instead of leaving the energies in places where they are not wanted, one pulls them up and puts them in places where they are useful, and uses them in this way for progress, for transformations.
All this is the result of enlightened, assiduous, very patient practice; this is not done it just like that, while thinking of other things or playing about. These are disciplines. Naturally, once one is master of the working, it becomes very interesting. But this is not done in a flash without ones doing what is necessary.
1954-11-03 - Body opening to the Divine - Concentration in the heart - The army of the Divine - The knot of the ego -Streng thening ones will, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He says here that it is easier. For some people it is more difficult, it depends on ones nature. But it is better because if you concentrate there, deeply enough, it is there that you enter into contact with the psychic for the first time; while if you concentrate in the head you have to pass later from the head to the heart to be able to identify yourself with the psychic being. And if you concentrate by gathering the energies, it is better to gather them here, because it is in this centre, in this region of the being that you find the will to progress, the force of purification, and the most intense and effective aspiration. The aspiration that comes from the heart is much more effective than that from the head.
Will and aspiration are needed to bring down the aid of the Divine Force and to keep the being on its side in its dealings with the lower powers. What is the meaning of keep the being on its side?
1955-02-23 - On the sense of taste, educating the senses - Fasting produces a state of receptivity, drawing energy - The body and food, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you think about it, you see, it is the vital energy which is in either plants or animals, that is, logically it is of an inferior quality to the vital energy which should be in man, who is a slightly higher being in the gradation of the species. So if you draw from below you draw at the same time the inconscience that is below. It is impossible to eat without absorbing a considerable amount of inconscience; this makes you heavy, coarsens you; and then if you eat much, a large amount of your consciousness is absorbed in digesting and assimilating what you have eaten. So already, if you don't take food, you don't have all this inconscience to assimilate and transform inside you; it sets free the energies. And then, as there is an instinct in the being to recuperate the energies spent, if you don't take them from food, that is, from below, you instinctively make an effort to take them through union with the universal vital forces which are free, and if one knows how to assimilate them one does so directly and then there is no limit.
It is not like your stomach which can digest only a certain amount of food, and therefore you can't take in more than that; and even the food you take liberates only a little bit, a very small quantity of vital energy. And so what can remain with you after all the work of swallowing, digesting, etc.? Not much, you see. But if you learn... and this indeed is a kind of instinct, one learns instinctively to draw towards himself the universal energies which move freely in the universe and are unlimited in quantity... as much of these as you are capable of drawing towards you, you can absorb-so instinctively when there is no support from below which comes from food, you make the necessary movement to recuperate the energies from outside, and absorb as much of them as you are capable of doing, and sometimes more. So this puts you in a kind of state of excitement, and if your body is very strong and can bear being without food for a certain length of time, then you keep your balance and can use these energies for all kinds of things, as for example, to progress, to become more conscious and transform your nature. But if your physical body doesn't have much in reserve and grows considerably weak from not eating, then this creates an imbalance between the intensity of the energies you absorb and the capacity of the body to hold them, and then this causes disturbances. You lose your balance, and all the balance of forces is destroyed, and anything at all may happen to you. In any case, you lose much control over yourself and become usually very excited, and you take this excitement for a higher state. But often it is simply an inner imbalance, nothing more. It sharpens the receptivity very much. For example, precisely when one fasts and no longer takes the energies from below, well, if you breathe in the odour of a flower it nourishes you, the perfume nourishes you, it gives you a great deal of energy; but otherwise you do not notice it.
There are certain faculties which get intensified, and so one takes that for a spiritual effect. It has very little to do with the spiritual life except that there are people who eat much, think much about their food, are very deeply absorbed in it, and then when they have eaten well-and as I say, they must digest it, and so all their energies are concentrated on their digestion-these people are dull in mind, and this pulls them down very much towards matter; so if they stop eating and stop thinking about food-because there is one thing, that if one fasts and thinks all the time that he is hungry and would like to eat, then it is ten times worse than eating-and can truly fast because they think of something else and are occupied with something else and are not interested in food-then that can help one to climb to a slightly higher degree of consciousness, to free himself from the slavery to material needs. But fasting is above all good for those who believe in it-as everything. When you have the faith that this will make you progress, is going to purify you, it does you good. If you don't believe in it, it doesn't do much, except that it makes you thin.
There was... Maeterlinck-you know the books of Maeterlinck, I think; you must have read The Blue Bird and others. He was a very fat man, and as he had a sense of beauty, becoming fat upset him very much. So he had decided to fast once a week; one day in the week he did not eat, and as he was an intelligent man he did not bother about food; he wrote, he worked hard on that day, and that kept him reasonably well and in an elegant form; and from that point of view it was very useful to him.
1955-03-02 - Right spirit, aspiration and desire - Sleep and yogic repose, how to sleep - Remembering dreams - Concentration and outer activity - Mother opens the door inside everyone - Sleep, a school for inner knowledge - Source of energy, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some people dont know how to receive the forces at all. These live on the energies concentrated in the body for there is some concentrated energy in all the cells of the body. They live upon that, but after some time, they are drained out completely if they dont know how to recuperate; when they have spent all the energies which were concentrated inside them either they fall ill or they never recuperate them. So this cannot last very long; it lasts the average lifetime of human beings, and yet, at the end of a certain number of years they are no longer able to make the same effort or to produce as much, or above all to make any progress.
But those who know instinctively or who have learnt to receive and accumulate the universal vital forces, these can last almost indefinitely. The wear and tear is very little, especially if they know how to do it and do it with knowledge and method; then here it can reach a certain degree of perfection.
When one knows, sometimes just two or three minutes are sufficient to recuperate the energies spent over a long period. Only, one must know how to do it.
But those who draw back upon themselves, who turn and double up on themselves, cannot do this. One must live all the time in a very vast and very expansive consciousness (I dont know if you understand the word, it means something which extends very homogeneously and quietly, as when the tide is at its height and the water spreads like that, quietly thats the impression). The vital must be like that then one is open to the universal forces. But if, for example, one has the very bad habit of exchanging vital forces with ones fellowmen, then one loses the capacity altogether. So unless one is in relation with someone, one receives nothing at all. But naturally if you receive forces through others, you receive at the same time all the difficulties of the other person, perhaps sometimes his qualities also, but these are less contagious. This indeed is something that shuts you up most.
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There are many other means, but this one is very spontaneous. There is also when you see something very beautiful you can have the same thing: a kind of inner joy and an opening to the forces, and so this widens you and fills you at the same time. There are many means but usually one does not use them. Naturally, if you enter into contemplation and aspire for a higher life and call down the forces from above, this recuperates your energies more than anything else. But there are numerous methods.
There we are. Thats all? Good.
1955-03-30 - Yoga-shakti - Energies of the earth, higher and lower - Illness, curing by yogic means - The true self and the psychic - Solving difficulties by different methods, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1955-03-30 - Yoga-shakti - energies of the earth, higher and lower - Illness, curing by yogic means - The true self and the psychic - Solving difficulties by different methods
class:chapter
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But in fact, the idea is to draw from the energies of the earth which, when you are standing up, are under your feet, that is, below in relation to you. But these energies are always mixed, and mostly they are terribly dark.
No questions?
1955-05-04 - Drawing on the universal vital forces - The inner physical - Receptivity to different kinds of forces - Progress and receptivity, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some people discover that with certain movements, certain gestures, certain activities, they enter into contact more closely. I knew people who gesticulated while walking this truly gave them the impression that they were in contactcertain gestures they made while walking But children do this spontaneously: when they give themselves completely in their games, running, playing, jumping, shouting; when they spend all their energies like that, they give themselves entirely, and in the joy of playing and moving and running they put themselves in contact with this universal vital force; they dont know it, but they spend their vital force in a contact with the universal vital force and that is why they can run without really feeling very tired, except after a very long time. That is, they spend so much that if they were not in contact with the universal force, they would be absolutely exhausted, immediately. And that is why, besides, they grow up; it is also because they receive more than they spend; they know how to receive more than they spend. And this does not correspond to any knowledge. It is a natural, spontaneous movement. It is the movement a movement of joy in what they are doingof joyful expenditure. One can do many things with that.
I knew young people who had always lived in citiesin a city and in those little rooms one has in the big cities in which everyone is huddled. Now, they had come to spend their holidays in the countryside, in the south of France, and there the sun is hot, naturally not as here but all the same it is very hot (when we compare the sun of the Mediterranean coasts with that of Paris, for example, it truly makes a difference), and so, when they walked around the countryside the first few days they really began to get a terrible headache and to feel absolutely uneasy because of the sun; but they suddenly thought: Why, if we make friends with the sun it wont harm us any more! And they began to make a kind of inner effort of friendship and trust in the sun, and when they were out in the sun, instead of trying to bend double and tell themselves, Oh! How hot it is, how it burns!, they said, Oh, how full of force and joy and love the sun is! etc., they opened themselves like this (gesture), and not only did they not suffer any longer but they felt so strong afterwards that they went round telling everyone who said It is hottelling them Do as we do, you will see how good it is. And they could remain for hours in the full sun, bare-headed and without feeling any discomfort. It is the same principle.
1956-04-18 - Ishwara and Shakti, seeing both aspects - The Impersonal and the divine Person - Soul, the presence of the divine Person - Going to other worlds, exteriorisation, dreams - Telling stories to oneself, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At one pole of it the seeker may be conscious only of the Master of Existence putting forth on him His energies of knowledge, power and bliss to liberate and divinise; the Shakti may appear to him only an impersonal Force expressive of these things or an attribute of the Ishwara. At the other pole he may encounter the World-Mother, creatrix of the universe, putting forth the gods and the worlds and all things and existences out of her spirit-substance. Or even if he sees both aspects, it may be with an unequal separating vision, subordinating one to the other, regarding the Shakti only as a means for approaching the Ishwara. There results a one-sided tendency or a lack of balance, a power of effectuation not perfectly supported or a light of revelation not perfectly dynamic. It is when a complete union of the two sides of the Duality is effected and rules his consciousness that he begins to open to a fuller power that will draw him altogether out of the confused clash of Ideas and Forces here into a higher Truth and enable the descent of that Truth to illumine and deliver and act sovereignly upon this world of Ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 117
1956-05-30 - Forms as symbols of the Force behind - Art as expression of contact with the Divine - Supramental psychological perfection - Division of works - The Ashram, idle stupidities, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I was very young at that time, and I always used to tell myself that if ever I could do it, I would try to create a little worldoh! quite a small one, but still a small world where people would be able to live without having to be preoccupied with food and lodging and clothing and the imperative necessities of life, so as to see whether all the energies freed by this certainty of a secure material living would turn spontaneously towards the divine life and the inner realisation.
Well, towards the middle of my lifeat least, what is usually the middle of a human life the means were given to me and I could realise this, that is, create such conditions of life. And I have come to this conclusion, that it is not this necessity which hinders people from consecrating themselves to an inner realisation, but that it is a dullness, a tamas, a lack of aspiration, a miserable laxity, an I-dont-care attitude, and that those who face even the hardest conditions of life are sometimes the ones who react most and have the intensest aspiration.
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I would very much like to see the contrary but I havent yet seen it. As there are many energies which are not utilised, since this terrible compulsion of having something to eat or a roof to sleep under or clothes on ones back does not existas one is sure of all thatthere is a whole mass of energies which are not utilised for that; well, they are spent in idle stupidities. And of these, the foolishness which seems to me the most disastrous is to keep ones tongue going: chatter, chatter, chatter. I havent known a place where they chatter more than here, and say everything they should not say, busy themselves with things they should not be concerned with. And I know it is merely an overflow of unused energy.
That is all.
1956-06-06 - Sign or indication from books of revelation - Spiritualised mind - Stages of sadhana - Reversal of consciousness - Organisation around central Presence - Boredom, most common human malady, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is always a way of reading and understanding what one reads, which gives an answer to what you want. It is not just a chance or an amusement, nor is it a kind of diversion. You may do it just like that, and then nothing at all happens to you, you have no reply and it is not interesting. But if you do it seriously, if seriously your aspiration tries to concentrate on this instrumentit is like a battery, isnt it, which contains energiesif it tries to come into contact with the energy which is there and insists on having the answer to what it wants to know, well, naturally, the energy which is there the union of the two forces, the force given out by you and that accumulated in the bookwill guide your hand and your paper-knife or whatever you have; it will guide you exactly to the thing that expresses what you ought to know. Obviously, if one does it without sincerity or conviction, nothing at all happens. If it is done sincerely, one gets an answer.
Certain books are like this, more powerfully charged than others; there are others where the result is less clear. But generally, books containing aphorisms and short sentencesnot very long philosophical explanations, but rather things in a condensed and precise formit is with these that one succeeds best.
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
1956-10-17 - Delight, the highest state - Delight and detachment - To be calm - Quietude, mental and vital - Calm and strength - Experience and expression of experience, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This capacity to remain still when one wants to, to gather all ones energies and spend them as one wishes, completely if one wants, or to apportion them as one wants in action, with a perfect calm even in action that is always the sign of strength. It may be physical strength or vital strength or mental strength. But if you are in the least agitated, you may be sure there is a weakness somewhere; and if your restlessness is integral, it is an integral weakness.
So, if I tell someone Be calm, I may be telling him all kinds of things, it depends upon each person. But obviously, most often it is, Make your mind quiet, dont be restless all the time in your head, dont stir up lots of ideas, calm yourself.
1956-12-12 - paradoxes - Nothing impossible - unfolding universe, the Eternal - Attention, concentration, effort - growth capacity almost unlimited - Why things are not the same - will and willings - Suggestions, formations - vital world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Besides, they are very thirsty or hungry for certain human vital vibrations which for them are a rare dish they love to feed upon; and so their game lies in exciting pernicious movements in man so that man may emanate these forces and they be able to feed on them just as they please. All movements of anger, violence, passion, desire, all these things which make you abruptly throw off certain energies from yourself, project them from yourself, are exactly what these entities of the vital world like best, for, as I said, they enjoy them like a sumptuous dish. Now, their tactics are simple: they send you a little suggestion, a little impulse, a small vibration which enters deep into you and through contagion or sympathy awakens in you the vibration necessary to make you throw off the force they want to absorb.
There it is a little easier to recognise the influence, for, if you are the least bit attentive, you become aware of something that has suddenly awakened within you. For example, those who are in the habit of losing their temper, if they have attempted ever so little to control their anger, they will find something coming from outside or rising from below which actually takes hold of their consciousness and arouses anger in them. I dont mean that everybody is capable of this discernment; I am speaking of those who have tried to understand their being and control it. These adverse suggestions are easier to distinguish than, for instance, your response to the will or desire of a being who is of the same nature as yourself, another human being, who consequently acts on you without this giving you a clear impression of something coming from outside: the vibrations are too alike, too similar in their nature, and you have to be much more attentive and have a much sharper discernment to realise that these movements which seem to come out from you are not really yours but come from outside. But with the adverse forces, if you are in the least sincere and observe yourself attentively, you become aware that it is something in the being which is responding to an influence, an impulse, a suggestion, even something at times very concrete, which enters and produces similar vibrations in the being.
1957-02-07 - Individual and collective meditation, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
However, there are two methods, and this is what I am going to explain to you. In both cases, one must practise as one does in individual meditation, that is, sit in a position at once comfortable enough for one to be able to keep it and yet not too comfortable for one to fall asleep in it! And then you do what I had asked you to do while I used to go for the distribution over there,1 that is prepare for the meditation, try to become calm and silent; not only to avoid chattering outwardly, but to try to silence your mind and gather your consciousness which is dispersed in all the thoughts you have and your preoccupations; to gather it, bring it back within yourself as completely as possible and concentrate it here, in the region of the heart, near the solar plexus, so that all the active energies in the head and all that keeps the brain running, may be brought back and concentrated here. This can be done in a few seconds, it can take a few minutes: that depends on each one. Well, this is a preparatory attitude. And then, once this is doneor done as well as you can do ityou may take two attitudes, that is, an active attitude or a passive attitude.
What I call an active attitude is to concentrate on I shall put it in general termson the person who is directing the meditation, with the will to open and receive from him what he intends to give you or the force with which he wants to put you into contact. That is active, for here there is a will at work and an active concentration to open yourself to someone, a concentration on someone.
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Of course, it does not work only in the Ashram, it is working in the whole world and in all places where there is some receptivity this Force is at work, and I must say the Ashram hasnt an exclusive receptivity in the world, the monopoly of receptivity. But since it so happens that all of us here more or less know what has taken place, well, I hope that individually each person is doing his best to benefit by the occasion; but collectively we can do something, that is, try to unify a ground, to produce a particularly fertile soil to obtain collectively the maximum receptivity and to have as little wastage as possible of time and energies.
So now, you have been told in a general way what we want to try to do and you have only to to do it.
1957-04-17 - Transformation of the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know if there ever were beings on earth who had partially realised this, but in a very small way there have been partial instances of one thing or another, examples which go to prove that it is possible. And following up this idea, one could go so far as to conceive of the replacement of material organs and their functioning as it now is, by centres of concentration of force and energy which would be receptive to the higher forces and which, by a kind of alchemy, would use them for the necessities of life and the body. We already speak of the different centres in the bodythis knowledge is very widespread among people who have practised yoga but these centres could be perfected to the point where they replace the different organs by a direct action of the higher energy and vibrations on matter. Those who have practised occultism well enough, in its most integral form, it could be said, know the process of materialisation of subtle energies and can put them in contact with physical vibrations. Not only is it something that can be done, but it is something which is done. And all that is a science, a science which must itself be perfected, completed, and which will obviously be used for the creation and setting in action of new bodies which will be able to manifest the supramental life in the material world.
But, as Sri Aurobindo says, before this can be done, it is good to utilise all that we have in order to increase and make more exact the control of physical activities. It is very obvious that those who practise physical culture scientifically and with coordination acquire a control over their bodies thats unimaginable for ordinary people. When the Russian gymnasts came here, we saw with what ease they did exercises which for an ordinary man are impossible, and they did them as if it was the simplest thing in the world; there was not even the least sign of effort! Well, that mastery is already a great step towards the transformation of the body. And these people who, I could say, are materialists by profession, used no spiritual method in their education; it was solely by material means and an enlightened use of human will that they had achieved this result. If they had added to this a spiritual knowledge and power, they could have achieved an almost miraculous result. Because of the false ideas prevalent in the world, we dont usually see the two things together, spiritual mastery and material mastery, and so one is always incomplete without the other; but this is exactly what we want to do and what Sri Aurobindo is going to explain: if the two are combined, the result can reach a perfection thats unthinkable for the ordinary human mind, and this is what we want to attempt.
1957-04-24 - Perfection, lower and higher, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A divine life in a material world implies necessarily a union of the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world so that it becomes more and more divine. The transformation is not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities, uplifts, sublimates, discloses their innate divinity. The divine life will reject nothing that is capable of divinisation; all is to be seized, exalted, made utterly perfect.
In the pursuit of perfection we can start at either end of our range of being and we have then to use, initially at least, the means and processes proper to our choice. In Yoga the process is spiritual and psychic; even its vital and physical processes are given a spiritual or psychic turn and raised to a higher motion than belongs properly to the ordinary life and Matter, as for instance in the Hathayogic and Rajayogic use of the breathing or the use of Asana. On the other hand, if we start in any field at the lower end we have to employ the means and processes which Life and Matter offer to us and respect the conditions and what we may call the technique imposed by the vital and the material energy. We may extend the activity, the achievement, the perfection attained beyond the initial, even beyond the normal possibilities but still we have to stand on the same base with which we started and within the boundaries it gives to us. It is not that the action from the two ends cannot meet and the higher take into itself and uplift the lower perfection; but this can usually be done only by a transition from the lower to a higher outlook, aspiration and motive: this we shall have to do if our aim is to transform the human into the divine life. But here there comes in the necessity of taking up the activities of human life and sublimating them by the power of the spirit. Here the lower perfection will not disappear; it will remain but will be enlarged and transformed by the higher perfection which only the power of the spirit can give.
1957-06-05 - Questions and silence - Methods of meditation, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is always better, for meditationyou see, we use the word meditation, but it does not necessarily mean moving ideas around in the head, quite the contraryit is always better to try to concentrate in a centre, the centre of aspiration, one might say, the place where the flame of aspiration burns, to gather in all the energies there, at the solar plexus centre and, if possible, to obtain an attentive silence as though one wanted to listen to something extremely subtle, something that demands a complete attention, a complete concentration and total silence. And then not to move at all. Not to think, not to stir, and make that movement of opening so as to receive all that can be received, but taking good care not to try to know what is happening while it is happening, for if one wants to understand or even to observe actively, it keeps up a sort of cerebral activity which is unfavourable to the fullness of the receptivityto be silent, as totally silent as possible, in an attentive concentration, and then be still.
If one succeeds in this, then, when everything is over, when one comes out of meditation, some time laterusually not immediatelyfrom within the being something new emerges in the consciousness: a new understanding, a new appreciation of things, a new attitude in lifein short, a new way of being. This may be fugitive, but at that moment, if one observes it, one finds that something has taken one step forward on the path of understanding or transformation. It may be an illumination, an understanding truer or closer to the truth, or a power of transformation which helps you to achieve a psychological progress or a widening of the consciousness or a greater control over your movements, over the activities of the being.
1957-06-12 - Fasting and spiritual progress, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is indeed possible even while fasting for very long periods to maintain the full energies and activities of the soul and mind and life, even those of the body, to remain wakeful but concentrated in Yoga all the time, or to think deeply and write day and night, to dispense with sleep, to walk eight hours a day, maintaining all these activities separately or together and not feel any loss of strength, any fatigue, any kind of failure or decadence. At the end of the fast one can even resume at once taking the normal or even a greater than the normal amount of nourishment without any transition or precaution such as medical science enjoins, as if both the complete fasting and the feasting were natural conditions, alternating by an immediate and easy passage from one to the other, of a body already trained by a sort of initial transformation to be an instrument of the powers and activities of Yoga. But one thing one does not escape and that is the wasting of the material tissues of the body, its flesh and substance. Conceivably, if a practicable way and means could only be found, this last invincible obstacle too might be overcome and the body maintained by an interchange of its forces with the forces of material Nature, giving to her her need from the individual and taking from her directly the sustaining energies of her universal existence. Conceivably, one might rediscover and re-establish at the summit of the evolution of life the phenomenon we see at its base, the power to draw from all around it the means of sustenance and self-renewal. Or else the evolved being might acquire the greater power to draw down those means from above rather than draw them up or pull then in form the environment around, all about it and bellow it.
The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp 28-29
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It is not by abstaining from food that you can make a spiritual progress. It is by being free, not only from all attachment and all desire and preoccupation with food, but even from all need for it; by being in the state in which all these things are so foreign to your consciousness that they have no place there. Only then, as a spontaneous, natural result, can one usefully stop eating. It could be said that the essential condition is to forget to eatforget, because all the energies of the being and all its concentration are turned towards a more total, more true inner realisation, towards this constant, imperative preoccupation with the union of the whole being, including the bodily cells, with the vibration of the divine forces, with the supramental force which is manifesting, so that this may be the true life: not only the purpose of life, but the essence of life, not only an imperative need of life, but all its joy and all its raison dtre.
When that is there, when this realisation is attained, then to eat or not to eat, to sleep or not sleep, all this has no longer any importance. It is an outer rhythm left to the play of the universal forces as a whole, finding expression through the circumstances and people around you; and then the body, united, totally united with the inner truth, has a suppleness, a constant adaptability: if food is there, it takes it; if it isnt there, it doesnt think about it. And so too with all things. This is not life! They are modes of existing to which one adapts oneself without giving it any thought. This gives you the feeling of a kind of blossoming, as a flower opens on a plant, a sort of activity which does not come from a concentrated will but is in harmony with all the forces around you, a way of being which is adapted to the circumstances you live in, which have absolutely no importance in themselves.
1957-07-10 - A new world is born - Overmind creation dissolved, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It may well be that the evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence. The centres in the subtle body, skma arra, of which one would become conscious and aware of all going on in it would pour their energies into material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary activities in this new existence could be maintained and operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This might go so far that these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as organs. This might well be part of a supreme total transformation of the body, though this too might not be final. To envisage such changes is to look far ahead and minds attached to the present form of things may be unable to give credence to their possibility. No such limits and no such impossibility of any necessary change can be imposed on the evolutionary urge. What has to be overpassed, whatever has no longer a use or is degraded, what has become unhelpful or retarding, can be discarded and dropped on the way. That has been evident in the history of the evolution of the body from its beginning in elementary forms to its most developed type, the human, there is no reason why this process should not intervene in the transition from the human into the divine body. For the manifestation or building of a divine body on earth there must be an initial transformation, the appearance of a new, a greater and more developed type, not a continuance with little modifications of the present physical form and its limited possibilities.
The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 38-39
1957-07-31 - Awakening aspiration in the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In former times, when yoga was a flight from life, it was a common practice for people, apart from a few predestined ones, not to think about yoga until they were old, when they had experienced much, known all the vicissitudes of life, its pleasures, its sorrows, its joys and miseries, its responsibilities, disillusionments, indeed all that life usually brings to human beings; and naturally, all this had disabused them a little of their illusions about the joys of existence, so they were ready to think of something else, and their body, if not full of youthful enthusiasm (!), was at least not a hindrance, for as it had been satiated, it no longer asked for much. To start from this end is all very well when one wants to leave life behind with a spiritual attitude and does not expect any collaboration from it in the transformation. This is obviously the easiest method. But it is also obvious that if one wants this material existence to participate in the divine life, to be the field of action and realisation, it is preferable not to wait until with wear and tear the body becomes sufficiently quiet so as not to obstruct the yoga. It is much better, on the contrary, to take it quite young when it is full of all its energies and can put enough ardour and intensity into its aspiration. In this case, instead of relying on a weariness which no longer demands anything, one should rely on a kind of inner enthusiasm for the unknown, the new for perfection. And if you have the good fortune to be in conditions where you can receive help and guidance from childhood, try while still very young to discern between the fugitive joys and superficial pleasures life can give and the marvellous thing that life, action, growth would be in a world of perfection and truth, where all the ordinary limitations, all the ordinary incapacities would be done away with.
When one is very young and as I say well-born, that is, born with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration, which for its childs consciousness is a sort of ambition, for something which would be beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, goodness without limits, and a conscious, constant success, a perpetual miracle. One dreams of miracles when one is young, one wants all wickedness to disappear, everything to be always luminous, beautiful, happy, one likes stories which end happily. This is what one should rely on. When the body feels its miseries, its limitations, one must establish this dream in itof a strength which would have no limit, a beauty which would have no ugliness, and of marvellous capacities: one dreams of being able to rise into the air, of being wherever it is necessary to be, of setting things right when they go wrong, of healing the sick; indeed, one has all sorts of dreams when one is very young. Usually parents or teachers pass their time throwing cold water on it, telling you, Oh! its a dream, it is not a reality. They should do the very opposite! Children should be taught, Yes, this is what you must try to realise and not only is it possible but it is certain if you come in contact with the part in you which is capable of doing this thing. This is what should guide your life, organise it, make you develop in the direction of the true reality which the ordinary world calls illusion.
1957-08-07 - The resistances, politics and money - Aspiration to realise the supramental life, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is the condition of the earth, and it is not very bright. But for us one possibility remains I have spoken about it to you several times alreadyeven if, outside, things are deteriorating completely and the catastrophe cannot possibly be avoided, there remains for us, I mean those for whom the supramental life is not a vain dream, those who have faith in its reality and the aspiration to realise it I dont necessarily mean those who have gathered here in Pondicherry, in the Ashram, but those who have as a link between them the knowledge Sri Aurobindo has given and the will to live according to that knowledge there remains for them the possibility of intensifying their aspiration, their will, their effort, to gather their energies together and shorten the time for the realisation. There remains for them the possibility of working this miracleindividually and to a small extent collectivelyof conquering space, duration, the time needed for this realisation; of replacing time by intensity of effort and going fast enough and far enough in the realisation to liberate themselves from the consequences of the present condition of the world; of making such a concentration of force, strength, light, truth, that by this very realisation they can be above these consequences and secure against them, enjoy the protection bestowed by the Light and Truth, by Purity the divine Purity through the inner transformation and that the storm may pass over the world without being able to destroy this great hope of the near future; that the tempest may not sweep away this beginning of realisation.
Instead of falling asleep in an easy quietude and letting things happen according to their own rhythm, if one strains to the utmost ones will, ardour, aspiration and springs up into the light, then one can hold ones head higher; one can have, in a higher region of consciousness, enough room to live, to breathe, to grow and develop above the passing cyclone.
1958-03-26 - Mental anxiety and trust in spiritual power, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
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 Natures 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 self-exceeding 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.
The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 842-43
1958-08-27 - Meditation and imagination - From thought to idea, from idea to principle, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is another method, more direct and deep; it is to take this mental formation, this combination of words with the thought they represent, and to gather all your energy of attention on it, compelling yourself to concentrate all your strength on that formation. For instance, instead of concentrating all your energies on something you see physically, you take that thought and concentrate all your energies on that thoughtin the mind, of course.
And then, if you are able to concentrate the thought sufficiently and stop it from vacillating, you pass quite naturally from the thought expressed by the words to the idea which is behind and which could be expressed in other words, other forms. The characteristic of the idea is the power to clo the itself in many different thoughts. And when you have achieved this, you have already gone much deeper than by merely understanding the words. Naturally, if you continue to concentrate and know how to do it, you can pass from the idea to the luminous force that is behind. Then you enter a much vaster and deeper domain. But that asks for some training. But still, that is the very principle of meditation.
1958-09-24 - Living the truth - Words and experience, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The means by which this need [of intellectual understanding] can be satisfied and with which our nature of mind has provided us is philosophy, and in this field it must be a spiritual philosophy. Such systems have arisen in numbers in the East; for almost always, wherever there has been a considerable spiritual development, there has arisen from it a philosophy justifying it to the intellect. The method was at first an intuitive seeing and an intuitive expression, as in the fathomless thought and profound language of the Upanishads, but afterwards there was developed a critical method, a firm system of dialectics, a logical organisation. The later philosophies were an intellectual account1 or a logical justification of what had been found by inner realisation; or they provided themselves with a mental ground or a systematised method for realisation and experience.2 In the West where the syncretic tendency of the consciousness was replaced by the analytic and separative, the spiritual urge and the intellectual reason parted company almost at the outset; philosophy took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation of things. Nevertheless, there were systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic, and Epicurean, which were dynamic not only for thought but for conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being; this reached a higher spiritual plane of knowledge in later Christian or Neo-pagan thought-structures where East and West met together. But later on the intellectualisation became complete and the connection of philosophy with life and its energies or spirit and its dynamism was either cut or confined to the little that the metaphysical idea can impress on life and action by an abstract and secondary influence. Religion has supported itself in the West not by philosophy but by a credal theology; sometimes a spiritual philosophy emerges by sheer force of individual genius, but it has not been as in the East a necessary adjunct to every considerable line of spiritual experience and endeavour. It is true that a philosophic development of spiritual thought is not entirely indispensable; for the truths of spirit can be reached more directly and completely by intuition and by a concrete inner contact. It must also be said that the critical control of the intellect over spiritual experience can be hampering and unreliable, for it is an inferior light turned upon a field of higher illumination; the true controlling power is an inner discrimination, a psychic sense and tact, a superior intervention of guidance from above or an innate and luminous inner guidance. But still this line of development too is necessary, because there must be a bridge between the spirit and the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence is necessary for the fullness of our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is lacking, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For the transformation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise it for all the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity of great importance.
The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 878-80
1958-10-22 - Spiritual life - reversal of consciousness - Helping others, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But this is not the standpoint from which the true significance of the spiritual evolution in man or the value of spirituality can be judged or assessed; for its real work is not to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a universal love and compassion, the will to spend the energies for the good of all creatures, are central to the dynamic outflowering of the spirit: he has turned therefore to help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis or the prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with something of the direct power of the Spirit, the results have been prodigious. But the solution of the problem which spirituality offers is not a solution by external means, though these also have to be used, but by an inner change, a transformation of the consciousness and nature.
If no decisive but only a contri butory result, an accretion of some new finer elements to the sum of the consciousness, has been the general consequence and there has been no life-transformation, it is because man in the mass has always deflected the spiritual impulsion, recanted from the spiritual ideal or held it only as a form and rejected the inward change. Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual method or attempt to cure its ills by the panaceas, the political, social or other mechanical remedies which the mind is constantly attempting and which have always failed and will continue to fail to solve anything. The most drastic changes made by these means change nothing; for the old ills exist in a new form: the aspect of the outward environment is altered, but man remains what he was; he is still an ignorant mental being misusing or not effectively using his knowledge, moved by ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body, unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and the forces that drive and use him. Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference. To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing or very little more is possible.
--
To live the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness is needed. This cannot be compared in any way with the different faculties or possibilities one has in the mental field. It may be said of someone that he hasnt much mental, vital or physical capacity, that his possibilities are very limited; in that case it may be asked how these capacities may be developed, that is, how new ones may be acquired, which is something rather difficult. But to live the spiritual life is to open to another world within oneself. It is to reverse ones consciousness, as it were. The ordinary human consciousness, even in the most developed, even in men of great talent and great realisation, is a movement turned outwardsall the energies are directed outwards, the whole consciousness is spread outwards; and if anything is turned inwards, it is very little, very rare, very fragmentary, it happens only under the pressure of very special circumstances, violent shocks, the shocks life gives precisely with the intention of slightly reversing this movement of exteriorisation of the consciousness.
But all who have lived a spiritual life have had the same experience: all of a sudden something in their being has been reversed, so to speak, has been turned suddenly and sometimes completely inwards, and also at the same time upwards, from within upwards but it is not an external above, it is within, deep, something other than the heights as they are physically conceived. Something has literally been turned over. There has been a decisive experience and the standpoint in life, the way of looking at life, the attitude one takes in relation to it, has suddenly changed, and in some cases quite definitively, irrevocably.
1960 04 07? - 28, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Besides, everything that happens on earth necessarily leads to its progress. Thus wars are schools of courage, endurance, fearlessness; they may serve to destroy a past which refuses to disappear although its time is over, and they make room for new things. Wars can, like Kurukshetra,1 be a way to rid the earth of a domineering or destructive race so that justice and right may reign. They can, through the presence of danger, shake the apathy of a too tamasic2 consciousness and awaken dormant energies. Finally they can, by contrast, and because of the horrors that accompany and follow them, drive men to seek an effective way to make such a barbarous and violent form of transformation unnecessary.
For everything that is unnecessary to the evolution of the earth automatically ceases to exist.
1.A - ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL, #Philosophy of Mind, #unset, #Zen
398 (3) When the individuality, or self-centralized being, distinguishes itself from its mere being, this immediate judgement is the waking of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts another state, viz. sleep. - The waking is not merely for the observer, or externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the judgement (primary partition) of the individual soul - which is self-existing only as it relates its self-existence to its mere existence, distinguishing itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the mind realizes its own distinct self. - Sleep is an invigoration of this activity - not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from the world of specialization, from dispersion into phases where it has grown hard and stiff - a return into the general nature of subjectivity, which is the substance of those specialized energies and their absolute master.
The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those posers, as they may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy: - Napoleon, for example, on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of ideology. The characterization given in the section is abstract; it primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental element implicate but not yet as invested with a special being of its own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the individual soul in its higher aspects as the
1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and
aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain
1f.lovecraft - In the Vault, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
out of the enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined
try. Clutching the edges of the aperture, he sought to pull himself up,
1f.lovecraft - The Last Test, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
reporters whose energies had done so much to bring on the trouble, but
now turning their sensation first avidity into more constructive
--
room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A
seconds rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands,
1.jk - Otho The Great - Act V, #Keats - Poems, #John Keats, #Poetry
The tight-wound energies of his despair,
Not make them tenser
1.pbs - Queen Mab - Part V., #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!
1.pbs - Queen Mab - Part VIII., #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
His chilled and narrow energies, his heart
Insensible to courage, truth or love,
--
Their all-subduing energies, and wield
The sceptre of a vast dominion there;
1.pbs - Song. Sorrow, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
My high strung energies are sank,
And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--
1.pbs - The Daemon Of The World, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.
1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Zen
It will now be understood that, in using the phrase, "Infinity of Space," I make no call upon the reader to entertain the impossible conception of an absolute infinity. I refer simply to the "utmost conceivable expanse" of space -a shadowy and fluctuating domain, now shrinking, now swelling, in accordance with the vacillating energies of the imagination.
Hitherto, the Universe of stars has always been considered as coincident with the Universe proper, as I have defined it in the commencement of this Discourse. It has been always either directly or indirectly assumed -at least since the dawn of intelligible Astronomy -that, were it possible for us to attain any given point in space, we should still find, on all sides of us, an interminable succession of stars. This was the untenable idea of Pascal when making perhaps the most successful attempt ever made, at periphrasing the conception for which we struggle in the word "Universe." "It is a sphere," he says, "of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference, nowhere." But although this intended definition is, in fact, no definition of the Universe of stars, we may accept it, with some mental reservation, as a definition (rigorous enough for all practical purposes) of the Universe proper -that is to say, of the Universe of space. This latter, then, let us regard as "a sphere of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." In fact, while we find it impossible to fancy an end to space, we have no difficulty in picturing to ourselves any one of an infinity of beginnings.
1.rb - Paracelsus - Part IV - Paracelsus Aspires, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
Your energies; as though the rivers should say
"We rush to the ocean; what have we to do
1.rb - Pauline, A Fragment of a Question, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
And I said "I have nursed up energies,
"They will prey on me." And a band knelt low
--
Turns its whole energies to some one end,
To elevate an aim, pursue success
--
A time requiring youth's best energies;
And lo, I fling age, sorrow, sickness off,
1.rb - Sordello - Book the Second, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
Strong, and to strength turning all energies
Wise, and restricted to becoming wise
1.sfa - Prayer Inspired by the Our Father, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Regis J. Armstrong, OFM CAP & Ignatius C. Brady, OFM Original Language Italian O OUR most holy FATHER, Our Creator, Redeemer, Consoler, and Savior WHO ARE IN HEAVEN: In the angels and in the saints, Enlightening them to love, because You, Lord, are light Inflaming them to love, because You, Lord, are love Dwelling in them and filling them with happiness, because You, Lord, are the Supreme Good, the Eternal Good from Whom comes all good without Whom there is no good. HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME: May our knowledge of You become ever clearer That we may know the breadth of Your blessings the length of Your promises the height of Your majesty the depths of Your judgments YOUR KINGDOM COME: So that You may rule in us through Your grace and enable us to come to Your kingdom where there is an unclouded vision of You a perfect love of You a blessed companionship with You an eternal enjoyment of You YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN: That we may love you with our whole heart by always thinking of You with our whole soul by always desiring You with our whole mind by directing all our intentions to You and by seeking Your glory in everything and with our whole strength by spending all our energies and affections of soul and body in the service of Your love and of nothing else and may we love our neighbors as ourselves by drawing them all with our whole strength to Your love by rejoicing in the good fortunes of others as well as our own and by sympathizing with the misfortunes of others and by giving offense to no one GIVE US THIS DAY: in memory and understanding and reverence of the love which our Lord Jesus Christ had for us and of those things which He said and did and suffered for us OUR DAILY BREAD Your own Beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES: Through Your ineffable mercy through the power of the Passion of Your Beloved Son together with the merits and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all Your chosen ones AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US: And whatever we do not forgive perfectly, do you, Lord, enable us to forgive to the full so that we may truly love our enemies and fervently intercede for them before You returning no one evil for evil and striving to help everyone in You AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION Hidden or obvious Sudden or persistent BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL Past, present and to come. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. [1495.jpg] -- from Francis and Clare: The Complete Works: The Classics of Western Spirituality, Translated by Regis J. Armstrong, OFM CAP / Translated by Ignatius C. Brady, OFM <
1.wb - The Errors of Sacred Codes (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Original Language English All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors: 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outer circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. [1982.jpg] -- from The Complete Illuminated Books, by William Blake <
1.whitman - Rise, O Days, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies, and Nature's
dauntlessness,
1.ww - The Excursion- IV- Book Third- Despondency, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Upon earth's native energies; forgetting
That mine was a condition which required
--
Than her destructive energies, attend
His independence, when along the side
1.ww - The Excursion- V- Book Fouth- Despondency Corrected, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance in each other; faith more firm
--
An equal among mightiest energies;
And haply sometimes with articulate voice,
2.01 - Habit 1 Be Proactive, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
We don't have to go through the death camp experience of Frankl to recognize and develop our own proactivity. It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.
I would challenge you to test the principle of proactivity for 30 days. Simply try it and see what happens. For 30 days work only in your Circle of Influence. Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These and other primal powers and aspects assume their status among the fundamental spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; all others are determinates of the fundamental spiritual determinates, significant relations, significant powers, significant forms of being, consciousness, force, delight, - energies, conditions, ways, lines of the truth-process of the Consciousness-Force of the Eternal, imperatives, possibilities, actualities of its manifestation. All this deploying of powers and possibilities and their inherent consequences is held together by supermind cognition in an intimate oneness; it keeps them founded consciously on the original Truth and maintained in the harmony of the truths they manifest and are in their nature. There is here no imposition of imaginations, no arbitrary creation, neither is there any division, fragmentation, irreconcilable contrariety or disparateness. But in Mind of Ignorance these phenomena appear; for there a limited consciousness sees and deals with everything as if all were separate objects of cognition or separate existences and it seeks so to know, possess and enjoy them and gets mastery over them or suffers their mastery: but, behind its ignorance, what the soul in it is seeking for is the Reality, the Truth, the Consciousness, the Power, the Delight by which they exist; the mind has to learn to awaken to this true seeking and true knowledge veiled within itself, to the Reality from which all things hold their truth, to the Consciousness of which all consciousnesses are entities, to the Power from which all get what force of being they have within them, to the Delight of which all delights are partial figures. This limitation of consciousness and this awakening to the integrality of consciousness are also a process of self-manifestation, are a self-determination of the Spirit; even when contrary to the Truth in their appearances, the things of the limited consciousness have in their deeper sense and reality a divine significance; they too bring out a truth or a possibility of the Infinite. Of some such nature, as far as it can be expressed in mental formulas, would be the supramental cognition of things which sees the one Truth everywhere and would so arrange its account to us of our existence, its report of the secret of creation and the significance of the universe.
At the same time indeterminability is also a necessary element in our conception of the Absolute and in our spiritual experience: this is the other side of the supramental regard on being and on things. The Absolute is not limitable or definable by any one determination or by any sum of determinations; on the other side, it is not bound down to an indeterminable vacancy of pure existence. On the contrary, it is the source of all determinations: its indeterminability is the natural, the necessary condition both of its infinity of being and its infinity of power of being; it can be infinitely all things because it is no thing in particular and exceeds any definable totality. It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Nonbeing, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence, - even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their coexistence or oneexistence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.
2.01 - Mandala One, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(3) For as forces that work the bright energies give their illumination by entering into all things with an equal self-yoking from the supreme realm and thence they bring energy to the right doer, the right giver (who perfectly effects his aims); yea, all things here they bring to the sacrificer who expresses the Soma bliss.
(4) Like a dancing-girl she lays bare her clear forms of beauty, like a Paramour she opens her breast casting aside its defences creating Light for the whole world. The radiant herds have left their pen; Dawn has uncovered herself of her robe of darkness.
--
(7) Luminous guide to true thinkings, the Daughter of Heaven has been affirmed in praise by the Gotamas (the men of light). Thou supportest in us plentifulnesses rich in creations and energies, perceptively received in the nervous movements, led by the rays of illumination.
(8) O Dawn, may I enjoy a victorious and energetic felicity, delivered from the Enemy, perceptively received in the nervous powers, thou who shinest wide by an inspiration perfect in activity giving birth to richnesses,O blissful one, to a plenty vast.
--
(3) We are making towards our desire and pray that our suns of light may not be broken, we are striving after the energies of our Fathers. By joy of Indra and Agni, the Strong Ones drink of the rapture, you are two pressing-stones in the lap of the thinking mind.
(4) The goddess Mind longs for the ecstasy, O Agni, O Indra, and she is pressing out with you for her pressing-stones wine of nectar. O twin Aswins, come running to us with your beautiful happy hands and mix the honey in the waters.
2.01 - The Road of Trials, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
And so it happens that if anyonein whatever society undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him) which is no less marvelous than the wild Siberian world of the pudak and sacred mountains. In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the "purification of the self," when the senses are "cleansed and humbled," and the energies and interests "concentrated upon transcendental things";[8] or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.
"I stood before a dark cave, wanting to go in," was the dream of a patient at the beginning of his analysis; "and I shuddered at the thought that I might not be able to find my way back.[9]" "I saw one beast after another," Emanuel Swedenborg recorded in his dream book, for the night of October 19-20, 1744, "and they spread their wings, and were dragons. I was flying over them, but one of them was supporting me."[10] And the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel recorded, a century later (April 13,1844): "In my dream I was being drawn with great force through the sea; there were terrifying abysses, with here and there a rock to which it was possible to hold.[11]" Themistocles dreamed that a snake wound itself around his body, then crept up to his neck and when it touched his face became an eagle that took him in its talons and, carrying him upward, bore him a long distance, and set him down on a golden herald's staff that suddenly appeared, so safely that he was all at once relieved of his great anxiety and fear[12].
2.01 - The Two Natures, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The five elemental conditions of matter are the quantitative or material element in the lower nature and are the basis of material forms. The five Tanmatras - taste, touch, scent, and the others - are the qualitative element. These Tanmatras are the subtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness in relation to the gross forms of matter, - they are the basis of all phenomenal knowledge. From the material point of view matter is the reality and the sensory relations are derivative; but from the spiritual point of view the truth is the opposite. Matter and the material media are themselves derivative powers and at bottom are only concrete ways or conditions in which the workings of the quality of Nature in things manifest themselves to the sensory consciousness of the Jiva. The one original and
The Two Natures
2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. The Upanishads affirm that all this is the Brahman; Mind is Brahman, Life is Brahman, Matter is Brahman; addressing Vayu, the Lord of Air, of Life, it is said "O Vayu, thou art manifest Brahman"; and, pointing to man and beast and bird and insect, each separately is identified with the One, "O Brahman, thou art this old man and boy and girl, this bird, this insect." Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the Force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could brea the or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of ForceNature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
An absolute, eternal and infinite Self-existence, Self-awareness, Self-delight of being that secretly supports and pervades the universe even while it is also beyond it, is, then, the first truth of spiritual experience. But this truth of being has at once an impersonal and a personal aspect; it is not only Existence, it is the one Being absolute, eternal and infinite. As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality, Self, Conscious Being or Spirit and God, the Divine Being, or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent Reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishwara, - so too its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings. These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the whole of existence and all Nature and, taken together as a single whole, they reconcile the apparent disparateness and incompatibility of the supracosmic Transcendence, the cosmic universality and the separativeness of our individual existence; the Absolute, cosmic Nature and ourselves are linked in oneness by this triune aspect of the one Reality. For taken by itself the existence of the Absolute, the Supreme Brahman, would be a contradiction of the relative universe and our own real existence would be incompatible with its sole incommunicable Reality. But the Brahman is at the same time omnipresent in all relativities; it is the Absolute independent of all relatives, the Absolute basing all relatives, the Absolute governing, pervading, constituting all relatives; there is nothing that is not the omnipresent Reality. In observing the triple aspect and the triple power we come to see how this is possible.
--
But it is evident that whatever the posture taken or relation formed in any individual nodus of Purusha-Prakriti, the Being is in a fundamental cosmic relation lord or ruler of its nature: for even when it allows Nature to have its own way with it, its consent is necessary to support her workings. This comes out in its fullest revelation in the third aspect of the Reality, the Divine Being who is the master and creator of the universe. Here the supreme Person, the Being in its transcendental and cosmic consciousness and force, comes to the front, omnipotent, omniscient, the controller of all energies, the Conscious in all that is conscient or inconscient, the Inhabitant of all souls and minds and hearts and bodies, the Ruler or Overruler of all works, the Enjoyer of all delight, the Creator who has built all things in his own being, the All-Person of whom all beings are personalities, the Power from whom are all powers, the Self, the Spirit in all, by his being the Father of all that is, in his Consciousness-Force the Divine Mother the Friend of all creatures, the All-blissful and All-beautiful of whom beauty and joy are the revelation, the All-Beloved and All-Lover. In a certain sense, so seen and understood, this becomes the most comprehensive of the aspects of the Reality, since here all are united in a single formulation; for the Ishwara is supracosmic as well as intracosmic; He is that which exceeds and inhabits and supports all individuality; He is the supreme and universal Brahman, the Absolute, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha.8 But, very clearly, this is not the personal God of popular religions, a being limited by his qualities, individual and separate from all others; for all such personal gods are only limited representations or names and divine personalities of the one Ishwara. Neither is this the Saguna Brahman active and possessed of qualities, for that is only one side of the being of the Ishwara; the Nirguna immobile and without qualities is another aspect of His existence. Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, revealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence.
8 Gita.
2.02 - Habit 2 Begin with the End in Mind, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity. You have the vision and the values which direct your life. You have the basic direction from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution based on correct principles, against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be effectively measured.
--- At the Center
2.02 - Indra, Giver of Light, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Confiners or Censurers, who, without altogether obscuring the rays or damming up the energies, yet seek by constantly affirming the deficiencies of our self-expression to limit its field and set up the progress realised as an obstacle to the progress to come.
Madhuchchhandas calls upon Indra to remove the defect and affirm in its place an increasing illumination.
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
balancing of forces, economising of energies for the purposes of
social stability or some other important but impermanent end.
2.02 - The Monstrance, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
to breaking point and all the energies within them
were strained to the utmost. And I was thinking
2.02 - The Status of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision only opens, it does not embrace. Just as the eye, though it is alone adequate to bring the first sense of realisation, has to call in the aid of experience by the touch and other-organs of sense before there is an embracing knowledge, so the vision of the self ought to be completed by an experience of it in all our members. Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illumined eye of knowledge. For since each principle in us is only a manifestation of the Self, each can get back to its reality and have the experience of it. We can have a mental experience of the Self and seize as concrete realities all those apparently abstract things that to the mind constitute existence-consciousness, force, delight and their manifold forms and workings: thus the mind Is satisfied of God. We can have an emotional experience of the Self through Love and through emotional delight, love and delight of the Self in us, of the Self in the universal and of the Self in all with whom we have relations: thus the heart is satisfied of God. We can have anaesthetic experience of the Self in beauty, a delight-perception and taste of the absolute reality all-beautiful in everything whether created by ourselves or Nature in its appeal to the aesthetic mind and the senses; thus the sense is satisfied of God. We can have even the vital, nervous experience and practically the physical sense of the Self in all life and formation and in all workings of powers, forces, energies that operate through us or others or in the world: thus the life and the body are satisfied of God.
All this knowledge and experience are primary means of arriving at and of possessing identity. It is our self that we see and experience and therefore vision and experience are incomplete unless they culminate in identity, unless we are able to live in all our being the supreme Vedantic knowledge. He am I. We must not only see God and embrace Him, but become that Reality. We must become one with the Self in its transcendence of all form and manifestation by the resolution, the sublimation, the escape from itself of ego and all its belongings into That from which they proceed, as well as become the Self in all its manifested existences and becomings, one with it in the infinite existence, consciousness, peace, delight by which it reveals itself in us and one with it in the action, formation, play of self-conception with which it garbs itself in the world.
2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the relationship between the radial and tangential energies of
the world in the course of their respective developments ? Obvi-
--
of its internal energies. Now everything becomes definitively
clear in value, in operation and in hope.
--
would the mechanical energies themselves be without some
within to feed them ? Beneath the ' tangential ' we find the
2.03 - Indra and the Thought-Forces, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These verses fix clearly enough the psychological function of the Maruts. They are not properly gods of thought, rather gods of energy; still, it is in the mind that their energies become effective. To the uninstructed Aryan worshipper, the Maruts were powers of wind, storm and rain; it is the images of the tempest that are most commonly applied to them and they are spoken of as the Rudras, the fierce, impetuous ones, - a name that they share with the god of Force, Agni. Although Indra is described sometimes as the eldest of the Maruts, - indrajyes.t.ho
Nr.n. The word nr. seems to have meant originally active, swift or strong. We have nr.mn.a, strength, and nr.tama nr.n.am, most puissant of the Powers. It came afterwards to mean male or man and in the Veda is oftenest applied to the gods as the male powers or
Purushas presiding over the energies of Nature as opposed to the female powers, who are called gna.
Indra and the Thought-Forces
--
It is so that the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, prays to them, "O ye who have the flashing strength of the Truth, manifest that by your might; pierce with your lightning the Rakshasa. Conceal the concealing darkness, repel every devourer, create the Light for which we long." And in another hymn, Agastya says to them, "They carry with them the sweetness (of the Ananda) as their eternal offspring and play out their play, brilliant in the activities of knowledge." The Maruts, therefore, are energies of the mentality, energies which make for knowledge. Theirs is not the settled truth, the diffused light, but the movement, the search, the lightning-flash, and, when Truth is found, the many-sided play of its separate illuminations.
We have seen that Agastya in his colloquy with Indra speaks more than once of the Maruts. They are Indra's brothers, and therefore the god should not strike at Agastya in his struggle towards perfection. They are his instruments for that perfection, and as such Indra should use them. And in the closing formula of submission and reconciliation, he prays to the god to parley again with the Maruts and to agree with them so that the sacrifice may proceed in the order and movement of the divine
--
For he would confirm again in himself these splendid energies, and it is a hymn of affirmation that he offers them, the stoma of the Vedic sages. In the system of the Mystics, which has partially survived in the schools of Indian Yoga, the Word is a power, the Word creates. For all creation is expression, everything exists already in the secret abode of the Infinite, guha hitam, and has only to be brought out here in apparent form by the active consciousness. Certain schools of Vedic thought even
Indra and the Thought-Forces
--
- higher than the ordinary life of divided and egoistic sensation, emotion, thought and action. And it is to be pursued always with the same puissant will towards victory over all that resists and hampers. But it must be an integral exaltation. All the joys that the human being seeks with his desire, all the active energies of his waking consciousness, - his days, as it is expressed in the brief symbolic language of the Veda, - must be uplifted to that higher plane. By vanani are meant the receptive sensations seeking in all objectivities the Ananda whose quest is their reason for existence. These, too, are not excluded. Nothing has to be rejected, all has to be raised to the pure levels of the divine consciousness.
Formerly Agastya had prepared the sacrifice for the Maruts under other conditions. He had put their full potentiality of force into all in him that he sought to place in the hands of the
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
discovered his soul; his main energies have been directed towards
realizing and mastering the physical world in which he moves.
--
out of the overlaying obscuration of the vital energies. Just as
Prana is involved in Anna and has to be evolved out of it, so
--
the vital energies in the brain and throughout the whole system,
disturb the Mind, the continual siege of external impressions
distract it, the insistent urgency of the senses towards the external world impede the turning of the energies inward; calm and
purity, concentration and introspection are rendered so difficult
--
seriously disturb his vital energies and physical health. Along
with the intellectual development of the race, there has been a
--
Mind that the energies of Man ought in future to be directed. He
must arrive at some arrangement of his social and individual life
--
this subtle ether a whole world of subtle forms and energies
are evolved which constitute psychical existence. Beyond subtle
--
these two they regarded as two terms - call them forces, energies, substances, or what you will, - of phenomenal existence;
and psychical life only as one result of their interaction. They
--
five differentiated vital energies supporting the human frame are
called the five breaths. So important is it, that even the searching
--
forms and energies and impresses or mirrors itself in each. Being
essentially the Self, it is, like the Self, One and Immobile, but as
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The Law of Karma is not mathematical or mechanical: Certain energies are put forward and certain results tend to be produced. Karma is not the fundamental law of consciousness. The basic law is spiritual. Karma is a secondary machinery to help the consciousness to grow by experience. The laws of being are primarily spiritual. It is quite possible to eliminate the Karmic force it is not absolute. It is the mind that formulates these laws; and the mind always tries to put them as absolute.
Disciple: Can one say that the accident has done 'good'?
2.03 - The Supreme Divine, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All this bringing out and continual change from state to state is Karma, is action of Nature, is the energy of Prakriti, the worker, the goddess of processes. It is first a loosing forth of the svabhava into its creative action, visargah.. The creation is of existences in the becoming, bhuta-karah., and of all that they subjectively or otherwise become, bhava-karah.. All taken together, it is a constant birth of things in Time, udbhava, of which the creative energy of Karma is the principle. All this mutable becoming emerges by a combination of the powers and energies of Nature, adhibhuta, which constitutes the world and is the object of the soul's consciousness. In it all the soul is the enjoying and observing Deity in Nature; the divine powers of
294
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Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of his departure. For whatever form of becoming his consciousness is fixed on at the time of death and has been full of that always in his mind and thought before death, to that form he must attain, since the Prakriti by Karma works out the soul's thoughts and energies and that is in real fact her whole business. Therefore, if the soul in the human being desires to attain to the status of the
Purushottama, there are two necessities, two conditions which must be satisfied before that can be possible. He must have
--
Absolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creator and Ruler of the worlds, kavim anusasitaram, dhataram, and it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All, vasudevah. sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him of our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the absolute release.
Then there comes a more curious thought which the Gita has adopted from the mystics of the early Vedanta. It gives the different times at which the Yogin has to leave his body according as he wills to seek rebirth or to avoid it. Fire and light and smoke or mist, the day and the night, the bright fortnight of the lunar month and the dark, the northern solstice and the southern, these are the opposites. By the first in each pair the knowers of the Brahman go to the Brahman; but by the second the Yogin reaches the "lunar light" and returns subsequently to human birth. These are the bright and the dark paths, called the path of the gods and the path of the fathers in the Upanishads, and the
2.04 - Agni, the Illumined Will, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
enjoying, purifying, preparing, assimilating, forming, he rises upwards always and transfigures his powers into the Maruts, the energies of Mind. Our passions and obscure emotions are the smoke of Agni's burning. All our nervous forces are assured of their action only by his support.
If he is the Will in our nervous being and purifies it by action, he is also the Will in the mind and clarifies it by aspiration. When he enters into the intellect, he is drawing near to his divine birthplace and home. He leads the thoughts towards effective power; he leads the active energies towards light.
His divine birth-place and home, - though he is born everywhere and dwells in all things, - is the Truth, the Infinity, the vast cosmic Intelligence in which Knowledge and Force are unified. For there all Will is in harmony with the truth of things and therefore effective; all thought part of Wisdom, which is the divine Law, and therefore perfectly regulative of a divine action.
--
brilliant energies. Let them create their plenty in us, pouring it forth from the secret places of our being so as to be utilisable in its daylight tracts and let their impulsions urge upward the divinising thought in Mind, till it transfigures itself in the supreme lustres.
The hymn closes. Thus, in inspired words, has the divine
--
Gotama means "entirely possessed of light". For it is only those that have the plenitude of the luminous intelligence by whom the master of divine Truth can be wholly received and affirmed in this world of an inferior Ray, - gotamebhir r.tava. And it is upon those whose minds are pure, clear and open, vipra, that there can dawn the right knowledge of the great Births which are behind the physical world and from which it derives and supports its energies, - viprebhir jatavedah..
Agni is Jatavedas, knower of the births, the worlds. He knows entirely the five worlds8 and is not confined in his consciousness to this limited and dependent physical harmony. He has access even to the three highest states9 of all, to the udder of the mystic Cow,10 the abundance of the Bull11 with the four horns. From that abundance he will foster the illumination in these Aryan seekers, swell the plenty of their divine faculties. By that fullness and plenty of his illumined perceptions he will unite thought with thought, word with word, till the human Intelligence is rich and harmonious enough to support and become the divine Idea.
The worlds in which, respectively, Matter, Life-Energy, Mind, Truth and Beatitude are the essential energies. They are called respectively Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, Mahas and
Jana or Mayas.
2.04 - Concentration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:Along with purity and as a help to bring it about, concentration. Purity and concentration are indeed two aspects, feminine and masculine, passive and active, of the same status of being; purity is the condition in which concentration becomes entire, rightly effective, omnipotent; by concentration purity does its works and without it would only lead to a state of peaceful quiescence and eternal repose. Their opposites are also closely connected; for we have seen that impurity is a confusion of Dharmas, a lax, mixed and mutually entangled action of the different parts of the being; and this confusion proceeds from an absence of right concentration of its knowledge on its energies in the embodied Soul. The fault of our nature is first an inert subjection to the impacts of things303 as they come in upon the mind pell-mell without order or control and then a haphazard imperfect concentration managed fitfully, irregularly with a more or less chance emphasis on this or on that object according as they happen to interest, not the higher soul or the judging and discerning intellect, but the restless, leaping, fickle, easily tired, easily distracted lower mind which is the chief enemy of our progress. In such a condition purity, the right working of the functions, the clear, unstained and luminous order of the being is an impossibility; the various workings, given over to the chances of the environment and external influences, must necessarily run into each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally, without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until we arrive at that eternal calm from which may proceed some partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and omniscient activity.
2:But in the path of knowledge as it is practised in India concentration is used in a special and more limited sense. It means that removal of the thought from all distracting activities of the mind and that concentration of it on the idea of the One by which the soul rises out of the phenomenal into the one Reality. It is by the thought that we dissipate ourselves in the phenomenal; it is by the gathering back of the thought into itself that we must draw ourselves back into the real. Concentration has three powers by which this aim can be effected. By concentration on anything whatsoever we are able to know that thing, to make it deliver up its concealed secrets; we must use this power to know not things, buttheone Thing-in-itself. By concentration again the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition of that which is still ungrasped, still beyond us; this power, if it is sufficiently trained, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently sincere, sure of itself, faithful to itself alone, absolute in faith, we can use for the acquisition of any object whatsoever; but we ought to use it not for the acquisition of the many objects which the world offers to us, but to grasp spiritually that one object worthy of pursuit which is also the one subject worthy of knowledge. By concentration of our whole being on one status of itself, we can become whatever we choose; we can become, for instance, even if we were before a mass of weaknesses and fear, a mass instead of strength and courage, or we can become all a great purity, holiness and peace or a single universal soul of Love; but we ought, it is said, to use this power to become not even these things, high as they may be in comparison with what we now are, but rather to become that which is above all things and free from all action and attributes, the pure and absolute Being. All else, all other concentration can only be valuable for preparation, for previous steps, for a gradual training of the dissolute and self-dissipating thought, will and being towards their grand and unique object.
2.04 - The Living Church and Christ-Omega, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
discovery of the great unities and vast energies of the cos-
mos, the ancient words begin to assume a new and more
--
gathers up all the biological and spiritual energies developed
by the Universe. Finally, then, Christ the evolver.
2.05 - Habit 3 Put First Things First, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organizations.
The late J. C. Penney was quoted as saying that the wisest decision he ever made was to "let go" after realizing that he couldn't do it all by himself any longer. That decision, made long ago, enabled the development and growth of hundreds of stores and thousands of people.
--
This approach involves an entirely new paradigm of delegation. In effect, it changes the nature of the relationship: The steward becomes his own boss, governed by a conscience that contains the commitment to agreed upon desired results. But it also releases his creative energies toward doing whatever is necessary in harmony with correct principles to achieve those desired results.
The principles involved in stewardship delegation are correct and applicable to any kind of person or situation. With immature people, you specify fewer desired results and more guidelines, identify more resources, conduct more frequent accountability interviews, and apply more immediate consequences. With more mature people, you have more challenging desired results, fewer guidelines, less frequent accountability, and less measurable but more discernible criteria.
2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is even possible to become wholly conscious in sleep and follow throughout from beginning to end or over large stretches the stages of our dream experience; it is found that then we are aware of ourselves passing from state after state of consciousness to a brief period of luminous and peaceful dreamless rest, which is the true restorer of the energies of the waking nature, and then returning by the same way to the waking consciousness. It is normal, as we thus pass from state to state, to let the previous experiences slip away from us; in the return only the more vivid or those nearest to the waking surface are remembered: but this can be remedied, - a greater retention is possible or the
442
--
is given a substance to work on or at least to use as a basis for its operations, or when it can handle a cosmic force of which it has acquired the knowledge, - it is sure of its steps when it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objectivised or discovered actualities and proceeding from them for creation is the reason of the enormous success of physical Science. But here there is evidently no creation of illusions, no creation of nonexistence in vacuo and turning them into apparent actualities such as is attri buted to the cosmic Illusion. For Mind can only create out of substance what is possible to the substance, it can only do with the force of Nature what is in accordance with her realisable energies; it can only invent or discover what is already contained in the truth and potentiality of Nature. On the other side, it receives inspirations for creation from within itself or from above: but these can only take form if they are truths or potentials, not by the mind's own right of invention; for if the mind erects what is neither true nor potential, that cannot be created, cannot become actual in Nature. Maya, on the contrary, if it creates on the basis of the Reality, yet erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with the Reality, is not true or potential in it; if it creates out of the substance of the Reality, it makes out of it things that are not possible to it or in accordance with it, - for it creates forms and the Reality is supposed to be a Formless incapable of form, it creates determinations and the Reality is supposed to be absolutely indeterminable.
But our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought, is something analogous to the action of Maya.
2.06 - Works Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The way of works too turns into an adoration and a devotion of self-giving because it is an entire sacrifice of all our will and its activities to the one Purushottama. The outward Vedic rite is a powerful symbol, effective for a slighter though still a heavenward purpose; but the real sacrifice is that inner oblation in which the Divine All becomes himself the ritual action, the sacrifice and every single circumstance of the sacrifice. All the working and forms of that inner rite are the self-ordinance and self-expression of his power in us mounting by our aspiration towards the source of its energies. The Divine Inhabitant becomes himself the flame and the offering, because the flame is the Godward will and that will is God himself within us. And the offering too is form and force of the constituent Godhead in our nature and being; all that has been received from him is given up to the service and the worship of its own Reality,
IX. 15.
2.07 - The Release from Subjection to the Body, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This being said, we must add that in the movement of the path of knowledge perfection of the mind and body are no consideration at all or only secondary considerations. The one thing necessary is to rise out of Nature to the Self by either the most swift or the most thorough and effective method possible; and the method we are describing, though not the swiftest, is the most thorough-going in its effectivity. And here there arises the question of physical action or inaction. It is ordinarily considered that the Yogin should draw away from action as much as possible and especially that too much action is a hindrance because it draws off the energies outward. To a certain extent this is true; and we must note farther that when the mental Purusha takes up the attitude of mere witness and observer, a tendency to silence, solitude, physical calm and bodily inaction grows upon the being. So long as this is not associated with inertia, incapacity or unwillingness to act, in a word, with the growth of the tamasic quality, all this is to the good. The power to do nothing, which is quite different from indolence, incapacity or aversion to action and attachment to inaction, is a great power and a great mastery; the power to rest absolutely from action is as necessary for the Jnanayogin as the power to cease absolutely from thought, as the power to remain indefinitely in sheer solitude and silence and as the power of immovable calm. Whoever is not willing to embrace these states is not yet fit for the path that leads towards the highest knowledge; whoever is unable to draw towards them, is as yet unfit for its acquisition.
At the same time it must be added that the power is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in, the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge.
2.08 - God in Power of Becoming, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Sama among the mantras. I am Time the head of all reckoning to those who reckon and measure. I am spiritual knowledge among the many philosophies, arts and sciences. I am all the powers of the human being and all the energies of the universe and its creatures.
Those in whom my powers rise to the utmost heights of human attainment are myself always, my special Vibhutis. I am among men the king of men, the leader, the mighty man, the hero. I am Rama among warriors, Krishna among the Vrishnis,
2.09 - Human representations of the Divine Ideal of Love, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
All rivers flow into the ocean. Even the drop of water coming down from the mountain-side cannot stop its course after reaching a brook or a river, however big it may be; at last even that drop somehow does find its way to the ocean. God is the one goal of all our passions and emotions. If you want to be angry, be angry with Him. Chide your Beloved, chide your Friend. Whom else can you safely chide? Mortal man will not patiently put up with your anger; there will be a reaction. If you are angry with me, I am sure quickly to react, because I cannot patiently put up with your anger. Say unto the Beloved, Why do You not come to me: why do You leave me thus alone? Where is there any enjoyment but in Him? What enjoyment can there be in little clods of earth? It is the crystallised essence of infinite enjoyment that we have to seek, and that is in God. Let all our passions and emotions go up unto Him. They are meant for Him, for if they miss their mark and go lower, they become vile; and when they go straight to the mark, to the Lord, even the lowest of them becomes transfigured; all the energies of the human body and mind, howsoever they may express themselves, have the Lord as their one goal, as their Ekyana. All loves and all passions of the human heart must go to God. He is the Beloved; whom else can this heart love? He is the most beautiful, the most sublime. He is beauty itself, sublimity itself. Who in this universe is more beautiful than He? Who in this universe is more fit to become the husb and than He? Who in this universe is fitter to be loved than He? So let Him be the husband, let Him be the Beloved. Often it so happens that divine lovers who sing of this divine love accept the language of human love in all its aspects as adequate to describe it. Fools do not under-stand this; they never will. They look at it only with the physical eye. They do not understand the mad throes of this spiritual love. How can they? For one kiss of Thy lips, O Beloved!
One who has been kissed by Thee, has his thirst for Thee increasing for ever, all his sorrows vanish, and he forgets all things except Thee alone. Aspire after that kiss of the Beloved, that touch of His lips which makes the Bhakta mad, which makes of man a god. To him, who has been blessed with such a kiss, the whole of nature changes, worlds vanish, suns and moons die out, and the universe itself melts away into that one infinite ocean of love. That is the perfection of the madness of love. Aye; the true spiritual lover does not rest even there; even the love of husb and and wife is not mad enough for him. The Bhaktas take up also the idea of illegitimate love, because it is so strong; the impropriety of it is not at all the thing they have in view. The nature of this love is such that the more obstructions there are for its free play, the more passionate it becomes. The love between husb and and wife is smooth, there are no obstructions there.
--- Overview of noun energy
The noun energy has 7 senses (first 4 from tagged texts)
1. (31) energy, free energy ::: ((physics) a thermodynamic quantity equivalent to the capacity of a physical system to do work; the units of energy are joules or ergs; "energy can take a wide variety of forms")
2. (8) energy, vigor, vigour, zip ::: (forceful exertion; "he plays tennis with great energy"; "he's full of zip")
3. (6) energy, push, get-up-and-go ::: (enterprising or ambitious drive; "Europeans often laugh at American energy")
4. (2) energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim ::: (an imaginative lively style (especially style of writing); "his writing conveys great energy"; "a remarkable muscularity of style")
5. energy, vim, vitality ::: (a healthy capacity for vigorous activity; "jogging works off my excess energy"; "he seemed full of vim and vigor")
6. energy ::: (any source of usable power; "the DOE is responsible for maintaining the energy policy")
7. Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE ::: (the federal department responsible for maintaining a national energy policy of the United States; created in 1977)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun energy
7 senses of energy
Sense 1
energy, free energy
=> physical phenomenon
=> natural phenomenon
=> phenomenon
=> process, physical process
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
energy, vigor, vigour, zip
=> force, forcefulness, strength
=> intensity, intensiveness
=> degree, grade, level
=> property
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
energy, push, get-up-and-go
=> drive
=> trait
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim
=> liveliness, life, spirit, sprightliness
=> animation, spiritedness, invigoration, brio, vivification
=> activeness, activity
=> trait
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 5
energy, vim, vitality
=> good health, healthiness
=> physical condition, physiological state, physiological condition
=> condition, status
=> state
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
energy
=> physical phenomenon
=> natural phenomenon
=> phenomenon
=> process, physical process
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 7
Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE
=> executive department
=> federal department, federal office, department of the federal government
=> government department
=> department, section
=> division
=> administrative unit, administrative body
=> unit, social unit
=> organization, organisation
=> social group
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun energy
5 of 7 senses of energy
Sense 1
energy, free energy
=> activation energy, energy of activation
=> alternative energy
=> atomic energy, nuclear energy
=> binding energy, separation energy
=> chemical energy
=> electricity, electrical energy
=> energy level, energy state
=> rest energy
=> work
=> heat, heat energy
=> mechanical energy
=> radiant energy
=> radiation
Sense 2
energy, vigor, vigour, zip
=> athleticism, strenuosity
Sense 3
energy, push, get-up-and-go
=> second wind
Sense 4
energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim
=> vitality, verve
Sense 5
energy, vim, vitality
=> juice
=> qi, chi, ch'i, ki
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun energy
7 senses of energy
Sense 1
energy, free energy
=> physical phenomenon
Sense 2
energy, vigor, vigour, zip
=> force, forcefulness, strength
Sense 3
energy, push, get-up-and-go
=> drive
Sense 4
energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim
=> liveliness, life, spirit, sprightliness
Sense 5
energy, vim, vitality
=> good health, healthiness
Sense 6
energy
=> physical phenomenon
Sense 7
Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE
=> executive department
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun energy
7 senses of energy
Sense 1
energy, free energy
-> physical phenomenon
=> acoustic phenomenon
=> atmospheric phenomenon
=> boundary layer
=> chaos
=> cloud
=> decalescence
=> electrical phenomenon
=> electricity
=> energy
=> energy, free energy
=> power
=> event
=> field, field of force, force field
=> force
=> hysteresis
=> resonance
=> mechanical phenomenon
=> opacity
=> optical phenomenon
=> pressure, pressure level, force per unit area
=> reflection, reflexion
=> refraction
=> resolving power, resolution
=> resolution
=> conduction, conductivity
=> propagation
=> interaction, fundamental interaction
=> surface tension
=> syzygy
=> transparency, transparence
=> turbulence, turbulency
=> chop
=> flotation, floatation
Sense 2
energy, vigor, vigour, zip
-> force, forcefulness, strength
=> brunt
=> momentum, impulse
=> energy, vigor, vigour, zip
Sense 3
energy, push, get-up-and-go
-> drive
=> action
=> enterprise, enterprisingness, initiative, go-ahead
=> ambition, ambitiousness
=> energy, push, get-up-and-go
=> aggressiveness
Sense 4
energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim
-> liveliness, life, spirit, sprightliness
=> pertness
=> airiness, delicacy
=> alacrity, briskness, smartness
=> energy, muscularity, vigor, vigour, vim
=> elan
=> esprit
=> breeziness, jauntiness
=> irrepressibility, buoyancy
=> high-spiritedness
=> exuberance, enthusiasm, ebullience
=> pep, peppiness, ginger
Sense 5
energy, vim, vitality
-> good health, healthiness
=> wholeness, haleness
=> energy, vim, vitality
=> bloom, blush, flush, rosiness
=> freshness, glow
=> radiance
=> sturdiness
=> condition, shape
Sense 6
energy
-> physical phenomenon
=> acoustic phenomenon
=> atmospheric phenomenon
=> boundary layer
=> chaos
=> cloud
=> decalescence
=> electrical phenomenon
=> electricity
=> energy
=> energy, free energy
=> power
=> event
=> field, field of force, force field
=> force
=> hysteresis
=> resonance
=> mechanical phenomenon
=> opacity
=> optical phenomenon
=> pressure, pressure level, force per unit area
=> reflection, reflexion
=> refraction
=> resolving power, resolution
=> resolution
=> conduction, conductivity
=> propagation
=> interaction, fundamental interaction
=> surface tension
=> syzygy
=> transparency, transparence
=> turbulence, turbulency
=> chop
=> flotation, floatation
Sense 7
Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE
-> executive department
=> White House, EXEC
=> Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Department, Agriculture, USDA
=> Department of Commerce, Commerce Department, Commerce, DoC
=> Department of Defense, Defense Department, United States Department of Defense, Defense, DoD
=> Department of Education, Education Department, Education
=> Department of Energy, Energy Department, Energy, DOE
=> Department of Health and Human Services, Health and Human Services, HHS
=> Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security
=> Department of Housing and Urban Development, Housing and Urban Development, HUD
=> Department of Justice, Justice Department, Justice, DoJ
=> Department of Labor, Labor Department, Labor, DoL
=> Department of State, United States Department of State, State Department, State, DoS
=> Department of the Interior, Interior Department, Interior, DoI
=> Department of the Treasury, Treasury Department, Treasury, United States Treasury
=> Department of Transportation, Transportation, DoT
=> Department of Veterans Affairs, VA
=> Department of Commerce and Labor
=> Department of Health Education and Welfare
=> Navy Department
=> War Department
--- Grep of noun energy
activation energy
alternative energy
atomic energy
atomic energy commission
binding energy
chemical energy
conservation of energy
department of energy
department of energy intelligence
elastic energy
elastic potential energy
electrical energy
energy
energy department
energy level
energy of activation
energy secretary
energy state
energy unit
free energy
geothermal energy
heat energy
high-energy physics
high energy physics
international atomic energy agency
kinetic energy
law of conservation of energy
libidinal energy
luminous energy
mass-energy equivalence
mass energy
mechanical energy
mental energy
nuclear energy
potential energy
psychic energy
radiant energy
rest energy
secretary of energy
separation energy
solar energy
waste of energy
wind energy facility
Wikipedia - Born-Haber cycle -- Approach to analyzing reaction energies
Wikipedia - Deploying Renewables 2011 -- Book by Internationaal Energieagentschap
Wikipedia - Electronic band structure -- Describes the range of energies that an electron within the solid may have and ranges of energy that it may not have
Wikipedia - Energies for Italy -- Italian political party
Wikipedia - Energies of God
Wikipedia - Energie -- Canadian French-language network of mainstream rock radio stations
Wikipedia - Essence-Energies distinction
Wikipedia - Fonroche Energie -- French company
Wikipedia - Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics) -- Quantum operator for the sum of energies of a system
Wikipedia - Ionization energies of the elements (data page)
Wikipedia - Law of specific nerve energies
Wikipedia - Molar ionization energies of the elements -- Table of molar ionization energies for the chemical elements
Wikipedia - Nur Energie -- Multitechnology solar power plant developer
Wikipedia - Sessile drop technique -- Method used for the characterization of solid surface energies
Wikipedia - Total Direct Energie (cycling team) -- French cycling team
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14342606-diverse-energies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18224520-galactic-energies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821108-the-energies-of-love
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2486747.Energies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2504656.Energies_bloqu_es
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28054491-der-energiek-rper
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41770480-the-yoga-of-the-three-energies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/561242.Savage_Energies
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9441300-opposing-energies
https://religion.wikia.org/de/wiki/Energiek
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Energies_distinction
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Essence-Energies_distinction
Integral World - Auszug G : Auf dem Weg zu einer umfassenden Theorie der subtilen Energien
Integral World - Auszug G : Auf dem Weg zu einer umfassenden Theorie der subtilen Energien
The Four Energies: Turn Your Energy IntoThings That Matter
https://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2011/06/anyone-can-feel-energies.html
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Energies
Ninja Sentai KakuRanger (1994 - 1995) - Part of the Super Sentai Series 400 years ago, the ninja and the Youkai had a great war. The legendary Sarutobi Sasuke and other four ninja sealed the Youkai Commander Nurarihyon and all his youkai's energies away in a cave protected by the "Seal Door". In the present, the only surviving youkai, Kap...
Thicker Than Water(1999) - A stellar roster of hip-hop performers star in this streetwise story about a pair of gang-bangers who want to channel their energies into music, but soon discover how hard it can be to leave their old lives behind. DJ (Mack 10) and Lonzo (Fat Joe) are members of rival street gangs in inner-city Los...
That Old Feeling(1997) - When an inimically divorced couple meets up again at the formal wedding of their somewhat humiliated daughter, their animosity is rekindled on sight. But that spark quickly snowballs into an old flame, as the energies they expend on insults and other inflammatory incivilities quickly translates into...
https://humanscience.fandom.com/wiki/Power_of_Preserving_our_Energies
https://jedipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Energiedroide
https://jedipedia.fandom.com/wiki/GNK-Energiedroide
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Direct_Energie
https://phansud.fandom.com/wiki/RaumEnergie
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Ley_energies
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Quest:Ley_Energies
Reikenzan: Hoshikuzu-tachi no Utage -- -- Studio Deen -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Comedy Magic Fantasy -- Reikenzan: Hoshikuzu-tachi no Utage Reikenzan: Hoshikuzu-tachi no Utage -- Long ago in the nine provinces of Kyushu, a calamitous event was prophesied to take place: falling comets would exhaust the spiritual energies of both the heavens and the lands and thus bring about an age of chaos upon the world. But contrary to the prophecy, the comets passed by with no calamity taking place. At the same time, as if touched by the phenomenon, a boy was born in a remote village of the Sokei region by the name of Ouriku. -- -- Twelve years later, as the memories of the event have faded from people's minds, the Reikenzan clan—one of the five supreme sects of the nine provinces—decides to hold an examination in order to gather the most talented individuals fit to become disciples and eventually sages. Hearing about this news, Ouriku and his servant Ouchou head toward the site, unaware that the organizer Oubu, despite her elegant appearance, is infamous for being extremely irresponsible and carefree; hence, making the trials in the examination unpredictable. -- -- Reikenzan: Hoshikuzu-tachi no Utage follows the story of Ouriku as he journeys through these trials to become a powerful sage. -- -- 79,165 7.10
Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku -- -- J.C.Staff -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Horror Demons Supernatural -- Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku -- Handsome and effeminate, quiet but proud, the sinister Akito Kobayashi has a passion for the occult and has developed a computer program to summon demons and the living dead. But little does he know that fellow high school students Kojirou Souma and Saki Yagami are reincarnations of powerful and benevolent spirits. When the pair's friends have become targeted by demons trying to harvest their life energies, they must harness their dark metaphysical powers to destroy Kobayashi's threatening program, or risk losing their loved ones forever. -- -- OVA - Apr 21, 1995 -- 5,519 5.41
Ushio to Tora -- -- Pastel -- 10 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Horror -- Ushio to Tora Ushio to Tora -- Ushio thinks his father's tale of an ancient ancestor impaling a demon on a temple altar stone with the legendary Beast Spear is nuts, but when he finds the monster in his own basement, Ushio has to take another look at the family legend! Fortunately, Ushio knows it's best to let sleeping dogs lie and leave captured demons where they are. Unfortunately, the release of the monster's evil energies begins to beckon other demons to Ushio's hometown! To save his friends and family from the invading spirits, Ushio is forced to release Tora from his captivity. But will the cure prove to be worse than the curse? Will Ushio end his life a Tora-snack? Or will the Beast Spear keep Tora in line long enough to save the city? -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films -- OVA - Sep 11, 1992 -- 11,509 7.15
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IF_SCIENCE_WAS_GLOBALLY_APPLIED,_CURRENT_ENERGIES_AND_DEPURATIONS_DO_NOT_HAVE_A_FUTURE.jpg
2004 Wien Energie Grand Prix Doubles
2004 Wien Energie Grand Prix Singles
2007 FIA Alternative Energies Cup
2008 FIA Alternative Energies Cup
2009 FIA Alternative Energies Cup
2010 FIA Alternative Energies Cup
2011 FIA Alternative Energies Cup
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